Speaker 1: You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges
Speaker 1: the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was
Speaker 1: recorded on it's two minutes after midnight on Wednesday, June thirteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, and Eurydicy Dixon removes her shoes as she
Speaker 1: strolls through Princess Parking Inner, Melbourne. She's just finished having
Speaker 1: a few drinks with friends after performing a comedy show
Speaker 1: at Highland of Bar. It went really well.
Speaker 2: She feels on top of the world.
Speaker 1: Finally, her career is really starting to take off. How exciting.
Speaker 1: I'm nearly home. How about you, She texts her boyfriend
Speaker 1: as she strolls across the soccer pitch drenched in moonlight.
Speaker 1: Suddenly she's yanked back by her hair in the back
Speaker 1: of her dress. A weight is on her chest, her
Speaker 1: clothes are ripped open. She's being choked. Eurydicy never makes
Speaker 1: it home. Her sister later shares in a victim impact statement,
Speaker 1: how the trauma of her sister's murder has pervaded the
Speaker 1: lives of everyone in their family, how her own enormous
Speaker 1: grief has been immobilizing. Sadly, the strongest emotion I feel
Speaker 1: is anger. She said, She's not the only one who
Speaker 1: feels that. Eurytic's name is one most Australians know because
Speaker 1: what happened to her on that average Wednesday night in
Speaker 1: a Melbourne park will forever be etched into our cultural psyche.
Speaker 1: I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations Amom
Speaker 1: of Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by
Speaker 1: speaking to the people who know the most about them.
Speaker 3: See let justice beacy and just did with me. I
Speaker 3: will fight sad Amin free.
Speaker 2: If we are we saying name, then you did not dine.
Speaker 2: You see.
Speaker 1: That song you just heard was written for twenty two
Speaker 1: year old Euridice Dixon. It's a tribute to a beautiful
Speaker 1: life gone too soon and for all the women lost
Speaker 1: to violence. It's been six years today since the rape
Speaker 1: and murder of the up and coming comedian, six years
Speaker 1: since her boyfriend Tony and her family the horrendous details
Speaker 1: of her death. Six years since Melbourne and Australia were
Speaker 1: widely erupted with anger at the circumstances surrounding her murder.
Speaker 3: We learned today of the terrible motive behind a murder
Speaker 3: that shocked Melbourne.
Speaker 1: The depraved crime that saw nationwide outrage and vigils in
Speaker 1: the days that followed.
Speaker 3: One of these marches is planned for this month and
Speaker 3: has already attracted the interest of thousands of people. It's
Speaker 3: being held in honor of Eurydice Dixon, who was murdered
Speaker 3: here in Prince's Park.
Speaker 1: A week after Eurydice's death, ten thousand people gathered at
Speaker 1: a candle at vigil at the park where she was killed. Men,
Speaker 1: women and children came with blankets and candles and flowers
Speaker 1: and sat in silence beneath dimmed park lights at six pm.
Speaker 1: Her killer remains behind bars. As recently as twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: James Todd lost a bid to reduce his sentence. At
Speaker 1: the moment, he won't be eligible for parole until he
Speaker 1: is fifty four years old. His crimes were described in
Speaker 1: court as being one of the worst examples of murder
Speaker 1: and pure and unmitigated evil. Sarah Krasnysteine is an award
Speaker 1: winning author who has covered and written about this case
Speaker 1: in detail. She holds a doctorate in criminal law, and
Speaker 1: in this episode was able to give us an insight
Speaker 1: into just how US sentencing judge uses the information available
Speaker 1: to them to determine an appropriate punishment. Sarah joins us. Now,
Speaker 1: before we focus on eu decease death, I'd like to
Speaker 1: talk about her life. What do we know about who
Speaker 1: she was and what she was doing with herself in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we can't talk about the crime that
Speaker 2: James Todd committed without talking about the woman he assaulted
Speaker 2: and killed, who was twenty two year old. You were
Speaker 2: to see Dixon, but I'm mindful of what her father
Speaker 2: said outside of the Supreme Court after Todd was sentenced,
Speaker 2: which was that Euridice should be remembered for her wits,
Speaker 2: her courage, and her kindness and not for her death.
Speaker 2: So in my piece about the case for the Monthly,
Speaker 2: I wrote that you ready to see Dixon was an artist,
Speaker 2: a comedian, and a writer, and the place to memorialize
Speaker 2: such an individual is not in the contact of her murder.
Speaker 2: It's the last note of her song and it was
Speaker 2: chosen by someone else. So at the same time, though,
Speaker 2: it's important that she is remembered, so I'll just mention
Speaker 2: a few things that I learned were important to her
Speaker 2: through her family and friends at the trial and also
Speaker 2: in the context of comedy show that they put on
Speaker 2: in her honor shortly afterwards. She lived in Inner City Melbourne.
