Patrick Carlyon: Mother’s killing shatters Ristevski family’s idyllic life
SARAH Ristevski lived with Mum and Dad in a kind of domestic bliss that verged on dull. They were “very, very close” and didn’t fight much, the court was told. On Tuesday, however, there was little comfort, writes Patrick Carlyon.
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EVERY family has its little quirks. Its habits and its hopes, its failings and its faultlines.
One family, from Avondale Heights, once boasted fewer than many.
Mum and Dad lived with their daughter Sarah in a kind of domestic bliss that verged on dull. They were “very, very close” and didn’t fight much. Or so the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court heard on Tuesday.
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Mum ran a fashion boutique, Sarah told a packed gallery.
She loved shoes, and devoted a spare bedroom to housing more than 100 pairs, which mother and daughter would share.
Dad did the business books and drove for Uber. That’s why he’d come home late from time to time and, rather than disturb the household upstairs, bunker down with Foxtel on the downstairs couch.
Sometimes, naturally, the family spoke about the business. Here was a passion and, like all small businesses, a source of tension, too.
The boutique needed to do better. Mum spoke of wanting more stock during these chats; Dad raised the notion of having sales.
Usually, such debates blew over, according to Sarah, who worked in the shop. Bella Bleu, as it was called, “wouldn’t have existed without my Mum”.
There were other arguments, too, if minor disagreements warrant such labels. Such as when Sarah studied with headphones, and didn’t hear her Mum’s questions.
Or when Mum asked Dad to get milk and he returned with junk food. It was on sale, he would explain in the face of Mum’s protestations about her thighs getting fat.
Dad was the “calm one”, Sarah Ristevski said on Tuesday. Mum, Karen, would need to “clear her head” or — as she put it — “to breathe”. She would clean the bathroom to calm down. At such times she would remove her rings and sometimes forget to put them back on. Mum was like that, it seemed. Her iPhone was always running flat.
Sometimes Karen would head upstairs. Or go for a walk. Or take the car. Sarah was uncertain how often she did this, but her time-outs would last for up to half a day.
So why does any of this mundane detail matter?
Because it helps understand why Sarah says she was not shocked that her father delayed telling her for hours that her mother was missing on the day Karen Ristevski disappeared.
The assumption went before Sarah entered the witness box on Tuesday that she was confronting a terrible dilemma. Call it Sarah’s Choice. Her mother or her father?
The ordinariness of her past life was replaced on June 29, 2016. From this moment, when her mother disappeared, her dad, Borce, firmed as a suspect in her mother’s loss. For Sarah, however — as she said on Tuesday — Dad grew to be a protector from the hostile surrounds.
Sarah was so quietly spoken that she was asked to raise her voice to be heard on Tuesday.
She cried on telling the story about the junk food. Her stress was evident when she stopped, mid-sentence, to point out the electronic shutter sound of an iPhone or iPad in the courtroom.
“Someone took a photo in here,” she announced.
She expressed anger at the media intrusion since her mother’s disappearance. In a text message to a friend, the court heard that she had written “like wtf” in response to a newspaper article about the alleged family debt.
Journalists had followed her. “My father and I didn’t have time to mourn because of them,” she said.
He had been distressed, she said on Tuesday, “extremely worried” and “very concerned about where Mum was”.
Sarah had seen her mother for the last time early that June morning.
It was a few weeks after the family had hosted about 80 people at home for her 21st birthday. Sarah was expecting to have dinner that night with her boyfriend, parents and grandparents. Her mum was “pretty bubbly”.
“Bye, Mum, see you tonight, she said.
“OK, see you tonight,” her mother replied.
Her father has said her mother later left that morning to “clear her head” after a spat about money. Police and prosecutors say he killed her and dumped her body in Mt Macedon Regional Park.
In the following weeks, father and daughter presented a united front in grim determination. Sarah stood alongside her father in appealing for information; it is believed they sought solace from one another at Karen’s funeral the following year.
She burst into tears when a cheeky reporter, in those early weeks, asked her father if he had killed her mother. His response was to comfort his daughter.
On Tuesday, however, there was little comfort. Dad Borce sat still in the dock, blinking often and hunched.
Father and daughter exchanged few glances as she described an ordinary family that will never be again because — according to prosecutors — Borce Ristevski took it away.