Prison Christmas: What criminals will be served for Christmas lunch
Matthew Flame killed his best mate and the son of rocker Angry Anderson - Liam. This is his what his new life behind bars is like.
Gang rapist Mohammed Skaf and paedophile TV star Robert Hughes could be looking at their last Christmas in prison, unless they’re too remorseless about their crimes to earn release in 2021.
But for northern beaches party boy Matthew Flame, it’s the first of at least four and potentially six more Christmas prison dinners as a convicted killer.
And for ice-fuelled killer Sharee Lorraine Turnbull, she’ll be in Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre potentially until 2032.
Flame was also warned by the judge, who some believe gave him a short sentence for viciously killing rock icon Angry Anderson’s son, that he could be kept in jail way beyond his earliest release date.
After spending his last free night in 2018 taking MDMA tablets, 22-year-old Flame brutally stomped to death the best friend he’d ever had, the sweet-natured Liam Anderson.
As Angry Anderson told Flame’s sentencing hearing “the light that came from deep within … Liam” was “snuffed out by darkness … from deep within” Matthew Flame.
As a committee decides which of the state’s 35 prisons will be home for Flame, he will have a few years of time to reflect, although his sentencing judge didn’t doubt his regret and remorse.
The former apprentice plumber and gym junkie, who appears to have stacked on weight while on prison remand, is one of 12,850 inmates spending Christmas in grim correctional centres around the state.
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18 YEARS FOR MURDEROUS SHAREE
Sharee Lorraine Turnbull, who pleaded guilty to the frenzied stabbing death of 25-year-old Jack Mulligan, was also considered remorseful and had a deprived childhood.
But she must serve a minimum of twelve-and-a-half years, by which time she’ll be 43 years old.
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The future is uncertain for Jessica Camilleri, who went down for the manslaughter of her 57-year-old mother Rita, who she decapitated in a sustained attack inflicting up to 200 knife wounds.
Camilleri, 27, will be sentenced in February and although her profound social, behavioural and intellectual impairments did not prevent a guilty verdict, they will make her placement a challenge.
HEY DAD STAR’S CRUEL YULE
These relative newbies in the prison system will be chowing down on exactly the same Christmas meal in a tinfoil tray served up to disgraced Hey Dad star, Robert Hughes.
Hughes, now aged 72, was expecting to be dining in London, scot-free of annoyances such as an electronic monitoring anklet, or parole conditions like staying away from children.
The convicted child molester’s March attempt to trick authorities into releasing him after renouncing his Australian citizenship backfired, stymieing his plan to be deported unsupervised to where his wife and daughter live.
The State Parole Authority (SPA) is meeting in February to decide if Hughes, so reviled in jail that other inmates threw their excrement at him, is an “acceptable risk to community safety”.
But potentially he could be kept in until he serves all of his maximum ten year and nine month sentence, meaning it’s five more festive jail dinners until his release in February 2025.
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SPA will also consider next year whether to release gang rapist Mohammed Skaf, on his fourth parole bid after serving 20 years for the notorious Skaf gang attacks.
Now aged 37, Mohammed has previously ruined his chances of celebrating the end of Ramadan with parents Mustapha and Baria by having a bad attitude.
The Serious Offenders Review Council found last year Skaf “still blames the victims for his offending, has no victim empathy and refuses to take responsibility for his actions”.
Also suffering another Christmas Day behind bars is BW, who was denied parole in 2019, and has until September next year to work up a fresh application for his release.
BW and then wife SW starved to death their seven-year-old daughter Ebony, whose 9kg “mummified” body was found in a stinking bedroom of their housing commission flat.
The controlling 59-year-old prescription drug addict lucked in with a minimum 12 year sentence, while Ebony’s mother got life reduced to 40 years on appeal.
While he denied his autistic daughter any sustenance, BW will be served up on Christmas Day, just like Robert Hughes and almost 13,000 others, the following:
CHRISTMAS DAY MENU IN NSW CORRECTIONAL CENTRES
Breakfast
Breakfast pack of cereal, bread, jam and carton of milk.
