Chapter 27

The Hit Man

When Melbourne woman Suzy Tsombanopoulos read the reports of the sordid love triangle, she remembered her boyfriend Tony telling her a story that almost mirrored the macabre murder attempt.

Suzy showed Tony a newspaper article with a photo of Vicky at her bail hearing in September, and her boyfriend immediately contacted Victoria Police. His account would add a new dimension to the case that was heading to the Supreme Court.

Tony Aleksovski, a disability pensioner, was the same age as Vicky Soteriou. He told police that he’d met this rich housewife in late 2004 or early 2005 at the Preston Market. He couldn’t remember the exact date, but he recalled seeing her having a coffee. He’d wandered over and struck up a conversation. During their chat, she took his telephone number, though she didn’t offer him hers. She’d already indicated that she was married, and he’d told her that he was in a relationship too.

Six months after that chance meeting, Vicky called his mobile out of the blue, suggesting they meet up. They met at the Shamrock Hotel in Preston, and afterwards they began to see each other once or twice a week.

Tony told police they usually met at the Shamrock, where Vicky would arrive in her silver Mercedes. Sometimes they’d go over to Docklands for a meal and a drink in one of the new upmarket restaurants. He explained that their dinner dates soon turned to raunchy all-night sessions in the Bell City Hotel, near her parents’ home.

‘Vicky would always pay for the hotel and meals, because I didn’t have money, being on a pension,’ Tony said in a formal statement. The affair went on for between twelve and eighteen months. During one particularly steamy session at the Bell City Hotel, they’d had a ‘very weird’ conversation, which didn’t mean much to him at the time.

‘Vicky asked me if I was a hit man,’ he told Detective Sergeant Mick Dolan. ‘I remember asking her who told her this and why she would ask such a question.’ Aleksovski said Vicky then offered him $50,000 to kill her husband.

‘I told her I wasn’t a hit man and that I wouldn’t kill her husband,’ he told the detective. ‘I thought she was joking and didn’t take her seriously at all.’ He told her that if she didn’t love her husband, perhaps she should consider divorcing him instead.

‘I can’t recall exactly what her response was,’ he told Dolan, but he remembered that she’d mentioned that she couldn’t divorce her husband because her father was very sick.

‘I told her that if the relationship we were having was causing that many problems, then we should just stop seeing each other.’

As far as he was concerned, the relationship was purely physical, and he had no long-term plans to stay with Vicky. ‘I was in love with another woman, and Vicky was married.’

Aleksovski said the affair changed markedly after this conversation. ‘It went from regular weekly catch-ups to maybe once a month,’ he said. She often changed her mobile phone number so that he was unable to contact her. ‘Then out of the blue she would message me and we would catch up at the Shamrock Hotel in Preston,’ he said.

After a ‘little while’, the calls stopped. The last time he spoke to her, she called out of the blue saying ‘farewell’ in Greek. He knew that was about the time she was going on holiday to Greece.

‘I never met Vicky’s husband or know of him,’ Aleksovski said. The only person he’d ever told about this dark conversation was his girlfriend Suzy. He told her shortly after the affair with Vicky ended.

‘There is no way on earth I thought Vicky was serious about killing her husband,’ he said. ‘I thought she was joking … If I thought she was serious, I would have gone straight to the police.’

Detective Sergeant Dolan notified the Crown about this new development. While it was a late addition to the evidence file, Tony Aleksovski’s name would soon find its way onto the witness list.

***

On Monday 12 September 2011, Vicky Soteriou’s trial opened with a pre-trial hearing. The hearing, known as the voir dire, which takes place before a judge alone, allows defence counsel an opportunity to challenge the evidence the Crown intends to present at the coming trial.

Vicky’s defence team, led by Mr Philip Dunn QC, argued that certain evidence shouldn’t be allowed, including the accused’s confession to police, the love letter she wrote to her co-accused from prison, and the calls she made to Christos Chronis from the Thomas Embling Hospital. The defence had enlisted an expert, Mr Michael Croucher, who would argue that is was an abuse of process for Vicky Soteriou to stand trial on the charge of attempted murder.

