Chapter 8

A Bloody Kiss of Death

Valerie Parashumti and Jessica Stasinowsky

The warm blood was still sticky on their clothes only adding to the rising sexual excitement of sick lesbian vampires, eighteen-year-old Valerie Parashumti and her nineteen-year-old lover Jessica Stasinowsky, as they leaned across the lifeless body of their dying victim to celebrate their warped love with a passionate bloody kiss. Moments later, the sadistic killers smiled and joked together for their mobile phone camera, laughing as they panned the lens around the blood-splattered room to record the final gruesome moments of mortally injured teenager, Stacey Mitchell.

Although the Australian lovers didn’t know it as they jubilantly gloated over the grotesque murder, mocking the accent of their British-born housemate, their chilling home-made video and macabre kiss of death was poised to make international headlines as the horrifying story broke among the seasonal swag of cheery Christmas news stories in December 2006. For within hours of the pair filming the sixteen-year-old runaway’s brutal and bloody death – which had been plotted as a test for Parashumti to prove her love for Stasinowsky – Western Australian police were preparing to raid their rental house on the bank’s of Perth’s Swan River. Just twelve hours later, police uncovered the bloody beaten body of Stacey Mitchell, dumped head-first by her killers into a wheelie bin and left to rot in the sweltering temperature of a suburban backyard shed.

Police, lawyers and media were given their first glimpse of the bloodthirsty pair’s indifference to their crime, when, ten days later, they appeared in court via a video link-up – still chuckling about the depraved way in which they had slaughtered the bubbly young woman. To the horror of onlookers, the teenage killers’ first public appearance on the television screen at the Supreme Court of Western Australia on 28 December, from the state’s notorious Bandyup Women’s Prison, captured them giggling and whispering as they were formally charged with Stacey Mitchell’s wilful murder.

Court officials watched in disgusted disbelief, as Valerie Paige Parashumti and her lover, Jessica Ellen Stasinowsky, sniggered throughout the brief hearing, despite the fact they were facing the most serious charge in the Australian criminal code. Their brazen response to the disturbing crime prompted seasoned Supreme Court Judge Justice Geoffrey Miller to curtly remind the defendants of the seriousness of the situation they now faced. But the remorseless pair’s laughter continued as they shared their amusement over the difficulty the authorities appeared to be having in determining the correct spelling and pronunciation of their surnames. Initially released to police as Spaninowski and Parshumti, it became a cause of great mirth to the callous couple to learn that Parashumti’s name had been misspelled again on court documents.

When Justice Miller asked the defendants to confirm their identities, referring to the younger of the alleged killing duo as ‘Parashmuti’, he appeared visibly taken aback to find his mispronunciation sent the pair into fits of giggles on the screen in front of him.

‘This is not a humorous matter,’ he told them, abruptly. ‘I can see you both laughing…You have both been charged with wilful murder. I don’t know what you are laughing about.’

While no applications were made for bail on either of the defendant’s behalf, their continued sniggering so concerned Justice Miller, that he warned them that even if they were intending to apply for bail, there would be ‘very little chance’ of them getting it.

‘They seem to have a remarkable attitude for two women accused of wilful murder,’ the judge told the pair’s lawyer, Andree Horrigan, as his clients’ grinning faces faded from the television screen. ‘No doubt you will speak to them.’

But whatever stern warnings their lawyer chose to issue made little if any impact on the young killers, whose depraved crime quickly earned them the dark moniker of the Lesbian Vampire Killers. The killers were so dubbed after gory revelations began to surface about the vicious nature of their young victim’s death, and after admissions by Parashumti that this was not the first time she had tasted human blood. While no further details were released about the teenage victim’s actual death at this early stage in proceedings, when the young offenders finally pleaded guilty to Mitchell’s wilful murder at Perth’s Magistrate’s Court in November 2007, the case’s suggested background vampirism ensured it would become one of Australia’s most disturbing and high-profile murder cases ever.

The vicious murder by two teenage girls, one of whom at least had admitted her involvement in bloodthirsty rituals and an active participation in a vampire subculture, prompted interest from the world’s media, attracting widespread coverage in the victim’s native England and as far afield as Canada.