Lunch
General: Roast chicken with gravy, potatoes, pumpkin and seasonal vegetables.
Vegetarian: Vegetarian sausages with gravy, potatoes, pumpkin and seasonal vegetables.
Dessert: Christmas cake.
Dinner
General: Schnitzel, potato salad with couscous, red capsicum, cucumber and tomato.
Vegetarian: Vegetarian schnitzel, potato salad with couscous, red capsicum, cucumber and tomato.
Dessert: Fruit mince tarts.
As has been the case in previous years, there will be no visits to correctional centres on December 25, visits will continue as normal on the weekends before and after Christmas.
Multi-denominational religious services will not be held on Christmas Day, but in the days leading up to and following.
FLAME’S DREARY FUTURE
Because he is now a sentenced inmate, Flame’s days in a remand jail where he could receive visits every day of the week are over.
His dreary existence will comprise up to 17 hours daily in a jail cell, which can also be dangerous depending on how he gets on with his cellmate.
Like all male inmates, he will be wearing dark green track pants or shorts and a matching T-shirt or sweatshirt, all sewn by male inmates at prisons like Cooma Correctional Centre.
He will be given white Dunlop volley sandshoes with velcro fastenings, and, for visits, a white jumpsuit backzipped to allow as little “contraband” exchange as possible.
After all visits by family or friends, which can be filmed, he will be stripsearched to ensure he hasn’t been smuggled any drugs, food or weapons.
Each day, every day, Flame be will given sandwiches at lunchtime and locked back in his cell while he eats them.
Sandwich selections include chicken, lettuce and mayonnaise, falafel and salad, roast beef and mustard, turkey, lettuce and cranberry and ham and salad.
The prison menu has remained largely unchanged for years. Measured for its precisely nutritious value, but largely tasteless food, it may remain the same for Flame’s next years of monotonous routine.
Each afternoon around 3.30pm, he will be returned to his cell and given dinner chicken, beef or pasta in a foil tray, plus the next day’s breakfast bag of cereal and coffee, 300ml of milk and at least three slices of white bread.
Each morning he will be let out of his cell around 8am for exercise, but as he adjusts to prison life may be given the opportunity to work in the prison’s wood or metal work rooms for around $60 a week.
Wherever he goes in the prison, Flame will be under video camera surveillance.
At any time in the pod where he is living, his cell may be opened in the middle of the night, when he will be ordered to stand outside it while prison officers and dogs search for drugs, mobile phones, or even just SIM cards.
AGED AND FRAIL IN JAIL
Lifers, such as the Anita Cobby killers can look forward to Christmas in the prison equivalent of a retirement home, without the Muzak or bingo.
Over at the Aged and Frail Unit in Long Bay Correctional Complex, it will be a fairly static day for those prisoners in declining health and mobility.
Without prison officers to push their wheelchairs, inmates like gangster Neddy Smith and murderer and fallen detective Roger Rogerson will likely be confined to their cells.
It’s a taste of things to come for Anita Cobby killer, Gary Murphy, who last year transferred to Long Bay from his jail of sentence, Goulburn, for closer transport to hospital treatment.
It’s unclear whether Gary, 62, was suffering from cancer, which killed his older brother and co-offender Michael Murphy in February 2019.
Perhaps that was in the minds of the six assailants who bashed Gary at Long Bay in June last year, alerted to his decades old infamy by the media coverage of Michael’s death.
Gary Murphy was 28 when he was found guilty in 1987 of raping and killing 26-year-old nurse Cobby, along with Michael, his other brother Leslie, Michael Murdoch and John Travers.
Seen for the first time in three decades on his way back from hospital treatment, Murphy, who suffered head and facial wounds and injuries to his rib cage and lungs, did not look well.
Sitting in a wheelchair, his clenched wrists were handcuffed and covered with tattoos.
The last time he’d been photographed, when he led detectives around the Prospect cow paddock where he and the others had raped, murdered and almost decapitated Anita, his hands had not been inked.
But it was the killer’s haunted stare that bore the weight of 33 Christmases behind bars, the raffish youth replaced with a grizzled old man.
