‘She had two black eyes and a broken nose. She said she had walked into a door …’
NO-ONE can say for sure how long it takes to squeeze the very life from another human. If the victim is lucky, the throat can be grabbed in such a way that minor pressure stops the heart and death is virtually instantaneous. But Julie Ramage, 42, was not one of the lucky ones. As she lay on the floor of the partially renovated family room with her husband’s hands around her neck, she could not scream because her vocal cords were already constricted. But that didn’t matter because there was no-one who cared close enough to hear. Her husband had made sure of that.
Struck twice with punches delivered with such force that his right hand was swollen and red a day later, she was already bleeding from small cuts to the left side of her nose and mouth when she fell to the ground. The big bruise just over her left ear may have been caused by the fall and pathologist Dr Matthew Lynch would later say ‘this may have resulted in a degree of incapacitation’. But bruises and cuts on both her hands indicated that Julie Ramage did fight for her life against the man she had once loved, but had long ago learned to fear.
According to pathologist and Associate Professor David Ranson, the pressure applied in such strangulation cases can vary but must be constant and sustained. Imagine trying to open a stubborn jar or squeezing the juice from a ripe orange by hand. Or grabbing an arm so hard it leaves an angry bruise for days. The pressure must be maintained for between 40 seconds and a few minutes depending on how long the victim can maintain a struggle. Then as the air and blood flow is stopped, the capillaries in the eyelids burst and the victim loses consciousness. People can kill in a split second – an unlucky punch, the squeeze of a trigger or an artery nicked by a sharp-edged weapon. But slow strangulation requires both strength and determination. And James Ramage, schoolboy rugby player turned aggressive self-made man, had plenty of both.
In his rambling ‘confession’ delivered to Senior Detective Darren Wiseman of the homicide squad 24 hours after he killed, he claimed he was not really sure how long his wife struggled. ‘Look, I … I had just lost the plot. I remember hitting her once or twice and then just strangling her … I just remember holding her neck.’
Wiseman asked, ‘Was she fighting?’
Ramage replied, ‘She did for a bit, but not for long.’
Despite his confession that he had attacked his wife without warning, that she was unarmed and unable to defend herself – just over a year later a jury would accept that he had acted under provocation so great that his crime was reduced from murder to manslaughter. So while no-one doubts that James Stuart Ramage is a killer, in the eyes of the law he is no murderer.
The story of how Jamie Ramage took a life and ruined his own in just a few minutes began three decades earlier and half a world away when he met an attractive and outgoing teenage girl and they decided to marry too young and too soon.
ENGLISH-BORN Julie Anne Garrett and her twin sister Jane were the sort of kids who were never short of company and always looked destined to succeed. Pretty, bright and sporty they had a large circle of friends while growing up in the township of Cheshunt, not far from London. While parents Patricia and Ray were building businesses, first with a corner shop and finally with two supermarkets, the twins became heavily involved in sport including tennis, netball and sailing. Julie represented her county in athletics and began a life-long love affair with horse riding.
James Ramage – Jamie to his friends – was born in Melbourne on April 9, 1959, to Joyce and James. The family, including his two younger brothers, moved to Hertfordshire where Jamie went to Cheshunt Secondary School completing his A-levels and excelling at contact sports such as rugby.
Julie had a few boyfriends by the time she met the well-travelled eighteen-year-old, who was then going out with one of her best friends. Soon Julie and Jamie became inseparable. According to Patricia the seventeen-year-old Julie was taken with Jamie. ‘She thought he was flash – he had the use of an impressive car. She was pretty impressed.’ Twin sister Jane was less so. ‘My first impression of Jamie was that he was very self-assured. He was always boasting about his sporting prowess. He was a snob.’ The twins’ father remembers his first impressions of the assured teenage boy with ambitions and an attitude. ‘He seemed like a young man who knew where he was going,’ he said with typical understatement.
But he had a small insight into the character of the man who would one day be his son-in-law, during an inconsequential spat in the house between Julie and her new boyfriend. ‘Jamie charged upstairs like a madman – he started yelling at Julie. I was appalled really. I told him that if there was any need for my daughter to be chastised then it was up to me. It was after this incident that I realised that Jamie could be a hothead.’ But at seventeen Julie had neither the experience nor the desire to search for partially hidden character flaws in her good-looking boyfriend.
Jamie had his future planned and he knew it was back in Australia. On completing secondary school his family had arranged for him to return to Melbourne, where a wealthy friend would provide an entrée to the big end of town. In September 1978, the Garretts held an eighteenth birthday party in a community hall for the twin girls. It was at that large gathering that Julie told her parents she would follow Jamie to Melbourne. ‘She then showed us the engagement ring. It was a solitaire diamond ring … At the time it broke my heart,’ Patricia said.
