WEBVTT - Episode 2: The Woman Who Spoke Out 0:00:00.320 --> 0:00:04.600 A note to listeners, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. 0:00:08.480 --> 0:00:11.880 There is corruption everywhere in the world, literally everywhere and 0:00:12.039 --> 0:00:16.760 at every level. The difference is that in Malta people 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:21.760 have a corrupt attitude towards corruption. They blanket they tolerate it. 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:27.319 The powers are not really separate institutions a week. The 0:00:27.360 --> 0:00:30.159 police operate as an extension of the government. Judges and 0:00:30.200 --> 0:00:37.440 magistrates are politically appointed. It's a dreadful situation, ripe and 0:00:37.479 --> 0:00:39.040 designed for abuse and corruption. 0:00:48.200 --> 0:00:50.000 So Manuel, where are we? What we're looking at? 0:00:50.240 --> 0:00:52.400 We're in the very middle of the Live Island, the 0:00:52.479 --> 0:00:56.600 small hamlet of Bignia, about one hundred farmers this year. 0:00:57.440 --> 0:01:02.600 I mean it's dry here, but the tree feels it 0:01:02.680 --> 0:01:05.600 was quite a busy road, a line of houses on 0:01:05.640 --> 0:01:07.199 the ridge and then the ridges bare. 0:01:10.800 --> 0:01:13.440 John and I are in maltawn on a country road 0:01:13.440 --> 0:01:16.400 about half an hour's drive from the capital, Valletta. At 0:01:16.400 --> 0:01:18.240 the end of the last episode, we heard how a 0:01:18.280 --> 0:01:22.120 team of contract killers were here watching Daphne through her 0:01:22.160 --> 0:01:26.880 windows with her rifle. But on that evening they didn't fire. 0:01:27.600 --> 0:01:30.080 At the very last minute. Their plan hit a snack. 0:01:30.600 --> 0:01:35.279 According to courtrum testimony, just Before the shot could be taken, 0:01:35.760 --> 0:01:39.120 getaway driver Chinese George de Georgio, learned there was a 0:01:39.160 --> 0:01:41.880 roadblock on some of the roads leading to Dafani's home. 0:01:42.720 --> 0:01:46.440 An escape by car suddenly seemed too risky, so the 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:47.280 plan is aborted. 0:01:48.360 --> 0:01:51.640 Instead, they decide they will carry out the hit using 0:01:51.680 --> 0:01:58.920 a different method, but just as deadly. Over to our 0:01:59.000 --> 0:02:02.280 left can see the sea, and then just there there's 0:02:02.280 --> 0:02:03.000 a police box. 0:02:04.000 --> 0:02:07.880 Who lives here, well, definitely Carmegality. I lived here, her 0:02:07.880 --> 0:02:11.600 family still lives here. It's a house that overlooks the 0:02:11.680 --> 0:02:13.920 valley within the sort of the center of the island. 0:02:14.400 --> 0:02:17.800 This little hamlet is mostly a farming community, and she 0:02:17.919 --> 0:02:20.120 had the last house on the. 0:02:20.080 --> 0:02:24.160 Ridge, So this ridge here, Where were the spots. 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:29.000 Is They're right across so through the trees in a 0:02:29.000 --> 0:02:31.520 way that wouldn't be visible to us from here, but 0:02:32.280 --> 0:02:35.360 they could see us from there. She was being spotted 0:02:35.400 --> 0:02:37.359 and watched by the people who are planning to kill her. 0:02:38.520 --> 0:02:41.440 And it's punishingly hot. We're actually standing in the shade, 0:02:41.919 --> 0:02:44.720 but it feels like thirty degrees now, yeah. 0:02:45.120 --> 0:02:48.239 And I think you're seeing just the atmosphere that would 0:02:48.280 --> 0:02:51.120 have been there on the day sixteenth October twenty seventeen. 0:02:51.160 --> 0:02:54.720 It was a hot day like this. October is the 0:02:54.760 --> 0:02:59.200 tail end of summer, but the landscape is dry, the 0:02:59.240 --> 0:03:03.240 heat is on, and Dephnely was running an afternoon errand 0:03:03.560 --> 0:03:07.280 on a day just like today. 0:03:08.280 --> 0:03:11.280 From my hard podcast topic Studios in Vespucci. 