Murder in a Small Town

The Rowe Family Massacre

The small town of Kapunda (population 3000), on the edge of South Australia’s Barossa Valley, hit the headlines in 2010 for the worst possible reasons. Until then, the town held the creepy distinction of being the most haunted town in Australia, based on a 2001 television show produced and hosted by actor Warwick Moss. Somewhat of a cult figure for his deep and mysterious voice, Moss also hosted a television series The Extraordinary from 1993 to 1996, which was shown around the world.

The town’s ‘most haunted’ reputation comes from the history of the St John’s Reformatory, which was a house for ‘wayward’ girls and was closed in 1909. According to Adelaide-based paranormal researcher Jeff Fausch, who maintains a website on the history of the Kapunda church, just days after the Moss-produced program The Most Haunted Town in Australia, ghost hunters, paranormal enthusiasts and weirdos came in their hundreds to investigate the ruins of the reformatory and cemetery in search of the ghosts mentioned on the show. Obviously, townsfolk weren’t too pleased about the invasion of their quiet little community and resented the ‘most haunted’ tag.

A decade later, the town would be known in Australia, and over­­seas, for one of the most brutal multiple murders of recent years.

On 8 November 2010, the town was shocked to its core by the murders of 16-year-old Chantelle Rowe and her parents Rose and Andrew. The Rowe family had moved to Kapunda in 2007. Chantelle lived with her parents in a small, tidy house at Harriet Street and her older brother Christopher lived with his fiancée at another address in the town.

The scene that confronted police at the Rowes’ home was grisly and shocked even the most experienced investigators who had been to bloody crime scenes before. The injuries to the three victims were extreme and frenzied.

The bodies of the family were discovered when Mr Rowe, a carpet cleaner, did not turn up to work. His business partner went to the house at 11 a.m. to find out what was wrong and saw the bodies of Mr Rowe and his wife. No doubt in absolute shock, he rang police and one of the largest homicide investigations in South Australian history began.

At a press conference in the early evening of 8 November, South Australia Police Superintendent Grant Moyle, barely one month into his new position as head of the Major Crime Squad, told a group of journalists that the investigation and examination of the crime scene at Harriet Street would take quite some time, but he urged the community to be ‘vigilant with their safety’.

‘This is a small community and I would ask anyone who saw anything to let police know immediately. No matter how trivial they think it is, it could be the vital piece of information we are looking for,’ Moyle said.

At this stage it had not been revealed who the victims were or how they had died. Speculation was rife that it was a murder-suicide but journalists, to be expected, asked whether the police were looking for a murderer. The police were reserved in their response, saying that the investigation was still in its infancy, though to seasoned journalists, the emphasis Moyle placed on reassuring the community that there would be a high police presence in and around the town was somewhat of a hint that something very, very bad had happened at the Harriet Street house.

The details of the victims were not revealed until the next day and even then, the grisly nature of the scene was kept from the public, including the weapon used to kill the family and whether police had any suspects. Another reason for this was that Christopher Rowe, then 25, was on holiday in Queensland and had to be informed that his family had died. What Moyle did ask was that the community help police with information on anybody seen acting suspiciously or with bloodied clothes.

‘It’s a very complex scene to examine, as you’d appreciate – there’s three deceased in the house,’ Moyle said on the morning of 9 November at a press conference.

What residents had feared for at least 24 hours since the bodies were discovered was true. A killer was on the loose and it could be one of Kapunda’s own. Police were careful not to fuel the fears of the already terrified townsfolk. Investigators needed to strike the delicate balance of getting the community to help them catch the person or persons responsible and not raise panic to levels that would hinder the investigation.

Kapunda was a community in fear. People were scared and horrified by the murders and the police knew the clock was ticking and the media glare intense. They had to get a result … and fast.

