December 10, 2025 • 35 mins
On March 17, 2015, 17-year-old Masa Vukotic left her Doncaster home for an evening walk through her local park, a routine she had followed countless times.
That night, her boyfriend, Timothy Draper, did not receive a goodnight text from Masa. By morning, police were at his door with devastating news: Masa had been brutally stabbed 49 times in Koonung Creek Linear Reserve, her screams having been heard by neighbours who called emergency services.
The man responsible, Sean Price—a previous offender out on bail—would go on to continue a spree of violence before eventually surrendering to police.
You can listen to Michael's podcast with The Age, Diagnosing Murder, here.
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Guest: Michael Bachelard
Host: Claire Murphy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
On March seventeen, at twenty fifteen, seventeen year old schoolgirl
Marsa Vuketich left her home in Doncaster, Melbourne at around
six pm for her usual evening walk through her local park.
Earlier that day, the keen cosplayer who was obsessed with
the color pink, had attended classes at Canterbury Girls Secondary College.
She was hoping to one day become a lawyer. She'd
(00:23):
come home, shared a meal with her family, and then
spent some time texting her boyfriend Timothy Draper. They were
chatting about which dress she should wear to an upcoming formal,
but after that conversation, Timothy didn't receive any more messages
from her. Now that struck him as a bit odd
because she would normally say good night, but then he
assumed she was just busy, or maybe she'd fallen asleep. Instead, Masa,
(00:46):
wearing her headphones and listening to music, had gone for
a walk along the familiar footpath in the nearby Kunung
Creek Linear Reserve, a quiet suburban park where she felt safe.
It was used by a lot of other locals to
exercise and walk their dogs, and it was of her
everyday routine. But as she continued along the path, she
was suddenly confronted by a man. By the next morning,
(01:08):
before the sun was even up, police were knocking on
Timothy's door, and instead of waking up to a text
from his girlfriend, he was told the unthinkable, Marsa had
never made it home. I'm Claire Murphy and you're listening
to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
(01:28):
most about them. The court would later hear how Marsa
Vukeitch was forced into a secluded area of the Kunann
Creek Linear Reserve and stabbed forty nine times. Her screams
were heard by neighbors who contacted emergency services, but despite
paramedics rushing to the scene along with police, they couldn't
save her. Mars's body was found at approximately six fifty
(01:52):
pm that evening near a footbridge. Police would scour CCTV
footage in the area, spotting a man in a red
shirt a mohawk shaved into his hair fleeing the scene
carrying a white plastic bag. They would also see him
jump on a bus, taking with him in that bag.
What police believe is the murder weapon. But Master's murder
wasn't the end of his violence. In the days it followed,
(02:14):
the man who would later be identified as thirty one
year old Sean Price would rob a woman at knife point,
beat a man in an elevator, rape a woman in
a Christian bookstore. Eventually, he would hand himself into police,
who realized they already knew him. In fact, he'd handed
himself into them before, more than ten years earlier, and
had a long history of violence and mental health issues,
(02:37):
committing crimes and expressing concerning behaviors that should have seen
him hand a much harsher punishments and be given much
more support. Instead, he was free to rape and murder.
Journalist and host of the podcast Diagnosing Murder Michael Bachelard
covered Master's story extensively in twenty fifteen when she was killed,
(02:58):
and then again in twenty sixteen Whence was convicted. He
joins us, now, Michael, welcome to True Crime Conversations. I'd
like to start with you on what exactly happened on
March seventeen. So we know that Marsa was walking in
the park and was confronted by a man in the park.
(03:18):
We've since learned exactly what happened on that day. Can
you talk us through it?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah, So Sean Christian Price had been released from prison
perhaps six months earlier, and it's fair to say that
his rage and kind of symptoms of his illness had
been building over that time. And so you know, while
you've got Marsha going about her day as a year
(03:44):
twelve student at school doing VCE, coming home, having dinner,
you know, preparing for her evening walk, putting her headphones
in and going off on her walk, you also have
this man whose rage has been building for six months,
who's that day, March seventeenth, twenty fifteen, has been roaming
by public transport all over Melbourne, from Sunbury in the
(04:06):
west to Doncaster in the east, on and off trains
and buses, planning on killing someone, probably a woman, but
not knowing who and not really having a plan except
that he was full of rage for people he saw
as affluent, middle class. He described killing and raping women
(04:29):
as being a natural high, which he preferred to the
chemical high of drugs, but he participated, or I guess
enjoyed both. And so you've got these two kind of
people coming together. One young woman seventeen years old, you
wanting to be a lawyer, a cosplayer, princess to her
friends going about innocently going about her business, and another
(04:54):
man roaming Melbourne to try and find a victim. And
they came together at who known Linear Park at about
six fifty pm on March the seventeenth Saint Patrick's Day.
In twenty fifteen. We've got witnesses in that park saying
they saw a man hanging around a jogger. A female
(05:14):
jogger had run past and seen this man, who she
noted a fit looking, not bad looking, but fit, kind
of edgy looking, thirty one year old Sean Price. And then,
unfortunately for Marsha, she comes along and she doesn't know
what's going on. We suspect she had headphones in, probably
(05:34):
listening to music. He says, I saw this woman talking
to birds. He said, like some you know, some yuppy
Cinderella type figure. And he resolves to kill her, and
he jumps out from behind a tree, drags her into
the bushes and stabs her forty nine times in the neck.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now her family start to worry about her after she
doesn't return from her walk. The way that Marsa's mother
finds out what's happened is truly heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So yeah, at that time of year, it was still light,
it was still they out saving and her mother started
to get worried when Marsha hadn't come home. She'd been
calling her on the phone and trying to raise her.
