Hi, it’s Kelly. Sorry I missed your call. Um, just leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks. Her message was an eerie voice from the grave. I would have done anything to keep her alive, keep her from leaving the house that night.
And finding the young woman’s mobile was key to solving her murder. Kelly’s phone’s out there.
Who’s got it? Tonight, the tragic tale of 26-year-old Kelly Hoch, a young woman who grew up without a mother.
My sister, she was exquisitively sensitive emotionally and very physically, too. And was brutally killed and dumped on the side of a road like garbage.
The things that have happened, nobody deserves that. A sex crime that had countless suspects and many dead ends.
So you go from the peaks to the troughs. With her killer free to strike again, it was pretty scary on the streets at that time.
The detectives chased one phone call after another. It’s our job to find the culprit and give the family answers.
I was at the casino and I was there with this other guy and you and we met Kelly.
Police emergency. Uh, hi. Yeah, I I think I found a body. Can you get the police here?
I’m on Sydney Road. August 26th, 2003. A motorist heading home made a grim discovery.
He’s come across what he thought was a package of some sort on the side of the road.
He believes it to be a body. It’s wrapped up in some type of material.
And with that, he rang the police. So, you’re saying it’s a red blanket. Is that right?
Yeah. Look, I I haven’t gone right up to it. As I say, at first I thought it was a bundle of clothes, but I think I saw some hands.
I think there might be a body in it. The body was found in the rural town of Beverage, 42 kilometers north of Melbourne.
At this stage, we don’t know what we’ve got. We haven’t even seen the body because the body is wrapped up in a blanket and outside the blanket is rope that’s keeping it all together.
We’ve already spoken to the pathologist. We’re not going to wait till the morning. We’ll get the postmortem done then and there.
Because one of the major issues for a detective is, has a crime been committed?
When the body was brought here, the body was weighed weighed only 50 kg and we noted, of course, that the body had been wrapped with [music] rope.
There were a large number of blunt force injuries to the head. In addition [music] to injuries over the head like that, we found areas of bruising, grazes, tears, lacerations in the skin.
They involve [music] the face, the arms. Really, a large area of the body was injured.
And the first thing we’ve got to do is try to work out who is this person.
And what we did in this case was check the fingerprints to see if this person was in the police fingerprint system.
And as it turned out, she was known to the police. Kelly Elizabeth Hodgej, 26 years of age, of a Kberg address.
Police now had the horrible task of letting her sister Stacy know Kelly [music] had been murdered.
It was about 5:00 in the morning and I hear this banging on the front door and I thought it was one of my obnoxious friends [music] from uni.
And I’m like who is it? And they said police. And then they say, “It’s about Kelly.”
And I [music] said, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” And they said, “Yes.” I said, “I have a drug overdose.”
And they said no. And um she’s been murdered. I couldn’t believe it. I knew she was dead.
I kind of could feel it before that, but um I never thought she she would have been murdered.
Kelly Elizabeth [music] Hodgej was born in 1977, the only and adored sibling of older sister Stacy.
My sister’s [music] the only person I know who could pick up a snail, pat it, and say, “Aren’t you beautiful?”
She loved animals, and animals seem to respond to her. She was very delicate child, exquisitively sensitive, and [music] emotionally and very physically, too.
She had almost white hair with these big blue eyes, and she just looked adorable.
The two girls lost their mother when she died of pneumonia [music] when they were only five and six years old.
My mom [music] was not in the best of health and um she has passed away and my grandmother has organized for us to be placed [music] in her care.
The girls were well looked after. She indulged us shamelessly and were given tips [music] from a young age as to boyfriend material.
If Michael Jackson came on TV, she’d say, “This [music] is the kind of man you girls should marry when you’re older because he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he can sing, and [music] he can dance.”
So for her, that’s, you know, so instead, Kelly fell hopelessly in love with a man who hooked her on drugs and then pimped her on the streets of St Kilda to feed his own habit.