And there was good reason for people to be scared. The family had been subjected to a frenzied attack. Mr Rowe was found lying facedown on the floor of the kitchen area. The well-respected businessman and community member had been stabbed, slashed and cut at least 29 times. One of the stab wounds had been so ferocious that a metal fragment from a knife had lodged in his skull. He had also been stabbed in the chest and a back wound had penetrated his lung and pulmonary artery.

Mrs Rowe was found lying facedown in the family room area of the house. She had been stabbed almost 50 times and had injuries from a sharp object all over her body including her head and neck, shoulders, arms, hands, chest and back. Again, the attacker had struck with such force that a fragment of metal was found stuck in Mrs Rowe’s skull. Like her husband, Mrs Rowe died of multiple stab wounds.

Chantelle, the pretty, popular and friendly teenager was found dead in her bedroom. She had also been stabbed multiple times – the coroner found at least 33 wounds. It was clear from her wounds that Chantelle had tried to defend herself. There were also signs that she had been sexually assaulted but this had to be officially confirmed. Whether she was alive or dead at this point could not be definitively determined.

For the forensic investigators, the crime scene proved to be complex. In a 2012 feature article on catching the Kapunda Killer for South Australia Police’s magazine Blueprint, Brevet Sergeant Peter McKenzie said that as soon as he saw the crime scene he knew that the people in there had been fighting for their lives.

‘It was the bloodiest scene I had ever encountered in my 20 years. Blood was in every room, on every wall,’ McKenzie told South Australia Police Director of Media Shelaye Boothey. Ms Boothey was able to speak in-depth to the key investigators involved and reveal details of the investigation and the thoughts of those involved that were previously unreported in the mainstream media.

‘There were more than a thousand bloodstain patterns. I made the separate, significant patterns my priority – there were 250 of them,’ Sergeant McKenzie said.

It was quickly established by forensic investigators that Chantelle would prove the focus of the investigation and officers from the Major Crime Squad set about interviewing the many people who knew the popular student. Chantelle’s body had been in a state of semi-undress when found and while tests had to be conducted to determine whether she had been raped, it was obvious that the killer must have had a personal connection to her.

As well as canvassing the neighbourhood and chasing up tips from the public, uniformed police interviewed and took statements from the people who had attended a gathering at the house on Saturday, 6 November, two nights before the murders. Several friends of Chantelle and her boyfriend, Dylan Pratt, had watched a movie and stayed overnight at the house. Police believed one of these young people could hold vital information on the murders. There were also a number of friends interviewed who didn’t attend the gathering.

It was from information gathered from Chantelle’s friends that the name Jason Downie was mentioned as someone who was on the outer edges of the friendship circle. He was a friend of Dylan. Police first interviewed Downie, then 18, on 9 November 2010. He told police in his statement that he knew Chantelle from school and that he had not attended the gathering at the Rowe home on the previous Saturday night. Along with many other statements, Downie’s was placed in the pile.

Forensic crime scene investigators were working hard to find answers at the house. In a twist of luck, some forensic spray used to reveal fingerprints, handprints and footprints had run down the door of Chantelle’s room and revealed a fingerprint on the very edge of the door. As would be expected in a family home, police had found fingerprints all over the house. But what made this a significant discovery was that the print was in blood matter on the door, meaning that it could be the killer’s. Although the print was unable to be identified, to police it meant that it did not belong to the family or anyone else who investigators had found had reason to have been in the Rowe home – such as Chantelle’s boyfriend Dylan, or friends who’d been at the party on 6 November.

Then semen was found on Chantelle’s body – she had been raped by her murderer. This information reinforced to detectives that it was Chantelle who was the focus of the crime.

Investigators had a list of suspects and it was the good old-fashioned policing – the ‘hunch’ – that led to Downie’s name being one of those who were DNA swabbed and fingerprinted. The hunch came from Major Crime Squad Sergeant John Keane. Keane thought it was a bit odd that Downie mentioned several times that he didn’t have a girlfriend and though he was aware that Chantelle and Dylan had a gathering, he hadn’t been on the invite list. Downie was also insistent on mentioning that Chantelle ‘wasn’t his girlfriend’, even though police had never initiated discussion that the two had anything but a friendship.

