MOTHER-IN-LAW NIGHTMARE

Everything was happy – even beautiful – in the Spina household in the hours before Maria Spina woke up her husband of 28 years … by punching his head ‘very hard’. That shock punch from that stocky (166cm, 118kg) woman slammed into Nicola Spina as he slept in his bed about 2am on Sunday 21 October 2001. Another and another quickly followed.

Spina: One, two. Bang, bong.

Maria Spina, 49, then shoved, scratched and pulled the hair of her barely awake 55-year-old husband. When he hit back, she called for her mother’s help. Giovanna Persico was 73 years old, hard of hearing, just 162cm tall and 76kg, but she enthusiastically joined in the bizarre bedroom battle. Mother and daughter punched, bit and scratched Nicola Spina. They broke his glasses and chased him – in his T-shirt and underpants – around the room. The nightmarish awakening took a terrifying turn when the women urged each other in Italian to: ‘Finish him off!’ That’s when Spina fought for his life, lashing out at his attackers in a ‘Mad Max’ kind of mood.

Spina: I hear, ‘bong, bang, bang, boom’ and then they say: ‘Help, help.’ Mother-in-law come … My wife, she call for help – she really want to fix me up. Pulling, scratching and I don’t know where to look in the dark. I don’t know what to do … Scratch me, pull me, bash me … 15 minutes … ‘Oh God, God!’ … I heard them yelling: ‘Ah, we’re going to get you this time!’ One, two. Bang, bong, pushing … I don’t know what they done. They bite me - both of them … They’re yelling: ‘We’ll do it now. That’s it. Finish him off.’ You know, in the Italian language. When I hear that – they push here, punching there – and: Jesus! Now, I’m going to die now.

So, I manage to jump out of bed … and then they were chasing me around here (pointing to a drawing of the bedroom) … So, I start pushing them against the wall … Oh, I push so hard … into the brick … I smash her against the double brick wall. I was like a jumping in the moon … Both at the same time, I pushed them against the wall – very hard.

He said his wife’s head was probably cut so badly because it was ‘banged on the wall many times … maybe her head hit the corner’.

The women’s heads were smashed. Their blood was sprayed and smeared on the wall.

Detective Peter Trichias: Was there a lot of blood on the walls?

Spina: A lot of blood, yes.

In the bedroom battle, Giovanna Persico – ‘a 75-year-old who couldn’t do a very heavy punch … the most she can do is a slap or a scratch’ – went down first.

Spina: My mother-in-law, she quick collapse, but I kept going with my wife.

Suddenly, it was quiet: the threat was over.

Det Trichias: How did it stop?

Spina: I throw them both on the ground. Then I look at myself: ‘What I done?’ Why? I don’t want to be in this situation … I’m just looking. Thinking: ‘Why this to me?…

Det Trichias: Did you do anything else to them while they were on the ground?

Spina: Well, to tell you honestly the truth, I put ’em in the garage and I clean up all the blood … from the walls … I put ’em in the garage. Cover up their heads [with plastic bags] that blood not go everywhere, and that’s it.

Det Trichias: When you moved them from the room to the garage, were they dead then or were they alive? Do you know?

Spina: Dead. Dead.

Det Trichias: Did you check to see whether they were alive?

Spina: Dead. Dead. I was so weak…

Det Trichias: How long did you leave them on the floor before you moved them?

Spina: Until I recover a bit. I went to drink cold water, you know. I was feeling so battered. You know. I couldn’t even speak … I was so weak, so tired. It was so confusion. What I do? You know? I went to drink a glass of water and then another one and then another one and I sat down and I think: ‘Why? Why this? I can’t understand why. Can’t understand why this happen to my house.’…

Det Trichias: Do you know how long, even approximately, before you moved them?

Spina: It was one minuto – it was like two years for me … When you frightened, it’s terrible. Terrible.

He told police that he had cleaned the blood from the walls and carpet with water and some Spree detergent. He had a shower and washed the T-shirt and underpants he had been wearing when he was so terrifyingly awoken and hung them on the backyard clothes line.

There had been no warning, no hint an attack like this was imminent. About 6.30am on Saturday 20 October 2001, Spina had gone to his factory job at an engineering company. Maria hadn’t felt well and she had asked him to collect her mother from her Oakleigh home. He had done as she asked, bringing Giovanna Persico over to their house about 11am and the three of them had had a pleasant afternoon. It hadn’t always been like that.

Det Trichias: What was your marriage like?

Spina: Beautiful.

Det Trichias: Have you had any problems at all lately?

Spina: Who doesn’t have a problem these days? I hit [Maria] a long time ago … we have arguments every night but it’s normal. A hit or a punch in the teeth: that’s what I want to tell her who I am.

Det Trichias: How come the argument leads to hitting her?

Spina: I am the man…

Det Trichias: Has your wife ever hit you in the past?

Spina: Yes … when you least expect it, she comes from behind and goes [hits his hands], that’s how she is. Me different: I just give her a bump.

Maria’s family, Spina said, had not made things easy. He had ‘a feeling’ his wife had left him for 30 days in 1981 because ‘someone pump her up behind my back … I don’t know – family, family’.

Spina: Faustino [Maria’s oldest brother] – the one who rung you … he’s the one cause the problem. He’s always too close to my wife … Look, between husband and wife – other people should stay out … We were happy. I don’t know. Someone put their nose in my business. I don’t know why … I been forced to do this, what happened.

For Spina, his wife’s family was just ‘too big’. But in the hours before that fight, Spina, his wife and her mother had got on very well.

Det Trichias: Was there any problem with your mother-in-law or wife that day?

Spina: Beautiful.

Det Trichias: Did you have any argument with your wife…

Spina: No, it was beautiful.

Det Trichias: … or mother-in-law?

