From the grave: Letters from a baby-faced killer to his daughter

CARL Williams’ secrets didn’t die with him. His letters to his daughter reveal a loving man, far from his gangland persona.

CARL Williams died as he lived: brutally, violently and in cold blood, beaten to death by a fellow prison inmate.

Now the murderous Melbourne crime kingpin who triggered a gangland war in the late 1990s that left a city in fear in scenes immortalised in the miniseries Underbelly, is speaking from the grave.

The secrets lurking in the computer he used in jail have been unlocked.

The diaries and letters contain shocking confessions, and fresh revelations from a criminal monster, serial philanderer and unapologetically callous killer.

But that’s not the man his now-15-year-old daughter Dhakota knew, the teenager has revealed in her first interview.

Dhakota and her stepsister Breanane sat down with journalist Steve Pennells for Sunday Night. She said her first memory of her dad is of him tickling her arms, giving her bear hugs. She was still a toddler when suddenly he no longer lived with the family at home, and visiting him in jail became her childhood normality.

“Hello my little princess ... I hope you are well and looking after your teeth,” he’d write to her on that prison PC — a convicted killer carefully adding clip-art images of butterflies and teddy bears to the text.

Jail visit: Killer Carl Williams and his ‘princess’, daughter, Dhakota. Picture: Supplied by Sunday Night

“I’m so proud of you. I’m going OK, just missing you like crazy — I’m trying to keep myself busy by learning things on the computer.”

She grew up vaguely aware of his crimes, and as the awareness grew, formed the belief that he did what he did only to protect his family.

“I simply killed people who were planning to kill me,” he writes at one point on that PC — but never to his daughter.

“She told her mum (Roberta Williams) once: ‘Mum, I know what went on. I know everything,’” says Pennells.

“But for her it’s a different world. Her Carl and her reality is very different to what we understand Carl to have done.

“Her belief is he had to do those things to protect the family.”

The letters and diaries reveal a man with no remorse who justifies his actions as pure kill-or-be-killed necessity.

Dhakota’s response to those who call her father a killer is: “That’s what they think and how he’s made to look, he’s not that sort of person.”

She remembers “just a loving caring dad. I don’t need to convince anyone. As long as I know, that’s all that matters”.

“I don’t (see him as a killer) that’s not what I saw ... we know our dad as our dad, as fun and loving and caring for us.”

‘We know our dad as our dad’ ... Breanane and Dhakota Williams. Picture: Supplied by Sunday Night

Up to 35 gangland murders happened over 10 years in a world she was largely shielded from.

But Dhakota and Breanane now admit growing up was difficult — they couldn’t understand why their friends’ parents wouldn’t let their kids visit, nor why they weren’t allowed on sleepovers.

On jail visits, “I would lay on him and he would tickle my arm and give me hugs. I remember one time he gave me a bracelet,” she remembers.

Pennells’ visit to the family was far from what he expected.

“I went to do a story on Carl’s computer, and walked in expecting something like a cross between Underbelly and Animal Kingdom,” he said.

“And it was something entirely different.

“I found this warm family with teenagers, and this Jekyll and Hyde memory of Carl — as a soft, gentle family man side of him, which is very hard to reconcile with brutal crimes.

“Let’s not forget this was a guy who ordered people to be murdered.

“And Carl had no remorse — he justified it by saying he did it to protect the family. But what was he protecting them from? A world he created in the first place.

“That’s the hardest thing for me in the story to get my head around.

“Dhakota and Breanane are eloquent, open, warm. I wasn’t expecting that from the kids of Carl Williams.

“Dhakota carries his face and his name. And she’s proud of that — but it’s a big burden to carry.

Carl Williams and Dhakota before he was jailed. Picture: Sunday Night.

“Nobody is excusing what Carl did — he was a monster — but I’m fascinated by the dichotomy of a vicious killer against how he was as a father to these kids.”

Jim O’Brien, the former head of the Purana Task Force that brought Williams down, is a man with no time for dichotomy.

He’s unflinching in his analysis, telling Pennells that Williams “may well have been a doting father. I knew him as a monster”. He also saw him as a “coward — when he ordered hits and didn’t pull the trigger, it was easy for him to get on with life and cut the Christmas cake.

“As a witness he had limited value ... a convicted murderer ... it doesn’t matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it’s still a pig.”

Carl Williams’ reign of terror ended when he was jailed for murder in 2005.

He died five years later when he was bashed to death by a fellow prisoner.

Dhakota wants to be a criminal lawyer when she grows up. She thinks it would be “interesting”.

Sunday Night airs on Channel 7 at 7pm Sunday.