0:03:11.360 --> 0:03:14.560 I'm John Sweeney and I'm Manuel Delia and this is 0:03:14.720 --> 0:03:17.080 Crooks Everywhere, Episode two. 0:03:17.680 --> 0:03:19.079 The woman who spoke out. 0:03:23.960 --> 0:03:32.720 Ter Daphne was a year older. She's the eldest of 0:03:32.800 --> 0:03:35.320 us four. We used to share a bedroom when we 0:03:35.320 --> 0:03:38.240 were children and up to about the age of twelve 0:03:38.280 --> 0:03:39.560 thirteen on. 0:03:39.520 --> 0:03:41.840 A small island. A lot of people thought they knew 0:03:41.880 --> 0:03:45.680 a big personal little like Daphne, but her sister Corinne 0:03:46.000 --> 0:03:47.200 saw a different side. 0:03:47.880 --> 0:03:51.960 The strongest memory I think books and reading writing. She 0:03:52.000 --> 0:03:54.640 didn't care for much else, you know, especially at school. 0:03:54.920 --> 0:03:57.160 She just loved reading and writing. 0:03:57.920 --> 0:04:01.520 This would be the mid seventies definitely, as a young teenager. 0:04:02.560 --> 0:04:05.400 Deafney's son Paul has written a biography of his mother. 0:04:06.160 --> 0:04:09.120 It describes her so hungry for reading matter that she 0:04:09.200 --> 0:04:12.160 forms her own book club in school, sharing British children's 0:04:12.200 --> 0:04:16.400 literature like Enid Blyton Exotic Adventures from afar off Land. 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:19.599 But the other thing I suppose, rather than books alone, 0:04:19.880 --> 0:04:23.640 was that she really loved magazines, and she always said, 0:04:23.760 --> 0:04:25.520 you know, if you want to know what's going on, 0:04:25.600 --> 0:04:27.520 you ought to keep in touch with the world magazines 0:04:27.560 --> 0:04:30.120 well the way I mean it's a spre internet. Of course. 0:04:33.160 --> 0:04:35.599 Deafnely was born the same year that Malta stopped being 0:04:35.600 --> 0:04:41.000 a British colony nineteen sixty four. Let's say a more traditional. 0:04:40.520 --> 0:04:43.680 Time, such as the time of austerity. In a postcolonial 0:04:44.600 --> 0:04:47.680 we couldn't travel much, you know, people didn't at that time. 0:04:48.279 --> 0:04:50.479 It just didn't happen. I mean, we grew up in 0:04:50.480 --> 0:04:52.680 a neighborhood where you know, my mom had grown up 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:56.600 in the same street. It is a seaside town, so 0:04:56.839 --> 0:04:59.880 it is a tourist destination, but when we were children, 0:05:00.080 --> 0:05:02.000 tourism wasn't very well developed. 0:05:02.360 --> 0:05:04.440 Back in the seventies and eighties. Who are still a 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:07.560 fairly poor nation and also living under a mild form 0:05:07.600 --> 0:05:11.279 of socialism, which made luxuries like foreign travel or teenage 0:05:11.279 --> 0:05:15.159 fashion feel exotic and precious. Even Enid Blyton was a 0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:18.719 form of escapism. Daphnie's was a family that was fairly 0:05:18.760 --> 0:05:22.720 prosperous and successful part of the English speaking educated middle class, 0:05:23.600 --> 0:05:25.960 the kind of people sometimes seen as more British than 0:05:25.960 --> 0:05:29.200 the British, the kind of people who don't have great 0:05:29.200 --> 0:05:33.560 socialist credentials, and that can cause resentment, as we will 0:05:33.560 --> 0:05:34.600 hear down. 0:05:34.440 --> 0:05:37.120 With the British Empire and all that. I mean, no 0:05:37.160 --> 0:05:41.320 one likes to be associated with all that gasslyl colonial nonsense, right. 0:05:41.520 --> 0:05:45.800 Right, and these things matter. There are deep social and 0:05:45.839 --> 0:05:48.840 cultural divides that still run through our whole culture and 0:05:48.880 --> 0:05:51.000 through Daphne's story even today. 