Mr Croucher contended that the Crown was seeking to put its case in two ways: one on the doctrine of common purpose, which the defence assumed to mean that the pair were alleged to have acted in concert, and the other on the basis that Vicky Soteriou had counselled and procured her co-accused to kill her husband.

The defence maintained that for Vicky to be charged with counselling and procuring, Dimitrakis should also have been charged with attempted murder. Having accepted the lesser plea ‘at face value’, the Crown couldn’t prove an intention to kill or a conspiracy to murder the victim. But now they wanted to do ‘an about face’ and use Dimitrakis in this trial to prove exactly that.

Mr Croucher argued that Dimitrakis had never said there was an agreement to kill the victim at the time of the crime. But the prosecution now intended to ask the jury to accept that there was such an agreement, and that it was still on foot at the time of the stabbing, which was contrary to what their own witness said. While the Crown would say there had been a ‘meeting of the minds’ between Vicky and her lover, they wouldn’t be relying on Dimitrakis’s professed amnesia, because they considered he was being untruthful.

The defence therefore argued that to proceed with the counselling and procuring charges was an abuse of process that the court shouldn’t tolerate.

Mr Dunn waded into the argument, saying that if the counselling and procuring doctrine and the attempted murder charge proceeded, the prosecution would be ‘selling a trick’ to the jury. In effect, the Crown would be stating that they’d be deliberately calling a witness even they believed wasn’t truthful when he maintained there was no agreement to kill the victim. ‘It stands criminal justice on its head,’ Mr Dunn argued.

The presiding judge, Justice Elizabeth Curtain, said that essentially this was a ‘concert case or common purpose case’. The argument that the lovers acted in concert was all the stronger because the accused was present at the time of the crime.

Mr Dunn asserted that the Crown had accepted the plea of guilty to a lesser offence by the person who actually struck the blow or blows, but then the prosecution ‘turns around and says “No, but he is actually, in truth, an attempted murderer.”’ The case was an abuse of process that ‘an ordinary person in the street might think is a bit rough’.

The judge responded, ‘There is a lot about the law that an ordinary person in the street, uninformed, might think is a bit rough.’ Anyway, this wasn’t Dimitrakis’s trial, it was his co-accused’s, so it wasn’t a question of telling the jury that Dimitrakis was really guilty of attempted murder.

In his counter-argument, Crown Prosecutor Andrew Tinney said the court was being urged to ‘permanently stay’ the prosecution for attempted murder because it would be unfair to the person in the dock. ‘But what is there about what’s suggested here that would be remotely unfair to the accused?’ Mr Tinney asked. ‘Would it be a bit rough for the accused to be prosecuted, and if it comes to that, found guilty of attempted murder if the evidence admissible against her completely establishes her guilt?’

It would be an abuse of process if the trial for attempted murder didn’t proceed. It was up to the jury, after hearing the evidence, to decide whether Dimitrakis was being truthful when he claimed that he couldn’t remember the crime, and that there was no agreement with Vicky Soteriou to kill the victim. The jury might think this nonsense because the evidence showed Dimitrakis was simply doing what he’d arranged to do.

Just because the Crown saw fit to accept a plea to a lesser charge from Dimitrakis didn’t mean the jury was excluded from finding that at the time he stabbed the victim, he did intend to kill him. That would be based on the overall evidence against the accused, not on which charge he’d accepted.

‘I think ultimately that is the sense of unfairness that Mr Croucher refers to,’ Justice Curtain pointed out.

Mr Tinney maintained that Vicky Soteriou’s case would be judged on the overall evidence against her.

The defence then turned to the issue of Vicky’s videotaped interview with police on 15 January. Mr Dunn argued that the jury shouldn’t be allowed to see it because at the time she was interviewed, she was already a suspect in the crime and should have been cautioned before the interview went ahead.

Mr Dunn said the DVD had been viewed by two psychiatrists, Dr Danny Sullivan and Dr Kerry Mack, and both agreed that Vicky’s answers to the detectives’ questions had been adversely affected by her mental state. Once she admitted she was involved ‘in it’ with Ari Dimitrakis, she should have been cautioned by the detectives.