Speaker 2: She had made her first debut at the Melbourne International
Speaker 2: Comedy Festival in twenty eighteen, and the respect and love
Speaker 2: that she inspired in her friends and family was palpable
Speaker 2: in the courtroom. So I think it's also important to
Speaker 2: note that at the time of her death she was
Speaker 2: working on a show about radical empathy, and that it's
Speaker 2: notable that the subject of that was the men who
Speaker 2: felt left behind by feminism. I think it's also important
Speaker 2: for anybody who's interested in learning more about her as
Speaker 2: a person and not just a victim. Was a book
Speaker 2: called No Apologies by Joanne Brookfield, which is about Australian
Speaker 2: live comedy, and she actually describes one of Dixon's acts
Speaker 2: in detail and gives her the respect that she deserved
Speaker 2: as a writer and a comedian and a performer with
Speaker 2: her own very funny, very unique and profound voice.
Speaker 1: Comedy is such a hard profession, especially when you're young
Speaker 1: and rising, which is what Dixon was doing. And on
Speaker 1: the particular night Wednesday, June thirteen, twenty eighteen, she just
Speaker 1: finished a comedy show at the Highlander Bar. From all accounts,
Speaker 1: it sounds like she did a great job. She was
Speaker 1: pretty happy with herself afterwards, chatting with her friends and
Speaker 1: her boyfriend, and then she walked home after celebrating via
Speaker 1: Melbourne's Princess Park. Can you tell us about that walk.
Speaker 1: You've written about how she in fact enjoyed her commute.
Speaker 1: She often took her shoes off.
Speaker 2: It's a very Melbourne map that she covers. So she
Speaker 2: had just said goodbye to her boyfriend Tony Magnuson after
Speaker 2: the show, and they had a snack, kind of a
Speaker 2: late night snack, and he got on a tram and
Speaker 2: she started walking back to her place in the other direction,
Speaker 2: and so they saw each other for the last time
Speaker 2: outside of Linder's Street station. So it's a very Melbourne
Speaker 2: iconic setting for what happens next she walks through the city.
Speaker 2: There was a sense in the description and in the
Speaker 2: camera footage that she was kind of open to the world.
Speaker 2: And there was a mention which touched me kind of
Speaker 2: as a writer, that she was seeing kind of speaking
Speaker 2: to herself. And I think anyone who is a writer
Speaker 2: or writes comedy or does performances, we do that all
Speaker 2: the time, we're kind of living in a separate world
Speaker 2: all the.
Speaker 1: Time, saying things out loud to process them exactly.
Speaker 2: So that was quite familiar to me. So she walks
Speaker 2: down through the city back towards the Inner North where
Speaker 2: she was living, and it's right outside Flinders Street station
Speaker 2: as well that James Todd happens to see her, and
Speaker 2: that he starts following her home.
Speaker 1: You know that park, Well, you've retraced yourridcey steps. Is
Speaker 1: it a well lit place? Is it frequented by many
Speaker 1: people at that time of night.
Speaker 2: Well, this is part of the reason why this case
Speaker 2: kind of grabbed me from the beginning, which was that
Speaker 2: Princess Park where she spent her last moments. Like you mentioned,
Speaker 2: she does take off her shoes when she answers the park,
Speaker 2: which I think is this glorious image of, you know,
Speaker 2: a woman who is embracing this quality that I think
Speaker 2: is eroded in all of us by crimes like this,
Speaker 2: which is that openness to life and a kind of
Speaker 2: enjoyment of the moment in the place. And she's walking
Speaker 2: across the grass of Princess Park, and yeah, it is
Speaker 2: familiar to me. I trained for two marathons around it.
Speaker 2: It's a three k radius, so it's not very big,
Speaker 2: and there would be weekends where I'd run around it,
Speaker 2: you know, ten times for training. I went to UNI
Speaker 2: at Melbourne UNI nearby, so picnics and played a and
Speaker 2: you know, exercise and relaxation. That has all happened in
Speaker 2: my life in that space where yeah, she had her
Speaker 2: last living moments and then where she was violently attacked.
Speaker 1: Can you talk us through what happened to you?
Speaker 2: To see?
Speaker 1: After midnight on that evening, so.
Speaker 2: James had been following her for about an hour since
Speaker 2: he saw her outside of Flunder Street station. She was walking.
Speaker 2: He was keeping a distance behind her. If she stopped
Speaker 2: to look at something or at a crosswalk, he would
Speaker 2: stop and roll a cigarette and pretend to just be
Speaker 2: hanging out. But he had his eyes on her the
Speaker 2: whole time. And the footage of that is quite chilling
Speaker 2: because it is very much like a hunter's stalking prey.
Speaker 2: Around midnight, she texted her partner that she was almost
Speaker 2: home and to see if he had made it home
Speaker 2: safely as well. She was nine hundred meters from her
Speaker 2: home when she was walking across one of the soccer
Speaker 2: pitches of the park and Todd attacked her from behind,
Speaker 2: and he sexually assaulted her and strangled her, and she
Speaker 2: was killed not even a kilometer from her house.
Speaker 1: She was found the next morning, very early in the morning.
Speaker 1: How did they find her?
Speaker 3: So she was.
Speaker 2: Killed just after midnight and she was found just before
Speaker 2: three am by a man who was like she had
Speaker 2: been returning home from work. He was just a passer
Speaker 2: by and he was riding his bike across the soccer
Speaker 2: pitches in the dark, and he saw a figure on
Speaker 2: the ground and he stopped to check on her, and
Speaker 2: then he called Triple O when he found that she
Speaker 2: wasn't responsive, and he tried to administer CPR. And in
Speaker 2: the sentencing hearing, when we heard that evidence, it was
Speaker 2: immensely reassuring to know that, you know, people will stop
Speaker 2: and he doesn't know what happened to her, and when
Speaker 2: he can kind of see that it's been violent, that
Speaker 2: doesn't stop her from trying to help. So that was
Speaker 2: quite life affirming. At the same time, there is something
Speaker 2: quite dark in the fact that he was going to
Speaker 2: just walk home in the same way that women have
Speaker 2: been and would be again. After this case was in
Speaker 2: the media, warrened that we're not allowed to do.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the evolution of the media
Speaker 1: coverage of this, but first of all, let's just talk
Speaker 1: about that initial coverage, because I'm imagining it would have
Speaker 1: been women found murdered in local Melbourne park, signs of
Speaker 1: sexual assault, it would have been all of those initial
Speaker 1: kind of reports. Do you remember breaking how did it
Speaker 1: make you feel?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I remember that day after she had been found,
Speaker 2: and he confessed fairly quickly, and the day after that
Speaker 2: he was brought into the magistrates court and charge. So
Speaker 2: it was quite quick. And at that early stage, all
Speaker 2: that we knew was that this terrible crime had happened
Speaker 2: in Princess Park in the middle of the city, and
Speaker 2: the victim was extremely young, and the mind raises with
Speaker 2: all of the tropes of who the stranger in the
Speaker 2: dark might be, a man with a bellaclava and a knife.
Speaker 2: We think that it was going to be an older guy.
Speaker 2: So my curiosity was, oh, my gosh, this terrible thing
Speaker 2: has happened in one of the collective Melbourne places. I
Speaker 2: wonder who it was. I can't believe how young this
Speaker 2: victim is. And so I showed up at the magistrates
Speaker 2: court for that reason. And you know, we see James
Speaker 2: Todd walk out and he was so young.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he was nineteen.
Speaker 2: Surprisingly young and a young nineteen. The way he carried himself,
Speaker 2: the kind of baby fat on his face, he presented
Speaker 2: like a child.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that it all happened quite quickly. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about that her killer surrendered to police. How did that
Speaker 1: all unfold?
Speaker 2: So one of the many chilling things about this crime
Speaker 2: is that the day of the murder had been very
Speaker 2: normal for James Todd, and so was the night after
Speaker 2: the murderer. So he raped and killed Ort to see Dixon,
Speaker 2: and then he left the park with her phone, and
Speaker 2: he slept on a bench at a very nearby train station.
Speaker 2: And then he actually returns to Princess Park just before
Speaker 2: five am, where he was moved on by the police
Speaker 2: who were trying to establish a crime scene. He then
Speaker 2: takes a tram back into the city. He eats a
Speaker 2: pie and has a coffee, and then he takes the
Speaker 2: train home and he's back home by around quarter to
Speaker 2: seven in the morning, googling a violent porn on his iPad.
Speaker 2: He also, and we know this from the police search,
Speaker 2: that he was googling for Princess Park. He was trying
Speaker 2: to find of news about the crime had broken yet,
Speaker 2: and so those kind of news searches are interspersed with
Speaker 2: searches for rape and murder porn that night. So the
Speaker 2: day passes and around six point thirty in the evening,
Speaker 2: he has a friend call him and say that his
Speaker 2: face is on the news. So they've released the CCTV
Speaker 2: footage which shows him walking through the city, just outside
Speaker 2: Melbourne UNI. And that's when he googles broad Meadows police
Speaker 2: station number and he calls the police saying that it's
Speaker 2: him on the news, but he wasn't involved in any death.
Speaker 2: And he's driven to the station by his girlfriend. They've
Speaker 2: been together four years at that point, his girlfriend and
Speaker 2: her mother and it's the girlfriend's mother who says, you know,
Speaker 2: you better call your own mom and have her come down.
Speaker 2: And that's when he's interviewed.
Speaker 1: And in that interview he does crack. But it takes
Speaker 1: a while, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he kind of maintains his denial over one hundred
Speaker 2: of questions. It sounds like it was a very long time,
Speaker 2: but it actually would have been I think a fairly
Speaker 2: standard police interview. So they're asking him all about his day,
Speaker 2: and he maintains his innocence for I think was over
Speaker 2: six hundred questions. And then the detective explains to him
Speaker 2: how the DNA comparison is going to work when they
Speaker 2: do it, and that probably if he has anything to
Speaker 2: tell them, the earlier the better. And so he says,
Speaker 2: don't worry about the DNA. I did it and I'll
Speaker 2: tell you everything. But of course then what he says
Speaker 2: is not the truth.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: So he had a kind of elaborate story. He had
Speaker 2: just wanted to rob her. He wasn't stalking her with
Speaker 2: intent to rape. That was something that just popped into
Speaker 2: his mind when he was on the ground with her
Speaker 2: after this botched attempt to rob her. That the strangulation
Speaker 2: was an an attempt to stop her crying out about
Speaker 2: the robbery, and it matched none of what subsequently came
Speaker 2: to light about his motivation.
Speaker 1: You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Jimy Bass.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking with Sarah Krasmustin about the murder of Youriddicy Dixon.