More intriguing though, for the hardened journalists who packed into the press gallery of the Magistrate’s Court, was the obvious apathy of the two accused lesbian lovers, who laughed openly again as the Crown Prosecutor outlined for the first time the bare but grisly details of the teenager’s murder and the callous disregard of the two killers, who triumphantly celebrated her death with a kiss. Apart from showing no remorse, the pair seemed almost amused as they entered their guilty pleas, smiling at one another as the Prosecutor explained the lack of any apparent motive for the brutal slaying apart from their admissions that they had found the young woman ‘annoying’.

A stunned court listened in silence as it learnt how Mitchell had incurred the instant hatred of Stasinowsky from the moment she had moved into the rental house in Rutland Avenue, in the Perth suburb of Lathlain on 15 December 2006. The sixteen-year-old had run away from home following an argument with her parents, moving into the house with the lesbian lovers and the landlord’s son, David Haynes, then twenty-seven, after an introduction through a friend. From the time Mitchell unpacked her things, Stasinowsky became convinced Mitchell was flirting with her lover, Parashumti. Gripped by escalating jealousy, the pair hatched a plot to eliminate the victim who had unknowingly incurred Stasinowsky’s wrath.

It would be a test, explained Crown Prosecutor, David Dempster, in which Parashumti would kill the teenager to prove the girl meant nothing to her, her murder being further evidence to Stasinowsky of her love.

‘She’s been pushing our buttons,’ Parashumti told their flatmate, Haynes, adding menacingly that she would have to die for it.

‘No one should destroy your happiness and you should kill anyone who does,’ she stated flippantly.

In Haynes’ statement to police, which had been suppressed by order of the court at an earlier hearing in which he had pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the girl’s murder, he responded: ‘That sounds like a good idea, but I can think of better people to kill than Stacey.’

He then went on to describe how he had later found Stasinowsky grinding glass in a mortar and pestle. When he asked what she was doing, she told him she was planning to put the ground glass into a drink for Stacey, telling him ‘it would be an agonising way to die’.

Gauging his response, she then said blithely: ‘Don’t worry, I will just bury her head in the ground to shut her up.’

Haynes, who claimed the pair had talked about killing someone before, then went on to describe how he had been asked by the lovers to help corner and trap Mitchell, being told when he refused, ‘Just watch then.’

Later, when he expressed concern at the proposed murder plan, he was warned that if he tried to stop them, he would be hurt. Instead, he agreed to hide in his room until the murder was over. Haynes would later tell police that as he walked into his bedroom in the early hours of 18 December he heard Stasinowsky shouting ‘now, now, now!’ He did as Parashumti had instructed, turning his music up loud to drown out his young flatmate’s terrified cries for help.

Earlier, Haynes had been in the house when Parashumti, Stasinowsky and Mitchell gathered in the kitchen over a bottle of whisky. Unbeknownst to the unsuspecting victim, the evil pair covertly slipped some Stilnox sleeping tablets into the cocktail of alcohol they had prepared for her. Waiting until Mitchell became drowsy, they then attacked their sleepy victim. While Bach’s St John Passion played loudly on the hi-fi in the background, Parashumti crept up behind Mitchell and began ‘raining blows’ on her head with a piece of concrete paving slab she had found lying around in the backyard.

Mr Dempster told the Magistrates Court hearing that at first the young victim, who had been drinking, and possibly smoking cannabis, did not realise what was happening to her. In her panic, she attempted to crawl to Haynes’ bedroom, crying out for help. But Haynes suffered a panic attack and told Stasinowsky he wanted to leave the house, failing to offer the already injured teenager any help. He would later tell police he had observed Parashumti holding a large slab of concrete, and despite his loud music had heard a loud thud, followed by further movement and banging, and Stacey’s cries for help. Panicking, he recalled Stasinowsky handing him a black T-shirt to use as a blindfold. He tied it around his eyes and made his way to the front door, so he could leave without have to glimpse the teenager’s battered body. Stasinowsky callously handed Haynes a mobile phone, saying she would call him when it was all over and safe to return.

