How love letters became obsessive ex-boyfriend's undoing | To Catch a Stalker 2 | Australian Story

[Music] it was absolutely a chance meeting that changed dye's life his name was max gardner he came across extremely charming very much a gentleman within two months max had become extremely possessive of me i said i'm done as far as he was concerned there was no no he just kept on coming back and coming back and coming back we started receiving the letters and each letter would be describing dye as a [ __ ] quite nasty letters this is absolute [ __ ] i know nothing about it for me it was a no-brainer that it was him but to convince police of that was another thing they would release him and he'd continue on putting the flyers up again and again and again dar started to tell me about strange things that were going on tires slashed mirrors broken used condoms left on my doorstep it takes a toll so i actually did try to commit suicide but i woke up and then thought get your game face on you're here to get this guy i just didn't realise it was going to take me five years by january 2016 i've been dealing with max's attacks for nearly a year but i just didn't know how low he would go police searching for missing victorian woman karen chicouti have found a body karen chicouti was my childhood friend michael cardimony had been formally charged in the early hours of the morning with the murder of 49 year old karen chet couti dai got together with some other school friends and they organised a fundraiser to raise money for karen's children we did an interview and a photo shoot with harold son and didn't think anything more about that it was a walk from her old high school to the local hotel [Music] during the walk posters had been placed everywhere in the area on trees and poles on the flyers max had used the photo out of the herald sun saying the usual garbage you know that i cheated on my husband i abandoned my children i was just like what what is wrong with this guy why is he attacking me my friend has just been murdered and he's attacking me as well it definitely made die think about things in a bit of a different light is that the lead up to him becoming violent and him you know actually physically attacking her is it you know is this how it all starts you just don't know she was very scared that he would follow her to places where she went he just terrorized i constantly and played with her mind a system in crisis a royal commissioner recommends sweeping change for victoria's family violence safety net i used to get really annoyed with police or whoever was talking about domestic violence and all the changes women and children are more likely to be assaulted in their own homes than on the street that is simply not tolerable to me it was a crock of [ __ ] basically it seemed that stalking didn't count these flyers had now started appearing regularly and police wouldn't help me because i couldn't 100 guarantee that that was max with stalking it's not a physically violent crime usually so and people don't understand it they don't understand you're constantly living on edge a lot of my friends were getting sick and tired of hearing about what max is up to what he's doing how is he attacking but kathy my best friend stuck by me even though she herself was being attacked with the flyers she was being named and um quite clearly this would have had a disturbing effect a lot more on kathy than most people realised i guess at the time kathy would get very animated sometimes she would be screaming saying make it stop make it stop make it go away [Music] which yeah i couldn't how could i kathy was a painter a great artist actually and she was troubled in her own little way i stumbled over a post on facebook that referred to kathy and had a broken heart and i i went oh what what's going on here you know and did a little bit more looking into it and found that sadly she had suicide we just sat on kathy's stoop we didn't go inside we didn't know what to do just [Music] naturally dye was absolutely devastated as every everybody was really and then more letters started coming in so max obviously knew that kathy had died and probably knew the circumstances of her death [Music] these notes started to be really quite cruel blaming dye for for the suicide of cathy and talking about blood on the hands and stuff like this it was actually horrible horrible to read the dress was printed on a typed label and stuck with sticky tape and there was always fibres like from a glove or from a a jumper or something stuck under the the sticky tape they're all anonymous but um it became obvious that they're all by the same person and that person was actually max i went down to the cinco de police station and said listen you know you've got to do something about this this guy is a fruitcake and he's you know he's really doing some damage to this woman does the name kathy mayney mean anything to you at all so again at the um wine ladder and our wood food and wine there's a couple of posters old piece of paper yeah let me see what can you tell me about that fast forward to 2018 and after we'd been in court one day max went to big w looking for my youngest daughter as that was her work place he was in there for quite some time asking people where she was you've got no idea the terror i felt and i was absolutely hysterical i rang ed o'donoghue he was the shadow police minister at that time he said leave it with me die we will we will take care of this we will get you help i've worked with many victims of crime over the last decade or more as a member of parliament and dia clearly was compelling she was truthful she was afraid i wrote to the police minister that i thought she was in potential danger and to the police minister's credit she that was passed to the chief commissioner almost immediately and that then initiated contact from victoria police to assist die all of dye's reports had been made to different areas with different investigators so once it came to my office it was able to be pulled pulled together [Music] detective senior sergeant tony gallagher was running one of the 21 