‘You never know if somebody’s listening.’
—Aaron Rolls
PATRIZIA ROLLS was a very good wife. But her partner Aaron Rolls was a very bad husband. Patrizia had come to Australia from Italy as a twelve year old with her parents and without a word of English. Friends spoke admiringly about how she battled to learn the foreign tongue and then interpret for her mother who never mastered it.
Little Patrizia grew into a woman and met a man called Aaron. The pair started dating then got engaged. By 1996 they were sharing a house in the Queensland major mining belt of Blackwater.
Aaron was a competitive bodybuilder who worked in the local coalmine. Patrizia, or ‘Trish’ to her friends, worked as a dental nurse with Blackwater’s only dental surgeon, treating the sum total of the town’s challenged canines and molars. Those who knew Patrizia in her mid-twenties described her as an ‘absolutely stunning’ woman.
But for Trish, Blackwater—named for its watering holes coloured by Ti-trees—was fairly unglamourous. About 8000 residents, mostly miners, call the town home. And it is a three-hour drive to the coast.
Jo Kayes was a friend of Trish’s and her co-worker at the dental practice. She described her as ‘just a hard working, down-to-earth, honest woman’. Jo and Trish were both engaged. There was not a lot to do in Blackwater, so the two would make a social foursome with their fiancés and meet for dinner at each other’s houses. Jo Kayes remembers Aaron as a complex character. ‘Aaron was very egotistical and also very charming. He could charm the skin off a snake, that guy. He was very convincing,’ Kayes told the author. ‘He wasn’t openly affectionate with Trish. He seemed to be totally absorbed in himself and fairly controlling of Trish.’
Kayes got out of Blackwater before Trish and Aaron did. She moved to Gladstone in late 1997 to devote more of her energies to the mining training company she had long been working to establish. But with hindsight, she recognised, even on her way out, that something was amiss. ‘When I left Blackwater, Aaron was grooming a relationship with myself,’ she said.
PATRIZIA and Aaron married, changed jobs and moved to the Gold Coast. Patrizia cooked for Aaron, talked him through his wild mood swings, and considered him her best friend. In return Aaron screwed around with other women and told Patrizia she was fat and unattractive. Both of them were fitness fanatics and known figures on the Gold Coast bodybuilding scene.
Aaron was so keen to preserve his squat, muscular build that he walked as little as possible, fearing it would lean down his bulk. He regarded himself as God’s gift to the female species. But in reality he was by then a short-fused bald 41-yearold security guard and steroid abuser.
Meanwhile Jo Kayes was in Gladstone working hard in her new life as a company founder. She was juggling her kids but had split with her fiancé and was focusing on the work at hand to keep the heartache at bay. One day she got a call at work—completely out of the blue—from Aaron Rolls.
Trish and Aaron had known about Ms Kayes’s business plans when they were all still in Blackwater and Aaron had tracked her down through her company. ‘He contacted me. It was on the proviso “Look I want to talk to you about mining training courses so I can do some further training”,’ Kayes said.
It was not an unusual request. The bottom had started to fall out of the Queensland market and there were plenty of workers looking to improve their skills to keep jobs, get new jobs and look elsewhere for work in the mining sector. But with Rolls, things rapidly moved from the industrial to the personal. One night Kayes watched as his car rolled into her driveway at home.
‘He came down to Blackwater. He actually found out where I lived. I didn’t tell him. He just turned up at my house,’ she said. Rolls, a master exploiter of female generosity and maternal sympathy, was determined to twist his weakest card—his engagement to Kayes’s friend—into an entry ticket.
He had this huge sob story that he and Trish had separated, blah blah, feel sorry for me. He came up with this very charming, very convincing routine. And I had separated from my partner at that time, I was single, and from what he told me they were single. As far as I knew, he left Trish months before. I truly believed what he said that he and Trish had split. Only they weren’t. He tricked me—he was very very good at that.
Jo and Aaron had a brief fling. She had never really seen a future in it and Rolls’s demanding, selfish ways ensured that his unwitting mistress would not reconsider. ‘I didn’t want to start a relationship with him at all. I didn’t see it for anything more than what it was,’ she said.
Ms Kayes did not like the way Rolls would arrive unannounced whenever he wanted, become ‘sexually demanding’, act like the king of the castle, and object to the fact that her kids were around her house. Rolls landed on Kayes’s doorstep a fortnight after their first tryst and half a dozen times after that.
He thought it was okay to turn up at my home any time that he felt like and basically command that I be there. He thought he could turn up and get what he wanted. Week after week he was ‘I’m so upset’ and I started to think: Well why are you so ready to move on? The final straw for me was [when] my children had a performance at school. My work phone was diverted to my mobile. My mobile rang while I was at the performance and it was him. He wanted me to completely blow that performance off and drop everything and [meet him]. I said these are my children. It’s something you don’t understand. I’m not going to just leave the school performance because you want me to. It was just creepy.
Rolls constantly harangued Kayes for having her kids around her house and not getting a sitter for them any time he popped in. When she’d had enough, Kayes gave Rolls his marching orders over the phone. ‘I said, It’s not going to happen so I just think this is where the buck stops. Enough. You need to go.’ And so Aaron Rolls drove out of Jo Kayes’s life and back to her friend Trish, whom he had never really left. Rolls indulged in affairs with married women and with girls from the gym. He sometimes even shared the painful details with his faithful wife, telling her she was driving him to it.
Patrizia knew Aaron had always been a hard dog to keep on the porch. But when Rolls got a new mistress named Mirvat Sleiman it opened a door to a much darker betrayal of the long-suffering wife. Sleiman had come to Australia from Lebanon to be a teenage bride in an arranged marriage. Her family had settled in an outer northern suburb of Melbourne. The marriage did not work out and, after having a son, Sleiman fled the relationship. She ended up working as a prostitute.
Aaron Rolls was doing security at a Gold Coast marina event when he met Sleiman. By their first meeting Sleiman, thirty-one, had graduated from turning tricks to running other prostitutes. The company she ran was called East Coast Full Moon. Rolls was impressed by the foul-mouthed, life-weary ex-prostitute. A thin, melancholy brunette, Mirvat Sleiman was not unlike Rolls’s wife Patrizia in looks. But where Patrizia’s face was open, friendly and approachable, Mirvat’s was all angles and severity.
The mistress also had a fearsome personality that could lead to explosive fights and rages. When it was suggested by a barrister at a later trial that Sleiman’s turbulent streak paid dividends when it came to making up, sex-mad Aaron Rolls did not disagree. The couple’s desire would spiral into a detached and deadly bloodlust. Their chance meeting was a match made in view of the watery grave they would prepare for their intended victim—faithful, hardworking Patrizia.
PATRIZIA Rolls was no stranger to her husband’s bad behaviour on the home front. He would threaten her with knives, push her face into his groin, yell at and belittle her. When his rage subsided and the tough guy act was over, he would rock in the foetal position on the floor, blame her for his woes, play the wounded child and call his doting mother.
When her fragile psyche was pushed to breaking point, Patrizia washed down pills with alcohol. As she recovered from the suicide attempt, bewildered and alone, her husband refused to visit her. She begged him to. But instead he went fishing and then stayed in a luxury hotel. It was never a perfect relationship. But when Aaron came home drunk one night with a heart-shaped tattoo on his chest containing the name Mirvat, long-suffering Patrizia knew things had gone from bad to worse.
In her lowest moments Patrizia conceded that her marriage might be at risk of ending but she never suspected that so, too, might her life. That life was insured with a policy worth $1 million. Aaron Rolls wanted to claim on that policy. And Mirvat Sleiman, mistress of just ten months, wanted to step into the dead woman’s still-warm shoes and help him spend it.
Aaron Rolls had thought of everything to get away with the perfect murder of his loving wife. He would drown her in the ocean so there would be no forensic evidence. He would walk 12 kilometres home to avoid cameras. He would then pretend to mourn for the appropriate period before reuniting with Mirvat in Sydney for a new life. The twisted lovers would speak on multiple phones in fake names and use public pay phones to discuss their sinister preparations.
Innocent, trusting Patrizia Rolls meanwhile had no idea of the danger she was in. She carried on her life oblivious of the predators by her side. But in reality she was a dead woman walking.
ON 16 January 2008, Aaron Rolls phoned Mirvat’s mobile from a Gold Coast pay phone to discuss their wicked plot. Mirvat was with family in Melbourne. She was deliberately staying away from the Gold Coast and Aaron in the weeks before the murder, just as she planned to afterwards in order to cool any suspicions.
The conversation was as stilted and banal in style as its subject matter was chillingly wicked.
ROLLS: What’s gonna happen is—
SLEIMAN: Yup?
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: She’s gonna have an accident there.
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: I’ve gotta make sure that it’s done properly.
SLEIMAN: Yep.