It was unlike Marsha not to answer, so she herself
went down. The mother went down to Kunung Lanier Reserve
where she knew Marsha had been walking, and she always
(06:30):
saw all this police activity, and these police officers gathered
in the area, and she went up to a police
officer and said, listen, my daughter's missing. I don't know
where she is. I've been calling her. The police officers
suggests that she call her phone, So her mother calls
her and in the bushes where the body is lying,
the phone rings, and that's how they know that Marsha
(06:53):
is the victim.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So paramedics and police turned up pretty quickly because neighbors
had called in that they'd heard screaming. But Price has
already gotten away. What do we know about his movements
when he leaves Kunung Linear Park.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
So we know that this wasn't premeditated in the sense
that he was going to kill Marsha Vuktik. We do
know it was premeditated in that he had prepared. He
had a bag in it with a spare T shirt
and after he's killed her, he was covered in blood.
He's got a knife in his hands. He walks quickly
away and finds a tap in the backyard. He washes
(07:31):
the knife, He washes his hands and face with the blood.
He puts his fresh T shirt on over the top
of the T shirt that he's been in and he
gets on a bus and his heads west again and
gets off at Abbotsford, so he's quickly moved away from
the scene. He travels around a bit more that night
and finally ends up back at his unit in a
(07:53):
suburb called Albion in Melbourne's far West that night and
goes to bed.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
In the days, though he's not satisfied after killing somebody,
his violence and rage is still simmering. What does he
do in the days after he's killed mars.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Well The following day in March eighteen, he goes out
again and again he starts roaming, and he says later
that at that time he is planning to kill somebody else,
but somewhere along the line, a stranger gives him fifty
dollars and that appeases him to the extent that he
is capable of resisting those murderous urges on day two,
(08:35):
so he doesn't kill anyone. But day three, March nineteen,
he's out again. At this point, there's this massive police
operation to try and find him and find out who
this guy is that they're sort of tracking his movements
on the day that he killed Marsha. But he goes
out again. He's out and about tooling around Melbourne on
(08:56):
public transport and he ends up in Footscrape and there
he checks in to his parole officer, and the parole
officer meets him and then lets him go again, and
clearly the message has not at that point got through
(09:16):
that Sean Price is the man who they're all searching for.
And he goes He goes out. He's in a pedestrian footbridge.
There's a lift and he gets in the lift and
he punches this man repeatedly in his face and steals
his wallet. He tries to steal a car, but the
owner of the car fights him off and he runs off.
(09:38):
Then he goes into a Christian bookshop, and there in
the Christian bookshop, he sexually assaults the worker there and
the most brutal fashion, you know, he lies on her,
he taunts her, he says, where's your Jesus now, he
rubs himself against her, and then he runs off, and
that's the sexual assault allegation that he's then tried for later,
(10:01):
And he says later that he he knows at this
point that he's going to be in prison for a
long time and he just wanted to get his rocks off,
essentially before he spends most of the rest of his
life in prison. And then he goes back to the
police station and turns himself in and he says, I'm
the Donnie killer, the don Caster killer, I'm the Donnie killer,
(10:22):
and turns himself in and is arrested.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And about the exact same time that he's handing himself in,
people do start to recognize who he is though, right
and I understand that maybe someone who even works for
the Department of Justice rang in and said that I
think I know who this is because he had a
history with them.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Right well, Shawn Price has spent basically his entire adult
life in prison. He'd been arrested in two thousand and
four after some assaults sexual assaults, particularly in two thousand
and two and two thousand and three, again random street assaults.
He would drive around in his car with his pea
(10:57):
plates on and ask for directions, stop women, ask for directions,
then follow them and then assault them. One woman he
assaulted on the street, pulled her pants down and assaulted
her on the street. A thirteen year old girl coming
home from school, he assaulted her. Another woman he followed
into her home and assaulted her there. So in two
(11:19):
thousand and four, he was charged with twenty two separate
charges involving I think thirteen different women, and he was
sent to jail for five years and five months for
those assaults, ranging from scary kind of threats and assaults
to digital penetration rape. And he served that sentence in prison.
(11:41):
But then so when I first came across this story,
I'm starting to look up these sentences, and it turns
out like five years and five months, but doesn't work
between two thousand and four and when he's released in
twenty fifteen or twenty fourteen. End of twenty fourteen, and
in prison, he's made a lot of enemies He's assaulted
(12:02):
a lot of people. He's been sentenced for those assaults.
So he is rocketed between Thomas Emblin, which was a
forensic psychiatric prison facility, and prison where is tried and
sentenced over and again for prison assaults. So this is
a man who is well known to the detention system
and well known for his sexual proclivities and for his violence,
(12:25):
his random and explosive violence. In two thousand and six,
he briefly made the news, though I don't think by name,
because he assaulted the then Health minister, later the Prime Minister,
Tony Abbott, who was visiting Thomas Emblin. He jumped out
at Abbot, grabbed him, punched him twice in the face
(12:46):
while that this senior politician, his minister, was doing a
tour of the facility. So yeah, he was well known
to prison authorities.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
You're listening to true crime Conversations with me Clare Murphy.
