Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  ‘Phoebe loved all that stuff,’ Natalie told me later. ‘She was so creative and she loved doing anything that made others happy.’ Natalie was also looking forward to it, as she’d been away during the crises of the past few weeks and had had to rely on others to help Phoebe.

  At 8 a.m. on Monday, Phoebe had her usual weekly breakfast with her father at French Fantasies in South Yarra. Len told me this was a bit of a ritual he’d established so he could keep an eye on Phoebe and see how she was going week by week. He also looked forward to catching up with his daughter.

  Len’s birthday was the next day, and a little family party had been booked for Wednesday, but Phoebe said she couldn’t attend as she had tickets to a U2 concert Ant had organised. Tickets were like gold, she said, some re-selling on eBay for up to $7000, and she was looking forward to seeing the act. It was more than a concert; it was a major experience.

  She suggested that Len come to the Golden Triangle on Thursday night, when she and Ant would buy him dinner for his birthday.

  Around 2.45 that afternoon, Phoebe rode her bike over to Linley Godfrey’s salon and spent half an hour having coffee with him. When she got back to Balencea, she wheeled her bike through the foyer towards the lift. Her bike had to be kept in the apartment, as no bike space was available.

  In the foyer, she ran into Eric Giammario, who told her a permanent space for her bike had become available at last.

  He told me later that her reaction was quite strange. ‘She hardly seemed to notice me when I gave her the news. Usually, Phoebe was cheerful and polite, but that day she wasn’t her normal self at all.’

  Ant Hampel’s key-fob records show that he came home on 29 November at 3.50 p.m. to get ready for an early dinner with his close friends the Rockmans. Phoebe was on a promise to be on her best behaviour, but she drank more than her agreed two glasses of wine and started trying to tell Mrs Rockman about her depression. Ant tried several times to cut her off, but then he got cross and took her home. They arrived back at 7.51 p.m., not very long after they’d left. Phoebe defiantly continued drinking. Ant retreated to the bedroom and locked the door.

  Phoebe rang Linda at about 8.30 p.m. and told her of the argument with Ant. She said she was out on the balcony and Ant had ‘locked himself away, as usual’. She asked Linda if she could come and stay with her, and Linda agreed, but said she couldn’t manage another marathon session if Phoebe came over, as she had an early start the next day.

  Phoebe then rang Russell Marriott on her Nokia and told him about the argument. Russell asked what she planned to do and she said, ‘I’ll stick it out.’

  Still looking for someone to spend time with, Phoebe rang Bren Hession at 10.30 p.m. She’d called him four days earlier to say that she’d broken up with Ant and ask if they could meet. On that occasion, Bren was working, but this time he was free, so they arranged to meet in the city for drinks.

  Bren later said Phoebe was happy and jumped into his arms when they met in the European Bier Café at 11.30 p.m., but her iPhone rang constantly while they were talking. It was Ant looking for her.

  There were others looking for her as well. Her Nokia phone, which she’d used to call Russell Marriott, was bumping around in her bag and redialling Russell’s number, the last number she’d called. He answered but got no reply. Worried, he rang Natalie, who was spending her last night away, and she rang Ant on the landline.

  ‘Where is Phoebe? What’s happening?’

  Ant said that Phoebe had left the apartment drunk, and he didn’t know where she was. He thought she was probably out with her ‘drunken deadbeat friends’.

  At midnight, Bren left Phoebe in town. She wanted to keep partying, but he had to go home because he had an early start the next day. He told her to go home and sort things out with Ant, but she didn’t take any notice. She got so cross with Ant’s constant calling that she threw her iPhone away. It landed in the gutter, and Bren retrieved it for her before leaving. The last he saw of her, she was skipping down Exhibition Street.

  Phoebe made her way to her mother’s house in Clifton Hill, where Russell took her in and made a cup of tea. He later said he was sure she had both her phones with her — the iPhone listed in Ant’s name and her older Nokia, which she kept for its directory of numbers.