0:05:53.120 --> 0:05:55.919 The way her sister Koran tells it, even as a teenager, 0:05:56.320 --> 0:06:00.400 young Daphne was already looking outside Maulta for inspiration, a 0:06:00.440 --> 0:06:04.279 world that was outside her grasp, listening to Adam Ants 0:06:04.360 --> 0:06:08.039 and Bob Marley, reading British teenage magazines, and it. 0:06:08.120 --> 0:06:10.520 Was a particular one called Jackie, which was aimed at 0:06:10.600 --> 0:06:15.520 teenage girls, you know, dealing with fashion and romance. You know, 0:06:15.760 --> 0:06:18.279 the typical problem page you get for teenage girls, that 0:06:18.400 --> 0:06:21.359 sort of thing. That was a magazine definitely used to 0:06:21.440 --> 0:06:23.600 like very much. I remember that she used to buy 0:06:23.640 --> 0:06:26.800 it regularly. My parents used to buy lots of magazines, 0:06:26.839 --> 0:06:31.080 you know, Life magazine, Spectator magazine, Newsweek. So there was 0:06:31.160 --> 0:06:35.200 that connection, and I do remember this sense of the 0:06:35.200 --> 0:06:36.240 wider world. 0:06:37.440 --> 0:06:39.280 And the way the country was run at the time 0:06:39.600 --> 0:06:41.800 wasn't making things easier for teenagers. 0:06:42.760 --> 0:06:46.600 It wasn't, let's say, a time of opportunity for teenage girls. 0:06:46.960 --> 0:06:51.839 That way, education beyond the mandatory first years of education 0:06:52.160 --> 0:06:53.680 wasn't greatly encouraged. 0:06:57.160 --> 0:06:59.800 At that time, the socialist government was attempting to force 0:07:00.200 --> 0:07:04.080 a Catholic schools to abolish fees, effectively forcing them out 0:07:04.120 --> 0:07:08.880 of existence. The authorities saw church schools as religious and elitist, 0:07:09.480 --> 0:07:12.880 definitely not part of a socialist Malta the kind of 0:07:12.880 --> 0:07:16.440 schools that many middle class families like Dafni's used, and 0:07:16.480 --> 0:07:18.440 maybe the notion of a church school makes you think 0:07:18.440 --> 0:07:22.080 of xalatory and conservatism, but at that time these schools 0:07:22.080 --> 0:07:25.040 were a rare spot of independent thinking that the government 0:07:25.080 --> 0:07:29.680 could not control. They felt threatened by that. Forcing church 0:07:29.680 --> 0:07:32.560 schools out of business became a mission for a government 0:07:32.560 --> 0:07:35.800 that wanted to monopolize education and, as they put it, 0:07:36.320 --> 0:07:42.040 to cultivate future generations of socialists. And so while Daphne 0:07:42.120 --> 0:07:45.560 is reading Jackie magazine and listening to Damant, her classmates 0:07:45.560 --> 0:07:48.559 are beginning to join protest marches to keep their school open. 0:07:49.680 --> 0:07:53.520 So this is an unusual coalition. Teenage rebellion meets the 0:07:53.520 --> 0:07:54.320 Catholic church. 0:07:54.760 --> 0:07:59.320 Deafhney was nineteen at this time and not really political yet. 0:08:01.160 --> 0:08:04.440 You know, huge crowds of people marched through the streets. 0:08:04.720 --> 0:08:06.400 And there was a time when there was a protest 0:08:06.440 --> 0:08:09.760 in our own hometown. For some reason, I hadn't gone 0:08:09.800 --> 0:08:11.960 to that one, but I remember definitely had gone there 0:08:11.960 --> 0:08:14.920 with her friends out in the street, a few streets 0:08:14.920 --> 0:08:18.200 away from our home, and then the police moved in. 0:08:21.080 --> 0:08:23.960 Back then, Maltese police were not known for their life 0:08:24.000 --> 0:08:25.160 touch and. 0:08:25.240 --> 0:08:28.600 Remember one of them punched deafnely and then she and 0:08:28.640 --> 0:08:33.120 her friends were arrested. And then, you know, it's not 0:08:33.160 --> 0:08:37.280 like anyone reads you or your rights, and so they knew. Basically, 0:08:37.280 --> 0:08:39.440 they knew they could do whatever they liked. Human rights 0:08:39.520 --> 0:08:43.559 as a concept didn't exist for many people. Mike was right. 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:48.559 I can't imagine how frightening that must have been for her, 0:08:48.880 --> 0:08:51.640 but also how scared her parents must have been. 0:08:52.160 --> 0:08:54.880 Yes, yes, it's a terrifying prospect, both for the person arrested, 0:08:54.920 --> 0:08:57.520 but even more terrifying if you were on the outside. 