Excuse 8
‘I was a robot’
Accused of trying to murder his father and stepmother in a bizarre, bloody and blackly comic stabbing/wrestle, Vito Vuocolo tried to blame…a liqueur-laced espresso.
A former chef at three of Melbourne’s trendiest Italian restaurants, Vuocolo claimed the coffee with a dash of Sambuca reacted with his back medication and caused him to act in an unwilled way—like a robot. He said it was while he was in this ‘dissociated’ state that he attacked his father and stepmother. He had not realised what he was doing. He could not have intended killing them because he had not been intending anything at the time. He was not acting consciously. It was, he said, all the fault of a little alcoholic coffee his stepmother had given him moments before she found herself fighting for her life.
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For Giuseppina ‘Josephine’ Galiano-Vuocolo no alarm bells rang when her 38-year-old stepson, Vito, visited on 31 January 2002. Sure, relations with her and her husband, Romano Vuocolo, and Vito had been a bit strained from time to time over the years, but everything had seemed just fine at the family Christmas, a month or so before. When Vito walked in the door at about 4.30 pm, he gave his father the traditional two-cheek welcoming kiss. Pleasantries were exchanged. He talked amicably enough about his latest visit to the doctor, in his ongoing battle to treat his back pain—a legacy of falling down some stairs at his job as a plasterer. Vito had arrived just as his 65-year-old father was coming home from a plastering job.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: We were sitting around the table, Romano, I and Vito, and Vito he says to us, ‘Which side is the heart?’ And Romano and I just giggled, you know, we thought what a silly question and then we just think and say, ‘It is on the left’. We just giggle about it.
…
So we were sitting around the table. Romano was very dirty from work and we suggested Romano go and have a shower before coffee…
While Romano was in the shower, I poured the coffee standing at the kitchen bench and before he had the coffee he asked me for Sambuca to flavour the coffee and I says to him, ‘I don’t think it is a good idea to have alcohol if you take medication’, and he said, ‘I didn’t take any medicine today’. So I brought the Sambuca out and he put a dash of Sambuca into the cup and he drank. He drank straight away without waiting for us.
…
Vito, he says, to me, ‘Do you still have that knife that I gave you? And I said, ‘Yes, yes’, and he says, ‘Is it sharp?’ I says, ‘No, it’s not sharp. We don’t have a sharp knife in the house’. And in fact he gave me that knife as a present some time ago because I never had a good knife in the house. He says to me, ‘Can I have a look?’ I says, ‘Yes’. You know? And I got the knife out the drawer and he took the knife from my hand and he looked at the knife and then he started to poke the knife at me.
…
Prosecutor: Was the knife penetrating you?
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: No, no…It seemed something so unnatural, so strange that he was doing…it did not penetrate me initially.
…
I says to him, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ and then he started to corner me into the kitchen and he started to penetrate me [with the knife] and I started defending myself.
Prosecutor: How much force was he using?
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: Well, enough to cut my hand holding the knife and penetrate my shoulder and my arm.
When I realised he was serious, I started to scream and yell and call Romano, and Romano must have heard it from the shower and he came out.
Wearing just a towel, Romano Vuocolo raced to his wife’s rescue tackling his son as he slashed and stabbed his wife.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: Romano sort of pulled him and Vito got up and he turned around and he started to stab Romano and then I got up and tried to pull Vito away. Because Romano was between the fridge and the bench, he couldn’t move, so I tried to pull Vito away from him.
So Romano moved and he ran out the door.
…
He was naked. He ran out the door but Vito caught him in the garden and he started to stab him again. Vito still had the knife in his hand and he stab him again and I ran after them and I try to pull Vito from off Romano…but I couldn’t grab him because of my injured hand and…I start to kick him…and then I try to pull his pants.
Breaking down in tears, her voice choking, not looking at her stepson in the dock, Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo told the jury, ‘Romano was covered in blood’.
Somehow Mr Vuocolo and his wife managed to force Vito to drop the knife, and Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo grabbed it and hurled it over the hedge of their home in the normally quiet, leafy, Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: Then Romano run inside and he locked the security door.
