Evil woman Natasha Darcy’s astonishing chat in prison cell after callous murder of her partner Matthew Dunbar
The inside story of how a woman murdered a man she’d been dating for three years – after already trying to kill her husband – can be revealed.
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Three and a half months after her partner Mathew Dunbar was discovered dead, Natasha Darcy found herself sharing a jail cell at Tamworth Police Station. As conversation starters go, Darcy’s was outstanding: “I just got arrested for murder.”
“Oh, really?” her cellmate replied.
“Yeah,” Darcy said.
The other woman laughed. “F--k.”
Her partner had killed himself, Darcy told her new companion. But now the toxicology report was back, and “obviously they’re blaming me”.
She started to cry as she described how Mr Dunbar, a 42-year-old sheep farmer from Walcha, NSW, had died in August 2017.
“I’m sorry to hear that, hey. How long were youse together?” the cellmate asked.
“A bit over three years,” Darcy said, sniffing.
Darcy had already told at least 10 lies by the time of these crocodile tears.
But she wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. Her cellmate was an undercover police officer, acting out the role of a fellow down-and-out in the hope of eking out something incriminating.
The dishonest duo were soon joined by a second undercover officer, who said she had overheard detectives outside talking about Mr Dunbar’s toxicology results.
“Did they say anything about ace? Acepromazine?” Darcy asked.
Acepromazine, generally used on rams before shearing and horses, was one of four sedatives — along with temazepam, clonidine, and seroquel — detected in Mr Dunbar’s blood.
But at the time she asked that question, sitting in that cell, Darcy had not seen the toxicology report.
She didn’t know what Mr Dunbar had taken. Or at least, she shouldn’t have.
“Oh, they were saying heaps of stuff,” the second cellmate replied. “What’s the ace one?”
“Oh it’s, ah, I don’t know about that one,” Darcy back-pedalled.
Later in the covertly recorded conversation, Darcy admitted to Googling acepromazine and clonidine after Mr Dunbar died.
Her slow realisation this may not look good was captured in a transcript released to NCA NewsWire.
“I didn’t think I had anything to hide … but it sounds like I do,” she mused to her new friends.
She said she had searched the drugs because she thought Mr Dunbar had taken them and wanted to know if they would show up in a toxicology report.
“But I thought that would be a good thing if these things show up because they prove that, anyway, maybe not,” she said.
“Oh, my god. This is terrible.”
This revealing conversation was played to a NSW Supreme Court jury in Darcy’s marathon murder trial, which spanned from the end of March into June this year.
Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield said Darcy used her cellmates as a “sounding board” to test out her story ahead of an impending police interview.
And she asked about acepromazine knowing full well Mr Dunbar had taken it — because she had given it to him, Mr Hatfield said.
On Tuesday, the jury found Darcy guilty of murdering Mr Dunbar by drugging him with a sedative milkshake mixed in a Nutribullet and gassing him to death in his bed in the early hours of August 2, 2017.
Darcy’s motive, the crown said, was to inherit Mr Dunbar’s property Pandora, then valued at $3.5 million, which he had left to her in his 2015 will.
Darcy pleaded not guilty, contending Mr Dunbar had taken his own life.
She did not give evidence at trial, but told police she had dialled triple-0 after finding an unresponsive Mr Dunbar hooked up to a helium cylinder in the middle of the night.
He had a history of depression, Darcy’s barrister argued, and six weeks before he died, he had threatened suicide and spent two days in the psychiatric unit at Tamworth hospital.
During the trial, the 11 jurors (one was discharged mid-trial due to illness) were confronted with a truly bewildering array of circumstantial evidence pointing to Darcy’s guilt.
Most memorable were the hundreds of Google searches recorded on phones and a computer used by Darcy, starting in February 2017 and continuing to the night before she was arrested.
Initial searches about poisonous mushrooms and spiders soon graduated into gruesome anatomical terms such as “base of skull vulnerable” and “stabbed in the brain”.
Dozens were about suicide and various drugs. There were searches for “oxycodone murder”, “murder by inducing heart attack”, “murder by stroke”, “murder by injection”, “acepromazine murder”, “lethal dose of oxycodone 200 pound male” and, simply, “how to commit murder”.
The grim research was punctuated by periodic queries like “can police see websites you visit on your mobile”.
The incriminating searches continued long after Mr Dunbar’s death. The day before her arrest, November 17, 2017, Darcy typed in the names of female killers Keli Lane and Kristi Abrahams.
She googled late into the night, looking up police procedure — “how long after arrest warrant do police act”, “can police lie to get me into station”, “how much evidence is needed to charge someone australia” — and cruised through numerous news stories about murder arrests.
Court documents reveal she even visited the Reddit page r/legaladvice.
The next day, in the cell at Tamworth, the officers attempted to draw Darcy on this history, laughing at the size of a folder containing Google searches they claimed to have spotted outside.
“I just want answers,” Darcy told them. “And Google’s been my best friend.”