Today I'm speaking with Jenny List Michael Bachelade about the
tragic case of Massa Vukitch and the man who took
her life. Coming up, we delve into the shocking crime
Sean Price had already committed throughout the early two thousands,
long before he was able to attack Marsa. So what
(13:19):
do we know about his background up until these assaults
begin in two thousand and three, two thousand and four,
And there's this idea that maybe he's done a lot
of other crimes in other states, but he's just never
been charged with any of them.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
What we know about Sean Christian prices background, his deep
background is that he is a descendant of the mutineers
from the bounty ship. The Christian is a reference to
Fletcher Christian, one of the chief mutineers who after the mutiny,
they put the captain will Imply on a little boat
and sent him off into the ocean and then landed
(13:57):
on Pitca, went to Tahi, he abducted, enslaved some men
and women from Tahiti and then sailed off to pitt
Can Island where they scuttled the boat and burned it
and set up a new society and became Pitcurners. Now
we do know that he was abused as a child,
(14:17):
that there was drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse in
his family background. He spoke of being beaten up by
his father, of having his father put out cigarettes on
him as a child, so out of that horrendously abusive background,
he becomes this violent, unpredictable, somewhat undiagnosable patient and abuse it.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Well, that's the thing, because when I was looking at
the mental health aspect of his situation, it seems doctors
have tried to diagnose him with a whole bunch of things.
We're talking schizophrenia, psychosis. Was he a psychopath, Was he
a narcissist? Did he have borderline personality disorder? It doesn't
seem anyone's really like narrowed it down to exactly what
his issues are.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
That's right. This was It became clear to me when
I was researching this store and speaking to people who'd
worked with him at the various facilities he'd been at,
that various diagnoses were made over various periods of time,
but that none of them seemed to really fit his symptoms.
He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, but when he
was put on anti schizophrenia medication, it kind of took
(15:27):
some of the edge off, but it didn't fix him.
He was on anti psychotic medication for a long time.
He was supposed to be on anti psychotic medication when
he was released. At the time when he ultimately then
killed Marshall Vuketik, but he was living in the community
and his supervision was pretty light. It's not clear that
he was taking his medication. He didn't like taking his
(15:48):
medication because it took the edge off. So yeah, he
was a seriously disturbed, essentially undiagnosable patient. But interestingly, he
wasn't tried as somebody who was incapable of knowing right
from wrong, and of being somebody who had to be
(16:08):
tried as not fit or competent to plead. He pleaded,
he pleaded guilty. His competence wasn't seriously questioned in the case,
and he was locked up as somebody who was a
competent person in prison. Now he's essentially in isolation because
he is such a dangerous, such an unpredictable, and such
(16:29):
an unfixable character. In Thomas Embling, I know they tried
to treat him with you know, they gave him books
to read, with exercise, with meditation. He had a girlfriend
for a while who was herself a schizophrenic killer, and
she tried to convert him to Christianity. I tried that
for a while, but that didn't stick either. So yeah,
(16:50):
I mean, his issues are incredibly complex and it makes
him a very very dangerous man.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
What it seems when you read through the that he
has been up against judges or has been punished for
things that he's done behind bars, that he keeps getting
lenient punishments. I mean, in the bigger scale of things,
obviously wouldn't seem lenient to your eye, but to his circumstances,
they seem quite lenient. And every time it seems factored
(17:19):
in that his mental health is an issue, but that
that's not really treated well enough or monitored well enough.
Especially when he's released back out into the community. It
seems every report said he is a serious offender, he's
at very high risk of repeat offending. And yet it
(17:41):
seems like his monitoring and supervision, as you mentioned before,
was not great, and that he was kind of left
to his own devices. No one's monitoring that he's taking
his medication. Why was he treated so leniently when he
was such an obviously violent man.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That is kind of a remarkable fact of this case,
and it's the six million dollar question. Really, Well, let's
go back a little bit. In twenty thirteen, he was
released from prison, but he was deemed to be dangerous,
and he was put in a unit called the Kerala
Unit of ra at prison in Country Victoria, and the
(18:17):
Kerrella Unit is where they send people who have finished
their sentences but are deemed to be still too dangerous
to be released into the community.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Is this the place they refer to as the village
of the damned?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
They refer to Corella as the Village of the Damned,
And that's because a lot of sexual offenders end up there,
people who are pedophiles and who believe are not reformed
and are not safe to be put into the community.
And this to some extent fitted Shorn Price's profile. But
at Kerrella he became this serial pest. He was violent,
(18:50):
He assaulted people, He assaulted the other prisoners, he assaulted
the guards. There are two occasions on which he does
these things and goes back for trial on these things,
and for one of them he's sentenced to three years
and eight months in prison, but on appeal that's reduced
to ten months, and so he serves his ten months.
(19:12):
He's sent back to Corella. He takes an iron bar
to the cars of the guards. He threatens the guards,
he smashes up the gym. There he's tried again and
again given a ten month sentence. After he's finished that sentence,
the correction system is wondering what to do with him,
I should say, shortly before he finishes his sentence. In
(19:33):
twenty fourteen, he does a spell in Port Philip Prison
and there he's such a difficult, violent character they put
him in an isolation cell. And over two days in
an isolation cell, he is on the intercom constantly, and
we know this because these calls are recorded and I
have those recordings. He is urinating the cell, he's flooding
(19:56):
the cell. He's making the most horrendous threats to the
g guards and to people. He says, when I get out,
I'm going to come and get you. I'm going to
kill children. I'm going to slip their throats, so I'm
going to put the knife so far into them that
you know, it gets into their guts. I'm going to
come and get you. The guard he's talking to the
guard is giving it back as well. She calls him
rain man. She says, you know, how are you going
(20:17):
to be buzzing that into com if all your fingers
are broken. So there's this incredibly violent environment. He's charged
with those threats to kill. In fact, two days after
he's released in twenty fourteen, late twenty fourteen, he's brought
in and does a police interview over these charges. But
you know, they let him go. And why have they
(20:40):
not sent him back to Kerrella where at least he's
under supervision, because they say they can't handle him because
of these two previous incidents of violence at Kerrella. They
can't handle him, So what do they do. They put
him in a unit in a suburban housing block in
West Albion and ask him to come in for psychological
(21:02):
profiling and bail conditions weekly. That's how this man is treated,
and that's where he was living, and this is the
state he was in when he killed this young seventeen
year old girl in Doncaster.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
It feels so hard to comprehend that a man who
is that violent and that unstable, that the prison system,
the reform system, cannot handle him, that the next logical
step is to release him into the community where what
the community is expected to handle him. Has anyone along
this journey up to that point ever taken responsibility for that,
(21:39):
Because the result of that is that Massavukitich is dead.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Well, you know, if he'd served his full three years
and eight months on that twenty thirteen conviction, he would
still have been in prison on the day he was
killing Marsha Vukitik, but that was reduced to ten months. Look,
the state government, I think, recognizing what a mis handling
of this man had occurred here, did eat some humble pie.
