The Canley Heights Killings

Article here. Excerpt:

'Canley Heights is a suburb in Sydney’s southwest. During the first years of the millennium it threatened to become an incubator for Australia’s violent murderesses.

On 31 January 2006 the patriarchy met its match there in the form of two 14-year-old girls. Having refused to pay a taxi fare on arrival near their destination, the girls robbed and repeatedly bashed about the head their disabled driver. It was found afterwards that their victim had died of a heart attack, so perhaps the girls offered no more than a few love taps to the skull, though there was mention of “massive head injuries”. Anyway, they left him to die while they stole his mobile phone and drove off in his vehicle, which they soon crashed into a parked car. He was found lying beaten in a darkened street at about 2 a.m.'
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A couple of years afterwards police charged a 29-year-old woman in the same suburb with the murder of her two children. Screams were heard from the back of a dwelling in McKibbin Street, and a neighbour called triple-0 saying she could see a woman as she attacked a 2-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy. They were already dead from multiple stab wounds by the time their father got home from work, ten minutes later. The killer had slashed her own wrists and was taken to Liverpool Hospital where eventually she was charged at her bedside.
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Those killings had happened in early 2008. At the time it seemed that Canley Heights had also been visited by a parricide. The death in question had happened in April 2001 but details hadn’t come to light for six years. It wasn’t adjudicated till a full jury trial in 2009.

Because 70-year-old Ederino Beltrame had a history of heart troubles, his GP didn’t bother to view his body before issuing a death certificate. The policeman who was called to the house by Ederino’s daughter Daniela, aged 55, took a look at the body and found no suspicious marks or injuries. Likewise the ambulance officers who turned up. Daniela Beltrame told them that her father had been “a bit off colour” the previous evening. Then he’d woken up dead in bed that morning. The constable examined the dead man’s medicines before calling at the GP’s surgery close by. The doctor issued the certificate sight unseen. He wrote on it “cardiac failure”.
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The determined Beltrame obviously impressed the jurors. Like Farah Damji or Wendy Titelman or Norma Khouri (all discussed elsewhere), she seemed to be one of those women who grow more passionate and virtuosic in their denials, the stronger the factual evidence piles up against them. Whatever the truth, it is from legal outcomes like this — as well as those in such cases as Matthey’s and Fitchett’s and Farquharson’s — that ordinary people are able to go on clinging to the myth that all the trouble in the world derives from men, and that women and girls are gently law-abiding.'