According to Keane, all the males at the party were to be DNA tested and he decided that Downie was also worth a more detailed look, especially after he had spoken to the apprentice mechanic’s boss. The boss told police that Downie had been at work on the day that the bodies of the Rowes were discovered but that he had arrived late and had cuts on his hands, which he said were from a motorbike accident. Downie agreed to give the police a DNA sample and have his hands printed. Detectives noticed the deep cuts on Downie’s hands while they were doing the prints and questioned the young man about how he had injured himself. At first Downie said he had fallen from a bicycle, and then he changed his story to the cuts being from a fall from a motorbike. When asked if he had been inside the Rowes’ home, Downie said no, but admitted he had been outside it.

Tests revealed that the print found on Chantelle’s bedroom door belonged to Downie. So how did it get there if Downie claimed he hadn’t been in the house? This result was very good for the police, who felt that they were edging closer to capturing the killer. When DNA from the semen sample came back as a match for Downie just over one week after the murders, police were confident they had their killer and made plans to arrest him.

On 16 November 2010, Downie voluntarily attended the Kapunda Police Station, escorted by a colleague. Police had asked Downie to come and sign his statement, which was something several other people who had been interviewed had already done. It was decided that this was the best, safest way to arrest Downie. Video footage of his arrival shows Downie pushing his sunglasses up to his head and then shaking hands with the detectives who greeted him at the door. It was reported later that Downie’s colleagues had joked that he was going to get locked up when they heard he had been asked to attend the police station. Little did they know their workmate was a prime suspect for murder most foul.

He was arrested moments later and so began an interview that was a web of lies. Detectives knew Downie was lying when, confronted with the fact that his semen was found on Chantelle, he said the pair had had consensual sex months earlier and that a condom must have broken. Downie’s mother Lorna Carter was by his side by this stage. He had asked to telephone her. Detectives had allowed Ms Carter to sit in on the interview with her son who was barely an adult but had allegedly committed the most brutal of crimes. He told police that on the night of the murders, he’d had an argument with his mother at midnight and then driven to Gawler and returned to his Kapunda address at 1.30 a.m. on 8 November. To explain why he had not been in his house he told police he had slept in his car. Police video footage of Downie’s mother, her face blurred to conceal her identity on television when it was later broadcast to the public, show the shocked woman pleading with her boy to come clean. Downie’s story flip-flopped from lie to lie, and he was unable to explain what he had done in the early hours of 8 November. He told police, ‘I lie all the time,’ and said that it was because he was nervous.

Downie had moved to Australia from Kilmarnock, Scotland with his mother, stepfather and brother in 2006. Downie wrote about his background on social networking site Bebo (a site where teens can customise a web page and chat to other users): ‘I grew up without a dad since I was two months old so I have been raised up by my mum all my life. I respect and love her to death, even though we have our bad moments. Love my family in Scotland – haven’t seen them for six years – love ya and hope to see you soon.’

Downie’s mother and stepfather separated in early 2011, deeply affected by his actions. In a letter to the court, Downie’s mother described her son as a person who caused no trouble at home and had been caring and helpful. Downie’s mother and stepfather told the court that they were both unable to comprehend the brutality of their son’s actions. To his extended family back in Scotland, Downie was known as a ‘quiet, gentle giant’.

When police officially released the news that they had arrested someone for the murders, more than 100 people gathered at Kapunda Police Station. Police had very real worries that vigilante action could be taken against Downie’s family for their son’s brutal actions and they made sure that the community got the message that retribution was not on.