(22:09):
They agreed that this had been badly handled. They apologized,
they apologized, The Premier apologized to the family, and they
instituted a review, the Harper Review of dealing with these
kind of serious sexual and violent offenders. That review made
thirty five recommendations. The government accepted them all and of
things like, you know, better orders here, and more supervision
(22:31):
there and so forth. Stuff that kind of is procedural
and bureaucratic and perhaps works, perhaps doesn't, but you know,
it doesn't change the fact that for this man, in
this case, the handling just failed. There was a proposal
at one point to put him on what's called a
detention order. This was debated up and down the prison system.
(22:52):
A detention order would be an order which would allow
them to keep him in prison even though his sentence
had ended. It's a pretty big thing to do. It's
kind of like extra judicial detention if you like.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's not isolated, though, there's plenty of criminals who remain
behind bars purely from state governments enacting legislation that stops
them from being released.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
That's right. That tends to be one off legislation for
people who were just a danger to society. So this
detention order was considered for Shawn Price and rejected for
reasons I'm not sure of. But again, you know, he
was supposed to be on a ten year supervision order
and yet he was allowed to live out in the community.
This was an egregious failure by the system in Victoria.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
After the break, we examined what Seawan Price revealed in
his police interviews and how his behavior in the interview
room exposed who he really was when he's finally he
hands himself in. But when he's finally sat down and
police interview him about what had happened to marsa vug
did what did he say? What did he actually admit to?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
He admitted to doing it, he said, I think the
phrase is he said he'd seen this girl talking to
a bird like snow fucking white, and he told her
that she was all yuppy and shit, and that's why
he wanted to kill her. He had this incredible chip
on his shoulder about people who were he perceived to
be wealthy and successful, and this young woman fit that mold,
(24:21):
unfortunately for her in his twisted mind, and off he
went and killed her. So he admitted to the murder. Oddly,
he resisted for a long time admitting to the rape
in the bookshop, whether or not he thought that was
didn't counters rape, or whether he thought there was some
(24:41):
kind of defining thing in his mind that he should
resist that. Then he pleaded guilty to it, and then
later he came back, you know, years later, he came
back and tried to appeal at representing himself. He tried
to appeal that added sentence for the sexual assault, and
that was thrown out as well.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Just I mean, we don't know the answer to this,
as we don't know the answer to many things with
this case. But do you think that him having spent
time behind bars as a sexual predator taught him that
maybe he didn't want to go back in as a
sexual predator again, that perhaps it's better life in jail
to be seen as a murderer rather than a sex offender.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
I think for him, as you say, we don't know,
we don't know what was going on in his mind.
We do know his words were essentially I knew I
was going back for a long time, so I wanted
to bust an up before I went back in. Hence
the sexual assault on day three of his rampage. I
think for him he refers to assault as a natural
(25:46):
high sexual assault. I think he'd never killed anyone before
and he wanted to see what that was like. I
think often with sexual killers and sexual abusers that the murder,
the torture, the pain, the fear is it's more about
that than about the actual sexual act, if you like.
(26:09):
He refers to he sees it as being the thrill
he gets. All the high he gets is from the torture,
not actually from the sexual act, if you like. So
for him, perhaps the murder was just an extension of that.
It's noteworthy. I suppose that it's a woman that he's talking,
not a man, so I think there's a sexual element
(26:31):
to that as well.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I mentioned this kind of earlier, but I wanted to
touch on the fact that so growing up, his parents
did eventually separate and his mum is living in New
South Wales and his dad in Victoria, where he eventually
commits a lot of those crimes. But there is suggestion
that perhaps he's behind crimes in New South Wales also
because you would sometimes go and live with his mother,
and that he'd potentially been connected to some crimes there too.
(26:53):
Has that ever been fully investigated in the timeframe, especially
in the aftermath of what happened to Marsa.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Look, as far as I know, there was some speculation
around that, but from what I can see and from
what I know, there's been no serious effort by policing
New South Wales to investigate those alleged crimes in New
South Wales.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I think what's really interesting about Sean Price is to
look at it from an outside perspective. Just knowing what
he's done and the reasons for him, the ones he's
given himself for doing what he did, he seems like
such an unhinged human being who's really suffering with some
very deep mental health issues. But when you hear police
(27:36):
interviews with him, he seems very rational and reasonable. When
he's explaining the things that he's done, he's almost unemotional
about it to a point, but he does say, like,
for example, when he's been in court, he has talked
about the fact that he feels like he shouldn't be
locked up for life. He knows there's something wrong with
him mentally, and that he should be able to prove
that he is a decent member of society, and that
(27:56):
he should be taking his medication. Like, he seems very
rational and reasonable when you do see him in this setting,
but then he can be completely unhinged.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Also.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
I mean, he's tried to fire his legal team and
claim a whole bunch of stuff. But is that really
interesting that the fact is that he does seem to
really quite understand himself in those situations.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Well, I actually met him. I met Sean Price. I
was the investigations editor at the Age, and I got
a call from a guy saying, in fact, he dropped
some stuff off at reception for me to look at.
