Chapter 31

Strange Behaviour

While the authorities made arrangements to transport Dimitrakis back to Ararat Prison to serve out his sentence, the Supreme Court was making plans for the jury to view the scene of the crime and the restaurant where Chris Soteriou had celebrated the birthday his wife intended would be his last.

But first, the Crown wanted the jury to hear from the friends who had been there that night and see the CCTV footage of Vicky and her husband.

Nick Stamboulakis had struggled with his evidence at the committal due to his limited English, but this time he spoke through a Greek interpreter. He said it was ‘weird’ to see his friend arriving with so much alcohol, especially as Chris didn’t drink.

His wife Eleni found it strange that Chris brought wine at all. ‘When it’s a surprise, no-one brings their own alcohol,’ she explained. But they all had a pleasant night. ‘Everyone was in a good mood. It was probably one of the best nights we’d had in months.’

Bill Pappas said Vicky had vanished for about twenty minutes, probably between 10.30 and 11 p.m. He also found it ‘out of the ordinary’ to see her ordering Chris cocktails when everyone knew he didn’t drink.

But there had been nothing about the couple’s behaviour to suggest anything was amiss. ‘They were fun, they were laughing, there was some dancing going on, joking at the table,’ he said.

Jim Nestoras told the jury it was odd for his mate’s wife to drive, and for them to be parked in a dark side street. Jim also described the brief encounter outside Crown in August 2009, when he’d unwittingly introduced Chris to his wife’s lover. He recalled Vicky coming outside and promptly disappearing back into the complex. With hindsight, he thought she appeared ‘a little bit shocked’.

Jim’s wife Lina told the jury that on the night of the birthday dinner, Vicky had complained about her handbag. ‘She said to me, “Look, I bought this bag, and I couldn’t fit anything in it. I couldn’t even bring my mobile phone, so I’ve left it in the boot.”’

Before the jury went to Fitzroy, they heard preliminary evidence about the crime scene from Detective Senior Constable Graefe. Mr Tinney led the detective through the crime-scene photographs. Graefe identified the route the Crown claimed Dimitrakis’s vehicle had taken when it fled. He also pointed to the internal shots of the restaurant, highlighting the rear door close to the toilets where the prosecution claimed Vicky had slipped out on the night of the crime to alert her lover to the car’s location.

The jury would soon follow that route from the restaurant into the rear laneway and along the narrow side streets back to Rose Street, a journey that would take only a few minutes on foot. This would illustrate how easily Vicky could have slipped out to the car and back again when she disappeared on the night of her husband’s birthday.

The jury was then shown CCTV footage from two cameras outside Bimbo Deluxe: one facing north toward Brunswick Street, the other facing down Rose Street. The jury glanced at the woman in the dock as they watched her clutching her husband’s arm, his other arm wrapped protectively around her, as she walked him to an unimaginable fate.

When the jury left for Fitzroy, the defence informed the judge that Vicky had asked to be excused from the view, but was agreeable to being represented by her counsel.

Half an hour later, barristers for both sides joined the judge and the jury, tracing the victim’s footsteps up Rose Street to the restaurant, then exiting through the back door to the laneway and walking back to the location of the victim’s car. Graefe hoped they’d notice that there were no CCTV cameras down those lanes.

***

After the brief tour of Fitzroy, the jury heard the evidence of Erica Schmidt, who had been staying at Rose Street that night. Ms Schmidt said she’d come out of the house after hearing screaming and observed someone comforting a hysterical female. A man was trying to calm a woman, who appeared to be struggling to her feet. The woman was well dressed, with lots of jewellery, and there were gift packages strewn around her.

Ms Schmidt told the jury that the injured man was flat on his back with a crowd gathered around him, while the screaming woman was closer to the car. The witness went to help the woman and asked her what happened. She replied that they’d been coming from her husband’s birthday party, but claimed she hadn’t seen the actual attack. She’d turned around to see her husband bleeding on the ground.

