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Three Strikes and Gone For Good: Justice at last for John Leslie Coombes

Many times on our radio show, Crime File, we have looked at – either individually or collectively – the numerous killers in our history who have committed murder and been sent to prison, only to be released to commit murder again. Those who come immediately to mind are Barry Hadlow, who murdered a kiddie and was released 25 years later to murder another child; Robert Theo Sievers, who served 12 years for the shooting murder of his estranged wife and eight years later stabbed his girlfriend to death with a carving knife; and Eric Thomas Turner, who murdered his girlfriend and her father and after serving 22 years behind bars was released to murder his mother-in-law and his 11-year-old stepson.

But until just recently, only once in our history has anyone ever been found guilty of murder and sent to prison, released, then found guilty of murder again and sent back to prison, and then released again to commit yet another murder. But before we look at this latest case of multiple murder, which has left family and friends of the victim asking why the killer was allowed back on the streets, let’s go back and look at the first landmark case.

Rodney Francis Cameron was born in Kew, Victoria, in 1955. By the time he was a teenager he had a shocking history of attacks on women. The children’s courts said it was only a matter of time before he killed someone. In 1974, 18-year-old Cameron was working as a trainee nurse in the Queen Victoria Nursing Home at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, where he shared a platonic friendship with nursing sister Florence Edith Jackson, who he sexually assaulted and strangled to death in her home.

A week later, 19-year-old bank clerk Francesco Ciliberto picked up Cameron as he was hitchhiking towards Victoria. Cameron bashed Ciliberto with a boulder and then strangled him with a football sock and threw his body off a cliff. Cameron was eventually arrested in Queensland on 21 February 1974, after abducting a mother and daughter. Cameron told arresting detectives he ‘had to kill three’.

Cameron was found guilty of murder and served nine years in New South Wales prisons. When he was released in 1983, he was arrested and taken back to Victoria to face the charge of murdering Francesco Ciliberto. Diagnosed as a ‘psychopath not fit to be in society’, Cameron was sentenced to life, with the recommendation he should remain in jail ‘for the term of his natural life’. In other words, Rodney Cameron should have spent the rest of his life in jail without the possibility of parole. But no. On 12 March 1990, Cameron was released after a successful appeal against the length of his sentence. It was believed he had been fully rehabilitated. He had served just 16 years for the two separate murders.

Ten weeks after he walked free, on the evening of 26 May 1990, Cameron called a lonely hearts program on Melbourne’s radio station 3AW, describing himself as a teetotaller marine biologist from Castlemaine. He added that he was a Gemini who played squash and basketball, had no hang-ups and was searching for a soul mate ‘willing to share his happiness and enjoy a good, quiet life’. Maria Goeliner was one of the nine women who rang expressing an interest in meeting Cameron.

On 23 June 1990, at the Sky Rider Motor Inn at Katoomba, New South Wales, not far from where Cameron had murdered Edith Jackson 16 years earlier, Maria Goeliner was found strangled. A week after the murder, Cameron, now dubbed ‘the Lonely Hearts Killer’, gave himself up. In sentencing Cameron to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he die in jail, the judge said that only ‘old age or infirmity’ would stop Cameron from carrying out his ‘homicidal desires’. Cameron has since also confessed to the murder of an elderly lady in Sydney.

You would think that authorities may have learnt something from the case of the Lonely Hearts Killer. But apparently not.

John Leslie Coombes was a seriously rotten person. After a dysfunctional childhood, he married in Melbourne in 1975 and had two children. His family were regulars at the local hospital because of his beatings, with his wife suffering broken ribs on several occasions. He shot the family cockatoo because it was squawking and strangled the family cat in front of his kids. He also killed the family’s adored German shepherd, which had followed his daughter everywhere, disembowelled it and hung it on the back fence.

On the night of 16 November 1984, Coombes took a kitchen carving knife to Henry Desmond Kells and violently stabbed him to death as Kells lay unconscious in a drunken stupor after an altercation with Coombes. With his wife Sandra as the main witness against him, Coombes was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of six years. While in jail, Coombes was charged with stealing and escaping from legal custody and given another six months’ imprisonment on each count. He ended up serving 11 years of his life sentence.

While Coombes was in prison police began investigating the suspected murder of Michael Speirani, 20, who was last seen in Coombes’ company and went missing almost a year before he murdered Henry Kells. Released in 1995, in 1998 Coombes was charged with Speirani’s murder, again based on the testimony of his now ex-wife, who told the court that Speirani came to their home to sell his car to Coombes.

To test the car, Speirani, Coombes and another man towed a boat to Port Phillip Bay, where there had been an argument; the two men had thrown Speirani into the water and repeatedly run over him and sliced him up with the boat’s propeller. She said that he told her that they had dragged Speirani’s body to the side of the boat and had sliced it up so that the fish could finish the job. Coombes made his wife scrub the blood and flesh from his boat. In April 1998, Coombes was sentenced to just 15 years in jail with a minimum of 10 years, after being found guilty of a violent murder for the second time. The other man received eight years for his part in the murder.

Released on parole in early 2007, in August 2009 the squat, grey-bearded Coombes, now 56, strangled 27-year-old early learning teacher Raechel Betts, at Phillip Island, dismembered her body in a bathtub and threw the body parts off various intervals of the Newhaven Jetty. Raechel Betts was an attractive and decent young lady who was the carer for two teenage girls. With Coombes’ encouragement she had fallen into the drug trade and Coombes had become her supplier. Her terrible end became evident when, among other body parts, her easily identified tattooed foot was found washed up not far from the jetty. It led police to Coombes, who pleaded guilty at his trial.

In sentencing the ex-soldier Coombes to life in jail without the possibility of parole on 26 August 2011, Justice Geoffrey Nettle told him that he believed that if he was given the opportunity he would ‘kill and kill again’. Justice Nettle concluded that Coombes had a ‘frightening predilection for homicide’, that ‘the nature and gravity of your offending places it in the worst categories of murder’, and ‘you should never be released to be among decent people again’.

Seems as though someone finally got it right.