Glen Cassidy’s to-do list: ‘Things I want to do before the job’
This chilling to-do list revealed clues to a wicked murderous plot — but in a twist of fate, Glen Cassidy collapsed and died in the bloody onslaught.
Police & Courts
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Inside Glen Cassidy’s mobile phone was a to-do list.
“Things I want to do before the job,” he wrote on December 26, 2015.
He wanted to ensure “financial for Biannca and kids”.
“Have baby or at lest’ (sic) be pregnant” was also on the memo.
He added: “Get married and have as much sex as possible.”
But he outlined there were “opsticlas”, in which police say was obstacles misspelt by a man who was somewhat illiterate.
Underneath that header he wrote: “One bullet. Getting him alone. Body. Transport.”
The notes were a chilling clue to detectives of his wicked murderous plot.
Less than three months later and just weeks after marrying Biannca Edmunds, 36, it was D-Day for “the job”.
On March 12, 2016, he would drive 170km from his Shepparton home to Michael Caposiena’s Westmeadows flat near Melbourne and shoot him dead.
But in a twist of fate, Cassidy would also collapse and die in the bloody onslaught.
As he moved the gun towards Mr Caposiena’s head to pull the trigger, his victim stabbed him multiple times with a kitchen knife to try and stop him.
When police arrived at the bloodied scene on Pascoe St, they arrested Mr Caposiena’s partner, Silvana Silva, believing she had killed both men.
Ms Silva, 34, was later released without charge after giving a terrifying eyewitness account of seeing her partner killed, and how Cassidy, 49, then attacked her before he bled out.
“He pointed the gun towards my head as well and pulled the trigger,” Ms Silva said.
“But it didn’t work. So then he started assaulting me.”
With Ms Silva cleared of any wrongdoing, the sights of homicide detectives turned to a different woman: Cassidy’s wife.
It would take them more than three years to lay a murder charge against Ms Edmunds. Ms Edmunds has denied involvement and pleaded not guilty.
A three-week trial in the Supreme Court this month heard Ms Edmunds “procured and persuaded” her husband to commit the brazen crime.
Prosecutor Neill Hutton painted the mother of three as the “master manipulator” who would use kinky sex to have a hold over her doting husband, who was almost 20 years older than her.
Inside their Shepparton home, he said the newlyweds concocted the murderous plan, surveilled Mr Caposiena’s Westmeadows house and sourced a gun.
He said they wanted to catch him unawares in his Pascoe St unit, so they drew a map of the surrounding area identifying where street lights, security cameras and barking dogs were.
But Ms Edmunds was to be out of town in Darwin with her husband’s mother when the plot was executed to give her an alibi, Mr Hutton told the jury.
Telephone calls between the pair while she was interstate hinted at their plan, he said, with them speaking in code about the “job”.
On March 7, 2016, Cassidy rang her and said: “Yeah, well, I’ll get this job finished today so that we don’t have any …”, before she interrupts, “I hope you do, I want to celebrate”.
Ms Edmunds then said: “Yeah, just don’t get all funny after the job.”
Cassidy replied: “Nah.”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Ms Edmunds added.
“Nah, nah. That won’t happen either,” he told her.
Five days later, both Cassidy and Mr Caposiena would be dead.
“It’s all my fault. It wasn’t meant to get this out of control,” the court heard Ms Edmunds told her mother, Ellen Edmunds, in the hours after the killings.
The court heard Ms Edmunds had a young son with Mr Caposiena and that she had become angry that he was seeking more access to the boy.
The prosecution alleged she told friends and family Mr Caposiena was violent towards her and that she wanted Cassidy to be her son’s only father.
Cassidy’s friend Paul Bonner, a burly outlaw motorcycle gang member, also testified how Ms Edmunds had asked him if he would “get rid of” her ex, and he told her to “f--- off”.
Mr Bonner, who considered Cassidy his brother, said the couple were always fighting about Mr Caposiena and recalled hearing Ms Edmunds calling her husband a “spineless coward” and that “if you were a real man, you had any f---ing balls, you’d go and deal with this bloke”.
He also described another time where he was standing outside talking to Cassidy about his Harley Davidson motorbike, when Ms Edmunds came out with a firearm wrapped in a cloth, claiming she had bought it in Melbourne for $100.
