Life behind bars for some of Victoria’s most high-profile female crims
FORMER prisoner Kerry Tucker reveals the inside story of life behind bars for Roberta Williams, Renate Mokbel, Tania Herman and some of the state’s most high-profile criminals.
VIC News
Don't miss out on the headlines from VIC News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
REFORMED criminal turned author Kerry Tucker has a couple of close links to murderer and gangland boss Carl Williams.
“Firstly, Carl and I were both investigated by the ladies and gentlemen from the famed Purana taskforce,” Tucker said.
“Secondly, we both at one time or another had to put up with Carl’s excruciatingly painful ex-wife, Roberta.”
Tucker — who pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $2 million from her employer and her children’s day care centre — spent four and half years at Victoria’s main women’s prison, the maximum security Dame Phyllis Frost Centre at Deer Park.
BUDDING MP ROBERTA WILLIAMS WAS ARRESTED IN A POLICE STING
BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS AGAINST ROBERTA WILLIAMS
DHAKOTA WILLIAMS WANTS TO BECOME A LAWYER
She was released in 2007 and has since written a book with Craig Henderson called The Prisoner, which is being published later this month, about her time behind bars and the female crims she met.
“When Roberta arrived at Deer Park after being charged with credit card fraud she had yet to be immortalised on the small screen in Underbelly,” Tucker wrote.
“She was, however, already a household name in Victoria thanks to her maniac ex-husband’s penchant for slaughtering people in order to stay atop the state’s blood-soaked drug-dealing pile.”
COURT ORDERS SALE OF WILLIAMS’ ESSENDON HOME
Tucker’s first experience of Roberta Williams was when both of them were in the Visitor Centre with their children — a space most prisoners respected as a peaceful refuge where mothers could spend quality time with their families, but not Williams, who began swearing loudly.
“My girls looked at me with a mixture of alarm and confusion but Roberta just continued spouting obscenities like she was on the set of a hip-hop video shoot,” Tucker wrote.
“By now the girls were completely shocked by the angry, fetid invective that poured out of Roberta’s mean little sewage pipe of a mouth.
“An hour or so later Roberta and I were locked in a holding cell together, waiting to be stripsearched and returned to our units.”
Tucker was furious that her ex-husband might stop letting her children visit if they told him about Roberta Williams’ foul language.
“If you ever do that again in the Visitor Centre, I’m going to let everyone on the compound know that you have just risked their visits with their children,” Tucker warned Williams.
“You will become an endangered species overnight.”
Tucker said Williams was far from the hard-as-nails gangster’s moll many people would expect her to be.
“When she wasn’t curled up in a ball crying, she was whining or demanding extra attention because, y’know, she was Carl Williams’ ex-wife,” she wrote.
“Eventually Roberta felt so threatened by her own celebrity she decided to get herself a minder.
“Amanda was a six foot tall, thin, ageing prostitute from the mean streets of St Kilda.
“She was known for wearing rollerskates and tiny little shorts as she glided up and down the red-light pavements selling drugs.
“We called her Deals on Wheels, which she thought was fantastic.
“Roberta ended up in the same unit as Amanda and one day it appeared they’d become Siamese twins. Roberta refused to go anywhere without her.
“Amanda, what are you doing following her around?’ I asked one day.
“Then the truth came out. Amanda revealed that Roberta — the influential ex-wife of a multi-millionaire mega-gangster — had promised to buy her a beautiful house the minute she was released, only if she served as Roberta’s private bodyguard for the remainder of her sentence.
“I had never heard such nonsense before. ‘Um, Amanda, think about it,’” I said. “She’s in here on credit card fraud. It’s a fair indicator that she doesn’t have any money. You’re not getting a house.’”
RENATE MOKBEL: HOW I BECAME ONE OF HER ‘BACK-UP MOTHERS’
Renate Mokbel was another prisoner Tucker shared time behind bars with at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.
Tucker was instrumental in getting permission for Mokbel’s youngest son to join his mother in jail.
“At the time of her incarceration Melbourne mother of three Renate Mokbel possessed one of the most infamous surnames in the country,” Tucker wrote.
“We bonded straight away over our many shared interests — the biggest being a desperate longing for our kids. She, like me, cared for nothing else.
TONY MOKBEL’S MURDER CONNECTIONS
THE DRUG DEALER WHO DOBBED IN TONY MOKBEL
“Her brother-in-law, the notorious Melbourne drug lord Tony Mokbel, sat at the top of Australia’s Most Wanted list.
“Tony had skipped bail and secretly fled the country in 2006. While that might have been good news for him, it spelled disaster for Renate who was jailed for failing to pay a $1 million surety for him.
“When Renate arrived in the prison she was naturally considered a rock star in the criminal world — particularly among the drug users.
