Prison letters reveal cold heart of double-murderer Daniel James Holdom
THEY are the prison letters that go inside the mind of cold and calculated double-murderer Daniel James Holdom. Written to Sunday Telegraph crime reporter Ava Benny-Morrison, the letters show how he thought very little of his victims Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter, Khandalyce.
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FROM Belanglo State Forrest to Tin Can Bay, Daniel James Holdom left a path of destruction in his wake.
Two dead children in South Australia. A mother and child murdered in NSW.
Rarely one to admit fault, the father-of-three attempts to blame his catastrophic life choices on a rough childhood of abuse and neglect.
A series of letters written from inside his cell at Goulburn Correctional Centre offer a disturbing insight into the killer’s frame of mind.
“I know I am tangled up in all of this,” he wrote in 2017.
“But there is still a lot to be said.”
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The Sunday Telegraph can publish the self-serving scribblings for the first time after Holdom this week pleaded guilty to murdering Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter, Khandalyce.
Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s skeleton was found in the Belanglo State Forest in August, 2010.
She was identified five years later after her two-year-old daughter’s remains were found stuffed in a suitcase on the side of a highway in rural South Australia.
A complex and lengthy investigation mobilised detectives in two jurisdictions and discovered the mother and child were killed days apart in December 2008.
Detectives mounted an overwhelming case against the convicted sex offender, despite a 10-year lapse between when the crimes were committed and Holdom was charged.
It left him with little choice but to plead guilty to the murders on Tuesday, a week before his mammoth NSW Supreme Court trial was due to begin.
The 43-year-old, who once dreamt of being a football player or a chef, claimed he grew up in an alcoholic and abusive household in Central Western NSW.
“I was constantly bashed with fist, belt, belt buckles and bits of wood around the legs or over my hands,” he wrote.
LISTEN TO DANIEL HOLDOM’S LETTERS FROM JAIL:
“He would ram my head through cupboard doors punch me in the face, I would run away to get away only for the police to take me straight back home.
“I would be locked in my room for days without food; my sister would sneak bits of food for me that she could fit under the door.”
Similar claims were regurgitated in various court cases over the years, including when Holdom sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl in 2013 in a Central Coast caravan park (a crime he refused to admit to).
Holdom, who started using drugs in his teens and was booted from school in Year 7, said he was placed in foster care and rejected by his parents.
In October, 2015, police raided the house of one of Holdom’s close associates and found Khandalyce’s birth certificate among the killer’s items the killer had left at the home.
The theft of Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s and her daughter’s identities after their murders would become one of the most disturbing aspects of the case.
Identity documents were used — by Holdom and another woman — to get access to her bank accounts and steal more than $70,000.
Holdom’s letters were penned before he entered a guilty plea and when the prospect of a criminal trial still loomed.
He is careful in his language and selective about what parts of his background he delves into, ignoring the criminal history that increased in severity during his adult life.
For reasons only he would know, he never mentions Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s or Khandalyce’s names.
Holdom, also known as Daniel Bishop or Daniel Marshall, had married a woman he met in Orange and the couple had two children in the mid-2000s.
“We moved from Orange to Coffs Harbour to get away from bad influences in Orange,” he wrote.
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“A couple of years after moving we broke up and got devorced (sic).”
Despite his suggestions he chose to cease contact with his kids to keep them out of the media spotlight, it is understood they barely had anything to do with him.
He claimed he then went to Queensland and met another woman in Tin Can Bay, a town north of Brisbane.
That woman, who can’t be legally identified, would go on to have a significant influence on his life.
In his letters, Holdom provides an overview of his nomadic movements with this woman around Australia.
“When in Alice Springs we liked it there so we decided to settle there, I was away from all bad influences,” he wrote.
“We both had good jobs after 12 months thou (sic) I started with drugs again. Then late 2008 had a (sic) accident between Alice Springs and Adelaide … that turned my whole life upside down. What happened that nite (sic) and what I saw was beyond.”
That incident happened in September 2008, two days after using methamphetamine at a party, when Holdom, the woman and three children jumped in a car and drove towards Adelaide.
He swerved to avoid a kangaroo on the Stuart Highway and rolled the car.
Two of the woman’s children died.
She was left with horrific injuries and spent six weeks in a coma.
“After the kids funeral I took of (sic) from Adelaide to try and escape what had happened,”
he wrote.
“I took to use lots of drugs when I took of (sic) to ACT I was not coping at all. Took a couple of attempts on my own life overdosing.
“After a couple of months I went back to Adelaide to try and fix my relationship (with his girlfriend from the car crash).”
That relationship fell apart in the shadow of the fatal car crash.
Despite his role as the driver, which he was charged for, he blamed his girlfriend for not forgiving him.
“It … caused a huge strain on our relationship and was arguing all the time over it and things she said,” he wrote.
“Which she couldn’t take back but I couldn’t forgive her for no matter how much she said sorry and didn’t mean it.”
It was while that girlfriend was in hospital that Holdom struck up a short relationship with Ms Pearce-Stevenson.
The 20-year-old, who had a strong family network in Alice Springs, left the Red Centre with Holdom and her two-year-old daughter Khandalyce in November, 2008.
A month later, after an argument in Canberra’s northern suburbs, Holdom killed the young mother in the Belanglo State Forest.
He took photographs of her body and kept the images on an SD card, a move that would eventually contribute to his undoing.
In 2015, police ended up with the damning evidence on that card.
In a six-hour interview with homicide detectives, Holdom ducked and wove questions about Ms Pearce-Stevenson and when he last
saw her.
His answers were self-serving, not unlike the responses in his letters. But his inability to remember his own lies over the course of the interview served as another nail in his coffin.
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