On August 16, 2009 a severed leg washed up on Newhaven Beach on Phillip Island, near the San Remo Bridge. About two weeks later more remains, including a patch of tattooed skin, came ashore at Ventnor Beach, some twenty miles away, and DNA confirmed they were Raechel Betts. She was twenty-seven, a childcare worker from Epping in Melbourne's north, and she had last been seen on August 11, 2009; reports place her disappearance in Preston and in Heidelberg Heights.
She had been at a house on Phillip Island leased by Nicole Godfrey, a twenty-eight-year-old shop assistant who was Coombes's lover and later a co-defendant in the case. There was an argument. John Leslie Coombes, of Preston, put her in a headlock and strangled her, or broke her neck; the accounts differ, cut her body up in the bathtub, and threw the pieces off the pier at Newhaven. He was arrested on November 2. Godfrey later told the court she had heard bones popping and chopping sounds from the bathroom next door, and admitted giving false alibis out of fear. She pleaded guilty as an accessory and to perverting the course of justice and received a suspended three-year sentence.
He was fifty-four years old and on parole for two murders.
Coombes was born in Victoria on September 14, 1954. He left school at fifteen to train as a mechanic and served in the Australian Army until an injury in a truck accident ended it.
On February 26, 1984 he stabbed Michael Peter Speirani, who was twenty, during a fishing trip on a boat. The body, stabbed and mutilated, was dumped a few miles off the coast in Port Phillip Bay and has never been recovered.
On November 17 that year he stabbed Henry Desmond Kells, forty-four, to death at Kells's home in Chelsea.
The Kells murder came first. In December 1985 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and that sentence was later reduced to a minimum of eleven years. In 1988 he escaped from Ararat Prison while serving it. He was released in 1996.
Seven weeks later he was remanded for the murder of Michael Speirani, which had been open for twelve years. He was convicted in April 1998 along with an accomplice, Glen Conlon, and received fifteen years with a minimum of ten.
He was paroled in 2007. Raechel Betts was killed two years after that.
He changed his plea to guilty during pre-trial argument in the Supreme Court of Victoria in May 2011, and a suppression order that had kept his record from the public was lifted that week. The court heard he had become angry when Betts told him she had allowed the sexual exploitation of two teenagers, and a psychologist gave evidence connecting the killing to his own sexual abuse as a child.
Justice Geoffrey Nettle sentenced him on August 26, 2011. He said the combination of the earlier murders and this one showed a frightening predilection for homicide and a dangerous propensity to commit murder, that the dismemberment was an act of depraved inhumanity and an utter disregard of the law and basic norms of society, and that it passed understanding that a sane person could hack up and destroy the body of another. He found no remorse and a real risk that Coombes would kill again if given the chance.
The sentence was life with no minimum term. In Victoria that means there is nothing to apply for: the prisoner stays in custody until death unless the executive intervenes, which almost never happens.
In December 2011 he sought leave to appeal, arguing that his guilty plea and his remorse should have earned him a minimum term. Justice Bernard Bongiorno refused it, saying he agreed with Nettle. Coombes was fifty-six. Outside court Raechel's grandfather, Neville Betts, said justice had been done, and that the family was appalled he had appealed at all.
Sandra Betts told the court the justice system had failed her daughter, and said outside it that she did not want him to walk free ever again. Her daughter Raine Charlton-Betts, who was eighteen, said he had changed his story four times. Michael Speirani's body has never been found.