The critically injured Mitchell then attempted to escape the attack by crawling into her own bedroom. But Parashumti followed, continuing to bludgeon her with the now-broken slab. Because the young victim was taking too long to die, Stasinowsky took off a dog chain belt, wrapped it around the critically wounded girl’s throat, and began strangling her. Tragically, it took a whole forty-five minutes for the mortally injured teenager to die, and as the bloodthirsty lovers monitored her fading pulse, they became so sexually aroused by their bloody actions that they leaned over Mitchell’s semi-naked unconscious body and passionately kissed each other. Stasinowksy would later tell police she had found her lover ‘sexy’ during the killing.

After the murder, the killers, not sure what to do with their victim’s body, tried to tie it into a sitting position with some rope, making a sick recording of the crime scene which they later showed to Haynes. The vile video footage discovered on their mobile phone became the key piece of evidence that would lead to their subsequent convictions. On the recording, the camera scans the harrowing crime scene, capturing sickening footage of Stacey Mitchell’s blood-spattered bedroom. The killers even filmed themselves standing in front of their victim’s semi-naked dead body, laughing and mocking her English accent.

At around 1.30 a.m., Haynes rang the house on the loaned mobile, asking if Stacey was dead yet. Stasinowsky gave him the jubilant news that the deed was done but instructed Haynes to give her two hours to clean up the mess. He told police he spent the next two hours walking around the suburb of Burswood in the dark, to ensure the place was clean when he returned. When he rang again at 3 a.m., Stasinowsky told him that the house was ‘still a bit messy’ but to ‘come on in’. He was still so panicky that when he returned to the rental property, he asked to be blindfolded again.

‘There was still a great deal of blood around,’ he told detectives.

Then the killers fetched a wheelie bin from a neighbour’s house and stuffed the dead girl into it, dumping the bin in the backyard shed like a piece of discarded rubbish.

The court heard how police raided the property the following day after receiving a report from Stacey’s worried parents, Sophie and Andy Mitchell, who became concerned when their daughter failed to meet up with them as she had promised she would. The distraught couple told detectives of a phone call Stacey had made just hours before her murder, arranging to meet them.

When detectives finally discovered the teenager’s badly bludgeoned body, in the sweltering heat of the backyard shed, it was so disfigured that police had to use dental records to identify her.

Four days later, they arrested unemployed Stasinowsky and Parashumti and their flatmate, who later confessed he had gone with them on a macabre shopping trip to a Bunnings Warehouse store in Morley.

‘There was something of a shopping list,’ the prosecutor told the hearing. ‘Involving things like a chainsaw and lime, and spades in an effort to see what method could be done to dispose of the body.’

While they had to listen to strong references to Parashumti’s past bloodsucking and preoccupation with vampires, the victim’s traumatised family would be spared the further anguish of a lengthy trial and not have to endure hearing the gruesome details of their daughter’s last moments, due to the defendants pleading guilty. As a result, when the killers appeared at the Supreme Court on 17 December for a full plea hearing, the full extent of the grotesque and violent thrill-killing perpetrated by the known vampire and her lover was withheld. This left some media sources speculating that the depraved nature of the girl’s death could have fuelled the imaginations of copy-cat killers. The policeman in charge of the investigation, Senior Detective Sergeant Steve Post, simply said that no purpose would be served in adding to the newfound notoriety and fame of the vampire lovers who hailed from the bottom of society.

The pair’s continued giggling throughout their initial plea hearing and subsequent sentencing the following March would not have escaped the hardened policeman any more than the flippancy of the accused pair failed to astound the presiding judge. During the prosecution’s description of the ‘bizarre and callous crime’ the lovers whispers and smiles in the dock had drawn comments from Justice Blaxell, who said their ‘light-hearted demeanour’ was inappropriate in such grave circumstances. The couple had exchanged smiles again when the court was told of their kiss in a room ‘spattered with blood and brains’ which had taken place over Stacey’s dying body because the pair were aroused by the murder.

The judge observed that on remand Parashumti had told a psychologist who had assessed her that this was not the first time she had tasted blood – describing how she had regularly consumed blood during her involvement in a vampire subculture. The psychologist also revealed that Parashumti had strong sexual sadistic tendencies and was sexually aroused by physical torture and violence. This, combined with her severe personality disorder, meant a murder like Stacey Mitchell’s had been ‘almost inevitable’.