family violence investigation units that had been implemented across the state as a result of the royal commission and i was really keen to be part of that i had been in the police force maybe eight years but i had only been a detective two ish years so there was people much more senior to me i asked for rebecca norris she'd shown a lot of tenacity a lot of patience a lot of victim-centric policing once she started to investigate max gardner she was absolutely certain he'd committed all the offences and she did not want him to get away with it suddenly they're taking it seriously [Music] finally i thought i've got a detective assigned to me now she she changed my life [Music] looking at max's history i was able to work out that there was about five other women that had been victim to the same sort of behaviour as die over three decades so obviously it's corroboration that this is what his mo is this is what he does and it's been gone for a very long time however none of the other women wanted to become part of an investigation i think sometimes it's easier to let the lack of a better term sleeping dogs lie [Music] i was hoping to have back up you know with both of us going to the court about the same person with the same kinds of incidences happening to both of us so you know yeah i was on my own die was very tired she was exhausted i was on the back foot already because of her perception of police so i had my work cut out for me to build a relationship with her and it's a long process these sorts of investigations and she needed to trust me that when i said i'm working on it you know that i meant it i gave back footage one lot hanging brunswick which the person was not wearing a balaclava and the second lot was at the elwood bar where he was wearing balaclava it wasn't his straightforward case he had hidden his identity intentionally so he could continue with his offending the one thing that we could use were the posters that were written anonymously and i was able to compare them to the love letters that max had given to dye throughout the years and i could see similarities there myself but we weren't able to get fingerprints from the letters and dna to confirm identity he would use postage paid stamps so you wouldn't have to lick a stamp there was sticky tape on the back of the envelopes for the same purpose and you would be able to see the glove fibers in that sticky tape he would use different businesses to go and use computers and print from there so it was very well thought out and pre-planned not just his identity in terms of his face and his fingerprints or his dna it was to the extent of i don't even have a computer it can't have been me i would be lying if i said there were times where i wasn't a little bit worried about what i was going to do to solve this one but i got lucky in august of 2018 we executed a search warrant at max's address and i remember standing there and sort of looking to my right and there was like a plastic shopping bag oh what's in that and i've opened it and i just thought you are kidding and it was some sticky tape and a print out where one of the images had been cut out and used in the posters and the balaclava black balaclava and black woolen gloves ready to go in the shopping bag not hidden just sitting there and it was a good moment for us i think but without a confession from max the detective wasn't sure that they had enough to get a conviction so they had to think outside the box and look for something else i recall ringing die she's like what's going on back and i'm like i've got some news but you can't tell anyone we've come across this avenue of inquiry that we're going to try i don't know if it will get approved i'm going to do everything i can it's called linguistic analysis and i think doll was the same as me going what is that she said do you have netflix yeah um why so it was really bizarre question she said i want you to watch a show called manhunt unabomber i want you to think about the mail for a minute manhunt unibomb is a story about james fitzgerald the ex-fbi agent who solved a case that had terrorised america in the very worst cases he is the guy that caught the unabomber using linguistics for 17 years the man code named the una bomber has terrorized america's business and industrial community with a series of letter bombs that have killed three people and maimed 23 others here i am just graduated profiling school in june of 95 and the unabomb task force called up our unit and said we'd like to bring a profiler out to san francisco to help on this 17-year long case three months ago he vowed to end the attacks if either the washington post or the new york times published his manifesto in full so i had the brand new manifesto 56 pages 35 000 words and 13 other letters he wrote to victims and the new york times and in the left-hand column of one of these letters i noticed the message first letter of each paragraph dad it is i it's actually called an acrostic it's a literary technique a secret message no one had ever seen this before in 10 years maybe this guy has a father issue or a dad issue or doesn't like his dad or whatever this could be a clue and within nine months we had it solved and that was the first time language analysis was used in a criminal case the department of justice has just accept accepted a plea of guilty for life in prison without the possibility of parole from theodore kaczynski the unabomber's career is over [Music] i'm in cape may county new jersey and detective senior constable beck norris contacted me by email and said jim can you help us with this case of a stalker so i said well i'll look at your documents your communications and i'll let you know what i can see i was really quite excited once i realized who james r fitzgerald was it was such an amazing moment and and to have someone of his caliber james's caliber working on my case but it hadn't really been done in australia that i knew of let alone victoria there was no case law so it was all very new territory for all of us what she was sending to jim was the love letters that max originally gave me the