Stacey Mitchell was the daughter of Andy and Sophie Mitchell, who had emigrated from West Moors in Dorset to Perth in Western Australia in 2001. Aged sixteen in 2006, Stacey was employed as a ride operator at the Adventure World amusement park, and naturally had a profile on MySpace which was decorated with a "bright pink wall-paper of Playboy bunnies" and announced that "My name is stacey, Im english, I love me alochol, i'm a party gurl, music is me life, i cant live with out my friends, im a very loud person, i talk 24/7, im a very down to earth person if you get to know me ...xxx". On the evening of Thursday, the 14th December 2006 she decided to leave her parents' home and moved to 14 Rutland Avenue in the suburb of Lathlain in Perth. That property was owned by a local chiropractor and occupied by his son David Haynes, together with two young women named Jessica Ellen Stasinowsky and Valerie Paige Parashumti, all of whom featured amongst the ranks of the unemployed.
It seems however that Stacey was not entirely happy with this decision and by the Sunday was telling her parents that she wanted to come home. Why she changed her mind will never be known as later that evening Stacey was sitting in the kitchen of 14 Rutland Avenue drinking whisky with her fellow housemates Stasinowsky and Parashumti. It was sometime during the course of that evening that the two older women slipped a Stilnox sleeping tablet into Stacey's drink. Then, during the early hours of Monday, the 18th December after Stacey had become suitably drowsy, Parashumti crept up behind Stacey and began hitting her over the head with a concrete paving slab she'd removed from the backyard, accompanied by the strains of Bach's St John's Passion reverberating throughout the household. Apparently Parashumti soon became frustrated when Stacey refused to die from the blows she'd inflicted and so Stasinowsky removed a dog chain that she wore as a belt and proceeded to strangle Stacey with it, whilst Parashumti continued hitting her with the aforementioned concrete slab. All in all it seems to have taken Stacey at least forty-five minutes to die, and so Prashumti and Stasinowsky filled in the time kissing each other over the body and then shot a brief clip of the murder scene on a mobile phone, on which they could be heard making fun of Stacey's British accent. Stasinowsky later told a prison officer that she wished it had at all lasted longer.
Stacey's parents, who hadn't seen their daughter since the Sunday, subsequently reported her missing on the Wednesday. Local police naturally began their enquiries at 14 Rutland Avenue on the morning of the 22nd December, where they soon found Stacey's body stuffed head first into a wheelie bin in a shed at the back of the house, where she had been dumped by Stasinowsky and Parashumti pending a conclusion to their discussions regarding the disposal of the body.
Both Parashumti and Stasinowsky later appeared before the West Australian Supreme Court on the 25th January 2008 where they both pled guilty to the willful murder of Stacey Mitchell. Parashumti's defense counsel, one David Edwardson, claimed that his client had suffered a "violent family life", and that she had been "associated with the vampire sub-culture since she was ten" and had been drinking both her own blood and that of others. The defense also produced a psychologist who testified that Parashumti suffered from a severe personality disorder, was sexually aroused by torture and violence, and was indeed obsessed with vampires. Whilst there was no suggestion that Stasinowsky was similarly obsessed by vampires, or that vampirism featured in their relationship, or indeed that their killing of Stacey bore any vampiric features, nevertheless this was sufficient for a number of newspapers to juxtapose the words 'vampire' and 'lesbian' in their headlines. In fact the whole motive for the killing appeared to be unclear. Although there were suggestions that Stacey had in some way "betrayed a confidence" and that she inspired a certain amount of sexual jealousy due to her habit of walking around the house "scantily clad in a bikini", it all seems to have boiled down to the fact that Parashumti found her "so fucking annoying".
Parashumti and Stasinowsky later returned to court to be sentenced on the 7th March 2008. Justice Peter Blaxell noted that the couple had failed to express any genuine regret and had also appeared to find the court proceedings amusing, however "Even more appalling are your admissions to the effect that at the time of the murder you were each sexually excited by the violence of the event". He sentenced both to a strict security life sentence, with a recommendation that they serve a minimum of twenty-four years. The fourth member of the household, David Ross John Haynes had already pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact to the murder. He was sentenced to serve two years and was released on parole on the 15th February 2008.
MySpace currently features an online memorial for Stacey Mitchell at http://www.myspace.com/foreverinourheartsstacey, whilst YouTube featured a video (or at least a filmstrip of stll shots) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAXDxPqqFdM&feature=related.
Such is the nature of death in the twenty-first century.
SOURCES
- Stacey Mitchell (16) was bludgeoned to death with a brick by two female flatmates, Dec 22, 2006
http://www.mydeathspace.com/article/2006/12/22/Stacey_Mitchell_(16)_was_bludgeoned_to_death_with_a_brick_by_two_female_flatmates
- Lesbian killers smile across courtroom, Brisbane Times, January 25, 2008
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2008/01/25/1201157635635.html
- Vampire lesbians killed British teenager, Daily Telegraph, 08/03/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/08/wvamps108.xml
- Todd Cardy, Sadistic killer lesbians shared blood lust, March 07, 2008
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23335351-2,00.html
- Peter Walker, Vampire-obsessed couple jailed for life for 'sexually perverse' murder, The Guardian, March 7 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/07/internationalcrime.australia?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront