Victoria’s most chilling murder cases of the past 20 years
They have committed some of the most unspeakable crimes in our state’s history. Inside the stories of Victoria’s most heinous murders. WARNING: Graphic
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It’s the crime that grips the news headlines, so foul it brings fear into the hearts of ordinary Australians.
And Victoria is no stranger to senseless killings, with a murder occurring in the state every six days.
In the past decade, 591 Victorians have been murdered.
According to police, most murders are committed by someone known to the victim and, in many cases, within a relationship or a family.
Here are some of the worst murders Victoria has seen in the past 20 years.
ARTHUR PHILLIP FREEMAN
It was the crime that left Melburnians aghast, a four-year-old girl thrown 80m to her death during peak-hour traffic on the West Gate Bridge.
Darcey Freeman died hours later in hospital on January 29, 2009.
Tha man responsible, her father Arthur, had been driving the little girl to her first day of school, murdering her during a custody battle with her mother.
Freeman was arrested the same day outside the Federal Court complex in Melbourne’s CBD and spent two years arguing he was not guilty by way of mental impairment.
The then 37-year-old was found guilty after a marathon five-day jury deliberation and sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 32 years.
At the time, Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan said Freeman had shown no remorse in the two years since the “horrible act” that breached the basic trust between father and child.
“One of the unfortunate features of this case is that others blame themselves,” he said.
“You are responsible for it. And nobody else.”
VASILIKI “VICKY” EFANDIS
Lonely but successful businessman, George Marcetta, thought himself lucky to find love again in his 50s when his housekeeper began to reciprocate his feelings of affection.
The pair became friends, then lovers for two years. Or so he believed.
She took control of his finances before drugging him with sedatives in his favorite meal — pork rolls and noodles — in September 2004 at their Bellfield home in Melbourne’s inner northeast.
After Mr Marcetta retired to bed, Efandis splashed up to 28 litres of kerosene around the home and lit small newspaper fires in nearly every room.
She was jailed for 24 years in 2008, with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Kaye describing the crime as “chilling”.
“You insinuated your way into his life, gained his trust and then abused it in the most appalling way,” he said.
ROBYN LINDHOLM
Dubbed the “Black Widow” after organising the murders of two lovers almost a decade apart, Lindholm is serving a minimum of 30 years in jail.
The femme fatale arranged her secret lover, Wayne Amey, to murder her fiance Gorge Teazis at his Reservoir home in May 2005, ensuring she had an alibi.
His body was never found and Lindholm has maintained her innocence.
The ruthless ex-stripper then made out he had disappeared before moving in with Mr Amey at his Hawthorn mansion soon after.
In a cruel twist of fate she would do the same to get rid of him in December, 2013, enlisting lover Torsten Trabert, and another man John Ryan to kill Mr Amey, whose body was found between boulders on Mount Korong in central Victoria.
Lindholm was jailed for 25 years in 2013 for the murder of Mr Amey and had nine years added to her sentence in 2019 over the murder of Mr Teazis.
CHRISTIAN BAIN-SINGH
The horrific murder of Rani Featherston in April 2014 remained an unsolved mystery for more than two years until a 22-year-old from Clyde North confessed.
Ms Featherston’s bloodied and beaten body was found near a tree in an industrial area in Eumemmerring - in Melbourne’s southeast - with 21 stab wounds to her face, neck and back.
In 2016, the Supreme Court of Victoria heard Ms Featherstone and Christian Bain-Singh were acquaintances, but that the senseless killing was a chance street encounter.
The violent killing came only 11 days after Bain-Singh‘s unrelated stabbing attack on sleeping man Daniel Maynard, 55, for which he was charged with attempted murder.
The failed butcher told police he had chosen to come forward after returning to the church and finding God.
He was jailed for 29 years.
ROBERT DONALD WILLIAM FARQUHARSON
Blasted as a “monumental act of betrayal” by prosecutors, Farquharson is serving three life sentences for the cold-hearted murder of his three young sons on Father’s Day in 2005.
The Winchelsea man drove the family car into a farm dam along the Princes Highway between Winchelsea and Geelong after an access visit with his ex-wife Cindy Gambino.
He escaped and left Jai, 10, Tyler, 7, and Bailey, 2, to drown in the vehicle.
Farquharson later denied he had intended to kill the children, claiming he had suffered a coughing fit that had made him lose control of the car.
In October 2007, a jury found him guilty of three counts of murder and was jailed for a minnimum term of 33 years.
MATTHEW WALES
The disappearance of Margaret Wales-King and her husband, Paul, in 2002 gripped the public’s attention like few cases before it.
Dubbed the “Society Murders” by the media, it was a crime that seemed more fiction than reality and later inspired a book and a television movie.
The wealthy Armadale couple were last seen alive after visiting Magraret’s son for dinner on April 4, nearly a month later their bodies were found in a shallow bushland grave at Marysville, 100km northeast of the well-heeled Melbourne suburb.
