Eileen Creamer was a woman torn: torn between love and loathing. Her husband, David, liked having sex with other women, sometimes in front of her. He wanted Eileen to have sex with other men so he could watch. He really liked the idea of threesomes. David was a sex maniac who, according to Eileen, treated her like a ‘dog’. But she couldn’t help but love him. To try to salvage her marriage, Eileen enlisted the help of internet psychics to place spells on David’s lovers, and his former wife. They were the actions of a desperate woman. It was alleged Eileen Creamer, a fifty-one-year-old woman ‘of small stature’, murdered David. It was a brutal killing. Blood was left smeared and spattered all around their Moe home—in the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen and out in the courtyard. David Creamer suffered numerous blunt-force injuries to his head and a stab wound to the upper abdomen, the knife ravaging his stomach and liver, causing massive internal bleeding. Was it a crime of jealousy, passion or defensive homicide? At Eileen Creamer’s Supreme Court murder trial, defence counsel Jane Dixon, SC, said the killing was a case about ‘human behaviour’.
‘You need to get inside the skin of Mrs Creamer to understand her motivations and what would drive a person to physically attack her husband,’ Dixon told the jury. ‘You might need to know something of her prior background and the pressures affecting her in February of 2008.’
Born in Durban, South Africa, on 1 September 1957, Eileen spent her childhood growing up in a small town called Matatiele. Her father died when she was three, and the family moved in with relatives.
‘My mother wasn’t coping and she started drinking,’ Eileen recounted in court. ‘She couldn’t take care of us.’
After primary school, Eileen was sent to boarding school in the nearby township of Flagstaff until her aunt intervened and brought her back to Durban. She completed high school in a place called Pietermaritzburg. It was there she met David Creamer. He was classed a ‘coloured’ boy, according to the racial classifications of the ruling apartheid regime. Eileen was classified as the same, as her dad was white and her mother black.
‘We started dating from high school … I always loved David from school and I think he felt the same way about me as well,’ she said.
David, who spent two years in Bible school at Cape Town studying to become a minister, came from a strict Pentecostal background. He urged Eileen to go to church with him. She came from a Catholic upbringing. The religious differences caused tensions.
‘I wasn’t comfortable in his church,’ Eileen told the jury during her Supreme Court murder trial.
Because of the religious backgrounds we were constantly getting into arguments. I was allowed to go dancing and I started drinking then because I was working. David wasn’t allowed to go dancing. All his family did was go to church. I did try and go to a couple of church services with him and youth groups with him, but it was just a totally different background to the Catholic religion.
Eileen was only nineteen when she tied the knot—not with David but a man named Aaron Butka. They had two children—son Elton and daughter Candice. It was alleged Butka drank a lot, and mistreated Eileen.
‘We got divorced after that,’ she said in court.
Eileen bought her own home and lived there with her children. In a bizarre move, she allowed Butka to move in ‘for the kids’ sake’. It wasn’t long before David Creamer came back into her life. He reappeared through a surprise phone call during which he inquired how married life was going. She told him hers was over.
‘He told me that his marriage was on the rocks as well and he wanted to meet up with me.’
David had married a woman named Lynn but separated in 1994. They had two sons, Dale and Lyle. Eileen met up with David in Pietermaritzburg only weeks after his phone call, and they resumed a relationship.
It was very passionate because David made it clear to me that his marriage was on the rocks and that he still loved me. And I still loved him from school days … It was good because he wasn’t as religious as he was in his teenage years.
David admitted he loved the ladies, and admitted to an affair he had with a dance partner after choosing to be with Eileen. Eileen explained:
David was always a ladies’ man. We spoke about it and he apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again. And I believed him … He said to me that he would pick her up from her home and drop her off after dancing and one time she invited him in and things just got out of control … I did suspect that there were other women but I had no proof of it.
Once David’s divorce was finalised, he and Eileen married and bought a house in Pietermaritzburg. David received mixed reviews from Eileen’s children.
‘David got on very well with Candice,’ Eileen explained in court. ‘Elton wouldn’t give him the time of day. Elton never liked David from the word go.’
His former wife was also proving a thorn. It was a case of ‘show me the money’, apparently.
‘Every anniversary of his divorce, he was dragged through the courts for more money,’ Eileen told the Supreme Court. ‘David just couldn’t take it in the end.’
As a result he suggested they emigrate. New Zealand appealed as a destination and they sold up. David travelled there first to find a job and a rental property. Eileen and daughter Candice followed about eight months later. They all lived in a suburb called Tauranga. (Elton had decided to stay in South Africa with his biological father.) For work, Eileen did some fruit picking and worked as a hotel cleaner before gaining full-time employment in Auckland in credit management. That job saw her up at 4.30 am each Monday morning. To avoid the alarm clock she would stay in Auckland for the remaining working week and return home on Friday evenings. On the weekends she worked as a supermarket hand. Well settled, and believing rent money is dead money, the couple bought a home.