But her compulsive searching proved to be her worst enemy. Some of Darcy’s browser history could not be recovered, but plenty of her keystrokes were placed on full display for the jury.
The seven men and four women also heard much about her attempts to obtain acepromazine.
The first vet she asked was so alarmed by the suspicious request that she actually rang the police. (“Total misunderstanding,” Darcy told police.) The second said no, too.
Eventually Darcy found a clinic in Armidale where a male vet, who gave evidence wearing a Hawaiian shirt and board shirts, doled out a 100ml bottle on June 28, 2017.
Her details were taken down as “Natasha Pascoe” from the non-existent address of 4 Daly St, Walcha, which Darcy put down to mistakes made by the “really, really young girl” at the till.
She said a horse trod on the 100ml bottle the very next day, smashing it.
Just over a week later, Mr Dunbar landed in hospital with a calf infection so severe that at one point a surgeon contemplated amputating.
The farmer told doctors that, according to Darcy, he had “gone for a walk around the farm” on Friday night. He had no memory of the walk, nor of Saturday.
The crown alleged Darcy was the real cause of that injury, injecting Mr Dunbar’s leg with acepromazine in one of two “dry runs” ahead of actually killing him on August 2.
Mr Hatfield painted a scene of Darcy sitting beside an unconscious Mr Dunbar on the day he said he couldn’t remember, searching things like “what happens if you don’t urinate coma” on her phone.
Darcy appeared to land on the idea to use helium gas during a trip to Dorrigo, the court heard, and she rang Supagas in Tamworth to order a 3.5 cubic metre bottle of pure helium on July 31.
She denied making the call to police, suggesting the attendant may have instead heard Mr Dunbar’s “very feminine sounding voice”.
The couple together picked up the bottle on August 1, hours before Mr Dunbar died.
At 1.14am that night, a text was sent from Mr Dunbar’s phone to Colin Crossman, a local paramedic and Darcy’s ex-husband. (The pair remain legally married but separated in 2012.)
It read: “Tell police come to house. I don’t want Tash or kids to find me.”
The crown said it was a fake suicide message sent by Darcy as she carried out her plan.
This was not the only evidence the jury heard about what Darcy did to Colin Crossman.
Eight years earlier, shortly after taking out a $700,000 life insurance policy, Darcy had asked Mr Crossman before bed how hard you would have to hit a person in the temple to cause damage.
Then she hit him on the temple with a hammer while he slept.
Three days later, she set the house alight while he slumbered under the influence of several sedatives he did not knowingly take.
The last thing Mr Crossman recalled before he woke up surrounded by flames was watching the cricket and eating tacos, prepared by Darcy.
In an almost indescribable irony, Mr Crossman was the first responder to Darcy’s triple-0 call.
The jury was also shown two letters Darcy wrote to a friend while she was in custody waiting for her trial.
She offered the friend $20,000 to lie about Mr Dunbar, saying she had been inspired by an episode of Frasier in which Niles asks Frasier to lie in court, sparking a moral dilemma.
She asked the woman to tell several specific lies about Mr Dunbar, including that he had spoken to her about planning suicide.
“If the lawyers ask for your phone records, just say it was over 2.5 years ago and you don’t keep them,” Darcy wrote.
Shocked, the friend cut off contact. Darcy wrote again, this time apologising “if the amount I offered offends you”.
“I can give you as much as you need,” she wrote. “This reminds me of a funny saying which I can’t remember word for word but it was something like … if you’re ever in trouble, I won’t be there to support you ‘cause I’ll be next to you helping you hide the body. LOL.”
At trial Darcy sought to argue Mr Dunbar was gay and internally tortured by his “unclear sexual orientation”.
Mr Hatfield highlighted her “callous” comments about this, including that Mr Dunbar’s suicide threat in June was another of his “poofter hissy fits” and that his aptitude for bargain hunting “must be the gay in him”.
Close friend Lance Partridge said Mr Dunbar was not gay, and had one relationship with a man that did not work out.
His sexual orientation, history of depression, suicidal ideation, alleged financial problems and despair over his calf injury were all pointed to by Darcy’s barrister Janet Manuell SC as troubles playing on Mr Dunbar’s mind when he died.
But the few holes the barrister poked in the crown case were not enough to cast reasonable doubt over Darcy’s guilt.
The jurors were told they could only convict if convinced there was no other reasonable explanation for Darcy’s behaviour surrounding Mr Dunbar’s death.
Their verdict says it all. Darcy, a mother of three, now faces the prospect of life in prison.
Family and friends remember Mr Dunbar as a gentle and generous man, who would do anything for anyone.
Darcy’s own barrister conceded she told “lot of lies” about Mr Dunbar’s death.
But perhaps the most chilling was this declaration, three and a half months after she killed him.
“He would be devastated,” Darcy told her cellmates at Tamworth.
“Like, absolutely devastated if he knew that I was going through this.”
Originally published as Evil woman Natasha Darcy’s astonishing chat in prison cell after callous murder of her partner Matthew Dunbar
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