A teenage girl who wanted a relationship. A small-town beauty who wanted to be left alone. A beloved good Samaritan in the wrong place at the wrong time. Parents unaware their daughter had become the object of lustful obsession, and a pensioner who unwittingly became the target of a demented child's callous fantasies.
Their victims were very different but the new generation of South Australian killers — Jose Omonte-Extrada, Jason Alexander Downie and the boy known as “B” — are frightful in their similarities.
All three lived in small towns and were considered outcasts by the locals.
All three found fulfilment and self-expression online, be it through violent, gore-soaked gaming, obscene “dark” artwork or ego-boosting, fanciful social media profiles.
All three displayed undreamed-of levels of butchery in their malicious offending, turning the stomachs of veteran police officers while leaving the public scrambling for answers. And all three were under the age of 20.
“B”
“MY wishes are killing more and more people,” he told a psychologist when he was seven. “I wish I had a catapult that would hit someone on the head and then they would all be dead.”
Few things chill the blood like hearing a child discuss murder.
“We don’t think of children as being at the peak of their potential for evil,” social researcher Mark McCrindle told advertiser.com.au. “We want to think of them as clean slates growing up to make a positive contribution.”
Yet precious little about the boy who, for legal reasons, can only be identified as “B” is clean. Just seven years after wishing for a catapult, the boy sadistically murdered a 63-year-old woman. Pirjo Kemppainen suffered 58 knife wounds to her body and skull and 69 blows with a piece of concrete. She had done nothing to earn B’s rage. She was simply a vulnerable target.
There had been, in the years prior to the murder, other potential targets. Ms Kemppainen was the unlucky last.
B’s life in the small town of Callington was marked by social isolation due to his mental retardation and low intellectual function. He internalised the disapproval of others and projected it as utter hatred.
He threatened neighbourhood children with knives and offered to murder a teacher’s partner. He dreamed of attending his high school reunion with an automatic weapon so he could “mow down mother---kers”.
“I was obsessed about killing people,” he would later admit. “From Year 1 to Year 8, I’ve just had thoughts about killing people. I still think about it.”
Those thoughts were fuelled by violent movies, video games and pornography. The protagonists of Scarface, Saint’s Row and Gears of War were his role models, his idea of fun slicing a virtual person in half with a chainsaw.
To a susceptible mind like B’s, such games were desensitising.
Forensic psychologist Luke Broomhall, who treated B, stressed this was not true for all cases — only those who lacked the ability to separate fantasy and reality.
Psychologist and social worker Dr Alan Campbell agreed:
There’s no doubt violent video games and television shows have some impact, but we’re talking about something deeper than desensitisation here.”
“When children face a situation they don’t know how to handle, or that leaves them feeling like a failure, some think about taking revenge on the world. Psychologists and social workers try to identify ‘at risk’ individuals but many slip through the net.”
Tragically, the net caught B and let him go. Concerned teachers had arranged for a psychological intervention but, due to a lack of resources, the appointment was cancelled. When he was suspended from school due to violence, Ms Kemppainen’s fate was sealed.
Mr Broomhall said B used violence to empower himself.
“He is spectacularly unable to balance competing demands,” he would tell the Supreme Court. “If he had something on his mind he wanted to achieve, it would be very difficult for him to evaluate the consequences of that behaviour.”
B knew Ms Kemppainen lived alone, that she was vulnerable. She was the perfect victim for his sick fantasies and, in the early hours of September 11, 2010, he carried out one of the state’s most vicious murders.
He would later coolly recount the event in the witness box.
“I put the knife in her stomach, ‘’ B said, miming the action.
“I tried to stab her twice in the stomach and then I repeatedly stabbed her in the head. She tried to hold her arms up to keep me from stabbing her, she was screaming.”
B went on to describe how he continued the attack with a rock.
“(The rock) was a big chunk of rock, about 30cm across. The last thing I did was throw the slab of concrete at her head.”
Aghast, prosecutors asked how he had felt after the murder. “Relaxed,” came the unaffected reply.
Quickly arrested, B’s incarceration did nothing for his insight. Upon hearing of another elderly woman’s murder, he boasted “I’ve started a revolution”.
He expressed his glee through amateurish rap lyrics. “Don’t ever think you can befriend me because I’ll cut you so gently,” he wrote. “I will turn your bedroom into a blood frenzy. Don’t think I can ever change.”
B received a sentencing discount after promising to give evidence against his alleged co-accused, but a jury rejected his evidence upon hearing he wanted to “smash a hammer” over the other boy’s jaw.
The alleged co-accused was acquitted, and B was left to serve his life sentence alone.
Privately, those involved in the Pirjo Kemppainen murder investigation admitted it was the most disturbing they had seen.
Even so, they were not ready to write B off as a monster. That would, they said, be too easy. Social researcher Mark McCrindle says there is never anything easy about killer children.