Parashumti’s defence lawyer, David Edwardson QC, said the crime was ‘senseless, sadistic and without justification’. In mitigating, he detailed Parashumti’s violent childhood, which had been marked with severe sexual abuse. Her deeply troubled past had sparked an ‘intense interest’ in violence, he said, and she had first started experimenting with drinking blood when she was just ten. Parashumti began by cutting herself and drinking her own blood, explained the lawyer, but by her later teens she had become a devotee of an underground vampire subculture in which she drank blood as part of their rituals and became obsessed with vampires.

He told the court his client had become involved in an ‘intense and bizarre sexual relationship’ with Stasinowsky, in which she and her lover were ‘obsessed with proving their commitment to each other’. He explained that Stasinowsky ‘hated Stacey with a passion because of the attention she paid to Parashumti’. The court heard how Stacey’s habit of running around the house ‘in a bikini and bra’ created further friction between the lesbian lovers and that Parashumti believed Stacey Mitchell deserved to die because she kept talking about suicide despite having the loving family that his client had always wanted.

He said while Parashumti had expressed no remorse for killing Mitchell, she wanted to apologise to her victim’s parents for any pain she had caused.

Stasinowsky’s defence lawyer, Andree Horrigan, compared the senseless crime to the apparently motiveless Collie case in which two sixteen-year-olds received life sentences for strangling a fifteen-year-old girl with an electric cable. Ms Horrigan pointed out that Stasinowsky was just nineteen at the time of the killing, close to the ages of the Collie killers, and had suffered a lonely childhood that had left her ‘emotionally barren’.

But Judge Blaxell concluded that neither of the killers had shown any remorse for the murder, which had sexually excited them both. He alluded to evidence that while on remand Stasinowsky had given a very graphic account of the victim’s murder to a security guard. She had also told a prison officer that Mitchell had taken at least forty-five minutes to die, though she had wished it could have lasted longer and that the passion she and her lover had felt during the crime had gone further.

It was also revealed that in February 2007 Stasinowsky had penned a letter to Parashumti, saying ‘I have never felt that kind of lust for blood before. Something in me changed. The feel of her blood sprayed all over me was almost a romantic animalistic lust. I don’t know when or how, all I know is something in me felt in place.’ The content of that grisly letter, determined the judge, confirmed a psychiatrist’s observation of Stasinowsky that she lacked any genuine remorse or any sense of guilt.

In January 2007, while on remand, Stasinowsky had also told another prisoner the gory details of the murder, in which she repeatedly complained that Stacey Mitchell would not die.

‘Jess kept saying it was so hot that they [she and Parashumti] had to have a pash,’ the prisoner later said in a statement to authorities. ‘She said she wished she’d spent more time on it [the bashing] to do a better job…she said she was sexually aroused.’

On 7 March 2008, Justice Peter Blaxell, sentenced Stasinowsky and Parashumti to strict security life imprisonment with a minimum 24-year non-parole period, for what he described as a ‘sexually perverse’ and ‘evil’ murder.

Jailing the pair – who stood impassively in the dock dressed in identical black shirts and matching jeans – he said the ‘shocking’ crime was particularly horrifying because of their apparent amusement. This, along with any failure to show remorse and their lack of any substantial motive, meant any prospects of rehabilitation were bleak.

‘You’ve each had more than a year in custody, to reflect upon the evilness of your crime, yet you still lack remorse and obviously place no value on the sanctity of human life,’ said Justice Blaxell.

‘Even more appalling are your admissions to the effect that at the time of the murder you were each sexually excited by the violence of the event,’ he added, back-dating the sentences to 2006.

The judge said he did not wish to divulge ‘the intimate details of the killing’ out of respect to Stacey Mitchell’s family, but that it was troubling to him that neither of the defendants had shown any shame for what they had done.

‘Instead you appeared to be amused and jubilant,’ he said.

Justice Blaxell said there was the added problem that both defendants enjoyed being sexually aroused by the infliction of violence.

