Kelly Wilkinson murder to be reviewed for systemic flaws

ABC NEWS (Australia)

An investigation into the murder of gold coast mother-of-three Kelly Wilkinson will look into whether her death could have been prevented. The review is being conducted by the domestic and family violence death review and advisory board.

Transcript

00:00 Her family were saying that Ms Wilkinson, prior to her death, was frantically going

00:08 to police stations seeking safety for herself and her children and was being ignored or

00:15 was being turned away and had to go to multiple police stations and wasn't getting any kind

00:20 of response.

00:22 Obviously, such a circumstance is appalling.

00:27 Now you say that her high levels of fear were relevant to assessing risk.

00:33 That seems obvious.

00:34 Is it not always the case in practice?

00:38 Well what happens is that women have lived with perpetrators often for many years.

00:44 They're very attuned to perpetrators and escalating risk.

00:50 And so when a woman who is a victim of domestic violence is presenting to a police station

00:57 with high levels of fear, with a history of domestic violence, and quite frankly in this

01:02 case there were also four very serious charges as well, criminal charges that the police

01:08 could have easily seen in the history of the matter.

01:11 If a person is presenting in those circumstances, you really do have to take that seriously.

01:18 And unfortunately it would seem from reports of the family that that was not the case.

01:23 Now there will be this investigation into whether her death could have been prevented.

01:27 Kelly Wilkinson's family wants an inquest into this case.

01:29 You do too.

01:31 What would you like to see highlighted here?

01:35 There were multiple issues of systemic failure.

01:38 I think that we need to know why the police were turning her away.

01:43 We need to understand why the perpetrator was given watch house bail when he was not

01:48 supposed to be.

01:49 He actually killed Miss Wilkinson whilst he was on bail.

01:54 We also need to consider more widely the issue of possible contagion.

01:59 This was the third woman in 12 months who had been killed by fire in Queensland.

02:06 Obviously a horrific death and we need to understand that more carefully about whether

02:13 there were other circumstances involved or that could have contributed to this issue

02:19 as well.

02:20 As well as what other interactions Miss Wilkinson may well have had with other service providers

02:24 and understand what their responses were.

02:27 And Angela, with each tragic case, with each inquest, we hope to get a better understanding

02:32 of DV.

02:34 How can the community better respond to this?

02:39 Well there's a couple of things that they can do.

02:41 There's a need to understand that many victims, or most victims of domestic violence actually

02:45 don't go to service providers or even the police.

02:49 So it's around us ourselves actually being able to, when somebody discloses domestic

02:55 violence, to be able to reach out to believe them and to support them.

02:58 We need to sort of continue our prevention approaches but I think that we have to upstep

03:04 our approaches to high risk offenders as well.

03:08 In this case Miss Wilkinson had four charges.

03:11 There were four charges against him.

03:14 They're described as very serious domestic violence charges.

03:18 Obviously a detective was involved in making those charges against him prior to her murder.

03:25 Why was she required to go to all these other police stations?

03:29 Why wasn't there some much more coordination around her case to provide safety for her

03:35 and increase her circumstances of safety?

03:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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