‘We had a good marriage in New Zealand,’ Eileen told the jury. ‘We had a good life. We earned good money. Everything was fine. I loved my job. I had lots of friends.’
While a humble suburban home life suited Eileen, it left David restless and bored. As a consequence he started to stray. Again.
‘He started going out often and I used to get left to clean up the house and do all the washing and ironing and all the other stuff—and I still worked over the weekends,’ Eileen said in court.
And then I started suspecting that he was having affairs and I asked him about it and he didn’t hide it. He was just amazed at all the white women that he could get in New Zealand because it wasn’t something that he could get in South Africa. Because of the apartheid years in South Africa … David wouldn’t mix with white people [for some time] and when we got to New Zealand it was just a whole new world for him.
According to Eileen, David would become angry and accuse her of nagging him if she asked too many questions. He suggested she start communicating with people on the internet.
‘He started going on the internet as well. He said to me it was fun and I had to have some fun in my life and experiment.’
Eileen became lonely at home on the weekends.
As I walked in the door [having arrived home from work on Fridays] David would leave, going dancing or going out to meet somebody. And in the end I just got really lonely so he set up a profile for me on the internet. And I started meeting people as well.
Eileen was drinking up to two casks of wine each weekend while David was out ‘dancing’. It was during this period she started dating another man. That man cannot be named due to a court suppression order, so we shall call him Robert. He and Eileen met on a dating website in 2003. Her username was ‘Can you spoil me’.
‘We started talking over the internet and it was made very clear right from the beginning what Eileen wanted,’ Robert told the Supreme Court. ‘She was just after physical intimacy and nothing more.’
Robert knew Eileen was married. It didn’t seem to bother him. To him, Eileen came across as a proud mother and a sharply dressed workaholic who ‘always took pride in her appearance’. He told the murder trial:
She just said that her husband was either away on business all the time or when he came home from business he basically used to go out dancing and she would be left at home by herself and that she just wanted some intimacy—and that’s all it was.
Of Eileen’s character, he said: ‘She seemed conservative, yes.’
Robert lived some two hours away from Eileen but travelled a lot for business. He started making regular detours. Their first liaison was a dinner date. On their second meeting they had sex in a hotel room. David Creamer contacted Robert after that rendezvous. Theirs was certainly an odd conversation. Robert said in court:
He just said that he was aware of us meeting and that he didn’t want me to lead his wife up the garden path and that he was basically okay with me coming down and seeing her … I just said that, you know, ‘If you took care of your wife more you wouldn’t be in this situation,’ and he just acknowledged that. There was no angry tone in his voice. He sounded an absolute gentleman on the phone … It was quite bizarre. I was shocked.
On another occasion Robert met David face to face. That happened after he picked Eileen up from work one lunch time and drove her to a marina at Mount Maunganui. David had tailed them and pulled up behind them. Robert described what happened to the court:
I basically got out of the car thinking, ‘Oh, here we go, something’s going to happen.’ But he was very much a gentleman … Very quiet spoken. Put his hand out to shake my hand. Basically he said, ‘Hi, how are you? You guys have a lovely lunch.’
Robert said Eileen never spoke ill of David.
‘Never mentioned to me in any form whatsoever that he was ever violent towards her,’ he confirmed in the Supreme Court. ‘In our times of intimacy I never saw any marks or bruises.’
Robert’s work took him from New Zealand to Australia several times during his affair with Eileen. She went with him to Sydney on a couple of occasions. On one trip she took a naked photo of him as he lay on a bed unaware. Robert demanded she destroy it. She refused to do so. In court, Robert was asked if Eileen ever complained about her husband’s ‘sexual preferences’.
‘Never,’ Robert answered.
According to Eileen, it was obvious David Creamer was encouraging her to have affairs.
‘To David it was like I had to prove to him that other men found me attractive for him to find me sexually attractive,’ Eileen explained in court.
When I started seeing Robert, [David would] always want to find out what we talked about; what happened … David always wanted to know the sexual details … He presumed that there was sex and he always said to me that I must talk openly about it because it would make him horny.
David was constantly checking Eileen’s website profile for new contacts. He was, meanwhile, very open about his own sexual conquests.
‘He never hid anything from me,’ Eileen told the jury.
David was quite open and frank and he would always want to show me the text messages that he was getting from these women. How they were chasing him. And he just felt that it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He had all these white women chasing after him wanting to have sex with him. And he thought I’d be interested in knowing all the ‘ins and outs’ but I would just brush it off.
David was apparently ‘quite explicit’ about the sex he was having with other women and what tricks they would perform and allow him to do in return.
‘He always wanted me to be the same,’ Eileen told the court. ‘He said I was boring.’
To alleviate that boredom, David proposed some group sex. Eileen was not comfortable with the idea:
David kept on insisting that we meet other couples for group sex or threesomes and I would get angry with David and tell him that that wasn’t what I wanted. And then he’d get angry with me—give me the silent treatment and he would just get really nasty with me.