Speaker 1: Up next, we examine James Todd's sentencing hearing and his
Speaker 1: sexual sadism diagnosis. We know he eventually pleads guilty. So
Speaker 1: does that mean he does go with the prosecution and
Speaker 1: the police's version of events eventually.
Speaker 2: Well, yes and no. It means that for the purposes
Speaker 2: of what can be proved in terms of his conduct
Speaker 2: and his intention, that there is not a viable argument
Speaker 2: in favor of his innocence for the murder charge. But
Speaker 2: motivation is always an internal thing. The lord has to
Speaker 2: just prove that that he intended to kill her or
Speaker 2: that he intended to cause her serious harm. He was
Speaker 2: quite vigorous at the sentencing hearing in saying that he
Speaker 2: did not have this rape and murder of fantasy that
Speaker 2: he was acting on. That was not something that was
Speaker 2: in his mind when he was stalking her, because in
Speaker 2: terms of his moral culpability, killing someone at the service
Speaker 2: of a violence sexual fantasy is incredibly aggravating and serious,
Speaker 2: and if it happened in a fit of panic or
Speaker 2: what have you, it's still, of course terrible, but violence
Speaker 2: is slightly different. Can you tell us a.
Speaker 1: Bit more about him? We know he's nineteen, we know
Speaker 1: he has a girlfriend. What else is there to know
Speaker 1: about James Todd.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that was striking to me,
Speaker 2: and I think to many given the activation in the
Speaker 2: media around this case, was the fact that obviously, as
Speaker 2: I said, he's so young at the time, and that
Speaker 2: he had no prior criminal history, so this offending was
Speaker 2: the first the criminal justice system had ever seen of him.
Speaker 2: We know that he was about to finish a hospitality
Speaker 2: training course in the city, and like I said, he'd
Speaker 2: had a girlfriend for four years at the time of
Speaker 2: the murder, so had been maintaining a normal relationship. He
Speaker 2: lived with his parents and his two brothers in public
Speaker 2: housing in Broad Meadows, and we did not get a
Speaker 2: great deal of information about that home life. But one
Speaker 2: of the reasons that I was interested in writing about
Speaker 2: the story at the level of detail that I did
Speaker 2: was we know that someone who offends in this way,
Speaker 2: but the extremity of human violence before they're even twenty
Speaker 2: years old, we're not seeing the same sort of failure
Speaker 2: of character or control that we see in older offenders,
Speaker 2: because we've got data that says that their brains haven't
Speaker 2: finished forming yet. So it speaks to these deeper and
Speaker 2: broader social and systemic failures. So I was very curious
Speaker 2: about his home life, his education, the kind of name
Speaker 2: or what he grew up in, what he had been
Speaker 2: exposed to, and we just didn't get that level of detail.
Speaker 2: But what we did get was shocking. There was evidence
Speaker 2: that he had routinely slept rough in parks or at
Speaker 2: the beach despite having this home with his family. There
Speaker 2: was a video submitted by his counsel of the police
Speaker 2: walk through at the time of executing the warrant, and
Speaker 2: we weren't allowed to see it, and I think the
Speaker 2: reason for that was to preserve kind of the privacy
Speaker 2: and dignity of the other family members who were not
Speaker 2: charged with anything. But the defense psychologist who had seen
Speaker 2: the video said it showed his home in a state
Speaker 2: of squalor that was the worst he'd seen in eighteen
Speaker 2: years of practice as a forensic psychologist.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: So that was something that was quite shocking, and it
Speaker 2: was described verbally. So, this is an environment where a
Speaker 2: family of five are living with multiple pets. It's so
Speaker 2: dense and cluttered with rubbish that it was very normal
Speaker 2: for Todd to be in his room and not know
Speaker 2: if anyone else was home. The level of squalor was
Speaker 2: so longstanding that the kitchen floor had collapsed and rotted away.
Speaker 2: And the cooking occurred in the bathroom near the toilet,
Speaker 2: which was clogged, and every room was stacked with rubbish
Speaker 2: and food waste. So that kind of complicated backstory changed
Speaker 2: the weather in the courtroom, and you could almost feel
Speaker 2: this kind of anger and rage not disappear, but it's
Speaker 2: complicated by this very complicated compassion for the child who
Speaker 2: had grown up in that environment, and it made it
Speaker 2: harder to see him as a monster. That's something I
Speaker 2: still think about five years later. I've been in that
Speaker 2: courtroom every day for the past three weeks because I'm
Speaker 2: serving a double murder, which I'm writing about for my
Speaker 2: next book, and Todd's case made such an impact on
Speaker 2: me that there are moments when I can only see
Speaker 2: everybody in the room as they were at the time,
Speaker 2: and it's always in the context of that planned mitigation
Speaker 2: where we learned these details about his backstory.