And that’s where she went on the night of August 18th. It was the last time her grandmother had seen her and eight days before her body was found.
My grandmother called me and said that Kelly was not home and had not been home.
And I thought immediately that was very out of character. Now after about a day, I was so cross with Kelly, I start ringing Kelly.
Hi, it’s Kelly. Sorry I missed your call. Um, just leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks. I start leaving a series of really angry and I phone calls telling her that she needs to call home that we’re worried that she’s worrying our grandmother that I won’t forgive her.
While Stacy [music] wanted to call the police, her grandmother didn’t. My grandmother was, “No, no, no.
She’ll be so angry if she’s not really missing.” And by that stage, I thought, “There has to be a problem.”
So, I said, “Look, I’m going to go [music] to St. Kilda and look for her body because there’s no [music] way she wouldn’t have come home a week.”
I went to bed and then that’s when the police have come to my home to let me know that they found her.
Over a week had passed since Kelly disappeared and her body being found and the police were now under the pump.
Experience has taught us about the magic 24-hour window. If you’re going to solve it, um that’s the period you’re going to solve it in.
But we were 8 days behind it. We’d already started behind the plane. Evidence gets destroyed.
The weather might have a play in it. Witnesses aren’t recalling things as they would when we make the immediate appeal.
Did someone see this person uh eight days ago? Well, hard for people to reflect back as opposed to did you see this person yesterday?
So, we were behind the eightball. Thanks for coming, ladies and gentlemen. The lady has been identified as Kelly Elizabeth Hodgej.
The purpose of today is to try and get as much information as we can in relation to her movements.
She would have made her way to the area of Grey Street and Gerna Streets in Gilda.
This was the patch where Kelly began selling sex for a living 3 years before.
I used to do uh street outreach [music] on a Tuesday night and I always used to see Kelly standing there.
She was sort of bit of a lone figure really. She was supporting pretty expensive habit and she’d do the work she needed to do and then returned to Coberg to her grandmother.
I think that’s where she retreated to and felt safe and and clearly very loved.
We want a picture of her working environment. Did anyone see her at the time?
Did she anything untoward? Has she been abducted by someone? Did she get in a car that she knew?
These were all the questions we needed to get answers for. Where Kelly stood was pretty quiet.
There’s a bit of lighting there and you’ve got the street corner on the other side.
But if no one was working that other corner, Kelly would have been quite an isolated figure.
So we start doing a door knock. Some of the reactions we got was, “Why are you worried about it?
She was just a sex worker.” And that was an unfortunate reaction to get from some people.
I think they see girls who work on the street is very separate to the girl walking to the office block or you know to the shop to work on the checkout whatever they’re not.
[snorts] Some of the reactions was I’m not [music] surprised or I knew her. She was living at uh grandmother’s place in Coberg North.
It was very reassuring when [music] we met Charlie Bazina. He reassured us that they would work around the clock to find who has done this and that they would investigate it the way they would any other murder.
We don’t care the status of a person. We’ve lost a life. It’s our job to find the culprit and give the family answers.
And that’s what it’s all about. The family need answers. Charlie, why was my granddaughter murdered?
And we hopefully bring someone to justice and get them off the streets before they kill again.
Police emergency. Hi. Yeah, I think I found a body. Can you get the police here?
26-year-old Kelly Hodgej had been murdered. Her naked and brutally bashed body callously discarded by the roadside and her family were desperate to catch the evil killer who cut her life short.
Appealing as a father, as an uncle. I’m appealing to everybody out there that have ch children if they know something to please come forward because nobody [snorts] deserves to go that the things that have happened.
Nobody deserves that. When Kelly was found, her clothes, phone, and treasured denim bag were nowhere to be found, and police hoped someone may have seen them since.
The morning she was murdered, Kelly was carrying a blue denim bag. Actually, that bag had initially belonged to me, and she was using it to write number plates down.
