‘For me to spend $5000 on a handbag or a pair of shoes is nothing, right. And these coppers live in their little square world.’
—Shirley Withers
SOME PECULIAR parental peccadilloes are best left to go to the grave quietly, sparing the next generation the vivid detail. At least, that is one view. Another view—and the one Shirley Withers subscribed to—was that things are better out than in. When her boyfriend was discovered murdered and tied up in his mansion, she opted not to spare the dead man’s daughter the gruesome details.
In doing so, she used five words that most mourners would happily avoid: ‘Your father was into bondage.’
‘We never hurt each other, though.’
The second part was a lie.
ON THE surface Peter Shellard was a relatively normal, wealthy businessman while Shirley Withers was a friendly boutique owner. The truth was much darker and involved sex, drugs, money, resentment, murder, bondage, debts and betrayal. The bizarre and bloody crime scene testified to the sinister nature of the dealings behind the otherwise normal, successful lives.
No murder scene is pretty, but this one was particularly ominous. The noted entrepreneur had been found murdered in his luxurious $6 million Caulfield mansion. He was naked, bloodied and trussed up with dog leads, electrical cords and ropes. Shellard’s ankles were handcuffed and his mouth was gagged with rope. His bed was bloodstained. He lay on the floor nearby, a towel half-draped over his lifeless body. It looked like a senseless debasement of a man who had already paid with his life for whatever offence he had caused his hateful attackers. But, while sick, the extra frills in the contract killing were not without rhyme or reason.
By the time the whole truth emerged it was a bizarre and eclectic saga involving, among other things, a stumbling pair of drug-addicted sidekicks, a lethal hot shot, an unburgled window, an anal suppository, and a self-appointed sleuth keen not to be seen to be knocking Maoris.
THEY called him an eccentric millionaire. You could tell that’s what he was because he would wear sandals over socks matched with a business suit.
Peter Shellard did not finish high school but studied at night to obtain his real estate agent’s licence. Once licensed he started a real estate company in Brighton. He then took control of Kellow-Falkiner Motors, which dealt in Rolls-Royce and Bentley parts. A teetotal non-smoker with a likeable larrikin face, Shellard struggled with bipolar disorder. But his curiosity and work ethic saw his wealth boom. He became an owner of multiple commercial and residential rental properties and was the director of several companies. He had a fleet of classic luxury cars, including a 1951 Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn saloon, a 1923 Rolls and a Mercedes-Benz 450SL convertible, as well as a treasure trove of antiques including a large Dutch organ. He was ultimately worth between $10 million and $15 million and owned about eleven properties.
A hoarder, Shellard had also accumulated two ex-wives and three daughters by the time he met Shirley Withers and decided not to make her the third Mrs Shellard. There was no love lost for the previously betrothed. The millionaire had made provision in his will to leave his ex-wives a dollar each.
Shellard was born shortly after World War II. Withers was nearly twenty years younger than him. The fashion tragic who became his lover forgave him his sock-and-sandal combinations but his quirks ran much deeper than that. And Withers was lying when she said the lovers never hurt each other.
After meeting Shellard, Withers founded Suzette Boutique in the ultra-rich bayside Melbourne suburb of Brighton, where dollars are more common than sense. A fashion gadfly, she ran her shop as a way of life, not a business. She ran it as a symbol of her superiority to others. And she ran it into the ground.
For a time Shellard’s money saved the business from its inevitable financial death but it could never survive the way it was run. Withers seemed to enjoy buying more than selling and would drop big money purchasing expensive designer stock that she would struggle to onsell. Shellard’s daughter Jenny, who Withers employed at the shop, noticed the business was being run in an unorthodox way. ‘The clothing was all brand name and included Charlie Brown, Lisa Ho and Marianna Hardwick,’ Jenny Shellard said.
My first impression when I started working there was that it was just a mess. I couldn’t understand how Shirley could keep paying us every week. I had seen invoices totalling thousands of dollars and wondered where Shirley was getting the money. Shirley would just continuously buy stock for the business and for herself. She definitely had a problem with spending money.
