Evil Greed

Angelika Gavare

Adelaide pensioner Vonne McGlynn had her daily rituals. The fiercely independent 82-year-old was a regular sight walking up and down Somerfield Avenue, Reynella, where she had lived on her own for many years. Her nearest neighbours knew her as well as the elderly woman would allow, and at the very least, it was the kind of street where people would nod and say hello to each other.

Reynella is a suburb located 20 kilometres south of Adelaide’s CBD, in the north of the City of Onkaparinga. Somerfield Avenue is a long, tidy and friendly street, well located near schools, transport and a hub of fast food restaurants on the main road.

Ms McGlynn would often venture to the local McDonald’s, around 1.5 kilometres from her home, and order her favourite breakfast: bacon-and-egg McMuffin. And Ms McGlynn was fastidious and very organised. Her home was neat and simple. She didn’t go for frills and her home decor hadn’t changed much over the years. Her kitchen refrigerator, which had been a gift in 1958, was still in perfect working order. She was, by all accounts from family and friends, very happy in her cosy little three-bedroom home.

Despite her age, Ms McGlynn was in generally good health and very active. She was an avid traveller and would often book short breaks away, usually day trips. Whenever she did, Ms McGlynn would dutifully notify the Red Cross, who gave her a welfare call each morning, to advise them that she did not require the service. Though she lived alone, Ms McGlynn was not a lonely woman. Her emergency contacts, provided to the Red Cross, were her younger brother Donald Smallwood, who lived interstate, and her next-door neighbours Roger and Sharon Zadow.

The Zadows kept an eye on Ms McGlynn. They had lived next door for 17 years. Mrs Zadow would cook extra meals for the plucky pensioner – curries were gratefully received – and when Ms McGlynn was away they would put her bins out and collect any mail. And it was reciprocated, with Ms McGlynn walking the Zadows’ dogs or feeding their chickens while the family was away.

In August 2008, Ms McGlynn broke her arm and this caused her to have to accept more help than she would usually have liked – meals on wheels for a while and some assistance to shower. Mrs Zadow thought a toaster might make things easier for Ms McGlynn and bought her one so that she could make quick and easy meals while she had her arm in plaster.

Mrs Zadow often drove Ms McGlynn to the doctor and on one of these trips the pensioner mentioned that a young woman had come around to her house, asking to be her carer. Ms McGlynn said the young woman had banged on the front door, saying she knew Ms McGlynn had broken her arm and asking whether she wanted a carer. Very careful about who she let into her home, Ms McGlynn told the woman through the security-door screen that she did not need a carer, but that didn’t stop the persistent stranger who then went around knocking on the windows of the house and insisting that she be hired.

‘You need a carer, I want to be your carer, you can pay me and I can move in,’ said the woman.

Former neighbour and good friend Therese Molloy also found out about this strange visit when she was chatting to Ms McGlynn in November 2008. It would be the last time they ever spoke. Ms Molloy urged her friend, who over the years had been a de facto grandmother to her three children, to tell the police.

While Ms McGlynn didn’t know the identity of the woman, she told her friends and brother that she thought she was from ‘down the street’. By all accounts Ms McGlynn was annoyed and upset by the incident.

On the evening of 2 December, Ms McGlynn had a conversation with her brother and told him she had hurt her wrist after a fall and it wasn’t healing well. The next morning, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. she received her daily call from the Red Cross.

So when on 4 December 2008, the Red Cross call went un­answered, the volunteer phoned the local police station. The volunteer knew Ms McGlynn’s habits and that it was highly unusual that she would go away without letting the service know.

The first police visit came around 10.30 a.m. that morning and the officers looked around the property and spoke to neighbours but did not enter the house. A short time later, an officer gained entry to the house by breaking a rear window and entering through the laundry. The officer cut himself in the process and went to the bathroom to wash his hand. He noticed that the house seemed tidy but there was a hole in the ceiling where a manhole cover would usually be.

Another officer arrived at 1 p.m. and left a card in the letterbox to say that police had called around and that they had damaged a window. There was no lack of officers checking on Vonne McGlynn’s home because at around 9.50 p.m. that same day three uniformed police officers went to the house after a neighbour had reported that the front door had been left open.

