Canley Heights is a suburb in Sydney’s southwest. During the first years of the millennium it threatened to become a chief range for Australia’s violent murderesses.

On 31 January 2006 the patriarchy met its match there in the form of two 14-year-old girls. Having refused to pay a taxi fare on arrival near their destination, the girls robbed and repeatedly bashed about the head their disabled driver. It was found afterwards that their victim had died of a heart attack, so perhaps the girls offered no more than a few love taps to the skull, though there was mention of “massive head injuries”. Anyway, they left him to die while they stole his mobile phone and drove off in his vehicle, which they soon crashed into a parked car. He was found lying beaten in a darkened street at about 2 a.m.

Naturally the girls cannot be named. They were Pacific Islander cousins whose families lived in Liverpool and Canley Heights. Both were said to be from violent backgrounds, with plenty of alcohol and drugs about, so no doubt it was understandable for them to kill a person who was scraping an income by doing them a service they didn’t deserve. Their victim can be named. He was 53-year-old Youbert Hormozi: divorced and, having been separated from his two children, living a lonely existence. He had suffered a stroke which had paralysed his left side. Though not truly fit, he’d returned to work the week before his death because, his employer said, he had nothing else to do. He had been robbed at gunpoint several times, and was known as a driver who would pick up fares that more cautious cabbies wouldn’t touch. His manager described him as “a very simple man”.

Naturally in the first instance the wily police arrested a nearby youth on suspicion of the murder. The girls where caught, however, when they were detained the evening after by railway security at a station following robberies that had no connection with the cabbie’s death. They had armed themselves with a knife and embarked on a succession of robberies at two stations, taking $50 from one victim. In an attempt to intimidate witnesses, one of them was heard to boast “I’ve been on the news. We killed the taxi driver”. That led to their apprehension.

When the pair were arraigned in the children’s court, they exercised their female right of “choosing” not to appear — as if they could make the court go away by refusing to acknowledge it. In due course, however, they were given six years each, with parole in three and a half. Their judge thought it “important for them to have an opportunity for rehabilitation”. No doubt he was right, though the dead Youbert Hormozi would not be rehabilitated. With time served, the South Seas Thelma and Louise were expected to be out after no more than 19 months, in August 2007.

A couple of years afterwards police charged a 29-year-old woman in the same suburb with the murder of her two children. Screams were heard from the back of a dwelling in McKibbin Street, and a neighbour called triple-0 saying she could see a woman as she attacked a 3-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy. They were already dead from multiple stab wounds when their father came home from work ten minutes later. The murderess had slashed her own wrists and was taken to Liverpool Hospital where eventually she was charged at her bedside.

The family was Vietnamese, and reportedly quiet. According to Supreme Court papers the woman had given her two children rat poison and an unidentified pink liquid before smothering and then stabbing them. She pleaded not guilty to the murders by reason of serious depression — not a common mental-illness defence. Naturally the woman cannot be named. Her lawyer told the judge that she’d decided life was not worth living after she learned about her husband’s affair, or supposed affair. She’d left him a note accusing him of betraying her with another woman. She said this had forced the murders on her:

“I have to go away because I don’t want to witness the situation in which my husband betrayed me. … I take away my own life [because] I don’t want to witness the situation in which my children live lonely by themselves. … I don’t want to take away their lives ... however ... living without love, to me life is just only selfishness and betrayal. Let my children and myself leave in peace.”

The children’s father gave evidence through a court interpreter that he had bought Valentine’s Day flowers for a female friend a few days before, but had said nothing about the woman to his wife. The couple had barely been speaking in recent days. He admitted he’d slapped her during an angry argument the day before. He denied threatening to leave his wife, and claimed he wasn’t having any affair. He and the other woman were just friends.

