Kim Meredith's killing in 1996 devastated her family and deeply shocked the Border community. Twenty years later, her family opens up about how they have coped with the death of their beloved daughter. They and a detective involved in the case spoke to Nigel McNay, who two decades ago reported extensively on Kim's tragic loss
The music didnt belong to him, or his wife, or his son.
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It was with her. From the moment he arrived home, an electronic keyboard tucked under his arm. Back from an overseas business trip with a treat for their beautiful daughter.
Kim was seven.
When they moved to Albury in 1989, their Kimmie joined the choir at The Scots School. She filled her life with music, with a large circle of friends that grew and who stayed loyal and true when she swapped schools.
They loved her so, for her laughter, for the crazy times, for simply being Kim. But no one ever loved her like her Mum and Dad and her younger brother. Her family who, two decades after the brutality, celebrate her but forever have to mourn deeply in a way no one will really understand.
Such as this Wednesday just gone. Another anniversary. Those two decades lost in grief, in legal tribulations that fostered anger and bitter disappointment.
Years wasted, out of something that never should have happened.
Bob and June Meredith visited Kim. They sat by her grave in Perth, glasses of wine and cigarettes in hand, to chat to their girl. About the life they have and the life they should still be sharing, with their growing wider family that sometimes inadvertently magnifies Junes sadness. For this tells the story of what their girl will never have.
The Merediths have been enveloped in love and support, the familiarity of family, since the trauma and shock led to them moving back to their home town. To where Bob has his brother, Lloyd, and June her sisters. They left Albury on February 26, 1998, 23 months after Kim died.
I feel envious of my sisters with their daughters and their babies, June says, her voice breaking ever so slightly. And then proudly. But I do have a grandson.
Its back home then to the suburban house Kim never saw but in which has sat her piano that gave her glimpses of a wish she might one day teach music, to show kids how to play the guitar, to sing. All that type of thing, is how June summed it up many years ago, during that netherworld of the months after Kims death, sitting at the dinner table. Mum and Dad sharing photos of their first-born with a stranger. Dignified. Down-to-earth. At the table where once it was Bob, June, Kim and Graeme.
Her loss rendered the piano silent in their home in West Albury, in that new estate before the houses began to creep higher, then higher again across bare paddocks clinging to the hillside. It came with them when they travelled thousands of kilometres to the other side of the country. But now it has gone, the Merediths having hung on to it for all those years.
Not that long ago we sold her piano to Junes sister, so its still in the family. I remember her playing and how she sang in the choirs, Bob says. She loved her music and we miss that.
Any sort of reconciliation with that singular horror of the early hours of March 23, 1996, will never come. It is something they have to accept, repeated day-after-day and more so, because of the aching absence.
There is no such thing as closure. You read about that in the press all the time. That is absolute bullshit, Bob says.
One life has ended and so the four of us is now the three of us.
The then
ITS 9.30pm. Belinda Neil is in a car, at high-speed, hurtling down a country road.
She is 28, just nine years older than Kim Meredith, though has already racked-up a resume that shows just how good she is at being a copper. In her 18 years in the job she would work in major crime, train in counter-terrorism, go undercover in Sydney, tread the carefully honed path of a police negotiator.
But on this night, less than 24 hours after Kim Merediths slaying, she is heading to Forbes with three colleagues to find their suspect. Shes with homicide, on a path that would ultimately lead to issues that haunt her to this day.
Graham Mailes was at his aunts place, outside of town. She answered the door, then Mailes appeared from behind. Twenty-three, thin but muscular. He would be charged five days later.
His appearance was striking. Neil recalls his cropped red hair and repaired cleft lip, bulging out of a roughly hewn scar. This was not the clincher, would not be so remarkable on another face. It was being folded into a deeply cold stare that was so unnerving, how this hung heavy, though impotent, in the air in court that is, when he wasn't sleeping, or turning on antics such as parroting the lawyers, exercising in the dock or singing nursery rhymes.
Nine months after Kims death, drivers at the Forbes taxi rank recalled the manic behaviour but also the clumsily crafted pretence of being the town drunk, staggering along and swigging from an old wine cask filled with water.