‘She was quite distressed,’ Ms Schmidt recalled. The witness helped her to calm down a bit. ‘I was able to get her to stay on the ground in one spot.’

Dr Katherine Bryan, one of the young medics who had helped Chris that night, said a ‘continuous scream’ had alerted them to the scuffle. She hadn’t seen the attack, but had called 000.

The witness recalled Vicky screaming in the street. ‘She was standing to begin with and she was breathing quite fast and I think she had balloons in her hand and she just kept screaming. I think maybe she said something like “That’s my husband.”’

Dr Bryan was trying to console Vicky when she collapsed. The doctor tried to grab hold of her but wasn’t strong enough. Vicky fell to her knees. The doctor placed her in the recovery position, monitored her breathing, then went to help her partner.

A silence fell over the court as the emergency call was played. Various voices could be heard, the most chilling being the sound of Vicky’s screams. Chris’s family appeared shaken as they listened to him crying out in pain, saying he was dying. Above his cries came the voice of Dr O’Loughlin, urging him to breathe and open his eyes.

‘He had blood all over him, and we didn’t have face masks,’ Dr Bryan explained. ‘You are advised in first aid that you should protect yourself first, and so I wanted this man to keep breathing.’ They didn’t want to have to perform CPR. The victim was ‘wavering in and out of consciousness’, and it seemed a long time before the ambulances arrived.

When Dr Bryan examined Vicky, she appeared ‘conscious and alert’. She had no obvious physical injuries except that she’d fallen onto the pavement.

Dr Christopher O’Loughlin told the court he’d heard muffled noises in Rose Street that night. It was very dark and he could only see shapes, but then he heard the figure on the bottom screaming ‘something about being stabbed’.

He told Dr Bryan to call 000 and yelled out that the cops were coming, in the hope the fight would stop. The attacker fled into a car that was parked or idling in the road, then headed off at speed. ‘I didn’t see it clearly enough to identify it,’ the doctor said.

He described the battle to stop the injured man from bleeding to death. ‘At some point he tried to stand up,’ Dr O’Loughlin said. He also remembered the woman standing nearby. ‘My recollection is that she tried to grab the person I was assisting and possibly tried to push my hands away or push in front of me to get to him.’ They’d had to push her off.

‘When we took her away, she was thrashing around,’ he said. By then, the victim was losing consciousness and saying he felt faint. The injuries were very serious, the doctor told the jury. ‘We lay him down, but that was probably all we could have done.’

The scene was ‘chaotic’ and ‘distressing’, the doctor recalled. He described helping the injured man into the ambulance, and his foot brushing against the knife on the ground.

There was hush in the court as the knife was handed to the witness in a plastic bag to identify. He confirmed this was the one he’d briefly picked up and returned to the ground, certain it was the weapon used in the attack.

In cross-examination by Mr Dunn, he admitted telling police that he believed the attacker was ‘stocky’ and about 180 centimetres tall. But it was dark, he said.

Other witnesses described what they saw in the street that night. Michael Azzopardi, the paramedic who attended to Vicky, described her as anxious and said she was unable to answer questions at the scene. He saw her again at the hospital, where she appeared ‘extremely distressed’. After she calmed down, he asked her again what had happened. She claimed her husband had interrupted a man breaking into their car, and the stranger had stabbed him and slashed his throat.

Leading Senior Constable Steven Hemingway, who spoke with Vicky in the hospital’s family room, recalled her being ‘visibly upset’ but said he’d been able to ‘hold a clear conversation with her’. She’d told him that they’d seen a male ‘leaning’ on their car. She described setting off the car’s remote locking system. When the stranger grabbed her husband, she claimed, Chris had pushed her out of harm’s way. She couldn’t describe the attack, but said the assailant was ‘short, dressed in black, with short hair’, though she’d only seen him from behind.