And he called me and he said, you know, I've
got some complaints about the way I was handled in
the prison system. And he was referring to those days
(28:38):
in isolation. And he got through the FOI Act, the
freedm Information Act, he got the recordings of his interactions
with guards in the system during that isolation, and he'd
edited them to put paint the guards in the worst
possible life light, and he'd sent them to me, and
he said he wanted to do a story about how
(29:00):
mistreatment of people in the prison system was driving them
towards radical Islam. And this is a period twenty fourteen
when Isis is running rampage in Iraq and Syria and
there's fears in the Australian community about radicalized Islam. So
this struck me as potentially a good story. And I
(29:21):
called him and I said, look, I'm going to need
more than just the edited versions of this. I need
to hear the whole thing. I need to verify what
you're saying. And he agreed to hand them over, and
he agreed to meet me, and he came to the
Age building and we sat outside and had a coffee,
and he seemed rational. He was rational, He had a story,
(29:42):
applausible story to tell, and he was prepared to give
me the evidence. So he gave me the full six
hours of the tapes. He also gave me his DVD
of his police interview, which I watched and I noted
in my notebook he seemed edgy. He was quite a
handsome man, a very fit, lean, kind of muscular, and
(30:04):
that kind of slightly scary demeanor. He looked on edge.
I thought perhaps he was on methamphetamines or something like that.
But he was kind of clearly on edge, but also rational,
soft spoken, you know, and he had a plausible story
to tell. I parked the story. It was going to
be complicated. I was working on something else. And it
(30:26):
wasn't until a week later, or a bit over a
week later, when I saw the photos of this man
in the back of a police car. I thought, shit,
I know who that is, and I was able to
identify him. But yeah, long diversion. To answer your question,
he can come across as rational. The people I've spoken
to who dealt with him in the system say that
(30:47):
he was always oscillating between this. They described it as
love hate. So he was oscillating between rationality and extreme
and kind of unpredictable violence. He would oscillate between in
self loathing and loathing of others and anger at others.
He read a lot. Clearly a clever man. He read
(31:08):
a lot, but he found it hard to stick to things.
He exercised a lot, or he didn't and became kind
of lazy and fat. As they described him, he was
either on or off and like this kind of split personality.
And so yeah, a rational, calm, self reflective man, self
(31:30):
loathing man, in some ways also prone to these extreme
and unpredictable outbursts of violence. It made him incredibly hard
to diagnose and also hard to predict and hard to control.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
In the aftermath of what Sean Price did, obviously there's
a family who's now missing a daughter and a sister,
and in fact, her death really hit her local community very,
very hard. There were people who are very scared in
the aftermath of that and were very relieved when Sean
Price was taken into custody. But more than a thousand
people turned up to her funeral, and the family spoke
(32:05):
so eloquently about the pain and the suffering that they
had endured. What kind of legacy does the death of
Master Ugiti to leave on that local community.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Look, it's incalculable the death of a relative, a loved one,
in such a random way, and because there's no explaining it,
there's no predicting it, there's no reason for it, there's
no motive beyond I just wanted to kill someone. It
(32:38):
seems so random, so pointless, so inexplicable, and that kind
of death, I know, leads it to mark on families
and communities. Does it mean that people won't go down
and walk in that beautiful little park in Doncaster? No
(32:59):
people walk there every evening. Does it mean we have
to change the way we live our lives? Know, because
we can't. But you know it has left its mark.
It's left its mark in Melbourne. It came not that
long after the murder of Jill Maher again by man
on parole Adrian Bailey was on parole. Yeah, it leaves
(33:23):
its mark on a society. But people move on and
you know, we have to live. We live our lives
because we don't have much choice. We have to.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
I guess the one big legacy though, that legislation you
spoke about, the recommendations from the report that's known as
Mars's Law. Now, do police think that that has made
any difference those recommendations being implemented.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think it's fair to say that Mars's Law and
those those recommendations and the existence of Shawn Price has
made the authorities here more alert to the idea that
certain people shouldn't be in the community. You know, I
probably will describe myself as a civil libertarian, and I
find that a hard sentence to say. But when you
(34:09):
see the legacy of Sean Price, you see the behavior
of Seawan Price, I think, you know, there are some
people who just are bad and who need the kind
of extreme end of custodial law that we now have
in place. And those laws should be applied incredibly, sparingly
(34:30):
and with great reluctance. But sometimes they need to be applied,
and somebody like Sean Price is somebody that they need
to be applied to.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Sean Price is currently serving his forty year minimum sentence
in the high security Alaria unit of bow And Prison
in Victoria. He's made several attempts to appeal his sentence,
which have been refused, and he's been adding charges to
his rap sheet while behind bars, including one for assaulting
a prison officer. He'll be eligible for BARL twenty fifty
five when he'll be in his seventies. Will he be
(35:03):
any more suitable for a lease into the community, then
time will tell. Thank you to Michael for helping us
tell this story. You can find a link to Michael's
podcast Diagnosing Murder in our show notes. If you want
to see images from this story, head to our Instagram
page at True Crime Conversations. True Crime Conversations is hosted
by me Claire Murphy. Our senior producer is Tarlie Blackman.
(35:24):
The group executive producer is a Laria Brophy and has
been audio designed by Tina Madeloff. Thanks so much for listening.
I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on
On March seventeen, at twenty fifteen, seventeen year old schoolgirl
Marsa Vuketich left her home in Doncaster, Melbourne at around
six pm for her usual evening walk through her local park.
Earlier that day, the keen cosplayer who was obsessed with
the color pink, had attended classes at Canterbury Girls Secondary College.
