Witness to Shandee Blackburn murder helped police prepare sketch

A taxi driver ‘didn’t see’ the face of Shandee’s killer, but when a detective asked him to help with a sketch, an image emerged.

Taxi driver Jaspreet Pandher’s turn into Boddington Street interrupted the attack on Shandee Blackburn.

He had not been a reliable witness over several statements and appearances, though he was consistent and clear about the big picture.

Shandee and her assailant, he said, looked like they were fighting. “I don’t want to remember those things,” Pandher said, testifying at the trial of John Peros for the 2013 murder of his former girlfriend Shandee.

Taxi Driver Jaspreet Pandher `didn’t want to remember’ interrupting the knife attack on Shandee. Photo: Daryl Wright

“I just remember a couple of things. That I saw somebody fighting there; next thing I saw, somebody is running in the paddock. It’s affecting me emotionally, mentally, physically, economically – every time. I have kids, I have family. I know they lost something; I want to help them. But every time when you call me here, I am not able to work for sometimes three weeks, four weeks. I know what you are doing, but think about me. It breaks me totally.

“I don’t want to talk to my kids; I don’t want to talk to my wife; I don’t talk to anybody else. I just sit in my room, just sitting idle there, thinking about all those things. And it’s really affecting me.”

Supreme Court judge Jim Henry said there was no choice. “This is a murder trial. It’s serious business,” he said.

Peros’s lawyer, Craig Eberhardt, asked Pandher about a re-enactment video in which the traumatised taxi driver described what he saw.

Eberhardt: “You also told police that it looked like a black person to you?”

Pandher: “Yeah, first time I did tell that thing.”

Eberhardt: “And by ‘black person’ do you mean an Aboriginal person?”

Pander: “No, a dark-skinned person.”

Eberhardt: “You certainly didn’t see some sort of stabbing motion?”

Pandher: “No.”

The cab driver was in the witness box for some time, but he had little to add. He really didn’t want to be there.

He repeated himself – that he didn’t see Shandee’s attacker, and he didn’t want to think about it. One curious thing, however, was that when detective Lisa Elkins asked him a few years earlier to help in the drawing of a sketch, a likeness of the killer, an image did emerge.

Some cops believed this image looked just like Peros. Others said it was also possible to see a likeness to William Daniel – the man Peros and his lawyers have repeatedly claimed was the killer. The sketch wasn’t evidence of anything. It was inadmissable.

Shandee Blackburn's former boyfriend John Peros in a police video from mid-February 2014. Source: Supplied

William Daniel leaves court during the inquest into Shandee’s death.

The jury didn’t see it for good reasons. One being that Pandher had insisted at the time that he didn’t see the killer’s face. But was it possible Pandher spent a long time trying to forget he had in fact caught a glimpse of a face. The sketch was the product of what Pandher had somehow imagined to be the killer’s likeness. The likeness to the accused – and, for some who have studied it, to the other person of interest, was uncanny.

This is an edited extract from Shandee’s Story Episode 11, Lollies