…
When I saw Vito was still on the ground I run inside through the other door…Romano went to put a pair of pants on…And I tried to ring [emergency] 000 and I think when Vito finally got up he started to…scream, ‘The car key, the car key’. He had left the car key inside and so Romano got the car key and threw it in the garden from the laundry door but Vito saw me on the phone through the glass door…and he smashed the glass with a kick.
Vuocolo walked through the shattered glass door, went to the kitchen and found himself another knife and continued his terrifying attack.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: He grabbed me again. I tried to run but he grabbed me in the corner of the family room and that’s when I got the other cut into my head. And then again Romano came again to my rescue. He pulled him out and when Vito got out Romano started to run outside and I was worried for Romano. I thought now if Vito catches Romano he still has the knife in his hand.
…
I thought I have got to do something. I went into the carport and got a broom. I thought I can defend myself without thinking that with my hands cut the way they were I couldn’t do anything and I went out there.
They weren’t in the back garden so I went into the driveway. I went right down the road and I saw Vito coming back.
…
Vito saw me, and he started to run towards me and that was when I run over to number 33 across the road.
…
Romano wasn’t nowhere to be seen and I was alone in the street. I rang the bell…Nobody was home and I saw Vito coming towards me and Vito grabbed me and he tried to push me over the balustrade.
Finally a neighbour, John Durrant, came to the rescue.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: I saw this man coming and he come over and he grabbed Vito and keep telling Vito, ‘Leave her alone. Leave her alone’…And he started to wrestle with Vito and I got away…I ran home but I collapsed in the driveway.
The next thing the 63-year-old woman remembered was waking up in the hospital.
Romano Vuocolo told the court that once during his son’s attack on him and his wife, he almost collapsed.
Romano Vuocolo: He [Vito] turned around and he stabbed me two or three times in the back…
I had a big stab wound and I felt like fainting and maybe then God gave me back my strength and I recuperated so to speak and I started to run.
He was chasing me.
After twisting out of Mr Durrant’s grip, Vito fled. He jumped a fence, got into his car and raced away. He drove to his mother-in-law’s home in inner-suburban Brunswick—at least a 30 minute drive. He went round the back, let himself in, opened the fridge and helped himself to a beer. When his mother-in-law asked him whether he had been in a car accident he told her: ‘No. I had a fight with Dad’. But he said he couldn’t say over what.
Vito then drove to his nearby Brunswick flat where he was arrested and charged with two counts of attempted murder, as well as alternative counts of intentionally or recklessly causing serious injury. He told police when they asked him about an incident at Mount Waverley, ‘I don’t remember. I’ve got a problem with my memory’. He claimed he had no memory of even going to his father’s Mount Waverley home on the day of the stabbing. He said everything was ‘a complete blank’ after 3 pm.
He might not have been able to remember what he had done, but Vito had left behind a bloodied father and stepmother, not only struggling with painful injuries but battling to understand why he had turned on them, why they had suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives.
Vito’s stepmother had several small stab wounds behind her right ear. She had also been stabbed several times in the back and upper arm. If her injuries had not been treated as quickly as they were, they could have been life-threatening, but the prompt treatment meant there was no danger of death. The cuts to her hands meant she had to have microsurgery to two fingers and a skin graft to her right hand, and would have ongoing gripping difficulties. She was also severely bruised.
Romano Vuocolo had two major stab wounds to his chest, one in his left armpit and three in his back. None of the wounds were life-threatening and the tough-as-nails man was released from hospital the following day.
The couple’s physical injuries may have been amazingly minor, but long after they healed they were still damaged psychologically. They both told Vito’s trial 18 months later, that they were still fearful of the slightest noise at night. Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo wrote of a feeling of loss of independence, and difficulty in concentrating and in making decisions. She also told the court she had withdrawn from social life and took medication for anxiety. Romano Vuocolo told of his distress at how his son’s attack had affected his wife. He said he felt depressed, guilty and confused about it, and told how it had divided his family.
Both Romano and Josephine said that before the attack the only thing out of the ordinary they noticed was that Vito wasn’t speaking with his normal stutter. While they were fighting for their lives, they also noticed something strange about their attacker—besides the fact that it was their son and stepson.
Romano Vuocolo: He was like a zombie…His eyes were like crystal. Like fixed. Not nice.
