Kirralee Paepaerei was making a bid for a new life. Pregnant with her fifth child, she was thrilled to be having a girl after four boys. Then her life was taken.
Josh Homann fatally stabbed her 49 times at the townhouse they shared with her children and sister Kylee. Her unborn baby Mia – the only child of the ill-fated couple – was also killed.
Paepaerei is one of the hundreds of murder victims whose death was captured by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research’s data. BOCSAR release new data for major crimes across Sydney and NSW every month. The numbers do not refer to murder convictions, but entries of murder into COPS, the NSW Police database.
Using this data, the Herald has built a series of interactive maps, pinpointing where murders have occurred over the past decade, including the latest quarterly data released by the bureau last week. The maps are built on Sydney postcodes, as well as local government areas for regions outside the city. They show murders that physically took place within a region, murder victims from that area and local residents accused of committing murder.
Paepaerei was one of the 17 people killed in the 2770 postcode, centred on Mount Druitt but also encompassing smaller satellite suburbs, between 2014 and 2024. This was the most murders in any NSW postcode over the past 10 years.
The Liverpool (14) and Bankstown (13) postcodes had the next highest numbers over the same period. Ten people were murdered in the Sydney CBD over the decade, with nine in Green Valley, eight each in Wentworthville and Guildford, and six in Parramatta, Peakhurst, St Marys, Kings Langley and Bossley Park.
Outside of Sydney, based on local government areas, the Central Coast recorded 31 murders, Newcastle recorded 23, Lake Macquarie, Tweed and Wollongong recorded 16 each and Shoalhaven recorded nine murders across the decade.
There has been a serious uptick in women being killed by intimate partners, says Professor Rick Sarre, a criminologist from the University of South Australia. In 2022-2023, there was a 28 per cent increase in women being killed in domestic violence murders across the country, upending the downward trend over the past decade.
Indigenous people, who make up around 3 per cent of the nation’s population, are disproportionately represented in homicides – 20 per cent of victims and 28 per cent of perpetrators are Indigenous nationwide.
Of the 17 murders in Mount Druitt’s 2770 postcode over the past decade, seven of those were domestic violence deaths.
“The red flags were there. People choose to ignore them and think that people will change when they don’t,” Paepaerei’s sister Jodie Dugo says.
Paepaerei and Homann had been in a de-facto relationship for two years when Homann, an ice addict, killed his partner and their unborn daughter in 2015. Another sister, Tammy Dugo, says she had been fearful that Paepaerei “had jumped from the frying pan into the fire” with Homann.
Homann was verbally abusive, the family said, and threatened to kill Paepaerei more than once. On another occasion, he hit her hard enough to leave a bruise on her arm.
“But it wasn’t always like that. I was at their place all the time, I lived with them, and other times they’d be laughing and having fun. But I still didn’t like him,” Paepaerei’s sister Kylee says.
BOCSAR Executive Director Jackie Fitzgerald said the murder rates hit a historical low during the pandemic and is down 6.5 per cent across the state over the past decade, reflective of a trend of declining crime across the Western world since the 1990s.
“There has been a small bounceback, but we’re still way fewer than before,” she said.
“If you go back in the years to March 1996, 130 people were murdered – it’s actually half that now.”
Sarre says: “It’s to do with economic prosperity, better policing, better government, fewer people are isolated, there is underpinning social welfare – in other words, we’re smarter.”
The unrepentant worship of statistics, as author David Simon (of The Wire fame) once wrote, forms the orthodoxy of any modern policing. These numbers play a vital and strategic role, but they are inert, unfeeling. Murders never let go, regardless of the number committed. They cast whole families into a maw of darkness.
“[Paepaerei] will never be forgotten. She was my perfect child,” her mother Joyce Dugo says.
Dugo is afraid for the future of her children and her grandchildren as they wrestle with Paepaerei’s murder, particularly when Homann is released from prison. His earliest possible release date is 2038.
“How can we live, knowing he is walking around free?” she says.
One of Paepaerei’s sons is now 24, with a daughter of his own. Her name? Kirralee.
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