Spina: Beautiful … We had a meal. Everything together. Happy. No problem … We watch TV … After the Tattslotto numbers come out, I said: ‘It would be nice’ and I went to bed … and they remain to watching TV, both of them…

I went to bed. Went to sleep. I wake again. There’s still the TV on … They’re yappin’ yappin’ in the kitchen … I go to sleep again…

It was one, two o’clock. I didn’t look at the time. I have a punch on my head…

He agreed to police videoing him at his home as he showed them how he killed his wife and mother-in-law.

Spina: You can make a movie. I don’t care … I was like Mad Max – that mood … When you sleeping and – punch! You don’t know where you are. God! … It’s like movie.

As the two women’s bodies lay in the garage, Spina spent Sunday 21 October cleaning up the blood and generally tidying up his house. About 2pm on Monday 22 October 2001, the day after killing his wife and mother-in-law – with their battered bodies still on the garage floor – Spina phoned Faustino and asked him to come around to fix an answering machine.

Spina: I wanted to tell him … what happened.

Det Trichias: What’s happened when he’s come over?

Spina: I didn’t know what to do … First of all I offered him a drink. He wouldn’t drink it. I had a beer. Then I come back and say: ‘When your sister and mother come back, I am going to kill them, both of them ’cause I am here waiting for the dinner to be ready’ … I still have no guts to tell him … I wanted to tell him what’s happened to his sister and the mother – didn’t have the guts.

Spina challenged the two policemen interviewing him.

Spina: If you were in my position, what you tell to the brother? … You have the guts? What could happen then, if you tell him: ‘This, in my house.’ You tell him?

He admitted holding a gun, but not to planning to shoot Faustino.

Spina: I was so crazy still … I had a gun then … a double-barrel shotgun. I was going to use it for myself, after what I done.

Spina agreed that he had used rags to tie a cut-off plastic milk bottle to the gun’s barrel but said he did not know why: ‘I was so confused.’ He admitted ordering Faustino to stay but insisted he had not touched him with the gun. He had wanted Faustino to stay but not because he wanted to kill or even punish the man he blamed for ruining his marriage.

Spina: I wish he could stay all night to keep me company … He wanted to go, but I was so confused, I just said: ‘You stay here.’ I knew why I want him there: make sure nothing happen to me.

He agreed that he had threatened Faustino, but only because he was afraid of what Faustino might do if he saw the bloodied bodies of his mother and sister in the garage.

Det Trichias: Did you threaten him at all when he was at the house?

Spina: Yeah. Yeah … I said to him: ‘You lie on the ground. Pretend you’re dead. So they [his wife and mother-in-law] don’t scream on me any more. They don’t fight me any more.’ He knows they fight … He was laughing. I said: ‘All right, lie on the couch. Stop laughing now.’

Det Trichias: Were you laughing?

Spina: No, I was not laughing. I know what I done. He didn’t know. I know. So, he was laughing, I was not.

Det Trichias: When you were talking to him and you had a gun, were you pointing the gun at him?

Spina: Yes. He’s a big man, mate. I was scared he jumping on me but I didn’t do nothing to him. When he left, we shake hands … He say: ‘You my best man. I know that you my brother-in-law.’ I know that, but he didn’t know what had happened…

I was trying to keep him calm … All the time I keep saying: ‘Sit down’ … I don’t want him jump on me … I didn’t feel safe … I was frightened if he jump on me and then opens the garage door: what happens?…

I don’t want him to know, otherwise he could have grabbed me. I could have shot him. I tell him: he kill me now. He get me on the spot or grab me and bash me against the fence – that’s it. So I didn’t tell, until you people catch me – and I’m alive … So here I am – he’s there. He’s all right – I’m all right.

For four hours – from 3.40pm – Spina forced Faustino to keep him company. He let him regularly try to phone his mother. Why not? She wasn’t going to answer. About 7.30pm, Faustino appeared to dial Triple 0 for police and emergency services on his mobile phone. Spina didn’t object; indeed, the pair laughed about it. When Faustino finally left, Spina shook his hand. It was all just craziness.

Just after midnight on Tuesday 23 October 2001 – nearly 48 hours after he had killed the women lying in his garage – Spina decided it was time to bury them. He decided to take them to the Springvale Cemetery just a couple of minutes’ drive away. He put a large black plastic sheet on the floor of the boot of his Toyota Landcruiser and heaved the head-bagged bodies on to it. Just after 1am, he threw their handbags, a purse and a pair of blood-stained workman gloves in with them, covered them with a plastic curtain, and drove out.

Det Trichias: Did you have a plan of what you were going to do when you go to the cemetery?

Spina: I don’t know. Maybe sit down and cry.

Moments after he drove out of his home in Police Road in eastern suburban Mulgrave, a police car stopped him.

• • •

That was the story Spina told police of how he came to be driving out of his home in the dead of night with the battered bodies of his wife and mother-in-law: he had killed them while fighting for his life. That was his story of his afternoon pointing a double-barrelled shotgun at his brother-in-law: it was just craziness; a crazy way of getting someone to make sure he didn’t commit suicide, an aborted attempt at confessing.

Spina was keen to show police his injuries.

Spina: You want to see all the bruises … Look at my eyes. Look at my face. Look at all the scratches here and here. Punches. They bite me. I don’t know which. Both of them were doing this … You better take a photograph because it will disappear … Here, have a look at my hair – missing.

He also repeatedly gave his excuse for killing the women.

Spina: I lost my head … to defend myself … I want it: self-defence … I don’t know what I was doing. I was asleep. They punching my head and I act at once … I don’t mean to kill her – ever. I don’t want to kill her, not even a cat.

He appeared calm, unemotional, even stoic.

Spina: What can I say? What’s done is done … What can I say? It’s happened … I’ve been forced to do this.

He answered a lot of questions but police still didn’t believe him. There were too many questions not answered to their satisfaction.

