Chapter 28

All Systems Go

Although she’d bewitched at least two lovers, Vicky Soteriou looked more like a legal secretary than a temptress on 19 September 2011 as she sat in the dock of the Victorian Supreme Court whispering instructions to her legal team. The public gallery and the press bench were crowded for the opening of what promised to be a lurid tale of infatuation.

Vicky looked fragile and even smaller than ever as she was formally arraigned in the dock. In a soft voice, she pleaded not guilty to the crime of attempted murder and the charge of intentionally causing serious injury on 2 January 2010.

Justice Elizabeth Curtain began the proceedings by instructing the jury that if anyone knew the victim, the accused, or any of the witnesses whose names were about to be read out to the court, they should immediately notify the court and they’d be excused. But while the process was taking place, one of the jurors had already vanished into the toilet, so the jury selection process had to begin all over again.

For the second time, the defendant stood before the new jury and pleaded not guilty, sounding just as harmless as she had the first time around.

Mr Tinney rose to his feet to outline the Crown’s case against the wealthy housewife. ‘Members of the jury, in marriage as in life, things are not always as they seem,’ he said. The Soterious looked ‘to all the world’ like a happy, loving couple, but ‘Mr Soteriou had been deceived. His wife was no loving wife. She had betrayed him.’

Not only had she been conducting a passionate love affair with another man, but her betrayal had taken a ‘dramatic and dangerous turn’. On the afternoon of Chris Soteriou’s birthday, his wife had handed a knife to her lover, who before the evening was out would repeatedly stab her husband, leaving him for dead. It was only by sheer good luck that he survived. If he hadn’t, his wife would now be facing a charge of murder.

‘It will be alleged that she was an accomplice, that she was involved in this crime, and is as guilty of it as she would have been if she had carried out the stabbing herself,’ Mr Tinney said.

The prosecutor described Vicky Soteriou’s affair with Ari Dimitrakis as a volatile and dysfunctional relationship peppered with dramatic break-ups and passionate reconciliations. The evidence would indicate the lovers had ‘an almost obsessive preoccupation’, which was illustrated by three pieces of evidence.

The first strand of evidence included the pair having tattoos in honour of each other, despite the risk of being caught out by their spouses. Dimitrakis came up with ‘all sorts of ridiculous explanations’ when his wife asked about the large ‘V’ tattooed on his chest. Soteriou had her lover’s name tattooed under her wedding ring as well as a large A on the back of her neck.

The second piece of evidence related to their purchase of joint burial plots in September 2009. The lovers engaged in bizarre behaviour, kissing and cuddling throughout the transaction. The administration worker who sold them the plots would give evidence that this wasn’t the normal behaviour of people buying burial sites.

The third piece of evidence was the hundreds of text messages police discovered on Ari Dimitrakis’s phone after the couple’s arrest. These texts were sent between October and November 2009. Some were in Greek, others in English, but all were extremely intense and passionate.

Mr Tinney read out some of those messages to the jury. Perhaps the most telling text was one Vicky sent on 28 November, saying, ‘I will never have enough of you, my love.’ This was significant, because she’d told police that she’d ended the relationship and that Dimitrakis was stalking her at that time.

The Crown prosecutor said by 2009, the lovers were talking about leaving their spouses, but the divorce discussions soon became a ‘genesis for murder’. Early that year, the conniving housewife told Dimitrakis that she was afraid to leave her husband, claiming he’d threatened her. The prosecution contended that this was when Vicky first came up with the idea of killing her husband. While she told her lover this was the only way she’d be free and they could be together forever, she actually had a financial motive for wanting her husband dead.

‘The accused regularly, perhaps every couple of weeks or so, raised that topic again with Dimitrakis,’ Mr Tinney revealed. Her lover played along, thinking the talk of murdering her husband was just part of some fantasy ‘role playing’. When Dimitrakis realised she was serious, he tried to fob her off.

Mr Tinney said that throughout 2009, Vicky Soteriou came up with different ways they might dispose of her husband. She suggested poisoning and talked about hiring a hit man to shoot him. When Dimitrakis pointed out this would cost $400,000, the scheming wife said flippantly she’d pay the fee from her husband’s life insurance.

Nothing happened until December 2009, when Vicky came up with the idea of murdering her husband on his birthday. She’d take Chris out for a birthday celebration, and her lover would wait by the car for their return. She suggested he stab Chris to death and snatch her handbag to make it look like a robbery gone wrong.

Soteriou repeatedly raised the subject with her lover until she finally wore him down. After having oral sex at a local football oval on New Year’s Day 2010, the Crown claimed that Vicky Soteriou looked her lover in the eye and told him that ‘she loved him to death’. The jury heard that Dimitrakis had been taking a cocktail of prescription and illicit drugs daily. As a result, he claimed the events immediately before the stabbing and the crime itself remained a blur.

But some things weren’t a blur for Dimitrakis, explained Mr Tinney. He remembered Vicky Soteriou arranging the meeting at a park in Greensborough and again broaching the subject of her husband’s murder. The prosecution maintained this was ‘an obvious reference to the arrangement that had previously been discussed between the two’ involving killing Vicky’s husband on the night of his birthday.

They met again the next day at Binnak Park, near her home. Dimitrakis claimed Vicky handed him a knife wrapped in a towel and told him where they were going for her husband’s birthday. She also told him she’d leave the restaurant at about 11 p.m. She informed him she’d be driving her husband’s black Nissan rather than her Mercedes, and would park the car a couple of blocks away from the restaurant. She left him, saying, ‘I love you. I’ll see you tonight.’