David took his fantasy to ‘sextraordinary’ levels by taking Eileen to an Auckland swingers’ bar where anything and everything was apparently permissible. David had sex with another woman in front of Eileen. She left the room and sat by the bar as he finished.
‘He was angry because I didn’t sit through it and watch, and he basically hauled me out of there,’ Eileen said in evidence. ‘He was really angry with me. He said that he wanted me to watch; that it wasn’t that bad, so that I could do the same for him.’
To try to appease her husband, Eileen went with him to meet other men over drinks and dinners.
‘I just preferred to keep it [an extra-marital affair] with [Robert],’ she told the court. ‘He was a good man. He treated me well. I didn’t have to pretend I was something that I wasn’t in front of [him]. He had a lot of respect for me.’
According to Eileen’s evidence, David was ‘happy’ that she was seeing the other man but became annoyed when it appeared that she was sticking to just the one. ‘He wanted me to meet up with other men and not just [Robert],’ she said.
The problem was Eileen Creamer still loved her husband despite his proclivity for lady hopping. ‘It wasn’t always bad [with David],’ she told the court. ‘When he did treat me good it was special and I always believed that some day David would calm down and lead a normal married life.’
But it was like living with Doctor Jekyll and Mr Snide. ‘One day he could be really nice. The next day he could be really nasty. And I just never knew what to expect from one day to the next. But I always believed that David would change.’
She told the jury that she carried a silent burden. ‘There was no way I could tell my family what was going on and I never burdened my kids with stuff like that.’
Eileen started receiving queries from neighbours about all the different women David was seen to be bringing home. It was a close-knit suburb, after all. She explained them away by saying they were David’s dancing partners. There was Gladys. And the woman we will call Melissa.
‘A whole lot of women,’ Eileen confirmed in court. ‘He would always tell them that he was either separated or divorcing me, because he said that if he told them that he was married no-one would be interested in him.’
David continued to show Eileen emails and text messages sent from his lovers. He told her that mistress Melissa gave up her job and moved house to be closer to him. He spent weekends with Melissa, but she yearned for more.
In an effort to try to frighten Melissa away, Eileen embarked on a harassment campaign. It involved abusive phone calls, text messages and letters slipped in Melissa’s letter box. One envelope contained a torn-up photo of Melissa.
I did that because David would come home complaining to me about [Melissa] with all the commitments that she wanted and I said to him, ‘Well, why don’t you tell her that you’re married?’ He would always have an excuse, so I just wanted [Melissa] to know that David was married and that I was still a wife to him.
A mechanical engineer, David began to chase work in Australia. There was good money to be made across the Tasman.
‘He left New Zealand, as far as I know, to get away from [Melissa] because she wanted a commitment from him and he wasn’t prepared to,’ Eileen explained in court.
He did a lot of [nine-to-five] work up in Auckland but when that dried up and jobs came to Australia, he took the jobs … He said it was great, he was getting good money and it was a lovely country to come to.
David left New Zealand for a permanent move to Australia—Melbourne to be exact—in April 2006. He found a place to live in trendy South Yarra: a cosmopolitan inner-city suburb known for its cafes and vibrant night-life. It wasn’t long before he struck up yet another affair. We shall call that woman Helen to protect her identity. Eileen remained in New Zealand. In mid 2006 she took work leave and travelled to Melbourne and stayed with David for a couple of weeks. She said they had a good time together, eating out at restaurants and riding the city’s tram system. During her stay, Eileen said, David again tried to entice her into seedy sexual situations. Eileen explained in court:
One day he said to me I should get dressed nicely, we were going out for the evening. We went to a bar across from Flinders Street station and when we got there we met another couple that David was corresponding with on the internet.
It soon became obvious to Eileen that David was trying to drum up some good old-fashioned group sex.
‘David spoke about it. We left that evening and they wanted us to come over to their house the next weekend, but we couldn’t because I was leaving back for New Zealand,’ Eileen said.
David returned to New Zealand for a visit in September 2006. ‘There was nothing wrong with that visit,’ Eileen said in court. ‘David was still in my bed.’
According to Eileen, David phoned her often from Melbourne saying he was lonely and that he had no-one to talk to. She said he begged her to pack up and come to live in Melbourne with him as soon as possible.
‘So that we could start a new life,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t too sure because I knew I was doing well in New Zealand and I was just sick and tired of David’s games … I didn’t want to leave New Zealand.’
Eileen told the jury she received a letter from David’s lawyer regarding their marriage. It contained a threat of divorce.
It shocked me because I didn’t know there was any divorce or separation pending. But I knew that when I got that letter that it was David’s way of saying to me it’s either you pick up your bags and come to Australia or I’m going to leave you … I realised that I still wanted the marriage to David.
Barrister Jane Dixon would ask Eileen of her suspicions about further affairs.
DIXON: At the time that you were taking steps to arrange to come to Australia, did you know that he was in a relationship with [a woman named Helen]?
EILEEN: No. I did suspect though because some days I would get hold of him and some days his phone wouldn’t be available.