1. If Spina hadn’t used any kind of weapon to kill the women:

• Why was he carrying in the boot of his car – with the two dead women – two pieces of rope with blood matching Giovanna Persico’s DNA?

• Why did the bruises on Mrs Persico’s neck look like they had been caused by a rope?

• Why was a bloodstain found on a billiard cue racked in the billiard room?

• Why did a blood-spatter expert find that although some of the blood spatter could have been caused by a head hitting the wall, it was more likely to have been caused by ‘multiple blows … from an object hitting a bloodied surface’ and that that ‘bloodied surface’ was likely to have been 30cm to 50cm away from the wall and could have been a bloodied head?

2. If he had been driving out to the Springvale Cemetery to bury the women he had accidentally killed while defending himself:

• Why did he not have a spade? Did he just forget the spade? Was it just more crazy thinking or was he planning to dump the bodies somewhere safe, just as a cunning murderer would?

• Why was he carrying the bloody rope and a pair of his shoes with Giovanna Persico’s blood on them? Was that just his mixed-up thinking and panic, or was he trying to get rid of evidence of two murders?

3. If he had been attacked so viciously that he had to kill to defend himself, why were his injuries so minor? Spina had only superficial wounds on his face, forearms, hands and chest. There was no sign of injury to either side of his head or of any hair having been pulled out. Was it that his injuries had healed before he was examined? Were the injuries superficial because he had been lying on his bed when he was attacked and then managed to dodge most of the women’s blows, or were they just the sorts of minor injuries two women fighting for their lives would have caused?

4. If he had been woken up by being punched in the head and had then furiously defended himself in a frenzied fight, why were his spectacles broken on his face? When did he put them on? During a pause in the fracas he forgot to tell police about, or was he lying about being asleep?

The trickiest questions for Spina to answer, however, were posed by two silent witnesses – the bodies of the dead women. The main one was that the pathologist found both women had to have been strangled for at least 15 seconds – Spina had not even mentioned strangling them, just bashing them against the wall. Because of her thick neck, the pathologist believed it might even have taken at least 30 to 40 seconds to strangle Maria Spina. Then there were the neck bruises, particularly on Mrs Persico, which looked like they had been caused by a rope. The pathologist also believed that Maria Spina’s head had been hit with a blunt object, possibly a billiard cue, an ‘absolute minimum’ of eight times.

Police not only rejected Spina’s self-defence claim, but they also didn’t believe he had killed them when he said he did.

After talking to Maria’s brothers Faustino and Joseph, to her favourite niece Joanne Persico, and to Spina’s workmates, police suspected a much more horrific scenario: that over four days Spina had tried to rid himself of those he most hated and envied – his wife, two of her brothers and their mother.

It had been, police believed, a bizarrely bloody long weekend of horror … and blackly comic bungling.

What police suspected happened at the Spina home from Friday 19 October 2001 to Tuesday 23 October 2001

Friday 19 October: Spina bashes and strangles his wife – probably during an argument over her taking $5000 out of their bank account. He then calls Joseph Persico and tries to lure him to come over by asking him to check on his pizza oven. Mr Persico says he will come over the next afternoon.

Saturday 20 October: Spina picks up Giovanna Persico from her home – possibly by force: uncharacteristically, she leaves her gates and doors unlocked. When he gets her to his home, Spina bashes and strangles the mother-in-law he considers belittles him and interferes in his marriage. At 6.30pm, Joseph Persico and his daughter arrive but Spina changes his mind about killing Joseph and doesn’t answer the door. Maybe he hasn’t finished cleaning up after killing Mrs Persico, or maybe he baulks at killing Joseph because his daughter is with him.

Monday 22 October: Spina lures another Persico he considers pesky to his home. He holds Faustino Persico at gunpoint for four hours but can’t get up the nerve to kill him and lets him go about 7.30pm, after Faustino manages to call the police on his mobile phone.

Tuesday, October 23: Just after midnight, Spina tries to get rid of the bodies of his wife and mother-in-law but police catch him driving out of his home.

Joanne Persico’s story

Police suspected that Maria Spina was killed on Friday 19 October because on that day she did not phone to say ‘Happy 14th birthday’ to her goddaughter and favourite niece – Faustino’s daughter, Joanne Persico.

Joanne: Aunty Grace [the Persicos’ name for Maria] … was like another mother to me and I was just like a daughter to her…

I saw her every two weeks and she would call me two or three times a week … but she would hang up at four o’clock because Nick would come home … She would say: ‘Giovanna, that’s my name in Italian, I’m sorry, I have to go. He is home’ … She made me feel really special and like I was just this person that she gave all her love to … She would never forget my birthday. Like, the least she would do would be to telephone me to say: ‘Happy birthday’.

I even remember my 12th birthday. She sent a surprise bunch of 12 roses to my house and she kept calling me that day saying: ‘Are you going to be home’ … Like – yeah! – I’m going to be home. She would never have forgotten.

Joanne said when her Aunty Grace didn’t call on her birthday she thought it was ‘really strange’ but did not ‘make a big deal out of it’ because she and her aunt had planned to go birthday present shopping at Chadstone Shopping Centre the next day…

Joanne: I thought she had probably got tied up with something.

But the next day, her aunt not only failed to take her niece birthday present shopping, she didn’t even phone to say why. It was all very baffling for Joanne because it had been her Aunt Grace who had suggested the shopping trip in the first place – on Tuesday that week. Her Aunt Grace had confirmed the trip the next day and had checked the details on the Thursday … but then nothing.

Prosecutor: Did you hear from her at all that day [Saturday 20 October 2001]?

Joanne: [Long pause. She blinks away tears.] No, I didn’t.

Prosecutor: Did you ring your Aunt Maria’s home to find out: ‘Where is my present? When are we going?’

Joanne: No, because I never rang my aunty at her house because Nick would direct the phone to his mobile and he would answer and I didn’t like speaking to him, so I didn’t call.