“They cause national, sometimes international, soul-searching because we don’t blame the children — we blame parents, government and the media,” he says. “We can’t accept that children could be responsible for such atrocities, and so we all but close the door on the idea of individual blame and evil. We, as a society, feel uncomfortable using the word ‘evil’ because it goes against our modern enlightened views that children are never beyond rehabilitation.”
Andrew, Rose and Chantelle Rowe and their murderer, Jason Alexander Downie.
JASON ALEXANDER DOWNIE
THE precise details of what happened on Harriet St, Kapunda, on November 7, 2010 will never be known — and that is, perhaps, for the best. What is known about the events that took place in the home of Andrew and Rose Rowe is already the stuff of nightmares.
Late that night, Jason Alexander Downie, 18, entered the house as an intruder.
When he left, hours later, his bloody footprints led back to the bodies of Andrew, Rose and their daughter Chantelle.
Downie had taken a knife from the Rowe family’s kitchen and stabbed Andrew 29 times. Rose, who had tried crawling for help, had been stabbed 50 times. Forensic examiners would later find pieces of the blade broken off inside the couple’s bodies, but would never determine which parent died first.
Chantelle, 16, had hidden under her bed. Investigators believed she was the last to die, meaning she suffered the agony of hearing her parents’ murders.
In an act police would dub “pure evil”, Downie pulled the doubtlessly terrified girl into the open and stabbed her multiple times. He stabbed her again with a second knife and then raped her. Bizarrely, he chose to strip and redress Chantelle’s body then tried to clean up after himself, smearing blood around the crime scene but leaving evidence that would prove vital to his eventual conviction.
As Andrew and Rose’s traumatised son, Christopher, made his way home from an interstate holiday, Downie moved to distance himself from the crime.
He was used to putting space between himself and goings-on in Kapunda — a town he referred to, derisively, as “Krapunda”.
Downie wanted to return to his native Scotland, to his half-sister and relatives in Kilmarnock, to a place he felt understood him. He was the outsider in Kapunda.
Online he promoted himself as a skilled basketballer who was busy “on and off the court, if you know what I mean”.
His taste in movies ran to violent horror films such as Saw, and his internet profile automatically played the haunting rap lyric “one two, you hear the clock ticking, tick-tock, you’re about to stop living”. The words came from “I’m Coming” by Silkk the Shocker, which was used as theme music by pro wrestler “MVP”.
Most ominous of all was his Facebook profile picture — a photo of he and Chantelle Rowe sitting together on a fence.
Then-Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Pallaras, QC, would explain that Chantelle had become Downie’s obsession. She was dating his only real friend but he wrongly perceived a deep connection.
“Downie was, it seems, fantasising over the true nature of their relationship,” Mr Pallaras told the court. “He was becoming increasingly sexually infatuated by Chantelle. Everything (in the evidence) suggests he was unrequitedly sexually attracted to Chantelle, which may form the beginning of an explanation.”
He broke into her home after she made it clear his love was not returned, determined to have her one way or another. The result was a charnel house.
Fortunately, Downie was no match for experienced SA Police detectives. He was soon arrested and, to the great relief of the victims’ family, pleaded guilty to three counts of murder. Spared the trauma of a criminal trial, the bereaved had to nonetheless sit through four hours of sentencing submissions.
“You are f--ked,” one of the mourners yelled from the public gallery. Another was even less restrained: “You will not get out anyway, you f--king scumbag … enjoy life in hell, you dog bastard.”
Downie barely responded and, as details of Chantelle’s death were recounted, he licked his lips.
Defence counsel insisted Downie couldn’t remember the murders, speaking of “fugue states” and a long-suppressed rage so terrible the killer had functioned as an automaton.
Greg Mead, SC, for Downie, told the court:
The explanation is as old as humanity itself — ordinary, unremarkable, common jealousy.”
“Faced with resistance from Andrew and Rose Rowe, he seems to have lost total control ... he obviously went completely berserk that night.”
Robbed of any insight into his actions, Mr Mead insisted Downie’s attempts to apologise for his savagery were doomed to inadequacy and failure.
“This whole situation is eating me alive,” Downie’s apology, written in childish, badly-spelled scrawl, read. “I had a career, car, friends and most important I had my family ... now due to my recent actions I have nothing. I want you to know that if I could turn back time and fix my wrongdoings (sic) I would do it in an instant, but unfortunately I can’t. So once again I sincerely apologise for my actions.”
Christopher Rowe kept a laudable, dignified silence. The ornate memorial tattoos across his body did the talking for him until Downie was jailed for at least 35 years.
“Whilst many feel my family and I have reached some form of justice today, I find it hard to agree,” he said in a statement outside court. “The lives of my dad, mum and sister (being) viciously taken by someone of sound mind qualified this bastard, Jason Downie, to 35 years non-parole, whilst my family and I continue to serve life. Please explain to me the ‘justice’ in this.