In March 2007, David paid Eileen a surprise visit in New Zealand. According to her evidence, he became angry upon discovering that she had changed the house locks. She told the jury that after breaking his way inside he forced himself upon her. Eileen told the jury that the sex was painful.
‘Every time David forced himself to have sex with me and I would complain, he said I was his wife and he could do whatever he wanted to do with me. So I just didn’t go to the police station.’
Despite the rough sex, Eileen had made up her mind. She was going to make the move to Melbourne for the sake of their marriage.
‘He was hot and cold all the time … and I still loved him no matter what,’ she said in court. ‘I thought I would give this another go because he also said that coming to Australia, a town where nobody knew us … it was giving us a chance at our marriage.’
David Creamer was either very, very smooth or Eileen Creamer was very, very gullible. After handing in her resignation she informed David of her decision. He told her, via email, that he had changed his mind and did not want her in Melbourne. She informed him that it was too late—she had already resigned.
Eileen arrived in Melbourne in May 2007 for a preliminary visit. She stayed with relatives in the south-eastern suburb of Noble Park. She quickly found a job working in retail. At that stage, David had moved from inner Melbourne due to work changes and was boarding with a lady in the semi-rural town of Traralgon. David told Eileen that she could not stay there with him. Instead, he asked Eileen to move into a house with him. For Eileen, that meant a lot of train travel to and from work. She accepted the deal nevertheless. At some point David had given her his old mobile telephone—as he had purchased a new one. The phone held many secrets.
‘David hadn’t deleted the messages on the phone,’ Eileen said in court. ‘They were from [Helen], probably from [Melissa] and there were a few other names I didn’t know. Deanna. Julie.’ Eileen didn’t ask about the romantic messages, at first. ‘I knew it would start an argument so I just read them.’
One, dated 18 October 2006, read:
Hi David, I am happy today despite no message from you. Ha ha. Never mind, I am fully aware you may not have an opportunity for a chat. (I do hope you have at least had a romantic thought about us.) Are we going to explore the possibility of a real connection? Do you feel inspired? I do. [Helen]. XXX
Another, dated 21 October, stated: ‘Want to exhaust you. Take care. XXX Dede.’
According to Eileen: ‘He always said it was the women who were chasing him; they couldn’t get enough of him … He wasn’t the one chasing them.’
Eileen did finally ask about the messages one night when David stayed at Noble Park. ‘That’s when he told me about [Helen] and the other woman that he was seeing.’
It seemed [Helen] was a serious flame.
‘David would leave [Helen’s] house after a weekend and come back to Noble Park and want to have sex with me,’ Eileen told the jury. ‘David would always send me a message when he left [Helen]’s house to tell me to open the door and make sure that I had no panties on because he needed a fuck.’
Despite this, according to Eileen, ‘David promised me that he was going to break off with [Helen] when she went [on a planned trip] to Germany,’ and that he would stop ‘all his fooling around’ and give the marriage ‘a go’.
They should have gone their separate ways.
Eileen returned to New Zealand and packed up her belongings. David also returned to New Zealand for a work commitment, and the two spent a night together at a motel. They had sex, Eileen said. They then flew to Melbourne and started afresh in a new home in Traralgon, in Victoria’s south-east. Or at least that’s what Eileen thought.
In July 2007, a war of words exploded between Eileen and Helen via email. Helen responded to one particular message. ‘Eileen, do not forward me any further e-mails or set foot on my property again. David does not love you. Nor does he wish to have any kind of future with you.’
Eileen responded with:
Are you trying to threaten me? Don’t go there. You don’t know me. David is my husband and you’re a slut sleeping with him. He brought me to your house, you little whore, take a long look in the mirror. Who are you trying to destroy? My family. But wait and see. He’s using you and you can’t see it. Ask him about the other females he’s screwing. Did he tell you? David showed me where you’re staying. Remember, I’m living with him and, yes, we have made love since then no matter what he’s telling you, stupid. He has a future with me, not with you in it. Find your own. Don’t threaten me. Eileen.
Eileen said that while Helen was on her holiday in Germany, she and David had ‘the best five or six weeks that we had ever had in Melbourne’.
‘We did everything together,’ Eileen told the jury. ‘Even David commented and said that he was just so much more relaxed and it was definitely over between him and [Helen].’
But when Helen returned, David collected her from the airport. Eileen gave his reasoning in court: ‘He said he felt bad to leave her stranded there because her plane was arriving at an unearthly hour.’
Eileen ended up driving David halfway to Melbourne Airport. She spent the night at her relative’s house in Noble Park and let David go on to the airport on his own. He turned his phone off and went AWOL.
‘David said to me that he was finishing off with [Helen], collecting all his stuff and I must wait for him,’ Eileen recounted in court. ‘I waited in Noble Park and I waited, and I never heard anything.’
Eileen called David’s phone. It went to his voicemail. She looked up Helen’s number in the phone book and tried that too. In the end she caught a train and knocked on Helen’s door. David answered. Eileen told the court, ‘David just said to me that he wasn’t coming home with me that [Saturday] night and I didn’t say anything further. I just turned and walked away.’
