What drove Borce Ristevski to kill his wife, and how did police catch him?
Remorseless wife killer Borce Ristevski has finally been brought to justice. But what drove the suburban dad to kill Karen, his wife of 27 years, and how did police gather the evidence to catch him?
Behind the Scenes
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The mystery of Karen Ristevski’s disappearance gripped Victoria after the mother vanished without a trace on the morning of June 29, 2016.
As the cloud of suspicion slowly engulfed her husband Borce, detectives worked behind the scenes to work out what happened to the 47-year-old.
Three days after his wife’s disappearance, Mr Ristevski appeared in a police media conference alongside his daughter Sarah and appealed for information.
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Mr Ristevski spoke softly as he said his wife had left the family’s $1.1 million Avondale Heights home to cool off after a row.
She had walked out in the past, he said, but never for more than a couple of hours.
He said she left on foot, leaving her 2004 Mercedes Benz Coupe behind and was wearing a black blazer, jeans and carried a gold Coach handbag.
Dressed in a blue shirt, Mr Ristevski was wearing glasses and looked pale as he tried to comfort his sobbing daughter at the media conference.
The couple, who had been married for more than 20 years, were discussing improving figures at the family’s Bella Bleu ladies boutique following some problems at the Watergardens store the previous day.
“That was the last thing she said to me: ‘I’m going to go and clear my head’,’’ Mr Ristevski said.
“She has always walked back in the door after calming down.
“And this time, we’ve got concern and that’s why we made the report. It is distressing for all the family.
“Without the knowing is the hardest part — not knowing where she is or what we can do to actually get her back.”
As the media conference drew to a close, watched by several members of her family, Sarah decided to say a few words.
“I just want my mum to come home,” she said. “It’s not like her to miss work as well. It’s not like her.”
The case was being handled by local detectives but was soon passed to the missing persons squad, based at Victoria Police’s crime command headquarters in Spencer St.
A team of detectives, led by Detective Inspector Stephen Dennis and Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Rhodes, began to work to unravel the mystery.
The detectives followed the steps they take in any other missing persons case.
The initial investigation into the disappearance of Karen Ristevski was made up of three parallel probes, which looked at:
• The location Ms Ristevski was last seen alive;
• The movements of Ms Ristevski up to and after she was reported to have been last seen alive; and
• A list of persons of interest, which might include individuals from her business interests or competition, family and friends.
It didn’t take the detectives long to zone in on Ristevski
Several days after the media conference, Mr Ristevski was sitting across the table from detectives.
He was asked about his marriage and about how the boutique business was doing.
Property records showed a caveat had been lodged over the Ristevski family home earlier in 2016.
The detectives pushed and probed to try and find a hole in his story.
It would emerge later that police had obtained evidence from the phones of both Mr and Ms Ristevski.
On the day she disappeared, Ms Ristevski’s phone and her husband’s had been tracked 40km northwest of Melbourne — not far from where her body would eventually be discovered.
The data also revealed Mr Ristevski’s phone had been switched off for two hours on the day she vanished.
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Police already secretly believed the missing mum was dead.
Clues from the phone records led them to believe the rural area northwest of Melbourne was where she would eventually be found.
Mr Ristevski said he had taken his wife’s car for a drive up the Calder Highway because it had a faulty fuel gauge.
He said the fault corrected itself when he hit a bump in the road and he returned home.
Soon after Mr Ristevski’s first extensive discussion with the police, his son from a previous relationship went public with claims of a secret family conflict.
In an interview with the Herald Sun, Anthony Rickard denied having anything to do with his stepmother’s disappearance and said a family conflict had been “swept under the carpet”.
Police would later say Mr Rickard had been spoken to by investigators and was considered a red herring.
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The pressure on Mr Ristevski had been mounting since his wife vanished
He hunkered down behind the walls of his home, receiving regular visits from his brother Vasko.
On July 14, the Victoria Police media unit sent out an alert to journalists, inviting them to a press conference at Canning Reserve in Avondale Heights, close to the Ristevski family home.
Insp Dennis, head of the missing persons squad, was in attendance, along with Borce and Sarah Ristevski and Patricia Gray, Ms Ristevski’s aunt.
The press conference came as officers carried out a sweep of the area around the Ristevski family home.
Police and SES searched the area behind the house while a water police boat looked for clues in the nearby Maribyrnong River.
During the media conference a television reporter asked Mr Ristevski, dressed in a dark coat with a brown hoodie underneath, if he killed his wife.
A stunned Mr Ristevski did not respond and the press conference was brought to a premature end.
Mr Ristevski and his weeping daughter were ushered away to a nearby police car.
As the weeks and months passed, police struggled to make a breakthrough in the case.
They had the phone evidence against Mr Ristevski. They had also seized an iPad that had suspicious web searches in its history.
But, crucially, they had no body.
On December 19, 2016, on a scorching summer’s day, police carried out an extensive search of farmland northwest of Melbourne as they stepped up their quest to find the missing mother.
Investigators from the missing persons squad supervised teams of SES crews dressed in orange overalls as they combed the parched land between Diggers Rest and Toolern Vale.
CFA crews drained dams and police search and rescue divers were brought in to check waterways.
Cadaver dogs, used to sniff out human remains, were also used. Insp Dennis again spoke to the press. Although he said he remained confident the case would be solved, it soon became clear the search crews that day had no specific idea about where to look.
The investigation had stalled and was in need of a lucky break
Shortly before 5pm on February 21, 2017, two young officers from the missing persons squad arrived at the Ristevski family home. They pressed the buzzer outside the front gate and were let inside.