The interviewing detectives’ notes, which had surfaced during the discovery process, detailed their conversations with Vicky before and after that interview. Detective Sergeant Michael Dolan had expressed ‘grave concerns’ about Soteriou’s version of events after she told them about the affair with Dimitrakis. He noted there were ‘holes’ in her story, which suggested she was a suspect before making her confession. Knowing this, contended the defence, she should have been cautioned by Detectives Graefe and Kukuljan before the brief interview where she confessed her involvement in the crime.

Both psychiatrists also agreed that Vicky Soteriou was in a very emotional state, and was in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. She then had a complete mental collapse in the cells and was unfit to appear at court the next Monday. She was subsequently committed to a mental hospital. The defence argued that the interview should be inadmissible because Vicky Soteriou’s condition made her admissions ‘unsafe’.

Mr Dunn said this also applied to the phone conversations his client made to Christos Chronis from the Thomas Embling Hospital and the love letter she wrote to Dimitrakis from the prison psychiatric ward. For all these reasons, the defence concluded that the interview shouldn’t be allowed, the evidence about the letters and bizarre phone calls should be inadmissible, and the attempted murder charge shouldn’t go ahead.

Over the next four days, Justice Curtain heard evidence from the detectives about their discussions with Vicky Soteriou. The court also heard from other officers who witnessed Vicky’s behaviour and the paramedic who was called after her fainting spell by the fingerprinting machine.

Detective Senior Constable Graefe said that the victim’s wife wasn’t a suspect when she made her startling confession. Dimitrakis was a suspect, but not Vicky Soteriou. Detective Sergeant Kukuljan said the police had followed procedure: after Vicky suddenly confessed, she was cautioned and informed of her legal rights. The officers suspended the interview, escorted her into a different room, and again cautioned her and informed her of her rights. Only then had they conducted the seventeen-minute interview being presented as evidence.

The officers said there was nothing about Vicky’s behaviour at that time to suggest she had a mental issue. Her demeanour appeared nervous, but she was composed, coherent and lucid.

Detective Sergeant Dolan told the voir dire that Vicky’s mental state only deteriorated after she’d been arrested and detained. She then realised she couldn’t return home to her children, and the enormity of her predicament appeared to sink in. It was normal to be distressed under such circumstances, he said.

Justice Curtain then heard lengthy testimony from Dr Nina Zimmerman, Vicky’s treating psychiatrist, who saw her immediately after she’d been charged and remanded in custody. Dr Zimmerman had diagnosed Vicky as suffering from a reactive psychosis in response to her arrest and incarceration.

Asked whether Vicky had been suffering from catatonia, a movement disorder evident in extreme cases of schizophrenia, Dr Zimmerman said there was no evidence of it. She said a catatonic person would have been incapable of taking part in a seventeen-minute police interview as Vicky Soteriou had done.

Dr Zimmerman’s evidence was at odds with that of the other two doctors, Sullivan and Mack, both of whom argued that the prisoner had been psychotic during her police interview.

Dr Sullivan, who first saw Vicky five weeks after her arrest, told the court that the prisoner exhibited depressive features consistent with a psychiatric illness. He had read the medical notes and the report of her actions at the police station, where she’d expressed a desire to kill herself.

‘She described long-standing auditory hallucinations from a guardian angel,’ he said. She became markedly disordered in the second interview, when she was charged. Dr Sullivan felt she’d been appropriately committed under the Mental Health Act.

Dr Sullivan believed that Vicky’s behaviour during both interviews showed some psychomotor retardation, a disorder associated with catatonia. Dr Mack made the same observation. Both doctors suggested that the real trigger for Vicky’s evolving psychotic state may have been the stabbing of her husband, rather than her arrest.

Dr Mack, who saw Vicky weekly after she was granted bail in September 2010, told the court she’d observed catatonic features in both police interviews. The obvious symptoms of catatonia included deteriorating speech, progressive mutism and reduced movement. Dr Mack said that Soteriou barely moved during her interviews, and was almost silent in the second one. The prayer-like pose the paramedic saw when he found her kneeling on the floor was common in catatonic patients. While the paramedic thought it was ‘a stunt’, Dr Mack said it was consistent with the stupor that led to catatonia, as was the mutism that saw her nodding but not answering the ambulance officer’s questions.

Mr Tinney challenged this strongly. He said it was hardly mutism if the accused was simply refusing to speak to the ambulance officer after her supposed collapse. And it was more likely she was refusing to give police any details because she didn’t want to incriminate herself further.

The doctor went on to say that there is sometimes excessive motor activity in catatonic people, and this too was observed where she clung onto the detective and had to be pulled off. Dr Mack thought it unlikely that the prisoner was faking or malingering. Vicky’s refusal to call a lawyer was also evidence of her ‘disturbed judgement.’

Mr Tinney said this was ‘nonsense’. Vicky didn’t want a lawyer and had simply refused.

Mr Dunn asked Dr Mack more about the police interviews. She said she believed Vicky Soteriou was suffering a major depressive disorder with psychotic features when the first interview with Graefe and Kukuljan began. She was unlikely to have understood the implications of the police caution or relate past events properly. ‘I think the evidence has to be considered unreliable,’ the doctor said.

Under cross-examination by Mr Tinney, Dr Mack admitted that she wasn’t a forensic psychiatrist. The prosecutor also pointed out that she didn’t see Vicky Soteriou until 21 August 2010, while Dr Zimmerman, who saw her within days of her arrest, didn’t observe any evidence of catatonia in hospital or on the DVD.

Dr Mack said she had observed evidence ‘suggestive of an emerging catatonia’. Vicky Soteriou had admitted guilt, but couldn’t explain what she felt guilty about.

Mr Tinney looked exasperated. Perhaps the accused wasn’t giving more detail because she didn’t want to? What the doctor had seen on that tape, he suggested, was a guilty woman confessing.

Dr Mack didn’t think so. She maintained that Vicky Soteriou appeared more disorganised and withdrawn by the second interview.

The Crown argued this was because she’d spent five hours in custody, and the reality of her situation had become obvious.

***

After hearing all the evidence, Justice Curtain ruled that the charge of attempted murder had been properly laid and should proceed.

The judge said, ‘Without wishing to say more, there’s evidence which would justify a conviction, and the Crown is entitled to seek a conviction in respect of attempted murder. It is not therefore an abuse of the court process to permit trial on a count of attempted murder where an active participant, here indeed the wielder of the knife, has pleaded guilty to a lesser offence.’

Justice Curtain said there was nothing unfair or inappropriate about calling the co-accused as a witness, but inviting the jury not to accept all of his evidence. It wasn’t an uncommon situation. The defence’s application to stay the attempted murder charge as an abuse of process was dismissed.

Justice Curtain also ruled that the police interviews, the love letter and the phone calls to Christos Chronis were admissible as evidence.

The judge took the view that the accused’s realisation of her predicament was likely to explain the change in her demeanour in the two interviews when she made her initial confession and was then told she was being charged. Until then, the judge accepted that the police had viewed her simply as a witness.

Justice Curtain accepted the Crown’s submission that there was no basis for contending that the police ought reasonably to have suspected the accused of being involved in the crime, the focus of the investigation being on Dimitrakis. The judge was satisfied that the circumstances of Soteriou’s admissions were unlikely to have affected the truth of her confession and could see nothing that would make the use of that evidence unfair to the accused.

‘It is cogent, and in my view, reliable evidence,’ said the judge. ‘The admissions were made voluntarily in circumstances where Ms Soteriou knew the police were investigating a serious offence … and because it was the first thing she said to them, she must have come to confess.’

The defence couldn’t say that the probative value of the admissions was outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice to the accused and it wouldn’t divert the jury from its task.

‘The evidence is highly probative and properly admissible in the case against the accused.’ The defence’s application to exclude those items of evidence was dismissed. The jury would be hearing every detail in this high-profile case.