Chapter 22

Hallucinations

At the Thomas Embling Hospital, the new involuntary patient was slowly improving. Vicky’s treating psychiatrist, Dr Zimmerman, noted that the accused mum had ‘improved enormously’ since her admission. Vicky was sleeping well and paying greater attention to her appearance. She now presented as well-organised. She was socialising around the campus of the psych unit in full makeup and with carefully blow-dried hair.

The antidepressant medication the doctor had prescribed seemed to be doing its job, and Dr Zimmerman anticipated that the patient would make a full recovery. The staff caring for Vicky had noticed a marked improvement in her capacity to reason, as well as in her general behaviour. By late February, Vicky could describe aspects of her history clearly and sensibly, though others appeared delusional.

From Vicky’s self-reported history, it was obvious that she’d been suffering from postnatal depression after the birth of her twins. The team suspected the depression had crept up on her slowly. She told the doctors she’d been unhappy with her marriage and had a history of bulimia and anxiety, for which her GP had prescribed Valium. This was supported by discussions with Vicky’s parents and her sister Dorothy.

Vicky’s medical notes observed that her mood fluctuations, the difficulties she referred to in her relationship with Chris, and the body-image issues evidenced in her repeated cosmetic surgery were hallmarks of a vulnerable personality. Borderline features were apparent in her unstable emotional regulation, her doctors noted. These included difficulty in being alone and a propensity to self-harm.

More concerning was the fact that the prisoner seemed to believe that the events surrounding her husband’s stabbing weren’t real. Sometimes she claimed that the stabbing had been staged, and that the casualty staff at the Royal Melbourne were involved in some sort of charade. She also maintained that her husband’s injuries had been created using theatrical makeup. Even the tubes and drains coming out of Chris’s body were props that had been taped on. She claimed she’d tried to peel the tubes off because she was convinced they were fakes.

Vicky continued to express fears about her own safety and that of her children, claiming there was a conspiracy that placed them all in danger. All these observations confirmed that she had lost touch with reality.

In the days after her arrest, Vicky’s family were constant visitors at the Thomas Embling Hospital. While Marie was refusing to speak to her father, she accompanied her grandparents on their visits to her mum.

***

After the Magistrates’ Court hearing, the detectives stepped up their inquiries, keen to build a case that would prove the lovers had been in cahoots when they plotted Chris Soteriou’s murder. By early February, the evidence was growing. The detectives had compiled detailed statements about Vicky’s activities on the night her husband was stabbed, as well as observations from her neighbours about her lover’s movements in the days surrounding the attack.

Detective Senior Constable Matt Graefe had spoken to the Dimitrakis family, hoping they could tell him what was going on in Ari’s life in the months leading up to the crime. The police were keen to pinpoint when the plot had been hatched, and hoped that phone and financial records would shed light on the lovers’ intentions.

On the Friday when the couple were arrested, Graefe spoke with Dimitrakis’s mother-in-law, Valerie Christopher, who had watched in disbelief as police searched her home.

She pulled no punches. It was clear that this upstanding Greek woman didn’t like her son-in-law. She told the police she thought Ari was ‘unintelligent’. She also described him as ‘lazy and hopeless’. He often refused to get out of bed to go to work, complaining that it wasn’t worth his while. He had lived rent-free in her home since marrying her daughter Irene in 2008.

Irene was Ari’s second wife. He had married in 1984 but divorced two years later. The couple had no children and occupied the lower level of her double-storey home. Valerie claimed her son-in-law had borrowed money from her and never repaid it. Early in the marriage, she’d lent him $24,000, which he still hadn’t returned.

By contrast, Irene was a hard-working woman with a responsible executive job who earned a good wage. Over the past year, Valerie had sensed difficulties in the relationship, though she wasn’t sure what they were about.

Irene Dimitrakis had become suspicious of her husband in the middle of 2009, when she noticed a marked change in his attitude to her. He had suddenly become cold and detached. He was experiencing mood swings and was no longer affectionate, as he’d been in the early days of their marriage.

He started putting her down in front of her family. He humiliated her by calling her names, saying she was an idiot and calling her dumb. Irene’s family didn’t like what they saw. Her sister Julie suggested Ari try being kinder to his wife.