They had come to inform Mr Ristevski that a body, found wedged between two logs in a shallow bush grave 52km away in Mt Macedon the day before, was that of his wife.
The area Ms Ristevski’s remains were found is about an hour’s drive northwest of Melbourne, just off the Calder Freeway.
A secluded area of natural beauty, it is popular with cyclists, horse riders and walkers. It was about 12.30pm on Monday, February 20, when a walker happened across human remains in bushland, about 1km from the main road.
A funeral, attended by hundreds of people, was held a few days later and Ms Ristevski was laid to rest at Williamstown Cemetery.
But despite the discovery of Ms Ristevski’s remains, detectives were still months away from placing charges.
As 2017 dragged on changes were made to the missing persons squad, with Insp Dennis moving into a new role in professional standards command.
He was replaced by Inspector Tim Day, who took control of the missing persons squad and the Ristevski investigation.
In June police released CCTV from the day Ms Ristevski vanished, showing a black Mercedes at the Diggers Rest railway crossing at 11.12am — not far from where Ms Ristevski’s remains were eventually found.
They believed Mr Ristevski was behind the wheel of the car and his wife’s body was in the vehicle. The images were murky though, and the police appealed for members of the public who might have seen the car in that area on that day to come forward.
In August, the Herald Sun obtained exclusive footage of the police carrying out road tests on a Mercedes similar to the one owned by Ms Ristevski less than 100 metres from where her remains were found.
The net was closing in and investigators were confident of laying charges soon
On December 13, 2017, detectives arrested Mr Ristevski and he was charged with his wife’s murder.
Many members of Ms Ristevski’s heartbroken family breathed a sigh of relief.
Her brother Steve released a statement, saying: “Today has been a surprisingly emotional day — one in which I have been patiently waiting for.
“It is in no way a celebration, it’s another stage in bringing my beautiful sister, Karen, the justice she so deserves.”
Months after Mr Ristevski was charged, he faced a committal hearing at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, to determine if he should stand trial for the murder of his wife.
During the hearing, police forensic accountant Gerard Curtin described the Ristevski’s financial situation.
Between May 2015 and June 2016, Mr Curtin said the Ristevski’s company, Warrant Brands, trading as Bella Bleu, had “serious cash flow issues”.
“You can see there was a constant struggle,” Mr Curtin said after analysing the company’s records.
Mr Curtin said sales were not able to meet the business expenses.
“If you can’t cover your rent, wages and stock you won’t be surviving — and this business wasn’t even covering that,” he told the court.
The court heard Mr Ristevski set up another company, Envirovision, in December 2015 where his daughter Sarah was listed as a shareholder.
That company didn’t open a bank account until June 14, 2016 — two weeks before Mrs Ristevski went missing.
From July 3, when the search for Ms Ristevski was well underway, all revenue from Bella Bleu was going into this account, Mr Curtin said.
During that hearing, Sarah defended her father, saying he was never aggressive towards her or her mother.
“He was always the calm one,” Sarah said.
“I didn’t grow up in a household where there were major arguments.”
But she said her parents would fight “every few weeks” about finances, as her mother was concerned that sales were down at the fashion boutique.
“There was no Bella Bleu without my mum. It was her passion,” Sarah Ristevski said.
She said her dad was always the calming voice in disputes, while “mum would get annoyed quickly”.
Sarah got emotional and paused
Then she recalled how her parents would fight over trivial things, such as her father being sent to the shop to buy milk, but coming home with fattening foods such as a sale-price box of biscuits.
“She’d say to him, ‘What have you done?’” Sarah Ristevski said, adding that her mother would complain that she would only end up eating them and “my thighs will get fat”.
Asked by her father’s lawyer, David Hallowes, SC, if her dad appeared distressed, cold or unemotional during the days after her mum went missing, Sarah Ristevski said: “He was very concerned about where my mum was.”
She added: “He was extremely worried. People who actually knew him and know him, know he was distressed.”
An Optus technician told the committal hearing that a new tool could pinpoint the exact location of a phone.
Oleg Prypoten said the CovMo geolocation technology was able to detect phone activity despite Ms Ristevski’s mobile being deactivated from the network on the day she went missing.
Usually, a phone could only be tracked when it was on.
He said Ms Ristevski’s phone was cut off from the network at 11.40am, last pinging from a cell tower in the Gisborne region, on June 29, 2016.
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Her husband Borce’s phone had been cut from the network at 11.09am, Mr Prypoten told the court.
Mr Prypoten said the disconnection of both phones could be from three things: the phone was switched off, flight mode was activated or the battery died.
Mr Ristevski’s phone did not reconnect to the network until 12.51pm.
His wife’s phone never reconnected.
Mr Prypoten said by using CovMo — recently bought by Optus to resolve network issues more quickly — they were able to detect a call was made to Ms Ristevski’s phone at 1.19pm.
The network recorded a “voice call attempt” at this time to her phone, which they were able to trace to the Sunbury-Diggers Rest area, he said.
On August 1 last year Magistrate Sue Cameron ruled there was enough evidence to commit Mr Ristevski to stand trial in the Supreme Court for the murder of his wife, Karen.
But in a shock move just as his Supreme Court trial was about to start, Ristevski pleaded guilty to manslaughter, after some of the evidence prosecutors had hoped to use against him was ruled out by a judge.
Ristevski was finally brought to justice, jailed for nine years with a minimum of six years.
But after 491 days served, Ristevski could be free in less than five years.
Originally published as What drove Borce Ristevski to kill his wife, and how did police catch him?
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