Photographed out front of their Brighton bathing box, Withers did not look much less eccentric than the laidback Shellard with his devastating sock, sandal, suit ensemble. In the picture her squat, stocky body is hunched over in a director’s chair while she squints up at the camera. She is wearing a layered gypsy skirt probably designed for a leggy Parisian model but now wrapped around a stumpy, mendacious money-hungry midget.
Some people found her as strange as he was eccentric. ‘Initially mum and I thought Shirley was a bit odd,’ Jenny Shellard said. ‘She would never look you in the eye. She was always very kind [though].’
Shellard gave Withers a key to his Caulfield mansion. It was the first of two decisions that would cost him his life.
SHIRLEY Withers had not had an easy life. She was born in 1966 in India before migrating with her family to Australia. Defence lawyers later told how, when she was about nine years old, she was the victim of a prolonged period of abuse. The abuse led to her developing post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which ebbed and flowed over the years.
She married, had two sons, and divorced. Following the birth of her second child she suffered a severe bout of post-natal depression. The condition saw her go in and out of hospital for eighteen months after the birth. There were three suicide attempts by prescription pill overdose, and the condition needed treatment for seven years. At the time of Shellard’s murder she was still seeing a shrink lest the black dog wander in again.
Withers said she had been further hurt in life by boyfriend Shellard. She told friends that the kinky bastard had forced her against her will to take part in sexual bondage practices. The effect of this was likely to have been compounded by her past experiences.
We may never know if these turmoils alone had shaped her outlook or whether her persona was a mixture of personal choices combined with nature and nurture. But whatever was the case, the Shirley Withers the world was left to deal with at the start of the new millennium was not a pleasant character. The series of blows in her life had left her toughened, unscrupulous and with an abiding feeling of entitlement.
In her own mind Withers was a serious player, a big-picture woman, out of the box, thinking outside the square. A rich, renegade genius, and one with a superiority complex completely out of sync with her intelligence or abilities. She once complained to a mutual friend of hers and Shellard’s that Victoria’s financially challenged, straight-laced law enforcers just couldn’t comprehend how she rolled. ‘I’ve had money all my life, right. I married someone who was, you know, and we made a shitload of money,’ Withers said. ‘So for me to spend $5000 on a handbag or a pair of shoes is nothing, right. And these coppers live in their little square world.’ She went on:
I was up at Sydney at fashion week and, um, Peter gave me his credit card because he owed me a lot of money and um, he said, ‘I shall, you know, all I can give you is my credit card.’ And I said, ‘Oh darling, I really need you to give me real money but if you want me to do that I’ll use your credit card.’ So I bought a few bits and pieces up there and then they start crossing their hands and saying ‘Well how come you don’t know how much you spent?’ And I said ‘Because money’s not a problem to me.’ And they said ‘Well why isn’t it a problem?’And I said ‘Because I’m financial in my own right and I know if I ever did [need money] Peter would help me.’
Shirley Withers seemed to love talking about intimate financial details and debts to people who were virtual strangers. In a particularly damning summary a court later said of Withers: ‘In those conversations, the applicant showed herself to be a liar, a hypocrite, a racist and a snob.’
The courtship of Shellard and Withers was atypical. Friends told how he had discovered an unusual fetish. ‘He had told me that he had gone to the Hellfire Club with a friend,’ one said. ‘He said they would dress up in a full range of leather outfits and had belts with studs. He said that there was whipping. He told me initially his pain threshold was low and after a number of visits his tolerance for pain increased to the point where he really liked what was occurring. He found it very erotic.’When Shellard pressured Withers into bondage she resented it immensely.
Withers did some bookkeeping for Shellard on his company and property accounts. It was then that he made her a signatory on his Kellow-Falkiner Motors cheque accounts. It was an arrangement she would sway strongly in her favour, sneaking nearly a million dollars out of that business for her own needs.
The wolves were at the door of Withers’s hobby business, Suzette Boutique. Business was bad and soon various trade creditors would be threatening to sue for what they were owed. She was overdrawn by $43 000 on two credit cards and her business owed almost a quarter of a million dollars. In over a year Withers had written 195 cheques drawn from the Kellow-Falkiner accounts. They were all made for cash and amounted to bank staff handing Withers a total of $913 895. All the while she was claiming to anyone who would listen that she had supported Peter the whole time they were together.