0:09:00.320 --> 0:09:02.560 Definitely claimed that she was forced to sign a pre 0:09:02.640 --> 0:09:06.480 written confession for assaulting a police officer. When it reached court, 0:09:06.600 --> 0:09:09.920 she was acquitted of all charges, and the magistrate presiding 0:09:10.000 --> 0:09:13.360 criticized the police involved, calling for their conduct to be 0:09:13.400 --> 0:09:14.960 condemned and severely censured. 0:09:15.480 --> 0:09:18.960 That is the kind of experience that scarce you for life, 0:09:19.320 --> 0:09:22.320 especially at that age, even if she did make it 0:09:22.360 --> 0:09:23.360 out in one piece. 0:09:23.600 --> 0:09:26.840 Yes, when I imagined nineen year old, definitely, this I 0:09:26.840 --> 0:09:29.840 think has to be a crossroads in her life. Some 0:09:29.840 --> 0:09:31.600 people would have learned the lesson to keep their head 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:35.640 down from then on, but with definitely, it did the opposite. 0:09:35.960 --> 0:09:38.520 I mean, it wouldn't say radicalized her, but it also 0:09:38.640 --> 0:09:41.680 brought home in a very personal way, just how fragile 0:09:42.280 --> 0:09:45.160 you know fundamental freedoms are, How you know you need 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:47.800 to protect, you need to fight back every day. You 0:09:47.840 --> 0:09:48.880 can't take anything for. 0:09:48.840 --> 0:09:52.120 Granted, Malta being a small place. The same young arresting 0:09:52.160 --> 0:09:55.880 officer went on to become a major multice politician, this 0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:59.480 time quarter of a century later. Definitely was determined to 0:09:59.480 --> 0:10:00.120 have her say. 0:10:00.880 --> 0:10:04.320 October seventh, twenty ten. I stand by what I have 0:10:04.360 --> 0:10:08.760 said for twenty six years. Angelou Farrugia forced me to 0:10:08.800 --> 0:10:11.800 sign a false confession which he wrote himself. 0:10:12.720 --> 0:10:16.079 Naturally, this is Daphne's version of what happened, and it 0:10:16.080 --> 0:10:18.640 should also be noted that definnely lost a libel case 0:10:18.920 --> 0:10:22.840 related to these claims, although an appeals court held that 0:10:22.840 --> 0:10:24.720 she managed to prove some of the facts. 0:10:25.120 --> 0:10:27.400 We should also note that it would have been hard 0:10:27.400 --> 0:10:30.240 for Deafney to prove her case thirty years after the fact. 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:33.720 Malta cannot have a prime minister who, in his days 0:10:33.760 --> 0:10:37.000 as a police inspector, forced a nineteen year old girl 0:10:37.320 --> 0:10:40.400 to sign a false confession which he himself had written, 0:10:41.120 --> 0:10:43.600 telling her that if she did not do so, she 0:10:43.600 --> 0:10:46.600 would be returned to the pitch black cell with feces 0:10:46.600 --> 0:10:49.880 smeared walls and a metal bucket for a lavatory, where 0:10:49.880 --> 0:10:56.839 she had been kept for the past twenty seven hours. 0:10:57.240 --> 0:11:00.680 After young Daphney finishes school, she began also followed the 0:11:00.679 --> 0:11:04.640 expected path for someone of her background, marriage, starting a family, 0:11:05.320 --> 0:11:10.040 but also something more surprising. She becomes a journalist, Malta's 0:11:10.040 --> 0:11:12.480 first female opinion columnist. 0:11:13.760 --> 0:11:17.160 And that was surprising even for what was by then 0:11:17.160 --> 0:11:20.120 in the early nineteen nineties. I remember she started writing 0:11:20.160 --> 0:11:23.839 around the time I started reading newspapers, I obviously didn't 0:11:23.880 --> 0:11:26.320 realize how unique she was, because to me, everything on 0:11:26.320 --> 0:11:29.080 a newspaper was new. But I became a fan early on. 0:11:29.760 --> 0:11:32.160 And it wasn't just that Definnely was a female journalist. 0:11:32.679 --> 0:11:35.400 It was also that she wrote openly under her own name. 0:11:35.760 --> 0:11:38.760 Until then, most columnists preferred to stay anonymous. 0:11:39.000 --> 0:11:42.560 It felt safer, but that wasn't Daphne's style. 0:11:46.520 --> 0:11:51.120 Well, I started out purely out of my own sense 0:11:51.160 --> 0:11:55.199 of frustration with the newspaper's local newspaper. 