There was still no sign of Ms McGlynn but what would later become apparent when the police compared notes was that someone else had accessed the property between 11.30 a.m. and 9 p.m. because the house had been left untidy, with rubbish bags strewn over the floors of the rooms.

Several more visits occurred between 5 December and 9 December. Neighbour Mr Zadow mentioned to a police officer that there were tiles missing from Ms McGlynn’s roof and asked if he could replace them. The officer told Mr Zadow he could also board up the window that had been broken.

There was no sign of Ms McGlynn but someone had been in her home.

Meanwhile, on 9 December, police received a call from the Morphett Vale ANZ bank branch. A woman had attempted to withdraw $2000 from Ms McGlynn’s account using her keycard. The woman had presented a power of attorney form to the bank teller, who had seen reports of Ms McGlynn’s disappearance.

The woman was Latvian-born Angelika Gavare, a mother-of-two in her early thirties, who lived in Christie Downs and had never banked at the Morphett Vale branch before. Gavare had moved to Australia in 2001 on a spousal visa. Christie Downs was another suburb in the City of Onkaparinga region.

The bank teller phoned the missing persons unit of South Australia Police to report the encounter. The police officer she spoke to, Constable Robyn Ferraro, phoned Gavare to find out why she was trying to withdraw money from the missing woman’s account.

Gavare told Constable Ferraro that she was a friend who helped Ms McGlynn and that she had been asked by the pensioner to withdraw money to do some improvements on the Somerfield Avenue house.

Gavare was interviewed several times in December, including the day she had attempted to use Ms McGlynn’s bankcard.

The young mother told the police that she did not realise that Ms McGlynn was missing but that she had last seen her on 27 November and had been given the pensioner’s bankcard.

Gavare painted a picture to police that she knew Ms McGlynn very well and described her as an ‘independent and mentally OK’ woman who walked to the shops a lot.

‘All old ladies, they, you know, tell their stories,’ Gavare told police when she said she would have cups of tea with Ms McGlynn and chat at the Somerfield address.

Gavare said she had visited Ms McGlynn around eight times in two years. This was at complete odds with evidence from those closest to the pensioner, such as the neighbours, who, despite living next door for 17 years, told police that they has only ever set foot in Ms McGlynn’s home around eight times in total.

Meanwhile, Ms McGlynn’s brother and friends were desperately worried for the pensioner, fearing the worst. On 23 December 2008, Ms McGlynn failed to show up for an organised tour to Portland, Victoria, which she had previously booked and paid for. As Ms McGlynn was careful with her money and let people know when she was away, not going on the trip was highly suspicious.

There were public appeals for information and Mr Smallwood told The Advertiser newspaper that he thought his sister was dead.

‘She wasn’t wealthy, and I can’t see any motive for anyone wanting to harm her. But she’s not the type to just go missing,’ Mr Smallwood told The Advertiser.

Police had their sights on Gavare. The story she told with such confidence and ease did not seem right at all to investigators. They had built a profile of Vonne McGlynn and the story from Gavare about being given access to her accounts and home did not match the habits of the quiet and private pensioner.

When police visited Gavare’s home in the weeks after Ms McGlynn was last seen, they found some of Ms McGlynn’s possessions there including her passport, house keys and purse. There were personal bills and photographs as well – some of them were of the Molloys’ three children, who were like grandchildren to Ms McGlynn. And there was a toaster – the one that Mrs Zadow had bought for Ms McGlynn (she identified it for investigators). In fact, it was the discovery of the toaster and a nest of tables that led a police officer at the scene – Detective Sergeant Matthew Fitzpatrick – to strongly suspect that Ms McGlynn had been murdered.

Police kept working away in the background. The house in Somerfield Avenue was now a crime scene and the spotlight was firmly on Angelika Gavare.

Gavare’s link with Somerfield Avenue was her mother Inara Dombrovska, who also lived on Somerfield Avenue and knew Ms McGlynn by sight. Gavare had lived with her mother before moving to her own home in Christie Downs, so knew the area well.

The very worst news for Ms McGlynn’s brother and close friends came in late February. Some of Ms McGlynn’s remains – a leg and torso – were found in a place called Christies Creek and the location was right near Gavare’s Scottsglade Road home. The decomposed state of Ms McGlynn’s remains meant that a cause of death could not be determined, but it was obvious that someone had dismembered her body with a saw-like instrument. One of the body parts recovered included an artificial hip joint and its serial number was matched to Ms McGlynn.