The Garretts had raised the twins to be independent, even sending them to different schools in their senior years and although they had doubts, they were prepared to support Julie’s decision. But there was something else that jarred. The young Ramage had not bothered to talk to them about taking their daughter to the other side of the world. ‘I found it pretty rude that Jamie had not asked for Julie’s hand in marriage. In those days it was customary to do so,’ Patricia Garrett said.
About three months later, Jamie left for Melbourne while Julie worked for a bank in London. The girl with the wide network of friends stopped socialising and began saving for her trip to Australia. Meanwhile Jamie was getting a quick course in business and networking through his family friend. Julie’s twin Jane said the friend was ‘well off and Jamie was living a privileged lifestyle. He was mixing with the social set’. But it would be wrong to suggest that success was handed to him on a plate. Jamie worked full-time during the day and studied accounting at night. He was always determined to find the fast track to success. He held business management positions in Hardie Industries, Country Road and McDonalds, before establishing his own companies.
On March 16, 1979, Julie flew to Melbourne and initially lived with her uncle, Alf Kellett, in Preston before moving in with Jamie in a small unit in Black Rock. According to Jane, Uncle Alf arrived in Australia in the 1920s aged just seven. ‘He was a classic Australian working-class man.’ Perhaps too classic for the ambitious and social-conscious Ramage. ‘He took a dislike to Alf and his family because they were working class. Initially they socialised with Alf but over the years Jamie chose to sever the relationship with Alf and his family.’ The couple flew back to England in December as part of a round-the-world-trip. ‘When Julie returned she looked fabulous, she looked so happy,’ Jane said.
But there was still tension. The Garrets planned a ‘small, quaint wedding’, but the groom wanted the celebration to be on a grand scale. Eventually it was agreed the reception would be extended at a cost of 400 pounds with the excess to be split between the two families. ‘What really sticks out is when Jamie went to give us the 200 pounds, he just walked in and threw the envelope at us … I suppose looking back it was an indication as to how Jamie was going to treat people,’ Patricia would recall almost 25 years later.
They were married on January 5, 1980, and then returned to Melbourne. Any lingering resentment was buried when two years later the Garretts holidayed in Australia. Julie and Jamie were perfect hosts – taking the couple to Lorne, Yarrawonga and the Gold Coast. So impressed were Patricia and Ray they decided to follow their daughter and immigrated the following year. Jane was also to move but she had met her future husband, Howard. They would settle in Melbourne later. Ray and Pat arrived in August 1983 and for six weeks they stayed with Julie and Jamie at their home in Percy Street, Balwyn. The couple found jobs, bought cars and were looking for a house within three weeks.
For independent people it can be hard to adapt to the routines of others, but even so the Garretts quickly felt they had soon outworn their welcome. According to Patricia, ‘Jamie became overbearing.’
He made it clear that the house revolved around him. If he was caught up at work, then dinner was delayed until he was ready. ‘Although we were all adults and working we had to wait for Jamie,’ she said. If Julie found this strange she kept her thoughts to herself. Ray found that Jamie needed to feel that he was always in charge. ‘If he was in a situation he couldn’t control, he would grab Julie and leave … Anyone who didn’t have the same opinion as him, he didn’t want to know.’
Being an inflexible control freak was one thing but soon the in-laws sensed an undercurrent of intimidating violence. Patricia recounted, ‘I can also recall when Ray and I found a hole in the living room plaster. Jamie had punched a hole in the wall. I spoke to Julie about the hole … She tended to laugh it off and said that Jamie didn’t know his own strength.’ There were other warning signs – a wedding gift painting that had hung on the wall disappeared. Julie told her parents that Jamie had destroyed it. At the age of eleven Julie had collected some delicate French china but now when her mother tried to give her the collection she refused without explanation. Patricia believed she feared that Jamie would smash it during one of his rages.
In 1984 came the first of several attempts by Julie to break free. But she would always return when her domineering husband promised to change. On this occasion she moved back with her parents, staying with them for about six weeks before moving to a rented home.
When Jamie tried to coax her back, she at first refused but according to her mother, Julie’s resolve weakened when she was ill with the flu. ‘Jamie came around with Lucozade and flowers. Soon she moved back.’