When Hemingway asked who might have wanted to harm her husband, she revealed that Chris had recently changed jobs and said an attempt had been made on his former employer’s life. Their conversation lasted between ten and twenty minutes. Hemingway left a constable with Vicky and instructed him to get a statement, but shortly afterwards the officer rang saying he couldn’t continue because of her ‘deteriorating emotional state’.

After the jury was discharged on Friday afternoon, the judge had a question for the Crown. It related to an additional witness called Tony Aleksovski, who had made a statement to police about Vicky Soteriou.

‘Are you calling him or not?’ inquired Justice Curtain.

Mr Tinney said the Crown no longer intended to call the witness. Chris’s family wondered who he was. They’d only hear when the case was over that Ari Dimitrakis wasn’t the first lover Vicky had tried to enlist to kill Chris. But the jury would make their decision without hearing this evidence either.

Instead, the court heard the medical evidence, with intensive-care specialist Dr Thomas Rechnitzer outlining the complex operations required to save Chris. The specialist ran through the confronting photographs of Chris’s injuries, which he said were potentially fatal. ‘He had massive bleeding in the abdomen, which had resulted in haemorrhagic shock, that is the loss of blood pressure, loss of flow around the body due to loss of blood. As well as that, the involvement of the lung led him to be in respiratory distress.’

Constable Philip Drews told how he’d tried to interview Vicky at the hospital after her husband’s attack. He was taking a statement from her when they were interrupted by a female doctor, who told Vicky they had stopped the bleeding. ‘The accused reacted immediately by, I would say, a complete loss of her composure. She became almost immediately incoherent,’ Drews said. She deteriorated so rapidly that he had to abandon the interview.

Former cemetery worker Natlee Quinn gave her evidence by video link, telling the court about the smartly dressed couple who arrived at Keilor Cemetery on 22 September 2009.

‘I took particular notice of Vicky because she looked stunning,’ Ms Quinn said. ‘She had a beautiful Chanel scarf on, she had high heels, a skirt, fishnet stockings, she was all done up very beautifully. Her hair was up at either side and she was wearing designer clothes.’

Vicky and Ari arrived in a flash car. ‘They were kissing quite passionately. At one stage, Vicky had her leg wrapped around Ari while they were kissing.’ This went on throughout the 40-minute transaction, she said.

Ms Quinn was again on duty when they returned on 29 September. ‘She was dressed beautifully once again,’ recalled the witness. The transaction took about 45 minutes, and again they were all over one another.

Ms Quinn next saw Vicky at Melbourne Airport, dressed in jeans, a casual top and only a little bit of makeup. ‘I said hello to her, but she just looked at me,’ she told the jury. Vicky turned and spoke to the man with her, who wasn’t the same man the cemetery worker had met a few weeks earlier.

***

The accused wife looked hard at Katina Heaslip as she took the stand. Vicky’s bail conditions had prevented her from contacting her friend of twenty years.

But Kat had plenty to tell the jury about the affair and its aftermath. She began by describing how they bumped into Ari after Vicky’s fortieth birthday dinner. Kat told the court she was unaware that Vicky and Ari had met again later that evening. She only discovered they were seeing each other in early 2007.

‘It wasn’t a sexual affair,’ Kat explained. But when it ended about three months later, Ari began begging her to help him get back with her friend. Then, when the pair rekindled the relationship, it became ‘quite intense’. Vicky complained that Ari was ‘hassling her’ to leave her husband and ‘wouldn’t leave her alone’.

Kat warned Vicky the affair was ‘quite dangerous’, because Chris was likely to find out about it. This was why Vicky was trying to end it, Kat said.

She said that before the twins were born, ‘things were good’ in her friend’s life. Vicky seemed ‘pleased that she hadn’t heard from Ari any more and that it was sort of all over’.

But Vicky had also told her that she’d asked Chris for a divorce and things had ‘erupted’, giving her father some kind of heart attack. That was why Vicky and Chris stayed together.