Police also found fragments of a statue, which they believed to be from Ms McGlynn’s home, and a pram. The pram would become an important part of the case they were building around Gavare being the killer of the elderly woman.

Gavare was arrested and charged with the murder of Ms McGlynn.

What followed was a case that shocked South Australia and uncovered one of the most callous killers Australia has ever seen. The case ended up one of the most shocking and bizarre in South Australian criminal history, and that is no mean feat considering the state’s world notoriety for violent and gruesome murders.

Gavare made an application for a trial in front of a judge only because she feared any jury would be influenced by a series of newspaper articles about other murders of three other elderly women in their homes. There had been a spate of violent killings on lone women. Her application was granted and her trial began in front of Justice Trish Kelly in 2011.

The evidence that was so damning for Gavare came from those closest to her.

A key piece of evidence against Gavare was the pram found at the creek. Her sister Agnese Dombrovska saw a news report in late February 2009 about the police discovery of the pram. The dark blue cloth design with teddy bear print looked very familiar to her.

Phoning the police, Ms Dombrovska told them it was similar to one she had used to take her children to a playground near her mother Inara’s Somerfield Avenue home. The pram kept at her mother’s also had a missing screw, which caused a lower beam to dangle down. The pram found at the creek also had a missing screw.

Several witnesses reported seeing a young woman walking by the creek with a pram filled with oddly shaped garbage bags in the days after Ms McGlynn’s disappearance.

Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Pallaras, QC, said Gavare used the pram to move Ms McGlynn’s body parts for disposal, as well as other items from the pensioner’s home that Gavare did not want.

Ms Dombrovska also said she was disturbed by the reaction of her sister, the prime suspect by that stage, when pressed about the missing woman.

‘She just laughed,’ Ms Dombrovska said. ‘She just laughed it off, and I found that a bit odd … it was not a laughing matter.’

And it was not only her sister to whom she had joked about the murder. An ex-boyfriend of Gavare’s, Ejaz Ahmed said he and the accused had used an electric chainsaw when they were renovating a bathroom at the time of Ms McGlynn’s disappearance. Mr Ahmed said he asked Gavare if she had done something to the old woman and she laughed and joked, saying ‘yes’.

Mr Ahmed ceased contact with Gavare after her arrest and was upset that she had implicated him in Ms McGlynn’s murder, including the grisly accusation that he had disposed of the pensioner’s head and hands for her when he was on a trip to Pakistan.

Gavare’s mother Inara Dombrovska testified against her daughter in court, which turned out to be one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

Gavare had told her mother a story on Christmas Eve, just a few weeks after Ms McGlynn was last seen, about what happened to the elderly woman. Knowing her daughter had something to do with the disappearance, Mrs Dombrovska demanded her daughter tell her what happened otherwise they could not celebrate Christmas together.

It was then that Gavare told her mother she had had been watching Ms McGlynn for a while and had gained entry to the ‘old woman’s’ house while she was on her regular breakfast trip to McDonald’s. When Ms McGlynn returned home, Gavare told her mother that she made her ‘unconscious’ and searched through the house. Gavare left the pensioner in the house and then returned later that evening, where she claimed Ms McGlynn was now dead. Mrs Dombrovska said her daughter told her she then wrapped Ms McGlynn’s body in plastic sheets and had taken her away where the police would never find her.

No doubt reeling from the words coming from her child’s mouth, Mrs Dombrovska was further shocked when Gavare said she had faked the power of attorney form and intended to use it to sell the pensioner’s house.

Mrs Dombrovska also told police and the court that she saw a little wooden table with carved legs and a toaster on top of it when she was at her daughter’s home on 6 December 2008 to celebrate Gavare’s birthday. Gavare told her mother that she had bought the table in a garage sale. However, the table was, of course, from the house of Ms McGlynn.

Gavare’s day on the stand came and brought with it another shock turn. She had elected to give evidence after the prosecution had finished their case presentation.

Gavare told the court while she did forge power of attorney documents to get access to Ms McGlynn’s assets, she did not murder her. Gavare did admit that she lied to police. In a complete backflip from the original story she told police about being asked to renovate Ms McGlynn’s home, Gavare pinned the pensioner’s death on her ex-partner Giuseppe Daniele, who was the father of her youngest child.