Since the alleged filicides the wife had been diagnosed with “major depression”. For all that, a forensic psychiatrist testified on behalf of the prosecution that the defendant was not psychotic and should have known the difference between right and wrong. The psychiatrist supported the prosecution view that the defendant had killed out of revenge and anger because she’d formed a suspicion her husband was having an affair and was about to abandon her. The defendant was pathologically jealous and intent on revenging herself. “She was considerably angry the night before. From her account she destroyed the wedding photos and had not slept very well that night. And in the morning she made a plan to take her life and the lives of her children. There was a degree of planning. She purchased the rat poison ….” The psychiatrist thought there might have been “a degree of malice in her behaviour. If she killed her children, her husband would suffer.” There were also doubts about the seriousness of the defendant’s suicide attempt.

The trial is still under way, and the defence has yet to present its case in full.


The alleged filicide had happened in early 2008. At that time it seemed that Canley Heights had also been visited by a parricide; the event in question had taken place in April 2001 but hadn’t come to light for six years and was not adjudicated till a full jury trial in 2009.

Because 70-year-old Ederino Beltrame had a history of heart troubles, his GP didn’t bother to view his body before issuing a death certificate. The policeman who was called to the house by Ederino’s daughter Daniela, aged 55, took a look at the body and found no suspicious marks or injuries. Likewise the ambulance officers who turned up. Daniela Beltrame told them that her father had been “a bit off colour” the previous evening. He’d woken up dead in bed that morning. The constable examined the dead man’s medicines before calling at the GP’s surgery nearby. The doctor issued the certificate sight unseen. He wrote on it “cardiac failure”.

So far so good. (According to one newspaper two forensic experts were called in but found themselves unable to say whether the death was really due to natural causes or whether smothering could have been involved. But this can’t have been at the time of death since no one was suspicious at that stage. It seems rather that they were asked their opinion much later when evidence was being collected for a delayed inquest. That was long after Ederino had been cremated. If that was so, the pathologists must have been going only on what people were then saying about the death.)

In the days immediately after Ederino’s demise, Daniela had her father cremated and uncovered a will which left his whole estate to her. Once the debts had been paid, she sold the Canley Heights house and went to live in Italy. There she stayed for the next five years or so, only returning to Sydney in 2006 at her older daughter’s urging. As things developed, that return was odd indeed; and her daughter’s urging was even more so.

All might have been well had not this daughter — Ederino’s grand-daughter Romina, who was 23 at the time of his death and his principal nurse — suddenly come forward six years after the event with a witness statement that she’d seen her mother suffocating the old man. What follows now is her story of the night Ederino died.

Romina said she’d been woken in the small hours by her mother calling for help from the old man’s room. Supposing that her mother was being attacked, she went in, only to find that her mother was suffocating the old man with a pillow. She was straddled on top of him on the bed and seemed to Romina to be beside herself, stuffing a pillow into Ederino’s face. She called to Romina: “Help me, help me; he won’t die; he’s a demon.”

The young woman thought her mother the demonic one — she looked “very evil, it was like she was possessed”. Romina expostulated with her, tried to push her off the old man and grabbed the phone to call for help. She noticed that her grandfather was bound from the upper chest down with cling wrap, and that this wrap strapped him to his bed. When Romina started to cut the wrapping her grandfather said to her in Italian, “Bless you, my child” but her mother shouted, “What are you doing, it’s taken me hours to do this!” and she pushed her daughter out of the room, saying Ederino “had to go”. “It’s either him or me. If I stop now he’ll call the police and they’ll throw me in jail.” Romina said she left the room in a shocked state and sat in the lounge, where she was soon joined by Daniela and was told, “He’s gone.” They drank a cup of coffee together and her mother completed her explanation. “I’ve suffered a lot.”

All this was according to the daughter’s evidence as she eventually gave it in the Supreme Court. Romina said she’d delayed her report to police till January 2007 out of concern for her mother, who had attempted suicide twice already, and had threatened a third attempt if anyone spoke about Ederino’s death. In the years that followed she missed her mum and begged her to come back to Australia from Italy. However, someone somewhere must have had doubts about the death, for events were moving independently towards an inquest. Romina in time was subpoenaed for this, and at that point she decided the best thing was to get the whole tale off her chest; so she told it to police.