ROLLS:Then I’ve gotta leave the car there, then I gotta [get] home—so I’m gonna have to walk all the way from Surfers to home.
SLEIMAN: Leave the car there?
ROLLS: Her car.
SLEIMAN: Okay.
ROLLS: So that she’s—
SLEIMAN: Yep. Yep.
ROLLS:Then I’ve gotta get home—I can’t take taxis, buses, anything that I can be recognised on or maybe put on camera.
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS:Then go home—then I’ll have to report that she’s gone missin’.
SLEIMAN: Ah huh—
ROLLS:The other one is—is that I go for this hike thing up in—in the mountains there an’—there’s an accident.
ROLLS: Ah huh.
SLEIMAN: Okay.
ROLLS: But it’s gonna look like an acc’—the—the beach one’s the only real safe …
SLEIMAN:Yeah, but how ya gonna get her in there?
ROLLS: She wants to go for a walk on the beach—
SLEIMAN: Yeah.
ROLLS: So she’s gonna go to the beach with me—
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: I just gotta make sure it’s the right time and that to do it … But it’s the best way … ’cause there’s not prints … No food—there’s no anything—it’s in the water—accidental drowning.
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: Alright?
Sleiman: Yeah. Yeah, yep. Yep. Yep.
In the same chilling staccato Rolls explained to his mistress that the killing could not happen until ‘after Tuesday’ because he was busy with work on the weekend. Then the two discussed how Rolls would return home on foot, a trek of more than an hour.
ROLLS: So that way the—the car’s left there, the whole lot—toss the phone—
SLEIMAN: Okay.
ROLLS:Toss the keys—
SLEIMAN: Her car?
ROLLS: Yeah.
SLEIMAN: Uh huh.
ROLLS:Then report her missing and everything like that.
SLEIMAN: But then you gonna be wet aren’t you?
ROLLS: I’m gonna go home—I got it all worked out what to do, the clothes and boots and stuff like that—they’re … gonna be dumped and I’ll have other stuff waiting.
SLEIMAN:Yeah, but like on the way to get home—
ROLLS: Yeah.
SLEIMAN:Wouldn’t—wouldn’t you be wet?
ROLLS: I—yeah, a bit. I—It’s gonna be late—
SLEIMAN: Okay—
ROLLS: So it’s gonna be alright—
SLEIMAN: Mm.
Rolls and Sleiman also weighed up an alternative, hiking-based, kill plot, their deadly focus distracted only by nerves about external noises.
ROLLS: Or the other one is I go hiking—
SLEIMAN: Yeah yeah. Yeah.
ROLLS: It’s the only way. There’s no—stuff done so—I-I don’t like—
SLEIMAN: Ah huh—
ROLLS: Saying too much on these, because—
SLEIMAN:Yeah, I understand—
ROLLS:You never know if somebody’s listening—
SLEIMAN: Mmm, yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Yeah.
ROLLS: Okay?
SLEIMAN:Yeah, the beach one seems to be, yeah.
ROLLS: Yeah.
ROLLS: It’s the best one—she—an’ an’—… mentioned it already so—you know?
SLEIMAN: Mmm. Mmm.
ROLLS: Okay?
SLEIMAN: Yeah, cool.
ROLLS: Did you just drop ya—bang ya phone then?
ROLLS: Did you sorta just move ya phone or clunk ya phone then?
SLEIMAN: Oh, I just moved to see who’s talking outside—
ROLLS: Oh—
SLEIMAN: The window—
ROLLS: That’s alright.
SLEIMAN: Yeah.
ROLLS: Okay? And then—what’ll happen is that I—you know—the grieve and all that sort of shit—
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: An’—An’—An, and go through all the process with the law and stuff like that—
SLEIMAN: Ah huh.
ROLLS: And then—and then we’ll be right.
SLEIMAN:Yeah. Yeah, ya just gotta—
ROLLS: Alright?
SLEIMAN: Okay, that’s like a nice, um, romantic walk or some shit—
ROLLS: Mmm. Mmm.
SLEIMAN: Skinny dipping—
SLEIMAN: Mmm’.
ROLLS: So that’s—that’s easiest and best way—
SLEIMAN: Yeah—
ROLLS: Just like—I physically gotta do it.
SLEIMAN: Mmm. Yep.
ROLLS:Which is the hard bit—
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: But it’ll be right, okay?
SLEIMAN:Yeah. You gonna be alright doing it?
ROLLS:Well—Well I got no fucking choice, have I?
SLEIMAN: Alright.
ROLLS: Huh?