Police had been given a quick lesson in the power, and problems, social media sites such as Facebook can have on investigations. Almost immediately after the identities of the Rowes were confirmed as being murder victims, a tribute Facebook page was set up, and is still maintained to this day with over 11 000 ‘likes’. Police closely monitored activity on pages that were either dedicated to the Rowe family, suspects or, specifically, Chantelle. Facebook sites can have drastic implications on a criminal case, especially once the identity of the accused is known.

Downie’s name, subject to a suppression order, was already being splashed around social networking sites, connecting him with the deaths. His identity was revealed publically in February 2011 after the suppression order was lifted and his photo published in the Adelaide Advertiser. Under the headline ‘Portrait of an accused killer’, a photo was published of Downie smiling at a work Christmas function in the Barossa Valley just days after the murders. It was also revealed that Downie also visited the makeshift shrine to the Rowe family outside their home in the days after the murders. Downie was videoed by a news crew placing a teddy bear and flowers at the fence of the Harriet Street house. He pretended to grieve with the Rowes’ family and friends, such was his disassociation – or purely evil nature – with his actions.

From his arrest to an appearance via video link at the Elizabeth Magistrates Court on 9 November 2011, Downie volunteered little information about his involvement in the murders; however, he did plead guilty. But despite his guilty pleas, Downie was still maintaining his innocence to his mother and brother. This contradiction saw Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Pallaras, QC, ask Justice John Sulan to have Downie confirm his guilty pleas. This was to ensure that the killer was unable to avoid punishment on a technicality.

‘We are aware of a conversation had by the accused, with his brother, in which he expressed an attitude inconsistent with his plea,’ Mr Pallaras told the court on 7 February 2012. Mr Pallaras said the DPP wanted to ensure that Downie’s guilty pleas were not open to interpretation, and therefore a reversal to ‘not guilty’. Again, Downie pleaded guilty, to all three counts of murder.

Apparently Downie told his brother the ‘real killer’ was a man dressed in ‘dark clothing with a green shopping bag’, whom he had seen loitering in the area.

He also claimed in a letter written from jail to his mother that he had driven to the Rowe home and noticed blood on the walls, and then discovered their bodies. Downie said he found Mr and Mrs Rowe dead and Chantelle dying on her bedroom floor. In the letter he said: ‘She had cuts everywhere … she said “help” and she died in my arms. I fucked up, mum, I’m sorry, I should have rung the police.’

He said the police would not believe his story and that was why he pleaded guilty.

Downie lied and lied to people – police, his family, his psychologist – in the months following his arrest.

Exactly what happened in the Rowes’ house on that terrible night was revealed in the courtroom, mostly through the evidence of investigators and a psychological report on Downie.

The scrawny teen, now 20, was obsessed with Chantelle. He was jealous of her relationship with Dylan Pratt and it was this desire that led him to the Rowes’ house. Chantelle, according to information gathered during the investigation, had tolerated Downie because he was a friend of her boyfriend. When police first interviewed him, Downie said he didn’t know Chantelle very well, yet police discovered he was in regular contact with her on Facebook and paid her unwanted attention. But the teenager who was a friendly young girl only politely maintained a distant friendship with Downie.

Throughout 2010, until the murders, Downie became more obsessed with Chantelle and was starting to really pester her. Chantelle had mentioned to her boyfriend and friendship group that Downie was annoying her with the constant contact on Facebook. In his sentencing remarks, Justice John Sulan said he was satisfied that Chantelle did not encourage Downie or at any time ‘engage in a relationship with you’. Downie was in some sort of fantasy that Chantelle would become more than a friend to him and when this didn’t happen was becoming frustrated.

Police believed that there was a certain degree of calculation on Downie’s part before the murders because he knew Dylan would not be staying at the Rowe home that night. Downie had caught up with Dylan on the afternoon of Sunday, 7 November and Dylan had mentioned that Chantelle was unwell. According to what Downie told a psychologist after his arrest, he drove around until the early hours, anger building up inside him that Chantelle was not interested in him.