The inquest was aborted by this information from Romina, which obviously pointed to murder. So it was that Daniela Beltrame found herself charged and on trial in the New South Wales Supreme Court. She pleaded not guilty to the murder. Likewise to the charge that she had tried to bully her second daughter, Loretta Appleyard, into false testimony for the inquest. It was alleged that Beltrame had confronted Loretta with a number of written statements and demanded she sign them. Specifically, she wanted Loretta to lie about Beltrame’s having forged the grandfather’s will. When Loretta declined, her mother produced a typewritten document which spelled out Loretta’s many reasons for wanting to kill her grandfather. Beltrame asked her to sign this paper, but instead Loretta reported her bullying to police.

Beltrame had at first denied forging her father’s will (just as she denied the two other charges of murder and suborning a witness). But before the trial began she changed her plea on the forgery count to ‘guilty’ — when it became clear that the physical evidence against her was overwhelming.

At trial it was alleged that “Beltrame had been jealous of her adopted brother, John, since he was brought into the household when she was 12 years old. The jury would see evidence that Beltrame had attempted to persuade her father to cut John out of his will and had later forged wills that made her the sole inheritor of Mr. Beltrame’s estate.” Evidence was laid in due course that the signature on the will was forged, and that the document had been typed on Beltrame’s typewriter. Further, her computer’s hard-drive showed that someone had used it to search the web for details about forging documents, and about poisoning, lethal injections, deprivation of oxygen and air embolism. When she came to defend herself, Beltrame admitted that she had looked at these sites, but she said she’d done so only to relieve her feelings, not to gather information which she put into effect against her father.

It had come out at the committal that relations between Ederino and his daughter had been “strained” for a long time. At least one of the arguments between them had turned violent. She’d rowed with her father over the house and his will one night when friends were at dinner with them, and had screamed at him: “You put me on this world just to make me suffer.” To which he’d responded by retreating to his bedroom, saying as he went, “Go away, you slut.” At that she’d bitten his arm. The same doctor who signed the death certificate was shown a photo of his patient’s arm taken some weeks before death. It had bite marks and bruises on it. The doctor couldn’t recall ever seeing such an injury. Had he known there’d been a history of violence, he would have examined Ederino’s body minutely, he said.

Beltrame was sent for trial at the Supreme Court in March 2008, but the hearing did not come on till almost a year later. There it was alleged that she’d been motivated by greed combined with “some deep bitterness and resentment” towards her father. There was a definite gender dimension to the family feuding. Beltrame resented her father’s closeness to her adopted brother John, which perhaps was heightened by the latter’s being in gaol for strangling a 17-year-old prostitute. The way the family behaved was consistent with the mother’s having kept her two daughters under her close domination, turning them, but without complete success, against their grandfather. It seems likely that the adoptive and then criminal brother was the object of similar treatment, and no doubt there was talk in the household about the fact that if Ederino’s estate went to John, both grand-daughters would be disinherited. Perhaps this generated hostility towards the invalid, and a wish to be rid of him so long as he could be despatched without suspicion. In all the reporting there was no mention of Romina and Loretta’s father, whether he was dead or disappeared; there may have been another source of gender hatred in Daniela’s relations with him.

In light of all this family strife it was a sour irony when it emerged towards the end of things that the father’s true will had in fact left all his estate to Beltrame — apart from $30,000 for the adopted son. This meant that her forgery and all the bullying and blackmail, as well as any alleged murder, had netted Beltrame no more than $30,000 — “hardly a huge amount”, as the judge commented.

If there was a gender element in the family’s squabbles, it seems more than probable that something gendered crept into the jury’s deliberations. After all that had been alleged, and after only a day and a half’s discussion, the jury of 7 women and 5 men were able to find Beltrame not guilty of murder.

She was convicted on the forgery charge (which she’d admitted) and on that of inducing her younger daughter to give false testimony. Her sentence for these lesser offences was a non-parole period of 34 months. Since she’d been in gaol since February 2007, this meant that she’d go free after another eight months, at the end of 2009.

It is a central fiction of our legal system that a jury is always right.