Rich people don’t get rich by tolerating thieves and grifters, and eventually the self-made multi-millionaire tired of propping up his deceitful girlfriend’s dismal financial affairs. A month before he was murdered Peter Shellard made the sensible business decision to remove Withers as a signatory to the Kellow-Falkiner accounts. A week after striking her from those accounts Shellard told a friend he thought she was using his credit card and that his cheque book had gone missing and he suspected Withers was tearing through that too.
The bondage incident had caused offence but Withers had stuck around while the financial going was good. What she regarded as the real deal breaker was Shellard’s plan to sell her house. That was the second decision that cost Shellard his life. Withers had put her East Bentleigh house in Shellard’s name to keep at bay claims made on it by her ex-husband. Shellard thought it made good sense to now sell the house to compensate for the fortune Withers had secretly sprited away from him. Withers considered violently forcing Shellard to sign the property back to her.
Peter Shellard had executed a will in 2002. After the princely two dollars he had left his two former wives, he left the lion’s share of his estate—worth between $16 million and $40 million—to his three daughters. The will had been witnessed by Withers but she was not a beneficiary. In April 2005, just a few weeks before Shellard was killed, Withers typed up a second version of the will on her computer but backdated it to 2004. The new will still left a dollar to each of the ex-wives but this time gave the remainder of the estate to Withers herself.
Of course the Withers-drafted will was practically worthless without Shellard’s signature. But the gulf between her perception and reality was wide, and widening. This became further apparent in her next step, when she reached into the criminal underworld—to get revenge, to show how she could throw her weight around, to become a serious, even more major player—and came up with a couple of incompetent smackies.
HEROIN was the beginning and end of Stan Callinicos and Sophia Stoupas’s universe. It was their reason to get out of bed in the afternoon. Withers looked down her nose at the pair as ‘greedy, dirty little druggies’ but in reality they just preferred a different poison to herself. Callinicos told how he had supplied Withers with amphetamines for her own use over the years. She was also prescribed buprenorphine—like methadone for opiate users—he said.
But if she was a holier-than-thou drug abuser Withers still saw how the smackie duo could be useful to her plans and set about grooming them. When Sophia, the Cheltenham smackie in her early thirties, came into Shirley Withers’ Brighton boutique the fashion tragic befriended her and gave her clothes and money. Withers lent Sophia and her shadow—44-year-old Stan—her car, made them gifts, and gave them money to gamble at Crown Casino.
Withers disclosed to the pair how she wanted revenge against Shellard for the bondage breach of trust, she wanted to find some paperwork and get him to sign it and she also wanted to generally confront him about her property. She made embryonic plans with Stan to dope him and then to tie him up and threaten him into signing over the house. But the target had become suspicious, she said. ‘At one time she suggested what if she drugs him,’ Callinicos recalled, ‘like gives him a couple of Xanax and puts them in his coffee or tea—I can’t remember what she wanted to do. And then she was going to try and tie him up herself or ring me up to come over and tie him up, but like, apparently he found out.’
Callinicos was on Xanax and gave Withers a couple of pills. She had asked me, you know, how they worked and all that. I told her they were like a sedative, they used to help me sleep, and I probably told her that if she gave them to him they would put him to sleep. She rang me up … she said that Peter had caught her trying to put the, I don’t know how—he knew that she was trying to put the pills in his cup of tea and that she had to flush them down the sink or something and she asked me if I could get her some more.
The failed ploy hardened into a concerted plan for a house intrusion and violent criminal conspiracy. Withers told the smackies she wanted Shellard tied up as revenge because he had forced her to participate in bondage and so he could be made to sign documents to transfer to her a property that she claimed was hers.
Withers had then planned to inject Shellard with a syringe of Proladone, apparently obtained from her brother, a nurse, to sedate him. But when she obtained a Proladone needle it piqued Callinicos’s interest, and like a viticulturist of veins he wanted to try the new intravenous blend. Callinicos told under cross-examination how, as a result, the plan was changed to heroin instead.
LAWYER: Mrs Withers had a mechanism that she proposed to put him to sleep and that was the use of the Proladone?
STAN CALLINICOS: That’s correct.
LAWYER: But the Proladone was something that interested you. Correct?
CALLINICOS:Well I’d never used it before so, yeah, we were interested in it.