Joseph Persico’s story

Nicola Spina’s relationship with his wife’s family, according to Joseph Persico, had never been very good but it had deteriorated after Spina’s widowed mother died in 1992. After that Spina seemed to become even more envious of the Persico family.

Joseph: He withdrew into himself. He just concentrated on doing work and making money. It seemed to be money was his only purpose in life … They [Nicola and Maria] were quite well off…

He didn’t particularly like to associate with my family or our family, in general.

He said he had only once seen Spina threaten Maria – on Father’s Day 2000 when they were at his place.

Joseph: We were sitting at the table – my wife and my daughter were washing the dishes – and I just sort of started a conversation with Nick. I said: ‘Hey, Nick, why don’t you go take the caravan and go with my sister around Australia, you know, and just enjoy yourselves.’ As I said that, my sister sort of shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘That will never happen with him.’ As soon as Nick heard that he said: ‘I’m going to kill you one of these days’ … He sounded threatening.

Joseph, however, acknowledged in cross-examination by Spina’s barrister, Max Perry, that Maria could ‘dish it up as much as she could take it’. He said he last spoke to his sister about 9am on Friday 19 October 2001 – the day police believed Spina killed his wife. Maria had phoned and asked Joseph to drive her to the doctor because she had just vomited. (Even though she had a driver’s licence, Spina wouldn’t let his wife drive either of their cars.) Joseph told his sister he had something to do and asked her to phone him again in a couple of hours if she didn’t feel any better.

Later that day, Joseph was astonished to get a call from Nicola Spina asking him to come over the next afternoon to see whether his pizza oven was worth repairing.

Joseph: I would say in probably 28 years that I have known Nick, he would have rang me twice … That was the first time he asked me for a favour. I think he had felt too proud to ask me … He seemed reasonably calm about it. I was quite happy to help him out because I’m always looking for an opportunity to help somebody else. He mentioned to bring my daughter Sarah because my sister asked if she could be brought out to his place because she had some old clothes for her to try on, which she said didn’t need any more.

When Joseph asked to speak to Maria, Spina told him she was at a nearby church at a committee meeting for an upcoming fair. (The priest of that church, however, told police – and Spina’s jury – that there had been no meeting at the church that night.)

About 5pm the next day, Joseph rang Spina from his mobile phone to say he was on his way but Spina told him: ‘Oh no, not now. Come in about an hour’s time.’ He added: ‘Don’t make it too late.’ When Joseph and Sarah got to the Spinas’ home at exactly 6.30pm, however, no-one answered the doorbell. Joseph suspected Spina was home after hearing a loud click inside and because of the way Spina’s Jack Russells – Deana and Charlie – acted when he looked into the backyard. First they barked but then the older one stopped, looked towards the back door of the house and acted as he did when Spina was around.

Joseph: He started running in a circle, a happy circle. You could say there was smile on the dog’s jaws.

Under cross-examination, however, he agreed that: ‘Jack Russells get excited for all sorts of reasons’. (Spina told police he, his wife and mother-in-law had been out when Joseph called, and that they had missed him by about 10 minutes.)

Indirectly, Deana and Charlie were part of another reason police believed Maria Spina was killed on Friday 19 October 2001. Spina’s workmates told detectives that on the morning of Saturday 20 October 2001 they noticed scratches on Spina’s face and arms. They said Spina had told them he got these the previous day, while playing with his dogs. He said he had slipped and fallen on the grass and hit a branch of a lemon tree in his backyard. Spina did not mention this to police; instead he blamed the scratches on the attack by his wife and mother-in-law.

Faustino Persico’s story

Maria’s eldest brother and Joanne’s father – Faustino Persico – said Nicola Spina had ‘all the time, continuously’ threatened Maria.

Faustino: The biggest one was: ‘One day I am going to break you. I am going to kill you. I will fix up the whole family.’ Those type of gestures were common.

Once, when talking to his sister on the phone, Faustino heard Nick in the background.

Faustino: He said: ‘Who are you on the phone with? One of these days I am going to kill the whole lot of yous.’

Nick and Maria used to go over to her big brother’s house three to four times a week because she was fond his children but, in the five years before Maria was killed, Nick had only visited three or four times a year. Mostly, he just dropped Maria off.

Faustino: There was the one time when he said: ‘I don’t really want yous to come. I want to be on my own. I am a private person.’

About two weeks before she was killed, Maria told Faustino she could never leave her husband because Nick had threatened to kill her nephews and nieces if she did.

Faustino: I was given the impression he was jealous because we were a close family.

About 9am on Friday 19 October 2001, Maria called Faustino to say she wasn’t feeling well, that she had a stomach-ache. Just like Joseph, however, Faustino was busy and he also suggested she call him back in an hour if she still wasn’t feeling well.

Faustino: [Long pause, wipes an eye] I didn’t hear back.

Faustino Persico’s account of what happened between him and Spina on the afternoon of Monday 22 October 2001 – while unaware the battered bodies of his sister and mother were a few metres away in the Spina garage – was significantly different from the story Spina had told police.

About 2pm that day, Faustino was surprised to get a phone call from Spina.

Faustino: He asked me if I could do him a favour. He said he had bought himself an answering machine and it didn’t work. He asked if I could go over and fix it for him, if I could go over straightaway.

Faustino – a telecommunications company technical officer – told Spina that he was helping his other sister, Nancy, with renovations and that he would come the next day.

Faustino: He said to me: ‘No, I prefer you come today to get it over and done with.’

He got to the Spina’s home about 3.40pm.

Faustino: I rang the intercom at the gate and waited about three or four minutes before Nick came out to open it and he asked me if there was anyone else with me and I said, ‘No,’ and then he said: ‘Come in. Come in,’ and he took me around the back of the house.