He carried knives. He committed assaults. The Albury coppers knew all about him. He would jump on the bonnet of cars stopped at traffic lights, this bloke dubbed two dogs because of the strays at his heel. That all sounds disarmingly hopeless, enough to alarm and worry and make townsfolk switch course.
But not this, not the terror of someone who would stalk a young woman, grab her with his noted brute strength to drag her into a car park and kill her. Two deep, relentless wounds to her throat. And then to strip her down to her white socks and drag her body around in a bizarre display of triumph. Of look at me.
His sister could not believe it in a lengthy interview back in January of 1997. But then she added this insight. She had to kick him out of her Forbes flat when his behaviour became more erratic, more violent. One day he punched a hole in the wall and I said, youre gonna have to go mate.
The impact
BELINDA Neil did not like what she saw. Instantly. It came together in the menace and in the lies Mailes told.
Once he was an unwitting accomplice to a mates murderous deeds. Then he was home with a make-believe girlfriend, Debbie Wilson, when Kim was killed. But there was his shoe print in blood at the scene, the pile of bloodied clothes his jeans, Kims blue collared shirt in his aunts house. Kims watch. And there were his failed attempts to use Kims Hume Building Society card to get cash from an ATM before her body was even found, by a security guard who three years later still could not face returning to work.
Mailes was an intimidating looking character, says Neil, who has written a book, Under Siege, about her experiences over the years.
Obviously when he was confronted by a number of police he was a lot meeker and milder. But certainly as a female I would not want to confront him in the street. In that sense he was a bit of a loose cannon.
Sloppy lies but cunning, a low IQ of around 50 though always the question of his mental capacity to be guilty of murder. Bob Meredith maintains strongly that with Mailes it is about a low, yet functioning intellect, not mental health. Someone who knows how to look after himself.
It set the scene for the seven-year legal slog that unwittingly tore Neil apart. Her years in homicide slowly sowed this unravelling.
She was especially thrown by the De Gruchy murders in Sydney just 10 days before Kims death. In that case, Jennifer De Gruchy, her daughter, Sarah, 13, and 15-year-old son Adrian were bashed to death. The eldest son, 18-year-old Matthew, committed the crime and got 28 years in jail.
It was a horrendous crime scene that began her slide into post-traumatic stress disorder. The fact she faced a similar death so soon afterwards was devastating. Somehow she reckoned she might be OK if she could maintain a professional detachment. But the Merediths long haul through the courts brought that wish undone.
The number of court matters we had was unusual. It was effectively seven times. You had the committal, the fitness to plea, the sentencing, the new fitness, the new trial, she says.
What happened there is getting to know her parents breaks down those professional barriers and effectively humanises her. And then you've got this terrible crime scene, this beautiful girl. I then had children, and a daughter in particular.
Neil stops talking. Abruptly. She checks her emotions but cannot speak, albeit briefly. Its now almost 13 years since a jury found Mailes responsible for Kims death, since Justice James Wood sentenced him to a limiting period of 25 years for a killing he described as brutal, senseless and predatory. Yet the case still hits hard. Neils illness meant she could not attend that final sentencing.
It still affects me, I still have trouble talking about this. Having my own daughter I could really start to relate to some of the things that June had said to me, like wanting to hold Kims hand at the crime scene.
She struggled with the flashbacks and with getting to know the Merediths while always aware they were in court listening to the forensic evidence, which would just be absolutely devastating. They were such beautiful, decent people. I can only imagine how they were impacted by that. This is their beautiful young daughter.
The now
A FEW days ago Bob and June Meredith returned to Albury. Lunches, some drinks. A lot of Kims closest friends. They find solace in maintaining strong ties and in seeing where life has taken them all since they were teenagers just like Kim.
It buoys them. Bob reckons Kim would have happily gone wherever life took her. Mum differs. She would have stayed if she met the right guy.
Catching up struck home the tragic result of Kims fateful walk from the Termo Hotel early that morning to catch up with some mates at Sodens.
The thing that hurt the most was we saw their kids, Bob says of her friends, which of course well never see with Kim.
Kim was 19 when she died. Next January 15 she would have turned 40. They celebrated her 30th birthday with cake and decorations and, June says, I'll do it for her 40th.
I decorate her grave every Christmas, so shes always near. I miss her heaps.
For Bob, Kim is constantly with us.
Kim is very much at the forefront of our thoughts and obviously our life.