LAWYER: So you talked her out of using it so you could get it yourself?
CALLINICOS: I wouldn’t say I talked her out of using it. She asked me what the comparison with the heroin was, like, were they similar in effects and I told her that they were pretty much the same.
LAWYER: And your object in having that conversation was to get the Proladone for yourself. Correct?
CALLINICOS:Yes. But she already had a couple more I could have gotten off her anyway.
LAWYER: So when she proposed using the Proladone you had a conversation which resulted in her—
CALLINICOS: Deciding to use the heroin instead of the Proladone.
LAWYER: And you advised her prior to that happening that she could achieve the same effect of putting him to sleep or sedating him by use of heroin. Correct?
CALLINICOS:Yes. That was discussed between us. Whether I suggested it or her suggested it I’m not sure.
LAWYER: But she took your advice?
CALLINICOS:Yes. She asked me certain advice about it, its effects and all that.
LAWYER: So having come to you with plan A—to use the Proladone—on your advice she changed that plan, you say, and decided to use an injection of heroin to put him to sleep?
CALLINICOS: That’s correct.
LAWYER:The object of the exercise was to put him to sleep for an hour or two or three?
CALLINICOS: I thought so.
On 6 May 2005 Withers gave Stan Callinicos and Sophia Stoupas $300 to buy heroin. The two smackies were to keep two-thirds of the illicit score for their own use and pass a third on to Withers to be used on Peter Shellard. But if Withers wanted her ex-husband knocked out from a potent hotshot she hadn’t factored in the peculiar hidden taxes that apply in junkie-nomics. One of her helpers decided they should get a cut of Shellard’s dose as well. ‘Well I wasn’t intending on giving Peter the whole hundred [milligrams], or so I thought when I went by meself and I left [Withers] and Sophie in the house,’ Stan Callinicos said.
He then ‘taxed’ the applicant’s share in a shed that was located on a path around the side of his Cheltenham house. ‘When I got the deals I got her hundred, opened it up and took about nine-tenths out of it and … put some sugar in with hers.’ Stan then went indoors where the two female conspirators were waiting in an upstairs bedroom. He handed Withers her taxed share of the heroin, more sugar than junk.
As Stan and Sophia mulled up, mixing the powder with water and drawing it into syringes, Withers followed their lead. She took a needle from a box on the bed and mulled up from her taxed package, Stan said, placing the full syringe of heroin into her handbag. It was the day the trio planned to commit their major crime. Stan and Sophia shot up. Sophia was not initially going to be part of the invading posse—Withers really just needed hired muscle—but it was all a very liquid plan and Sophia changed her mind at the last minute.
That night Withers used her key to let herself and fellow misfits in to Shellard’s Caulfield home, dressed in disguise. Shellard was asleep as what would have been a dispiriting sight formed at the end of his bed: his girlfriend, who he had just thrown off the gravy train, accompanied by a couple of drug-worn desperadoes.
The intruders pounced and a struggle ensued. Withers put a pillow over Shellard’s face so he couldn’t identify his assailants. The attackers attempted to restrain Shellard but in the melee he managed to chomp down on Sophia Stoupas’s finger. She returned the favour using an unknown object to deliver two swift blows to Shellard’s head. The trio gagged Shellard and tied him up with dog leads, ropes and electrical cords. They placed a pillowslip over their prisoner’s head, then retired to the kitchen.
Withers rifled through paperwork lying around Shellard’s house, looking for the documents to her house. ‘Oh here we go, he’s closed another account,’Withers complained as a battered Shellard moaned from the bedroom.
Stan later recalled: ‘Because he was moaning she said she was going to go into the bedroom and shut him up and she proceeded to—she grabbed her handbag, grabbed a syringe [out of it] and headed for the bedroom.’
As far as the heroin helpers understood, the lady who had been nice to them had various specific aims that night; she had given them a bunch of different stories. But now that they were lingering at the crime scene they weren’t sure exactly what to do. Stan reverted to instinct. ‘I started wandering around the house looking to see if I could find the paperwork, looking to see if there was anything worth pinching,’ he said.
Withers also had other plans, Stan said, involving an anal suppository. Her approach to violent crime, like her approach to business, was flighty and haphazard. ‘She said that she’d done her bit and she wanted someone to use—because she wanted Peter still put—wanted Peter out for longer, she wanted someone to put the suppository in him.’