SLEIMAN: Okay, honey.
ROLLS: Now, are you cool with that?
SLEIMAN: Yeah, abs’—absolutely—absolutely. You know—absolutely.
ROLLS: Alright, then.
SLEIMAN:What’s the weather looking like now—how—how is it coming now?
ROLLS: Oh well it’s basically gonna rain all the way ‘til the weekend it’s really muggy again so it’s probably gonna rain again anyway … I got—I gotta do it after Tuesday when I can afford then to—you know to do all the stuff that I need to do if it happens.
SLEIMAN: Mmm—Mmm. Yeah, but if the weather goes fucking good any day, like before that, then just fucking do it.
ROLLS:Yeah, but I can’t ’cause then I gotta have time off from work to grieve and do all the stuff with it—’cause I don’t—
SLEIMAN: Mmm.
ROLLS: Everybody’s gonna think oh, he’s not even taking time off work—
SLEIMAN: Mmm. Mmm.
ROLLS: I’ve got—’Cause I got the Big Day Out on Sunday—I’ve got the other thing on Tuesday night—
SLEIMAN: Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand.
ROLLS: I—I can’t just walk away from work—
SLEIMAN: Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I understand.
ROLLS: After that—after that I’m right. [Sniff]
SLEIMAN: Okay.
ROLLS: So then I can just—
SLEIMAN:Yeah, yeah. Because you gotta take time off—yeah.
ROLLS:Yeah. So then I’ll be alright.
ROLLS: After that I’m right—I—the work just goes—er—er—oh—it doesn’t matter if it gotta have a week or two off.
The plotters even planned their behaviour in the murder’s aftermath.
ROLLS: So I just gotta do it cracking. That’s all. OK?
SLEIMAN: Oh. Yeah, absolutely.
ROLLS: And then once er—all the—dies down and that then—I’ll—I’ll just pack up er—you know—the week after or whatever and then say, oh, I gotta get out of here and bolt—I’ll go to Sydney, ’cause I got that—do those coupla things there—you can come up there—
SLEIMAN: Ah huh—
ROLLS:Alright? And then a coupla weeks after that then you can just leave down there and come up—come up to here then.
SLEIMAN: Yeah. Yeah, for sure—
ROLLS:Ya know and if anybody starts a’—query I’ll just say you come up to help me and everything—You cool with that?
SLEIMAN: Oh course I am—
ROLLS: It’s on—
SLEIMAN: I’ll—I’ll just be happy to see if it happen—do you know what I mean, and—
ROLLS: Yeah.
SLEIMAN:Then like—I don’t—you know—really care after that, as long as I just know—like yep, it’s happened—
ROLLS:Yep, well, it’s the only way I—
SLEIMAN: It’s cool and then it’s just like—you know—I understand all the time and shit—you know we gotta play and do—
ROLLS: Yep.
SLEIMAN: Do you know what I mean?
ROLLS:Well—It’s the only way I can do it—it’s only proper way of doing it—
SLEIMAN:Yeah, I ha—I had a feeling it was something like that, anyway so—
ROLLS: And the situations she is at the moment, it’s ah—the only way the—er, so it looks like that way—it’s done—
SLEIMAN:Yeah, would be—it would be good like that—
ROLLS: So that’s what I’ve been saying to you, just hold on—okay?
ROLLS: By rushing it’s not gonna be done and then there’s gonna be all sorts of shit go on—
SLEIMAN: I just want it to get over and done with fucking—just to be able to relax and just say yep. Cool ya know?
ROLLS: Okay? I’ve been waiting to get it over and done with too but I gotta—… Be careful, so … That’s why I said to ya, I’m not gonna rush—
SLEIMAN: Yep. Yep. Of course.
ROLLS: ’Cause I’m gonna get looked at straight away, so—
SLEIMAN:Yeah. Mmm. Yeah, for sure—
ROLLS: And then it’ll be right.
SLEIMAN: Mm. It’ll be good if, um there’ll be alcohol in her system—
ROLLS:Yeah, well—I’m—I’m working on that—I’m I’m—… thinking about how to do that—
SLEIMAN: Because that way is better—
ROLLS:Yeah, well that’s what I’m—I’m thinking of that—alright, I got two dollars left, so this might cut out bub—
SLEIMAN: Okay. Do you want me to call you on your phone, the other phone? …
SLEIMAN: Alright, bye.