Ari had changed in other ways too. The man Irene had married was a non-smoking keep-fit freak who never drank or took drugs. But now Ari often smelt of alcohol, and she feared his erratic behaviour might be a side effect of illicit drug use. He began coming home later and later, blaming his ungodly hours on his driving commitments. He’d climb into bed beside her and fall asleep without a word.

Though Irene didn’t know what was affecting her husband’s behaviour, it seems the high drama that had been a feature of Vicky’s relationship with Chris was also evident in her relationship with Ari. At 4.17 p.m. on 9 July, the police were called to Panther Court, Eltham, after locals reported a loud argument coming from a parked car. Two officers spoke to Ari and Vicky, asking if there was a problem and suggesting they keep the noise down.

Eight hours later, Vicky and Ari were back in the police’s sights. This time, Senior Constable Rohan White and Constable Emily O’Sullivan received a report about an incident on the intersection of Williams Road and Foote Street in Templestowe. There had been a complaint about a man and woman yelling at each other on the footpath, and the police officers approached the pair to see what the disturbance was about.

Constable O’Sullivan heard the man shout ‘I don’t understand you. I can’t believe this!’ She noted the registration number of the vehicle and asked for his identification. The police approached Vicky and asked if she was OK.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I just want to go home.’

She admitted she was married to someone else but was seeing this guy. She claimed he’d sat out the front of her home and phoned her on his mobile. She told the police he’d said that he wanted to marry her, and she’d told him she didn’t want to leave her husband. He’d left her house claiming he was going to kill himself. She’d followed in her car, and they’d had an argument on the side of the road.

The policewoman asked more questions, but Vicky wasn’t answering them. She strutted off toward a dark-coloured car. ‘Follow her and make sure she’s not too upset to drive,’ O’Sullivan told White.

Senior Constable White caught up with her and asked, ‘Has he hurt you?’

Vicky shook her head.

White persisted. ‘What’s going on? Do you need our help?’

‘I just want to go home,’ she replied. ‘I don’t want him to follow.’

The officer checked her licence and asked if she was OK to drive. Vicky said she was. White then suggested she consider getting an intervention order.

Vicky said nothing and drove away.

While White was with Vicky, Constable O’Sullivan was talking to Ari. He said it was true he’d asked Vicky to leave her husband.

The policewoman asked if he’d wanted to kill himself. Ari replied, ‘No, I just told her that to get her attention.’

Senior Constable White returned and told him, ‘She’s gone home to her partner, so you go home to your partner. Don’t go to her place.’

Ari promised he wouldn’t.

As the officers left, White told Dimitrakis, ‘Talk to her about it another day. She doesn’t seem too keen on the whole idea tonight.’ The police watched Ari drive away.

***

In July 2009, Julie Christopher Coster and her family moved back into her mother’s house while they were renovating their own home. Julie immediately detected the tension between Irene and Ari. There were constant rows, and the relationship was deteriorating fast.

In August, Irene confronted her husband with her suspicions that he was having an affair. Ari was dismissive, saying she’d done her dash by accusing him of such a betrayal. Irene wanted to believe him, but she told Julie she wasn’t confident he was telling the truth.

Julie also asked her brother-in-law if he was having an affair.

‘No,’ he said crossly. ‘Why would I do that? It’s very lonely being by yourself when you’re older.’

But Irene’s hunch was correct. That month, the police came across the lovers on one of their trysts in Greensborough. At 8.42 p.m. on 4 August, Constable Dean Jackson and Constable Tully Sage drove their divisional van into the car park behind the Grimshaw Street shops with their headlights on high beam.

A black Caprice was parked in the shadows, and the officers walked over to perform a welfare check. Constable Jackson shone his torch on a man and woman looking ‘very startled’ in the back seat.

The couple were in a state of partial undress, their upper bodies naked. It was obvious that they were about to engage in some sort of sexual activity when they were disturbed. Constable Sage asked the woman if she was consenting, and if they were OK. She said they were.

Constable Sage tactfully suggested that they move on. Later, he made a note of the incident in his running sheet. This was only days before Irene confronted her husband.