Soon after she returned, he had his first brush with the law and discovered the value of good legal advice. When he lost his licence for drink-driving he managed to claim victory from the humiliation by bragging how he beat the system. ‘Even that was a farce. Jamie ran from the police and got into a bottle of whisky before the police could catch up with him,’ Ray said. According to Patricia, ‘When it came to court he had a good lawyer, who picked holes in the two policemen’s statements. Julie went to court and pleaded for him. She was heavily pregnant with Matthew.’ His licence was suspended for four months. ‘When Julie went into labour, she had to drive herself to hospital.’
With busy lives and young children, Matthew and Samantha, who was born two years later, the Ramages started to rely on the Garretts as babysitters – a role the older couple embraced. But often they felt they were treated as unpaid domestic help rather than part of an extended family. After returning from taking the children to their caravan at Inverloch they were hurt when introduced to some of the Ramages upwardly-mobile friends. ‘They were surprised to see Julie’s family. It was as if we weren’t spoken about,’ Patricia said. ‘Their friends would even ask if we were over on holiday.’
Their strained relationship effectively fractured after another alcohol-fuelled row in 1993. ‘Jamie got more abusive as he drank more. He would sneer at everything that we held dear,’ Patricia said. Jamie told Julie that her parents were not allowed to see the children at Christmas. Eventually he relented and said Patricia could see the kids as long as Ray wasn’t home. So desperate was she to see her grandchildren that she took the day off work for the Ramage-sanctioned meeting. But Jamie’s brittle indignation was tempered by the need for free childcare. ‘(For) the next three or four years we only saw the children when they wanted a babysitter. Julie was told by Jamie that she could stay for twenty minutes when she dropped off or picked up the kids,’ Patricia said. Finally they were permitted to attend school plays and school sports. Jamie would not speak to them although he would occasionally favour them with a nod. They always sat behind the family, never with them.
Despite the bizarre rules, Jamie still had a serious problem with his father-in-law. ‘He even told Julie that his ambition in life was to outlive me. I found this very odd considering that I am now 70.’
While the older man felt Ramage was clearly strange, he believed that at least he didn’t play favourites. ‘It wasn’t just Pat and I – he treated everyone poorly.’
DOMESTIC violence is the socially homogenised term for wife bashing and child abuse. It is, we are often led to believe, something that happens amongst the poorly educated, the chronically unemployed and downtrodden. It is not supposed to happen in nice families, with picture postcard homes and kids in private schools. People with horses and imported cars and beach houses and smart friends, who talk about politics and the environment and their hopes for their children during pleasant dinner parties. Smart, independent women know there is no excuse for staying with wife beaters, men who apologise and cry and say it will never happen again. Until the next time.
Julie Ramage appeared to have the story-book home with the story-book life. The couple’s double storey red clinker brick home, with white shutters on the windows, a well-manicured lawn, roses and well-clipped hedge bushes in a quiet court off Mont Albert Road could have been transplanted from the English county where they had met as teenagers. The worn basketball ring attached to the double garage showed it was a family home where kids could play in the street if they didn’t want to wander to the park just a few hundred metres away. But like many things in the Ramage family the façade appeared to be more important than the reality. Downstairs the house was beautifully furnished. Upstairs it was a shell, like their marriage. Jamie like to drink good wines but kept the bottles in ‘racks’ made of cardboard supermarket carry boxes.
Gilda Pekin first met Julie Ramage at a Balwyn health centre when their sons were receiving their two-month check-ups. More than eighteen years later, they remained close friends. ‘I was never really fond of Jamie as he was dominating of Julie and dismissive of women generally,’ she told police. Twice in the early years she saw the signs of domestic violence when Julie arrived at the kindergarten with bruises and black eyes. Her suspicions were confirmed when Julie rang in February 1991 and asked her to come over. ‘Julie told me that she was going to the plastic surgeon. She had two black eyes and a broken nose. She said she had walked into a door.’ A week later she confessed that Jamie had head-butted her. Mrs Pekin urged her friend to move out. ‘I told her if someone hits you, you leave. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t leave him. Jamie had a financial hold over her.’
But he didn’t just physically dominate her. ‘I recall when Julie was preparing for her thirtieth birthday party she purchased a black dress to wear. Jamie didn’t like the dress, he thought it was too revealing. He went with her to take the dress back. He chose the dress that she wore. He would go to the hairdresser’s with her and tell the hairdresser how to do her hair. Jamie would even decide what nail polish she would wear. He controlled Julie to every extent. I also felt that she wasn’t permitted by Jamie to have an opinion on anything.’