Matthew was eventually arrested and admitted to drugging them and bashing them with a piece of wood, leaving their bodies in the front garden of his Burke Rd townhouse.
He was sentenced to 20 years jail for each murder in 2003.
SEAN CHRISTIAN PRICE
The public was horrified by the random slaying of 17-year-old schoolgirl Masa Vukotic at a Doncaster park in March 2015.
She was in the wrong place at the wrong time — her killer would later tell police he had spent 11 hours on Melbourne’s public transport system looking for a victim.
He wanted society to suffer for the hardships he had endured behind bars and chose her because she looked like Snow White, singing to the birds as she walked through the park.
In 2017, Supreme Court judge Lex Lasry jailed Price for life with a non-parole period of 38 years, saying his murder of Masa was “the extremity of brutality”.
DONNA FITCHETT
Feeling trapped in a loveless marriage, a qualified nurse hatched an evil plan to kill her two sons in what she claimed was her “greatest act of love”.
Donna Fitchett gave Thomas, 11, and Matthew, 9, a cocktail of drugs before strangling one and smothering the other at their Balwyn North home on September 6, 2005.
After killing the boys, she left a note for her husband David: “I am so sorry for your pain upon the discovery of what I have done. I can’t abandon the boys. I pray I don’t live through this”.
Fitchett admitted the killings but pleaded not guilty to murder on the grounds of mental impairment.
This was rejected by Justice Elizabeth Curtain who jailed Fitchett for 27 years in 2010, describing the shocking murders as “an act of unfathomable selfishness”.
SCOTT ALAN MURDOCH
Mia and Holly Blackwood were just 11 years old when they discovered their mum, Kylie Blackwood, in a pool of blood at their Pakenham home after school on August 1, 2013.
She had been savagely stabbed to death in what police suspected was a burglary gone horribly wrong.
Murdoch had been on parole at the time after attacking a 79-year-old grandmother with a knife.
It took police three years to charge Murdoch, after DNA taken from Ms Blackwood’s jeans came up with a possible match.
He was jailed for 36 years in 2020, but was found dead inside his cell at the Melbourne Assessment Prison in April this year.
JAMES STUART RAMAGE
The high-flying millionaire businessman bashed, strangled and killed the mother of his two children moments after she told him she had met someone else.
Julie Ramage had moved out of their Balwyn family home a month earlier in 2003, ending the marriage because she was “repulsed” by the thought of sex with him.
He bundled her petite lifeless body into the boot of his Jaguar and drove to Kinglake, 50km to the northeast, where he buried her in a shallow grave.
Afterwards, Ramage washed his car, cleaned the home, ordered new bench tops, took his son to dinner, met with lawyers — and then surrendered to police.
Ramage was jailed for 11 years in 2004 for manslaughter, beating a murder charge after infamously claiming he had been provoked into the frenzied attack and “lost it”.
He was the last person in Victoria to successfully use the provocation defence before it was abolished in 2005 following widespread outrage.
He only served eight years behind bars after he was given parole in 2011.
VICKY SOTERIOU
Playing the role of a loving wife, the mother of three organised a surprise party for her husband’s 44th birthday in 2010 at one of his favourite restaurants in Fitzroy.
Unbeknownst to her husband, Vicky Soteriou had her secret lover, Ari Dimitrakis, lying in wait outside the restaurant to ambush Chris Soteriou as the pair walked back to their car.
Chris was in a coma for 13 days after the frenzied attack where he was stabbed multiple times and had his throat slashed, but ultimately lived to tell the tale.
“I was gutted, I just wanted to end my life. I was just in a state of shock for days. They say love is blind. It‘s so true,” he said after police revealed she planned the attempted murder.
She pleaded not guilty and tried to claim Dimitrakis had acted alone, but was ultimately found guilty of attempted murder after a jury trial the following year.
Sentencing Soteriou to 12 years imprisonment in the Victorian Supreme Court in 2011, Justice Elizabeth Curtain said she had shown a “complete lack of regret”.
JOHN MYLES SHARPE
The quiet suburb of Mornington was horrified when news broke of the gruesome crimes committed by the “Mornington Monster” in March, 2004.
Believing his partner to be moody and controlling, Sharpe decided to kill his wife and chose a spear gun to do so.
Anna Kemp was pregnant at the time, asleep in their bed, when he shot two spears into her head.
Four days later he turned the weapon on his 20-month old daughter, Gracie, to help perpetuate his story that his wife had left him for another man.
In May, he even made several tearful but unconvincing media appeals for help to find his wife and child.
Both were disposed of in a Mornington Peninsula tip, beginning weeks of botched attempts by Sharpe at covering his tracks.
In June he confessed under intense questioning by police and was jailed in August 2005 for two consecutive terms of life imprisonment.
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