With tail between her legs Eileen rode a train all the way home to Traralgon on her own. It was a long and lonely trip.
It was around this time that she turned to the internet for help. US-based psychics, she figured, would prove valuable allies.
‘I was just so tired of not knowing what was going on,’ she said. ‘Every time I spoke to David he gave me a different story.’
By late 2007 Eileen felt trapped and isolated in Traralgon. She had no real friends or close family.
‘I was on my own. I was left alone on weekends.’
As a reminder for Eileen, David took a photo of his penis with her phone.
He said that I should keep the picture so that I would always remember it … I had to have pictures of him on my phone and I wasn’t allowed to delete them … As much as he said that I wasn’t fit or I was lazy or despicable to sleep with, he came to my bed when he had nobody else.
And he still harboured the group sex dream. Eileen said she remained not interested.
I made him know that I wasn’t comfortable with it. I kept on telling him that. But he would get angry with me and say that I never ever wanted to make him happy. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to bring men over for me to have sex with while he watched. And I said to him I wasn’t going to do that.
David also had a porn fixation. ‘He loved watching blue movies,’ Eileen told the jury.
He had lots of pornographic magazines … He used to say to me that I should watch more blue movies to get me in the mood and I would be more fun. And the things David wanted me to do I just wouldn’t do to him—with him or anybody else. And that always ended up in arguments. And he started getting on to the swingers sites, contacting men to come over. And then he wanted us to go to the parties as well.
David became abusive when Eileen—who was drinking heavily—refused to play the sex games.
‘I was alone at home. I had nothing to do,’ she said. ‘I would clean up the house and yes, I started drinking … David used to get angry and compare me to his mother.’
Amid her time of turmoil, Eileen searched through personal ads in the local newspaper in the hope of finding a secret male companion. ‘I was looking for somebody that I could go somewhere with over weekends … and just be friends with,’ she explained in court.
I was so lonely at home. I had nobody. I was isolated. I had no transport. I just had nobody that I could talk to … David always made out that I wasn’t attractive anymore. He basically made me feel like I had passed my use-by date.
Eileen met up with a couple of blokes and had a coffee or a wine with them. She had several men listed as women in her phone to hide their existence. Some of the blokes only knew her as Louise.
‘I think I met [a Mr Hooper] twice but he was too old and nothing happened,’ she said.
In September 2007 she found ‘John’. John scored the code name ‘Claire’ on Eileen’s phone. Like Robert, he cannot be named.
‘[John] and I decided that we were going to see each other,’ Eileen admitted in court. ‘I didn’t even tell David that I was seeing [John] because David was always away. He had no idea that I was seeing anybody.’
The relationship between Eileen and David remained a tortured and dysfunctional one. Eileen said she was growing scared.
I was petrified because David … would bring people to the house that we didn’t even know and I was always scared of what would happen with these people when he wasn’t there. I got to the stage in Traralgon where I bought a chain and a padlock for the gate. When David would go I would go outside and padlock the gate closed … I had no control over the situation. The more I told David how I felt it didn’t seem to bother him.
David kept pushing for group sex. At one point in October 2007, he contacted a hotmail group called Party Insatiable in his effort to broker what Jane Dixon described as a ‘gang bang’. This is part of an email he received from Party Insatiable.
The best thing is to have a look at our website which will give you a clear picture of what our parties are about/total hardcore gangbangs for women who enjoy the attentions of multiple men in a total group scenario (one open play room). On the party page the scrolling text at the top of the page links to party reviews which give a vivid description of what goes on at Insatiable.
The planned orgy party was cancelled due to a lack of willing women.
Eileen said she was relieved. ‘If I ever stood up to David and said no, there were always consequences,’ she said in court.
David never ever stopped at the couples thing. The threesomes thing: it seemed like that’s all that he wanted from me. He couldn’t take me out to a normal place … He would get angry with me. He wouldn’t talk to me for days. Some days he would just pretend that I wasn’t even there …
Eileen’s anti-Helen campaign continued. Around October 2007 she sent a used condom to Helen’s workplace with the message: ‘Just to let you know how good last night was with David. Sorry you’re not women [sic] enough for him. Ha ha ha ha.’
Eileen also speared off an email to David. It read in part:
I just want to ask you to please share accommodation with me for the next nine months. I will stay out of your way. You won’t even know that I’m around David. Following the next nine months I will leave you to your happiness, David, as I’ve tried to make conversation with you and you can barely open your mouth to me. So, yes, I think I’ve tried my best and you’re just not interested. As I said, David, I didn’t come to Australia for a job—I had that in New Zealand. I came here to try and salvage what was left of or marriage.