His desire to control her meant that any independent activity was seen as a threat. He tried to stop her riding horses and pressured her to share his passion for golf. While her twin sister went to university Julie had cut her education short to follow Jamie to Australia. But years later she felt it was time to return to school to qualify to be a teacher herself. But according to friends, Jamie sabotaged her ambitions by placing endless and meaningless hurdles in her path. Gilda Pekin remembered vividly that, ‘Jamie wouldn’t allow the expenditure on babysitters … she missed classes. Jamie made it difficult.’ When he agreed to be home so that she could attend lectures at Deakin University he would be late or not turn up at all. Despite good grades she eventually gave up.
One early January the women had lunch in Lorne and lost track of time, leaving Julie slightly late to meet Jamie at their holiday home for a golf date. Her reaction, bordering on panic, stuck with Mrs Pekin. ‘She was distressed. She said that he’d kill her if she wasn’t home in time … she seemed terrified. We were fifteen minutes late.’ So concerned was her friend that she rang Julie twice to see that Jamie hadn’t over-reacted. This time he remained calm. It appeared to be a storm in a porcelain teacup. Friends all found him dominating and her submissive. He increasingly found he needed her popularity to maintain a social life. A fellow member of the Hurstbridge Adult Riders Club, Annette Luckman, said Julie once told her that Jamie, ‘had no friends and relied on her socially’.
While he needed her network he remained jealous, bad tempered, controlling and violent. Mrs Luckman said that as late as 2003 she saw Julie with a bruised face. ‘A few of us were standing around and one of the group asked Julie how she got the black eye. She replied, “I hit it on a door, what do you think?’”
When the Ramages went to a riding club Christmas barbecue, members saw how she changed in her husband’s company. One said Jamie was ‘quite stuck-up – he didn’t mix well and looked uncomfortable’. Julie appeared nervous, apprehensive, as if worried about what her volatile and indulged husband might do. She later confided to one fellow rider that she was deeply unhappy, complaining that while her husband gave her anything she wanted, he still tried to control her. ‘She said that I wouldn’t believe the temper that Jamie had. On a number of occasions she told me that he had a terrible, terrible temper. I told her that she shouldn’t stay if he had such a temper, she should get out.’
Gillian Holding, a co-owner of the clothing business where Julie worked as a bookkeeper and computer networker, said staff would have a cheap lunch out once a week. Jamie tried to cut it back to once a month. When co-worker Joanne Mclean first met Julie’s husband she found him charming but soon found him obsessive and frightening. ‘If we were ever in a social situation Jamie would just stare at her and she couldn’t talk to anyone. It was sick. She told me he demanded sex every morning, even if she didn’t want to, he would do it. She hated it, she couldn’t stand it. She just wanted to enjoy life, have a normal life – she just couldn’t relax. She was frightened to leave. I felt that if she left Jamie she would have been in a lot of danger. I would tell her that he would kill her. I don’t know why I felt this way.’
She told another fellow worker that her husband demanded sex every morning as his non-negotiable marital right. ‘She said she felt like a piece of meat, she said that it felt like rape.’
After a fight in 2001 Julie left home and stayed overnight at her sister’s. ‘As usual Jamie came crawling back (and) wooed her back,’ a friend said. Julie’s mother said that after the 24-hour separation that, outwardly at least, Jamie appeared to try to change. ‘He again was friendly and charming. He had made a complete turnaround. I did note that Julie was cool to him. I now know that she left him because he had thrown her out of bed. He threw her across the room.’ Patricia was relieved that the relationship appeared to improve. ‘Julie was allowed to come and visit us and was allowed to go horse riding. Jamie started to treat Julie better. He bought her a new car, she accompanied him on business trips, and the house was being renovated.’
But the balance of power in the relationship had altered. Julie was growing in confidence. She had friends and a future. Jamie had worked all his adult life building business to create wealth. Now the firm he co-owned, a bath restoration business, was on virtual auto-pilot. He would later confide that he was bored. A marriage counsellor wrote that Ramage said, ‘The business ran itself and he would come home and annoy Julie.’ They argued less – only because Julie tried to ignore being baited. But the passive approach came at a cost. ‘Recently she had just been … agreeing with James instead of fighting, which built up hatred inside her,’ according to one counsellor.
But Julie Ramage had reached the point of no return deciding the marriage was doomed. In May 2003 she told her parents she intended to leave Jamie but would wait until November so she wouldn’t interrupt Matthew’s Year 12 exams. But a month later she decided she could no longer wait and would leave when he next took a business trip. The reason Julie jumped five months earlier than planned was due to an argument between the two over their daughter, Samantha. The father was concerned about the 15-year-old girl. He was strict, and, it would emerge, violent with her. Samantha would later tell police that a year earlier he had given her a black eye. ‘He hit or slapped me the wrong way across the face … It wasn’t like the worst time … Dad had hit me before.’
