The (Re)trials and Tribulations of Sydney's 'Balcony Killer'
Last week in Sydney, the infamous 'balcony killer' Simon Gittany lost his appeal against a conviction for the 2011 murder of Lisa Cecelia Harnum from within their luxurious 15th-floor Hyde Park apartment.
The only remaining avenue for a further appeal would be a dubious High Court challenge - something which is unlikely, given the case gives rise to no significant constitutional questions within Australian law.
For those unfamiliar with the case, Mr Gittany and Ms Harnum had been in a tumultuous relationship that began in early 2010.
She was a beautiful, vivacious ballerina who had moved to Australia from her native Canada in 2004 and had worked on and off as a stylist.
What Simon may not have known was that Lisa had suffered from an eating disorder when she was younger, and that her bulimia had recently returned.
He was a charismatic, handsome and deeply Catholic man, slightly older than the deceased, whose means of income was unclear but who was in the business of setting up a home business with an associate.
By all accounts he was charismatic, warm, effusive, handsome and affectionate.
What Lisa may not have known was that he had been convicted of violently resisting arrest, an incident in the course of which he perforated an officer's ear, and earlier had been convicted of assaulting a man who had taken him to task for verbally abusing his then girlfriend. In other offences, he'd received the proceeds of crime, in the form of ecstasy tablets, but had served no jail time - instead, serving a period detention order.
Simon and Lisa lived together in an expensive apartment complete with a sumptuous balcony which looked out at the surrounding Hyde Park: a sprawling public square in the heart of Sydney's CBD.
This apartment would become the epicenter for the tragic crime which shocked this city.
It was here that they reconvened each evening after Simon had been out with mates, loosely defined associates and in coffee shops, while Lisa would have spent the day inside the apartment, permitted to leave only for the purposes of seeking groceries to replenish the semblance of domestic harmony which filled the home. She did some casual work for a hairdresser of Simon's acquaintance at no pay, until Simon flew into a rage when she returned home with her hair done to the nines and he concluded that her workmates were a corrupting influence.
For a vivacious and by all accounts extroverted young woman, this captivity was at first disheartening. She withdrew within herself, dressing in what her Canadian mother called 'almost military' style black clothing and only ever wearing her hair back. When out in public, she was careful to keep her eyes downcast, so she could not be accused of flirting with another man.
It was also a captivity that anchored its inhabitant in very real ways. Days after bitter and acrimonious disputes, an affectionate and captivating Simon would propose to Lisa in a heartfelt soliloquy in front of all of his family and friends. Suddenly, Lisa was walking on air. The very same mother, 3000 miles away in Canada, who would within months hear a police officer knocking at her door, informing her of her worst fear, sent flowers. "I wish you were here to celebrate this with me," Lisa replied to her mother in a text. This longing for her allies, her family, would permeate their entire relationship.
But one very significant thing changed Lisa from a withdrawn, disheartened young woman to a woman determined to change her circumstances:
Someone believed her.
When Lisa started having contact with another Lisa, a Coogee-based personal trainer, Lisa Brown, who in turn referred her to a nutritionist and counsellor, Michelle Redmond, everything changed.
Instead of inhabiting a dark room whose only patches of light emanated from the presence of the very person who had shut out the light from the outside world - her lover - these two strong women shone a light on the fact that Lisa existed within a room with a very real door to freedom.
Simon had told Lisa that if she ever left him, not only would she leave without even the shirt on her back - fitting into the narrative that he painted, which dictated that everything she had originated from him - she would leave without any prospects of settling permanently in Australia.
It was Lisa and Michelle who explained that this was a compassionate place, especially towards women who had become embroiled in controlling relationships. They became her lifeline. Together, they hatched a plan to put some of Lisa's clothing in storage at Bondi Junction, creating a pathway to liberation.
Unfortunately for Lisa, her loving fiancé was tracking her text messages via an application he purchased on the internet and loaded onto her phone.
Through this means, he found out about the plan and through an offended rage, announced to Lisa that her trusted confidante had ratted on her when he ran into the nutritionist at his gym. Lisa was devastated and newly mistrustful of anyone in the outside world. He was running rings around her psychologically and cut her off from her final two lifelines in Sydney.