I want to thank you for the years that you and I have had together. I just want you to know that you’ve been a great husband and friend to me and I’ll always treasure the memories—yes, the good and the bad or hard times that we went through because we both certainly did have some trying times, especially after your divorce but somehow we managed to survive those and we came out whole. Guess that’s because we both wanted to. And now I’m trying my level best to make us come out whole again but I’m not winning because I’m trying all on my own. I don’t have you trying with me. Love always, Eileen.
But still she stayed. Homicide detective Allan Birch later asked Eileen why.
‘I loved David from when we were at school,’ she told Birch during a record of interview. ‘I just don’t know why he was never happy. He was happy with me at the beginning but in the end it was all just sex. We were good together before he got on to this internet.’
BIRCH: Why didn’t you leave David?
EILEEN: Where was I going to go? At least I had my own home with David.
BIRCH: Do you think he treated you appallingly?
EILEEN: He treated me like a dog … I loved David. He had no idea how much I loved him.
BIRCH: Did he show you the same love in the end?
EILEEN: No.
BIRCH: Did he show it to other ladies?
EILEEN: Yeah.
To help turn the tide and defeat her competition, Eileen went back to the internet mystics. She contacted a woman calling herself ‘Psychic Ma’ who cast a spell on Helen. It seemed to work. David began to talk about moving with Eileen to the nearby township of Moe. Then, in December 2007, Eileen and David took a trip back to their homeland together. Eileen’s son was getting married, and David wanted to see his former wife and his two sons. Jane Dixon examined Eileen about the trip.
DIXON: And at that stage did you believe that he was nursing fond feelings or romantic feelings for his ex-wife Lynn?
EILEEN: No … David said that he would have to do whatever he could to see his kids with Lynn, and I just said to him, ‘Well, do what you have to do. You have to see your boys.’
DIXON: What about Helen? Did you understand that his relationship with her was still continuing when he was planning to come to South Africa with you and planning to move into the unit at Moe with you?
EILEEN: As far as I knew David was over with [Helen].
DIXON: So what were you hoping for at that time?
EILEEN: I was hoping that David would finally calm down and just stay at home and we would have a normal relationship.
According to Eileen, she and David enjoyed each other’s company at her son’s wedding and shared the same bed that evening. The following day David met up with his former wife.
Eileen unsuccessfully tried to contact David over the next few days. ‘I had no idea where he was.’
Due to work commitments, Eileen had to return home. She collected David from Melbourne Airport upon his return from South Africa on 10 January. He spoke fondly of the time he’d spent with his sons and ex-wife. He also spoke about money problems. During the trip he’d maxed out his $10,000 credit card. Eileen sent a new message to another internet psychic. This request concerned David’s ex-wife, whom he now seemed to be yearning for. Eileen’s message to the psychic read: ‘Hi, having problems with my husband at the moment. He wants to go back to his first wife and I love him too much to let him go. Please can you help me keep him. What is your cost?’
In late January 2008 Eileen caught David posting a lewd photo of her on a sex website. The photo only showed her torso and legs. Her face was cut off the picture.
‘David was back into the group sex thing and the threesomes,’ Eileen told the jury. She demanded he remove the image.
‘We got into an argument but eventually he huffed and puffed and said, “Okay, I’ll take the photo off.”’
DIXON: Did you believe that he had removed everything or what was your state of mind about what David was doing and what he had in mind for you?
EILEEN: I knew that David still had profiles on the internet. I knew he had an active one, and to get into the couples’ thing and threesomes you have to have both parties having a profile. I didn’t put any profile of myself on the internet but I did suspect that David had put one up of me with him.
On 2 February Eileen contacted ‘Psychic Ma’ again.
Hi Ma, thanks so much for your help. Last time it worked wonders but now I need your help again for another spell. Over Christmas my husband and I went to South Africa and he met with his ex-wife whom he had not seen or spoken to in thirteen years and now that we are back in Australia he has changed. He ignores me and is always on the computer talking to her. And now everything she says to him is like gospel. What happened? And he hardly talks to me now. I know she’s done something—to have him change the way he has. Please, please can you reverse this? Please Ma, help me again. Love and regards, Eileen.
Eileen was confused. ‘I didn’t know who he wanted to be with,’ she said in court.
I was good enough for David to have sex with when there was nobody else around and I was also scared about the internet dating thing because I knew he was back on that internet dating stuff with the threesomes and group sex.
Phone records showed that David was contacting his former wife Lynn twice a day via text messages, and was continually calling and emailing her.
Prosecutor Tom Gyorffy told the jury that Eileen had ample motive for murder.
By February 2008, Eileen Creamer knew the relationship [with David] was over. She was not going to keep David Creamer from his first wife and children. She wasn’t prepared to accept that. The Crown says that’s the motive for her to kill him.
On the night before Eileen killed her husband at their Moe home, she spent the night at the Quest apartments in Melbourne with her gentleman friend John. She did not arrive back in Moe on the train until the Saturday afternoon. David demanded to know where she had been.
‘I was hoping that he wouldn’t be home that weekend,’ she said.
While downing a glass of wine she told him she’d spent the night with girls from work. David didn’t believe her. ‘I could see it was getting out of hand,’ Eileen said in evidence.