When she was doing these transactions, my crocheted [music] blanket that my mother had knitted with Kelly, she would keep it in the bag and use it as something [music] to sit down on or keep warm with and as a security blanket as well.
Kelly also never went anywhere without her mobile. It was her work and lifeline. Hi, it’s Kelly.
Sorry, Mr. Cole. Um leave your name and [music] number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks. Knowing that uh she had a phone that was significant to us. We needed to track that phone down.
Not having it physically is a problem for us, but we can go to what we call call charge records and we were able to track down a phone call about midnight.
And as it turned out, it was one of our regular clients. That client [music] spent 45 minutes with Kelly and then left.
He was certain a person of good repute, no issues with him, and we’re more than confident that he wasn’t involved with Kelly’s death.
So, police knew she was alive [music] at 12:45 a.m., but after that, they were at a loss as to where she went, who killed her and dumped her body 40 kilometers away from where she had last been seen.
If the people are watching this or whoever done this, we have faith in the police [snorts] and you’ll be looking over your shoulder all the time and it won’t be long before the police apprehend you.
On the streets, Kelly’s fellow sex workers were hoping that was true. It was pretty scary on the streets at that time and pretty distressing for the ladies.
Some of them left that, you know, they just couldn’t [snorts] cope with it. Their fears were that if he wasn’t caught, could they be next?
But then a call from a psychologist gave the investigation the breakthrough it needed. Uh, look, I might have some information uh that could help about this sex worker that was killed.
He was quite hesitant to speak to us on the phone because I think he was grappling with the the doctor client privilege type of thing.
He told us that he’d been treating a client and this male person made certain comments to him that the psychologist married up to the media reports of of having found a sex worker murdered.
I had a client uh come in who disclosed that he done a bad thing to a sex worker.
I think he placed himself in a situation, could I be treating the killer of Kelly Hodgej?
It must have gone through his mind enough for him to pick up that phone and call us.
I hope it helps your investigation. And I think the conscience was if I don’t say anything and this is the offender I’m treating and this is the person that may kill again, can I live with myself?
And I think he took the appropriate action, gave us a call and gave us his person’s particulars.
It was a bit of a eureka moment for us as investigators. I think we might have our guy.
Armed with a warrant, the detectives headed out to search the premises of the psychologist’s client.
The man in his 20s lived in a caravan at [music] the back of his mother’s house.
Going into this caravan, you know, you’re bewildered by what you see as an investigator.
There was numerous cutings out of pornographic material. There was handbags there. In one bag, there was an identification badge of a receptionist from a brothel.
The adrenaline starts pumping up and you just saying, “Right, we really got our guy here.
I think let’s move on with it.” And then we start the investigation going back to identifying this [music] receptionist in a brothel.
She’d been assaulted and you start building up confidence. Are we on the right track?
Do we have our man? But police also had another suspect under their magnifying glass.
The ex-boyfriend who had put Kelly on the streets. They asked me if I knew of anyone who may have a vendetta or a reason to harm Kelly [music] and I did nominate a couple of people.
One was an ex-boyfriend who Kelly had testified [music] against and he was serving time for murder.
The fact that she was implicit in giving evidence against him was something quite significant.
So he becomes a particular suspect and you might say to yourself, “Well, hang on a minute.
How can he be a suspect if he’s in custody, which he was, but that doesn’t mean the fact that he could have got someone else to commit the murder on Kelly Hodgej?
When Kelly Hodgej was growing up, her sister would defend her in the schoolyard. My sister was being bullied and she was huddled in a corner crying [snorts] and I told the bullies off, but she couldn’t protect her from the sadistic monster who killed her younger sister.
Police had two suspects. Kelly’s ex-boyfriend already serving time for murder who may have put a hit on her and the guy who lived in the caravan who’d been identified by the call from a psychologist.
I had a client uh come in who disclosed that he’ done a bad thing to a sex worker.
Having exited [music] the warrant going into this guy’s caravan, he start talking to them.