…
To me it was like looking at the tree that goes from one side to the other and not standing still. Like if you have a strong wind and the trees would be moving from one side to the other.
Barrister: Did you ever say to him, ‘Stop! Stop!’
Romano Vuocolo: Yes. I tried to say words like this. I tried to stop him but he was like a piece of wood.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo also remembered her stepson’s fixed and staring eyes while he stabbed her.
Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo: His eyes…were glassy, sort of.
These ‘glassy eyes’ were stressed and stressed again by Vuocolo’s defence barrister, Tony Lewis, in trying to argue that his client had been acting like a robot at the time he attacked his father and stepmother. He told the jury it would be up to them to decide whether they believed Vuocolo was really ‘behaving in a willed and intended manner’.
Mr Lewis: Or was he simply the victim of the drugs he was taking and the alcohol he’d had very shortly beforehand.
…
Were his actions unwilled or intentional?
Mr Lewis said the mixture of the Sambuca and the drugs Vuocolo was taking for his back pain—including morphine—had been known to ‘induce bizarre and somewhat automatistic behaviour’.
The defence produced a leading psychiatrist—Dr Graham Burrows—who said he believed that when Vuocolo attacked his father and stepmother his actions had not been conscious, voluntary ones, that he had been acting in a ‘dissociative state’. The prosecution hit back with a psychiatrist of its own—Dr Douglas Bell—who said he believed that Vuocolo’s complex series of actions, for example, breaking down the glass door, resuming his attacks, driving the car and finding the second knife, could not have been done in a dissociative, a robotic, state.
Prosecutor Ray Gibson rejected the claim that Vuocolo was acting like a robot.
Mr Gibson: These are not random, purposeless acts. It is directioned behaviour. He is not in a drug-crazed dissociated state, not aware of what he is doing.
…
He runs away gets back into his car, turns the ignition and speeds off…goes all the way to his mother-in-law’s place, walks round the back, opens the fridge, gets a beer and sits down.
…
He says to his daughter—because he has got blood on his tee-shirt, ‘Go inside’.
…
Is it the coffee turning him into this crazed stabbing person? Was the espresso too strong?…It just does not fit commonsense.
Although the prosecution technically doesn’t have to prove motive, in this case the apparently motiveless, out-of–the-blue nature of the crime bolstered the defence claim that their client had not really intended doing what he did, so the prosecution had a stab at it. It claimed Vuocolo had tried to kill his father and stepmother in a boiling over of his long-simmering resentment at them for refusing to help him after he went bankrupt.
Long-simmering is right. The prosecution said the anger Vuocolo felt toward his father and his stepmother, went right back to the death of his mother 18 years earlier. Vuocolo told police he believed his father had bribed a lawyer to have his mother change her will, disinheriting him and his brother. (Vito’s brother, Aldo, told police he believed the real story was that their mother had wanted to change her will in favour of her children but that she could not do so because a brain tumour meant she was not legally mentally capable enough.)
In the late 1980s, father and son fell out again when Vuocolo’s building company went bankrupt and he lost his home. Romano considered his son a failure and the two barely spoke for about four years. Relations were only resumed upon the birth of Vito’s daughter, Maria, in 1992. Grandfather Romano wasn’t going to miss out on his granddaughter. In the 1990s, Vito rebuilt his partly devastated finances with stints as a chef at three of Melbourne’s swankiest Italian restaurants—Vivaldis in the central business district, Café Florentino in bayside Brighton, and Mietta’s in inner-suburban Fitzroy.
By 1998, he thought he had so rebuilt his standing in his father’s eyes that he held hopes Romano would give him one of three Brunswick townhouses he had built, but Romano dashed these hopes by steadfastly refusing. So Vito’s resentment toward his father—and his stepmother who he blamed for his father’s decision—was stoked again.
The next year Vito’s fortunes took another dive when a car accident ended his career as a chef. A few months later, just as he was restarting his plastering career, disaster struck again when he fell down some stairs with a bag of cement.
That back-damaging accident changed a hard-working cheerful person, a man who liked to keep fit, had a black belt in Ninjitsu martial arts and liked going bike riding with his young daughter. After his debilitating accident, Vito needed regular and lots of different types of medication for his back pain, insomnia, anxiety and depression. In the months before attacking his father and stepmother, Vuocolo also turned increasingly to alcohol. He told his wife, ‘I just want to be comfortably numb. I don’t want to feel my pain’.