All that remained now was her mother, whom she spoke to in the early hours of Saturday 30th of July 2011 - her daughter's final day. They decided that Lisa had to return to Canada. She made a booking, which they crucially discussed via text message. That morning, Simon would access her text messages on the computer in the home study. He learned of the one-way booking. This led to Lisa's realisation that she had been a prisoner in her own home - her intimate text messages read, her movements watched by a pinhole camera facing the living room, and someone whose partner would not allow her to end the relationship without his permission.
What we know about what came next is only piecemeal:
Later that morning, an unassuming middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Glanville, of Unit 1503, heard screaming from their immediately adjoining unit. They heard a young woman screaming, "God help me, please help me!" and urgent knocking on their door. They did not open the door.
Then, the very camera that Simon had established inside their home caught vision of an enraged Simon, distressed by the reputational damage that such entreaties to a neighbour would cause, clamping his hand over the mouth of a terrified Lisa and physically dragging her body back into their unit.
69 seconds later, witnesses observed a young woman's body slam into the Liverpool Street pavement, milling with shoppers and holidaymakers, 15 floors below.
What happened in those 69 seconds remains the provenance of one eyewitness alone: the man accused of rendering his lover unconscious during this time and consigning her motionless body to certain death below.
CCTV footage then shows a pacing Simon summon the lift to take him down to the ground floor, before visibly realising he is shirtless, and returning into the apartment for 33 seconds. Upon his return, the lift has arrived, and he spends some seconds inside the lift, captured by a further camera, visibly remonstrating with himself and casting his hands into the air.
When the lift reaches the ground floor, he pulls himself together and dashes out into the foyer.
When he sees the team of onlookers and bypassing doctors working on the sprawled body of his fiancée, he suddenly slows to a stride as he approaches the body.
Innocently, he asks of an attending doctor, "What happened?"
Suddenly, an admission to fellow onlookers: "That's my fiancée on the ground."
One young man's presence in the vicinity of Hyde Park that day would become the lynchpin of eyewitness evidence which would secure victory for the Crown's case.
Joshua Rathmell was a young news producer at the nearby Australian Broadcasting Company at Ultimo and was on his habitual route to work, where he held down the fort on weekends, past the war memorial at Hyde Park.
His attention was drawn by a "guttural ... indistinct" scream, which seemed to be a male voice.
As he looked towards the source of the scream, he saw a shirtless man by a glass balcony holding a horizontal black object of some dimension over a meter. In an 'unloading' motion, the black object was pushed off the balcony and the man pushed away from the balustrade and back into his apartment. He appeared to be in a rage.
Initially, Joshua had thought the object a duffel bag or an item of rubbish. When he saw the proliferation of stunned and disturbed onlookers and the arrival of paramedics and doctors, he thought that he better approach the scene, given the proximity of the "rubbish unloading" to the sudden occurrence of a serious incident.
He approached two council workers.
"Was that a body?" He hated to think of the implications if the answer was to come back as a 'Yes'.
But a "yes" was exactly what he was told.
Joshua proceeded to work at the ABC, disturbed by what he had seen, and trying to piece it together. Eventually he would call the Surry Hills police station a little after noon.
It was Joshua's evidence which would be dissected into a million tiny pieces at trial and then again on appeal, just last week.
He has since moved overseas, after what could only have been an immensely pressure-filled experience involving witness protection officers and police escorts to give evidence.
Simon's legal team called a memory expert from the University of New South Wales who argued that such a fleeting glimpse from some 60 metres away in Hyde Park would be subject to a 'false memory reconstruction' phenomenon.
That proposition was dismissed in the case of the 'careful and compelling' Joshua.
The trial judge's reasoning was echoed by the Court of Criminal Appeal this week.
Having followed the case (admittedly) obsessively, three questions bubble away in my mind:
- What would have happened if Joshua Rathmell had taken a different course to work that day?
- What would have happened if Mr and Mrs Glanville had have answered the door that day?
- What would have happened if Simon hadn't thought to check the message surveillance application early that morning?
It is shocking to reflect upon the fact that we live in a world in which coincidence, afterthoughts and chance decisions can lead to a life being taken, or a conviction being avoided.
A Court is absolutely beholden to the evidence available to it. It depends upon well-placed witnesses, crime scenes remaining undisturbed, and members of the public giving their assistance to reach judicious conclusions.
In this uncertain laboratory of reconstruction, we can only be grateful that there will always be those who speak up about things that go against the grain of the ordinary course of civilian life, and hope that we will count ourselves among those who speak up and intervene when we witness the same.