flyers that he put up and also court documents that he had submitted to say did one person create all of these over a year on and blood is still and always will be on d mcdonald's hand let's all pray and hope he had some problems with possessives and plurals in terms of whether it's apostrophe s and that they haven't been influenced by their mother's filthy promiscuous ways what most striking to me was the odd usage of one sentence paragraphs just a dirty chi pour as all the community knows most of which were indented at the same time but not in any real steady pattern and i found that same sort of non-pattern pattern in the writings of gardner and all these features started adding up [Music] i remember coming in on the monday and the first email i had was from james fitzgerald with his report and i opened it and i scrolled straight to the bottom and i thought i'll read the content in a minute i just want to know the result and i remember seeing exceptionally distinctive and that there was a remote of possibilities that it could be anyone else and it was just relief [Music] the posters that max had written were definitely his undoing [Applause] in april 2019 we arrested him and i was really hopeful that he would comment and that he would give me his his version of events and that maybe he'd give me a reason for doing what he's done but he didn't he made a no-comment interview this is a recorded interview between detective senior constable norris and maxwell gardner max was charged with the number of offences including stalking between 2015 and 2018. he was charged with offences of breaching intervention order you're going to be charged you don't have to say or do anything unless you wish to do so but whatever you say will do may be recorded and given in evidence do you understand this yes yes there was also a charge of intentionally caused serious injury and recklessly caused serious injury that we laid and that was in relation to dye being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and the psych report spoke about the impact of max and his offending has had on die and that it's caused her to suffer from ptsd you wish to say anything else in answer to the charge no interview concluded at 11 38. yeah yeah 28 charges for max it was amazing i was like oh my god let's crack this champagne open we've got him but um as if having to deal with all the things that max did to her wasn't enough you then have to go to court countless countless countless times it was horrific and of course you know max denies denies deniers and he would find any excuse to adjourn adjourn adjourn he'll be walking out of here by five o'clock tonight i'm not safe i'm not safe but max and his defense would have had the brief of evidence and they would have had jim's report and it all laid out very clear how many letters were sent and how we compared it and all roads were leading to him just as that happened it all changed as it does and max had decided to plead guilty to one count of stalking only one out of the whole 28. i fought to have the recklessly causing serious injury charge still left in there because i have ptsd i have depression i have anxiety i never had these things before so he needs to be held accountable for my mental ill health that's what he's done to me you can't see it but it's there and the prosecutor ultimately said no it won't get through the courts in the end there was three charges of stalking breach intervention order and breach of bail the breaches of intervention order was the one charge but it encompassed every breach so although there was only one charge it was between dates and the same as the stalking it was explained to die that the stalking did in fact encompass the injury and the harm and that the charge was duplicitous [Music] [Music] so on the 2nd of june we're in county court and we now have a judge not a magistrate detective norris emailed me late last night saying well this is the last time i'll be seeing you in court like that's a hopeful message but also sad why is it sad it's been a long journey yeah she's beck's just my savior to make this nightmare go away the maximum penalty for stalking is 10 years imprisonment in relation to max i know die felt that she lost five years of her life to max and that he should therefore possibly be sentenced to five years imprisonment to compensate for that he was pretty cocky when he was walking in i think he thought he was going to get away with this again and once he realized that things were turning south for him he started shaking i could see his legs shaking and and bex just kind of looked at me and and whispered yeah he's gone down he's going down garden was ultimately sentenced to eight months in jail and two years with a community corrections order upon his release i think for repeat offenders in particular recidivist offenders there is a strong case to look afresh at the penalties and whether they should be increased we got him into jail it's not what we wanted but he's still in jail it's such a relief that finally finally people are listening i'm not looking forward to his release date so i will be on high alert when that happens i am expecting the worst but i'm also prepared for the west dyer's file definitely got under my skin i'm proud of it i'm proud of her and i hope that she reaches people that have been victims of of stalking maybe in the same way as die and show them that they can get a result and they don't have to live like that and they can be free because she's a great example of that she put up with so much for so long and she was resilient and now is her time to live the rest of her life without that fear [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 336,424

Keywords: abc news, australian news, abc news indepth, documentaries, long-form journalism, Australian Story, Di McDonald, Max Gardiner, stalker, Melbourne stalker, stalker australia, dirty john, dating nightmare, dating stories, Beck Norris, James R Fitzgerald, Unabomber linguistic analysis, forensics language analysis, unabomber

Id: viFDCdkAyms

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021