Andrew Rule: Three years after Maddy Murphy-West’s death, her family still suffers
HARDLY anyone thinks abused young mother Maddison Murphy-West died by her own hand, but that’s how it was presented to police by her violent, drug-dealing, boyfriend, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
Don't miss out on the headlines from Andrew Rule. Followed categories will be added to My News.
IT IS three years today since Maddison Murphy-West was found dead in her unit in Pakenham. She was 20. Her son, Noah, was 20 months.
Hardly anyone thinks the abused young mother died by her own hand, although that’s how it was presented to the police called to the scene by her violent, drug-dealing, thieving boyfriend, Troy Boothey.
Boothey, then 24, told the police he had come in from doing something in the garage to find his partner of four years hanging from a doorknob.
The investigators doubted his story, despite his crocodile tears. They suspected the scene had been dressed up to look like suicide. Nothing has happened in the three years since to change their minds or those of the dead woman’s family.
`Mum prays for answers to daughter Maddy Murphy-West’s violent death
For Boothey, his girlfriend’s violent death did not seem to divert him from a life of crime. Later the same day, instantly recovered, he was seen scoring drugs at Seaford. When someone he knew asked him how Maddy was, he lied: “Great!”
They say the leopard’s spots never vanish — they just get bigger or smaller. This week Troy Boothey appeared in Dandenong Drug Court charged with the latest of a lifetime of offences.
He admitted thefts and having illicit drugs after he was caught red-handed robbing a Dandenong South auction house in early August.
He was carrying a torch and nine grams of the drug ice after he and an accomplice had broken in by cutting a fence and smashing a window.
Three months earlier, in June, police found Boothey asleep in a car in Hampton Park, engine running and headlights on. The car was unregistered and Boothey had ecstasy pills, scales and $450 cash on him.
In the sick and selfish world of Boothey and thousands like him, cash is for necessities like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and gambling — not to be wasted on registering cars, paying rent, buying real food or supporting children.
Victorian courts are clogged with crimes which are symptoms of the same sort of sordid circumstances: drugs, drinking, chronic unemployment, stupidity, criminal carelessness and more drugs. Which, of course, is just another variation on the circumstances leading to the death of the neglected toddler Jaidyn Leskie at Moe in 1997.
If Jaidyn’s body had been found the night he died, instead of being successfully hidden for six months, it would have been just another sad case to be tutted over and then forgotten.
“Just another little murder,” as Phil Cleary reflects bitterly of the pre-planned butchering of his sister Vicki by a violent piece of vermin called Peter Keogh in 1987.
Keogh, notoriously, was let off with a pathetically light jail sentence by a judge who should have known better than to humour the defence case of “provocation”.
Maddy Murphy-West, like Vicki Cleary and hundreds more, think they can change bad and damaged people — nearly always drunks or druggies with criminal “form” — into someone who can be trusted with their own lives and their children’s. We all know (or know of) someone like that.
Patting monsters doesn’t work, a point Maddy Murphy-West’s mother and uncle have had too much time to think about since they got the awful news three years ago.
A month after Maddy’s death, Boothey cut off a bus driver at a Hallam roundabout, got out of his car with a baseball bat and smashed the bus window, spattering shattered glass into the driver’s face.
A dash camera recorded the incident and Boothey was arrested soon after, identified by his mugshot.
He could offer no reason for the attack — and claimed he could not even remember it — but in his defence it was suggested he was lashing out wildly because of his “grief” over Maddy’s death. The same excuse, incidentally, he used for various other offences.
He was either lying about not recalling the attack — or so off his face on drugs that his mind was blanked out.
Either way, he deserved the four months’ jail he got. And more.
One way he could have proven his bona fides as a grief-stricken partner was to keep his promise to detectives to go through with a polygraph lie-detector test.
But — surprise, surprise — he didn’t.
Maddy Murphy-West had reasons to want to escape her life with Boothey but, insist her family and friends, she would never have killed herself.
She loved Noah too much. Her mother, Paula Murphy, has always believed that her daughter’s renewed determination to leave Boothey might have sparked an ugly confrontation before her death.
“People told her to pack her bags and leave and that was a mistake — she should have walked straight out the door without packing anything,” Paula Murphy once told this reporter.
“I told her once to just go out to buy milk and never come back.”
Maddy’s death is all the harder for her mother because she had often tried to persuade her girl to leave the fated relationship.
But Maddy wouldn’t — even after being separated for six months early in the year she died, she had stuck by the jailbird boyfriend. Her family still believe she was too frightened to do anything else.
The day before she was to reunite with him after he got out of jail in 2013, Maddy looked sick with strain. No wonder. The year before, she had been admitted to hospital after being brutally attacked.
In texts to a friend, she confessed she had been choked in front of her little boy. The texts, sent from Casey Hospital in Berwick in late 2012, admit she was waiting on results of neck scans after being half-strangled.
She was clearly afraid that her attacker would be angry about her going to police.
“So now he’s going to kill me,” she texted. “I’m not only doing this for me and Noah, I’m doing it for him. He bashed me, choked me today. I can’t have that in front of my son.”
Her fear was clear in the exchange during her day-long hospital stay.
“If he calls you, don’t tell him anything. Not even about me being in hospital,” she wrote.
But she went back. It seemed to her she had no choice but to wade back into the quicksand she knew was going to choke her.
When Boothey left prison last January, Maddy’s aunt, Kelly Anne Murphy, took to Facebook to express her anger and concern.
“The prime suspect in Maddy’s murder is being released from prison tomorrow,” she wrote.
“I’m warning everyone because it’s not just us that are in danger, he is a danger to the community as well. Our justice system has a lot to answer for!”
Troy Boothey is only 27. How many more lives will he destroy before he destroys himself?
Racing rogue’s real world alliances brought rough trot in jail
Disgraced harness trainer-driver Rod Weightman started to associate with serious crooks after he was disqualified on doping charges in 2004. And he soon found out such alliances can make you a jailhouse target.
How families help suburban killers sneak through the cracks
When a wife or mum “goes missing” many children, having lost one parent, don’t want to lose the other. But how do they block out a truth too terrible to contemplate and accept a barely plausible story?