WELCOME BACK SALIM!
For a certain one-time flamboyant property developer, it’s welcome home Salim Mehajer, sorry we missed you last year but your “crims-mas” dinner is looking much the same.
The flashy cars, the extravagant parties, the babes and the boats, but mostly the luxury digs seem a distant fantasy for Mehajer as he readjusts to life in a prison yard.
The disgraced former Auburn deputy mayor has yet again been forced to spend a seasonal break apart from his long-suffering family.
Mehajer was found guilty in October of perverting the course of justice over a faked 2017 car crash.
He had been released from Cooma jail in May last year after serving 11 months for electoral fraud charges, then spent a night in the Burwood police cells over a bail glitch.
A District Court judge revoked Mehajer’s bail in late November, after describing Mehajer’s legal status as “shambolic”.
The 34-year-old knows the drill now, and dutifully emptied his pockets in a Sydney courtroom last month and was handcuffed, as his father and sister looked on, and led down to the cells.
He may spend the period until his sentence is handed down in February at the vast Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre in Silverwater in western Sydney.
His barrister Ertunc Ozen SC told the court Mehajer will likely get a further stint in jail then, after which he will be bundled off to a prison appropriate to the length of time he gets.
KELI LANE
It’s nine down and four to go for baby killer Keli Lane.
But for the former Olympic water polo hopeful who has forever protested her innocence, that time could drag.
And parole authorities may consider once Lane has served her 13 year and five month minimum that a continued failure to acknowledge guilt means she is not ready for society.
Lane was sentenced in 2011 for the 1993 murder of her baby daughter Tegan Lee, immediately appealed and has exhausted all avenue of appeal since.
She then went to ABC TV, which aired a documentary, and the Victorian Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative is reportedly preparing to petition the NSW Attorney-General.
Meanwhile, it’s just another Christmas in prison for Lane, who turned 45 this year.
ROBERT XIE
The now 56-year-old Xie has been sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, but is hopeful of winning a challenge to his convictions in the Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA)
Xie was given five life sentences for murdering five members of the Lin family inside their North Epping home in July 2009.
The victims, his wife Kathy’s brother Min Lin, his wife Yun Lin, their sons Henry, 12, and Terry, 9, and their aunt, Irene Lin were bludgeoned to death.
Xie, a former ear, nose and throat surgeon in China, was arrested in 2011, and went to trial four times before being convicted in 2017.
Prosecutors said Xie had lost face with business failures overshadowed by the success of Min and Yun Lin, who ran a popular and successful newsagency, and had been sexually attracted to another relative.
Forensic police identified a tiny spot in his garage, called “Stain 91” which had the DNA of four of the five murder victims.
At his appeal in June this year, Xie argued the Crown misled the jury and the DNA evidence was misleading and unfairly prejudicial.
The CCA justices are yet to hand down their judgment, so Xie is spending yet another Christmas in Lithgow Correctional Centre, which is freezing in winter and stinking hot in summer.
SIMON GITTANY
For at least the next 11 years, until December 2031 when Simon Gittany will be 57 years old, the flashy former Sydney shoe importer is one more murderer in prison greens.
Gittany was sentenced to a maximum 26 years for murdering his girlfriend, Lisa Harnum, by throwing her off the 15th floor balcony of their luxury Sydney apartment in 2011.
Ms Harnum, a Canadian-born dancer, had threatened to leave the controlling Gittany who told the 30-year-old what to wear, who to see and forbade her from looking at other men.
Sentenced to an 18 year minimum, Gittany has served a third of that, although authorities will have to consider in 11 years time whether he is eligible for parole, considering NSW Supreme Court Justice Lucy McCallum ruled he had “no prospects” of rehabilitation.
Gittany’s jail of sentence is Parklea, where he shares a yard with the some of Parklea’s 800 other inmates.
Gittany’s girlfriend during his trial, Rachelle Louise, then an aspiring lawyer, said she believed in his innocence and the likelihood of his winning an appeal.
However, he lost his CCA appeal in 2016.
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