How police finally solved Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and Khandalyce Pearce murders
Inside the murder of mother and daughter Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and Khandalyce Pearce – and the stunning way police pieced their deaths together.
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A mother is dying of cancer.
She hasn’t seen her daughter, Karlie, and granddaughter, Khandalyce, since the girls left on a road trip with Karlie’s boyfriend in 2008.
The missing persons’ report she filed came to naught after police told her they’d followed up but Karlie told them she didn’t want to be found by family.
But every so often, she gets a phone call from her daughter.
In the calls, Karlie is whispering, the line is crackly, and she tells her mum she needs help.
She says she needs money, and hoping this will be the final payment that will bring her daughter back to her, the sick mother obliges.
But Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her two-year-old daughter Khandalyce never come home to their grandmother before she dies.
In fact, their killer, convicted sex offender Daniel Holdom has murdered them long before the fraudulent calls were dialled.
In a career spent covering the most depraved acts of humanity, this was an act that stood out for its cruelty to crime reporter, Ava Benny-Morrison.
“Karlie’s mum had received phone calls from someone she thought was Karlie saying things like: ‘Oh, mum, yeah, I’m in some trouble here, can you please wire me $500? I’m going to come home. I promise. Like I’m going to come home now’,” said Benny-Morrison, whose extensive coverage of the story led her to write the book, The Lost Girls.
“One of the most heartbreaking elements of the story was at the time [Pearce-Stevenson’s mother] Colleen was suffering breast cancer and she was undergoing treatment in Adelaide. When I did interviews with colleagues, family and friends, they spoke about how Colleen always held out hope that her daughter was going to come home … Colleen ended up passing away without knowing what happened to her daughter or her granddaughter.”
But perhaps that was a blessing, the truth of the torturous demise suffered by Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter would have been unbearable to hear.
In 2008, Holdom left Alice Springs with Pearce-Stevenson, on a road trip. The 20-year-old single mother was murdered on 15 December, 2008, when she travelled into the Belanglo State Forest with Holdom, who stepped on her throat, crushed her windpipe and dumped her body in bushland.
After sexually assaulting her with foreign objects, he took “trophy photographs” which were later discovered on an SD card. Police were able to use the photographs to place Holdom at the crime scene.
“He had robbed her of her dignity in the most horrific way in these photographs, the things that he did to her,” said Benny-Morrison.
The SD card later came into the possession of his girlfriend, Hazel Passmore, whose sister submitted it to police, some time later.
“Hazel had given that SD card to her sister, saying: ‘If anything ever happens to me, take this to the police’.”
After Holdom murdered Pearce-Stevenson, he returned to Canberra and picked up Khandalyce, telling family he was taking her to her grandmother’s house. Instead, he drove her to a motel in Narrandera, NSW, and suffocated her.
He stuffed her body into a suitcase, dumping it on the side of the road in Wynarka, South Australia, where it remained for almost seven years.
The bodies of Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter were discovered five years and more than 1000km apart, in different states, and were not initially linked by police.
However, when Khandalyce’s remains were found in the suitcase, an image was broadcast around the country, and Pearce-Stevenson’s stepfather and aunt identified the quilt buried with the little girl.
They put in a call into Crime Stoppers and the mystery begins to unfold.
Complicating the investigation was that Pearce-Stevenson appeared to be alive as her bank accounts and Centrelink payments were being collected. However, it was discovered Holdom and associates, including girlfriend Hazel Passmore, had been fraudulently using her identity after her death for their financial gain. Passmore was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Once Pearce-Stevenson and Khandalyce were identified, Holdom quickly became a prime suspect and police were able to trace his mobile phone to the site in the Belanglo State Forest where Pearce-Stevenson’s remains were discovered.
He was arrested and charged with her murder in October, 2015, and was charged with Khandalyce’s murder that December.
In July 2018, Holdom pleaded guilty to the murders and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, without parole, in November, 2018.
“One really disturbing part of this case: is there were a few people along the way, [including] Hazel who Daniel [Holdom] confided in and said: You know, Karlie is not here anymore. She’s dead.’
And people brushed that off as that he was big-noting or he was making it up. But I always found it quite disturbing that wouldn’t ring alarm bells. Or especially in Hazel’s case, she found that SD photo card in the back of his car and plugged it into the computer or the camera, and saw these images of Karlie clearly dead and that didn’t raise an alarm? That just beggars belief,” Benny-Morrison said.
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