0:11:54.880 --> 0:11:58.200 Definitely spoke about this time. This is a rare recorded 0:11:58.280 --> 0:12:01.400 interview with Definitely from the nineteen ninety years before she 0:12:01.480 --> 0:12:02.280 started her blog. 0:12:02.400 --> 0:12:05.920 And I also noticed an absence of columns written by 0:12:06.000 --> 0:12:09.679 people under their own name, you know, his photograph name, 0:12:10.520 --> 0:12:14.319 as I read regularly in foreign newspapers. And that's what 0:12:14.480 --> 0:12:17.319 this is very odd. And the reason Giffen was always 0:12:17.400 --> 0:12:20.240 that such a column would be impossible in Mortar because 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:24.240 it's such a close, closely knit society, and people are 0:12:24.280 --> 0:12:27.199 afraid to offend others are afraid of stepping on other 0:12:27.240 --> 0:12:29.640 people's toes, and obviously, if you're going to write a 0:12:29.640 --> 0:12:33.400 proper column, you're going to step on people's toes very often. 0:12:34.160 --> 0:12:37.160 Of course, on a small island, stepping on toes and 0:12:37.200 --> 0:12:41.440 making enemies can be a risky business. You never know 0:12:41.640 --> 0:12:44.720 quite who will hold a grudge, but in a small 0:12:44.800 --> 0:12:47.680 place you do know that they will be able to 0:12:47.720 --> 0:12:49.320 find you if they want to. 0:12:50.920 --> 0:12:54.040 Daphney's writing was a hit. People started to buy the 0:12:54.080 --> 0:12:57.440 paper purely to read what definitely had to say, to 0:12:57.559 --> 0:12:59.559 watch her stepping on toes. 0:13:00.120 --> 0:13:03.200 Previously, journalists had tended to be men. In fact, the 0:13:03.240 --> 0:13:07.840 newspaper I started out with, The Sunday Times, had had 0:13:07.840 --> 0:13:13.080 a policy of never employing staff reporters who were women. 0:13:13.760 --> 0:13:16.480 It was a very absurd and antiquated policy, and the 0:13:16.559 --> 0:13:19.240 test since of course bitter the dust. I mean, it 0:13:19.280 --> 0:13:23.800 was totally absurd, but that accounted for a lot of 0:13:23.840 --> 0:13:25.280 my effect at the time. 0:13:26.280 --> 0:13:29.600 She's being very modest here. The quality of her writing 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:32.520 and the urgency of it where what really made her 0:13:32.559 --> 0:13:33.040 stand out. 0:13:33.280 --> 0:13:37.240 But not surprisingly, the idea of a strongly opinionated female 0:13:37.240 --> 0:13:42.360 columnist didn't go down well with everyone, and. 0:13:42.240 --> 0:13:45.880 That became a very difficult time for Defne because she'd 0:13:45.880 --> 0:13:49.040 get all these ominous messages which weren't sort of avert 0:13:49.559 --> 0:13:52.240 but you get a sense that you know something creepy 0:13:52.280 --> 0:13:52.600 going on. 0:13:53.360 --> 0:13:55.920 I know this myself as a writer on news and 0:13:55.960 --> 0:13:59.520 politics in Malta. You can't prove where the hostile messages 0:13:59.559 --> 0:14:01.840 come from or whether it had anything to do with 0:14:01.920 --> 0:14:05.920 any specific piece of reporting, but people know who you are, 0:14:06.720 --> 0:14:09.080 and on an island this small, if people want to 0:14:09.120 --> 0:14:13.040 find you, they will find you. So there's a reason 0:14:13.080 --> 0:14:15.520 why it was normal for a journalists to write anonymously 0:14:16.080 --> 0:14:17.079 for their own well being. 0:14:17.320 --> 0:14:19.000 But you know when you hear something on the room, 0:14:19.160 --> 0:14:21.480 you know, on the grapevine, or someone says you'd better 0:14:21.520 --> 0:14:25.280 be careful because you know x y Z is feeling angry. 0:14:25.760 --> 0:14:29.200 That's the kind of thing that she was experiencing where 0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:33.400 you'd get these sort of not so subtle hints, And there's. 0:14:33.240 --> 0:14:36.640 A mother dafinitely did her best disguise of pressure she 0:14:36.760 --> 0:14:37.440 was coming under. 0:14:37.720 --> 0:14:39.400 After she was skilled, her son said they had to 0:14:39.440 --> 0:14:42.840 revise a lot of what they experienced when they were children. 