‘She wasn’t in love with Chris,’ Kat told the jury. Vicky had told her on three occasions that one day she’d divorce her husband because she was no longer in love with him.

When the affair was on again in 2009, she said Vicky told her that Dimitrakis had become ‘possessive’ and was stalking her. He followed her in his car, sat outside her home and became physically rough.

But Kat only discovered her friend had a tattoo under her wedding band after the stabbing. She hadn’t seen Vicky for three months before that.

She’d heard about the stabbing on the news, but had no idea the victim was her friend’s husband until Vicky called on 5 January. ‘She was just delirious over the phone,’ Kat recalled. When they met for coffee in Preston, ‘She was beside herself. Sort of collapsing … we didn’t even get into the café, we just started to talk there.’ They were both in tears by the time they got inside. Vicky told her the attacker had pushed her aside and stabbed her husband.

Kat recalled her friend describing the attacker as a short, overweight man in a balaclava, but then saying she thought it might have been Ari. Kat said, ‘What you are describing is not Ari.’ Vicky continued to cry uncontrollably and was shaking and smoking. ‘I hardly ever saw her smoke,’ Kat told the jury. ‘She was just, like, really beside herself.’

Kat also claimed Vicky had told her several times that Ari wanted to kill her husband.

Mr Tinney asked whether Kat had suggested that Vicky contact the police.

‘No,’ Kat said, ‘because Ari used to threaten her all the time about things like that.’

‘How do you know that?’ Mr Tinney persisted.

‘Because that’s what she would tell me.’

Kat told the court she met Vicky again the next afternoon for coffee. Vicky was on her way to see Chris in hospital. Again, Vicky voiced her fear that Ari had stabbed Chris. She mentioned something about a knife being missing from her knife block in the kitchen. That’s why she suspected Ari, Kat said.

Vicky told her Ari had been in her kitchen where she’d seen him rubbing his hands over the knives. She claimed she’d looked everywhere for the missing knife, and that’s why she needed to find out.

Kat told the jury she tried to get out of going to Box Hill Hospital by making an excuse about not having a car. But Vicky was persistent, and in the end Kat drove them there, hanging around in the car while Vicky and Ari talked in the street. When she went around the corner to hurry them up, Vicky was crying. ‘I just saw her shaking him a lot and her just sort of collapsing into his arms,’ Kat said.

Afterwards, Vicky said Ari had an alibi, which made Kat think a junkie was probably responsible for the attack. But on the drive home, Vicky told her friend she still feared for her own and her children’s safety and said she thought the attack might have something to do with her husband’s former job.

In cross-examination, Mr Dunn asked the witness if Vicky had said her husband was a good father and provider, but ‘she needed some love in her life’.

‘Oh, yes,’ Kat agreed.

She also agreed when Mr Dunn suggested that Vicky had arguments with Ari but couldn’t report them without her husband finding out about the affair.

***

The jury then heard from Dimitrakis’s wife Irene, who spoke of her distress when she discovered the evidence confirming her suspicions that Ari was having an affair.

There followed an argument in the jury’s absence about the phone calls Vicky Soteriou made to Irene Dimitrakis’s workplace in early December. The defence said they weren’t relevant to the case and shouldn’t be allowed as evidence.

But Justice Curtain disagreed. ‘They are relevant, are they not, if your contention is that by 9 and 10 December, the relationship was over?’

Before calling the jury back in, the judge wanted to ask the witness about these nuisance calls herself. Irene explained that there were numerous anonymous calls over a three-week period. They had no caller ID but came directly through to her work line. The caller always hung up.

After hearing the evidence, Justice Curtain ruled that the jury should hear about the calls, which records proved had to come from Vicky. Justice Curtain said they highlighted the nature of the affair and showed that it wasn’t one-sided. The calls took place at a time when the defence contended the relationship was over.

Later that day, the jury heard from the Soterious’ vigilant neighbours, who gave evidence about the longhaired man lurking around the court making a nuisance of himself during December. ‘The whole neighbourhood saw him,’ Christine Ulrich said.