The prosecution, however, rejected the defence claim that the Sambuca could have reacted with Vito’s extraordinarily strong medication, pointing out that he had told his stepmother, before she poured the Sambuca, that he had not had his medication that day. It also pointed out that his wife had said his medication packet had not been opened that day.
The prosecution claimed that the trigger to Vito’s attack—the thing that fired the inert gunpowder of his hatred of his father and stepmother—was a visit to collect his back-pay from the plastering firm where he had injured his back. He had expected to get $7000, but he only got just under $2000. It was a final insult for which—a few hours later—he would make his father and stepmother pay. At least, that was, according to the prosecution.
It took the jurors two days to make up their minds. In the end they couldn’t quite come up with the traditional unanimous verdict over Vuocolo’s attack on Giuseppina Galiano-Vuocolo. By an eleven-to-one majority they found him guilty of attempting to murder her. Confusingly, they then declared him not guilty of attempting to murder his father, but did find him guilty of intentionally causing him serious injury. Besides blinking hard a few times, the 39-year-old showed no emotion, staring hard ahead.
There were no cheers at the guilty verdicts. Nobody had won.
In November 2003—nearly two years after his strange and scary attack—Vuocolo fronted up to be sentenced. Justice John Coldrey said that while the jurors had clearly rejected his claim to have been acting like a robot when he stabbed his stepmother and father, that did not mean he was his normal self or that he had lied about not being able to remember the attack.
He noted that a psychiatrist had told the court it was very common for people who seriously attacked loved ones to completely block out what they had done to avoid ‘having to confront the horror of what they had done’.
Justice Coldrey: I think it highly probable that, given your cultural background of parental respect, your lack of any detailed recollection of your actions is quite genuine. Moreover, the evidence of your parents certainly suggests that you were in a disturbed state of mind.
The judge told Vuocolo that as a ‘traditionally dutiful Italian eldest son, you repressed your resentment [of your father], and life proceeded in an ostensibly friendly manner’ until his life started to unravel after his back was injured.
Justice Coldrey said the trigger of the attack was more likely to have been Vuocolo’s disappointment at his lower-than-expected back-pay than the Sambuca-laced espresso.
Justice Coldrey: I think it highly probable that for you this constituted the final psychological blow. It was a powerful reminder of your parlous social and financial position which contrasted vividly with that of your parents. It would not be surprising if the resentments you had felt towards them and suppressed over the years resurfaced, driving you to commit the acts of violence which bring you to this court.
…
The assaults…were persistent and prolonged. You attacked Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo on three separate occasions, being hampered on two of them by your father and restrained on the third by Mr Durrant…The jury found that you had the intention to kill her.
Insofar as your father…is concerned the jury has clearly entertained a doubt about whether you intended to kill him. This may well be because your initial attacks on him occurred when he attempted to frustrate your assault upon Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo and because subsequently having chased him from the scene, you appeared to have left him alone before turning your attentions once again to Mrs Galiano-Vuocolo.
The judge said he accepted that Vuocolo was deeply remorseful for what he had done, for the pain and suffering he had caused his father and stepmother. He noted that Vuocolo was a model prisoner who counselled others and that he was making a determined effort to rehabilitate himself.
Justice Coldrey: This is a distressing case. It is, of course, extremely sad for your parents and the physical and psychological pain they have suffered is patent, but it is also sad for you. It is impossible not to be moved by the unravelling of your life from model family man, worker and athlete to violent offender. In my view, this is a case where justice may, to some extent, be tempered by mercy.
Mr Vuocolo. For the attempted murder of Giuseppina Galiano-Vuocolo you are sentenced to be imprisoned for eight years. For the offence of intentionally causing serious injury to Romano Vuocolo, you are sentenced to be imprisoned for five years.
I direct that two years of the second sentence be served cumulatively with the first in a total effective sentence of 10 years. I fix a lower-than-normal non-parole period of five years.
Unlike in most Supreme Court sentencings, those weeping loudest at the jailing of their loved one were the victims.