One Friday Samantha was supposed to come straight home from school but was two hours late. The parents argued – Julie later told a friend Jamie said, ‘How can she help it when she had a slut of a mother like you?’ According to the friend, ‘that was the thing that made her think, “That’s it I’m out of here”. She told me that after this he demanded sex. She said that she just lay there and didn’t move, she had made up her mind that she was leaving.’
Jamie had a five-day business trip to Korea and was to leave on June 9. When he was gone, she would make her move. Unlike previous attempts she tried to set herself up in a way that would lessen her dependence on him. This time, she felt, there would be no way he could charm – or bully – her to return home. She transferred $100,000 from their joint account and bought new furniture for a small rented house. She was to tell her children before she informed her husband. Samantha decided to go with her, while Matthew wanted to stay with his father in their partially renovated Balwyn home.
But even while she was planning her move, she told her mother she feared Jamie would respond with violence. ‘She expressed that she was frightened of Jamie. She also told us that she didn’t want half of everything, just enough to buy a small house and for him to take care of the children’s education.’ ‘I asked her if he had been violent towards her and then she reminded me of injuries that we thought were to do with horse riding or accidents … I think she was still trying to hide the violence from us. When Julie was preparing to move, Ray and I offered to help her. She didn’t want us to hire the van. She said she didn’t want Jamie coming after us or killing her horse.’
Jamie was due home on Saturday so Julie moved out the day before on Black Friday, June 13, 2003. Ray went to the little house in Canberra Road, Toorak, she had rented. He fitted a bell to the front gate and checked all the locks. The father was not concerned with burglars but with her soon to be ex-husband. ‘We were afraid of what Jamie would do when he found out she had left,’ Patricia said.
When Jamie’s plane touched down in Sydney, he rang his wife to give her time to pick him up from Melbourne airport. That’s when she broke the news that their marriage was over. In a note left for him at home she wrote, ‘I know that you would really try to do anything to keep us together but that is not the point because it’s what is truly in your heart that matters and I know that you can’t help yourself and the real you bubbles to the surface and I don’t like that person … If you said I could do anything I wanted I couldn’t because I have been conditioned over the years to always worry about your reaction. If you do care for me please let me go without a horrible fight for the kids’ sake … I could hate you so much for some of the things you have done and said to me over the years but I also understand that you are a good person and that you work hard and most importantly that you love our kids very much … Please talk to your friends and think things through before going crazy … I have tried to leave the house clean and tidy and prepared a meal for this evening. Take care, Julie.’
Jamie didn’t go crazy – at least not initially. He began a campaign to woo her back. He wanted to show her that he could change and be the man she wanted.
The life-long conservative took to meditation, sent her flowers, tried counselling, opened up to her friends and continued to renovate their home. He had stared down near bankruptcy when one of his companies had threatened to capsize, fought through marriage problems for years and had kept his family together. He was not the type to give up – at least not without a fight.
He rang Julie’s mother and while he acknowledged that the Garretts owed him nothing, he pleaded for advice. ‘He was very calm and said that he wasn’t going to react as people expected him to.’ Ray Garrett was not the type to offer false hope or fake friendship. He told him he should get on with life. ‘I told him he was a good-looking man with money and he could find someone else.’ Julie told friends she knew he could not alter his basic personality although she was pleasantly surprised that Jamie was trying to control his notorious temper.
Even though she knew the marriage was over, she did not try to sever all ties. They would meet about twice a week for an occasional meal but Julie was sufficiently wary of her husband’s black side to make sure the meetings were always in public. Her mother said, ‘Julie was happy. She laughed like she used to laugh, and we had our happy daughter back. She told me that Jamie was being very reasonable and that she wanted to help him. She told me he was having counselling, but not that it was for anger management. She hoped it would help him for any future relationships he may have. She only wished him well.’ Another friend said Julie wanted ‘to ease him out slowly. He thought they would get back together. She wanted to stay friends for the kids’ sake.’
Jamie Ramage chopped and changed counsellors. As always, the driven businessman wanted results and did not appear impressed when told of his own failings. He grilled her friends. He told them he knew he had been too dominating and he wished he could turn the clock back. But it was too late – while he was looking back, for the first time in years his wife was looking forward.
An office worker friend said, ‘She was happy she could go out and have a drink. One Friday night we went to the Botanical Hotel, Julie was actually shaking because she was nervous. She told me that she had never done it, never gone to a bar by herself. Jamie would never allow it.’ She was introduced to a friend of her twin sister’s who shared her love of horses. Laurence Webb was physically imposing like her husband but that would appear to be the only similarity.