She was hoping to one day become a lawyer. She'd
(00:23):
come home, shared a meal with her family, and then
spent some time texting her boyfriend Timothy Draper. They were
chatting about which dress she should wear to an upcoming formal,
but after that conversation, Timothy didn't receive any more messages
from her. Now that struck him as a bit odd
because she would normally say good night, but then he
assumed she was just busy, or maybe she'd fallen asleep. Instead, Masa,
(00:46):
wearing her headphones and listening to music, had gone for
a walk along the familiar footpath in the nearby Kunung
Creek Linear Reserve, a quiet suburban park where she felt safe.
It was used by a lot of other locals to
exercise and walk their dogs, and it was of her
everyday routine. But as she continued along the path, she
was suddenly confronted by a man. By the next morning,
(01:08):
before the sun was even up, police were knocking on
Timothy's door, and instead of waking up to a text
from his girlfriend, he was told the unthinkable, Marsa had
never made it home. I'm Claire Murphy and you're listening
to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
(01:28):
most about them. The court would later hear how Marsa
Vukeitch was forced into a secluded area of the Kunann
Creek Linear Reserve and stabbed forty nine times. Her screams
were heard by neighbors who contacted emergency services, but despite
paramedics rushing to the scene along with police, they couldn't
save her. Mars's body was found at approximately six fifty
(01:52):
pm that evening near a footbridge. Police would scour CCTV
footage in the area, spotting a man in a red
shirt a mohawk shaved into his hair fleeing the scene
carrying a white plastic bag. They would also see him
jump on a bus, taking with him in that bag.
What police believe is the murder weapon. But Master's murder
wasn't the end of his violence. In the days it followed,
(02:14):
the man who would later be identified as thirty one
year old Sean Price would rob a woman at knife point,
beat a man in an elevator, rape a woman in
a Christian bookstore. Eventually, he would hand himself into police,
who realized they already knew him. In fact, he'd handed
himself into them before, more than ten years earlier, and
had a long history of violence and mental health issues,
(02:37):
committing crimes and expressing concerning behaviors that should have seen
him hand a much harsher punishments and be given much
more support. Instead, he was free to rape and murder.
Journalist and host of the podcast Diagnosing Murder Michael Bachelard
covered Master's story extensively in twenty fifteen when she was killed,
(02:58):
and then again in twenty sixteen Whence was convicted. He
joins us, now, Michael, welcome to True Crime Conversations. I'd
like to start with you on what exactly happened on
March seventeen. So we know that Marsa was walking in
the park and was confronted by a man in the park.
(03:18):
We've since learned exactly what happened on that day. Can
you talk us through it?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah, So Sean Christian Price had been released from prison
perhaps six months earlier, and it's fair to say that
his rage and kind of symptoms of his illness had
been building over that time. And so you know, while
you've got Marsha going about her day as a year
(03:44):
twelve student at school doing VCE, coming home, having dinner,
you know, preparing for her evening walk, putting her headphones
in and going off on her walk, you also have
this man whose rage has been building for six months,
who's that day, March seventeenth, twenty fifteen, has been roaming
by public transport all over Melbourne, from Sunbury in the
(04:06):
west to Doncaster in the east, on and off trains
and buses, planning on killing someone, probably a woman, but
not knowing who and not really having a plan except
that he was full of rage for people he saw
as affluent, middle class. He described killing and raping women
(04:29):
as being a natural high, which he preferred to the
chemical high of drugs, but he participated, or I guess
enjoyed both. And so you've got these two kind of
people coming together. One young woman seventeen years old, you
wanting to be a lawyer, a cosplayer, princess to her
friends going about innocently going about her business, and another
(04:54):
man roaming Melbourne to try and find a victim. And
they came together at who known Linear Park at about
six fifty pm on March the seventeenth Saint Patrick's Day.
In twenty fifteen. We've got witnesses in that park saying
they saw a man hanging around a jogger. A female
(05:14):
jogger had run past and seen this man, who she
noted a fit looking, not bad looking, but fit, kind
of edgy looking, thirty one year old Sean Price. And then,
unfortunately for Marsha, she comes along and she doesn't know
what's going on. We suspect she had headphones in, probably
(05:34):
listening to music. He says, I saw this woman talking
to birds. He said, like some you know, some yuppy
Cinderella type figure. And he resolves to kill her, and
he jumps out from behind a tree, drags her into
the bushes and stabs her forty nine times in the neck.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now her family start to worry about her after she
doesn't return from her walk. The way that Marsa's mother
finds out what's happened is truly heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So yeah, at that time of year, it was still light,
it was still they out saving and her mother started
to get worried when Marsha hadn't come home. She'd been
calling her on the phone and trying to raise her.
It was unlike Marsha not to answer, so she herself
went down. The mother went down to Kunung Lanier Reserve
where she knew Marsha had been walking, and she always
(06:30):
saw all this police activity, and these police officers gathered
in the area, and she went up to a police
officer and said, listen, my daughter's missing. I don't know
where she is. I've been calling her. The police officers
suggests that she call her phone, So her mother calls
her and in the bushes where the body is lying,
the phone rings, and that's how they know that Marsha
(06:53):
is the victim.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So paramedics and police turned up pretty quickly because neighbors
had called in that they'd heard screaming. But Price has
already gotten away. What do we know about his movements
when he leaves Kunung Linear Park.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
So we know that this wasn't premeditated in the sense
that he was going to kill Marsha Vuktik. We do
know it was premeditated in that he had prepared. He
had a bag in it with a spare T shirt
and after he's killed her, he was covered in blood.
He's got a knife in his hands. He walks quickly
away and finds a tap in the backyard. He washes
(07:31):
the knife, He washes his hands and face with the blood.