  He phoned Natalie to tell her that Phoebe had arrived safe but drunk and would be spending the night at Clifton Hill. Phoebe stayed up talking to Russell until about 3 a.m. Before she went to sleep in the spare bed, she asked him to wake her in the morning so she could get to work, as she was concerned she’d be sacked if she didn’t turn up.

  The following day, Tuesday 30 November, was a bad day for Phoebe. Russell and Jeannette, who’d sent a text asking how she was, both remember that she said she was going to work at Savvy, but she didn’t. She went back to Balencea, arriving at 9.08 a.m., after Ant had left.

  At midday, she phoned Judith Walker,* a psychologist who’d been treating her, and asked if she could see her. Ms Walker had appointments all afternoon and couldn’t see Phoebe or even take another long call that day. She asked whether Phoebe had someone else who could be with her. When Phoebe said she didn’t, Ms Walker gave her the numbers of various suicide helplines and suggested that Phoebe call them or, if she was still feeling bad, go to the nearby Alfred hospital. Phoebe phoned the Alfred, but the response must have been unsatisfactory, as she called Judith again.

  Some time that afternoon, Phoebe used her Nokia mobile to leave a voicemail message for Bren Hession telling him that if he didn’t call her back, she’d throw away her phone and leave the world. Bren wasn’t terribly worried when he got the message at about 6 p.m., as he’d known Phoebe to ‘crack it’ before and disappear for several days. When he tried to call back, her phone was off. Later, he recorded the message and gave it to police.

  Another of Phoebe’s so-called ‘deadbeat friends’ was a young man I’ll call Bob Gold,* who met Phoebe early in 2009 at the Centre for Adult Education, where he was studying fine-art printmaking. He was in awe of her beauty, and he said later in court that they clicked immediately because they had similar histories of depression and drug use.

  He says they’d discussed suicide on several occasions. He had the impression that if Phoebe ever did go through with it, she’d use drugs. ‘She loved drugs … all her stories of good times seemed to revolve around drugs.’

  Until mid-2009, they saw each other every day at school and spent many hours talking, but then they drifted apart. Bob was trying to clean up his life and was anxious about mixing socially with Phoebe because of her drinking. He says that Phoebe hung out with older people who drank, and she’d often been drinking when she came to school.

  He’d met Ant a few times and really liked him. Ant had given him tickets to big concerts that he couldn’t afford, and Bob described Ant as a genuine person who made Phoebe very happy.

  On 30 November, after not having seen Phoebe for a long time, he got a Facebook message from her saying she was keen to meet. She said she was having some issues and she’d asked her family for help so often that she just couldn’t ask them again. Bob agreed to meet her near Balencea for coffee at 4 p.m. When he arrived, she was waiting on the footpath.

  He said later in court that the talk they had that afternoon was ‘one of the best conversations we’d ever had. She was calm, lucid, and confident.’ He said she told him she was going to India to volunteer in a village. She felt that the life she was leading insulated her from the real world and detached her from reality.

  They talked about the problems they were both having with their partners. Phoebe said she was embarrassed for Ant because she was working in such a menial job. She felt he deserved better.

  That afternoon, though, she was out to have a good time. She took Bob’s photo with a camera given to her by her ex-boss, Linley Godfrey, then left him downstairs in the car for a few minutes while she returned to the apartmen
t to collect her old Nokia phone.

  She then persuaded Bob to drive her to Port Melbourne to obtain some drugs from a dealer she knew. She bought two ecstasy tablets, and they drove to Bob’s house in Yarraville* to look at his latest art creations.

  He says that he was pretty sure she’d taken a pill by the time they got there. She tried to kiss him, but he asked her to stop, at which she became violent, punching and kicking. ‘I had to restrain her until she calmed down,’ he said later. ‘I told her I couldn’t handle this and would take her back to Ant’s.’ She said she didn’t want to go back but had nowhere else to go.

  Ant got home at 6.03 p.m. and found no sign of Phoebe. At 6.25 p.m., he sent Bren Hession a text message asking about Phoebe’s whereabouts. Bren, who had never spoken to Ant, ignored the message.

  Back at Bob’s house, Phoebe ran outside and started playing chicken with the traffic. ‘She wasn’t trying to kill herself,’ Bob said later, ‘just picking cars that were going very slow.’