And so, in less than ten minutes, Patrizia Rolls’s fate was laid out. Her husband would charm her and ply her with alcohol and then, late in the day, take her to the beach. They might go night swimming, maybe skinny-dipping. He would then force her head under water until her lungs filled and she died. Murder by drowning—one of the most traumatic ways to die. In fortune’s tide it appeared Patrizia Rolls’s luck was rapidly flowing away. It seemed that way but, as it turned out, it had not ebbed completely.
The Gold Coast pay phone Aaron Rolls had used was being bugged by Victoria Police on a completely separate secret assignment. It was a one-in-a-million freak occurrence. As Rolls and his mistress discussed the finer points of a perfect murder the jaws of officers listening in 1300 kilometres away almost hit the floor.
But with ‘Alright, bye’ the plotters had vanished. Listening police would not hear their next conversation on the prepaid mobile. There would be no more clues. Yet they knew a plan was in motion to kill an innocent third party.
The short conversation had laid out a blueprint for murder and sparked a police race against time to match the would-be killers to their voices. The man had indicated he would kill his unsuspecting wife within days. His mistress had then urged him to do it sooner rather than later. Officers scrabbled to think if the murderous lovers had left clues to their real identities. No names had been used and the plotters had given few clues as to who they were or the identity of their intended victim. Victoria Police detectives instantly joined forces with Gold Coast officers to untangle the riddle before an innocent woman’s corpse washed up on a Queensland beach.
PATRIZIA had felt she could not leave her awful, cheating husband because he was depressed. When she broached the subject of leaving him she said they should split their half-million dollar assets down the middle. Aaron made a counter offer that she take $40 000 and go on a holiday to Italy, her ancestral homeland.
And then all of a sudden Patrizia Rolls’s horrible husband started being nice to her. He sent his mistress back to Melbourne. He would hold Rolls’s hand and take her out to dinners with friends, where he would be gregarious and charming and indulge in public displays of affection. The pair started getting marriage counselling. He started talking about hiking and—even though he was a walk-hating beefcake—walks on the beach. Patrizia was swept up in relief. She thought Aaron was finally smiling. But he was only showing his teeth.
Police said the public phone on which Rolls chose to make his fateful call was probably the only one out of Australia’s remaining 21 000 pay phones that contained a bug. Officers extracted the call records from that phone, recovering the mobile number dialled at the time of the disturbing conversation. In the following days they tracked the number to a very new mobile phone that had a history of only one other call. They then tracked that other call, which had come from a landline. It was Mirvat Sleiman calling her new mobile from her house either as a test or to make her phone ring so she could find it. Police traced the landline number to a family home in Meadow Heights, a suburb in Melbourne’s north.
Background checks revealed the missing connection between a resident of that house and the Gold Coast pay phone: Sleiman was the only resident of the Melbourne house with a Queensland driver’s licence. The Rolls’s neighbours in Melastoma Way, Arundel, connected the rest of the dots about the marriage and the mistress for officers.
The alarming first call had been made on a Wednesday night, and by Saturday police were closing in. But they still had not got the would-be murder victim to safety. That day, Aaron and Patrizia Rolls were driving around shopping when Aaron made a surprise diversion into the Southport Surf Lifesaving Club car park near Main Beach and Surfers Paradise. He said he wanted to see what the beach was like and so they should go for a walk. He said he wanted to look at the erosion. She found that odd. From there it would have been a short walk to The Spit—a quiet, secluded beach.
Patrizia Rolls’s life had been saved a first time when her husband chose what was perhaps the only ‘off’ pay phone in Australia for his murder talk. It was saved a second time that Saturday when the surf club car park was full, preventing the proposed beach walk. Aaron Rolls was forced to continue their shopping trip instead. The next day, Aaron Rolls was working at the Big Day Out music festival when police swooped. They played Patrizia Rolls the tape of the phone call plotting her killing and took her into protective custody.
Few people get to foresee their death. It is a disturbing experience. Patrizia Rolls later recalled: ‘They said, “Mrs Rolls we have evidence that there’s a conspiracy to murder and the murder is against you.” Straight away I knew it was him, that he was going to take me to the beach and kill me.’ Patrizia was taken into protective custody. Her would-be killers canvassed the idea her unexplained disappearance might be a new suicide attempt.
Aaron and Mirvat were recorded by authorities like a pair of vultures gleefully relishing the prospect of their vulnerable target saving them from having to kill her by taking her own life.
‘Yeah, so any luck she’s driven away and more likely done it herself,’ Rolls said.
‘That would be great,’ Sleiman said.
‘Ha.’
‘Be perfect.’