‘In my opinion this inappropriate behaviour is not some form of false bravado but is a true reflection of your attitudes to the offence,’ he said.

‘You also admit to kissing each other as Stacey Mitchell lay dead or dying and you, Jessica Stasinowsky, have since expressed regret that the sexual passion at the time did not go further.

‘It is dreadful to have to refer to these admissions, but they do reveal the enormity of the evil in what you did.’

The court had heard that David Haynes had been released on parole three weeks before the lovers’ sentencing hearing. He had just served a two-year jail sentence following his early pleas of guilty to being an accessory after the fact.

By now, the defiant smiles and whispers that had marked the killers’ earlier court appearances had all but vanished. In stark contrast, the blank expressions the evil pair wore during sentencing gave way to panic as Justice Blaxell called for authorities to ensure the killer lovers completed their life sentences separately behind bars.

Justice Blaxell ordered that the two immediately be segregated in Western’s Australia’s only maximum security women’s prison, Bandyup, so as not to encourage ‘their perverse outlook on life’. And he recommended that the killers should be barred from having any further contact for the duration of their sentences.

‘It is highly desirable that you should not be permitted to associate together within the prison system, and it is my strong recommendation that you be kept separate and apart,’ he said. ‘Failing this it s difficult for me to see how there will be any genuine change in your attitude which might make it safe for you to be released on parole.’

Outside the court, Detective Senior Sergeant Post told reporters that despite the lengthy sentence handed down, it was really the Mitchell family who had been given a life sentence because of the ‘cold-blooded killing’ of their daughter.

‘Nothing will change what has happened, not a conviction, not twenty-four years in jail – there are no winners in a homicide, there are only devastated lives,’ Post told journalists from Perth’s Sunday Times newspaper.

‘What makes it harder for families to accept is when there is no apparent motive for what has occurred. Stacey’s only mistake was she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. They killed her then celebrated with a kiss – it doesn’t get any more bizarre or grotesque than that, and this is not a horror movie, this is life in Perth!’

The policeman added that while the murder was one of the worst the state had ever seen, he did not want to give Parashumti or Stasinowsky any notoriety for the killing, which he hoped would haunt them.

The court case was a cruel and tragic ending for the victim’s English family who had migrated from the southern English county of Dorset six years earlier with their four children. Andy Mitchell had been on a short working trip to Japan in December 2006, when an argument had erupted at home between the feisty teenager and her mother, Sophie, during which the sixteen-year-old stormed out. Through a friend, she had found her way to the Lathlain house and a date with death.

While the parents were too distraught to speak to waiting media at the time, Andy Mitchell would remain haunted by the fateful memory of driving to the local bus station the morning after his daughter’s phone call expressing her plans to come home. He would keep the mobile phone bearing the anxious text messages he sent to Stacey, asking where she was after she failed to show at the appointed meeting place. The whole time he was texting, his daughter’s blood spattered body lay upside down in a garbage bin.

‘That’s sad because we got upset thinking that she didn’t want to know and didn’t really care, but she was dead,’ he would later tell the West Australian.

After her death, Andy Mitchell’s last tribute to the murdered teenager was to present the Christmas gifts his daughter had earlier placed on lay-by to her older brother and two younger sisters. For this family, Christmas would never again hold any cause for celebration: the anniversary of their daughter’s death cast a shadow over every coming Christmas.

With the killers now contemplating life sentences, Andy stood quietly behind his wife, whose hands shook uncontrollably as the police officer read the statement they had prepared.

‘We would like to say we are still devastated over Stacey’s brutal murder,’ the statement said. ‘We still can’t believe she’s gone and the violent way in which her life ended. Though we have to accept the sentence the two perpetrators have been given, no amount of time would ever be enough.’

‘Stacey was a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who was full of life, caring and loving, the life and soul of the house. She will never fulfil any of her ambitions or dreams. Though we are glad that this part of the ordeal is over, the pain of losing Stacey will live with us forever.’

The statement ended with a poignant request from the family that the media should respect their privacy at such a difficult time.

Back at her former British school in West Moors, England, a teaching assistant recalled Stacey Mitchell as a ‘warm friendly girl, lively, full of fun and popular with other children in her year’.