0:14:42.840 --> 0:14:44.720 So when they were pulled out of school and taken 0:14:44.800 --> 0:14:47.840 for an impromptu holiday to Gozo, which is a neighboring island, 0:14:48.760 --> 0:14:52.120 they then realized that that was a time when definitely 0:14:52.120 --> 0:14:55.360 possibly was feeling unsafe and thought, you know, getting out 0:14:55.400 --> 0:14:57.800 of the house, getting out of their normal environment would 0:14:57.960 --> 0:15:05.280 take them out of harm's way. For a while, I never. 0:15:05.120 --> 0:15:09.520 Really thought of my mother as a woman journalist, you know, 0:15:09.880 --> 0:15:12.320 I taught of her as my mother and as this 0:15:13.920 --> 0:15:14.840 incredible writer. 0:15:15.240 --> 0:15:18.520 Definitely had three boys. Matthew is the oldest, Paul the youngest. 0:15:19.120 --> 0:15:21.040 This is Andrew, the middle son. 0:15:21.920 --> 0:15:25.000 I guess what I always found striking was that she 0:15:25.160 --> 0:15:27.520 was so different to my friend's parents, to my friend's 0:15:27.600 --> 0:15:32.320 mother's you know, in Malta, in my parents' generation, maybe 0:15:33.640 --> 0:15:39.280 twenty percent of women worked, maybe thirty percent max. And 0:15:39.800 --> 0:15:42.280 the fact that she was the sort of famous journalist 0:15:43.440 --> 0:15:49.040 was you know, it made her almost like an alien somehow. 0:15:49.200 --> 0:15:52.480 And she was able to live these two lives very effectively, 0:15:52.840 --> 0:15:55.720 you know, to be the Maltese mother who was sort 0:15:55.760 --> 0:15:59.160 of very you know, like a typical Mediterranean mother who's 0:15:59.280 --> 0:16:04.480 very sort of you know, attentive and proud of her 0:16:04.560 --> 0:16:09.200 children and just you know, very warm, but then was 0:16:09.240 --> 0:16:13.360 able to be this sort of like razor sharp journalist. 0:16:14.280 --> 0:16:19.440 And Daphne's razor sharp journalism had real world consequences for 0:16:19.520 --> 0:16:20.160 the family. 0:16:22.960 --> 0:16:25.480 So I remember coming home from school and there was 0:16:25.960 --> 0:16:28.160 you know, we had this dog. All our dogs were 0:16:28.200 --> 0:16:30.640 mongrels at the time. We used to just adopt whatever 0:16:30.680 --> 0:16:35.480 straight dogs would show up, but this one actually was different. 0:16:35.840 --> 0:16:40.360 It was a colligue, really beautiful dog called Messalina. 0:16:40.760 --> 0:16:43.840 And on this day when they get home, somethink is 0:16:43.880 --> 0:16:45.360 waiting for them on the doorstep. 0:16:46.200 --> 0:16:50.200 Its throat had been slashed, but rather than making a 0:16:50.280 --> 0:16:53.520 fuss about it, definitely just walked inside and said, you know, 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:56.560 it must have drunk eaten some poison from the garden 0:16:56.680 --> 0:16:59.560 or something of the sort. So she played it down 0:16:59.720 --> 0:17:02.320 a lot and dealt with it that way. 0:17:03.880 --> 0:17:06.520 And obviously I believed her because I was, you know, 0:17:06.600 --> 0:17:10.639 maybe seven years old, But I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, 0:17:10.760 --> 0:17:12.840 I mean, is that what snail poisoned us? To you? 0:17:13.520 --> 0:17:15.479 How much poison do you need to kill a snail? 0:17:15.520 --> 0:17:22.160 And yeah, And then things moved beyond even warnings like that. 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:24.879 And then there was when our front door set on fire. 0:17:24.960 --> 0:17:28.160 The explanation was that we left the candle out that night, 0:17:30.040 --> 0:17:34.320 so so sort of semi plausible for a child, but 0:17:34.600 --> 0:17:38.480 over time, you know, you realize, okay, that that obviously 0:17:38.600 --> 0:17:42.560 was not true. The door was completely black and then 0:17:42.600 --> 0:17:46.280 obviously as we grew older, we you know, our parents 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:47.160 stopped pretending. 