He puts his fresh T shirt on over the top
of the T shirt that he's been in and he
gets on a bus and his heads west again and
gets off at Abbotsford, so he's quickly moved away from
the scene. He travels around a bit more that night
and finally ends up back at his unit in a
(07:53):
suburb called Albion in Melbourne's far West that night and
goes to bed.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
In the days, though he's not satisfied after killing somebody,
his violence and rage is still simmering. What does he
do in the days after he's killed mars.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Well The following day in March eighteen, he goes out
again and again he starts roaming, and he says later
that at that time he is planning to kill somebody else,
but somewhere along the line, a stranger gives him fifty
dollars and that appeases him to the extent that he
is capable of resisting those murderous urges on day two,
(08:35):
so he doesn't kill anyone. But day three, March nineteen,
he's out again. At this point, there's this massive police
operation to try and find him and find out who
this guy is that they're sort of tracking his movements
on the day that he killed Marsha. But he goes
out again. He's out and about tooling around Melbourne on
(08:56):
public transport and he ends up in Footscrape and there
he checks in to his parole officer, and the parole
officer meets him and then lets him go again, and
clearly the message has not at that point got through
(09:16):
that Sean Price is the man who they're all searching for.
And he goes He goes out. He's in a pedestrian footbridge.
There's a lift and he gets in the lift and
he punches this man repeatedly in his face and steals
his wallet. He tries to steal a car, but the
owner of the car fights him off and he runs off.
(09:38):
Then he goes into a Christian bookshop, and there in
the Christian bookshop, he sexually assaults the worker there and
the most brutal fashion, you know, he lies on her,
he taunts her, he says, where's your Jesus now, he
rubs himself against her, and then he runs off, and
that's the sexual assault allegation that he's then tried for later,
(10:01):
And he says later that he he knows at this
point that he's going to be in prison for a
long time and he just wanted to get his rocks off,
essentially before he spends most of the rest of his
life in prison. And then he goes back to the
police station and turns himself in and he says, I'm
the Donnie killer, the don Caster killer, I'm the Donnie killer,
(10:22):
and turns himself in and is arrested.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And about the exact same time that he's handing himself in,
people do start to recognize who he is though, right
and I understand that maybe someone who even works for
the Department of Justice rang in and said that I
think I know who this is because he had a
history with them.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Right well, Shawn Price has spent basically his entire adult
life in prison. He'd been arrested in two thousand and
four after some assaults sexual assaults, particularly in two thousand
and two and two thousand and three, again random street assaults.
He would drive around in his car with his pea
(10:57):
plates on and ask for directions, stop women, ask for directions,
then follow them and then assault them. One woman he
assaulted on the street, pulled her pants down and assaulted
her on the street. A thirteen year old girl coming
home from school, he assaulted her. Another woman he followed
into her home and assaulted her there. So in two
(11:19):
thousand and four, he was charged with twenty two separate
charges involving I think thirteen different women, and he was
sent to jail for five years and five months for
those assaults, ranging from scary kind of threats and assaults
to digital penetration rape. And he served that sentence in prison.
(11:41):
But then so when I first came across this story,
I'm starting to look up these sentences, and it turns
out like five years and five months, but doesn't work
between two thousand and four and when he's released in
twenty fifteen or twenty fourteen. End of twenty fourteen, and
in prison, he's made a lot of enemies He's assaulted
(12:02):
a lot of people. He's been sentenced for those assaults.
So he is rocketed between Thomas Emblin, which was a
forensic psychiatric prison facility, and prison where is tried and
sentenced over and again for prison assaults. So this is
a man who is well known to the detention system
and well known for his sexual proclivities and for his violence,
(12:25):
his random and explosive violence. In two thousand and six,
he briefly made the news, though I don't think by name,
because he assaulted the then Health minister, later the Prime Minister,
Tony Abbott, who was visiting Thomas Emblin. He jumped out
at Abbot, grabbed him, punched him twice in the face
(12:46):
while that this senior politician, his minister, was doing a
tour of the facility. So yeah, he was well known
to prison authorities.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
You're listening to true crime Conversations with me Clare Murphy.
Today I'm speaking with Jenny List Michael Bachelade about the
tragic case of Massa Vukitch and the man who took
her life. Coming up, we delve into the shocking crime
Sean Price had already committed throughout the early two thousands,
long before he was able to attack Marsa. So what
(13:19):
do we know about his background up until these assaults
begin in two thousand and three, two thousand and four,
And there's this idea that maybe he's done a lot
of other crimes in other states, but he's just never
been charged with any of them.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
What we know about Sean Christian prices background, his deep
background is that he is a descendant of the mutineers
from the bounty ship. The Christian is a reference to
Fletcher Christian, one of the chief mutineers who after the mutiny,
they put the captain will Imply on a little boat
and sent him off into the ocean and then landed
(13:57):
on Pitca, went to Tahi, he abducted, enslaved some men
and women from Tahiti and then sailed off to pitt
Can Island where they scuttled the boat and burned it
and set up a new society and became Pitcurners. Now
we do know that he was abused as a child,
(14:17):
that there was drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse in
his family background. He spoke of being beaten up by
his father, of having his father put out cigarettes on
him as a child, so out of that horrendously abusive background,
he becomes this violent, unpredictable, somewhat undiagnosable patient and abuse it.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Well, that's the thing, because when I was looking at
the mental health aspect of his situation, it seems doctors
have tried to diagnose him with a whole bunch of things.
We're talking schizophrenia, psychosis. Was he a psychopath, Was he
a narcissist? Did he have borderline personality disorder? It doesn't
seem anyone's really like narrowed it down to exactly what
his issues are.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
That's right. This was It became clear to me when
I was researching this store and speaking to people who'd
worked with him at the various facilities he'd been at,
that various diagnoses were made over various periods of time,
but that none of them seemed to really fit his symptoms.