Speaker 1: It is a hard one to wrestle in your mind,
Speaker 1: because as you were telling me that, I was almost
Speaker 1: feeling a glimmer of I don't know what it was,
Speaker 1: compassion for him. But then in the same instance, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about what he did to Uridicy, and I can't
Speaker 1: put the two together. So how do we look at
Speaker 1: what he experienced as a child in the context of
Speaker 1: what he did to another human being.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's why I would have no desire to be
Speaker 2: a judge. They are extremely difficult jobs and reconciling this
Speaker 2: ethically and legally yet alone putting it into a narrative
Speaker 2: that people are going to understand in the public. Victoria
Speaker 2: is the same as every other Australian legal jurisdiction, and
Speaker 2: that the job of sentencing for a criminal offense is
Speaker 2: always to match the seriousness of that offense with a
Speaker 2: unit of time and punishment, and so seriousness and the
Speaker 2: laws understanding is the harm that the offender caused and
Speaker 2: their moral culpability for it. So how much control they had,
Speaker 2: what choices they had, and so it's not just a
Speaker 2: one size fits all proposition. So here, obviously the harm
Speaker 2: was the greatest known to the law, the violation of
Speaker 2: the body and the taking of a life. But Todd's
Speaker 2: culpability was much more complex. So the judge in this
Speaker 2: case was Justice Kay the Victorian Supreme Court, and the
Speaker 2: task before him was to knit together, or balance all
Speaker 2: of these factors which were pointing in different directions. So
Speaker 2: On the one hand, we had Todd's extreme youth, and
Speaker 2: there are special rules that apply for young offenders, and
Speaker 2: that's generally anyone under twenty six. There was also the
Speaker 2: psychological and medical considerations, which was he had had a
Speaker 2: long standing diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, and the question
Speaker 2: was how that did and did not interact with the
Speaker 2: other diagnoses that he had and this background of social
Speaker 2: deprivation that he had at home and his high volume
Speaker 2: exposure to violent porn. So this was a very complicated
Speaker 2: thing to unscramble. It's like unscrambling an omelet. So he
Speaker 2: has the autism spectrum disorder. He also had sexual sadism disorder,
Speaker 2: so that's a paraphilia and I didn't understand paraphilias before
Speaker 2: this case, but they are conditions in which sexual pleasure
Speaker 2: depends on fantasizing about and engaging in extreme sexual behavior.
Speaker 2: They become disorders when they threaten harm or cause distress.
Speaker 2: So the sexual sadism disorder that he had was characterized
Speaker 2: by driving sexual pleasure through causing witnessing or fantasying about
Speaker 2: a non consenting indivisuals pain, and both the forensic psychologist
Speaker 2: for the prosecution and the forensic psychologist for the defense
Speaker 2: agreed that it was not possible to treat the paraphilic
Speaker 2: interest that was underlying the disorder, So that was something
Speaker 2: that spoke to his extreme dangerousness to the community going forward.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, the way it interacted with his
Speaker 2: autism disorder was something that would have normally deserved mitigation
Speaker 2: because these are things that are outside of his control.
Speaker 2: And again it was mentioned in the court, and I
Speaker 2: think it's important to always mention in the discussion that
Speaker 2: there's nothing about that autism diagnosis that meant that he
Speaker 2: would be violent. Was this jew of factors that were
Speaker 2: very personal to him and that they interacted in a
Speaker 2: particular way, And so that's what the court was looking at.
Speaker 1: Can I ask the sexual site is disorder? Had he
Speaker 1: been diagnosed with that prior to all of these proceedings.
Speaker 1: Did we know that he had this for a while.
Speaker 2: No, it was only in the context of the sessions
Speaker 2: that he'd had preparatory to the sentencing place, so to
Speaker 2: see how he was built and what was relevant. He
Speaker 2: had had previous interactions with child psychologists from a very
Speaker 2: young age to deal with social and emotional issues. And
Speaker 2: mood regulation issues. But no, this didn't come out. And indeed,
Speaker 2: the very nature of it was that it was quite
Speaker 2: hidden before it reached the stage. And as part of
Speaker 2: why it was so terribly dangerous is that no indication
Speaker 2: of it had been picked up previously in any of
Speaker 2: these sessions.
Speaker 1: Did Todd share any insights into why he picked you
Speaker 1: to see how he picked it, why he decided to
Speaker 1: do what he did.
Speaker 2: Not in the context really of the sessions. But there
Speaker 2: was a phone call that he'd had that was recorded,
Speaker 2: of course from prison to his father, in which he
Speaker 2: spoke about the living out of this fantasy and that
Speaker 2: it hadn't matched what he had hoped and that he
Speaker 2: hoped it would be better next time, which was a
Speaker 2: distressing thing to hear. But no, not that I know of.
Speaker 1: Can you expand more on those victim impact statements? They're
Speaker 1: such an important part of the process where the family
Speaker 1: gets to have their say before a sentence is handed down.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in Victoria, at least anyone who is affected
Speaker 2: by the crime can file a victim impact statement and
Speaker 2: those can be kept private for the judge to read,
Speaker 2: or they can be read out in court. And Dixon's
Speaker 2: sister read out hers, and she stood next to their brother,
Speaker 2: and she described understandably how the trauma of her sister's
Speaker 2: murder had pervaded the lives of the family, and the
Speaker 2: immobilizing impact of her grief on her own life, how
Speaker 2: it had shifted the course of her life, and she
Speaker 2: spoke with madness about her anger, which I think all
Speaker 2: of us can understand. Dixon's partner, Tony Magnuson, read out
Speaker 2: his statement, and he similarly explained kind of the shark
Speaker 2: waves of the loss in his own life, and they
Speaker 2: are extremely difficult things to read yet alone to be
Speaker 2: in the room for, because you're or I am filled
Speaker 2: with the kind of a cute awareness that, but for
Speaker 2: the grace of whatever you want to call it, that
Speaker 2: could be me at any moment. And yeah, you see
Speaker 2: the great cost of the individual example of these staggering
Speaker 2: statistics about violence against women.