He readily makes admissions. His fantasy was to [music] assault and rape a policeman. Take it what you will, whether just off the cuff comment, but you know this person’s got a problem.
So, he is a firm suspect. But as the investigation progressed, we find out that he’s got an alibi.
That’s a good alibi. He couldn’t have been our guy. He fitted the profile beautifully, but at the end of the day, what you led, you’ve got to prove.
So you go from the peaks to the troughs and we discard that person from the investigation.
But that doesn’t put you off the scent. You keep going. You’re driven even more.
On the streets of Melbourne’s red light district, sex workers were scared. Have they caught him yet?
That was a daily thing the ladies would say. They were fearful because we had nothing to give them or tell them.
So all we could really say to the ladies was, “Look, just proceed with caution.”
They needed to because when detectives looked at the calls in and out of the jail where [music] Kelly’s ex-boyfriend was imprisoned, there was nothing sinister to suggest he had put a hit on her.
It was another dead end. But you don’t let the frustrations take over your efforts.
We know the killer’s still out there and we keep moving on. The detective [music] seemed to be getting a lot of leads quite early on.
A lot of them unfortunately turned out to be red herrings, but they were always very good about letting us know where they were at, even if [music] there wasn’t anything new.
Just to reassure us that we’re not forgotten and that they are still working very hard.
It was now a month since Kelly [music] had been murdered and longer since Stacy had last spoken directly with her sister.
The last time [music] I spoke to Kelly, we had a massive fight and I told her I hated her.
Told her to go hang herself. Called her a junkie. I shouldn’t have done it and I was totally in the wrong and I hope my sister knows [music] how sorry I am and how sorry I’ve been every day since Kelly’s fellow sex workers were also hurting.
It’s important to grieve. A lot of the ladies of course were upset. I wanted to give them something of Kelly.
And there were a lot of tears that night. We all walked up to the the corner of Gray and Gera and we [music] all had candles and this was in the very spot that that Kelly used to work.
It was absolutely the atmosphere was was palpable. I can’t think that one [music] person there couldn’t remember Kelly standing there and weren’t visualizing it.
I would have done anything to keep her alive. I probably would have run her over and broken both her legs to keep her alive, keep her from leaving the house that night.
Then a new [music] suspect. Kelly had sold her car to pay for her drug debts to 34year-old Justin Degruchi, whose name rang alarm bells.
This particular fellow was a suspect in the assault of another sex worker. But unfortunately, the rape squad didn’t have a [music] statement from the victim.
They were very scared and so the squad were hampered in races to take the matter any further.
The kidnap and assault happened 2 months before Kelly’s murder. The chatter around the streets was very much getting louder and louder about this individual.
[music] And I think the girls were starting to really think that the person that had committed this really serious assault could potentially be the one that murdered Kelly.
We then executed a search warrant and we found clothing, shoes, and a handbag similar to Kelly’s.
And we see [music] he’s got some significant rings on his fingers. And we reflect back to the postmortem.
When we examined the body, there was clearly evidence of a very large number of injuries to the head.
And some of these injuries had some rather unusual appearances. So there were literally areas of the skin that had been punched out almost as if they had been cut out by a sharp object.
A peculiarity which is not usually seen [music] in weapons that we would commonly come across in our practice.
We picture those injuries and we’ve got them in our head of what they look like.
We then look at these rings that this guy’s got on. And you know what?
We come to a conclusion these rings could have caused a particular injury. The concave injuries in the face of Kelly Hodgej.
Again, our euphoria is growing. And as the search goes on, we find blood at his particular house.
Then Degruchi surprised the detectives and put up his hands for the assault on the sex worker two months prior to Kelly’s murder.
I’m not involved. I’m no murderer. I’m no killer. Charge me with this assault, but I’m I’m not part of the murder.
But the detectives weren’t prepared to take his word for it. So, while [music] he was reminded in custody for the assault, they waited for results on the blood in his house to see if it was Kelly’s.