The vibrant teen had kept in contact with friends back in England using the social networking site Myspace. She had written: ‘My name is Stacey, I’m English, I love me alcohol. I’m a party girl and music is my life. I can’t live without my friends, I’m a very loud person and I talk 24/7. I’m a very down to earth person if you get to know me…xxx.’

The distraught parents, silently slipping away from the scene, fought back tears. Nobody would ever get the chance to know their little girl now.

Meanwhile, supporters of Stasinowsky told the media scrum that public perceptions of her ‘as the evil one’ were wrong. They defended her flippancy in court, saying she was inclined to laugh when she was nervous. They further claimed she was a ‘beautiful person’ until she formed her unholy alliance with Parashumti.

While the victim’s family had hoped that the case would prove an end to the legal aspect of the ordeal they were wrong. In November 2008, the Western Australian newspaper The Sunday Times sparked a public outcry when it revealed that despite the judge’s recommendation that the lesbian lovers should be prevented from having further contact, the pair had been continuing their sadistic sexual relationship behind the bars of Bandyup. The headline-making story revealed that the couple had been hugging, kissing and having sexual liaisons during shared recreational time in the communal area.

According to a former inmate at the prison, recreational arrangements meant the lovers were free to spend up to seven hours a day together during the weekends, and ninety minutes each day on weekdays. With 180 prisoners incarcerated at the jail, the former prisoner, who refused to be identified, said authorities simply couldn’t keep tabs on everyone and were turning a blind eye to the pair’s antics.

‘They spend a tremendous amount of time together,’ claimed the former prisoner, who also said the bloodthirsty killers had bizarrely requested a diet of raw meat and that Parashumti had been found fashioning chicken bones into sharp makeshift weapons.

‘They are feeding off each other,’ said the anonymous woman. ‘Their relationship will not end while they are in Bandyup together, the officers know what they’re up to!’

In the public debacle that followed the revelation, Western Australia’s Attorney General Christian Porter said the arrangement was unsatisfactory and that plans were already afoot to transfer one of the lovers to Greenough Regional Prison, 400 kilometres north of Perth. Later, questioned about the matter in parliament, he said there was no evidence to substantiate the newspaper’s claims that a sexual relationship had occurred, or to support the anonymous source’s contentions that Parashumti had been found making sharp instruments or that the women were living on a raw meat diet. He said he had directed the Department of Corrective Services to organise the transfer to the smaller facility, which was equipped to manage twenty-nine prisoners and which would be upgraded to afford closer supervision for one of the maximum security killers. But he admitted that the transfer could take several months to be completed.

‘But immediately the directive I’ve given to the department is to structure the recreation time for each of the offenders on alternate days so there can be no contact during recreation,’ Mr Porter said.

He explained that the interim measure would mean that one of the killers would spend time in the confines of the unit, while the other was allowed free access to the prison grounds on alternate days. This, he told journalists, though a far better situation, was not ‘entirely satisfactory’ as there was still the possibility of ongoing contact, with the prisoners passing one another in the corridors. But he assured the public that both women would continue to undergo psychiatric assessments to determine which of the pair would be relocated.

The transfer of Parashumti had barely begun when the case was back in the headlines again – this time when lawyers for Jessica Stasinowsky asked the Western Australia Court of Appeal to reduce her strict security life imprisonment sentence and the minimum 24-year non-parole period both women had received from sentencing judge Peter Blaxell.

This time, an unsmiling and more sober Stasinowsky cut a lonely figure in the dock, dressed in her black shirt and matching black pants.

Without her lover, who only a day before had been relocated to Greenough Regional Prison to see out the rest of her sentence and end the public outcry over their ongoing relationship, Stasinowsky’s quiet demeanour cut a stark contrast to the grinning killer whose previous court appearances with Parashumti had caused such a stir a year earlier. In the public gallery, three of Stasinowsky’s friends waited to support her, nodding towards her as she sat expressionless, in the dock.

Tom Percy QC told the court on 4 December 2008 that the brutal murder was ‘short of the worst category of offending,’ his comments prompting outrage from the victim’s family and the Australian public.

