‘He’s a monster, but he’s a dumb monster’: Raped as husband lay helpless beside her

LAUITIITI Tualima raped an Australian woman as her husband lay bound and helpless beside her. They escaped with their lives. They pray he doesn’t escape jail again.

RAPED as her husband lay bound and helpless beside her, Angie Jackson saw the evil face of Samoa.

That evil has a name: A sadistic thug named Lauitiiti Tualima.

And now Angie, and husband Tommy Williams can only hope this time, a Samoan jail can hold him.

The Tasmanians recounted their ordeal — and their pursuit of justice — with reporter Liam Bartlett in a gut-wrenching interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday night.

Their story serves as a warning, they say, that Samoa may be billed as an idyllic South Pacific tourist paradise, but a danger lurks beneath when its dysfunctional prison system cannot hold the likes of Tualima — the country’s most dangerous criminal — and others like him.

Angie and Tommy were lucky to escape with their lives last September when an on-the-run Tualima — who had escaped jail where he was serving a sentence for a litany of crimes including rape, assault and theft a month earlier — attacked.

At one stage, as the couple lay bound and helpless, Tualima asked Angie why she was crying.

“I was begging him not to hurt us. not to kill us,” Angie told Bartlett, the trauma etched into her halting voice.

It was the last night of the couple’s honeymoon when the monster attacked. With a 6am flight to catch, they were catching a few hours sleep ahead of an early-morning taxi ride to the airport.

Angie woke about 2am and was heading to the shower when she saw a man crouched in a corner of the room in the darkness.

He said he wanted money. Told them to be quiet, he would kill them. They complied.

And then they realised he had more than robbery on his mind.

In the darkness, they could hear him ripping up their clothes.

“Then he started to tie Tom up, and he gagged Tom, and then put a jumper over his head,” Angie told Bartlett, voice halting, fighting the tears escaping down her face.

“Once Tom was completely helpless he came over to my side of the bed ... like I felt his hand touch my back, and he asked me why I was crying.

“I said because I was scared. And he tied my hands up. Just my hands.”

Haltingly, wiping tears she doesn’t want to escape, she continues.

“And ... um ... yeah. That’s when I was raped.”

Serial criminal and three-time prison escapee Lauitiiti Tualima is behind bars, for now at least.

Tom: “I was just so angry laying next to Angie when all of this was happening. And not being able to do anything for the one you love. Not to be able to help her.”

Then Tualima made a crucial mistake.

He picked up and iPad to steal, and turned it on.

The light from the device showed his face, and gave Angie the chance to show her steel.

Now she could identify her attacker.

“He might be a monster but he’s a stupid monster,” she said.

“So I just laid there and studied his face.”

Now evil had a recognisable face — but first they had to live.

“He asked Angie why he shouldn’t kill us,” Tom said.

Angie begged him not to.

“I was just like, this can’t be the way they die, I want to see my family again.”

Salvation came from an employee of Samoa’s Lupe Sina Tree Resort.

Tualima fled, stealing the pair’s money and belongings, when the staff member came to check if they still needed their taxi to the airport.

Over the next 48 hours the pair worked with police, giving evidence and identifying Tualima from a series of photos, before they could return to Australia, devastated, and tried to deal with the horror.

Tualima was eventually arrested, charged with a range of offences including rape and robbery, and returned to jail.

The realisation Tualima was not only a serial criminal, but a serial prison escapee, who had been on the run when he attacked Angie and Tommy, and has since escaped twice more to offend again, made it worse.

While he is back in prison, the pair wonders for how long.

Bartlett travelled to Samoa to watch Tualima go to court on June 27 and eventually plead guilty to the attack.

He discovered a pattern of escape and prison security so flawed that it should act as a warning to all tourists.

Samoan nightmare: Angie Jackson and Tommy Williams.

“Tualima is the axle on which this story hinges, because he is the most prominent visual example of it,” Bartlett says.

“The point is that there are other escapees, because of the way the whole system is.

“The first time he escaped the prisons minister said “oh yes the guards were incompetent” — and it’s kind of ‘well, yeah, what about the second and third time?”.

Tualima had escaped jail — where he had been given a lengthy sentence for crimes including rape, robbery and violence — and been on the run for about a month before his attack on Tommy and Angie last September.

“Yet after that he was able to escape two more times,” Bartlett says.

“So he escaped once and attacked Tom and Angie. He was caught for that, sent back to jail, and escaped again early this year — only to be caught again after in which he stole about $50,000 in cash.

“And the third time he escaped — just three months ago — he almost killed a Chinese businessman. He hit him over the head with a machete and left him for dead.”

Tafaigata prison is Samoa’s highest security prison, but it seems it can’t hold Tualima, or others.

“The thing is, it’s not just him. It’s the whole place. That’s why we are saying this is a real warning signal, because tourists don’t know this about Samoa’s prison system ... or what there is of it … it’s a bit grandiose to call it a system,” says Bartlett.

“This is their main prison on the island. And he (Tualima) and lots of others are getting out of there.”

Australia has given about $15 million over seven years to the Samoan Australian Police Program, and Bartlett says the Samoan President’s answer to where the money has gone, and ‘why can’t you just build a decent fence around a prison?’ seems ‘unfathomable’.

“They seem to have all the answers and none of the solutions,” he said.

“And in the meantime Tualima and his other dangerous mates, who are supposed to be in a maximum security facility are just free to sort of wander off, and tourists just don’t know this.”

Angie and Tommy’s biggest relief since the ordeal has been not having to go back to Samoa for their attacker’s court case.

Happier times: Angie Jackson and Tommy Williams.

“They’re too traumatised to go back,” Bartlett said.

“Initially he pleaded not guilty, and didn’t want a lawyer. Until he agreed to get a lawyer and then changed his plea to guilty, there was a prospect he could have been asking them questions in the witness box, because he was representing himself.

“That added to their trauma about the possibility of going back.”

He says the pair are “massively, massively relieved, but they’re still in a bit of a halfway house there”.

“The thing is, he will get sentenced on July 22 and he will cop a huge sentence — on top of the 20-odd years he has already got, but it doesn’t mean anything if there’s a chance he can just walk out again,” Bartlett said.

“What they are concerned about is not how much he gets — they are pleased that technically he will be in jail for the rest of his life, but what sort of jail, because that jail is not going to hold him.”

Tualima showed no remorse in court. “When he was pleading guilty he was laughing,” says Bartlett.

“To be fair to the Samoans, in any jurisdiction he would be a serious criminal. He has a serious criminal mindset. He knows nothing else.”

60 Minutes airs on Sunday nights at 7pm on Channel 9. Catch up with this story on 9 now.