We weren’t convinced. Let’s see what the [music] science tells us. Kelly Hodgej had been savagely beaten to death.
When her naked body was found, [music] her bag and mobile phone were missing. Then, out of the blue, the detectives received [music] one of the most important calls in the investigation from Kelly’s phone company.
Her missing phone had become active again. Major breakthrough for us. Kelly’s phone has just been turned on.
It’s lit up. Kelly’s phone’s out there. Who’s got it? Police traced the signal to a young man.
We track this guy down and we speak to him. We go to his door.
We’re investigating the murder of a sex worker called Kelly Hodgej. Do you know this person?
No, I don’t. Do you have a mobile phone? Yes, I do. He produces a phone.
How long have you had this phone? Oh, I bought it off a guy. Who was this guy?
Fell called Jackamoff. So, who’s this Jackimov fellow? Detectives tracked down Jakamov’s address and checked his police record.
He’s got no criminal history. We learned that he’s a brick layer. We know he lives in the West Matters address, which is not far from where Kelly Hodger’s body was found.
Appears to be a legitimate person living in a normal suburban area. Another lead we’ve got to tidy up and account for this person cuz he’s a link.
When police went to Nova Jakamov’s house, there was no answer. So they left a calling card and not long after the 34 year old.
I think you’re looking for me because you’ve been to my house, I’m told. I was at the casino and I was there with this other guy and you and we met Kelly.
So he basically gives us the story that the three of them go back to his home in West Meadows.
They had consensual sex with Kelly. Kelly then left with this friend of his. And lo and behold, when they leave, he discovers that she’s left her phone behind.
And I sold it. I didn’t need a phone. I don’t know what happened to Kelly.
Nothing to do with me. She left with this guy, mate. That’s the guy you got to be talking to, not me.
Detectives now had three suspects. Jackimoff, the man they had just spoken to, the friend he claimed left his house with Kelly, and Degruchi, the man with the rings, currently in custody for assault, who told detectives he [music] didn’t kill Kelly.
This guy with the rings and the clothing and the blood ticked all the boxes.
But when the results came back on the blood in Duchi’s house, it wasn’t [music] what they expected.
It’s not Kelly Hodgers’s DNA. It is not Kelly Hodger’s blood. Justin Degruchi was ruled out of the murder of Kelly Hodgej, but he was found guilty of the [music] assault and kidnap of the sex worker and sentenced to 9 and 1/2 years imprisonment.
The ladies uh were very relieved when he was taken off the street, but at the end of the day, we’d still lost Kelly.
Kelly had been murdered. The person that had committed this crime was still out there.
The Victorian police had now been chasing the murderer of Kelly [music] Hodgej for 2 months.
For Stacy and the family, it was tough. The wait for them to find the [music] person responsible is excruciating.
You think they’re never going to find them. And in my more wacky moments, I came a little paranoid and I would see someone out in the streets and think maybe it was you.
Detectives still had two strong leads thanks to Kelly’s [music] reactivated phone. And they had now tracked down the man Jackimoff claimed had left his house with Kelly the night she was murdered.
And on finding him, the reaction we get was overwhelming. Absolute crap. That didn’t happen.
I wasn’t at the casino. I wasn’t with a girl called Kelly Hodgej. I wasn’t with Jackimoff.
So, we need to go back to Jackimoff and say, “Sunny, I don’t think you were quite honest with us.”
Jackimoff was now their prime suspect. A search warrant was obtained on his rented house, but again, he wasn’t home.
So, as they waited for the real estate agent to let them in, the detectives went door knocking and spoke with the next door neighbor.
They said we heard a distressed female screaming, thumps going on like someone was being assaulted and they put it down to a domestic dispute.
That’s why they didn’t report it as such. Eventually went away and they thought nothing more of it.
Agent arrived, lets us in. House is vacant. Not a stick of furniture in there.
We start walking through the place and we start seeing repairs to the plaster wall particularly in the hallway about the size of a football basically not painted just repaired.