Mr Percy argued that three errors had been made during sentencing by Justice Blaxell. First, he said the judge had erred when he placed the murder in the upper category of offences of wilful murder. Second, Justice Blaxell had given excessive weight to the perceived lack of remorse on Stasinowsky’s part, the assertion that the crime was premeditated, and the sexual aspect of the offending, as well as the appellant’s limited capacity for reform and rehabilitation. The final error, he maintained, was that the strict security life sentence failed to take into account her youth, lack of prior convictions and the fact that she had pleaded guilty to the crime. His client did not deserve such a harsh sentence, he argued, saying the strict security life sentence was the toughest available to judges.

Mr Percy argued before the Court of Appeal justices that the sentencing judge had erred in imposing the minimum 24-year period because he had failed to take into account Stasinowsky’s age, remorse and chances of rehabilitation while in jail. Mr Percy added that although he accepted that his client had shown no remorse at the time of the murder, she had since become more enlightened.

But Justice Geoffrey Miller stated the murder was a ‘terrible killing’ and highlighted the evidence that showed she had filmed the crime scene on a mobile phone.

‘It is in the worst category, isn’t it?’ questioned Justice Miller.

But Mr Percy argued that the murder did not involve multiple victims, and that Stasinowsky was appropriate for a young first time offender who had acted out of ‘immense jealousy.’ The victim had not been a witness in a trial or a police officer and this should be taken into account.

In a counteroffensive, prosecutor David Dempster argued that Stasinowsky’s sentence was appropriate for a sustained and brutal attack that did not deserve to be cut. He said nothing changed the fact that they had planned to murder Stacey Mitchell, and the women appeared to have gloated over the killing.

‘There was evidence that both offenders were happy with themselves,’ he added.

In January 2009, Stasinowsky’s appeal for a shorter prison sentence was finally thrown out by the Court of Appeal. The court described the killing as ‘brutal and callous’ and said had it not been for her age, her guilty plea, and her lack of prior convictions, she might have faced a non-parole period closer to the thirty-year maximum. Justices Christopher Steytler and Carmel McLure unanimously quashed the submissions by Mr Percy that the sentencing judge made a mistake.

‘In any event it seems to us that the present offence does fall within the upper category of wilful murders,’ they ruled.

‘The murder in this case was a brutal, pre-meditated killing of a defenceless sixteen-year-old girl for no other reason than that her killers did not like her.’

‘The appellant has shown no credible remorse,’ they said, adding that it appeared obvious that the remorse she showed in video interviews with police and a court-appointed psychiatrist was only motivated by her own concerns over her predicament rather than any real concern for the fate of her victim.

The justices agreed that it had been open to the sentencing judge to conclude that a sentence of strict security life imprisonment was justified ‘in the overall circumstances of the case’. They further upheld that a non-parole period was warranted in a case of such a callous and brutal nature.

‘It unquestionably attracts a very significant community interest in punishment and deterrence,’ they ruled.

They said the violence inflicted by the appellant and her lover had been premeditated, vicious and sustained and appeared to have no real motive.

‘Also the callous conduct and boastful attitude of the appellant leaves little scope for confidence in her rehabilitation,’ they said, concurring with the original trial judge.

Justice Geoffrey Miller said the 24-year term was appropriate and reflected the seriousness of the crime.

‘I am of the opinion that the crime committed by the appellant was so high in the scale of crimes of wilful murder, that for this reason, it justified a strict security life imprisonment,’ added Justice Miller, who said the sentencing judge was also entitled to take aggravating factors surrounding the murder into account, in particular the letter Stasinowsky wrote to her lover, and the remorseless graphic account she had given to the security officer.

Later Mr Percy told the media his client was reviewing her options, leaving the door open for a possible appeal to the High Court.

Meanwhile Stasinowski returned to Bandyup, this time with no hope of any further fraternising with her killer lover, who was settling into an equally lonely life in her cell in Greenough.