As soon as he opened the door, he asked me to go straight into the kitchen downstairs. He asked me to have a seat. He said: ‘Do you want a drink?’ … He opened the fridge and he got a lemonade and I said: ‘No, don’t give me a lemonade, give me a Yakult. [Spina’s cheerfully rotund barrister asked if this was one of those ‘healthy people drinks’.]

He grabbed himself a beer too, and sat down … Well, he started talking. He seemed normal at the time … We started talking about how Nancy’s … doing her kitchen … then he asked me, you know, how’s the family, about interest rates, the economy, you know. Small talk. Here and there, and then all at once he said: ‘Hold on a sec. I just have to get something.’ He wandered towards the billiard room … I didn’t know where he went. I thought maybe he went to grab the answering machine to come and show me, but when he comes back out he’s pointing a double-barrelled shotgun…

He was pointing the gun at me and I said to him – the gun had like a plastic bottle cover over the end of the barrel wrapped with a piece of cloth, just a cloth, roughly tied up around it - and I said to him: ‘What’s that?’ And he said it was a silencer. Then I started laughing at him. I said: ‘What sort of silencer is that?’ And I said: ‘What is going on here? Where’s my sister?’ and he said: ‘She’s gone for a walk with your mother.’ And I said: ‘Is my mother here?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, she slept here last night.’ I said, ‘What’s going on, Nick? Have you had an argument?’ And he said to me: ‘Ask your sister. She took all the money out of the account, the whole lot – $5000. Someone must have put her up to it. You must know something about it.’ I go: ‘The only thing I know is that my sister did mention that you withdrew $30,000 from the joint account and you haven’t explained where the money has gone and she thinks that, maybe, you are going to run off with another woman and she is very upset about it.’ He goes to me: ‘I’m the man of the house. She should not have withdrawn the money without my permission.’

I had to try to keep at ease and calm, make sure he doesn’t do something stupid … I realised he was still pointing the gun at me and I said: ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And he goes: ‘I want you to get down on the ground and lay down. When your mum and sister come in, I want to show them that I killed you’ … I said: ‘No way, Nick. I’m not getting on the ground. I have a sore back. I will get a chill on the tiles.’ Then I tried to think and collect my thoughts, tried to find excuses not to get on the ground because I didn’t like the idea of getting on the ground with him holding the gun at me. Then he goes to me: ‘Get on the couch then,’ and I was still insisting: ‘No, no way, Nick. I am not getting on the couch either’…

Then he went quiet for about 10 to 15 minutes, you know, standing there. He was probably collecting his thoughts. He said: ‘What do I have to do? Act like a guard all night?’ I said: ‘No, Nick, you don’t have to act like a guard and have the gun pointed at me. Come, sit down. I am not going to bite you. Come and sit down.’ So I was able to convince him to come and sit down on the opposite side of me – still with the gun pointed at me…

I said: ‘Put the gun away, Nick. Come on, what are you going to do with that?’ And he said to me: ‘I’m serious. I’m not kidding. I am serious. It’s not a joke.’ And then I said to him: ‘I don’t believe there are any bullets in that gun. You’re bullshitting me. Stop mucking around.’ And he goes: ‘You don’t believe me?’ and I said: ‘No. If it’s true, show me if there is a cartridge in the gun.’

He then cracks the barrel – with the gun still pointed at me, he cracks the barrel – he sort of twists his body a little on the side and cracks the barrel down, pulls the cartridge out, closes the chamber again and shows me the cartridge. And I said: ‘No, that’s probably an empty cartridge. You have got to show me that it’s full.’ So he grabs the cartridge and knocks it on the edge of the table where he’s sitting and at that stage I realised he had had a loaded gun on me … Because there was a twin cartridge, I knew there would be another bullet on the other side of the barrel. I was delirious in my mind. … I started to panic, had anxiety, distressing thinking.

I stayed quiet for a few moments and then, while I sort of put my head down a little bit, he broke the chamber again, put the cartridge back in, closed the gun. And then eventually we sat down for a little while. He grabbed himself another beer and asked me if I wanted a drink and I said: ‘No, I don’t feel like a drink.’ Then I said: ‘Is there a trigger on the gun?’ And he pulled the thing back, like a pin and I knew, you know, it could go off any second now – even by a bit of a knock. He said: ‘Don’t do anything stupid. The gun is ready to go now.’

I kept on talking to him: ‘I can’t wait here all night. They haven’t come yet. They probably won’t come. You know Grace. If she’s scared of you, she won’t come.’ I then started to collect my thoughts: ‘What am I going to do here? Maybe I will ring my mum’s and see if they are there.’

So I stood up and started towards the phone and he said: ‘What are you doing?’ I said: ‘I will just ring Mum up and see if they are there and I will tell them to come over. I can’t stay here all night.’ He said: ‘All right, ring’ … Then I dialled my mum’s home and it rang and rang until it rang out.’

He said: ‘I told you they are coming. I spoke to them this morning. They have got to cook for me.’

After I hang up, I picked up the phone again and started dialling home and after I dialled the number, I said to him: ‘You don’t mind if I just ring Maria [Faustino’s wife] and let the kids know that I will be late?’ And the next thing I know he says: ‘Hang up. Hang up.’ At that stage all I heard was my daughter’s voice saying: ‘Hello’. I said: ‘Hi Joanne.’ And the next thing he charged up to me and pushed the gun into my guts. Because he was shoving it into my guts, I said to him: ‘I’ll hang up, Nick! I’ll hang up, Nick!’ and just hanged up the phone.

He asked me to sit down. After I went to sit down, he said to me: ‘You realise you are my hostage.’ And I tried to keep calm and not answer back.

After a few minutes I said to him: ‘Come on, Nick, relax, you are my brother-in-law. Let everything go. Don’t go over the top. Don’t worry about it.’