I asked David if I could use the car because I needed to go and get some stuff in town. I needed to go to the butcher, and get my scripts [filled at the chemist shop] and David told me I should walk. So I just took my wallet and I walked out of the house.
She claimed in court that when she got home David was standing outside the back door talking to two strange men. She claimed she could not hear what they were discussing. After they left, according to Eileen, David became all friendly towards her.
I asked him why and he said to me because he had a surprise for me for the evening. I asked him who the two men were and he just said that I mustn’t worry— he had a nice surprise for me for that night. And I said to him if he thinks I was going to have sex with those two men I wasn’t going to do it … David poured me another drink of wine because he said he needed to put me into the mood.
Eileen said David took the wine away when she told him there would be no gang-banging involving her. She said he called her a drunken whore, a bitch and a cunt.
I argued with him because I thought I’m not going to have sex with these men. And he carried on swearing. I don’t know how long he swore at me because then he started pinching me as well, and he smacked me across the face … David always pinched me. He’d give me a few smacks in the face as well but he always pinched me. He pinched me under my arms. I always had blue arms—blue marks under my arms and in between my legs and my thighs.
Eileen told the jury that David’s tirade eventually tapered off and she fell asleep on the couch. She said she awoke with David standing over her while brandishing an African tribal club referred to as a knobkerrie.
‘He hit me on my vagina,’ she told the jury. ‘I fell off the couch and asked him what he thought he was doing by hitting me. I went into the kitchen and he carried on abusing me and swearing at me. And hitting me.’
Eileen said she took refuge in her bedroom, and David stormed from the house with a bottle of wine under his arm. Eileen said she didn’t see him until the next morning— Sunday, 3 February 2008—when the atmosphere in the house was ‘really tense’. The jury was told David smothered her head with semen-stained bedsheets and demanded that she smell them. He made wild accusations about Eileen and read aloud saucy text messages from his lovers.
He kept on asking me who had a bigger penis … He just wouldn’t stop … calling me all the names under the sun. I went outside to sit on the garden furniture. I tried reading a book. He grabbed the book out of my hands. Every time I went inside he was behind me. It just carried on all morning. All afternoon.
According to Eileen, she resorted to doing some cleaning and was wiping David’s ensuite shower when he called her a ‘half-caste white bastard’. The jury heard that was the final straw.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Eileen said in evidence. ‘I snapped. I thought he was coming towards me and I had nowhere to go because I was stuck in the shower in the bathroom.’
She said she managed to grab the knobkerrie in David’s room and began to hit him.
I lost all my control. David screamed at me and asked me what the fuck I was doing lifting my hands to him. And I just carried on hitting him … I tried running out the back door. He followed me and we rolled around in the back. And then we went back inside. I tried to run out the front door. David got to the door first and he slammed the door shut.
Eileen claimed that David then came at her with a knife.
He got on top of me on the bed. He smacked me up. And then he tried to put his penis in my mouth. And when I wouldn’t open my mouth he said to me he was going to piss on me and when he was finished pissing on me he was going to finish me off once and for all.
At that stage, Eileen said, the knife was on the bedside table.
‘I couldn’t get David off me. Then I heard him saying that I’d knocked him in the balls. He lifted his weight off me. And I think that’s when I grabbed the knife and I must have stabbed him.’
Outside, Eileen threw the blade and the knobkerrie into a clutch of trees next to a nearby school oval. Upon her return home much later, she said, the home was in darkness. ‘David’s door was closed. I thought he was sleeping. I showered and I was just so tired. I went and I got into bed.’
Eileen told the jury that she awoke on the Monday morning and went to David’s room to ask him to drive her to the station. ‘I didn’t think David was dead,’ she said in evidence.
She found him lying at the foot of his bed. ‘I tried waking him up. He wouldn’t wake up. I tried washing his face. I smacked him a little bit. David wouldn’t wake up. I didn’t know David was dead until that morning when I opened the door.’
Eileen ran to a neighbouring home and hammered on the door. It was about 5 am on Monday, 4 February.
‘This woman was saying that she thinks somebody has broken in and she can’t wake her husband up and to call for the police,’ neighbour Mary Parnaby recalled in the Supreme Court.’
Of playing dumb and pretending to know nothing of the bloody killing, Eileen admitted in court: ‘I was scared. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. And I was ashamed of what was going on in the house. I didn’t want anybody to know.’
Police units arrived at the bloodbath.
‘I could see clearly down the corridor and there was blood basically all over the corridor floor and all over the side of the walls,’ Detective Senior Constable Stephen Cook told the trial.
I noticed that he [the victim] had extensive trauma to his head. There appeared to be a puncture wound to his abdomen and also what appeared to be a bite mark and bruising to his right side. The room was literally covered in blood. There was blood all over the carpet, the floors, over the bed, over the walls. The ensuite area was covered in blood also … In the kitchen living area, there was a heap of blood throughout there as well.