“We can close this chapter and now we can start to focus our strength on keeping mum, dad and Channy’s memories alive. I can slowly try to find my own way to survive this.”
And that he did, going on to marry his fiancee and welcome their first child into the world.
Jose Omonte-Extrada was convicted of murdering Jasinta-Leigh Fullerton and Rebecca Wild.
JOSE OMONTE-EXTRADA
HE was verbally and physically abused by an unmarried, alcoholic, drug-addicted mother.
He was left, with his siblings, to scavenge for whatever food was available in the poverty-stricken environment of La Paz, Bolivia.
Rescued and transplanted halfway around the world to Quorn, South Australia, Jose Omonte-
Extrada became an outcast — withdrawn, shunned because he preferred music and video games over farms and motorbikes.
He especially enjoyed video games in which he could stab characters, over and over again, in the head with a screwdriver or laugh maniacally while bashing corpses with baseball bats.
Arrests for petty theft and vandalism fuelled the SES volunteer’s outsider status and sense of ostracism while the loss of his adopted father — the first positive male role model in his life — hastened his downward spiral.
Dark and unsettling artwork with titles such as “Born Villain”, “Skullf--ked with a hammer” and “Tim is now single” — depicting himself about to slash a woman’s throat — filled his online accounts.
When he found himself unemployed he turned to heavy drinking.
Omonte-Extrada, 19, had long been primed for bloody mayhem when Port Pirie teenager Rebecca Wild became the focus of his rage.
Miss Wild, 16, had shared an online relationship with Omonte-Extrada for a few months in 2010. But their friendship persisted because, in his mind, she shared his sense of humour — and his feelings of depression.
They started to meet in person, eating takeaway while watching horror movies. A single kiss encouraged Miss Wild to hope for more in the future. Omonte-Extrada did not share her feelings. “Bec started seeing our relationship a bit more like a boyfriend-girlfriend,” he would later tell forensic psychologist Luke Broomhall.
“She wanted to marry on Facebook. She tried to be closer but I like my personal space too much.”
When Miss Wild asked Omonte-Extrada to have a baby with her, the friendship soured. Further communication devolved into arguments over why their “relationship” had floundered.
On December 5, 2012, Omonte-Extrada borrowed a SES ute and travelled to Port Pirie to see Miss Wild. He wanted to sort things out face-to-face — and while armed with an axe.
Frustrated, feeling used and believing Miss Wild was “up to things with different guys”, Omonte-Extrada pulled a knife from his bag and repeatedly stabbed the teen in the arm.
She lapsed into unconsciousness while pleading to be taken to hospital. Omonte-Extrada ignored her and pulled over.
A second car arrived on the scene, driven by Quorn local Jasinta-Leigh Fullerton. Known around the town as “Jessie”, she had overcome many challenges in her life — including dwarfism, hospitalisation as a child and injuries sustained in a serious car crash in 2010 — and gained fame as a camel jockey.
Ms Fullerton, 22, was considered kind, loving and thoughtful — an upstanding citizen. It was completely in-character for her to stop and ask Omonte-Extrada whether he needed help — and to react in shock upon seeing Miss Wild bleeding in the front seat.
“She was yelling out ‘why is there blood all over the f--king car? What the f--k have you done to her?’,” Omonte-Extrada said later.
He answered her questions by striking her with the axe, again and again, until she died. Admittedly “lucid”, Omonte-Extrada repeated his foul act upon Ms Wild and dumped her body beneath blankets on the side of the road.
After returning to the CFS depot to wash blood from the ute, he set Ms Fullerton’s body alight and buried Miss Wild in the local cemetery.
Like Downie before him, Omonte-Extrada was undone by his clean-up efforts and Facebook. Washing the ute had set off motion-activated CCTV cameras that recorded the grisly tableau, while his Facebook interactions with Miss Wild punctured his pleas of ignorance and innocence.
Incredibly, he was preparing to help his fellow locals search for clues the morning after the murders when police pulled him out of the ranks for questioning.
Even after his arrest, he showed no remorse while leading detectives on a tour of the murder and burial sites.
Asked if there was any reason for his actions, he replied: “I have no idea. I just got really frustrated with her (Miss Wild) and I just kind of lost it.”
The Supreme Court would label Omonte-Extrada a man with “chilling sociopathic disregard” for his victims and jail him for 33 years.
In his analysis, Mr Broomhall found the killer to be a mixture of self-protective survival instincts and impulsive, harmful, self-destructive behaviours.
“He likely questions and mistrusts the motives of those around him, despite the nature of the history of the relationships,” he concluded in his report. “There was evidence of lack of remorse and guilt ... there also are indications of a callous lack of empathy with a disregard for the feelings of others.”
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