But despite the judge’s order that the killers should be prevented from any further contact, in 2009 it was revealed that the now separated lovers had been using an elaborate letter writing ruse to stay in touch behind bars. The story claimed that from Bandyup Women’s Prison a highly creative Stasinowsky had been using convicted serial killer Catherine Birnie as a go-between to pass letters to Parashumti in Greenough.

Copied by another prisoner in a careful attempt to hide Stasinowksy’s handwriting, a letter obtained by a newspaper read: ‘Now that you are gone I cannot breathe. It’s anybody’s guess where we will be in five, or even 50 years from now, but one thing I do know, my heart is and always will be yours and yours alone?

‘Do you speak to the moon. I still speak to her nearly every night. The moon will carry your words to me if ever you want to send them.’

In the scandal that followed it was further alleged that Birnie, who was jailed for life in 1986 after being convicted with her late husband David Birnie over the kidnap, rape and murder of four Perth women, was at the centre of a prison security scare on 10 November 2009. Allegations followed that she had been found carrying a knife as well as acting as a go-between for the vampire lovers. But in a statement issued on 4 December 2009, the Department of Corrective Services in Western Australia, refused to discuss specific questions about the incident, which was alleged to have occurred in Bandyup Prison’s Education Centre, where 57-year-old Birnie and the now 22-year-old Stasinowsky were both serving life sentences.

‘Bandyup is a maximum security prison that deals with operational issues and challenges on a daily basis,’ a statement to the West Australian read. ‘The safety and security of a prison can be compromised by inappro­priate release of information/intelligence, particularly information relating to operational matters.’

They would not comment further on leaks from prison sources who claimed that guards had stopped to speak with Birnie in the education centre after learning she had been facilitating the writing of letters between the two young prisoners. At the time it was alleged Birnie was carrying a diary believed to have belonged to Stasinowsky. In the search that followed, witnesses claimed guards found a knife, prompting a security clampdown at the prison. One insider allegedly told journalists that one of the wheelie bin killers had been considering suicide in the lead-up to the clampdown, but had apparently indicated she wanted to take other people with her. The insider added that Birnie was the ‘best con artist’ in the prison, who had too much scope to move around the jail wherever she wanted, because the authorities ‘over trusted’ her and that she had everyone ‘bluffed’. But the Attorney General Christian Porter refused to comment on what he said was an operational matter.

Meanwhile, prison sources dismissed the media reports alleging Birnie had a knife in her possession as a total ‘beat up’. No kind of weapon had been found in her cell, claimed an anonymous source, although a security clampdown had apparently followed the allegations. Birnie, who had served twenty-three years of her life sentence, had been caught along with her husband, after a fifth girl they had abducted escaped from a house in Willagee and raised the alarm. David Birnie subsequently hanged himself in his cell in 2005.

This was not the last time that the ‘wheelie bin’ killers would make headlines. In November 2010 the case was in the news again, this time with controversial revelations that Valerie Parashumti had made a compensation grab for $337,000, claiming she was the victim of a crime!

Andy and Sophie Mitchell were furious when they learnt that one of their daughter’s killers had lodged a claim for compensation for personal injuries sustained in a road crash two years before the murder. The couple demanded that the state government reject the compo grab, saying the claim was sickening.

‘Give her nothing,’ Mr Mitchell told Perth’s Sunday Times. ‘They should throw the claim out now and show her the same rights she showed our Stacey – none!’

‘I think it’s disgusting she even has the front to lodge a claim. We miss Stacey terribly. She had her whole life in front of her before those evil bitches killed her.’

Parashumti’s application for publicly funded personal injury compensation caused a bigger furore when it was revealed that the Insurance Commission of Western Australia had engaged one of the state’s leading insurance litigation firms to handle the case. According to the claim, Parashumti was just sixteen when she was hit by a car while riding a bicycle across a busy Perth intersection in July 2004. She had been taken to hospital with serious leg injuries but medical assessments ordered by the court during her 2008 murder trial also detailed the possibility of frontal lobe damage to her brain as a result of the accident. Parashumti’s claim against the driver was successful and she was finally awarded $10,000 in damages by the courts, and a further $12,000 in legal costs.

Today, the killer lovers remain reliant on the moon to communicate their lunar love messages to one another as they complete their sentences – miles apart and in separate prisons.