Webb had been a successful businessman who was between jobs. He was a poetry-reading, theatre lover who Julie found fascinating. They soon began to go out.
On the evening of Friday, July 18, Julie told her mother she was going with Jamie to watch Matthew play football for Scotch College at Geelong the following day. ‘I was horrified and warned her not to go anywhere other than a public place with him. Julie told me that she wasn’t silly and wouldn’t do such a thing.’
During the football they talked. It was then she told him she had met someone else. Shocked, hurt and feeling betrayed Jamie listened. The next day he contacted one of her friends who was being worn down by his stream of needy calls. This time however she was struck by his calmness. ‘He asked me how I thought he should deal with it. He asked me if I thought he should wait until she got sick of him or it passed. He didn’t seem upset. I was impressed that he had taken it in his stride.’
While he continued to talk to friends, Julie spent the days with her new boyfriend. On the Sunday she told her mother she’d had a blissful day. ‘She told me she had been horse riding, Laurence had read her some poetry and she had some wine at the pub. She said it was all she ever wanted.’
The next day she was dead.
JULIE RAMAGE was happier than she had been for years when she agreed to meet Jamie at their partially renovated Balwyn home for lunch that Monday. Almost certainly she expected the builder to be there and had no intention of being alone with her estranged husband. One friend would recall later she was told the separated couple planned to meet the builder that week to inspect the work that had begun nearly five months earlier. But Jamie Ramage had told the builder to knock off for the day because he wanted to be alone with his wife. It is likely he wanted to impress her with the renovations as part of his plan to get her to return.
That morning Ramage dropped his son at Scotch College for a football recovery session at 7.15am and then swung his green Jaguar towards his business in Collingwood. Staff said he appeared tense and distracted during the morning. A fellow worker remembered trying to joke him out of his mood. ‘He snapped at me, he didn’t see the humour in what I was saying. This was unusual for James.’ He told her he was going out that day because he had a ‘meeting with the renovators’. He left, bought rolls for lunch and arrived home around 11.40am.
That morning Julie drove Samantha to Lauriston Girls School in her silver Mini before driving to work at Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. She was making morning coffee when she saw a friend in the kitchen and announced, ‘I’m on cloud nine’. She said she had told Jamie about her new boyfriend because she wanted ‘everything out in the open’. At 12.10pm she headed out for lunch, leaving her office heater and computer on. No-one expected her to be long as she had a meeting with her boss scheduled for early afternoon.
Carpenter Graeme McIntosh arrived at the Marock Place house at 7.45am to work through the day but Ramage rang to say Julie would be coming around and he should leave by 11.40am.
Ramage asked him not to leave a mess and said he would be paid for a full day. The builder offered to come back after lunch and if Julie’s car was not there he would continue working. ‘He told me no, he insisted that I take the day off.’
Ramage moved a table from the laundry into the family room and began to prepare lunch. Julie arrived around midday dressed in blue jodhpur pants, blue jumper, black jacket and R.M. Williams boots. What happened in the next 30 minutes before Ramage beat and then strangled his wife to death will never be known as only one self-serving version can be recorded.
According to Ramage his wife was off-handed and cold. She dismissed him, swore, taunted him and demeaned him sexually. Julie Ramage was 172 centimetres tall and weighed 67 kilos. Her husband was around 185 centimetres and weighed nearly 95 kilos. He was an ex-rugby player who kept fit playing touch football, bike riding and rowing. He had previously beaten her, head-butted her, broken her nose, thrown her from bed, demanded non-consensual sex and repeatedly bullied and intimidated her. She had told friends and family she did not want to be alone with him because of fears for her safety. She had said she wanted to ease out of the relationship, that she didn’t want their separation to be poisoned with bitterness and urged him not to go crazy. Yet on this rainy, cold day, when there were no independent witnesses, Ramage says his wife went out of her way to belittle and hurt him.
According to his uncontested version he showed Julie the renovations and she seemed unimpressed. When he tried to tell her how hard he and Matthew had worked she was insulting and dismissive. He said that when he told her of the difficulties of keeping going, ‘she sort of made this sort of, you know, wank wank sort of sign’. He claimed she said he should have renovated the house years earlier as ‘you had enough money … that hurt a lot’.
He would tell police that as they sat down, ‘I just pleaded with her, “What do I have to do? What, what can I do?” And she sort of said, “You don’t get it, do you? I’m over you. I should have left you ten years ago”.’
When he asked about Samantha, he claimed she said, ‘It’s none of your fucking business. I’m not with you any more’. This from a woman who had earlier written to him pleading that their break-up should be civilised for the sake of the children. He claims he then asked about her relationship with Webb and she allegedly responded, ‘I’ve had sleepovers with him’. Ramage said, ‘That really, really hurt.’