Sophia Stoupas recalled the surreal turn in a bit more cringe-worthy detail. ‘Shirley produced a Proladone tablet … and had asked Stan or said to Stan that she wanted him to insert it into Peter,’ she said. It was too much to ask, even for poor Callinicos. ‘Stan said there was no way he would do it. And then I volunteered. I just wanted to go home. I grabbed a blue plastic glove from the kitchen and went in with Shirley and inserted the tablet.’
The Proladone suppository was intended to have a sedative effect but was just another bungled and pointless indignity, and it was never actually absorbed into the victim’s system. What they didn’t realise was that Peter Shellard had already died—from a combination of head injuries, strain from being bound up, a pre-existing heart condition, and the heroin injection.
By the time the mission was accomplished it was early Saturday morning and Stan and Sophia went out to buy some more heroin before returning to the Caulfield mansion. Withers advised them to re-enter by a window so it would look like someone had broken into the house, but for some reason—perhaps their smackie athletics being found wanting—it came to nothing. Shellard was much the same as they had left him, trussed up and apparently out of it. Stoupas checked for a pulse but couldn’t tell if there was one there. The three intruders then left.
The thing about heroin-addicted criminal helpers is they tend not to have their own cars. So, unless you want them ordering a cab to the crime scene or catching the train with a plastic bag full of bloodied evidence, you have to drive them home yourself. That is what Shirley Withers did next. Stan Callinicos had, in his plastic bag, bloodied clothes, broken handcuffs and some stolen garments and perfume. Callinicos said that Withers called him some hours later, asking him to get onto his dealer and get some more heroin so she could ‘put Peter out for longer’.
It is claimed that Withers then returned to the house and set about leaving a false trail of clues. She found Shellard dead and bloodied on the floor with a black eye, bruising and cuts to all parts of his body. She then went to work at her Brighton shop about noon.
AFTER a day of staring straight through customers, trying not to think of what lay at her boyfriend’s Caulfield home, Withers bought a takeaway dinner and returned to the crime scene. At 6.50 p.m. she called 000 and, faking frantic, reported her grim ‘discovery’.
Withers was later interviewed by police but said she had not been at the mansion on the night in question. She claimed she had spent that night working in her shop. She otherwise gave a ‘no comment’ interview.
Police had plenty of leads, though. There was a record of calls between Withers and Stan, particularly over the murder period. Sophia had been particularly helpful, leaving her bloody fingerprint—probably from where the dead man had chomped on her—on a hallway telephone in the Caulfield mansion. She also left her DNA on a discarded cigarette butt in the kitchen. Withers had failed to clean away either of these clues before raising the alarm.
Although the will Withers drew up was never signed by Shellard, Withers spoke often after his death of looking for a copy of it that she said he had signed. If it was a deliberate murder for profit and not a bungled crime turned deadly, it was based on a wrong assumption. Withers’ understanding of how wills work was on a par with her business acumen. She seemed to think the will she wrote up on her computer would save her financial bacon and that she was free to treat the dead man’s assets—including the car company—as her own.
In a telephone conversation with Dale O’Sullivan, a friend of both Shellard’s and hers, she discussed moving into the dead man’s house. O’Sullivan advised her about returning to the police-infested Caulfield home where Shellard had been killed.
O’SULLIVAN: If you wanna go in you can. All you do is rock up.
WITHERS:They won’t let me in.
O’SULLIVAN:Yeah that’s okay. You say ‘It’s expired’. The crime scene time has expired. If you don’t have a search warrant I’m ordering you out of the house.
WITHERS: And they said to me that it’s a matter of course whether this is your house or not.
O’SULLIVAN: Oh they know so much don’t they. Well you know the story—Peter never owned the house.
The pair discussed another person who also seemed to have an intimate knowledge of Shellard’s business.
O’SULLIVAN: And I said, you know, what’s gonna happen with Shirley and all that?
WITHERS: Mmmm.
O’SULLIVAN: And he said: Oh I don’t know. He said: I think his last will left mainly everything to his eldest daughter.
WITHERS: No, no I typed it all again.
O’SULLIVAN: Ohhh—yeah.
WITHERS: Yeah.
O’SULLIVAN: Did you put your name in first?’ (Laughs)
WITHERS:Well, no. He did. Ha ha.
O’SULLIVAN: (Laughs)
Withers then reflected on what a positive influence she had been on the man she had killed. She also planted a cover story in relation to her foiled plot to slip a mickey in his cuppa.
WITHERS: Um, two years ago because we were so, you know, well entrenched and he didn’t wanna get married again per se at the time. Um and then I said I don’t really wanna get married but, you know, we’re in it for ever and as far as I was concerned that’s how it was. Um, he loved me, I loved him, everything was working out beautifully. You know Dale, he hasn’t started litigation against anyone for over two years. You know, he’s just lost, lost that interest in things, he’s just a normal person now.
O’SULLIVAN: His litigation days sort of died when you come on the scene.
WITHERS:Yeah, you know and he was taking his tablets, um, was being monitored. He was a little bit unwell, he went through a period about a month ago of accusing me of doing this, that and the other. But I’d been through that with him before. He’s done that to me before. Um it’s because he was on a stupid new medication and then he went back to—to—to his normal stuff and he was—he was getting quite good, you know. And I just don’t understand how this could have happened.
O’SULLIVAN:Well I, I, I believe that um under the circumstances, now, now this new will—where does that place you?
WITHERS:Well, he left me quite a lot of things and basically he still left John as executor but I thought there was a signed copy in the safe and when I, I asked the police yesterday for John, the two detectives and I went in there and they didn’t even know how to open the safe. So I’ve got the key for the safe and opened it but unfortunately it’s not in there.
O’SULLIVAN: I—
WITHERS: So I mean an unsigned will is worth shit, isn’t it?
O’SULLIVAN: Oh, he never signed your will?
WITHERS:Well he did and I just don’t know where it is. I thought he put it in the safe but when we went through the safe yesterday …
Withers then gloated over the fact that the dead man’s ex-wives would get so little from the rich estate.
WITHERS:You know Liz? You know greedy Liz? You know the first, one of the first things she said to me?
O’SULLIVAN: No.
WITHERS: Um, um, ‘Well I suppose that means Sarah, Clare and Jenny are wealthy women’ or something to that effect.
O’SULLIVAN:Well she’s got a shock coming because—
WITHERS: And I said …
WITHERS:The will gives her one dollar. Specifically—he made that very clear at the end of the day.
In another conversation the two people who seemed to know so much about the dead man’s estate detailed the assets.
O’SULLIVAN: All that’s going to be left really that’ll bring the big money are those antiques.
WITHERS:Yeah and at the moment what are they worth? Squat really, aren’t they?
O’SULLIVAN: Oh they’ll be worth a lot of money, um, I wouldn’t like to say, but, you know, I could sort of, I could visualise but, but, but I could visualise three hundred. Um I don’t think he’s got anything—any what they call um world, world famous stuff. But he’s got a hell of a lot of stuff—
WITHERS: He’s got one—I know he’s got one …
O’SULLIVAN:That people want. Mmm?
WITHERS: He’d got one that he … it’s a cup that he got somewhere along the way that’s part of the American federation.
O’SULLIVAN: Ahhh.
WITHERS: It’s—it’s very valuable.
O’SULLIVAN: And what’s gonna happen to all the part(s)?
WITHERS:Well the parts are staying as they are. I intend—I’m putting them on the internet and running Kellow-Falkiner Motors as a going concern and doing it in Peter’s memory.
O’SULLIVAN: Good on you.
WITHERS: So I intend to make it really good.
In yet another chat with O’Sullivan the topic turned to who might have killed their mutual friend and cash cow Peter Shellard. Withers came very close to accurately describing her accomplices in the dirty deed.
O’SULLIVAN:Yeah so I thought that Maori guy might be involved on the basis that he does drink. He goes down to the Inkerman Hotel. He drinks with other Maoris. I’m not knocking Maoris.
WITHERS: No, it’s not him.
O’SULLIVAN: But let’s put it this way—he could talk …
WITHERS: I’ve got a really good idea who it is. But I’m not telling the cops. That’s what I want to talk to you about.
O’SULLIVAN: Is it more than one person?
WITHERS: Ah yes.