  He eventually got Phoebe into his car to take her home. Her mood swings were violent — she was happy and sad by turns, yelling and silent. They got to West Melbourne, near Festival Hall, about 9.30 p.m., and she insisted he let her out of the car. She didn’t return to Ant’s apartment until 12.29 a.m. No one knows what she did in the intervening three hours.

  *

  Phoebe was still asleep when Ant left for work next morning around 9 a.m. He said he took her iPhone with him. This recollection became the focus of much investigation and suspicion, because the iPhone was used to send the bizarre ‘tomato soup’ text message, purportedly from Phoebe, about 10.30 a.m. the same day.

  There were other strange things about the events of that day. After exchanging texts with Jeannette that morning, Ant phoned her at lunchtime and reassured her that he’d called in at the apartment and Phoebe was still sleeping off the bender. Ant said he’d get Phoebe to ring when she woke up.

  In his second police statement, he said that during that visit, Phoebe had told him she’d taken two sleeping tablets. To make sure she didn’t take any more, he took away the Stilnox he’d been prescribed to help him sleep on the plane to Europe.

  But there didn’t seem to be a record of his visit. Lorne Campbell, Phoebe’s grandfather, went through the key-fob records for 1 December, which he obtained from Eric Giammario. (As Eric would later explain to the Coroner in excruciating detail, the Balencea residents’ comings and goings were recorded every time anyone swiped their individually numbered key fob in the lift, the car park, the front door, or wherever.) The records seemed to show that Ant had left the building at around 9 a.m. and re-entered at 7.33 p.m. Nothing seemed to be recorded for the middle of the day.

  At 2.17 p.m., Sally Teller, who worked as a cleaner for Ant and his sister Kristina, came for her regular Wednesday stint. Sally had to work quite hard at this job, she said, because Ant ‘wanted the apartment to look like nobody lived there’. She had her own key fob and apartment key. She parked in the basement and took the lift to Level 12. When she let herself in, she saw that the door to the master bedroom was closed; she thought it might have blown shut. She heard Yoshi scratching and opened the door to let him out. The room was in darkness with the blinds closed, but she could see Phoebe’s leg on the bed. Sally was surprised, because Phoebe wasn’t usually home when she came.

  She quietly cleaned the other end of the apartment, then knocked on the bedroom door. Phoebe came out, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Sally said the bedroom didn’t smell of alcohol.

  Thinking Phoebe might be feeling unwell, Sally asked if she could do anything for her, but Phoebe just gave her a dazzling smile. She didn’t look ill, Sally thought, and certainly not depressed. Sally had suffered from depression in the past. When she was blue, she could never produce a lovely smile like that.

  Sally liked Phoebe, and she later told police that at times the way Ant treated her gave her the creeps. Sally felt that Ant had the upper hand in the relationship, which was more like one between parent and child than between equal partners.

  After the bedroom was cleaned, Phoebe went back to bed with an eye mask while Sally finished the apartment. Sally left around 5 p.m.

  Ant returned home at 7.33 p.m. He later said that he and Phoebe stayed in that night. He ran her a bath, gave her a massage, and cooked dinner. He’d brought home their air tickets to show her that the trip to Paris was really going to happen.

  At around 8 p.m., Phoebe rang her father. In her confusion the day before, she’d forgotten to ring him for his birthday. It also seems that she’d lied to him about the reason for missing his celebration, as there was no U2 concert in Melbourne on the night of his birthday. They talked for about eleven minutes. Phoebe told Len she was feeling hung over from her bender the night before, but Ant was looking after her.

  ‘I really need to stop doing this,’ she told Len. In a police statement, he said that he’d interpreted her as meaning that going out and getting pissed was not what she wanted to be doing anymore.

  He agreed. That was the last time Len spoke to her.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE INVESTIGATION

  On 3 December at noon, Dr Matthew Lynch of the Victorian Coronial Services Centre commenced his autopsy on Phoebe. In attendance were two forensic photographers and Justin Tippett of the homicide squad.