“In the beginning I focused on finding a strategy that would allow her to settle in without becoming a target.
“I knew that everyone with even a whiff of a drug habit would try to befriend her and, pretty soon, they’d look for ways to stand over her and pressure her to get drugs into the prison.
“Since Renate’s mum was dying of cancer, this mostly left her teenage children struggling to look after their little brother, who was just two years old.
“Renate was anxious to get her little boy in to live with her in the prison.
“For that to occur I needed to get her out of Remand and into the C Units as soon as possible.”
Tucker had won the support and respect of the then prison general manager, Brendan Money, through the good work she was doing helping vulnerable inmates.
She told Mr Money that if Mokbel wasn’t allowed to move into the C Units with her, then the other prisoners in the general population would “rip her to shreds in record time”.
Tucker’s plea worked and Mokbel’s son was brought into the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.
“I became one of Renate’s ‘back-up mothers’ in the event she fell ill and needed help looking after her boy,” Tucker wrote.
“Renate’s boy blossomed in prison. He was a sweet, funny little man and although he twigged that we weren’t living in a normal house, he thought we were all ‘at work’.
“He had about 30 great aunties who treated him like a little prince.
“I can honestly say prison was the best place for him — right alongside his mother.”
SARAH CHENEY: ‘WITHIN TWO DAYS SHE APPEARED TO GO COMPLETELY INSANE’
Tucker was trusted enough by prison authorities to be given the job of meeting new arrivals for a chat to try to work out how best to help them.
Mostly, she was able to help make jail a bit more bearable and prepare them for life after release.
“At the other end of the spectrum were women who would never find peace, or even know what it was; the ones who would likely never fit back into society,” Tucker wrote.
“When I first met Sarah Cheney she appeared totally sane to me, despite the fact she was in prison for viciously attacking a random woman with a knife at La Trobe University.”
Cheney, 24 at the time, was jailed for eight years over the 2007 attack on Jemma Clancy, 27, in the library toilets at the Bundoora campus.
She told police: “I was intending to go on a killing spree at the university. I was planning it for these last months. I was sick and tired of getting to the point where I thought I was going to do it and not. Afterwards I just felt relieved, like a weight lifted off me.”
Cheney got the reputation in the corrections system as the most dangerous female prisoner in the country.
SARAH CHENEY ATTACKED PRISON STAFF
“Sarah was being kept in isolation and I spent time in there talking with her about her parents, her life and how she was trying to work out where she was in the world,” Tucker wrote.
“Within two days she appeared to go completely insane.
“Sarah managed to get her hands on some paperclips and tried to use them to gouge her eyeballs out.
“It was just the beginning of violence towards herself and others in Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.”
DONNA FITCHETT: THE ‘MOST NOTORIOUS’ CHILD KILLER
Tucker writes: “There were other inmates I struggled to extend the hand of empathy and kindness to.
“Some of the women in protection were the most hated criminals in Australia.
“Their crimes were considered so deplorable and unforgivable that it was feared ‘regular’ inmates might kill them on principle the first chance they got.
“The deepest loathing was reserved for those who had murdered children. The most notorious among these was Donna Fitchett.
“Donna, a nurse from the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn North, had gone through a divorce in 2005.
“She told her two little boys, aged nine and 11, that they were going to go on an exciting holiday but needed to drink special medicine so they didn’t get air sick on the plane.
“After giving them an overdose of a powerful sedative she suffocated them.
“As a peer educator I was one of only a handful of inmates who had any contact with Donna inside Dame Phyllis Frost Centre while she was awaiting trial.
“The Protection Unit is an impenetrable concrete cage and any time its residents are taken to the Medical Unit, the rest of the prison is locked down.
DONNA FITCHETT’S EX-HUSBAND BLAST HER SENTENCE
PROSECUTORS ASK THAT FITCHETT NEVER BE RELEASED
“The more I got to know Donna, however, the more I wondered whether people needed to be protected from her.
“The last time I saw Donna Fitchett she appeared to be in a wistful, reflective frame of mind.
“She was talking about the breakdown of her marriage.
“I was sort of listening and sort of not, but before I knew what was happening she was describing things I just did not want to hear about. ‘No’, I snapped and walked straight out of her cell.
“When the officers approached me in the hallway I was doubled over with my hands on my knees and hyperventilating. ‘Are you OK, Kerry?’ one asked. ‘What on earth has happened?’
“I’m OK, but I’m telling you now I can’t do this anymore. I will not go back in there with that woman. It’s over.”
TANIA HERMAN: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE BODY-IN-THE-BOOT CASE
Tucker became quite fond of triathlete Tania Herman, who pleaded guilty to the 2005 attempted murder of Melbourne woman Maria Korp in what became known as the body-in-the-boot case.