By Irene’s birthday on 9 September, the rows were so loud that the rest of the family could hear them from upstairs. Julie often overheard her sister demanding to know the name of the woman Ari was having an affair with. He continued to deny it.

Julie would later tell police, ‘Things around the house were really awkward … It was like we were walking on eggshells.’

Further investigations by the police revealed that on 21 September, Dimitrakis had gone to his GP complaining about pins and needles in his hands. The doctor noted that he was agitated and suffering from anxiety.

Irene’s doubts grew when Ari became secretive about his phone calls. But one day in November, Ari inadvertently left his Blackberry lying around. His sister-in-law picked it up and began to scroll through, looking for photographs of her children. Instead, she found explicit texts and lurid snapshots from a woman called Vicky.

‘You are my husband, you are my life … eternally yours,’ read one of the texts. Another message said, ‘You drive, and I’ll blow you all the way.’ Some of the texts were in Greek, one of them closing with ‘psihi mou’ – ‘my soul, my life’. In many of her texts, Vicky vowed to love Ari till death, or to the grave and back. She called him her ‘god’ and her ‘true husband and soul’. One of the text messages referred to a tattoo on Ari’s groin. It said, ‘You have now sealed your fate.’

Julie showed the texts to her sister. Irene was angry when she joined the dots and realised that the V on Ari’s chest stood for Vicky, the woman who had been sexting him.

Irene studied the lurid photographs and provocative messages this woman had sent to her husband. In some texts, Vicky referred to herself as Mrs Ari Dimitrakis. In one photograph, she was posing in a silver gown in what looked like a hotel room.

The real Mrs Dimitrakis didn’t recognise this smartly dressed woman smiling as she held up a glass of champagne, but she had no doubt that the barrage of texts and photographs had all come from the same person. Irene downloaded them onto her computer as evidence of her husband’s infidelity.

When she confronted Ari on 11 November, there was a blazing row. This time, the evidence of his affair was irrefutable. A few days later, he finally confessed, and Irene told him to leave. Ari begged his wife to let him stay until after Christmas, claiming he had nowhere else to go. Five days later, he returned to his GP, and again the doctor diagnosed him with anxiety and stress.

By December 2009, Irene and Ari were living separate lives under the same roof. Each night, Irene retreated to the marital bed, leaving Ari to sleep on the couch. He begged her for a second chance, but as far as she was concerned, the marriage was over. She was going on a holiday to the USA with her sister-in-law in the new year, and by the time she returned, Ari Dimitrakis would be out of her life.

***

In the lead-up to Christmas, Ari Dimitrakis was sinking into depression, which he was medicating with booze and drugs. He was barely working, which was creating additional money problems, and in the New Year he was going to be homeless. He told his wife that he wanted to kill himself. ‘That’s emotional blackmail,’ said one of Irene’s sisters.

The melodrama was documented in Dimitrakis’s medical records, which revealed a history of suicide attempts that coincided with the dates on which Vicky Soteriou claimed to have ended the relationship.

Records from Box Hill Hospital showed that Dimitrakis was first admitted on 15 April 2009 suffering an overdose after taking 35 paracetamol tablets, between 40 and 50 antidepressants and some cocaine. Tests confirmed high levels of cocaine in his blood. The patient told doctors that he was a hard drug user, and had taken an overdose because he was depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend. Since the break-up, he’d been crying and feeling upset all the time.

But he gave a different account to his wife and in-laws. After discharging himself, Dimitrakis told Irene that his drink had been spiked with cocaine during a night out at the Gypsy Bar in Fitzroy.

He returned home, continuing his sexual relationship with his wife, and rekindling the affair with his married lover. He’d later insist Vicky had contacted him first. But soon afterwards, after a session at the Eltham Hotel, Vicky again told him the affair was over, saying she’d let him know if she finally left her husband.

With his affair over and his marriage on the rocks, Dimitrakis was desperate. On 11 December, he checked himself into the Eltham Hotel and telephoned Vicky, threatening to kill himself unless they got back together. The dramatic gesture worked. Vicky drove down to the hotel and found Ari in his room. He showed her some packets of Panadol he’d brought along, threatening again to end his life.