Dimitrakis’s cousin Christos Chronis also gave evidence about Ari’s affair, describing the turbulent nature of the relationship and his cousin’s suicide attempts.

Chronis detailed the phone calls he’d had from Vicky in the psychiatric hospital.

The defence asked if Vicky Soteriou had told him she was being pumped full of drugs and was in a psychiatric ward.

The witness said she had. It was crazy talk, he agreed.

***

Various police officers described the lovers’ heated arguments in the months before the crime, and the sexual encounter in the back of the car at Greensborough shops.

Finally, the detectives investigating the stabbing told the jury about the interviews that the defence had fought so hard to keep from the jury.

Detective Sergeant Michael Dolan testified about Vicky’s concerns that the attack might have been premeditated, and that the family might need protection while Chris was in hospital. But when they visited her home to perform security checks and suggested she move out for a while, she’d refused point blank, he said.

Mr Tinney asked how the police had seen Vicky’s role before she made her confession. ‘Would it be correct to say that until such time as she said certain things to the police on her attendance on that day, 15 January, she was viewed as simply being a witness in this matter?’

‘That’s absolutely right,’ replied Detective Sergeant Dolan. Vicky was never a suspect until she confessed.

In cross-examination, Mr Dunn asked if Vicky had appeared ‘a bit embarrassed or reluctant or quiet’ when talking about the affair.

Dolan answered, ‘She was uncomfortable about it.’

But, said Mr Dunn, the fact that she’d told the police that she was being stalked by a man who had been into her house opened up a new line of inquiry?

‘That’s exactly right, it did,’ replied Dolan.

Then there was ‘a rather dramatic turn of affairs’ two days later, when Vicky Soteriou came to the police station and confessed her involvement.

‘Absolutely,’ Dolan agreed.

The final witness in the Crown’s case was Detective Senior Constable Matthew Graefe, who took the stand again on the ninth day of the trial.

He explained he’d become involved in the investigation in the early hours of Sunday 3 January, after speaking to Vicky’s sister, when she rang at 8.15 a.m. asking for Vicky’s mobile to be returned.

At 9.40 a.m., he went to Rose Street and removed Vicky’s mobile from the boot of her husband’s Nissan, which was still at the crime scene. He returned it to Vicky at 10 a.m. in the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She appeared emotional and upset.

She attended Richmond Police Station the next afternoon and made a three-page statement about the stabbing. This statement was then read to the court. In it, she described walking down Rose Street arm-in-arm with her husband, carrying the presents and car keys in her hand, when they saw a stranger looking into the car.

The jury heard Vicky’s account of how she’d triggered the unlocking device and lit up the car. The man had launched a sudden attack on Chris, in which she was thrown against a brick wall.

‘The next thing I saw was that they were on the ground near the gutter and the man was on top of Chris. I was screaming out.’ She said she heard Chris say in Greek ‘agape’, meaning ‘love’. ‘I think I must have passed out because I cannot remember how I got on the ground,’ she said.

‘I did not see the face of the man who stabbed Chris,’ she stated. ‘I have no idea why this incident happened. As I result I feel devastated and I’m extremely upset. I have not been able to sleep because I keep seeing Chris covered in blood.’

Mr Tinney asked the detective, ‘Is that the text of the statement you took from the accused that day?’

Graefe agreed it was.

The prosecutor asked if the police had obtained CCTV footage of Ari Dimitrakis arriving at the location.

‘Yes, I did,’ stated the detective, but not in the Corolla. He hadn’t been able to find any tapes of that vehicle turning into the street, though there were other ways he could have arrived at the crime scene without driving past the camera outside Bimbo Deluxe. But Ari was definitely on that footage, and blood matching the victim’s had been found in the Corolla he drove that night.

Mr Tinney asked if there was a ‘good deal of contact’ between the police and Vicky after the attack.