Then I waited a few minutes, collecting my thoughts: What I am going to say to him to calm him down? I told him: ‘Now that you are well-off, Nick, enjoy yourself, go on a holiday. You have got no kids. Make the most of it.’ I said: ‘There’s no marriage that is perfect. We all have our arguments and disagreements at home’…

He grabbed himself another beer from the fridge and went and sat down … He said he had to solve his problems. They had to be solved today and he couldn’t take it any more.

Spina let Faustino ring his mother a few times but kept the gun trained on him, warning him: ‘Make sure you don’t ring anybody else but your mum.’ He knocked back Faustino’s pleas to be allowed to leave.

Faustino: I said: ‘I would like to go now.’ And he goes: ‘You are not going anywhere. You are staying right where you are’ … I thought I would try and see how he was going to react if I stood up and grab my tools and say to him I’m about to leave. As soon as I stood up, he quickly stands up and says: ‘Sit down or I’ll let you have it’ … Then I said: ‘No, Nick, I have had enough. I am going to go now.’ So, quickly he moves towards the door … He said: ‘Don’t make me do it. I’m serious. I am going to blow you away.’ I said: ‘Relax, Nick. Don’t worry about it. I am your brother-in-law’ … He pushed the gun into my guts again and he said to me: ‘Get back or I’ll trigger it. Get back or I’ll fire.’ I said: ‘Come on, Nick, what’s going on.’ I looked down at the barrel and said: ‘What’s this thing at the front of the barrel? This plastic thing. What’s this stupid thing, Nick? Is this your silencer?’ I tried to keep things easy…

He put himself into a stance position, his leg leaning back and his body forward, head looking at the trigger, sort of where you can get a focus. He would not look at me in the face.

My mind was everywhere. I was petrified … thinking he could take my life away in a flash. So I didn’t want to push him … So, I said: ‘OK, Nick, I will go and sit down. I will do this for you until seven o’clock…

Before seven o’clock, I got a call on my mobile … my friend Bert rang me and asked me where I was and straightaway I said: ‘I’m at my sister’s house.’ And he [Bert] said: ‘What are you doing?’ … and the next thing, you know, Nick stands up and starts going delirious with the gun – jumping up and down. I just put my hand over the mouthpiece so Nick would know he wasn’t listening and he was pointing the gun at me, you know: ‘Hang up the phone! Hang up the phone!’ I said: ‘Nick, relax. I have got to explain to him why I hang up the phone otherwise he might think something is going on. Then he goes: ‘Hang up the phone.’ I said: ‘I will hang up the phone but just let me tell him politely or it won’t sound right to him. So I said: ‘I have got to go, Bert.’

Finally, Faustino was fed up.

Faustino: About 7.30 … I did my prayers … I said goodbye to my family and decided I had to do something.

I said to him: ‘I am leaving now. I am going to pack up my tools. I am going to leave, Nick. I am just going to grab my tools and I am going now. I have had enough. I can’t take it any more.’ He quickly stood up out of his chair with the gun still pointed at me and forced his way again … towards the door. Even though he had the gun pointed at me, I started walking towards the door saying: ‘I am going, Nick,’ and he said: ‘Don’t make me do it … Go and sit down again’ … He said: You know, when I had the gun pointed at your sister’s head, she wasn’t scared. She said to me: ‘If you are going to shoot me, shoot me’ … I didn’t know if that was a recent incident or something in the past. All I did was I turned my body to the side of him … I grabbed my phone … I took a glance to see where the zero was and dialled it three times and placed my thumb on the send button … I lifted my hand high in the air with the phone in my hand and shouted, ‘This is 31 Police Road. I am in a hostage situation. Please help!’

Well, he shook his head, not knowing what was going on and I said to him: ‘I have just rang the police to let them know where I am and that I am being kept hostage,’ and he said: ‘Why did you do that for?’ and I said: ‘Because if you are going to kill me, at least they will know where I am.’ He said: ‘I don’t believe you.’ My hand came down and my thumb was still on the send button … and he said: ‘Hang it up! Hang it up!’ I said to him: ‘Nick, they will be here in three minutes. You can get out of all this. Grab the gun, put it back where you got it from in the cupboard where you keep it and I will go so when they will find no-one here and they will think it was a hoax.’

He took a couple of seconds to answer. He said: ‘All right, I will do what I did last time. I won’t answer the door when they come. Don’t say anything to anybody. I’m a bit nervous.’ Then he lay the gun on the kitchen table.

I went to grab my tools and he accompanied me to the gate and I got into the car and just drove.

Faustino denied shaking Spina’s hand when he left. The first thing he did after leaving was to ring his brother, Joseph. He then drove his wife and children around to see their nonna. When they found she wasn’t home, he went to the police station and told of his bizarre afternoon.

Under defence cross-examinaton, Faustino Persico agreed that both Spina and his sister had become very materialistic. Neither wanted to end the marriage for fear of losing possessions to the other. His sister, he agreed, wasn’t afraid to swear or have screaming matches with her husband. Like her husband, she wouldn’t take her family upstairs to the ‘good’ lounge.

He said that on the afternoon of Monday 22 October 2001, Spina had ‘very obvious … fixed red eyes’.

The cross-examination then took a startling 180-degree turn. It completely ditched the story Spina had told police: that he had held the gun, but that it had been an afternoon of craziness in which he had never seriously threatened killing Faustino Persico.

Mr Perry: I suggest to you, what happened is that you were sitting in the kitchen, you were talking to him for a while and he told you he was going to put some eggs on for his tea.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: I suggest that shortly after that he excused himself and went to the toilet.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: And that you went into the billiard room.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: And, I suggest that you found the gun in the billiard room.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: And, I suggest that you were the one in fact, the person holding the firearm, not Mr Spina.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: Rather than he holding the gun on you…

Mr Persico: Not correct.

Mr Perry: … You were holding it on him.

Mr Persico: No.

Mr Perry: You understand, I am obliged to put these matters to you?

Mr Persico: Fair enough. Fair enough.