It was during sessions with psychologist Richard Balfour that Downie gave some insight into what happened, though he still could not be truly honest about his motives. Downie told Mr Balfour that he wanted to confront Dylan Pratt at the Rowe house on the night of the murders because he was jealous of his relationship with Chantelle. Justice Sulan dismissed this motive because of the evidence that Downie had known that Dylan would not be at the address.

‘I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that it was your intention to make sexual advances to Chantelle and to have sexual intercourse with her,’ Justice Sulan said on 17 April 2012 when he handed down the triple killer’s sentence.

Parking his car streets away from the Rowe house, Downie entered the house through the bathroom window. Downie’s shoe print was found in the Rowes’ bath with no blood on it, and investigators concluded that this was his entry point. There is only Downie’s word, and the forensic evidence, on what happened in the house – and his story was ever-changing – so the exact sequence of events will never truly be known. Downie told Mr Balfour that the house was dark and Mr Rowe woke and turned on all the lights. Mr Rowe confronted Downie in the passageway and as he moved toward the intruder, Downie said that he panicked and ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. As Mr Rowe pursued the teen, he was stabbed frenetically by Downie, and he finally dropped when he was stabbed in the back. Mr Rowe was eventually found facedown in the kitchen.

Downie then described to Mr Balfour that Mrs Rowe came down the corridor and he attacked her. Mrs Rowe was found facedown on the floor of the dining room, dead from multiple stab wounds.

Worse was to come. Downie said Chantelle saw him stab her parents and then hid under her bed. After he had slaughtered her parents, Downie went into her bedroom and stabbed her several times while she was still cowering under the bed. Downie told Mr Balfour that as he pulled Chantelle out from under the bed, he noticed that she was silent and not moving. Justice Sulan said, ‘[Chantelle] must have been terrified by what she had seen.’

Justice Sulan’s recount of Chantelle’s last moments chilled the courtroom during Downie’s sentencing: ‘Her eyes were closed. You then checked to see if her parents were dead. Chantelle was lying motionless on the bed. Her top lip was quivering. You told Mr Balfour that you then removed Chantelle’s clothes from her. You thought she was dead.’

But Chantelle was not dead. She regained consciousness and asked Downie what he was doing to her. Standing up, despite her stab wounds, Chantelle tried to get away but Downie ran to the kitchen, got another knife and stabbed her again. The rage displayed by Downie was, according to what he told Dr Balfour, directed at his friend, Dylan. Downie then pulled off Chantelle’s jeans and raped her. It could never be determined whether Chantelle was dead or dying as Downie violated her. Pathologists found Downie’s semen in her vaginal area and rectum. Investigators were sickened and shocked by the attacks, especially that on Chantelle, who at 16, was just a child. Downie redressed Chantelle in her jeans after he had raped her.

Downie then made attempts to clean up the bloodbath he had just created. ‘A somewhat ineffectual attempt,’ said Justice Sulan. ‘Words cannot adequately describe what [police] found. There was blood in almost every room, on the walls and covering the floors.’

Forensics found bloody shoeprints and footprints of Downie’s around the house. A photo of Downie and Chantelle showed him wearing the shoes investigators believed he wore during the murders. They obtained an identical pair from retailer Big W and tested those against the shoe patterns found and got a match. They retrieved Downie’s actual shoes when he gave them details of where to find them after the 7 February 2012 confirmation of his guilty pleas.

The knives Downie used have never been found. Police also believe he took Chantelle’s phone and her mum’s purse, possibly as trophies, and these have not been recovered either.

The brutality of Downie’s crimes was something normally associated with people from disturbed backgrounds or older, jail-hardened men. In his report to the court, Mr Balfour said, ‘The contrast between the normality of Mr Downie’s life prior to committing the current offences and the frenzied violence of his murders is astounding.’

Mr Balfour went on to say he had no doubt that most people who knew Downie would never have imagined he was capable of such ‘wanton violence’.