“Tania was the mistress of Maria’s husband Joe Korp, who had hatched a plan to do away with his wife and live happily ever after with Tania,” Tucker wrote.
“He convinced Tania to strangle Maria, but after Tania choked the woman unconscious she panicked and bundled her body into the boot of Maria’s car, which she abandoned in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
“Four days later Maria was found — still in the boot and barely clinging to life.
“Joe and Tania were subsequently charged with attempted murder.
“Tania pleaded guilty but Joe maintained his innocence.
“After six months in a coma, Maria Korp’s life support was turned off, but the charges were never upgraded to murder due to a deal prior to Maria’s death.
“Tania was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison.
“The other inmates weren’t upset that she had attempted to kill another woman, but weren’t happy that she had confessed to everything and given Joe up in the process.”
Prison authorities had intended locking Herman in the Protection Unit because of the jail code that informers needed to be punished.
“I felt it unreasonable that a woman who had confessed to the crime and taken the consequences on the chin was going to spend the next 12 years locked away from other human beings because of the daft code,” Tucker wrote.
So she asked prisoner general manager Brendan Money if she could look after Herman in the general prison area.
“As I chaperoned her around the compound one woman yelled out, ‘you’re a dog Herman. You’re a rat’. ‘What the f … has it got to do with you? It’s not your sentence. It’s not your business’, I bellowed back at her,” Tucker wrote.
“By this time I felt comfortable speaking to prisoners like that.
“I had already written five parole letters for them, looked after them while they were withdrawing and got them access visit with their kids.
“No one was going to challenge me directly, not because they were afraid of me but because they respected me.”
DONNA PARSONS: LIFE INSIDE WITH THE ‘WELSH DRAGON’
That respect stood Tucker in good stead and prevented her being harmed when she had a run in with notorious murderer Donna Parsons.
“I set about writing a book called Shannyn and Sarah Visit Mum,” Tucker wrote.
“We decided it should be a colouring-in book that not only engaged and educated the children of female inmates, but helped inform their fathers and carers.
“The idea was that if you were the wife or partner who ended up in prison you would be given the book to sit down and read with your children while they coloured in,” Tucker wrote.
MEET DONNA MARIE PARSONS, THE WELSH DRAGON
“The story took them through each step of what to expect during a visit to Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. How the officers were friendly and there to help, why Mummy had to dress in a special green zip-up jumpsuit, how sniffer dogs were very busy hounds who would never hurt a soul.
“It was a friendly book and I loved writing it, but since I was barely capable of drawing stick figures I needed to find an inmate to illustrate it.
“A woman named Donna Parsons said she was a handy artist.
“I didn’t know it at the time but Donna was a former professional wrestler from Wales who was known in the ring as the ‘The Welsh Dragon’.
“She was serving a 23-year sentence — one of the longest in Victoria at the time — for the murder of her husband.
“He had been having an affair with a girl called Kerry who had long dark hair — just like little ‘ol me.
“So musclebound Donna convinced two mentally challenged hitmen that her husband was hurting her.
“One day when Donna was out with the kids, the hitmen ambushed him with a crowbar and a knife and he bled to death inside the family home.
“To set an alibi, Donna — who stood to gain $1 million in life insurance — sent her two young children in first to find Daddy’s body.
“I wasn’t Donna’s biggest fan from the very beginning, but after she started work on the book we became legendary mortal enemies for the rest of my sentence.
“Her main problem was that she couldn’t bring herself to draw a smile. ‘Donna’, I said as she started sketching out pages, ‘why do all the mothers and children look grief-stricken? This is supposed to be a happy book, with a positive message that makes the kids feel reassured about coming in here’.
“Donna wasted little time in getting personal, ‘I think your kids are better off without you’. ‘Well, I think that dog you’ve drawn looks like a f … … horse’.
“That was it: I had criticised Donna’s drawings so she downed tools.
“Thank Christ. While I wasn’t thrilled to have made a bitter rival out of a wrestling champion, I was relieved that she wasn’t going to stuff up the book anymore.
“Tania Herman kindly finished the illustrations — complete with grinning mums, kids and officers.
“Unfortunately, because of her high profile, we couldn’t put her name on the cover to credit her with bringing some happiness to the project.”
The Prisoner by Kerry Tucker, with Craig Henderson, is published by Penguin Random House and the recommended retail price is $34.99.
‘Angels’: Hero Coles workers save mum’s life
A mother of three has opened up on how her life was saved after she suddenly collapsed while doing a routine supermarket shop.
Wildlife and traffic fears over music festival
Wildlife advocates fear a weekend music festival in central Victoria will endanger native animals including rescued joeys.