Vicky left about midnight, still refusing to resume the affair. Ari was so shattered that he started drinking bourbon and wine and swallowing handfuls of paracetamol.

Later, Ari rang Vicky, telling her he’d overdosed. Then he rang his cousin, Christos Chronis, and told him what he’d done. Christos immediately called an ambulance, and Ari was taken to Box Hill. His medical notes detailed his explanation. ‘Went to a hotel with girlfriend last night. Brought paracetamol with him to scare her if she changed her mind and decided not to tell her husband about the affair and make plans to leave him. Girlfriend told Ari she was unable to tell her husband and left the hotel.’

Ari Dimitrakis was admitted to Upton House psychiatric unit. While he was in hospital, Irene’s mother went to visit him with Julie’s husband Billy. Valerie told him she wanted him out of the house, but agreed to let him stay until after Christmas because she felt sorry for him. He returned home still begging Irene for another chance.

***

Although Vicky insisted that Ari had been stalking her after she ended the affair in November, the pair’s phone records told a different story.

Telstra provided pages of records listing all the calls made from Vicky Soteriou’s mobile between October and December 2009. During this period, Vicky sent 2405 texts to Ari Dimitrakis’s mobile and made 63 voice calls. If Vicky was claiming her lover was stalking her, these telephone communications proved the opposite.

The records also revealed that Vicky was stalking Irene Dimitrakis. She made repeated calls from her mobile to Irene’s work number in December. This is when she claimed the affair was over and she was trying to cease all contact with her lover. The obsessive relationship with Ari wasn’t as one-sided as Vicky wanted everyone to think.

The detectives had taken possession of Ari’s mobile and uncovered hundreds of explicit texts from Vicky. There was no evidence of the texts on Vicky’s mobile; clearly, she’d had the foresight to delete them. Some of these messages were sent at the time when she claimed Ari was stalking her. They spoke volumes about her infatuation.

In November, she texted, ‘You are my God, Ari, I will bow down to you until they bury us together.’ She celebrated his tattoo with another SMS: ‘Getting my name tattooed, scarred on your body for life, has proved to me that you have just signed our marriage certificate and your death certificate to me my love.’ Another read, ‘No man exists in my eyes ever, only you, Ari my husband. I only have eyes for you, baby.’

On 26 November, when Vicky claimed Ari was stalking her, she texted him declaring affectionately, ‘Such a love was never born, my soul, I adore you Ari.’ Later that day, she sent a more explicit text saying, ‘I need your flesh inside me baby.’

The police had already discovered from their discussions with Chris that Vicky had changed the number on her mobile two or three times between August and December 2009. On one occasion, she claimed Telstra had cancelled her number because she failed to pay her bill on time. On another, she told Chris Telstra had stuffed up the account when she bought Marie an iPhone, so she needed a new number. Telstra’s records showed that on 9 December, the day Ari was observed screaming out in the street, she’d disconnected her mobile phone.

The phone traffic between the lovers went both ways. In a ten-hour period on Christmas Day, Dimitrakis sent Vicky 64 text messages and one voice message. Irene Dimitrakis would later recall that they spent Christmas Day at her brother’s home, where Ari had vanished for about an hour during the afternoon. The records also showed that on 1 January, Ari attempted to contact Vicky 29 times.

More telling, the call log revealed that Vicki’s last voice call to Ari Dimitrakis’s mobile was made on the night of her husband’s birthday at 5.52 p.m. Later, Ari texted her at 8.45 p.m., about the time that the Soterious arrived in Rose Street.

The police also noted several phone calls in the days after the attack. One had been made from a Telstra phone box at 75 Devonshire Road, Watsonia, very close to the Soterious’ home. Someone called Ari Dimitrakis’s mobile and left a 13-second message on his voicemail. Other calls had been made from the Soterious’ home phone, and again from the public call box at Devonshire Road.

The phone records also showed a number of texts sent in the days after the stabbing from Ari’s mobile to Vicky Soteriou, who was at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

While Ari denied having anything to do with the stabbing of his lover’s husband, statements from Irene Dimitrakis and her family shed new light on the limousine driver’s activities in the hours leading up to the crime, and over the following days.