• • •

In Spina’s April 2003 trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria, prosecutor Sue Pullen did not try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the police theory of Spina’s bloody long weekend. She didn’t believe she needed to in order to have him found guilty of a violent double murder.

Ms Pullen: Even on his own version of events, the prosecution says this is not self-defence … The prosecution says to you the deaths of these two women by strangulation and assault was the result of an intense anger on the part of the accused … that very act of strangulation causing death speaks of an intense anger … watching as life is taken away and breathing stops, watching as that person struggles against the inevitable…

Regarding Giovanna Persico, there is no escaping this was a brutal and sustained attack – before strangulation – of a 73-year-old lady; a person the accused said … was ‘a 75-year-old who couldn’t do a heavy punch … a slap and a scratch’ … Where’s the need for self-defence? … The accused … described Mrs Persico as going to ground quickly, collapsing quickly. No mention of strangulation. The forensic evidence has caught him out…

I suggest it [Spina’s self-defence story] is not logical, is nonsensical. The accused says it’s self-defence. I say it’s not in a bull’s roar of self-defence.

Ms Pullen told the jury that Spina’s ‘preparedness to tell stories inconsistent with the truth’ was shown by his absurd ‘180-degree turnaround’ on what happened between him and Faustino Persico on Monday 22 October 2001 – from telling police he held the gun because Mr Persico was a ‘big man’, to claiming Mr Persico had the gun.

• • •

Mr Perry pointed out that Spina had been incredibly cooperative with police – answering their questions and re-enacting how he killed the women, even pointing out some of the blood spatter in his home. He said Spina’s account of being woken up by the women had been consistent and the prosecution had failed to prove any other scenario beyond a reasonable doubt.

Mr Perry said Maria Spina had been a ‘deeply unhappy, bad-tempered woman caught in a marriage she was not prepared to leave … an increasingly unhappy and depressed woman who has become resentful of her husband’. He said Maria Spina’s claims to her family that some weeks before her death her husband had put a noose around her neck and tightened it and that he had tried to poison her, without any evidence of these things or even complaints to police, suggested Maria Spina’s increasing paranoia. He pointed out that even Maria had wondered whether she had dreamed about her husband putting the noose around her neck.

Mr Perry: What if all the resentment and the anger and the perceived humiliation over the years finally came to a head that night and she couldn’t take it any more and she went into that bedroom and started on her husband? … He was attacked and during the course of the struggle, he heard words in his native tongue: ‘Let’s finish him now’. He fought for his life. He was terrified…

It’s very difficult in the cold, somewhat clinical atmosphere of this court to try to re-create the terror and the fear and the shock of what was occurring … Yes, he probably did have his hands on their throats…

If you have ever been woken up from a deep sleep, you know it takes a couple of minutes at times to get your thoughts around what’s happening. But when he [pointing to Spina in the dock] is woken, he is receiving blows and he is hearing a threat: ‘Let’s finish him off’…

Maria Spina is a strong lady – no two ways about it – and she is helped by another person. He fought back. My word he did! It was his only option, other than, perhaps, pulling the covers over his head and getting under the sheets…

This is a man frightened and aware of the fact that this is not a two-dollar domestic tiff. This is heavier and much, much more serious than anything that had ever happened before.

Mr Perry said that if the jurors did not believe it reasonably possible that Spina had killed his wife and mother-in-law in self-defence, they should at least accept the reasonable possibility that he had been provoked into temporarily losing his self-control and was, therefore, only guilty of manslaughter, not murder.

Mr Perry: He tells police: ‘I lost it.’ ‘I don’t know what happened.’ ‘I was like Mad Max’ … He is admitting the very loss of control that, you might feel, is the essence of a provocation defence.

He reminded the jury that the blood-spatter expert had said the wounds on the two women could have been inflicted in a frenzied fight by being bashed into the wall and door. He said the blood-spatter evidence was inconclusive because of Spina’s attempts to clean it but added that his cleaning it up did not mean he was guilty of murder.

Mr Perry: The accused man in a short period of time had killed these people. Then he sat alone, in an empty house, for some time wondering what to do. He had the horror of trying to clean up … He was … between a rock and a hard place.

He also tackled possible scepticism over Spina’s claim that Faustino had pointed the gun at him.

Mr Perry: At first blush, you might say, ‘Well I don’t think so,’ but you only have to look at Faustino’s evidence. This is a man who tells you he thought it was a joke … Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you are invited to someone’s home and, on your own account, they excuse themselves and come back with a shotgun with a cut-down container on it that has been described to you, are you going to think it a joke? Are you going to play along with the joke and see where it goes? I don’t think so! This is nonsense.

Mr Perry said Faustino Persico had only called police after calling Joseph and taking his family around to see whether his mother was home because he couldn’t be certain that Spina hadn’t called the police first to tell them Faustino had held him hostage.

• • •

On 17 April 2003, after the jury deliberated for about six hours, its foreman declared Spina guilty on all counts: two murders as well as threatening to kill and falsely imprisoning Faustino Persico. Spina stood impassively in the dock.

• • •

In the pre-sentence plea-hearing, the prosecution called for a rarely imposed ‘life means life’ sentence with no hope of parole. Mr Perry pleaded for his client to at least get a chance to apply for parole at some point. He said he had been found guilty of unplanned murders, that he was nearly 56 and he had health problems that would make prison life particularly tough. He said Spina had migrated from Italy with his family in the early ’60s, in his early teens. He had been a hard worker all his adult life, accruing assets worth about $700,000, and had not been in trouble with the law before. Mr Perry said that a few years earlier Maria had been pregnant with twins but, tragically, Nick Spina had been forced to agree to an abortion to save his wife’s life. Mr Perry said his client ‘denied strongly’ claims by the Persico family that Maria had miscarried that pregnancy after Spina punched her in the stomach.