Said you know what that may have been Kelly’s head going through that wall. Examination of the head revealed that there was a fracture at the back of the skull.
Now, that’s something that can certainly occur where a person falls over and strikes their head.
However, the multiplicity of the injuries across the body let us know that this is not an accidental injury pattern.
This is an inflicted injury pattern is the sort of injury pattern [music] that you see in an assault.
And when the forensic team was brought in and they used their lumininal, the empty house became a scene of horrors.
We may not see blood, but this test reacts with blood or where blood has been.
So in the darkness, our scientists go through, start spraying the luminol, particularly in the hallway.
Why is that’s where our damage was and this luminal is iridescent and it lit the whole hallway up basically.
We actually found a handprint on the wall and a footprint on the floor. Our adrenaline starts pumping.
That might have been Kelly’s handprint on that wall, her footprint on that floor, but we needed confirmation through DNA.
That was going to be the clincher. But in the meantime, we want to speak the jackimoff.
Where is Jackimov? When Kelly Hodger’s phone was reactivated, it was a major breakthrough in the investigation of her murder.
It was a lead. It gained momentum. It led us to Jackimoff. Except that Novaka Jackimoff was nowhere to be found.
[music] The detective called me and mentioned that they’d spoken to someone who admitted to having been with my sister the night before she died.
And then when they’ve gone to reinter him, he’s gone. And I guess at that moment I knew I suppose they knew too they’ve got their guy.
They’ve got the person responsible. But he’s um done a runner. Jackimoff had up and left.
But while his house was empty, it was filled with vital [music] evidence. Things started to fit.
The crime scene started to fit based on what we found at the autopsy. Based on what we’ve found now at the Jackamoff house, what we needed to doubly confirm for us is Kelly’s blood or DNA in Jackimoff’s house.
But in the meantime, we want to know where this Jackamoff [music] is. I wondered how they would find him, but the detectives [music] almost immediately put an item in Crimestoppers in the Herald Sun.
So, we g the media. It’s prompted someone in the community that all crimes stoppers.
I am just ringing up about that bloke you’re looking for. Um, I’ve seen him.
He’s using a different name. I saw him the other day. He’s working in a pizza shop.
And this call comes and identifies that a person fitting Jackamov’s description is working in a pizza shop at Lawn.
Lawn is a seaside town 142 kilometers southwest of Melbourne and a 2-hour drive from Jakamob’s rented house of horrors in West Meadows.
We notify the local police who go down there to assess is this the right person.
And once the police go to the pizza shop, they [music] speak to this person whose description fits Jackimoff.
And it is Jackimoff. He’s working under a false name and living out of his motorc car.
So we instruct the local police to take them into custody and they bring him up to Melbourne with his motorc car.
We start the interview with him and he maintains the same in relation to what he told us earlier.
I was at the casino with Kelly Hodgej with this male and he maintains that throughout.
The Victorian detectives were convinced Jackoff was lying but could not yet charge him. They needed that crucial bit of evidence and [music] they found it in his car.
As part and parcel of investigating him, we then go through his ute, we find paperwork in his car and there’s paperwork [music] there that he’s applying for looks like a false passport.
Maybe an indication of flight, indication of guilt. Can we also find some paperwork of a storage unit in Bellerat?
About the same time that he would have left the West Meadows address, about the same time of Kelly’s murder.
Interestingly, Berat was in a completely different direction from Lawn and the rented house in West Meadows.
So, it looked as though Jackimoff was purposely scattering evidence. So we go up to Bellerat.
We open up the storage unit. We find furniture there. In doing our search, we can visually see blood on the sofa.
Is this Kelly’s blood? Whilst we don’t have the DNA back, is that enough for us to charge him?
We are acting upon reasonable grounds. Is now risk power. We’ve got the scene. We’ve got the neighbors.
We’ve got the luminal check. There’s a judgment call. And we make that call and we charge him with the murder.