Police discovered from discussions with the family that Ari had been driving Valerie’s Corolla because he’d crashed his black Caprice on the night of 1 January, rendering it unroadworthy. This made his circumstances dire, because he had no means of earning money.

Irene recalled that she and her husband had spent the evening of Saturday 2 January at home watching television. But shortly before 10 p.m., she made a snap decision to go to the pokies at the Cherry Hill Tavern in Templestowe. Her husband agreed to drive her there, and his image was captured on CCTV when he arrived at 10 p.m. He said he was going home to have a shower and would collect her later.

But when Irene called her husband to come and fetch her, he failed to pick up her calls. She eventually left a message for him at 11.08 p.m. Exactly an hour later, at 12.08 a.m., Ari returned her call, making the arrangements to pick her up.

Irene told the detectives that there had been nothing suspicious about her husband’s appearance or behaviour when he arrived to collect her. She had no recollection of him wearing a hoodie or having any blood on him. CCTV footage showed Ari arriving and leaving in a white top like the one he was wearing when Matthew Ulrich photographed him in Berkerley Court earlier in the day.

Irene said his driving wasn’t erratic or unpredictable. She couldn’t say if he was affected by drink or drugs. She hadn’t been paying him much attention because of the situation between them. But she noticed tablet packets in the rubbish bin on 1 and 2 January and suspected he must have been taking some sort of medication.

Valerie told police that her son-in-law had left the house again after returning from the pokies. She couldn’t remember the time, but it would have been in the early morning. He drove her Toyota Corolla to the nearby Tunstall Square shopping mall to buy veggies and meat for a barbecue later that day. Ironically, Sunday 3 January was Irene and Ari’s wedding anniversary. It was a hollow celebration in the circumstances, but they’d already invited Irene’s sister and brother and their families, so Ari decided to proceed with the get-together ahead of Irene’s overseas trip.

Valerie told the detectives that on 3 January she accompanied her daughter Julie and her husband to Keilor, where they were visiting his parents. They left Ari cooking a barbecue for the extended family, but when they returned between 10.30 and 11.00 p.m., he’d gone to bed, apparently feeling unwell.

On Monday morning, Valerie tried to wake her son-in-law. She called his name about ten times, and when that failed to rouse him, she knocked on the bedroom door and went inside. She told him to wake up, but he just mumbled incoherently and went back to sleep. At 6.30 p.m., Valerie called an ambulance.

When the paramedics arrived, they asked Irene to look in the rubbish bins to determine what medication he’d taken. She found packages for anti-depressants, painkillers, Xanax and a prescription slimming drug called Duromine, which has similar effects to amphetamines.

The staff at Upton House noted that on 6 January, when Julie arrived to visit, Ari didn’t want to speak to her. Julie told police she found him distressed and incoherent. She assumed it was because his wife had refused to give their marriage a second chance. Irene had gone overseas that day.

Ari told Julie, ‘I’ve done something really bad’, but refused to say what. He told her that in five years time, she and her husband wouldn’t have to worry about their house, because it would be paid off. But he also said that if ‘they’ found out about ‘it’, he’d go to jail for fifteen years. Two days later, he said something similar to Irene’s sister Lena.

A fellow limousine driver, Harry Grammatos, visited Ari at Box Hill Hospital to collect his work phone so that his friend wouldn’t lose customers while he was sick. To Harry’s surprise, Dimitrakis announced that he had liver problems and had only six months to live. But he looked surprisingly healthy, despite his recent overdose. Grammatos later told police that he didn’t believe Ari, who was known for making up stories.

Grammatos was aware that Ari had been having an affair with a married woman. He frequently talked about her as his future wife, though all the drivers knew he was already married. The affair seemed to be taking a toll. Dimitrakis had always been a happy, upbeat person, but he’d recently been down in the dumps. Grammatos recalled a golf weekend at the end of November when Ari was uncharacteristically depressed. Though he was a keen golfer, he left the tournament early and drove back to Melbourne.

When Grammatos visited Dimitrakis at the hospital, Ari claimed he was taking a few months off.