Psychologist Ian Joblin said Spina had a ‘pervasive and suspicious attitude’, particularly towards his wife’s mother and brothers who he suspected of trying to get his wealth. Spina believed his mother-in-law had suggested her daughter stab him while he slept and claimed he heard his wife discussing changing her will with her family. Mr Joblin wasn’t convinced that Spina’s paranoia was delusional but said he had ‘persistent persecutory ideas’.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Don Senadipathy said Spina told him that a major issue in his marriage had been their inability to have a child. After two miscarriages, Maria had been unable to conceive and they had gone on the IVF program. She had become pregnant with twins but one had miscarried and the other had to be aborted to save Maria’s life. Dr Senadipathy said that Spina felt his mother-in-law had denigrated him as not man enough to have children and considered him ignorant because of his lack of education. Spina believed that after the death of her husband, Giovanna Persico had depended on and dominated his wife. Spina told the psychiatrist that things got so bad he would have liked his wife to leave him because it would have been peaceful not to be constantly attacked by her family. Dr Senadipathy said Spina had a ‘chronic paranoid disorder incorporating his wife and her family, with the mother-in-law being the key person’. He said, however, that his paranoia was a low-level psychosis. He suggested that Spina was a victim of shattered dreams despite working hard to achieve them. He said Spina’s paranoia was restricted to his mother-in-law and, to a lesser extent, his wife, and there was no danger of him committing more violence.

• • •

On 14 August 2003, Justice Tim Smith gave his verdict. He said it was likely Maria Spina and Giovanna Persico were killed on different days but that that could not be established beyond a reasonable doubt and that he would sentence Spina on the basis that in the early hours of Sunday 22 October 2001 he ‘brutally assaulted both women and strangled them’.

Justice Smith: The prisoner to date has shown no sign of real remorse … He still has not told the truth about what happened. It seems something caused Nicola Spina to erupt into uncharacteristic violent aggression towards his late wife and late mother-in-law … I reject his account of being viciously attacked in his sleep. The injuries which he said that he received during this allegedly violent attack were trifling in the extreme when viewed in isolation, and nothing when compared to those suffered by the two deceased.

While the murders of Maria Spina and Giovanna Persico cannot be shown to have been pre-planned, they were brutal and constitute a grave example of the crime of murder. He physically assaulted them. They tried to defend themselves. Having gained the ascendancy, he strangled one and then the other.

The judge said he was not as ‘sanguine’ as Dr Senadipathy that Spina was no longer a danger, saying his antipathy had extended to the Persico family, especially to Faustino Persico.

For the murders of Maria Spina and Giovanna Persico, he sentenced Spina to two life terms. For falsely imprisoning and threatening to kill Faustino Persico he sentenced him to concurrent four-year terms. He set a minimum nonparole term of 25 years: Spina would be able to apply for parole when he was about 80.

• • •

Outside the court, Joseph Persico fought back his tears as he said he hoped the sentence would end a ‘nightmare repeating itself’.

Joseph Persico: She loved him and yet he killed her. We cannot understand it.

He denied his mother had interfered in her daughter’s marriage.

Joseph Persico: She always tried to tell my sister: ‘Look, let him be.’ She was always trying to be understanding towards him. He couldn’t see that. He couldn’t understand love.

• • •

About two years later, Spina’s new legal team called on the Victorian Court of Appeal to overturn his convictions, claiming his trial had been unfair and his sentence was too harsh.

They said he should have had two trials – one for the two murder charges and one for allegedly falsely imprisoning and threatening to kill Faustino Persico. They said Spina’s jurors could have been prejudiced in deciding whether he was guilty of the murders by hearing what he allegedly did to his brother-in-law; and they would have been more likely to believe he falsely imprisoned and threatened Faustino after hearing what he had done to his wife and mother-in-law.

The defence claimed Justice Smith had not warned the jurors strongly enough not to jump to the conclusion that Spina was a murderer even if they accepted that he had been violent towards his wife in the past. They said the judge should have said more about the defence case that Maria Spina was a bad-tempered, resentful woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who would be likely to attack her husband.

Nearly four months later, the Victorian Court of Appeal roundly rejected the appeal.

Not only did it find that the four charges should have been heard in the same trial – because otherwise the alleged false imprisonment of Faustino would have been ‘almost unintelligible’ – it found that the defence may have been helped by the same jury hearing all the evidence. Justice David Ashley pointed out, for instance, that a jury that heard that Spina had let Faustino go unharmed – after a handshake – might be less likely to accept that he had earlier deliberately murdered Faustino’s mother and sister.

Similarly, the appeal judges not only denied that Spina’s trial was unfair as a result of Justice Smith not warning jurors strongly enough against jumping to conclusions of guilt if they accepted Spina had been violent towards his wife in the past, but said that the judge had done Spina a favour by not emphasising his violent marriage.

But, mostly, the judges rejected Spina’s appeal against his convictions because they said the forensic evidence, especially the strangling injuries on the victims’ necks, ‘overwhelmingly demonstrated the applicant’s guilt’. They said the evidence left open the possibility that the women had been killed at ‘distinctly different times’ but that even if they had been killed when Spina said they were, his self-defence excuse was still ‘utterly incredible’.

The judges also denied Spina’s sentence was ‘manifestly excessive’.

Justice Ashley: It is true that there may be said to be worse cases of murder, but once a certain point is reached, ‘worse’ is a largely meaningless adjective.

Despite his resounding loss, Spina applied for special leave to appeal to the High Court. In April 2006, however, he finally – after four and a half years – gave up his legal fight, abandoning the application.

Spina had lost a tough fight to get police, a jury and four judges to believe his ‘I killed my wife and mother-in-law because I was defending myself after they attacked me in bed’ killer excuse but, until at least October 2026, he’s got an even tougher battle. It’s not going to be easy to stop other prisoners laughing when he tells them he shouldn’t be in jail because he fought for his life against a ferocious onslaught … by his ‘old lady’ and his frail old mother-in-law.