For all that, some may wonder privately whether her acquittal does not place Daniela Beltrame with Carol Matthey and many another woman who is a beneficiary of special and unwritten rules that cover females when it comes to the law. These special considerations are applied by the police, by judges, and in this case perhaps by a jury — they are a relic of the traditional gallantry which feminists have claimed to despise, but which they have exploited in order to go beyond equality and so entrench special privileges for women.

Romina by her own testimony had not actually been present to see her mother kill her grandfather. She had seen him bound in wrap. She had seen her mother straddle him with a pillow over his face, but at that point she’d left the bedroom. She’d testified that her mother had come from his room and had said, “He’s gone” — and there was no doubt as to Romina’s understanding of these events. The ‘not guilty’ verdict inevitably casts doubt on her credit. Beltrame said that Romina’s evidence was “a despicable lie” but she didn’t explain what its motivation might be.

What was it that persuaded the jury to take their lenient view? Was it the force of Beltrame’s personality? Romina’s long delay in coming forward? something intrinsically weak in the daughter’s presentation? Was there some sense of a fierce dynamic among the women of the family, which suggested to jurors that Romina had a motive for giving false evidence against her mother? Those of us who weren’t at the trial cannot say, and none of these questions is discussed in the coverage.

Beltrame had agreed that she’d maintained “a vindictive and sometimes violent relationship with her father”, while nonetheless asking the jury to believe that he died of natural causes. She said her internet research into murder methods was mere recreation. Her forgery of the will was admitted, and her fears about her father’s intention towards herself and her adoptive brother about their inheritance had been completely wrong. The jury agreed that she’d suborned Loretta. Where in all that, and in the circumstantial evidence connected with Beltrame’s flight to Italy, did they find the space to conclude that she, and not Romina, was the one telling the truth?

Perhaps there’s a clue in her claim that Ederino “treated her with utter disrespect and encouraged her children to do likewise”. May that have struck a chord with some among the jury? At an inchoate and emotional level it may also have seemed unjust that her father “had a loving relationship with her adoptive brother” — a man who was serving a long gaol term for the manslaughter of a woman. Her anxieties about the loss of the house, unfounded though they were, may have resonated with any kitchen-sink feminist on the jury, especially as Beltrame claimed to have made a financial contribution to the mortgage as a younger woman, when she’d been living with her parents and working, between the ages of 16 and 24. There was an insinuation too that though Beltrame was now living with her father again (at his insistence), he’d had plans to oust her so that he could move in a girlfriend. Significantly, this girlfriend was a woman Ederino had met through his gaol visits to John. Was that plan an actuality or was it just another product of Beltrame’s fevered jealousy? Apparently the jury tended towards the former. Neither her jealousy nor her violence nor her dishonesty over evidence and the will proved that she had murdered her father, Beltrame told them.

We notice in all this that classic tendency of women to blame men for anything and everything that is unsatisfactory in their lot. If you can get rid of the man who is nearest to you, you can fill up the silence that his absence leaves with all sorts of vividly-imagined allegations that will sound right to other women. Nonetheless, that any sympathy for Beltrame should rise to the level of a jury’s giving her the nod to commit murder, is extraordinary indeed.

We may say that Beltrame silently employed the ‘Thelma and Louise’ defence. There was an implied argument in everything she said that a mean old man had ruined her life, and therefore deserved whatever came to him, a violent death included. It is frightening to pose the possibility that the jury’s decision in this case rose from some unformed perception that any ageing man is merely a relic of the patriarchy, and deserves whatever punishment is inflicted upon him.

The determined Beltrame obviously impressed the jurors. Like Farah Damji or Wendy Titelman or Norma Khouri (all discussed elsewhere), she seemed to be one of those women who grow more passionate and virtuosic in their denials, the stronger the factual evidence that piles up against them. Whatever the case, it is from legal outcomes like this — as well as those in such cases as Matthey’s and Fitchett’s and Farquharson’s — that ordinary people are able to go on clinging to the myth that all the trouble in the world derives from men, and that women and girls are gently law-abiding.