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:51.359 The family decided they needed more protection, so they built 0:17:51.400 --> 0:17:55.480 the first of several walls around the property. Sadly, that 0:17:55.640 --> 0:17:58.040 was still no guarantee of safety. 0:17:58.000 --> 0:18:01.960 And there was another ugly incident which came later on. 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:05.600 So they were asleep in their own beds and somebody 0:18:05.640 --> 0:18:08.359 crawled across the fields at the back of the house, 0:18:09.040 --> 0:18:12.160 piled rubber tires at the back of the house, filled 0:18:12.200 --> 0:18:15.639 them with fuel and set them alight. And this was 0:18:15.680 --> 0:18:18.159 in the early hours of the morning, so they had 0:18:18.200 --> 0:18:20.480 obviously been watching the house and waiting for the lights 0:18:20.520 --> 0:18:22.679 to go out, which was a signal everybody was actually 0:18:22.680 --> 0:18:23.080 in bed. 0:18:23.400 --> 0:18:26.320 And petrol obviously is explosive, so the idea was that 0:18:26.680 --> 0:18:30.040 the petrol would would blast through the glass and the 0:18:30.080 --> 0:18:33.200 fire would spread into the house. But luckily my younger 0:18:33.240 --> 0:18:35.520 brother came home. So this was about three in the morning. 0:18:35.520 --> 0:18:37.679 We were teenagers, were going out all the time. It 0:18:37.720 --> 0:18:42.840 was a weekend, and Paul came home maybe ten or 0:18:42.880 --> 0:18:46.359 fifteen minutes after the fire was started and saw the 0:18:46.400 --> 0:18:49.680 smoke and woke up the family and they were able 0:18:49.720 --> 0:18:52.600 to put it out, But otherwise it would have been Yeah, 0:18:53.119 --> 0:18:56.399 it would have been completely I mean, my mother was 0:18:56.440 --> 0:19:00.240 in no doubt that, yeah, it was an attempted murder. 0:19:00.320 --> 0:19:03.040 There were other measures that could have been taken, but 0:19:03.200 --> 0:19:05.639 somehow that would have felt like giving in. 0:19:06.320 --> 0:19:11.119 I would often see these kind of anonymous houses in 0:19:11.240 --> 0:19:15.440 Malta covered in security cameras and alarms and things like that. 0:19:15.560 --> 0:19:18.960 But in comparison, my parents were on the sort of yeah. 0:19:19.000 --> 0:19:23.160 The philosophy was, we need to feel good in our home, 0:19:23.640 --> 0:19:26.439 you know, our home. Our home shouldn't be a prison. 0:19:27.280 --> 0:19:29.639 You know, if someone wants to kill my mother, they're gonna, 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:32.160 you know, a sort of off the shelf alarm isn't 0:19:32.160 --> 0:19:32.920 going to stop them. 0:19:33.440 --> 0:19:38.200 But for all this, Daphne's writing doesn't change. Nothing deters 0:19:38.200 --> 0:19:42.400 her from writing difficult troops, whether biting gossip or hard 0:19:42.480 --> 0:19:45.119 hitting stories about those with power and money. 0:19:45.680 --> 0:19:48.840 And by this time many of Dephanie's regarding themes had 0:19:48.880 --> 0:19:54.320 clearly emerged. One of them is what she sees as 0:19:54.400 --> 0:19:59.320 more as deep cultural divisions, our culture war, what definitely 0:19:59.320 --> 0:20:01.160 called the Maltas. 0:20:01.040 --> 0:20:05.160 Daphnie is, Molta is fatally divided into two opposing camps, 0:20:05.760 --> 0:20:09.720 a country cut in half by education, language, and politics. 0:20:10.040 --> 0:20:12.760 On one side, there are the professional classes with a 0:20:12.760 --> 0:20:15.840 preference for the English language, people who have the skills 0:20:15.840 --> 0:20:18.440 and resources to maybe work or study in Britain or 0:20:18.480 --> 0:20:22.119 elsewhere in Europe. On people with an international outlook, people 0:20:22.119 --> 0:20:24.320 who might have marched for the right of private schools 0:20:24.320 --> 0:20:27.960 to stay open back in the seventies, people like Dafnie. 0:20:28.840 --> 0:20:30.960 And on the other side of the barricades, there is 0:20:31.000 --> 0:20:34.680 the other Malta, a more blue collar, working class culture, 0:20:34.920 --> 0:20:36.800 people with less interest in the rest of the world. 