Speaker 1: I was quite moved by the way her dad spoke
Speaker 1: in and around the court case because he actually shared
Speaker 1: compassion towards Todd's family as well, which he doesn't have
Speaker 1: to do and which would have been so hard when
Speaker 1: everything is still so fresh.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was the most magnificently in law human experience.
Speaker 2: To see a parent who was still grieving their child
Speaker 2: showed concern for the person who took that life. You know,
Speaker 2: he said he extended his sympathy to those who loved Todd,
Speaker 2: and that it was a terrible tragedy all round, and
Speaker 2: that he wished for Todd to get better, and that
Speaker 2: he thought you were would have also wished for Todd
Speaker 2: to get better. And it spoke to it was a
Speaker 2: little window into this family that she came from and
Speaker 2: this element that was in the heart of her artistic work,
Speaker 2: which was, like I said, this radical compassion as the
Speaker 2: only way of fixing all of these problems which ultimately
Speaker 2: killed her. So it was tragic but very powerful to
Speaker 2: see her father saying that.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Todd in that courtroom, because apparently he
Speaker 1: wept during some of these statements, but you think otherwise
Speaker 1: you were there, tell us how did he react?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean I had been reported that he
Speaker 2: wept during the victim impact statements. The way that that
Speaker 2: courtroom is structured, it's very archaic. It was built so
Speaker 2: long ago that the sound doesn't travel well and the
Speaker 2: angles are quite awkward. The press box is kind of
Speaker 2: like these two pews, and they're next to the dock
Speaker 2: where the accused sits behind a plexiglass screen. And that
Speaker 2: was the case even before COVID. And the way that
Speaker 2: I work is that I sit and observe as much
Speaker 2: as it's possible too, probably to a creepy extent, But
Speaker 2: I had tried to make sure that I was as
Speaker 2: close as possible to him for as long as possible,
Speaker 2: so that I would have as much information from which
Speaker 2: to make these assessments about emotion. And it's not something
Speaker 2: that's afforded to most court reporters, because they're under a
Speaker 2: huge time pressure to come in and out of a
Speaker 2: case and to go and do their crosses outside, or
Speaker 2: to go and file their reports on a twenty four
Speaker 2: hour cycle or even less than that. Whereas I'm writing
Speaker 2: at length and I kind of wait till there's some
Speaker 2: dust on the MATERI so I can see kind of
Speaker 2: what the larger implications are. And so I afforded more
Speaker 2: time in the research process to do these things. And
Speaker 2: that's a long way of explaining that I didn't understand
Speaker 2: what his face was doing as weeping. Given how long
Speaker 2: I had spent watching him. It seemed too extreme and
Speaker 2: too performative. It seemed like he was fulfilling what was
Speaker 2: expected of him at those times in the court. But
Speaker 2: I did see him have very strong emotion at other times,
Speaker 2: And the strongest emotion that I saw was this mix
Speaker 2: of fear and shame, and so that had a palpable
Speaker 2: impact on the way his face moved, and when he
Speaker 2: looked up directly, and when he hit his face, the
Speaker 2: way he held his body, the way he walked, and
Speaker 2: so I think he was feeling very strong emotions, just
Speaker 2: not in the way that most of the reports presented it.
Speaker 1: The sentence that Todd received yourself described it as surprising.
Speaker 1: Why was that?
Speaker 2: The first part is what I said about this need
Speaker 2: to balance all of these competing characteristics. So the forensic
Speaker 2: psychologist who testified for the defense had said that Todd's
Speaker 2: autism diagnosis interacted with the sexual sadist diagnosist to make
Speaker 2: him more rigid in the pursuit of these fantasies of
Speaker 2: rape and murder that had kind of grown and metastasized
Speaker 2: in proportion to the volume of violent porn that he
Speaker 2: was watching. He was less likely than somebody without those
Speaker 2: diagnoses to be able to desist. The prosecutions for psychologists
Speaker 2: disagreed with that assessment, saying that we'd seen Todd have
Speaker 2: a relationship, have friendships, His friends and girlfriends understood him
Speaker 2: as somebody who had a very social range of responses
Speaker 2: and was considerate to others. There was evidence that he
Speaker 2: was able to desist from violent sexual behavior or listen
Speaker 2: to his girlfriend in matters of sexual consent. So there
Speaker 2: was competing assessments of the impact of his diagnoses, and
Speaker 2: the law had and still has, I believe, a limited
Speaker 2: understanding of the way that neurodivergence works in criminal offending.
Speaker 2: So all of that was kind of an open question
Speaker 2: about how it would translate into the sentence. But the
Speaker 2: other consideration was his extreme youth. So on the one hand,
Speaker 2: we have a whole body of law that says that
Speaker 2: we should give the least amount of punishment required to
Speaker 2: fairly punish the offense, and that the airs of presumption
Speaker 2: when the offender is very young, that life imprisonment will
Speaker 2: be disproportionate to all of the factors relevant to their
Speaker 2: offending and who they are, mostly because of that youth.
