Balding killers will never be free

THE two teenage killers of Janine Balding this morning lost their final chance of ever walking free from jail when the High Court threw out their appeal.

THE two teenage killers of Janine Balding this morning lost their final chance of ever walking free from jail when the High Court threw out their appeal.

The court unanimously found Matthew Elliott and Bronson Blessington had suffered no miscarriage of justice because a judge in 1992 recommended they never be released.

Blessington, who was 14 when he abducted, raped and murdered Ms Balding with a gang of street kids, became the youngest person ever jailed for life in Australia.

The two men, bankrolled by the NSW Legal Aid Commission, had sought to reopen an appeal they made to the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1992 because of a remarkable legal blunder.

They argued the appeal was not finalised because a staple which was supposed to fix their original indictment to the court file was missing.

Last year the Court of Criminal Appeal again dismissed their appeal - despite finding that the 1992 case had never been finalised as a result of the sloppy record keeping.

Today the High Court said the Court of Criminal Appeal had been correct, staple or no staple.

The judges also rejected the argument that truth in sentencing laws passed since Blessington and Elliott were jailed could not apply to them.

The case locks the door on all nine of the state's most notorious killers who were jailed for life with the recommendation they never be released.

They include the killers of nurse Anita Cobby and young mother Virginia Morse.

Ms Balding was abducted from the car park at Sutherland Railway Station on her way home from work as a building society clerk in September 1988.

She was forced into her own car and repeatedly raped, gagged and hogtied and her face pushed down in the mud at a shallow dam at Minchinbury in one of the country's most callous and horrific murders.

Blessington, Elliott, then 16, and Stephen "Shorty" Jamieson, then 22, were convicted of her murder and Justice Peter Newman jailed them with the recommendation never to be released, before truth in sentencing laws were enacted.

At the time, a life sentence effectively meant eight years before killers were released on parole.

But they argued that because their 1992 appeal was never finalised, none of the subsequent laws to cement killers in jail applied to them.

"It is true that in some areas of litigation even final and perfected orders may, on further application, be suspended to allow for supervening legislative change," said the High Court in its judgment handed down this morning in Canberra.

"But that is far from the present case."

The court had been told that Blessington had hoped to be released to marry his girlfriend Kim Ly, a teacher he met through a Christian group visiting jail.

The third killer, Jamieson, did not join this appeal however the Legal Aid Commission continues to fund his case with a plan to get the bandana he used to gag Ms Balding sent to the UK for DNA testing.

Jamieson argues it was another man nicknamed Shorty and not him who was there and the gag belonged to the other Shorty, a claim which has been repeatedly rejected by the courts.

Ms Balding's mother Bev today said that after 19 years she just hoped it was all over.

"You can imagine how light my heart feels after this because I was worried about it, I really was," Mrs Balding told The Daily Telegraph Online.

"I feel sanity had prevailed.

"My personal feelings about this is that they are evil and I'm sure that some time in the future if they got out of jail, they would do something wrong again."