Downie had no prior convictions and had been a loving son and brother to his family. Mr Balfour said Downie had good prospects of rehabilitation considering his age and the situational nature of the crime, meaning he was triggered by a specific incident and feeling, rather than a psychiatric illness.

When asked by Mr Balfour why he had committed the crimes, Downie said, ‘Pretty much jealousy. I thought we [Chantelle and Downie] had something on. When I learned when she was with Dylan, I wasn’t happy. I pretty much got angry. Like I said to you before, I had nothing against the parents.’ Lanky Downie only weighed 52 kilograms so the ferocity of the attacks belied his physical form. The rage in him was explosive.

‘The reality is that Mr Downie’s crimes are not the by-product of severe psychopathology but stem from the fallibility and flaws of the imperfect human condition (i.e. biblical motives such as jealousy),’ Mr Balfour wrote. ‘He appears to have gone from infatuation to anger and resentment to homicidal rage, which led to a frenzied attack on the victims.’

Much was mentioned about Downie’s lack of emotion during police interviews and court appearances. Mr Balfour thought that this could be post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the gruesome nature of his crimes that caused him to shut down psychologically.

Police had other thoughts about Downie. ‘Pure evil’ was a term used by senior police investigating the murders.

Downie was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 35 years. Justice Sulan said Downie had a good prospect of rehabilitation but that his ‘truly horrific’ crimes needed to carry a severe sentence. Justice Sulan told Downie that he did not accept that his actions were from someone who wasn’t thinking rationally. Had it not been for his guilty plea, Justice Sulan said he would have handed Downie a non-parole period of 42 years. ‘Your cold-blooded, merciless attack on Chantelle, who was hiding under the bed in fear and who you dragged out, stabbed, sexually assaulted and then stabbed again and murdered, was a chilling act,’ Justice Sulan said. ‘You killed Chantelle’s mother simply because she witnessed your attack on her husband.’

Many people gave victim impact statements to the court, most notably Christopher Rowe who lost his entire immediate family through Downie’s actions.

In his statement, Christopher said, ‘In the future, getting married will be hard, having children will be hard … my mum and dad will not be there to be the grandparents they wanted to be.’

He also lovingly remembered Chantelle and said he had planned to teach her to drive when he returned from his Queensland trip. ‘Now I will not get the chance to do that.’

‘Chantelle took [lots] of photos of our family and now that’s all I have … I feel empty. No matter what anyone does, it’s not going to bring them back or change it.’

After the sentencing, Christopher, in a statement read by his cousin Kylie Duffield to media outside the courtroom, said he ‘struggled with his own visions and nightmares’ and he hoped others could begin to recover now that Downie had been sentenced, though he did not see the jail term as any sort of justice.

In an almost pointless exercise, Downie wrote a letter of apology to the family and friends of his victims. Written just a few months after the murders, Downie wrote: ‘From the bottom of my heart I am deeply sorry for my actions.’

He went on to say: ‘I have caused so much pain not only in my own family but many others … I deserve anything and everything that is going to happen to me.’

However, in court Mr Pallaras rejected the letter as another lie, saying it predated Downie’s claims of innocence to his mother and brother.

Downie’s mother has stuck by her son. The Adelaide Advertiser published a letter Ms Carter wrote to the court that expressed her shock at the actions of her ‘easygoing lad’. ‘I have never seen Jason angry, he wasn’t argumentative, he was just a happy-go-lucky boy,’ she said. Ms Carter has not yet spoken publically about her son or his terrible crimes.

Downie seemed to be a most unlikely killer, displaying no obvious signs of deviance or murderous rage. Psychologist Mr Balfour made the chilling observation that no doubt many felt in the aftermath of the murders: ‘The idea that an unremarkable member of the community can perpetrate such violence is unthinkable because it raises the possibility that all individuals are capable of violence.’

Downie will be in his early fifties before he is eligible for release.