Speaker 2: For that reason, but the Crown and the defense had
Speaker 2: agreed that life imprisonment wouldn't be an appropriate punishment. So
Speaker 2: normally that agreement would have not a determining impact, but
Speaker 2: a strong impact on the sentence. Always the sentencing judge
Speaker 2: retains the final discretion, the final say so, and what
Speaker 2: that sentence will be and how long it will be.
Speaker 2: So I was surprised because of the body of law
Speaker 2: about youth and life imprisonment and this agreement between the
Speaker 2: parties that life imprisonment wasn't going to be appropriate, because
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, Justice Kaye found that
Speaker 2: it was proportionate to impose a sentence of life, and
Speaker 2: that was because even taking the youth into account, it
Speaker 2: was the extreme dangerousness of this offending that meant that
Speaker 2: no other sentence would be possible, and all of the
Speaker 2: reasons for that held up on appeal.
Speaker 1: So he's given life, which means thirty five years right
Speaker 1: as a non parole.
Speaker 2: So the head sentence is life. That's the most that
Speaker 2: he can serve, and the non parole period is thirty
Speaker 2: five years, and that's the least he can serve. At
Speaker 2: thirty five years, he won't necessarily be released, but he
Speaker 2: becomes eligible for parole consideration. So the Adult Parole Board
Speaker 2: will then look at his time served, who he is,
Speaker 2: what rehabilitation he's done, if any expert reports on his
Speaker 2: psychological state, his personality, and they will make an assessment
Speaker 2: whether he's safe to release at that time. And he'll
Speaker 2: be in his mid fifties by that point.
Speaker 1: I think it's good to know that that decision isn't
Speaker 1: just you know, he's led out straight away. It's assessed
Speaker 1: because reading the detailed the sentencing, it said things like
Speaker 1: his chances of rehabilitation were slim and that the risk
Speaker 1: he posed to women was unacceptably great. That doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like the kind of person, at least at the time
Speaker 1: of sentencing, that you want released back into the community.
Speaker 2: It's a real concern specifically for those reasons, and then
Speaker 2: generally when we look at the efficiency of imprisonment in
Speaker 2: terms of reducing crime more broadly, so, prison actually has
Speaker 2: a criminogenic effect, which means that it increases people's likelihood
Speaker 2: to commit crimes. It cuts off their social ties in
Speaker 2: the outside world, living situations, job prospects, relationships, all of
Speaker 2: the things that would hold people and prevent them from
Speaker 2: offending in the future. It's also a place of punishment,
Speaker 2: it's not a place necessarily of rehabilitation. So all of
Speaker 2: the sexual offender rehabilitation programs that would be available in
Speaker 2: other contexts are necessarily available to him. Because of his
Speaker 2: youth and the nature of his crime, he would probably
Speaker 2: be in productive custody. And again that kind of isolation
Speaker 2: has a dangerous impact. So yeah, it's quite concerning.
Speaker 1: That being said, though, I've heard that Todd is I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say enjoying, but he likes elements of prison.
Speaker 2: Yes, that point was made by the forensic psychologist, I
Speaker 2: think for the prosecution, who was kind of asked this
Speaker 2: was kind of at that early stage where he had
Speaker 2: spent the months in prison in preparation for the sentencing hearing,
Speaker 2: how he was going in prison, the impact of prison
Speaker 2: on him, because again the court will take into account
Speaker 2: where there is kind of a pre existing psychological or
Speaker 2: neurological condition, whether the impact of prison would weigh more
Speaker 2: heavily on Todd than it would for someone without his diagnoses.
Speaker 2: And in that case, it was ironic that the order
Speaker 2: and predictability of the environment, compared to the chaos of
Speaker 2: the home that he had come from, was actually having
Speaker 2: a beneficial effect on him, and I think that said
Speaker 2: something more generally about the way in which the soul
Speaker 2: could have been avoided if he had had a different
Speaker 2: home life, different background. Where would we all have found ourselves.
Speaker 1: I want to move away from Todd now and get
Speaker 1: back to Uriticy and the community response to what happened,
Speaker 1: because the only word that I can come up with
Speaker 1: is anger. It felt like when everything started to come out,
Speaker 1: the response was huge, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: We'd had to previous explosively violent stranger murders of young
Speaker 2: women in Melbourne just in the previous months before this
Speaker 2: matter was heard, and we'd also heard police repeating this
Speaker 2: broad instruction to women to be careful about how and
Speaker 2: where they walked home at night, instead of a broad
Speaker 2: instruction to men not to kill and rape women. And
Speaker 2: so I think we were all fed up with that,
Speaker 2: and then we were all fed up more broadly with
Speaker 2: the types of factors that were leading again and again
Speaker 2: to sexual assault and murder. And we're still fed up
Speaker 2: with it, and we're still seeing it, and we're still
Speaker 2: at the very beginning of implementing systemic solutions to this
Speaker 2: problem of male violence against women.
Speaker 1: In the wake of you a decease murder. Did anything change?
Speaker 1: Did the Victorian authorities change anything? Was it discussed in parliament? Because,
Speaker 1: as you said, this was after quite a few stranger
Speaker 1: murders in Melbourne itself, in one city.