Gavare’s story was that Mr Daniele killed Ms McGlynn in an accidental hit-and-run car crash before forcing her to help him to stage a robbery as a cover-up, which explained why she had the woman’s personal items at her home.

‘It occurred to me that I could use the situation for my profit,’ Gavare said in front of Justice Kelly.

‘I lied because I felt that since I started lying I could not stop lying and I had to continue with the story I made up,’ she said.

Gavare had also admitted she had a history of dishonesty, having been dismissed from her newsagency employment for stealing co-workers’ IDs and bankcards, as well as banking letters from a mailbox. She admitted that she had forged powers of attorney before.

Mr Daniele had been called to give evidence too and said his ex-girlfriend was a compulsive liar whom he had not seen for several years. He had an alibi for the timeframe of Ms McGlynn’s alleged murder and said he was at a nephew’s birthday party 30 kilometres away from Somerfield Avenue.

Gavare’s defence grilled Mr Daniele and put to him that he had threatened the accused if she did not help him cover up Ms McGlynn’s death. Mr Daniele said Gavare’s story was laughable.

He told the defence lawyer Grant Algie, QC, that he had never threatened Ms Gavare or knocked on her door on the night it was alleged Ms McGlynn was killed.

‘No you’re absolutely wrong … I get a bad vibe when I speak to Angelika,’ Mr Daniele said.

There was no love lost between the pair. Their short relation­ship, which resulted in the birth of their daughter in 2005, had ended badly and they were in the midst of a custody battle over the child. Mr Daniele’s sister had also given evidence to back up his assertion that he had been at his nephew’s 12th birthday party on the evening of 3 December. Justice Kelly remarked that she was satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that he had nothing to do with the disappearance and death of the pensioner.

Gavare’s story was not holding up to scrutiny. There was too much evidence pointing to the fact that she was the killer.

While there was no forensic evidence to link her with the murder at the Somerfield Avenue house, blood was found in the boot of Gavare’s car that was a match to Ms McGlynn. A police officer also testified that when searching Gavare’s backyard he had detected a smell of ‘rotting flesh’ in her shed, which led him to search her car. The constable said the car boot was in pristine condition, unlike the rest of the vehicle, and appeared to have been vacuumed.

The prosecution alleged that the car had been used to transport Ms McGlynn from Somerfield Avenue to Gavare’s Christie Downs home.

There was also the internet browser history on Gavare’s home computer that showed she had searched for information on 4 December about ANZ accounts, which directly linked with paperwork she had in her possession belonging to Ms McGlynn.

The case transfixed South Australians who were kept up-to-date with the latest court reports from the city’s media, including newspaper The Advertiser. One of the most sensational days of evidence came on 17 August when a former prison cellmate of Gavare’s told the court that the accused had confessed to her and had found the murder ‘a bit of a turn on’.

Amanda Jayne Patterson, who, in the end, was not deemed by Justice Kelly to be a very reliable witness, appeared for the prosecution and said Gavare had told her about the murder while they were in Adelaide Women’s Prison together. Ms Patterson was also facing other charges for dishonesty at the time. Ms Patterson said Gavare told her she believed that if the police could not find the head or the hands of Ms McGlynn there would be no case against her. Gavare’s lawyer, Mr Algie, called Ms Patterson a liar and thief who could not be believed, which enraged the woman.

‘I don’t know how you sleep at night knowing you are defending a murderer!’ Ms Patterson shouted in court.

On 30 August 2011, the Supreme Court found Gavare guilty of Ms McGlynn’s murder. In her sentencing of Gavare on 4 November 2011, Justice Kelly said the killer had been motivated by ‘nothing more than sheer greed’ and said her crime was in the worst category. Sentencing Gavare to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 32 years, Justice Kelly called her a ‘greedy, narcissistic and deceitful woman’.

‘There is no evidence of any remorse or contrition. You have not even had the decency to give some small solace to the family and friends of Ms McGlynn by revealing how and where you disposed of the head and hands of this most unfortunate woman.’

Justice Kelly also noted that Gavare’s actions meant that her daughters would grow up without their mother and that they too were victims of the horrific crime.

On 4 May 2012, an appeal against her sentence was dismissed in the South Australian Court of Criminal Appeal.

To date, Gavare has not revealed where she disposed of the head and hands of Vonne McGlynn.