O’SULLIVAN: Is it involved with the church?
WITHERS: No.
WITHERS: No.
O’SULLIVAN: Oh well.
WITHERS:They’re greedy, dirty little druggies.
O’SULLIVAN:They’ve probably tortured Peter to—to open the safe and give them all his money.
WITHERS: No, they know Peter didn’t have money … Yes, I’ve got a very good idea who it is.
It seems that, having seconded bumbling smackies to do a professional criminal’s job, Withers blamed them, not herself, for getting it so wrong that her ex was snuffed in the process.
O’SULLIVAN:You do have powers. You can’t be fobbed off Shirley because—
WITHERS: I won’t be fobbed off Dale. I know what Peter’s intentions are.
O’SULLIVAN: But see what you can do with [Shellard’s brother and executor] John.
WITHERS: By God I’ll tell you … I found out who did this, I’ll fucking kill them with my hands. And I’ll make the bastards suffer.
Withers apparently no longer remembered how she had ordered more and more drugs to be forced onto her trussed up lover. It had been like she wanted him dead without confronting the ugly reality of being directly responsible for killing him off. It was like there was no space in Shirley Withers for introspection; just revenge against her helpers who, in her new revisionist view, had gone too far.
Her genuine anger in swearing to kill her helpers revealed that she likely believed her new convenient lies. She and Shellard were eternal lovers, once bound for Paris and marriage, separated by wicked external forces completely unconnected to her. She would soon get an opportunity to pursue her new plan for her old cronies.
Withers later bagged O’Sullivan—with whom she’d had the long, warm, candid chat—to another mutual friend of hers and Shellard’s called Frank.
WITHERS: Much as I don’t like Dale O’Sullivan …
FRANK: Ho ho.
WITHERS: He went to the Rolls-Royce meeting last Thursday.
FRANK: Mmmm.
WITHERS: And I said in Peter’s memory I will be running Kellow-Falkiner Motors at the end of the day.
FRANK: Mmmm.
WITHERS: And I’m going to be putting it on the internet and it’s going to be the great company that it should be.
FRANK:Yes, yeah …
FRANK: Yeah …
WITHERS:—of these little, greasy little scug-buckets are getting their hands on those parts.
Withers also told Frank about how Shellard had been on meds—not as many as she would have liked—and how a trial program of pills, monitored by a university, had messed him about, made him suspicious of even his loving girlfriend.
Now Peter went really, really strange. He started thinking that everyone was against him. He thought I was plotting against him. He thought, you know, he went very strange about four weeks ago and I said ‘Darling you have to get off this program sweetheart. You’re not the right person.’ It’s a long story but basically it was the same group of medication so he didn’t have to wean off it. So, um, you know, then he started apologising to me and saying, you know, he’s so sorry that, you know, he behaved … And we were really, really happy.
In the aftermath of Shellard’s death Withers shifted from saying she and he were never going to get married to romantic talk of a Paris wedding. ‘Peter and I were actually gonna go up to Paris later in the year,’ she told Frank. ‘I’ve talked him into going to there and he was really, really happy. Um and we were actually gonna get married when we were over there because we didn’t want it to be a big fanfare. Peter actually bought me my dress and everything.’
In the meantime things had gone from bad to worse for Withers’ Suzette Boutique. Trade creditors were howling for the money they were owed. Withers would stall some of the patient would-be debt collectors by spilling her guts about her tangled legal and financial affairs following her boyfriend’s murder.
WITHERS: I can’t do anything till probate comes through.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS: I have seen solicitors. Was sort of, well enough on Monday—
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS:—just gone by.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS:To do that, um, I’ve told them what the situation is because, um, I actually had—we just bought another property on Hawthorn Road and I gave Peter $100 000 for the deposit.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS: And so, cash-wise, Suzette as a company doesn’t have a lot of cash. And Peter was a director of me as you probably know from our form.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS: So you know what I mean? I can’t—
TRADE CREDITOR:You can’t touch anything right now.
WITHERS: No, no. And I know that, you know, obviously I’m happy to pay interest because probate will happen but it’s not gonna happen for thirty days at least I’d imagine.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS:The [lawyers] will do a good job and just tell people that until probate is granted—and unfortunately Peter has two very greedy ex-wives.