0:20:36.920 --> 0:20:39.679 According to Dafnie, they might be making a lot of 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:42.199 money in today's world, and they might be buying fleshy, 0:20:42.200 --> 0:20:44.520 designer cloaths and going on short trips to Sicily in 0:20:44.560 --> 0:20:48.359 their boats, but they would be culturally hostile to Daphnie's Malta. 0:20:50.800 --> 0:20:54.080 But start off it, I'd like to say that I 0:20:54.160 --> 0:20:57.800 believe the greatest problem and moret is society is that 0:20:57.840 --> 0:21:01.840 it's a clash of two cultures, and because it's such 0:21:01.880 --> 0:21:06.520 a small population and the territory is so limited, those 0:21:06.720 --> 0:21:08.720 cultures on head on confrontation. 0:21:09.240 --> 0:21:12.040 The same interview from nineteen ninety eight, you can see 0:21:12.080 --> 0:21:13.960 she doesn't make any effort to hide her view that 0:21:14.000 --> 0:21:16.200 her side of the culture war is superior. 0:21:16.760 --> 0:21:18.760 So you have, on the one hand, you have people 0:21:18.840 --> 0:21:23.200 who are subjected to I won't call it Western democratic culture, 0:21:23.240 --> 0:21:26.800 but I suppose that's what it really is, through exposure 0:21:27.000 --> 0:21:32.880 to foreign news media, particularly magazines, newspapers and so on. 0:21:33.000 --> 0:21:38.000 So they're continuously reading and absorbing American, British, Italian, French 0:21:38.040 --> 0:21:42.280 ideas and they get used to that way of doing things. 0:21:42.760 --> 0:21:45.240 And you can also understand why some people saw heretitudes 0:21:45.280 --> 0:21:48.880 to the rest of Malta the other Molta as s petronizing, 0:21:49.280 --> 0:21:50.679 almost colonial. 0:21:51.040 --> 0:21:53.600 Then on the other hand you have the other cultural block, 0:21:53.840 --> 0:21:58.240 which Perhabs, which is raised in a culture of not 0:21:58.400 --> 0:22:01.280 reading but listening to the radio, are watching the television. 0:22:01.840 --> 0:22:04.800 Once again, it's part of the conflict of cultures. Basic 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:09.360 Multis culture fundamentally is quite primitive and quite savage, and 0:22:09.720 --> 0:22:12.880 with a total lack of concern for other people. All 0:22:12.880 --> 0:22:17.359 that counts as the family. No absolutely no civic conscience whatsoever. 0:22:17.520 --> 0:22:22.760 It's totally totally alien to Northern European culture. The nearest 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:27.239 comparison I can make is to backwater Sicilian culture. We 0:22:27.320 --> 0:22:30.840 see the same problems. 0:22:39.960 --> 0:22:44.359 It's the afternoon of Monday, sixteenth October twenty seventeen, the 0:22:44.480 --> 0:22:47.879 end of the long multie summer, two of the hitmen 0:22:48.080 --> 0:22:51.040 are back overlooking Daphnese house in Benea. 0:22:51.240 --> 0:22:54.399 As before, we've taken evidence heard in the courtroom and 0:22:54.480 --> 0:22:58.720 dramatized what happened, providing color in places without changing any 0:22:58.760 --> 0:23:01.600 of the material facts or allegations. 0:23:01.840 --> 0:23:04.080 After the plan to kill Daphanie with a sniper shot 0:23:04.240 --> 0:23:07.000 was abandoned, the killers have come up with a plan B, 0:23:08.000 --> 0:23:11.560 a new method of murder, and they know they needed 0:23:11.600 --> 0:23:12.520 to work this time. 0:23:12.640 --> 0:23:15.480 They're getting pressure from their handler to get the job finished, 0:23:16.040 --> 0:23:18.320 so over the last few weeks they've been practicing and 0:23:18.359 --> 0:23:24.480 rehearsing intensively, all the while finding off impatiently inquiries from management. 0:23:25.520 --> 0:23:29.479 And on this day, everything finally seems to be coming together. 0:23:31.720 --> 0:23:35.320 From a hideout across the shallow valley, Alfred Deban and 0:23:35.400 --> 0:23:39.399 Vincent de Kov are watching Daphne's driveway through binoculars or 0:23:39.440 --> 0:23:43.520 a telescope. They've already been here nearly eight hours since 0:23:43.560 --> 0:23:48.680