  Dr Lynch noted that Phoebe weighed 57 kg, and he measured her height at about 166 cm. He described her jeans as ‘extensively’ bloodstained and wrote, ‘The waistband is just below the knees. The right leg of the jeans is extensively torn. The black leather belt with studs is looped through the first and second belt loops at the front on the left’. At the back and on the right, the belt was hanging free.

  Phoebe had a pierced upper lip and a stud with two stones in her upper umbilical fold. Above her pubis was a tattoo with the twin messages Nosce te ipsum (‘Know thyself’) and Audaces fortuna iuvat (‘Fortune favours the brave’). There were also symbols tattooed on her left arm and down her spine.

  The autopsy took just over three hours. Dr Lynch said Phoebe’s injuries were consistent with a fall down a narrow chute over approximately 30 metres. The injuries to her lower body and legs were more severe than those to her upper body. As both the paramedic and Mark Butterworth had suspected, her right foot had been virtually amputated just below the joint between the tibia and fibula; it was attached by only a couple of tendons, which are very strong in that joint. All the big arteries that deliver blood to the feet had been severed, including the popliteal artery, which is a lower branch of the femoral artery, the main artery supplying blood to the lower limb.

  Dr Lynch reported that the injury in that area appeared to have been inflicted by blunt force. The wounds had regular edges in some places, but the ends of the tibia and fibula had been fragmented. If an artery is severed neatly by being cut across, it retracts the severed ends to create a ‘plug’ and stop the blood flowing, but if the ends aren’t cleanly severed, blood will be pumped out with every heartbeat.

  When I read the report, I noted that there were a number of small bruises to her upper arms and neck. I wondered how a person could bruise when they were losing so much blood. For example, the report described a one-centimetre bruise on the outer side of Phoebe’s right wrist and a two-centimetre bruise on the outer side of her left wrist. There were also bruises on her left shoulder and the top of her right shoulder. How would you sustain such bruises going feet-first down a narrow chute and landing feet-first in a bin? If they’d been big bruises, they might have been caused by the compactor, but these sounded more like bruises left by someone’s fingers.

  There was a subdural haematoma on the left side of her brain on the surface of the parietal cortex, the upper part of the brain towards the rear. Dr Lynch speculated that this might have been caused when the brain was removed for autopsy. There was also an area where Phoebe had been bleeding on the left side of her scalp.<
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  In his summary of findings, Dr Lynch didn’t consider those injuries significant enough to mention.

  He did say that Phoebe had died from multiple injuries resulting in significant blood loss. He also said the police report indicated she ‘had a past history of depression, anxiety and an “alcohol problem”.’

  She had several broken bones, but there was no evidence of neck trauma or of any kind of sexual trauma, and no natural diseases were detected.

  The toxicology reports revealed a variety of substances in Phoebe’s blood. The ethanol content was 0.16 g per 100 ml, more than three times the legal driving limit. The test also found the hypnotic drug zolpidem, commercially known as Stilnox. Dr Lynch observed, ‘The consumption of ethanol in patients taking zolpidem is absolutely contraindicated due to described side effects, which include complex, sleep-related behaviours.’ The other drugs in Phoebe’s system were quinine, which is used for the treatment of muscle cramps and also malaria; the antidepressant duloxetine, which is sold in Australia as Cymbalta; and the anti-coughing drug dextromethorphan, which can have some very nasty side effects on its own, let alone when it’s part of a cocktail with alcohol and other drugs.

  Dr Lynch concluded with a visit to Balencea on 7 December, five days after Phoebe died. He told me later that he wanted to see for himself if the injuries he’d recorded during Phoebe’s autopsy were consistent with her falling down the chute. Afterwards, he wrote:

  I viewed the chute from the 12th floor and also from the ground floor. I formed the view that it would be possible for a woman of Ms Handsjuk’s size, 166 cm and 57 kg, to enter the chute if intent on doing so. With respect to the question as to whether any other party was involved in assisting her into the chute I make the following comments. If she was conscious and capable of defending herself I would expect to see some form of defence type injuries to the upper limbs and none were noted.