After she was arrested, Eileen denied killing her husband. ‘The alarm went off and I got up and I saw all the blood in the passage and that’s when I ran outside and went to the neighbour,’ she told Detective Sergeant Birch.
Homicide detectives gathered forensic evidence and statements. They charged Eileen with murder.
During the trial, Dixon asked Eileen what she intended to do when she hit David with the knobkerrie.
‘I didn’t intend to hurt David,’ Eileen replied. ‘I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. But I just wasn’t going to get another hiding. David kept on threatening me. I snapped. I just lost control.’
Defence witness clinical psychologist Jeffrey Cummins told the jury he believed Eileen was living in an ‘abusive relationship’.
‘She said her husband actively encouraged her to date other men and repeatedly requested she bring other men home so he could witness her having sexual intercourse with other males,’ Cummins said.
DIXON: In terms of the issue of Mr Creamer wanting her to participate in the swingers’ scene or some sort of group sex episode, how significant did you consider that aspect of the dynamics of their relationship?
CUMMINS: On the basis of what Ms Creamer said at interview I regarded that as being of crucial significance. She said she found those issues abhorrent … She provided a history of being verbally abused and intimidated by her husband. She also provided a history which indicated she perceived her husband as being more interpersonally powerful than herself.
Prosecutor Gyorffy told the jury that in order to establish murder, the prosecution had to establish four elements beyond reasonable doubt. Those elements were that Eileen caused David Creamer’s death; that her actions were conscious, voluntary and deliberate; that she either intended to kill or cause really serious injury; and that she killed him without lawful justification or excuse. He made mention of the nature of the attack.
‘The Crown relies on the sheer ferocity of this attack which extends from one end of the house to the other,’ Gyorffy said. ‘There was no domestic violence in the relationship. That’s what she told the police.’
Jane Dixon told the jury that David Creamer viewed his wife Eileen as a ‘diminished’ commodity.
In order to stay interested in her, she really had to be prepared to go along with some of the kinkier ways of having sex. For example, having sex with other men is what he wanted her to do for his titillation … Apparently her value was in the lower parts of her body.
This marriage was sick in more ways than one … [and] bound to end in wrack and ruin. Eileen Creamer was really living on the edge … The defence say family violence or domestic violence—it’s not just about battering people. It can be about sexual abuse, psychological or emotional abuse or other things.
During his preliminary directions, Justice Paul Coghlan told the jury that they would have to determine whether Eileen ‘did not believe that it was necessary to act in the way that she did to defend herself against the threat of death or really serious injury which she thought she faced at the time’.
‘You will have to consider the circumstances as she perceived them to be at the time she killed her husband,’ Coghlan said in part.
The question here is what Eileen Creamer believed was necessary in the circumstances … If you decided she was not guilty of murder, because she was acting in self-defence, you must consider whether she is guilty of defensive homicide and I will explain that offence to you. The law is that people who kill in the belief that what they’re doing is necessary to defend themselves from death or really serious injury do not commit murder even if their belief is unreasonable. However, if they do not have reasonable grounds for believing that what they are doing is necessary in self-defence, they are guilty of the offence which is known as defensive homicide.
The legal definition of defensive homicide is an oddly complicated one. It is amazing that juries consisting of laymen and women can get their heads around its complexities. Nevertheless, the jury in the Eileen Creamer case acquitted her of murder, instead finding her guilty of defensive homicide. Eileen Creamer became the first Victorian woman to be found guilty of that offence, which was introduced in 2005 to treat female victims of domestic violence with more compassion. Ironically, up until the 2011 verdict, only men charged over killing women had benefited from defensive homicide laws. In sentencing Eileen to a maximum eleven years’ jail with a seven-year minimum, Coghlan said the events leading to David Creamer’s death turned in part on the nature of the couple’s dysfunctional relationship.
‘I am satisfied that you regarded your position as extremely unsatisfactory and the future of your relationship with David Creamer as bleak, and you resented strongly any attempt to engage you in group sex,’ Coghlan said.
The injuries described by [pathologist] Professor Cordner demonstrate that David Creamer was struck a number of blows to the head in what can only be described as a very severe beating, demonstrating that you were out of control. I doubt you actually remember all of the details of what occurred.
In the absence of any finding as to domestic violence, it was inevitable that you be convicted of murder. I will sentence you on the basis that you had been overwhelmed by the whole of the circumstances as they surrounded you and, in particular, by your concern that you were being forced into a sexual scenario which you did not want … You are now fifty-three years of age. You have no prior convictions and your prospects of rehabilitation are good. You are unlikely to re-offend, particularly in this way.
Eileen unsuccessfully appealed against the severity of her sentence.
‘The non-parole period of seven years was, if anything, significantly lower than what might have been expected given the head sentence of eleven years,’ Justice Mark Weinberg said in an August 2012 Court of Appeal judgement. ‘There is nothing to indicate that his Honour failed to give adequate weight to all of the mitigating factors that were present. There is no justification, in my opinion, for interfering with this sentence.’