We were confident enough to know we had the right man. Confident enough to go to Kelly’s grandmother, to go to her sister.
And give the good news. He promised us that they would work really [music] hard.
He promised us that they would find a person, and he kept every promise he made to us that day.
And we’ve [music] said it, but I’d like to say it again. Thank you to the detectives.
And I happened to be at the local pub, and I shouted, “Jugs [music] of beer for everyone.
But the joy was short-lived. He pleaded not guilty and was going to fight it.
And he can maintain whatever story he likes. He maintains that story throughout right up to his trial.
Every piece of information you get in an investigation, you never know where it will lead you.
We got a breakthrough through a phone call from Crimestoppers. Hello. Just ringing up about that bloke you’re looking for.
Um, I’ve seen him. He’s in he’s in lawn. 34year-old Novak Jakamov thought he’d escaped the clutches of the law until a member of the public called the police with the critical tip they needed.
Now arrested and charged with Kelly’s murder, the detectives awaited the results of forensic testing from the house and the storage shed.
And the DNA comes back from the house. The DNA is Kelly’s irrefutable. And then blood comes back from the couch that was in a storage unit that was linked back to the ticket that was in Jammoff’s car in his name.
That blood comes back as Kelly’s. Job done. It looked like a straightforward case. While Jackimoff claimed he was completely innocent of the murder, the evidence stacked up against him.
We do not want to give the jury any room to move and prove it beyond reasonable doubt.
If we do anything less, the jury can come back with either hung jury or an acquitt.
And that was what Jakamov’s defense team were hoping for. And surprisingly enough, at the trial, he went into the witness box, opened himself up to cross-examination, and then he claimed self-defense.
He was a very burly brick layer. My sister [music] weighed 50 kilos ringing wet.
It just didn’t hold water. Here we have a brick layer, upper strength, arms, wrists, hands, some 78 kilos, and you compare that with probably a less than 50 kilo female.
But by giving his version of events, it answered one of the questions posed by the police and pathologist.
Whilst we never found any weapons in the house, we learned about an umbrella being used by Jackimoff.
Jackimoff claimed he used the umbrella to protect himself and struck her with it when Kelly attacked him over wanting drugs.
The unusual punched out [music] lesions on the skin of the head had a peculiarity as if a small tiny cake cutter had literally punched out a piece of skin.
So when we later found out that it was a broken umbrella that caused these injuries, we were able to go back and look at them in the context of what sort of damage the body is caused by a broken metal object with that sort of circular irregular edge.
The jury listened to [music] Jakamov’s version of events and came back with their decision.
Jury didn’t believe it. Convicted and sentenced. [music] Jackimoff was found guilty of Kelly’s murder and sentenced to a maximum of 19 years.
He is eligible for parole next year. I don’t think the [music] sentence was anywhere near sufficient.
As far as I’m concerned, that man should never ever see daylight again. At the time, I viewed the sentence through the eyes of a law student as well as the [music] sister of someone who’s been murdered.
As a law student, I thought that it was a very good outcome. It was a reasonably lengthy sentence for what he has done.
However, [music] as the sister of someone who was hurt like that, it’s not enough.
Jackie Roth killed Kelly and he didn’t just kill her in her last moments. [music] He set out to degrade her.
To discard someone, a human life on the side of the road is incomprehensible [music] to me.
After she’s died, you know, I mean, her on the side of the road like she’s garbage.
And maybe she was garbage. She can be she wasn’t garbage to us. My sister, you know, like everyone [music] just wanted to matter.
In our worst nightmares, we never imagine our loved ones being murdered. We imagine [music] perhaps they get sick or something happens and there’s an accident, but you never imagine that your loved ones last moments.
I like that. I’ve struggled to articulate this. I think when I die, I want to be surrounded by kind faces.
When my sister [music] died, the only face she saw was the face of her murderer.
How alone she must have felt. How angry [snorts] he must have looked.