The weapon he described he saw that day matches the gun found at the murder scene.
On the morning of the killing, Mr Bonner said Cassidy rang him asking if he could get a magazine for the .22 cut-down shotgun.
Mr Hutton told the court Cassidy then armed himself with “an assassination kit”, throwing a knife, tape and gun into a bag, and drove to Westmeadows.
He parked his car on nearby Riddell St — leaving a plate of food his daughter had earlier prepared for him to take to “work” sitting on the front passenger seat.
CCTV then captured him walk past Mr Caposiena’s unit to confirm he was home.
He soon after returned carrying the bag of arsenal and approached the front door.
A suspicious Mr Caposiena grabbed a knife from the kitchen before he answered the ring of the doorbell about 7.30pm.
Ms Silva hears her partner tell Cassidy through the locked security screen something along the lines of he is unable to help him.
She said Cassidy then asked if they could shake hands before he would leave.
“He wants to shake hands, which is, I suggest, a trick, a rouse, to get Michael to unlock, un-snib the door,” Mr Hutton told the jury.
“And the moment the door is un-snibbed, he forces his way inside and there’s a struggle, and he shoots Michael Caposiena in the side of the head.”
Minutes later, when he is bleeding out on the floor from a stab wound that had penetrated his liver, he begged a neighbour who came to help: “Please don’t let me die.”
Among his last words were: “Tell my kids I love them. Tell Biannca I love her.”
It was this love for his wife, Mr Hutton told the court, that drove him to commit the crime.
He said a recorded call captures Cassidy asking Ms Edmunds if they can have sex when he returns.
“She says, ‘depends if we’re celebrating or not’ and that’s in the context of the earlier call where the celebration refers to him getting the job done,” Mr Hutton explains.
“He’s an older man, she’s a younger woman, and she hits him where it hurts, sexually pressuring him, exaggerating Michael’s violence against her.
“And all this, we say, was done deliberately to turn the burners up on Glen Cassidy to get him to go and do her bidding.”
When Cassidy didn’t stick to the plan and kill Mr Caposiena while Ms Edmunds was in Darwin, a plan B had to be hatched, Mr Hutton said.
The prosecution allege she typed a text message to herself from Cassidy’s phone, claiming he was about to do something “absolutely f---ing stupid” and that “if I get caught I want them to know you had nothing at all to do with this”.
She then replied: “Don’t be so bloody stupid.”
The messages provided her with a false alibi, Mr Hutton suggested, but they were too perfectly written to have come from Cassidy who spelt phonetically and often would just call people to avoid texting.
Defence barrister John Kelly SC argued his client never directed her husband to kill, or had an agreement with him to do so.
He said Cassidy acted alone and had voice to text capability on his phone that could have been used to write the text to Ms Edmunds.
Mr Kelly picked apart the evidence and discredited the character of witnesses, saying Ms Edmunds is estranged from her mother and Mr Bonner was a bikie.
He also said the evidence of Todd Bookham, who testified Ms Edmunds had confessed to him, could not be believed.
Ms Edmunds had met Mr Bookham on Tinder three months after the double killing and later moved in with him with her children.
The court heard he was once convicted and spent years in jail over a vicious knife attack on a woman in which he went on to stab himself to try and claim he was the victim.
Mr Kelly said Mr Bookham had a motive to come forward to police with the confession information years on because he wanted to get back at Ms Edmunds for keeping him from his daughter.
The court heard Mr Bookham even wrote her a letter in prison telling her he could make the case go away if she agreed to let him be in the girl’s life.
“If she made this confession to Todd Bookham, one would’ve thought, out of pure self-interest, she would keep in sweet with him,” Mr Kelly said.
“Would you push him away? Would you make him angry? Would you give him an excuse for vengeance? Would you take out an AVO against him? Would you reject all of his advances?
“That’s what Biannca Edmunds did.”
Ms Edmunds has pleaded not guilty to murder.
In one interview with police in December 2016, she became emotional and said any suggestion she was involved in the murder was “absurd”.
“I’m not a psycho,” she said. “I have never wished anyone dead.”
A 12-person jury will determine if she is telling the truth or not.
The jury began deliberations at noon on Thursday and is yet to return a verdict.
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