Between August 2012 and July 2013 three Irish people were murdered in Melbourne. The deaths of David Greene, Jill Meagher and Dermot O'Toole were unconnected but for one similarity: all were killed by men out on parole for serious crimes. Having noticed a number of news reports on Irish people murdered in Australia, the TV director Ronan McCloskey set out to make a documentary about families who have lost loved ones in violent circumstances abroad.
“We wanted to find out what is it like when your son goes off to Australia and you get a phone call in the middle of the night to say they have been attacked,” he says. “But the documentary moved on to become much more than that. The families wanted to make a point about the flaws in the Australian justice system, which was letting these men, who were like time bombs, out on parole. These guys were going to kill somebody, and it just happened that, coincidentally, these three time bombs were let out and killed three Irish people.”
In the early hours of September 22nd, 2012, Adrian Bayley was spotted on CCTV outside a shop in the Brunswick area of Melbourne, talking to Jill Meagher, who was on her way home from a night out with friends. She was never seen alive again.
The following week 30,000 people marched in Melbourne to honour the murdered Irishwoman and to express outrage at a justice system that had released into the community a man with more than 20 convictions for rape.
Bayley was on parole after serving a sentence for the violent rape of five prostitutes. He had already broken parole by assaulting a man while drunk, but he had appealed his three-month sentence and had not been sent back to prison. Bayley pleaded guilty to raping and murdering Meagher; he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for at least 35 years. This was extended to 43 years in 2015, after he was convicted of raping three other women.
Life support
Just five days before Meagher’s disappearance the Greene family from
Cabinteely
, in Co Dublin, buried their son David, who had died following weeks on life support in Melbourne. The 30-year-old bricklayer had been living in the city for just under two years when he and a friend were attacked at a boarding house where he worked in St Kilda, not far from where Meagher was abducted. His attacker,
Luke Wentholt
, was also on parole, having been released three months previously.
Handing down an 18½-year sentence for the murder, Justice Terry Forrest told the court that Wentholt had "led a violent adult life", with multiple convictions since the age of 18 for assault and criminal damage. One witness had described him "behaving like a crazy monster" as he continued to attack the two men even after they had lost consciousness.
"He just seemed to be going from state to state, committing crimes," David Greene's mother, Catherine, says in an interview for McCloskey's documentary, Murder in Melbourne. "The anger [is] that he was only out of jail three months, and he just landed on Davie's doorstep."
Public anger in Victoria about the parole system escalated in 2013, after Jill Meagher’s husband, Tom, criticised it openly. The minister of corrections and crime preventions ordered a review, but before the report was published a third Irish person was fatally attacked by a man out on parole.
On July 12th, 2013, Gavin Perry, his girlfriend and her child went into a jewellery shop owned by 64-year-old Dermot O’Toole and his wife, Bridget, in Hastings, near Melbourne. CCTV footage shows him looking around at the gold and diamond jewellery, then wiping his fingerprints off the counter and door handles before leaving the shop.
Four hours later he returned with a knife. He stabbed Bridget multiple times and fatally stabbed Dermot twice in the chest. Bridget, who had moved from Ireland to Melbourne with Dermot just after their marriage, 41 years earlier, watched her husband die.
Perry had been released on parole five months earlier, after serving four years of a six-year sentence for armed robberies.
Tormented
During the court hearing Bridget O’Toole said she was tormented by the fact that, had Perry not been released on parole, her husband would still be alive.
In sentencing, Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth said Perry had poor prospects of rehabilitation and would pose a continuing risk to the community. She sentenced him to 27 years in prison, with the possibility of parole after 23. It was considered a lenient sentence in Australia, discounted by the judge because he had pleaded guilty. He could leave jail at the age of 51.
“Mum could be in her 80s when he is released, and I don’t know how she would be psychologically if he was released while she is still alive,” says Trent O’Toole, Bridget and Dermot’s son.
The review of Victoria’s parole system appeared a few weeks after Dermot O’Toole’s death; reforms have been introduced to tighten the conditions for early release. But victims’ families claim that the changes have not been radical enough.
Bridget O’Toole continues to campaign for tighter control on parole and for tougher sentencing. “I’m fighting for justice for Dermot, but not only that, so this doesn’t happen to another family.”
Murder in Melbourne is on RTÉ One on Monday, March 7, at 9.35pm