She was then supposed to have said how much nicer he was, ‘and you know he rides horses and cares for her more and all that sort of stuff’. Ramage claimed she said sex with Webb was better and sex with Jamie ‘repulses me’ then screwed up her face in disgust. In his confession he claims she then moved to end the conversation, ‘and that’s when I lost it. As she stood up, I … I stood up and hit her and then I just wanted it to stop and that’s when I strangled her and you don’t know how much I wish I could change that.’
EXPERIENCED homicide investigators say when a man kills his wife in a flash of murderous rage he usually rings the police or a friend to confess. One said that in 75 per cent of cases the offender is waiting for police at the scene when they arrive. Filled with grief and remorse he tells his story and is repulsed by his own actions. But Ramage was not that type. No matter what he would later say, his first, strongest and driving motivation was self-preservation. He told police he thought, ‘I might as well just call someone’. But he didn’t.
He did not check her pulse, he did not check her breathing, he did not attempt to revive her and he did not call an ambulance. Police say she may still have been alive although it is impossible to tell. James Stuart Ramage, father, husband and killer felt there was only one person worth saving and that was himself. He would spend the rest of the day in a cold-blooded attempt to conceal the crime.
At 12.38 he rang his plumber, Patrick Leonard, and told him not to come to the house that day. He then dragged his wife’s body out the back door into the double garage and into the boot of his Jag making sure to place her on a sheet to minimise any DNA contamination. He filled a red bucket from the laundry with warm soapy water and used blue and white tea towels to mop up the blood. He changed from his dark blue jumper and chino pants because of blood droplets then drove her Mini to the rear car park of Colombos, a large pizza restaurant in Whitehorse Road, before walking the 700 metres home.
He rang his work to say he would not be back that afternoon, grabbed a shovel and drove to Kinglake. Supposedly distraught by what he had done, he was still cool enough to try and build an alibi on the run by twice ringing his wife’s mobile phone that he knew was in her handbag in his car. He knew that when she was reported missing, police would trace her to his house. He would then say she had left and would have phone records to suggest he had tried to contact her later in the day. He dug two shallow holes in the bush, leaving the body in one and his compromised clothing, towels, sheets and her handbag containing $51.15, phone, licence and a bank cheque for $194 in the other. He left, bought petrol and tried to conceal any forensic evidence by running the Jag through the car wash at the Diamond Creek BP service station.
That afternoon he was due to check a piece of imported granite specially ordered for the kitchen renovations from a firm in Reservoir. Less than three hours after killing his wife Ramage wandered into the factory to keep his appointment. According to the manager of Acropolis Marble and Granite, Lena Tzimas-Kori, Ramage was, ‘very well-mannered and polite. He was very cool. He did not seem stressed to me’. There was only one moment when he showed any sign of being distracted. He removed one of his Blundstone boots to rearrange an annoying blue sock that was rubbing on his foot. He left after ten minutes and drove home. He washed his second set of clothes and had a bath.
Around 5.45pm Samantha grew impatient waiting for her mother to pick her up from school and caught a tram to their rented Toorak home. Matthew arrived home in Balwyn. His father said he couldn’t be bothered cooking and took his son out for dinner. He drove the Jag and parked out the front of Colombos. As the pair sat and chatted about their goals in life, Jamie Ramage knew that his dead wife’s car was still sitting twenty metres away in the rear car park. Police speculate Ramage chose the restaurant as a twisted show of domination against his dead wife. He paid the $35 bill with his gold Visa card that had a $30,000 credit limit, then took his son home
At 7.30pm, Samantha rang her father and asked if he knew where Julie was. He responded she was ‘probably off with that Laurence bloke or something’. But Ramage was smart enough to know that it was only a matter of time before his wife was reported missing and that he would soon be interviewed as a murder suspect. Certainly when Julie’s sister Jane was told, she immediately feared that Ramage had killed her.
He decided he needed help and called in an old family friend for advice. It proved to be an inspired choice – the friend was one of Australia’s best criminal barristers, Dyson Hore-Lacy QC. They met nearby at the Harp Hotel in Kew. When he told the barrister what he had done, Hore-Lacy called in experienced solicitor Steve Pica. The three men talked. The hotel video shows the men in deep conference. Whatever was said remains between them but when Ramage and Pica crossed the road to walk into the foyer of the Boroondara police station the cool businessman was ready to give his version of events.
