Michael Cardamone confesses to murder of Karen Chetcuti, who was tortured and burned alive
THIS is the last time Karen Chetcuti was seen. She could never have known she was about to be the victim of brutal torture carried out by a man on parole.
A MAN who tortured a mother-of-two before burning her alive is the latest to join a long line of vicious murderers to slip through the Victoria’s parole net.
Michael Cardamone, 50, was on parole for the violent rape of a teenager when he tortured and killed popular Wangaratta council worker Karen Chetcuti, 49, who disappeared on January 12, 2016.
Police allege Cardamone sedated his neighbour with animal tranquilliser, tied her wrists and ankles with cable ties, duct tape and rope, fractured her skull and ribs, then set her on fire while she was alive.
It is also alleged Cardamone injected Ms Chetcuti with battery acid and drove over her dead body.
He pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court in Melbourne on Friday morning, a month before his trial was scheduled to begin.
Cardamone had initially pleaded not guilty following a two day committal hearing in Wangaratta last year and had lost a bid to have his six week trial moved from the northeast Victorian city to Melbourne.
The battered and burnt remains of Ms Chetcuti, a well-liked mother of two teenagers, were found at Lake Buffalo, five days after she disappeared.
The Herald-Sun reports that Cardamone’s change to a guilty plea was prompted by a plea bargain to have his elderly mother released from jail.
The 79-year-old was locked up after intercepted phone calls between her and her son revealed he was plotting, with her help, to have the prosecution’s star witness, Eddie George, murdered.
Mr George told the committal hearing in Wangaratta he was with Cardamone when he set fire to Ms Chetcuti’s car.
However, he said he was not involved in her murder.
Cardamone pleaded guilty to the plot on Friday, in addition to the murder charge.
The guilty plea enabled the Herald Sun to reveal that the convicted rapist should not have been free to kill Ms Chetcuti, after failing a drug test while on parole for the rape of a 15-year-old girl.
According to the Herald Sun, the drug test led to an inspection of his phone, where child pornography was discovered.
He is the latest in a long line of Victorian killers to have murdered while on parole for previous crimes, including Adrian Bayley, the high profile rapist and murderer of ABC staffer Jill Meagher, and Steven Hunter, a convicted murderer who killed 22-year-old Sarah Cafferkey in 2012, just 10 days after his parole for kidnapping ended.
Ballarat mother Sharons Siermans was bashed to death in front of her young son by parolee rapist Jason John Dinsley in 2013, and Raechel Betts was murdered and dismembered in August 2009 by three-time killer and parolee John Leslie Coombes, 56.
While Victorian parole laws were tightened in 2013 in response to this string of deaths, they apparently did not stop Cardamone going on to kill his neighbour.
There are serious questions being asked about how he was still free after the two breaches.
For Ms Chetcuti’s friends and family, who were in court to hear the change of plea, however, there was just relief.
“It’s a total relief that this day has come, I never thought he’d plead guilty,” Ms Chetcuti’s sister Leny Verbunt said outside court.
“Mum’s 85, and for the children as well, for Karen’s children, this is good that we’re not having this trial.”
But Ms Chetcuti’s mother Clary Verbunt lamented it “doesn’t bring Karen back”.
“Now he should be locked up for life, if he comes out no woman or child will be safe in this world,” she told reporters in Melbourne.
Cardamone will face formal plea and sentencing hearings in Wangaratta in August.