August 2, 2025 • 53 mins
When two-year-old Khandalyce Pearce vanished, police were baffled that her mother, Karlie, hadn’t reported her missing. What no one realised was that Karlie Pearce-Stevenson had already been murdered years earlier, her remains discovered in Belanglo State Forest in 2010—eight years before Khandalyce’s name would make national headlines.
The true shock came from the killer’s calculated deception: for years after Karlie’s murder, her killers and their associates sent fake text messages and made calls using her mobile phone, convincing family and friends she was still alive.
Author Ava Benny Morrison joins Jessie to step through the case of Karlie and Khandalyce and explain how law enforcement agencies around the country managed to solve the case of The Lost Girls.
This episode first aired in 2019 and marked one of the earliest major cases on True Crime Conversations. We're re-releasing it today for listeners old and new.
CREDITS
Guest: Ava Benny Morrison
Host: Jessie Stephens
Senior Producer/Editor: Elise Cooper
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Truechrime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast was recorded on. Hey Claire here and
welcome back to True Crime Conversations. This week, we're revisiting
the heartbreaking case of Carly Pierce Stevenson and her two
year old daughter, Candalise. When Candlease was reported missing, police
couldn't understand why her mother hadn't come forward. But what
(00:29):
they didn't know at the time was that Carly's body
had actually already been found years earlier in Blangalo State Forest.
Author and journalist aver Benny Morrison joins Jesse to walk
us through how investigators finally connected the two and solved
one of Australia's most haunting crimes, now known as the
Lost Girl's Case. This is the last episode from our
(00:51):
archives for now. If you've been enjoying these re releases
and want to hear more, just let us know a
quick warning.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
This episode contains discussions of sexual assault, child abuse, and
the recounting of traumatic events. Listener discretion, Is it Guysed?
In July twenty fifteen, the bones of two year old
Candilease Pierce were found in a suitcase by the side
(01:20):
of a dusty highway two hours west of Adelaide. Alongside
her remains, investigators found a mud covered Dora the Explorer
T shirt, a mangled shoe, and a handcrafted quilt. The
question on everyone's lips was where is this little girl's
mother and how will she react when she hears that
(01:41):
her daughter was murdered? But Carl Pierce Stephenson wouldn't ever
know the tree because her body had been found five
years earlier in Bilangelo State Forest. So how did a
little girl and her mother end up dead five years apart?
(02:04):
I'm Jesse stephens In. In this episode of True Crime Conversations.
I'm speaking with author and journalist Ava Benny Morrison about
the case of the Lost Girls, Carl Pierce Stevenson and
her daughter Candales. So I want to start with an
August morning in twenty ten when a bunch of sort
(02:28):
of dirt bike riders visited Bilangalo State Forest. Can you
tell me what happened?
Speaker 3 (02:33):
So this was a winter morning in August twenty ten.
There was a group of guys from Sydney that had
driven down to the Blangalow State Forest to go dirt
bike riding. It's quite popular with dirt bike riding, but
most people know it for its association with Avian Malatt,
the serial killer who murdered backpackers in the forest they
went through. We spend the morning riding through all the
(02:55):
fire trails, and one of them ended up coming across
a woman's skeleton that was lying next to a lock.
And at first he only came across it because he
took a wrong turn, and he ended up finding a
leg bone, but he wasn't quite sure whether it was
human or animal, and I think he chose to believe
initially that it belonged to a kangaroo. So they've left
(03:18):
it and they've gone back to where their cars were,
had some lunch, and it was playing on his mind
and he spoke to others in the group about it,
and his brother had actually read a book about Ivan Malatt.
He was thinking about the way Ivan had discarded his
victim's bodies next to logs and whatnot, So that made
(03:39):
him go back and have another look. And it was
the second time that they went back that they found
a skull, a clump of hair, some rib bones, and
a few other things, and that confirmed to them that
it was human. So they called the police.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
There are fears of another murder victim in the notorious
Bilanglo State Forest, with police saying bones found there are
almost certainly human.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
It's certainly a fine that is more lucky good management.
Speaker 6 (04:08):
The human remains, which include a skull and fema, were
found by a trailbike rider yesterday afternoon. He immediately called police.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
Initially, we weren't sure until we walked a bit further
into the scrub and behind a log, we actually found
a skull.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
And when the police arrived, what did they find?
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They drove out later that afternoon and it was clear
to them initially that it was a human skeleton. I
guess the circumstances it was found in. It was in
a pretty isolated part of the forest. It was on
the edge of this forest, which is huge in the
southern Pocket, but it was next to a log. She'd
obviously been there for a very long time to the
(04:48):
point where she was just a skeleton, so automatically they
suspected that something suspicious had gone on, and it wasn't
n ttil the next day that the detectives came in
crime scene dies as well, and they spent a few
days going through the crime scene and They also found
a woman's T shirt, small earring and a single sock
as well, so they assumed that they were dealing with
(05:10):
a female skeleton.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Did they have any sense of the age?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
That wasn't until they went and had a autopsy done,
and it was a forensic pathologist that determined she was
probably between thirteen and twenty five years old and that
she had been in the forest for anywhere between a
year to up to ten years. That also helped them
rule out Ava Malatt because he would have been in
jail by the time this woman was killed.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Five years later, another body was then discovered in South Australia.
Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
In twenty fifteen, in July in a completely different state,
eleven hundred klmeters away in South Australia, a group of
guys in a car driving to Adelaide through the Murraymalley
region pulled over. One of them needed to go to
the bathroom. And the spot that they pulled over was
very unremarkable. It's just a random location on the side
(06:01):
of a straight, relatively empty highway in the country and
they pulled over and he's gone over to the bush
and he spotted a suitcase lying on the ground. There
were a number of items that were in that suitcase,
clothing and a blanket and a few other things that
were all over the ground, all over the dirt, and
he's gone over to have a closer look, given the
(06:22):
suitcase a bit of a shake and realized that there
was a small jawbone amongst all the clothing as well.
So that freaked him out, as you could imagine, He's
jumped back in the car, and then when he's got
two outla the next day, he's called the police. These
cases were treated completely separately, but they were immediately similar
(06:42):
in that police couldn't figure out who they were for years.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Haunting images have been released by major crime detectives investigating
the violent murder of a child whose remains were found
dumped in a suitcase in the Murray Malley Police releasing
pictures of the bag and girl's clothes in the hope
it'll trigger someone's memory.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And what were the other objects that were in that
suit case?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
There was about fifty odd objects in there, mainly children's clothing,
a few pieces of adults clothing and a very distinctive
hand stitch quilt, and this was key to the investigation
because a lot of the other stuff in the suitcase
was mass produced, so a child's too duo from cottona on.
Some stuff you can get a kmart, some Holden branded
(07:29):
silk shorts, things like that. But this blanket was very unique.
You could tell it was handstitched, and it looked like
something that someone would give to a young child or
an expectant mother.
Speaker 8 (07:42):
Yeah, well, I can just explain that that quilt to
the quilt is ninety centimeters by ninety centimeters, it's surrounded
with a pattern all the way around of the black
background with the bright colored musical notes. It's really very,
very distinctive. And we've had a quilting person have a
look at it and they believe that it's a homemade quilt.
(08:02):
So clearly somebody has gone to the effort of making
that quilt for somebody they cared and care about in love.
It's extremely distinctive, and it's impossible to believe that somebody
doesn't know who had that quilt.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
What kind of person was Carlie? What do we know
about who she was?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So Carlie grew up in Alice Springs. Her mum was
Colleen Povey. Carlie grew up with a huge supportive network
of friends and family. She had a lot of cousins aunties.
They all played netball together. She went to the local
high school, loved to go fishing with her dad, camping,
She went on trips with her stepdad who was a
(08:41):
truck driver, just crisscrossing around Australia with him. So she
was a really happy, social, vivacious young girl growing up.
As a teenager, she was a bit rebellious, but what
teenager isn't to be honest, and she started to have
a little bit of conflict with her parents over their
rules and you know, she wanted to go out and
(09:01):
it was a bit disinterested in school, so they would
have a few common flicks over that. But she left
high school in grade ten. She started working at her
Auntie stat bar in town and she moved in with
her grandmother Connie, who was a bit of a matriarch
in their family. She loved looking after her grandkids. Her
door was open to anyone whenever they needed it. And
(09:25):
it was when Carlie was living with her grandma that
she ended up getting in a relationship with a local guy
by the name of Robbie. Now Robbie was working at
a meat company in el Springs at the time, and
he adored Carlie. He had first spotted her, but he's
working on the door at a bar in Elie Springs
and they just fell in love. They ended up moving
(09:46):
into their own place, a unit and car by that
point had had candle lees Kennelie's dad wasn't involved in
their life from what I've been told, but Carlie was
fine with that. She was independent, She loved kids, and
she always spoke about the kind of life that she
would provide for her own daughter when that time came,
(10:06):
and that did come when she was seventeen, and she
was quite young, but she had a huge supportive network
of family around her that helped her raise candle lease
as well. It wasn't until Cali was twenty that she
lost away a little bit and she started hanging out
with some people that were new to town and picking
up their bad habits, which was getting into drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So her and Robbie are living together. How old is she,
like twenty?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
She's nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
And so then they sort of meet another couple. I
think Robbie meets another couple, doesn't he that's right. These
are these friends that Carlie starts hanging out with. It's
a man by the name of Daniel Holden and his girlfriend.
At the time, Hazel passed Moore and her three kids
had moved to Alice Springs. They lived quite a transient
lifestyle and had been staying at different places along the
(10:56):
East Coast in the prior twelve months, but finally settled
in Alice Springs in about late two thousand and seven
early two thousand and eight. Robbie had met Daniel through work.
Daniel approached him one day and they all started hanging
out together. Carl and Hazel both had daughters that were
at the same age, so they'd play together while the
(11:16):
parents just hung around and chewed the fat at Daniel's house.
But Daniel at the time was doing drug runs between
Adelaide and Alice Springs, and he was selling drugs around
Alice Springs as well, And it wasn't before long that
Carly started to be influenced by him. From what I've told,
it was only ever a short period, say in mid
(11:39):
two thousand and eight, that she moved from say just
using cannabis and then started using harder drugs like us,
and that was eventually her downfall. What kind of man
was Daniel? What do we know about his upbringing?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And in contrast to Carl's upbringing and the sort of
love and support that she had from her family, Daniel
had a really troubled upbringing. He was abused as a child,
He bounced around foster homes, He had a lot of
resentment for his immediate family, and going through his old
(12:19):
welfare records and different interviews with his mother and his
father as well, you got the sense that there was
a period there when no one really wanted to look
after him, no one wanted the responsibility. He went from
staying with his mom to staying with his biological father.
His biological father had to go to work and then
sadly died in a car accident, and then Daniel went
to his grandparents, but his behavior was out of control,
(12:42):
so they didn't want tom either, and then his mom
didn't want to take him back, so he ended up
bouncing between boys' homes. And it was that unstable upbringing
that really shaped him later in life. He started using
alcohol and drugs in his mid teens and started racking
up a pretty substantial criminal record from when he was
(13:04):
quite young. He spent most life growing up in Orange
in country New South Wales. He met a woman that
he got married to and ended up having two children with,
but he doesn't have anything to do with those children
anymore as I understand it. And then he sort of
moved from regional town to regional town, picking up odd jobs,
trying to kick a drug addiction. There were moments in
(13:26):
his life where he looked like he could succeed and
there was hope for him, but that was always short lived.
He'd always somehow fall back into drugs, even if it
was he was living in a new town with new
friends and new people, he'd somehow fine the bad apples
in town and just fall back into the same cycle.
(13:48):
And it wasn't until he moved to Queensland in about
two thousand and five thousand and six, and he met
Hazel Passmore, who became one of the constants in his
life but also shaped him for the next few years.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Let's go forward to two thousand and eight, because that's
sort of the one night that changed everything.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
So this was in September two thousand and eight. Daniel
told his mates that he and Hazel and the kids
were going down to Adelaide for a weekend for one
of the kid's birthdays, and they jumped in a full
drive and they were driving down there. It's a pretty
long drive in the middle of the outback, and at night,
(14:29):
especially when you're driving around those areas, you really need
to be careful of kangaroos. They're all over the road
and they completely right off your car if you hit them.
It was about eleven PM just before and he claims
that he swerved the car to avoid hitting a kangaroo
and the car rolled a few times. He climbed out
of the wreckage and he was relatively uninjured. But two
(14:51):
of Hazel's kids died, and he gives a pretty graphic
and horrific recollection of finding their bodies and his girlfriend
as well. Hazel was left with horrific injuries. She was
in a coma for two and a half weeks, had
to have one her legs amputated, countless operations as well.
Hazel was taken to Alice Springs Hospital and that night
(15:13):
Daniel texts Robbie and said, Nate, I need you to
come to the hospital. I've been in a really bad
car accident. Come and help me. Out. Robbie rushes down
there the next morning and finds Daniel and he's completely
hysterical and talking about he's responsible essentially for killing his
girlfriend's two kids and leaving his girlfriend at the time
unsure of whether she would survive or not. And it
(15:34):
was that day, that crash that really changed things. Robbie
and Carli had been having trouble a little bit before then,
and Robbie got the sense that Carlie wanted to leave town.
She wanted to see what was outside of Alex Springs
and go traveling, and Robbie was pretty happy with the
status quo how things were, but after that crash, Carlie left.
(15:58):
Robbie moved back in with her grandmother and stayed there
for a little while, but then ended up getting closer
to Daniel as well, and she left Alice Springs with
Daniel and went down to Adelaide not long after the crash.
Daniel later claimed that Carly was just a shoulder for
him to cry on and someone that was supporting him.
(16:19):
But they came back to Alice Springs briefly and Carly
took Daniel around to her mother's house and Tanya Webber
was there as well, and the general feeling about Daniel
from the get go was that he was untrustworthy and
there was just something off with him. Carly's mother tried
to convince Carlie to leave Candlea's with her so she
(16:40):
could look after her and Carli could go off and
do whatever she needed to do. But carl loved her
daughter unconditionally and she would never have left her on
her own and she was adamant about taking her with her.
Tanya I interviewed her and she said, you know, you
could just tell there was something wrong with him. He
wouldn't keep eye contact, He didn't really want much to
do with us. He just wanted to get out of there.
(17:02):
There was one point that afternoon where he yelled at
Candlease when she was playing in the backyard. That didn't
sit well at all with Colleen, Carly's mum, or Tanya.
And the last words that Tanya said to Daniel as
he packed Carlie and Canniley's in the car before they
drive to Adelaide was make sure you look after them,
and that was the last time she saw them.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You mentioned Tanya, who was a friend of Carl's mum,
and she's the person who will sort of later help
the police work out who the bodies are. But we're
going to get to her later. But at this point,
Carlie and Daniel they've moved away from Hazel and she's
now in a wheelchair because of that accident where Daniel
was behind the wheel What kind of position is Hazel
(17:45):
in at this point and how is she feeling about
what's happened.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
In two thousand and eight, when Carlie and Daniel and
Candles left Ella Springs and they went down to stay
in Adelaide, Hazel was at in hospital receiving treatment for
the horrific injury she suffered during that car crash. Holdham
was going to her hospital bedside, and when she finally
woke up from a coma, she was told that two
(18:10):
of her children had been killed. You can imagine as
a mother, what kind of pain and grief that would
leave you with. And then she found out that Carlie
and can Lease were down in Adelaide and staying at
Daniel's motel. She was immediately suspicious and started accusing Daniel
of all kinds of things. Daniel was trying to deflect,
saying she's just our friend. She's here to see you
(18:32):
you have nothing to be worried about. But Hazel wasn't
so sure. There's one recollection that she had of the
first day she was allowed out of hospital. She's in
a wheelchair, she's just had her leg amputated. She's feeling
quite vulnerable and insecure, and she goes down to the
shopping street in Adelaide with Daniel and it's clear from
(18:55):
how she describes her interactions with Carlie and her views
that day, that she was very jealous of Carlie. She
told police how Carlie was running around at a skirt
or a dress that Daniel had bought her, and she
could tell that, you know, they were flirting. There was
(19:15):
something going on. And just from reading that, you know,
you can really tell her insecurities just jump out of
the page. And it was the start of this deep
rooted resentment that Hazel had for Carly.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And so Daniel and Carly went to the motel and
then they sort of leave town and they go and
stay with friends. Is that do they go and stay
with Daniel's sort of friends.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
So in November two thousand and eight, Hazel buries her
two children that died in a car accident, and they
have this really emotional traumatic funeral and either that after
her or the next day, Daniel leaves Adelaide and Hazel
tells the police that he left her a ward of
cash under her pillow and Centera text message saying sorry,
(20:02):
gotta go police her after me. They ended up charging
him over that crash, but they weren't actively trying to
hunt him down or turning houses inside out trying to
find him. I think he was just trying to come
up with an excuse or some sort of justification to leave,
(20:23):
and he did leave. Carlie, Daniel and Canderalese drove to
the Act to Canberra and the northern suburbs there and
ended up staying with one of Daniel's relatives, his cousin,
and they settled there for about two weeks.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Police say they're no closer to establishing the identity of
a woman whose remains were found in the Blanglow State
Forest last year. In a first for New South Wales,
police have released a facial approximation image of the woman
in the hope that someone will recognize her. Police say
her death isn't directly linked to convicted serial killer Ivan Malatt,
but they have described the case as unusual.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So what does Daniel do from there?
Speaker 3 (21:03):
In late two thousand and eight, after he leave that house,
he goes he travels back to Adelaide and ends up
getting back in a relationship with Hazel. Unbeknown to Hazel
at the time, he has done something horrible to Carlie
and Candalise, but she's just happy to have him back
(21:27):
in her house and standing by her again. You've got
to remember, she has just been through this incredible trauma.
She's physically disabled for the rest of her life, and
her boyfriend has run off with someone else. She's feeling
particularly vulnerable and upset and just wanted a sense of
normalcy again. So she takes him back in. And it's
(21:48):
not until the following two or three years that she
starts to learn what really happened before he got back
with her.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
He had quite a bizarre sexual relationship with Hazel. Can
you talk us through some of the details there that
would later come out about sort of their proclivities when
it came to their sexual relationship.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Hazel and Daniel, they had this quite strong hold over
one another, and I think that's why they kept getting
back together over the years, and they were together for
so long, and that's because they engaged in these sexual
fantasies that most people wouldn't understand and most people would
quite find quite disturbing. What we've learned is that Daniel
(22:30):
would get Hazel to write out these fantasies that sometimes
involved the abuse of children, sometimes touched on someone's own
actual abuse as a child, and he would get off
on that. And she just told police about finding pornographic
images on his computer of young girls as well. They
(22:52):
were either pubescent or in their twenties.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Detectives have revealed the remains found in a suitcase on
the side of the road near Wenaka almost certainly belonged
to a little girl who may have been killed up
to eight years ago. More than a week after the
child's skeleton was found, police are raging closer to identifying
the victim.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And so eventually, when that relationship falls apart, Daniel finds
himself in a sort of relationship with like a sixteen
year old girl.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Doesn't he. Hazel and Daniel finally break up in about
twenty twelve. Daniel goes back to live with his cousin
at her place in Canberra, and he ends up getting
a relationship with this really young girl. She was about
sixteen seventeen at the time, and she lived up the
road and from what people have told me in neighbors,
(23:44):
old friends of theirs, even Daniel's family themselves, it was
really toxic. It was quite a volatile relationship. Daniel was
using drugs really heavily at the time. They would scream
at each other and then they'd get back together. But
they ended up going and staying up on the central
coast of New South Wales. They were staying at a
caravan park there. Daniel girlfriend at the time, the young
(24:08):
girl Tony, she went back to the act to go
see her family and left hold him in this caravan
park and it was only after about two or three
days that she left that he ended up sexually assaulting
a young girl that was staying at a caravan nearby.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Do we know how old that girl was?
Speaker 3 (24:27):
She was nine years old.
Speaker 9 (24:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
So how long did it actually take for Daniel hold
him to get convicted of this crime?
Speaker 3 (24:35):
He almost immediately police have figured out what's happened. The
victim went back to her mum's caravan and her mum's
partner was there and over the next forty eight hours
the girl breaks down and tells him mum what happened.
The mum's partner goes looking for Daniel, infuriated and chases
(24:57):
him out of the caravan park. Bizarrely, Daniel runs to
the police station in one or two k's away and
tells them that someone's after him, and you know, they're
accusing him of touching up a young girl but didn't
do anything, makes up this ridiculous story that it was
some old guy with a beard. Of course, police didn't
believe him. He was charged and then ended up pleading
(25:19):
guilty to those offenses. And that behavior is indicative of
the sexual interest that Daniel had. But there had only
been sort of tiny little insights into that over the years,
and this to me seemed like years and years of
pent up sexual interest in children, as disgusting as that is,
(25:43):
and he acted on it, and he was using drugs
at the time. He said he hadn't slept for three
days because he'd been using ice. But looking back at
his record, you can tell that this behavior wasn't It
was sort of a sign of the interest that he had.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So these two dead bodies have shown up and Daniel
Holdham is in jail, at the time. How do police
manage to actually link these two cases together.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
It wasn't until October twenty fifteen a woman named Tanya Weber.
She was in the Northern Territory. She was watching the
news and reading different articles about this little girl found
in the suitcase in South Australia. She was looking at
some of the images of the clothing that was founded
in there and recognized this tiny, little pink striped cotton
(26:32):
dress and it felt really familiar to her. And she
started going through some old photographs looking for photos of
a friend of hers and her daughter, Carlie Piers Stevenson
in Candlease, and she came across a photograph of this
little girl Candilease. She's two years old, very cute, blonde hair,
and she was standing looking at the camera in this
(26:53):
picture and she's wearing the exact same pink dress. And
this was particularly alarming because Carlinen and Kendales's family hadn't
seen them in several years since they had left Alice
Bring in thousand and eight. That rang alarm bells to
Tanya and she ended up calling crime stoppers and saying, look,
this could be a long shot, but maybe you should
(27:15):
look at the possibility that that girl in the suitcase
is Candlease.
Speaker 8 (27:19):
Thank you for coming. The purpose of this media conference
is to brief you on the identification of the human
remains that were found in July. The little girl has
been identified now as Candalse Kia Apears, who was born
in two thousand and six in Alice Springs. It's actually
a double breakthrough in that we've also been able to
(27:40):
identify that the human remains found in twenty ten in
the Bilangelo State Forest are that of her mother.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
How was it that this Tanya calls and goes, this
could be Candales, but neither of them were missing people.
We're officially missing people. How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Once they had Candalse's name and they were able to
identify that Candalse was a girl in the suitcase by
getting her medical records, figuring out that was the victim,
and then they were able to link it to the
remains fan of Blankley State Forest and figured out that
was actually her mum, Carl Peters Stevenson. They quickly started
(28:18):
to piece together their last known movements and where they
had been for the bryor seven years, and trying to
answer that question that you just asked as well, how
did no one notice her on missing? Now we know
that's because the person that killed them was pretending that
they were still alive. So he was using Carly's mobile
(28:40):
phone to text her auntie's, her mother, her cousin, her friend,
her ex boyfriend, making up all these fanciful stories saying
I'm in Queensland, I've met someone, I'm really happy. I
just don't want anything to do with you. Or I
don't have any money to buy Candilese a birthday present?
Can you please wire me something? I need five hundred
dollars to come home. At the time, her mum, Colleen,
(29:00):
was going through treatment for breast cancer and they were
really close and she wanted to desperate to know where
her daughter was. So every time she get a text
message saying Mama want to come home, can you just
transfer me money for flights, her mum would do it
without a second thought, and sometimes it was the last
bit of money they had left, especially because they were
pouring a lot into her medical treatment. One of the
(29:22):
saddest aspects of this case is that Colleen ended up
passing away in twenty twelve without knowing whatever happened to
her daughter. And her granddaughter. Another aspect that made people
think this mother and daughter were still alive was that
the man that killed them was accessing Carl's bank account
and taking advantage of her cent to link payments, putting
his own wages through her bank account. That's one of
(29:46):
the key proof of life checks that police perform when
they're investigating missing people as well. They go and have
a look on social media, bank accounts, phone records. And
in two thousand and nine, Carli's mother actually put in
a missing person's report because she hadn't heard from her
in a little while, and the police in Alice Springs
investigated it and they looked at her bank account all
(30:06):
that she accessed her bank account one or two days prior,
so that was a positive sign to them that she
was still alive. They wanted to know that it was
actually the man that killed her taking advantage of whatever
money was in her bank account, and they ended up
calling Daniel Holden. The police called Daniel Holden and asked
him do you know where Carly is? Daniel Holdham made
(30:30):
up this story that she was in Queensland with some
other bloke, but of course she wasn't. So police ended
up closing the investigation quite controversially looking back now, certainly
the detectives I've spoken to said we wouldn't have done
that today because they didn't physically cite Carly. They relied
on a phone call.
Speaker 8 (30:49):
From what I understand, a significant development the investigation has
been that people who we believe may be the offenders
and others have taken over Carly's identity, her telephone, her
bank accounts, has sent a Lincoln family payments in relation
(31:11):
to the telephone, her mobile phone. We believe that the
phone was kept by the offenders and used to provide
some proof of life and to mislead family friends law
enforcement by suggesting that Carlie was still alive because of
activity on her phone.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
In the book, you have this sort of scene when
Colleen is essentially on her deathbed and there were things
that she was sort of hallucinating. Can you talk us
through that?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
After a few years, it had been four years since
Colleen had last seen Carly, her daughter, and her granddaughter, Candallyse.
That was when they left Alice Springs in November of
two thousand and eight with this man Daniel hold them.
She'd receive sporadic text messages from Carl's phone, a very
(31:59):
strange phone call one day from someone that was whispering
down the phone, pretending to be Carly and saying, you know,
I'm scared and I've got two owns and I'm hiding somewhere.
But she never physically cited her daughter after she left
in two thousand and eight. Fast forward to twenty twelve
and Colleen is in the palette of care unit at
Alice Springs Hospital and the doctors have told her family
(32:22):
and her husband, Scott Povey, that she was going to
pass away sooner to get her affairs in order, And
her family and her friends have told me some just
heartbreaking moments of her final days alive, where she would
constantly ask are Carlie and Candles coming? Are they here?
And have you spoken to them? And at one point
(32:43):
when her sister was in the hospital room with her,
Colleen thought she could see Carlien Canderly standing in the
corner of the room, and of course she was hallucinating.
But that wasn't long before she passed away. And as
I said before, it's just such a sad part of
that case. She never knew what happened to Carlien Canderly's
(33:06):
certainly her close friend said she thinks it's better that
way because it would have completely broken her.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
So at this point he's in prison and on the
news there starts to be this talk of these bodies
found and there's a quilt and there's sort of certain
clothing items, which then caught the attention of the family
of Candalesse and Carly. What happens next in terms of
drawing a link between Daniel and these two girls.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Daniel, after he was convicted of that sexual assault, he
was sentenced to a few years jail in New South Wales.
He is serving time there when the suitcase turns up
with Candalice's remains in twenty fifteen, it's all over the news.
You can only assume that he would have seen it
because it was a massive case at the time. And
when police finally identify Candalise and then start looking for Carly,
(34:00):
they ended up ended up finding out that it was
Carli because they were going through cases of unideas remains
around Australia and they came across the Bilanglow case and
compared the DNA profile taken from those bones against Kali's
medical records and it was a match. Very quickly they
started to find out that the last person the mother
(34:22):
in child was sea with was Daniel Holdam. They had
to be pretty delicate in the inquiries that they were
making because they didn't want to tip anyone off. So
it was a very very sacred investigation for one of
a better word. Only a handful of people knew about it,
and they were very careful about the people that they
were talking to. They were quite comfortable with the fact
(34:42):
that Daniel Holden was in jail, so that kept him
at arm's length from key prosecution witnesses as well. In
October twenty fifteen, they coordinated this massive police operation where
they were doing raids in the Act South Australia. They
were interviewing people in our Springs and raids in New
(35:04):
South Wales and it wasn't until that morning in October
that the world or the country found out about Carly
and Kamalese. And at the same time it was timed
to precision that homicide detectives went up to Daniel Holdham's
jail in Cestock in New South Wales and turned his
(35:24):
cell inside out looking for evidence and let him know
for the first time that he was a key suspect
in these murders.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
State Crime Command, Homicide Squad, Strike Force Malaya and South
Australia Major Crimes Task Force MALLE have been investigating the
deaths of Carl per Stevenson and her daughter candalase kiar Apias.
In October this year, a forty one year old male
was arrested at Cesnock Police Station and charged with the
(35:52):
murder of Carl. Earlier this morning, police from the Homicide
Squad arrested the forty one year old man at Paramounta
Police Station. He has since been charged with the murder
of Candlease. At this stay, Joy anticipate that the man
will appear the Paramountal Life Record lad of this afternoon.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
What kind of evidence did they find because they turned
a few houses upside down because he was sort of
a notorious hoarder and kept everything. What kind of stuff
did they find?
Speaker 3 (36:24):
It was quite remarkable the evidence that they did come
across in this investigation. After any homicide investigation, it's hard
enough to try and find DNA evidence and weapons and
photographic evidence. When the police were interviewing Daniel Holdham and
searching through all his stuff, this is seven years after
(36:44):
he committed the murders, but the stuff they came across
was amazing, so they ended up finding photographs that Daniel
Holdham had taken off Carli's body in Blanglo State Forest.
And the way they found that was Hazel had actually
come across this SD card when she was searching through
Daniel Holdham's stuff. She was convinced that he was having
(37:06):
an fair even in twenty eleven twenty twelve, and she
would regularly go through all his stuff and he's in
their bedroom in the back of his car, looking for
evidence to confirm her suspicions. She ended up finding this
total little SD card and put it in to a
card reader and a computer and all these images came
up of what was clearly Carli and he was doing
(37:26):
some pretty horrific things in the photos ed. Hazel ended
up giving that SD card to her sister and she
said to her, if anything happens to me, take this
to the police. Her sister held on to it for
three years and when the news broke that this was
Carli and Candalise and Hazel was in the news as well,
(37:48):
be as her house was being raided in South Australia,
Hazel's sister walked into a police station ran a police
station near her house in South Australia and said, I
think you need to have a look at this. Hand
it over the SD card.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
So had Hazel ever asked him? She'd come across these
images Carli and Candalase who used to be part of
their lives. Suddenly she doesn't see them. Does she ever
confront Daniel and say what happened?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
It's hard to know in this case because there are
so many people that are lying and trying to protect
their own reputation. So just going off what she said,
I guess to police years later, Yes she did ask
Daniel and that's one of the hardest things to understand
is how you could stay with someone after he admitted
to killing a mother and child. He drip fed her
(38:33):
confessions over the years, so from when they got back
together in two thousand and eight until about twenty twelve
when they broke up, and at first it was when
Hazel would confront him after finding Carly's bank card and
Candalie's birth certificate in the back of his car and
just assuming that he was going off to the act
and having an affair with her. Holdham said don't worry.
(38:56):
She's gone. And when Hazel pressed him on that, he said,
and I killed her essentially, And then a little bit
later he would give her a little bit of information
about what happened to Candalase. One of the most hardest
part in this book is that Hazel recounts how Daniel
told her he murdered Candalise after trying to sexually assault her.
(39:20):
So Hazel tells police her justification for staying with him
was that Daniel was a prolific liar and she didn't
know whether to believe him or not, whether that's true,
whether that's just a self serving answer that's up out
for interpretation. But she said she didn't know whether he
was telling the truth or not and how to believe him.
(39:43):
But it was after she found those photographs that confirmed
to her he had committed these murders, and she gave
it to her sister, and then a few months later
they broke up. There was a part in her police
interview where she said, I knew then that I had
to get out of that relationship, otherwise I might not
get out alive.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So from the police, they've seen these photos and to
piece together the final moments of Carli and Candales. What
do we know about how they died.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
We know that Carl and Daniel had an argument when
they were staying in Canberra in December two thousand and eight.
Based on witness accounts. It was overboard over the money
that Carl was meant to be paying to be staying
at Daniel's relative's house. They jumped in her car for
some reason in the middle of the night and drove
to Bilanglo State Forest, which is about one and a
(40:35):
half two hours drive from Canberra. We don't know exactly
what happened in that forest because Daniel Holdham has never
told anyone this is how it happened and this is
why I did it. He's given certain versions over the years,
but they don't match up with any of the evidence.
So we will never really know what happened inside that forest.
But we do know that he murdered her. She had
(40:57):
cracks in her ribs, which suggests there was some blunt
force trauma to her body, and then he's left her
body there and driven back to Canberra. Over the next
few days, he turns his sights to Candlease. The suggestion
is after looking at all the evidence and the kind
of person Daniel was in the interest that he had
(41:17):
is that he killed Carli to try and get access
to Candilese. And we have to try to remember that
he did have this underlying sexual interest in children at
this point and fantasized about child sexual abuse. So one
of the obvious assumptions you can make is that he
had some horrific plans for Candalesse and needed to get
(41:40):
her mother out of the picture. One of the other
suggestions that was made, especially during the court case, was
that after he killed Carli, he was left with her
daughter and he couldn't possibly turn up to Adelaide without Carli,
so we had to get rid of Candilese. So, as
I said, because we don't have a definitive account from
the killer of why he did it, we can only
(42:02):
make a few assumptions about what happened. After he's turn
to Canberra without Carli, he gets his cousin's husband to
trade in Carl's car, essentially to get rid of it
and to get a new one so there's no trace
of Carli anymore. Then he tells his cousin and her
husband that he's going to go and drop Candlease at
her grandmother's house. In South Australia. They jump in this
(42:27):
new cover. They have candleicse in the back seat and
they start driving there. But he doesn't go straight to Adelaide.
He makes a number of stops along the way. Years
later police were able to figure out the exact route
that he went from tracking his phone records and his
bank statements and credit card statements, and it's it's quite
interesting when you look at it.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
They have a.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Physical map of his stops along the way, how long
he stopped at each town, the phone calls he was
making as well, and they sent some detectives out and said, okay,
go find out what he was doing. Even though it
was years later, they were able to figure out that
he went to Woolworth in Wogga Wogga and spent twenty
five dollars or thereabouts, and they requested his receipt from
(43:14):
the time, and this is several years later and they
ended up getting an itemized receipt. And these items on
their own look harmless enough, but in this context they're
particularly chilling. He bought garbage bags, chucks, wipe's hand soap
and then got back in the car with candle lease
drove on another hour to Nerandra, a tiny town outside
(43:36):
of Wogga, and checked into a motel. And again an
amazing piece of evidence that they've been to be able
to pick up years later was the handwritten check in
notice that Daniel Holdham signed when he checked in with Candlelese.
And at this point of the investigation, police didn't know
exactly where Candilease had died. They knew that she left
(43:56):
Canberra alive and she turned up dead in South Australia,
so they were trying to figure out where she was
murdered somewhere in between those two locations, and they needed
to pin down the last place that she was seen alive.
They go to this motel and they searching through all
the old records looking for anything they can that will
show Daniel checked in there because they knew on his
(44:19):
bank statements that he paid for a night. Couldn't find it,
so they went and tracked down the old motel owner
and said, look, we know it's ages ago, but is
there any chance that you kept your old records and
she had nothing to do with the business anymore. But remarkably,
a week later she calls police and says, I think
I have what you're looking for they go out to
(44:39):
her house and there's a small piece of paper with
the motel name on the top of it, and Daniel
Holdham has written his name, his address, his phone number
and marked one adult and one child and that was
essentially the last sign of Canderlelyse alive. Police believe that
(45:01):
she was either murdered inside a room at that motel
or near the motel somewhere before her body was put
in that suitcase with all the clothing and that beautiful
blanket of hers, and he just chucked it out like
it was rubbish on the side of the highway before
driving straight back to his ex girlfriend's house.
Speaker 10 (45:23):
Today, the police told Candalesse's grandfather and through him, other
family that a forty one year old man who is
charged with the murder of Carli Candalesse's mother will also
be charged with the murder of Candleesse. This is very
much welcome news. It is welcome because those who love
Candalise want her killer call to account for such a
(45:45):
despicable crime. Homicide is a most heenous crime. Carli's and
Candalesse's family and friends have had their lives suddenly and
horribly disrupted. Nothing has prepared these people for their suffering.
For them life will never be the same. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And he then went to court when they've got all
of this evidence together. What was the court case like
and what was the conviction.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
When it all broke, it was huge. People couldn't believe
that these two cases were linked. They were so high
profile on their own and to have them linked was
just mind boggling. I remember sitting in the newsroom one
morning and a call came through from someone in the
police saying, look, there's going to be a huge announcement
and we're going to link these two cases. We didn't
(46:41):
know which cases they were, and we're all speculating could
be William Tyrell and Madeline McCain or what's going on here,
And then to find out it was those two cases
was just incredible. So you can imagine the hype and
the media interest around it. Maitland Court was where Daniel
Holdham appears a week later when he was charged with
the murders in October twenty fifteen, and the court was
(47:04):
packed and he appeared by audio visual link and it
was the first time that people got to see him
almost in the flesh and get a sense of what
he was like, but it wouldn't be until years later
that he actually appeared in person in court and that
was during his committal hearing in Sydney. There was the
sense that he just wanted to do anything that he
(47:25):
could to delay it. He was admitted to hospital, he
left all his legal documents in a jail in Goldben,
He sacked his lawyer, He wanted to self represent and
it was just getting incredibly frustrating. But you know, the
magistrate was just determined to make it happen and wasn't
going to let him wriggle out of this, and we
all expected that he was going to go to trial,
(47:47):
even though the case against him was amazing. Police were
able to link all this stuff that we'd spoken about,
the stuff he bought it wogga wogga was used in
the way that Candale's body was discarded. The photographs. They
were able to close up on a mole on Daniel
Holdham's arm that was in one of the photographs with
(48:07):
Carli's body, the confessions he had made to his ex
girlfriends over the years as well, But he was just
adamant that he wasn't going to admit guilt. That wasn't
until twenty eighteen. It was a week out from his trial.
It was set down for three months. Witnesses had booked flights,
the police were putting the final touches on the brief.
(48:28):
It was going to be huge, and all of a
sudden he turns around and pleads guilty to two counts
of murder. And the one condition I guess he had
was he was adamant there was a non publication or
to placed on someone that was very close to him.
He was worried about their protection, and he entered the
(48:49):
guilty please, and that was It was sort of a
bittersweet relief, I guess for Carlin and Cannale's family. And
then it wasn't until November late last year where he
went to sentencing, and it was the first time then
when members of Carline Kennealse's family stood up and read
out victim impacts haatements. There were a really good sense
of who who this young mother and her child were.
(49:13):
The family were quite private and they respected the judicial process.
They didn't want to speak out or say anything that
would jeopardize that until it was all over. So to
hear them stand up and court one after another and
talk about the fond memories they had of the girls
and how much they missed them was just heartbreaking. Daniel
Holden was sitting there the whole time. He seemed completely disinterested,
(49:33):
just flicking through papers like it was just a mundane activity.
And then he was finally sentenced to two terms of
life imprisonment. That was after he tried to change he's
guilty plead to the murder of Candlease at the last minute.
Thankfully the judge was having nothing none of that and
pushed on.
Speaker 11 (49:53):
A Sydney judge has sentenced Daniel hold Him to life
in prison for the murder of Carly Pierce Stevenson and
her daughter, Candies Pierce. It was a pause from the
public gallery when the sentence was handed down.
Speaker 7 (50:06):
Robert Hume said Daniel James Holdham showed complete disdain for
the existence of his girlfriend, Carlie Pierce Stevenson, and that
to him, she was just flesh that could be extinguished
for his vile pleasure. He said the manner in which
she was killed amounted to extreme gravity and appalling depravity.
And he said that Canalis was a completely defenseless two
year old girl who was intentionally killed with some forethought,
(50:29):
and the fact that there was a sexual element to
her death only made it more despicable.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
And the last thing I wanted to ask you is
what it was about this case that you couldn't let
go of. What was it that you found so particularly
interesting and compelling about this that prompted you to write
a book.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
When I was reporting on this case as a newspaper
journalist in twenty fifteen, I remember being constantly frustrated that
I couldn't fit everything into one newspaper article. I was
always leaving something out, and with each press conference on
this case, there was just new shocking information that was out.
There was a sense that the case couldn't get any worse,
(51:09):
but then it did, and I felt like it really
lent itself to long form journalism. It needed to be
in a format where the whole entire story could be told.
It seemed like there was just so much to it
that wasn't being explored either. Something that struck me throughout
this was we didn't know much about Carlie and Canderies,
(51:30):
and that's only because their family respected their privacy. But
I wanted to really be able to highlight the victims
at the center of this case and not focus so
much on the person who did these horrible things to
them at the end of it, you know, having finished
the book, I think that's something that I'm most proud of,
(51:51):
or I found most rewarding, was being able to give
people a real sense of who Carlie and Kenley's were
and challenge some of those misconceptions people came up with
because she was a young mother, or as she had
been involved in drugs just before her death, that didn't
define her, and I think it was really important to
(52:13):
tell people that the kind of people Carlin Kennelly's were.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
Thank you so much for your time and for telling
us that story in the book is just so insightful,
and it's exactly what you've done. There are two humans
at the center, and that's something that I think we
need to be reminded of a lot when it comes
to true crime. So thank you.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 9 (52:33):
Carlie pier Stevenson and daughter Candalise finally reunited after being
found murdered more than a thousand kilometers apart. Early this morning.
Their bodies were carried to hers at an Alice Springs
funeral home before being driven to the desert Life Church
for a private funeral. In attendance, family close friends are
representative of SA Police and the Acting Commissioner for Victims' Rights.
(52:57):
All of them were dressed in pink and blue, Carli
and Candalise's favorite colors.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
You can buy Ava Benny Morrison's book The Lost Girls
in all good bookstores now or online via the link.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
In our show notes.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
For maps, photos and more details about the case of
Carlie and Candalise, check out the description in the notes
of this episode, or head to our website www. Dot
mamameya dot com dot au. True Crime Conversations is a
Mumameya podcast. Our senior producer and editor is Elise Cooper.
If you liked this episode, then be sure to leave
(53:36):
a review on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
Truechrime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast was recorded on. Hey Claire here and
welcome back to True Crime Conversations. This week, we're revisiting
the heartbreaking case of Carly Pierce Stevenson and her two
year old daughter, Candalise. When Candlease was reported missing, police
couldn't understand why her mother hadn't come forward. But what
(00:29):
they didn't know at the time was that Carly's body
had actually already been found years earlier in Blangalo State Forest.
Author and journalist aver Benny Morrison joins Jesse to walk
us through how investigators finally connected the two and solved
one of Australia's most haunting crimes, now known as the
Lost Girl's Case. This is the last episode from our
(00:51):
archives for now. If you've been enjoying these re releases
and want to hear more, just let us know a
quick warning.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
This episode contains discussions of sexual assault, child abuse, and
the recounting of traumatic events. Listener discretion, Is it Guysed?
In July twenty fifteen, the bones of two year old
Candilease Pierce were found in a suitcase by the side
(01:20):
of a dusty highway two hours west of Adelaide. Alongside
her remains, investigators found a mud covered Dora the Explorer
T shirt, a mangled shoe, and a handcrafted quilt. The
question on everyone's lips was where is this little girl's
mother and how will she react when she hears that
(01:41):
her daughter was murdered? But Carl Pierce Stephenson wouldn't ever
know the tree because her body had been found five
years earlier in Bilangelo State Forest. So how did a
little girl and her mother end up dead five years apart?
(02:04):
I'm Jesse stephens In. In this episode of True Crime Conversations.
I'm speaking with author and journalist Ava Benny Morrison about
the case of the Lost Girls, Carl Pierce Stevenson and
her daughter Candales. So I want to start with an
August morning in twenty ten when a bunch of sort
(02:28):
of dirt bike riders visited Bilangalo State Forest. Can you
tell me what happened?
Speaker 3 (02:33):
So this was a winter morning in August twenty ten.
There was a group of guys from Sydney that had
driven down to the Blangalow State Forest to go dirt
bike riding. It's quite popular with dirt bike riding, but
most people know it for its association with Avian Malatt,
the serial killer who murdered backpackers in the forest they
went through. We spend the morning riding through all the
(02:55):
fire trails, and one of them ended up coming across
a woman's skeleton that was lying next to a lock.
And at first he only came across it because he
took a wrong turn, and he ended up finding a
leg bone, but he wasn't quite sure whether it was
human or animal, and I think he chose to believe
initially that it belonged to a kangaroo. So they've left
(03:18):
it and they've gone back to where their cars were,
had some lunch, and it was playing on his mind
and he spoke to others in the group about it,
and his brother had actually read a book about Ivan Malatt.
He was thinking about the way Ivan had discarded his
victim's bodies next to logs and whatnot, So that made
(03:39):
him go back and have another look. And it was
the second time that they went back that they found
a skull, a clump of hair, some rib bones, and
a few other things, and that confirmed to them that
it was human. So they called the police.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
There are fears of another murder victim in the notorious
Bilanglo State Forest, with police saying bones found there are
almost certainly human.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
It's certainly a fine that is more lucky good management.
Speaker 6 (04:08):
The human remains, which include a skull and fema, were
found by a trailbike rider yesterday afternoon. He immediately called police.
Speaker 7 (04:16):
Initially, we weren't sure until we walked a bit further
into the scrub and behind a log, we actually found
a skull.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
And when the police arrived, what did they find?
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They drove out later that afternoon and it was clear
to them initially that it was a human skeleton. I
guess the circumstances it was found in. It was in
a pretty isolated part of the forest. It was on
the edge of this forest, which is huge in the
southern Pocket, but it was next to a log. She'd
obviously been there for a very long time to the
(04:48):
point where she was just a skeleton, so automatically they
suspected that something suspicious had gone on, and it wasn't
n ttil the next day that the detectives came in
crime scene dies as well, and they spent a few
days going through the crime scene and They also found
a woman's T shirt, small earring and a single sock
as well, so they assumed that they were dealing with
(05:10):
a female skeleton.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Did they have any sense of the age?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
That wasn't until they went and had a autopsy done,
and it was a forensic pathologist that determined she was
probably between thirteen and twenty five years old and that
she had been in the forest for anywhere between a
year to up to ten years. That also helped them
rule out Ava Malatt because he would have been in
jail by the time this woman was killed.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Five years later, another body was then discovered in South Australia.
Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
In twenty fifteen, in July in a completely different state,
eleven hundred klmeters away in South Australia, a group of
guys in a car driving to Adelaide through the Murraymalley
region pulled over. One of them needed to go to
the bathroom. And the spot that they pulled over was
very unremarkable. It's just a random location on the side
(06:01):
of a straight, relatively empty highway in the country and
they pulled over and he's gone over to the bush
and he spotted a suitcase lying on the ground. There
were a number of items that were in that suitcase,
clothing and a blanket and a few other things that
were all over the ground, all over the dirt, and
he's gone over to have a closer look, given the
(06:22):
suitcase a bit of a shake and realized that there
was a small jawbone amongst all the clothing as well.
So that freaked him out, as you could imagine, He's
jumped back in the car, and then when he's got
two outla the next day, he's called the police. These
cases were treated completely separately, but they were immediately similar
(06:42):
in that police couldn't figure out who they were for years.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Haunting images have been released by major crime detectives investigating
the violent murder of a child whose remains were found
dumped in a suitcase in the Murray Malley Police releasing
pictures of the bag and girl's clothes in the hope
it'll trigger someone's memory.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And what were the other objects that were in that
suit case?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
There was about fifty odd objects in there, mainly children's clothing,
a few pieces of adults clothing and a very distinctive
hand stitch quilt, and this was key to the investigation
because a lot of the other stuff in the suitcase
was mass produced, so a child's too duo from cottona on.
Some stuff you can get a kmart, some Holden branded
(07:29):
silk shorts, things like that. But this blanket was very unique.
You could tell it was handstitched, and it looked like
something that someone would give to a young child or
an expectant mother.
Speaker 8 (07:42):
Yeah, well, I can just explain that that quilt to
the quilt is ninety centimeters by ninety centimeters, it's surrounded
with a pattern all the way around of the black
background with the bright colored musical notes. It's really very,
very distinctive. And we've had a quilting person have a
look at it and they believe that it's a homemade quilt.
(08:02):
So clearly somebody has gone to the effort of making
that quilt for somebody they cared and care about in love.
It's extremely distinctive, and it's impossible to believe that somebody
doesn't know who had that quilt.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
What kind of person was Carlie? What do we know
about who she was?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So Carlie grew up in Alice Springs. Her mum was
Colleen Povey. Carlie grew up with a huge supportive network
of friends and family. She had a lot of cousins aunties.
They all played netball together. She went to the local
high school, loved to go fishing with her dad, camping,
She went on trips with her stepdad who was a
(08:41):
truck driver, just crisscrossing around Australia with him. So she
was a really happy, social, vivacious young girl growing up.
As a teenager, she was a bit rebellious, but what
teenager isn't to be honest, and she started to have
a little bit of conflict with her parents over their
rules and you know, she wanted to go out and
(09:01):
it was a bit disinterested in school, so they would
have a few common flicks over that. But she left
high school in grade ten. She started working at her
Auntie stat bar in town and she moved in with
her grandmother Connie, who was a bit of a matriarch
in their family. She loved looking after her grandkids. Her
door was open to anyone whenever they needed it. And
(09:25):
it was when Carlie was living with her grandma that
she ended up getting in a relationship with a local guy
by the name of Robbie. Now Robbie was working at
a meat company in el Springs at the time, and
he adored Carlie. He had first spotted her, but he's
working on the door at a bar in Elie Springs
and they just fell in love. They ended up moving
(09:46):
into their own place, a unit and car by that
point had had candle lees Kennelie's dad wasn't involved in
their life from what I've been told, but Carlie was
fine with that. She was independent, She loved kids, and
she always spoke about the kind of life that she
would provide for her own daughter when that time came,
(10:06):
and that did come when she was seventeen, and she
was quite young, but she had a huge supportive network
of family around her that helped her raise candle lease
as well. It wasn't until Cali was twenty that she
lost away a little bit and she started hanging out
with some people that were new to town and picking
up their bad habits, which was getting into drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So her and Robbie are living together. How old is she,
like twenty?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
She's nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
And so then they sort of meet another couple. I
think Robbie meets another couple, doesn't he that's right. These
are these friends that Carlie starts hanging out with. It's
a man by the name of Daniel Holden and his girlfriend.
At the time, Hazel passed Moore and her three kids
had moved to Alice Springs. They lived quite a transient
lifestyle and had been staying at different places along the
(10:56):
East Coast in the prior twelve months, but finally settled
in Alice Springs in about late two thousand and seven
early two thousand and eight. Robbie had met Daniel through work.
Daniel approached him one day and they all started hanging
out together. Carl and Hazel both had daughters that were
at the same age, so they'd play together while the
(11:16):
parents just hung around and chewed the fat at Daniel's house.
But Daniel at the time was doing drug runs between
Adelaide and Alice Springs, and he was selling drugs around
Alice Springs as well, And it wasn't before long that
Carly started to be influenced by him. From what I've told,
it was only ever a short period, say in mid
(11:39):
two thousand and eight, that she moved from say just
using cannabis and then started using harder drugs like us,
and that was eventually her downfall. What kind of man
was Daniel? What do we know about his upbringing?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And in contrast to Carl's upbringing and the sort of
love and support that she had from her family, Daniel
had a really troubled upbringing. He was abused as a child,
He bounced around foster homes, He had a lot of
resentment for his immediate family, and going through his old
(12:19):
welfare records and different interviews with his mother and his
father as well, you got the sense that there was
a period there when no one really wanted to look
after him, no one wanted the responsibility. He went from
staying with his mom to staying with his biological father.
His biological father had to go to work and then
sadly died in a car accident, and then Daniel went
to his grandparents, but his behavior was out of control,
(12:42):
so they didn't want tom either, and then his mom
didn't want to take him back, so he ended up
bouncing between boys' homes. And it was that unstable upbringing
that really shaped him later in life. He started using
alcohol and drugs in his mid teens and started racking
up a pretty substantial criminal record from when he was
(13:04):
quite young. He spent most life growing up in Orange
in country New South Wales. He met a woman that
he got married to and ended up having two children with,
but he doesn't have anything to do with those children
anymore as I understand it. And then he sort of
moved from regional town to regional town, picking up odd jobs,
trying to kick a drug addiction. There were moments in
(13:26):
his life where he looked like he could succeed and
there was hope for him, but that was always short lived.
He'd always somehow fall back into drugs, even if it
was he was living in a new town with new
friends and new people, he'd somehow fine the bad apples
in town and just fall back into the same cycle.
(13:48):
And it wasn't until he moved to Queensland in about
two thousand and five thousand and six, and he met
Hazel Passmore, who became one of the constants in his
life but also shaped him for the next few years.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Let's go forward to two thousand and eight, because that's
sort of the one night that changed everything.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
So this was in September two thousand and eight. Daniel
told his mates that he and Hazel and the kids
were going down to Adelaide for a weekend for one
of the kid's birthdays, and they jumped in a full
drive and they were driving down there. It's a pretty
long drive in the middle of the outback, and at night,
(14:29):
especially when you're driving around those areas, you really need
to be careful of kangaroos. They're all over the road
and they completely right off your car if you hit them.
It was about eleven PM just before and he claims
that he swerved the car to avoid hitting a kangaroo
and the car rolled a few times. He climbed out
of the wreckage and he was relatively uninjured. But two
(14:51):
of Hazel's kids died, and he gives a pretty graphic
and horrific recollection of finding their bodies and his girlfriend
as well. Hazel was left with horrific injuries. She was
in a coma for two and a half weeks, had
to have one her legs amputated, countless operations as well.
Hazel was taken to Alice Springs Hospital and that night
(15:13):
Daniel texts Robbie and said, Nate, I need you to
come to the hospital. I've been in a really bad
car accident. Come and help me. Out. Robbie rushes down
there the next morning and finds Daniel and he's completely
hysterical and talking about he's responsible essentially for killing his
girlfriend's two kids and leaving his girlfriend at the time
unsure of whether she would survive or not. And it
(15:34):
was that day, that crash that really changed things. Robbie
and Carli had been having trouble a little bit before then,
and Robbie got the sense that Carlie wanted to leave town.
She wanted to see what was outside of Alex Springs
and go traveling, and Robbie was pretty happy with the
status quo how things were, but after that crash, Carlie left.
(15:58):
Robbie moved back in with her grandmother and stayed there
for a little while, but then ended up getting closer
to Daniel as well, and she left Alice Springs with
Daniel and went down to Adelaide not long after the crash.
Daniel later claimed that Carly was just a shoulder for
him to cry on and someone that was supporting him.
(16:19):
But they came back to Alice Springs briefly and Carly
took Daniel around to her mother's house and Tanya Webber
was there as well, and the general feeling about Daniel
from the get go was that he was untrustworthy and
there was just something off with him. Carly's mother tried
to convince Carlie to leave Candlea's with her so she
(16:40):
could look after her and Carli could go off and
do whatever she needed to do. But carl loved her
daughter unconditionally and she would never have left her on
her own and she was adamant about taking her with her.
Tanya I interviewed her and she said, you know, you
could just tell there was something wrong with him. He
wouldn't keep eye contact, He didn't really want much to
do with us. He just wanted to get out of there.
(17:02):
There was one point that afternoon where he yelled at
Candlease when she was playing in the backyard. That didn't
sit well at all with Colleen, Carly's mum, or Tanya.
And the last words that Tanya said to Daniel as
he packed Carlie and Canniley's in the car before they
drive to Adelaide was make sure you look after them,
and that was the last time she saw them.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You mentioned Tanya, who was a friend of Carl's mum,
and she's the person who will sort of later help
the police work out who the bodies are. But we're
going to get to her later. But at this point,
Carlie and Daniel they've moved away from Hazel and she's
now in a wheelchair because of that accident where Daniel
was behind the wheel What kind of position is Hazel
(17:45):
in at this point and how is she feeling about
what's happened.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
In two thousand and eight, when Carlie and Daniel and
Candles left Ella Springs and they went down to stay
in Adelaide, Hazel was at in hospital receiving treatment for
the horrific injury she suffered during that car crash. Holdham
was going to her hospital bedside, and when she finally
woke up from a coma, she was told that two
(18:10):
of her children had been killed. You can imagine as
a mother, what kind of pain and grief that would
leave you with. And then she found out that Carlie
and can Lease were down in Adelaide and staying at
Daniel's motel. She was immediately suspicious and started accusing Daniel
of all kinds of things. Daniel was trying to deflect,
saying she's just our friend. She's here to see you
(18:32):
you have nothing to be worried about. But Hazel wasn't
so sure. There's one recollection that she had of the
first day she was allowed out of hospital. She's in
a wheelchair, she's just had her leg amputated. She's feeling
quite vulnerable and insecure, and she goes down to the
shopping street in Adelaide with Daniel and it's clear from
(18:55):
how she describes her interactions with Carlie and her views
that day, that she was very jealous of Carlie. She
told police how Carlie was running around at a skirt
or a dress that Daniel had bought her, and she
could tell that, you know, they were flirting. There was
(19:15):
something going on. And just from reading that, you know,
you can really tell her insecurities just jump out of
the page. And it was the start of this deep
rooted resentment that Hazel had for Carly.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And so Daniel and Carly went to the motel and
then they sort of leave town and they go and
stay with friends. Is that do they go and stay
with Daniel's sort of friends.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
So in November two thousand and eight, Hazel buries her
two children that died in a car accident, and they
have this really emotional traumatic funeral and either that after
her or the next day, Daniel leaves Adelaide and Hazel
tells the police that he left her a ward of
cash under her pillow and Centera text message saying sorry,
(20:02):
gotta go police her after me. They ended up charging
him over that crash, but they weren't actively trying to
hunt him down or turning houses inside out trying to
find him. I think he was just trying to come
up with an excuse or some sort of justification to leave,
(20:23):
and he did leave. Carlie, Daniel and Canderalese drove to
the Act to Canberra and the northern suburbs there and
ended up staying with one of Daniel's relatives, his cousin,
and they settled there for about two weeks.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Police say they're no closer to establishing the identity of
a woman whose remains were found in the Blanglow State
Forest last year. In a first for New South Wales,
police have released a facial approximation image of the woman
in the hope that someone will recognize her. Police say
her death isn't directly linked to convicted serial killer Ivan Malatt,
but they have described the case as unusual.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So what does Daniel do from there?
Speaker 3 (21:03):
In late two thousand and eight, after he leave that house,
he goes he travels back to Adelaide and ends up
getting back in a relationship with Hazel. Unbeknown to Hazel
at the time, he has done something horrible to Carlie
and Candalise, but she's just happy to have him back
(21:27):
in her house and standing by her again. You've got
to remember, she has just been through this incredible trauma.
She's physically disabled for the rest of her life, and
her boyfriend has run off with someone else. She's feeling
particularly vulnerable and upset and just wanted a sense of
normalcy again. So she takes him back in. And it's
(21:48):
not until the following two or three years that she
starts to learn what really happened before he got back
with her.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
He had quite a bizarre sexual relationship with Hazel. Can
you talk us through some of the details there that
would later come out about sort of their proclivities when
it came to their sexual relationship.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Hazel and Daniel, they had this quite strong hold over
one another, and I think that's why they kept getting
back together over the years, and they were together for
so long, and that's because they engaged in these sexual
fantasies that most people wouldn't understand and most people would
quite find quite disturbing. What we've learned is that Daniel
(22:30):
would get Hazel to write out these fantasies that sometimes
involved the abuse of children, sometimes touched on someone's own
actual abuse as a child, and he would get off
on that. And she just told police about finding pornographic
images on his computer of young girls as well. They
(22:52):
were either pubescent or in their twenties.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Detectives have revealed the remains found in a suitcase on
the side of the road near Wenaka almost certainly belonged
to a little girl who may have been killed up
to eight years ago. More than a week after the
child's skeleton was found, police are raging closer to identifying
the victim.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And so eventually, when that relationship falls apart, Daniel finds
himself in a sort of relationship with like a sixteen
year old girl.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Doesn't he. Hazel and Daniel finally break up in about
twenty twelve. Daniel goes back to live with his cousin
at her place in Canberra, and he ends up getting
a relationship with this really young girl. She was about
sixteen seventeen at the time, and she lived up the
road and from what people have told me in neighbors,
(23:44):
old friends of theirs, even Daniel's family themselves, it was
really toxic. It was quite a volatile relationship. Daniel was
using drugs really heavily at the time. They would scream
at each other and then they'd get back together. But
they ended up going and staying up on the central
coast of New South Wales. They were staying at a
caravan park there. Daniel girlfriend at the time, the young
(24:08):
girl Tony, she went back to the act to go
see her family and left hold him in this caravan
park and it was only after about two or three
days that she left that he ended up sexually assaulting
a young girl that was staying at a caravan nearby.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Do we know how old that girl was?
Speaker 3 (24:27):
She was nine years old.
Speaker 9 (24:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
So how long did it actually take for Daniel hold
him to get convicted of this crime?
Speaker 3 (24:35):
He almost immediately police have figured out what's happened. The
victim went back to her mum's caravan and her mum's
partner was there and over the next forty eight hours
the girl breaks down and tells him mum what happened.
The mum's partner goes looking for Daniel, infuriated and chases
(24:57):
him out of the caravan park. Bizarrely, Daniel runs to
the police station in one or two k's away and
tells them that someone's after him, and you know, they're
accusing him of touching up a young girl but didn't
do anything, makes up this ridiculous story that it was
some old guy with a beard. Of course, police didn't
believe him. He was charged and then ended up pleading
(25:19):
guilty to those offenses. And that behavior is indicative of
the sexual interest that Daniel had. But there had only
been sort of tiny little insights into that over the years,
and this to me seemed like years and years of
pent up sexual interest in children, as disgusting as that is,
(25:43):
and he acted on it, and he was using drugs
at the time. He said he hadn't slept for three
days because he'd been using ice. But looking back at
his record, you can tell that this behavior wasn't It
was sort of a sign of the interest that he had.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So these two dead bodies have shown up and Daniel
Holdham is in jail, at the time. How do police
manage to actually link these two cases together.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
It wasn't until October twenty fifteen a woman named Tanya Weber.
She was in the Northern Territory. She was watching the
news and reading different articles about this little girl found
in the suitcase in South Australia. She was looking at
some of the images of the clothing that was founded
in there and recognized this tiny, little pink striped cotton
(26:32):
dress and it felt really familiar to her. And she
started going through some old photographs looking for photos of
a friend of hers and her daughter, Carlie Piers Stevenson
in Candlease, and she came across a photograph of this
little girl Candilease. She's two years old, very cute, blonde hair,
and she was standing looking at the camera in this
(26:53):
picture and she's wearing the exact same pink dress. And
this was particularly alarming because Carlinen and Kendales's family hadn't
seen them in several years since they had left Alice
Bring in thousand and eight. That rang alarm bells to
Tanya and she ended up calling crime stoppers and saying, look,
this could be a long shot, but maybe you should
(27:15):
look at the possibility that that girl in the suitcase
is Candlease.
Speaker 8 (27:19):
Thank you for coming. The purpose of this media conference
is to brief you on the identification of the human
remains that were found in July. The little girl has
been identified now as Candalse Kia Apears, who was born
in two thousand and six in Alice Springs. It's actually
a double breakthrough in that we've also been able to
(27:40):
identify that the human remains found in twenty ten in
the Bilangelo State Forest are that of her mother.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
How was it that this Tanya calls and goes, this
could be Candales, but neither of them were missing people.
We're officially missing people. How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Once they had Candalse's name and they were able to
identify that Candalse was a girl in the suitcase by
getting her medical records, figuring out that was the victim,
and then they were able to link it to the
remains fan of Blankley State Forest and figured out that
was actually her mum, Carl Peters Stevenson. They quickly started
(28:18):
to piece together their last known movements and where they
had been for the bryor seven years, and trying to
answer that question that you just asked as well, how
did no one notice her on missing? Now we know
that's because the person that killed them was pretending that
they were still alive. So he was using Carly's mobile
(28:40):
phone to text her auntie's, her mother, her cousin, her friend,
her ex boyfriend, making up all these fanciful stories saying
I'm in Queensland, I've met someone, I'm really happy. I
just don't want anything to do with you. Or I
don't have any money to buy Candilese a birthday present?
Can you please wire me something? I need five hundred
dollars to come home. At the time, her mum, Colleen,
(29:00):
was going through treatment for breast cancer and they were
really close and she wanted to desperate to know where
her daughter was. So every time she get a text
message saying Mama want to come home, can you just
transfer me money for flights, her mum would do it
without a second thought, and sometimes it was the last
bit of money they had left, especially because they were
pouring a lot into her medical treatment. One of the
(29:22):
saddest aspects of this case is that Colleen ended up
passing away in twenty twelve without knowing whatever happened to
her daughter. And her granddaughter. Another aspect that made people
think this mother and daughter were still alive was that
the man that killed them was accessing Carl's bank account
and taking advantage of her cent to link payments, putting
his own wages through her bank account. That's one of
(29:46):
the key proof of life checks that police perform when
they're investigating missing people as well. They go and have
a look on social media, bank accounts, phone records. And
in two thousand and nine, Carli's mother actually put in
a missing person's report because she hadn't heard from her
in a little while, and the police in Alice Springs
investigated it and they looked at her bank account all
(30:06):
that she accessed her bank account one or two days prior,
so that was a positive sign to them that she
was still alive. They wanted to know that it was
actually the man that killed her taking advantage of whatever
money was in her bank account, and they ended up
calling Daniel Holden. The police called Daniel Holden and asked
him do you know where Carly is? Daniel Holdham made
(30:30):
up this story that she was in Queensland with some
other bloke, but of course she wasn't. So police ended
up closing the investigation quite controversially looking back now, certainly
the detectives I've spoken to said we wouldn't have done
that today because they didn't physically cite Carly. They relied
on a phone call.
Speaker 8 (30:49):
From what I understand, a significant development the investigation has
been that people who we believe may be the offenders
and others have taken over Carly's identity, her telephone, her
bank accounts, has sent a Lincoln family payments in relation
(31:11):
to the telephone, her mobile phone. We believe that the
phone was kept by the offenders and used to provide
some proof of life and to mislead family friends law
enforcement by suggesting that Carlie was still alive because of
activity on her phone.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
In the book, you have this sort of scene when
Colleen is essentially on her deathbed and there were things
that she was sort of hallucinating. Can you talk us
through that?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
After a few years, it had been four years since
Colleen had last seen Carly, her daughter, and her granddaughter, Candallyse.
That was when they left Alice Springs in November of
two thousand and eight with this man Daniel hold them.
She'd receive sporadic text messages from Carl's phone, a very
(31:59):
strange phone call one day from someone that was whispering
down the phone, pretending to be Carly and saying, you know,
I'm scared and I've got two owns and I'm hiding somewhere.
But she never physically cited her daughter after she left
in two thousand and eight. Fast forward to twenty twelve
and Colleen is in the palette of care unit at
Alice Springs Hospital and the doctors have told her family
(32:22):
and her husband, Scott Povey, that she was going to
pass away sooner to get her affairs in order, And
her family and her friends have told me some just
heartbreaking moments of her final days alive, where she would
constantly ask are Carlie and Candles coming? Are they here?
And have you spoken to them? And at one point
(32:43):
when her sister was in the hospital room with her,
Colleen thought she could see Carlien Canderly standing in the
corner of the room, and of course she was hallucinating.
But that wasn't long before she passed away. And as
I said before, it's just such a sad part of
that case. She never knew what happened to Carlien Canderly's
(33:06):
certainly her close friend said she thinks it's better that
way because it would have completely broken her.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
So at this point he's in prison and on the
news there starts to be this talk of these bodies
found and there's a quilt and there's sort of certain
clothing items, which then caught the attention of the family
of Candalesse and Carly. What happens next in terms of
drawing a link between Daniel and these two girls.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Daniel, after he was convicted of that sexual assault, he
was sentenced to a few years jail in New South Wales.
He is serving time there when the suitcase turns up
with Candalice's remains in twenty fifteen, it's all over the news.
You can only assume that he would have seen it
because it was a massive case at the time. And
when police finally identify Candalise and then start looking for Carly,
(34:00):
they ended up ended up finding out that it was
Carli because they were going through cases of unideas remains
around Australia and they came across the Bilanglow case and
compared the DNA profile taken from those bones against Kali's
medical records and it was a match. Very quickly they
started to find out that the last person the mother
(34:22):
in child was sea with was Daniel Holdam. They had
to be pretty delicate in the inquiries that they were
making because they didn't want to tip anyone off. So
it was a very very sacred investigation for one of
a better word. Only a handful of people knew about it,
and they were very careful about the people that they
were talking to. They were quite comfortable with the fact
(34:42):
that Daniel Holden was in jail, so that kept him
at arm's length from key prosecution witnesses as well. In
October twenty fifteen, they coordinated this massive police operation where
they were doing raids in the Act South Australia. They
were interviewing people in our Springs and raids in New
(35:04):
South Wales and it wasn't until that morning in October
that the world or the country found out about Carly
and Kamalese. And at the same time it was timed
to precision that homicide detectives went up to Daniel Holdham's
jail in Cestock in New South Wales and turned his
(35:24):
cell inside out looking for evidence and let him know
for the first time that he was a key suspect
in these murders.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
State Crime Command, Homicide Squad, Strike Force Malaya and South
Australia Major Crimes Task Force MALLE have been investigating the
deaths of Carl per Stevenson and her daughter candalase kiar Apias.
In October this year, a forty one year old male
was arrested at Cesnock Police Station and charged with the
(35:52):
murder of Carl. Earlier this morning, police from the Homicide
Squad arrested the forty one year old man at Paramounta
Police Station. He has since been charged with the murder
of Candlease. At this stay, Joy anticipate that the man
will appear the Paramountal Life Record lad of this afternoon.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
What kind of evidence did they find because they turned
a few houses upside down because he was sort of
a notorious hoarder and kept everything. What kind of stuff
did they find?
Speaker 3 (36:24):
It was quite remarkable the evidence that they did come
across in this investigation. After any homicide investigation, it's hard
enough to try and find DNA evidence and weapons and
photographic evidence. When the police were interviewing Daniel Holdham and
searching through all his stuff, this is seven years after
(36:44):
he committed the murders, but the stuff they came across
was amazing, so they ended up finding photographs that Daniel
Holdham had taken off Carli's body in Blanglo State Forest.
And the way they found that was Hazel had actually
come across this SD card when she was searching through
Daniel Holdham's stuff. She was convinced that he was having
(37:06):
an fair even in twenty eleven twenty twelve, and she
would regularly go through all his stuff and he's in
their bedroom in the back of his car, looking for
evidence to confirm her suspicions. She ended up finding this
total little SD card and put it in to a
card reader and a computer and all these images came
up of what was clearly Carli and he was doing
(37:26):
some pretty horrific things in the photos ed. Hazel ended
up giving that SD card to her sister and she
said to her, if anything happens to me, take this
to the police. Her sister held on to it for
three years and when the news broke that this was
Carli and Candalise and Hazel was in the news as well,
(37:48):
be as her house was being raided in South Australia,
Hazel's sister walked into a police station ran a police
station near her house in South Australia and said, I
think you need to have a look at this. Hand
it over the SD card.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
So had Hazel ever asked him? She'd come across these
images Carli and Candalase who used to be part of
their lives. Suddenly she doesn't see them. Does she ever
confront Daniel and say what happened?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
It's hard to know in this case because there are
so many people that are lying and trying to protect
their own reputation. So just going off what she said,
I guess to police years later, Yes she did ask
Daniel and that's one of the hardest things to understand
is how you could stay with someone after he admitted
to killing a mother and child. He drip fed her
(38:33):
confessions over the years, so from when they got back
together in two thousand and eight until about twenty twelve
when they broke up, and at first it was when
Hazel would confront him after finding Carly's bank card and
Candalie's birth certificate in the back of his car and
just assuming that he was going off to the act
and having an affair with her. Holdham said don't worry.
(38:56):
She's gone. And when Hazel pressed him on that, he said,
and I killed her essentially, And then a little bit
later he would give her a little bit of information
about what happened to Candalase. One of the most hardest
part in this book is that Hazel recounts how Daniel
told her he murdered Candalise after trying to sexually assault her.
(39:20):
So Hazel tells police her justification for staying with him
was that Daniel was a prolific liar and she didn't
know whether to believe him or not, whether that's true,
whether that's just a self serving answer that's up out
for interpretation. But she said she didn't know whether he
was telling the truth or not and how to believe him.
(39:43):
But it was after she found those photographs that confirmed
to her he had committed these murders, and she gave
it to her sister, and then a few months later
they broke up. There was a part in her police
interview where she said, I knew then that I had
to get out of that relationship, otherwise I might not
get out alive.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So from the police, they've seen these photos and to
piece together the final moments of Carli and Candales. What
do we know about how they died.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
We know that Carl and Daniel had an argument when
they were staying in Canberra in December two thousand and eight.
Based on witness accounts. It was overboard over the money
that Carl was meant to be paying to be staying
at Daniel's relative's house. They jumped in her car for
some reason in the middle of the night and drove
to Bilanglo State Forest, which is about one and a
(40:35):
half two hours drive from Canberra. We don't know exactly
what happened in that forest because Daniel Holdham has never
told anyone this is how it happened and this is
why I did it. He's given certain versions over the years,
but they don't match up with any of the evidence.
So we will never really know what happened inside that forest.
But we do know that he murdered her. She had
(40:57):
cracks in her ribs, which suggests there was some blunt
force trauma to her body, and then he's left her
body there and driven back to Canberra. Over the next
few days, he turns his sights to Candlease. The suggestion
is after looking at all the evidence and the kind
of person Daniel was in the interest that he had
(41:17):
is that he killed Carli to try and get access
to Candilese. And we have to try to remember that
he did have this underlying sexual interest in children at
this point and fantasized about child sexual abuse. So one
of the obvious assumptions you can make is that he
had some horrific plans for Candalesse and needed to get
(41:40):
her mother out of the picture. One of the other
suggestions that was made, especially during the court case, was
that after he killed Carli, he was left with her
daughter and he couldn't possibly turn up to Adelaide without Carli,
so we had to get rid of Candilese. So, as
I said, because we don't have a definitive account from
the killer of why he did it, we can only
(42:02):
make a few assumptions about what happened. After he's turn
to Canberra without Carli, he gets his cousin's husband to
trade in Carl's car, essentially to get rid of it
and to get a new one so there's no trace
of Carli anymore. Then he tells his cousin and her
husband that he's going to go and drop Candlease at
her grandmother's house. In South Australia. They jump in this
(42:27):
new cover. They have candleicse in the back seat and
they start driving there. But he doesn't go straight to Adelaide.
He makes a number of stops along the way. Years
later police were able to figure out the exact route
that he went from tracking his phone records and his
bank statements and credit card statements, and it's it's quite
interesting when you look at it.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
They have a.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Physical map of his stops along the way, how long
he stopped at each town, the phone calls he was
making as well, and they sent some detectives out and said, okay,
go find out what he was doing. Even though it
was years later, they were able to figure out that
he went to Woolworth in Wogga Wogga and spent twenty
five dollars or thereabouts, and they requested his receipt from
(43:14):
the time, and this is several years later and they
ended up getting an itemized receipt. And these items on
their own look harmless enough, but in this context they're
particularly chilling. He bought garbage bags, chucks, wipe's hand soap
and then got back in the car with candle lease
drove on another hour to Nerandra, a tiny town outside
(43:36):
of Wogga, and checked into a motel. And again an
amazing piece of evidence that they've been to be able
to pick up years later was the handwritten check in
notice that Daniel Holdham signed when he checked in with Candlelese.
And at this point of the investigation, police didn't know
exactly where Candilease had died. They knew that she left
(43:56):
Canberra alive and she turned up dead in South Australia,
so they were trying to figure out where she was
murdered somewhere in between those two locations, and they needed
to pin down the last place that she was seen alive.
They go to this motel and they searching through all
the old records looking for anything they can that will
show Daniel checked in there because they knew on his
(44:19):
bank statements that he paid for a night. Couldn't find it,
so they went and tracked down the old motel owner
and said, look, we know it's ages ago, but is
there any chance that you kept your old records and
she had nothing to do with the business anymore. But remarkably,
a week later she calls police and says, I think
I have what you're looking for they go out to
(44:39):
her house and there's a small piece of paper with
the motel name on the top of it, and Daniel
Holdham has written his name, his address, his phone number
and marked one adult and one child and that was
essentially the last sign of Canderlelyse alive. Police believe that
(45:01):
she was either murdered inside a room at that motel
or near the motel somewhere before her body was put
in that suitcase with all the clothing and that beautiful
blanket of hers, and he just chucked it out like
it was rubbish on the side of the highway before
driving straight back to his ex girlfriend's house.
Speaker 10 (45:23):
Today, the police told Candalesse's grandfather and through him, other
family that a forty one year old man who is
charged with the murder of Carli Candalesse's mother will also
be charged with the murder of Candleesse. This is very
much welcome news. It is welcome because those who love
Candalise want her killer call to account for such a
(45:45):
despicable crime. Homicide is a most heenous crime. Carli's and
Candalesse's family and friends have had their lives suddenly and
horribly disrupted. Nothing has prepared these people for their suffering.
For them life will never be the same. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And he then went to court when they've got all
of this evidence together. What was the court case like
and what was the conviction.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
When it all broke, it was huge. People couldn't believe
that these two cases were linked. They were so high
profile on their own and to have them linked was
just mind boggling. I remember sitting in the newsroom one
morning and a call came through from someone in the
police saying, look, there's going to be a huge announcement
and we're going to link these two cases. We didn't
(46:41):
know which cases they were, and we're all speculating could
be William Tyrell and Madeline McCain or what's going on here,
And then to find out it was those two cases
was just incredible. So you can imagine the hype and
the media interest around it. Maitland Court was where Daniel
Holdham appears a week later when he was charged with
the murders in October twenty fifteen, and the court was
(47:04):
packed and he appeared by audio visual link and it
was the first time that people got to see him
almost in the flesh and get a sense of what
he was like, but it wouldn't be until years later
that he actually appeared in person in court and that
was during his committal hearing in Sydney. There was the
sense that he just wanted to do anything that he
(47:25):
could to delay it. He was admitted to hospital, he
left all his legal documents in a jail in Goldben,
He sacked his lawyer, He wanted to self represent and
it was just getting incredibly frustrating. But you know, the
magistrate was just determined to make it happen and wasn't
going to let him wriggle out of this, and we
all expected that he was going to go to trial,
(47:47):
even though the case against him was amazing. Police were
able to link all this stuff that we'd spoken about,
the stuff he bought it wogga wogga was used in
the way that Candale's body was discarded. The photographs. They
were able to close up on a mole on Daniel
Holdham's arm that was in one of the photographs with
(48:07):
Carli's body, the confessions he had made to his ex
girlfriends over the years as well, But he was just
adamant that he wasn't going to admit guilt. That wasn't
until twenty eighteen. It was a week out from his trial.
It was set down for three months. Witnesses had booked flights,
the police were putting the final touches on the brief.
(48:28):
It was going to be huge, and all of a
sudden he turns around and pleads guilty to two counts
of murder. And the one condition I guess he had
was he was adamant there was a non publication or
to placed on someone that was very close to him.
He was worried about their protection, and he entered the
(48:49):
guilty please, and that was It was sort of a
bittersweet relief, I guess for Carlin and Cannale's family. And
then it wasn't until November late last year where he
went to sentencing, and it was the first time then
when members of Carline Kennealse's family stood up and read
out victim impacts haatements. There were a really good sense
of who who this young mother and her child were.
(49:13):
The family were quite private and they respected the judicial process.
They didn't want to speak out or say anything that
would jeopardize that until it was all over. So to
hear them stand up and court one after another and
talk about the fond memories they had of the girls
and how much they missed them was just heartbreaking. Daniel
Holden was sitting there the whole time. He seemed completely disinterested,
(49:33):
just flicking through papers like it was just a mundane activity.
And then he was finally sentenced to two terms of
life imprisonment. That was after he tried to change he's
guilty plead to the murder of Candlease at the last minute.
Thankfully the judge was having nothing none of that and
pushed on.
Speaker 11 (49:53):
A Sydney judge has sentenced Daniel hold Him to life
in prison for the murder of Carly Pierce Stevenson and
her daughter, Candies Pierce. It was a pause from the
public gallery when the sentence was handed down.
Speaker 7 (50:06):
Robert Hume said Daniel James Holdham showed complete disdain for
the existence of his girlfriend, Carlie Pierce Stevenson, and that
to him, she was just flesh that could be extinguished
for his vile pleasure. He said the manner in which
she was killed amounted to extreme gravity and appalling depravity.
And he said that Canalis was a completely defenseless two
year old girl who was intentionally killed with some forethought,
(50:29):
and the fact that there was a sexual element to
her death only made it more despicable.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
And the last thing I wanted to ask you is
what it was about this case that you couldn't let
go of. What was it that you found so particularly
interesting and compelling about this that prompted you to write
a book.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
When I was reporting on this case as a newspaper
journalist in twenty fifteen, I remember being constantly frustrated that
I couldn't fit everything into one newspaper article. I was
always leaving something out, and with each press conference on
this case, there was just new shocking information that was out.
There was a sense that the case couldn't get any worse,
(51:09):
but then it did, and I felt like it really
lent itself to long form journalism. It needed to be
in a format where the whole entire story could be told.
It seemed like there was just so much to it
that wasn't being explored either. Something that struck me throughout
this was we didn't know much about Carlie and Canderies,
(51:30):
and that's only because their family respected their privacy. But
I wanted to really be able to highlight the victims
at the center of this case and not focus so
much on the person who did these horrible things to
them at the end of it, you know, having finished
the book, I think that's something that I'm most proud of,
(51:51):
or I found most rewarding, was being able to give
people a real sense of who Carlie and Kenley's were
and challenge some of those misconceptions people came up with
because she was a young mother, or as she had
been involved in drugs just before her death, that didn't
define her, and I think it was really important to
(52:13):
tell people that the kind of people Carlin Kennelly's were.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
Thank you so much for your time and for telling
us that story in the book is just so insightful,
and it's exactly what you've done. There are two humans
at the center, and that's something that I think we
need to be reminded of a lot when it comes
to true crime. So thank you.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 9 (52:33):
Carlie pier Stevenson and daughter Candalise finally reunited after being
found murdered more than a thousand kilometers apart. Early this morning.
Their bodies were carried to hers at an Alice Springs
funeral home before being driven to the desert Life Church
for a private funeral. In attendance, family close friends are
representative of SA Police and the Acting Commissioner for Victims' Rights.
(52:57):
All of them were dressed in pink and blue, Carli
and Candalise's favorite colors.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
You can buy Ava Benny Morrison's book The Lost Girls
in all good bookstores now or online via the link.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
In our show notes.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
For maps, photos and more details about the case of
Carlie and Candalise, check out the description in the notes
of this episode, or head to our website www. Dot
mamameya dot com dot au. True Crime Conversations is a
Mumameya podcast. Our senior producer and editor is Elise Cooper.
If you liked this episode, then be sure to leave
(53:36):
a review on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
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