While Dimitrakis would say he didn’t intend to kill the victim at the time of that clandestine meeting, the evidence as a whole would show that by the time Vicky left the park that night, there was an ‘understanding or arrangement which amounted to an agreement’ to murder Chris Soteriou. From that moment, the prosecution said, it was ‘all systems go’.

The question the jury would have to ask themselves was whether they accepted Dimitrakis’s account that he was too drugged to recall anything from the time he left that park until 12.30 a.m., when he collected his wife from the pokies.

‘You may in the end choose to disbelieve that extraordinary lack of memory about critical matters,’ Mr Tinney said. But the Crown wasn’t suggesting that everything Dimitrakis said was true. Furthermore, Mr Tinney reminded the jury, Vicky’s lover hadn’t denied stabbing Mr Soteriou. He simply maintained he couldn’t remember it.

After Mr Tinney outlined the events of that night and its aftermath, the jury heard about Vicky’s admission to police that she’d been having an affair. She said the affair was over, but claimed her rejected lover had been stalking her and she feared he may have been responsible for her husband’s stabbing. Then, two days later, after hearing that police were closing in on the attackers, Vicky Soteriou went back to Richmond Police Station and confessed. In the interview, she told police she ‘did it’ with Dimitrakis and she was sorry.

The court was shown crucial excerpts of Vicky’s videotaped interview, which Mr Tinney explained they’d hear in full as the trial progressed. The jury cast surreptitious glances from the frustrated, sometimes irritated woman on the TV screen, pointing the finger of blame at her lover, to the blank face of the smartly dressed wife in the dock who was maintaining her innocence.

Mr Tinney said evidence would show that Vicky Soteriou was behind her husband’s stabbing. Since her arrest, she’d made a series of phone calls in an attempt to contact Dimitrakis. She’d even written him a love letter from prison, although she was now insisting he’d acted alone when he tried to kill her husband.

The Crown’s case, in a nutshell, was that this supposedly loving wife had come up with the plan to murder her husband, supplied her lover with the murder weapon and instructed him where to find the victim. If she hadn’t communicated with Dimitrakis, he wouldn’t have known where the victim would be. Dimitrakis couldn’t have followed them, as the accused now suggested, because Telstra records proved he was using his phone in Doncaster East when she arrived in Fitzroy with her husband.

Mr Tinney said the Crown was relying on the doctrine of ‘common purpose’, which in lay terms meant the pair were acting in concert; they had reached an understanding or arrangement to kill Mr Soteriou, which amounted to an agreement to murder. The only reason their plan failed was that the victim had the good fortune to survive.

Mr Tinney told the jury that Ari Dimitrakis had already been dealt with for a lesser crime, but that made no difference to this case, where the evidence was sufficient for a conviction of attempted murder. The Crown contended that Vicky Soteriou was as guilty as if she’d stabbed her husband herself.

In a brief counteroffensive, Vicky Soteriou’s defence barrister, Mr Philip Dunn, warned the jury that this wasn’t ‘a court of morals’ but a court of law. They shouldn’t be judging Vicky Soteriou for having an affair, but only on the evidence against her.

Mr Dunn said, ‘Ari Dimitrakis says to you, through the prosecutor, that Vicky Soteriou is the one who is responsible for what he did.’ But the defence would be arguing that Vicky Soteriou denied being in agreement with her former lover to kill her husband. The evidence would show she’d ended their affair in December, but he’d refused to accept it was over and behaved ‘in a very selfish, spoilt and possessive way’.

The question facing the jury, Mr Dunn said, was whether Dimitrakis had acted in concert with Mrs Soteriou or had committed the attack on his own under the influence of drugs and alcohol, taking revenge on the man whose wife he wanted to have.

He said one of the major aspects the jury would have to consider was Vicky’s videotaped police interview and confession. They’d have to decide whether Mrs Soteriou was confessing her involvement in the affair and showing ‘deep moral regret’, rather than confessing to the actual crime.

Mr Dunn said it was the defence’s job to show the jury that there was reasonable doubt as to whether his client was in ‘criminal agreement’ to kill her husband, as her ex-lover claimed. ‘Just because Vicky Soteriou has been charged by the police and is sitting here in the dock doesn’t mean she is guilty,’ said Mr Dunn.

There was ‘absolutely no doubt’ that in 2009 Vicky Soteriou and Ari Dimitrakis were having an affair. ‘It’s been described to you as a betrayal,’ Mr Dunn said. ‘It is a betrayal.’ But the evidence would show that Dimitrakis was chasing his client ‘very hard’, and there were times when she strongly rejected him. There was no doubt that this was a very passionate affair, and the lovers were oblivious to what was going on around them, and even to their responsibilities.

But in the end, the jury would have to ask themselves if the antics observed by the neighbours were the sign of a loving couple about to embark on some agreement to murder Vicky Soteriou’s husband so they could be together, or whether ‘this spoilt brat of a man’ was behaving as if his possession had been taken away from him, ‘causing him to stamp his foot outside the matrimonial home and make a nuisance of himself’.

The court would hear how the drug-affected rejected lover had crashed his car on New Year’s Day, only to take more drugs and alcohol and then return to Berkerley Court to harass her again. Did this sound like an arrangement to murder someone, or did it sound more like the antics of a man who was out of control?

Everyone can be affected by prejudices, argued the defence, but morals were not the issue here. Mrs Soteriou should only be found guilty if the jury was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that she’d conspired with Ari Dimitrakis to murder her husband.