‘That would be too easy, that.’
But instead of the big easy, the cold-blooded lovers got something much more appropriate: hard time.
When the averted plot became public knowledge it was a rude awakening for Patrizia’s old friend from Blackwater, who had been misled into an extra-marital affair with Rolls. ‘When it hit the papers I thought “Oh my God. That lying sack of shit”,’ said Jo Kayes.
He wasn’t separated from her at all. It was just absolute and utter lies. He was just a typical steroid-taking bodybuilder with a really big ego. When the story broke I felt absolutely and utterly disgusted. I never held any ill-will against Trish. It’s a situation that should never have developed between Aaron and I the few times that it did. But he was very convincing, heartbroken, his relationship broken up. My relationship had broken up. I was very down and out.
Kayes said with hindsight she found the way Rolls had tracked her down and arrived on her doorstep very creepy. ‘On his third or fourth visit I had started to pick up on some really weird vibes. He’s a control freak. He is freaky. You just don’t turn up at a woman’s place and expect her to A—drop things, B—be there and C—get rid of the kids,’ she said. Kayes now feels that she dodged a bullet when she sent him away.
Rolls was always money-hungry, she said, and she had founded a successful business and accumulated some assets. She shudders to think what might have happened to her and her family had her relationship with Rolls continued. ‘I just think oh my God what a lucky escape I had. I was right to actually read the signals I was getting from him. I wasn’t wrong. Those signals were correct.’
Patrizia Rolls loved her new life free from her emotionally crippled homicidal hubby. The woman derided by Aaron Rolls as overweight made a fresh start as a bodybuilding champion. ‘My best friend, my husband, was going to take my life and act as if it was nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m so grateful to be alive. I’ve been given a second chance.’
Evidence at court told how Mirvat Sleiman had ‘just wanted it done’ and wanted to get a bat and smash Patrizia’s head.
When Patrizia testified against Aaron, the bragging beefcake, sitting in court, covered his face and blubbered like an overgrown baby. He had pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to murder, claiming the taped murder plot was all talk to keep his hassling mistress pacified.
Aaron Rolls was sentenced to eleven years’ jail, with an 8-year minimum. Mirvat Sleiman copped nine years with a 6-year minimum. As he was taken away Rolls barked at the detectives who had foiled his murder plans. ‘Hope you’re happy,’ he snapped. They were.
Detective Sergeant Stuart Bailey said: ‘I certainly believe, and the jury also believe, that without the intervention of Victoria Police and Queensland Police this woman would have been murdered.’
Also happy was Patrizia’s old friend from the dental surgery Jo Kayes. ‘I’m really pleased that Trish, I guess, was rescued. She had a very narrow and very lucky escape,’ she said.
Jail for what he did is absolutely the right type of punishment. He is obviously a very dangerous, volatile person and manipulative to the nth degree. This man is human garbage and obviously has a huge problem with lying and this has been a habit as well. I am so glad Trish is safe and he is behind bars where cockroaches like him belong.
When the sentence came down, Patrizia was in transit in Hong Kong, finally taking that trip to Italy.
Getting banged up in a Victorian jail did not improve Rolls’s character. He was still proclaiming to anyone who would listen that it was all a police and media conspiracy. He complained to the internal affairs body Ethical Standards Division about police corruption and his doting mother placed ads appealing for funds so her little cherub could appeal the jury’s verdict. Rolls even managed to keep harassing Patrizia from behind bars. There is a specific law making it a crime for prisoners to write to their victims from jail. However, Rolls would write letters to Patrizia and send them to his mother, who would give them to a friend of Patrizia’s, who in turn would pass them on. Some were angry ramblings about the conspiracy behind his conviction. Some pointed the finger of blame at his dutiful wife and some made little sense at all. But in one he audaciously tried to win Patrizia back, telling her ‘I still love you.’
PATRIZIA Rolls was a very good wife. Aaron Rolls was a very bad husband. Fortunately for everyone this very bad man also had some very bad luck.
By rights long-suffering wife Patrizia Rolls should have wound up a lifeless body on a beautiful beach. By rights her wicked husband and the ex-prostitute he made his mistress should have got away with their perfidy. But a freak coincidence intervened to derail that grisly inevitability.
SO WE finish this saga of murder around the nation, conniving plots, brutal acts, senseless loss and retribution with a better result.
Aaron Rolls tried to execute the perfect murder. But instead chance intervened to make it the perfect murder story: one where the killers end up behind bars, but where there is no body, no victim.
And no murder at all.