Speaker 2: I think the broad answer to that is no and
Speaker 2: not enough. I used to work in the Victorian Department
Speaker 2: of Justice in a unit that formulated legislative reforms to
Speaker 2: the Crimes Act, and in a certain respect, while the
Speaker 2: criminal law is extremely important here, it happens at the
Speaker 2: end of this process when the damage that can't be
Speaker 2: undone has already occurred. So these are not necessarily solutions
Speaker 2: that can be fixed with new laws. They are social
Speaker 2: issues that need a whole range of behavioral and financial solutions,
Speaker 2: and I think if they had been efficiently implemented in
Speaker 2: response to cases like this, we would not be seeing
Speaker 2: the situations that we continue to say.
Speaker 1: As someone that is so embedded in this world, you
Speaker 1: have a history of being there with the Crimes Act,
Speaker 1: You've got a criminal law background. Please, Sarah, is there
Speaker 1: any help of fixing this in our lifetime? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean I think that there's so many people doing
Speaker 2: great work in this I am the mother of two
Speaker 2: sons and I think that these conversations don't start with
Speaker 2: grown men. They start with a whole range of ways
Speaker 2: of seeing women as equal and valuable adults. So this
Speaker 2: is a complicated web, from the way we handle internet
Speaker 2: regulation and peorn regulation, to the gender pay gap, to
Speaker 2: the stories that we read and value towards the voices
Speaker 2: that we see and hear are women being treated equally
Speaker 2: as real human people, And then how we talk about
Speaker 2: what masculinity means, the pressures and kind of expectations on men,
Speaker 2: and how that plays out in politics and in sports
Speaker 2: and in society economically, and so you know, this is
Speaker 2: a broad systemic issue. There, it's a unified field, and
Speaker 2: there's many people working in the space. But as I said,
Speaker 2: we're still at the very beginning of taking it seriously
Speaker 2: enough to ask these questions about what the solutions look like.
Speaker 1: It does make me feel a little bit better that
Speaker 1: you're at least hopeful though, that we can see change.
Speaker 2: Well. I think if the problems are socially caused, they
Speaker 2: can be socially fixed. And one of the things that
Speaker 2: happens when you write about cases like this is there's
Speaker 2: sometimes criticism about centralizing or even humanizing the offender taking
Speaker 2: a spotlight away from the victim, and I understand the
Speaker 2: emotion at the heart of that criticism, but I don't
Speaker 2: agree with the point because if we're not curious about
Speaker 2: the factors that creates someone like James Todd, then they
Speaker 2: are still going to be creating other young men like him,
Speaker 2: and that makes none of us safer. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: think that's very dark and it's not as necessarily a
Speaker 2: fun space to be in. But I think the questions
Speaker 2: are important, the curiosity is important.
Speaker 1: The reality is since twenty eighteen, since this happened, we
Speaker 1: have lost an unfathomable number of women who have been murdered.
Speaker 1: Why do you think it is that so many people
Speaker 1: remember urytices story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an interesting question and I don't think it
Speaker 2: has one answer. I think the location has something to
Speaker 2: do with it. That this kind of had so many
Speaker 2: iconic Melbourne places and spaces involved in the actual crime
Speaker 2: that there was a sense that it could have been
Speaker 2: any of us in the city. Her youth and Todd's youth,
Speaker 2: I think had a shocking impact on people that didn't
Speaker 2: see that coming. And I would like to say that
Speaker 2: she absolutely deserves like every woman who's killed at the
Speaker 2: hands of men to be remembered. But I'm also mine
Speaker 2: that not as many people remember other names. So Aya
Speaker 2: Marsawe who was killed by Cody Herman in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: Another stranger murder, another stranger murder.
Speaker 2: Both of them were similar ages twenty and twenty one,
Speaker 2: so again the same violence, the same ages. People remember
Speaker 2: Jill Mahr and Adrian Bailey, but they aren't as familiar
Speaker 2: with Adrian Bailey's other victims who are sex workers. And
Speaker 2: I won't name them now because I don't have any
Speaker 2: permission to name them, but their names are available. And
Speaker 2: so looking where our attention and our compassion and our
Speaker 2: energy go in mainstream media outlets, it's difficult to avoid
Speaker 2: the conclusion that we still look for women who fit
Speaker 2: a certain mold and that race, ethnicity, gender, and profession
Speaker 2: do play a role in where that attention goes. But again,
Speaker 2: unless all women are valued equally, none of us are safe.
Speaker 1: And I guess at the end of the day, it's
Speaker 1: important that we try and tell as many of these
Speaker 1: stories as we can right to keep this issue on
Speaker 1: the front foot and so people know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Absolutely thanks to Sarah for assisting us to tell eurydice story.
Speaker 1: Sarah has written about a number of the women mentioned
Speaker 1: in this interview, like Eurydicy, like Aya. You can find
Speaker 1: her work linked in our show notes. True Crime Conversations
Speaker 1: is a Mumamea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath,
Speaker 1: with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Giamoylan.
Speaker 1: I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you have a case you think
Speaker 1: we should cover next, send us an email to true
Speaker 1: Crime at mamamea dot com dot au.