‘What’s going on?’ Grammatos asked.

Ari replied. ‘I’ve just got too much on my plate. I’m stressing out and everything. I’m not feeling well.’

After Ari’s arrest on 15 January, Detective Senior Constable Graefe contacted Grammatos, asking him to bring his colleague’s work phone down to the police station in case it provided additional evidence.

***

The detectives also spoke to Katina Heaslip, who had been there when Vicky bumped into Ari on the night of her birthday in December 2006. Chris had shouted Vicky a night on the town, footing the bill for a private suite in the Crown Towers complex. She took Marie with her, and was joined by her sister Dorothy as well as Katina and another friend, Poppy Hadzi.

After a meal in one of the upmarket restaurants at the complex, Dorothy stayed in the suite with Marie while Vicky headed off with Kat and Poppy to celebrate her birthday. Kat confirmed that she was there when they bumped into Ari Dimitrakis outside the GPO nightclub in Bourke Street.

What the women didn’t know when they ran into Ari Dimitrakis was that this was the first anniversary of his mother’s death. Ari had been walking the streets of the city that night, grieving.

Vicky and Ari engaged in small talk for about five minutes before going their separate ways. As far as Kat knew, they didn’t begin to see each other until early 2008, when Vicky confided that she’d been meeting Ari for coffees and lunch. The friendship remained platonic for about three months, but then Vicky told Kat they had stopped seeing each other. At that point, Dimitrakis began calling Kat, begging her to help him get back with Vicky.

Kat said Dimitrakis had turned up at a shopping mall near the school where she taught. She was having lunch and was shocked to see him there. She immediately called Vicky. After that, Dimitrakis began calling Kat at school, again pleading with her to ask Vicky to get back with him. He even sent flowers to her at school, begging for help.

As far as Kat knew, the couple didn’t see each other again until 2009, when Vicky revealed they had rekindled the relationship, which became passionately sexual. A few months later, Vicky told Kat that Ari had started to hassle her about leaving her husband. She said she’d refused, and when Ari wouldn’t accept her decision, she told him their affair was over.

Vicky said she’d attempted to split up with Dimitrakis on a number of occasions during 2009, but he’d become possessive and started to stalk her. She claimed he’d followed her in her car, sometimes when she was with her children, and hung around the street where she lived.

‘I told her she was playing with fire,’ Kat recalled. She told the detectives that she’d observed bruises on Vicky’s arms. When she asked about them, Vicky claimed Ari had shaken her when he was trying to persuade her to leave her husband.

Vicky was afraid that Chris would find out about her affair. She’d talked about asking him for a divorce at some stage before 2009, but she claimed that the stress of the potential separation caused her father to suffer a heart attack.

Vicky said she’d always made it clear to Dimitrakis that she didn’t want to leave her husband. But after she said the relationship was over, Dimitrakis began threatening her and her children, and blackmailing her by threatening to tell Chris.

Kat and Vicky came up with a scheme to end the affair without Chris finding out. When Vicky was with Ari, Kat called repeatedly on her mobile, pretending to be Chris. They hoped this would fool Ari into thinking her husband was on to them, causing an argument that would split them up. But Kat’s calls had no effect; nothing could deter the infatuated Dimitrakis.

According to Kat, Vicky called her three days after the stabbing, telling her what had happened to Chris. Kat tried to console her sobbing girlfriend.

Vicky said she feared her lover might be responsible for the stabbing.

Kat asked, ‘Why do you think it’s him?’

Vicky replied, ‘He never liked Chris and has said that one day he’ll kill him.’

The next morning, on Wednesday 6 January, Vicky rang back, again expressing concern that Dimitrakis might have been responsible. ‘I really need to find out,’ she said.

But Kat was confused. Vicky had described Chris’s attacker as a short, overweight man in a black balaclava. Kat had met Ari and knew he looked nothing like that.

Next day, Vicky rang again, asking Kat to accompany her to Box Hill Hospital. She said Ari was in Upton House, the psychiatric unit, because he’d overdosed.

The women drove to the hospital, and Kat left Vicky sitting in her car while she went into the unit to find Ari. She saw him talking to some people and beckoned him over, explaining that her friend needed to ask him a question.