TRADE CREDITOR: Mmm.
WITHERS: So I’m sure it’s gonna end up in the Supreme Court. They’ve already told me, you know, be prepared for it to go to the Supreme Court. So the thing is that what they’re trying to do is, um, get me a hundred thousand dollars, like emergency fund sort of, you know, to carry on the business.
TRADE CREDITOR: So you can continue business.
WITHERS:That’s right so at least I can pay people something, um, and trust me you’re at the top of the list.
TRADE CREDITOR:That’s okay Shirley.
WITHERS: Cos I know we owe you forty thousand.
TRADE CREDITOR: I know Shirley.
A LITTLE over a fortnight after the killing a new shady player joined the decidedly chequered cast. Enter Victor Collela, a hitman offering Withers a one-time deal to do away with her helpers.
For someone with no overarching objections to killing, it was a tempting offer. The problem with junkie co-conspirators is that even if they don’t get caught outright they’re still likely to squeal later for the price of a fix. Offing the help would provide a tidy little cleanup for Withers. She told Victor the evictor that she only wanted the junkies snuffed because they had gone too far. She said Callinicos and Stoupas were meant to tie up Shellard but not harm him.
The hitman had appeared from nowhere. He told Shirley Withers he had heard of her dilemma via a phone call. A normal person might have been alarmed by the knowledge of their criminal act reaching unknown third parties. But over-sharing Shirley regularly spread her personal news far and wide and seemed not to mind the hitman’s approach at all. Victor was actually an undercover cop. The police had bugged Withers’ phone and overheard her unsentimental wealth-and-will obsession in full flight. Now they were testing her murderous mettle with Victor the bogus executioner. As they recorded her, she passed with flying colours.
VICTOR: How do you want them to die? Do you want them to suffer?
WITHERS: Yep.
VICTOR:Would you like them in hospital? Paraplegic?
WITHERS: Nah. Want ’em dead.
VICTOR: I need photos. I need their address. What do they do?
WITHERS:They’re nothing. They’re fucking heroin junkies. They stay at home all day and shoot up.
The bogus hitman and the frumpy fashionista met four times to discuss the murderous plans. While trade creditors to her boutique waited for the money they were owed, Withers paid Victor $1600 then $1400 as down payments on the contract price of $10 000.
Victor’s evidence founded two charges of incitement to murder against Withers. The junkies squealed, as she feared they would, and their evidence founded a murder charge against Withers for the death of Shellard. Stan Callinicos and Sophia Stoupas pleaded guilty to Shellard’s manslaughter and were both jailed for six years with a three-and-a-half year minimum. The judge noted they had been conned by Withers.
Withers pleaded guilty to the incitement charges but contested the murder charge. She no longer denied being present at the Caulfield mansion when Shellard was murdered. But she argued that it was the two helpers who killed her boyfriend. After a 6-week trial a jury found beyond reasonable doubt that Withers had intended to kill Shellard. The judge sentenced her to twenty-six years in jail for the murder and two incitement charges. She was not to be let out early until she had spent eighteen years behind bars. But Withers then successfully appealed her murder conviction, which had comprised twenty years of that sentence.
Her argument on appeal was that it had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt that she, and not one of her smackie sidekicks, had injected Shellard and plunged the heroin into his veins. Even if it could be proved she was the injector, her lawyers argued, that did not mean she intended for it to kill him. And finally it was not beyond reasonable doubt that it was the hotshot that killed him.
The appeal court upheld the jury findings that Withers had injected him and that the heroin was a major cause of death. But because Withers’ conversations on the topic and instructions to her two assistants had been so scattergun, the court found there was not enough proof she had intended to kill him. Withers’ murder charge was reduced to manslaughter (by an unlawful and dangerous act). It could still be said she killed him, just not that she did it on purpose. The court refused to overturn the charges relating to Withers’ plans to kill Stan and Sophia. It was noted there was nothing to indicate any genuine remorse on her part in relation to those matters.
But even with the murder reduced to manslaughter it will be a long time before Shirley Withers can haunt the avenues of Brighton again. The fashion frump will remain in a female prison for years to come. There will be no Dolce for the callous killer. No Gabbana. Just a very stylish home-brand blue tracksuit.