Graefe recalled there was. There were numerous phone calls as Vicky asked about the progress of the investigation and whether there were any suspects or if a getaway car had been identified on CCTV footage.

On 11 January, she contacted him saying she had information she wanted to share, but first needed her husband’s permission. Graefe had assumed it was to do with Mr Soteriou’s business affairs. The next day, she asked about police protection and expressed concerns for her family’s safety, claiming the attack might have something to do with Chris’s previous work.

Then came the impromptu visit to the police station on 13 January, when she dropped the bombshell about her affair. Graefe explained she’d gone on to say that her lover had been stalking her and had possibly stolen a knife from her home.

‘Did she tell you why she’d disposed of her knives?’ asked Mr Tinney.

‘No, not specifically, no. I got the impression that she was freaked out because she had made mention that he was in the house touching the knives, and I concluded that possibly after the stabbing, she was upset. I don’t know,’ Graefe replied.

Either way, they didn’t have enough information to search for those knives, though they’d later pulled up the drains outside her home and found nothing.

The jury heard what Vicky had told police about meeting Ari about 6 p.m. on the afternoon of her husband’s birthday, and how she’d later confronted him about the stabbing, suspecting it might have been him.

‘Was it specifically conveyed to you by the accused that she was concerned that Dimitrakis may be the person who stabbed her husband?’ asked Mr Tinney.

Graefe answered, ‘That’s right, but she wasn’t sure.’

The detective said Vicky had phoned again on Friday 15 January and arranged to come into the station. That was when she confessed to being involved in the stabbing of her husband.

‘At this time, as far as you were concerned, was the accused still a witness in this case, not a suspect at all?’ asked Mr Tinney.

‘That’s correct,’ replied Graefe. ‘She said, “I was involved in it with Ari.”’ The detective assumed she was referring to the attempted murder of her husband. He immediately told her she was under arrest, cautioned her and informed her she could contact a lawyer or a friend. She did not wish to. Graefe and his colleague, Rozy Kukuljan, then escorted her into an interview room, where they were legally required to caution her again and record the conversation.

The jury sat in silence as the controversial recorded interview was finally played in full. They heard Vicky confessing her involvement in the attack, and saw her irritation with the police as she told them she didn’t want to answer any more questions.

Detective Senior Constable Graefe then described how they obtained a warrant to search Dimitrakis’s mother-in-law’s home and subsequently arrested him.

Dimitrakis admitted nothing, said Graefe, but police later found Vicky’s texts and messages on his mobile phone. All the messages on Vicky’s phone had been erased, but phone records showed that in the two months leading up to the crime, she’d sent Dimitrakis 2468 texts and left 64 voice messages. Graefe also mentioned the calls from the phone box close to Vicky’s home in the days after the crime.

In cross-examination, Graefe agreed with Mr Dunn that Dimitrakis had initially said that the last time he saw Vicky Soteriou was three weeks before the crime.

‘You now know, don’t you, or believe, that Mr Dimitrakis lied to you a number of times through this record of interview?’ asked Mr Dunn. When the detectives asked him if he’d stabbed Mr Soteriou so he could resume his affair, he’d said, ‘I already had the relationship. What am I going to do? What would I do that for?’

The officer conceded Dimitrakis wasn’t entirely honest about that.

Graefe admitted that Dimitrakis had agreed to cooperate after seeing the damning brief of evidence in April 2010 with the telltale phone records and photographs from Berkerley Court, along with blood samples found in his car. His lawyers had contacted Graefe, indicating that their client was now keen to be re-interviewed and give evidence against Vicky.

‘Did his lawyers say he’d implicate Vicky?’ asked Mr Dunn, zooming in on this.

‘They may not have used those words, but that was the gist,’ Graefe agreed.

Detective Senior Constable Graefe said he had found no explicit texts or photographs on Vicky Soteriou’s mobile resembling the material they unearthed from her lover’s. And the police never established who sent the taxis to the Soterious’ home on New Year’s Day.