At first, Dimitrakis hadn’t recognised Kat, but when he realised she was Vicky’s friend, he followed her out into the street. Kat then waited in the car while Ari and Vicky disappeared around the corner to talk. They were gone for about ten minutes, and Kat became nervous. She went to look for them and heard raised voices. When she found the couple, Ari was holding Vicky, who looked as if she was about to faint.

Kat helped Vicky back into the car and drove away. On the journey, Vicky told her that Ari had denied having anything to do with the attack. He claimed he’d been with Irene on the night of 2 January. On hearing this, Kat commented, ‘Well, it couldn’t have been Ari, then. It must have been some drug addict.’

The friends met again on Friday morning for coffee. Kat recalled that Vicky was still distressed about her husband’s stabbing. Kat hugged her friend as she left, telling her that the police would sort it out. Over that weekend, she sent Vicky a number of texts but heard nothing back.

Kat was shattered when the police called her the following week, informing her that Vicky had been charged with conspiring to murder her husband. Kat told the detectives that she was aware Vicky wanted a divorce. She’d been talking about it ever since she first met Ari again.

But Vicky had said it wouldn’t be easy because Chris had been married before, and his former wife had cheated on him. She didn’t want to hurt Chris, who she acknowledged was a good father and provider. Vicky had decided to wait until the children were older and more settled. All the same, she’d divorce Chris when the time was right, because she wasn’t in love with him any more.

***

As well as interviewing friends and relations, the detectives trawled through the Soterious’ finances, paying particular attention to Vicky’s transactions around the time of her husband’s stabbing. They discovered that she’d withdrawn $200,000 from the Bendigo Bank two weeks before the assault. When they told Chris, he had no idea that she’d withdrawn the money or what she’d done with it.

On 2 February 2010, the paper trail led the police to Keilor Cemetery, where they spoke to the cemetery’s accountant, Kim Lee, about a receipt they had found for a burial plot. Ms Lee tracked the transaction on the computer, but told police they needed to speak to the staff member who was working on reception the day the plot had been bought. She gave them the woman’s contact details.

What the cemetery’s former receptionist, Natlee Quinn, had to say shed new light on the affair. In a statement made at Richmond Police Station on 10 February, Natlee recalled that on 22 September, a well-dressed woman and a man with a long ponytail came into the reception area to inquire about purchasing a burial plot. Natlee remembered them well, because they were a glamorous-looking couple and she’d observed them arriving in a luxury car.

She spoke with the pretty, dark-haired woman while her partner chatted on his mobile. Ms Quinn said they were discussing buying burial plot RO-149 for the sale price of $3075. Vicky told her she wanted her name on the deed along with her partner’s name, Ari Dimitrakis, and that both addresses should be included.

Natlee told them there wasn’t enough room on the form for all this information. She recalled that the woman waited until the man got off the phone, and they had a brief conversation in Greek.

The woman then said, ‘Well, you might as well put it down as Vicky and Ari, with his surname, because we’ll be married soon.’

Ms Quinn was stunned when the pair began to kiss and cuddle in front of her. ‘We didn’t often see people behave like that when they buy graves,’ she told police. The couple were in the office for 45 minutes. They paid in cash and left arm-in-arm.

Natlee was working in reception again on 29 September, when the couple came back. This time, they wanted to exchange the single burial plot for a plot where they could purchase five graves in a row. Natlee showed them an area where they could have five common foundation graves with concrete surrounds. This would allow a memorial to be erected after burial.

Natlee agreed to the exchange, and Ari Dimitrakis handed over $12,000 in cash. Vicky told the receptionist the graves were for her family and children and asked Natlee to put both their names on the plots.

Ms Quinn told police the couple were kissing and laughing together. ‘I had thought that Vicky and Ari were behaving too passionately toward each other to actually be married,’ she admitted. She found them embarrassing and didn’t know where to look.

A few weeks later, Natlee was standing at a boarding gate in Melbourne Airport when she noticed Vicky Soteriou with a different man. Natlee waved, but Vicky didn’t acknowledge her. No surprise there, thought the detectives. They added the statement to the mountain of evidence against the pair.