NOTHING destroys confidence and self-esteem like a visit to the homicide squad interview room. But Jamie Ramage doesn’t look like a man at the point of breaking as he sits across a small table chatting to police about how he killed his wife the day before. Dressed in the casual attire of the successful businessman on a day off, he talks quietly as he explains matter-of-factly the details of the killing. Earlier he took police to the gravesite where he had ‘stupidly buried Julie’. He tells police he tried to patch their marriage using Romance 101. ‘I’ve written her letters. I’ve sent her CDs. I’ve sent her roses. I’ve sent her all that sort of thing.’
In answer to question 386, he says. ‘That’s all I can say. I mean I regret it. I wish I could go back. I wish I could turn back the clock. I wish I could … I could change it. I … I don’t understand … I mean, doing … taking her up to Kinglake and all that. It’s just stupid.’ He wished for a lot of things that day in the homicide squad interview room. But there was one thing he didn’t wish – that Julie Ramage was still alive.
RAMAGE was charged with murder but the jury later convicted him of the lesser offence of manslaughter, accepting that he acted under provocation. This meant that while he knew what he was doing was wrong his ability to control his actions was somehow mitigated because of the behaviour of the victim. In other words Julie Ramage was somehow partially to blame for her own death. The jury had to rely heavily on Ramage’s version of what happened in the Balwyn house just before he killed his wife. His self-serving confession, delivered to the homicide squad just hours after he spoke to experienced defence lawyers in the Harp Hotel would prove to be an almost text-book provocation defence. So good in fact, it could have been used in law lectures to budding barristers.
The verdict of manslaughter due to provocation created outrage in the community. Many failed to understand how a wife, who had previously been subjected to domestic violence could somehow be considered to have inflamed her husband to such a point that it provided legal mitigation for his decision to kill her. It was not as though he had walked into a bedroom and found his wife having an affair. It was not as though she had a history of baiting or humiliating him. It was not as though she was threatening him with financial ruin or with running away with their children. Like tens of thousands of people she decided to leave her partner. She was attempting to make the best of a difficult but not impossible situation. That’s it.
She tried to leave in a dignified manner and with concerns for her husband and children. But she was not about to contest Ramage’s version of what was said in the partially renovated home which led an intelligent and rational man to strangle her to death with his bare hands. Many serious legal minds were clearly uncomfortable with the law as it stood.
In sentencing Ramage on December 9, 2004, Justice Robert Osborn said: I of course must apply the current law whatever view I may hold as to the desirability of change to it. He said he was satisfied the killing was deliberate and done with murderous intent; the killing was brutal involving an overwhelming and continuing assault on a smaller and weaker victim (and) this was not a case of objectively extreme provocation. He also said: I am not persuaded you have expressed real remorse for the killing; and the killing of which you are guilty was of a type which attacks the foundations of relationships within our society and must be the subject of general deterrence. After the fatal assault you made no attempt to revive your wife or to obtain emergency assistance for her. Rather, you embarked immediately on a sequence of careful and calculated actions to try and cover up what you had done. I have no doubt that you feel regret for your actions and the consequential disintegration of your former way of life, but I am not persuaded you have felt or expressed genuine remorse for the brutal killing of your wife and the abrupt termination of her life when she had much to look forward to.
He sentenced Ramage to eleven years with a minimum of eight.
AFTER his arrest Ramage was moved to another red brick building – the Melbourne Assessment Prison. For a man new to the jail system he appeared to adjust quickly. In a letter to a friend he wrote, ‘Well, life has changed a great deal for me. Apart from dealing with what I have done I also have to deal with living in here. The violence etc I think is a little exaggerated. As long as you stay away from the troublemakers it seems to be OK. A little like the playground. There’s actually some quite interesting characters in here. Apart from a job in the office I also am talking to some of the young guys helping where I can.’
Police wanted to seize the Jaguar he used to transport the body of his dead wife to the bush before he buried her but the Office of Public Prosecutions decided not to pursue the claim. Lawyers said his assets had been handed to his children and they did not want to compound the crime by hounding the innocent. Within weeks of the sentencing the Victorian state government announced it would reform the law so that such a defence could not be mounted again. Acting Premier John Thwaites said: ‘Provocation does tend to lend to a culture where the victim is blamed rather than the perpetrator.
The partial defence of provocation was developed when the offence of murder carried the mandatory death penalty It also harks back to an era when it was acceptable, especially for men, to have a violent response to an alleged breach of a person’s honour.’
Attorney-General Rob Hulls said, when making the announcement that he had received 2500 letters calling for the reform of the defence of provocation after the Ramage case: ‘In future, this defence will not be available’. He said for too long the law of provocation had allowed killers to ‘get away with murder’.
Many believe one of those is James Ramage.