He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, but when he
was put on anti schizophrenia medication, it kind of took
(15:27):
some of the edge off, but it didn't fix him.
He was on anti psychotic medication for a long time.
He was supposed to be on anti psychotic medication when
he was released. At the time when he ultimately then
killed Marshall Vuketik, but he was living in the community
and his supervision was pretty light. It's not clear that
he was taking his medication. He didn't like taking his
(15:48):
medication because it took the edge off. So yeah, he
was a seriously disturbed, essentially undiagnosable patient. But interestingly, he
wasn't tried as somebody who was incapable of knowing right
from wrong, and of being somebody who had to be
(16:08):
tried as not fit or competent to plead. He pleaded,
he pleaded guilty. His competence wasn't seriously questioned in the case,
and he was locked up as somebody who was a
competent person in prison. Now he's essentially in isolation because
he is such a dangerous, such an unpredictable, and such
(16:29):
an unfixable character. In Thomas Embling, I know they tried
to treat him with you know, they gave him books
to read, with exercise, with meditation. He had a girlfriend
for a while who was herself a schizophrenic killer, and
she tried to convert him to Christianity. I tried that
for a while, but that didn't stick either. So yeah,
(16:50):
I mean, his issues are incredibly complex and it makes
him a very very dangerous man.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
What it seems when you read through the that he
has been up against judges or has been punished for
things that he's done behind bars, that he keeps getting
lenient punishments. I mean, in the bigger scale of things,
obviously wouldn't seem lenient to your eye, but to his circumstances,
they seem quite lenient. And every time it seems factored
(17:19):
in that his mental health is an issue, but that
that's not really treated well enough or monitored well enough.
Especially when he's released back out into the community. It
seems every report said he is a serious offender, he's
at very high risk of repeat offending. And yet it
(17:41):
seems like his monitoring and supervision, as you mentioned before,
was not great, and that he was kind of left
to his own devices. No one's monitoring that he's taking
his medication. Why was he treated so leniently when he
was such an obviously violent man.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That is kind of a remarkable fact of this case,
and it's the six million dollar question. Really, Well, let's
go back a little bit. In twenty thirteen, he was
released from prison, but he was deemed to be dangerous,
and he was put in a unit called the Kerala
Unit of ra at prison in Country Victoria, and the
(18:17):
Kerrella Unit is where they send people who have finished
their sentences but are deemed to be still too dangerous
to be released into the community.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Is this the place they refer to as the village
of the damned?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
They refer to Corella as the Village of the Damned,
And that's because a lot of sexual offenders end up there,
people who are pedophiles and who believe are not reformed
and are not safe to be put into the community.
And this to some extent fitted Shorn Price's profile. But
at Kerrella he became this serial pest. He was violent,
(18:50):
He assaulted people, He assaulted the other prisoners, he assaulted
the guards. There are two occasions on which he does
these things and goes back for trial on these things,
and for one of them he's sentenced to three years
and eight months in prison, but on appeal that's reduced
to ten months, and so he serves his ten months.
(19:12):
He's sent back to Corella. He takes an iron bar
to the cars of the guards. He threatens the guards,
he smashes up the gym. There he's tried again and
again given a ten month sentence. After he's finished that sentence,
the correction system is wondering what to do with him,
I should say, shortly before he finishes his sentence. In
(19:33):
twenty fourteen, he does a spell in Port Philip Prison
and there he's such a difficult, violent character they put
him in an isolation cell. And over two days in
an isolation cell, he is on the intercom constantly, and
we know this because these calls are recorded and I
have those recordings. He is urinating the cell, he's flooding
(19:56):
the cell. He's making the most horrendous threats to the
g guards and to people. He says, when I get out,
I'm going to come and get you. I'm going to
kill children. I'm going to slip their throats, so I'm
going to put the knife so far into them that
you know, it gets into their guts. I'm going to
come and get you. The guard he's talking to the
guard is giving it back as well. She calls him
rain man. She says, you know, how are you going
(20:17):
to be buzzing that into com if all your fingers
are broken. So there's this incredibly violent environment. He's charged
with those threats to kill. In fact, two days after
he's released in twenty fourteen, late twenty fourteen, he's brought
in and does a police interview over these charges. But
you know, they let him go. And why have they
(20:40):
not sent him back to Kerrella where at least he's
under supervision, because they say they can't handle him because
of these two previous incidents of violence at Kerrella. They
can't handle him, So what do they do. They put
him in a unit in a suburban housing block in
West Albion and ask him to come in for psychological
(21:02):
profiling and bail conditions weekly. That's how this man is treated,
and that's where he was living, and this is the
state he was in when he killed this young seventeen
year old girl in Doncaster.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
It feels so hard to comprehend that a man who
is that violent and that unstable, that the prison system,
the reform system, cannot handle him, that the next logical
step is to release him into the community where what
the community is expected to handle him. Has anyone along
this journey up to that point ever taken responsibility for that,
(21:39):
Because the result of that is that Massavukitich is dead.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Well, you know, if he'd served his full three years
and eight months on that twenty thirteen conviction, he would
still have been in prison on the day he was
killing Marsha Vukitik, but that was reduced to ten months. Look,
the state government, I think, recognizing what a mis handling
of this man had occurred here, did eat some humble pie.
(22:09):
They agreed that this had been badly handled. They apologized,
they apologized, The Premier apologized to the family, and they
instituted a review, the Harper Review of dealing with these
kind of serious sexual and violent offenders. That review made
thirty five recommendations. The government accepted them all and of
things like, you know, better orders here, and more supervision
(22:31):
there and so forth. Stuff that kind of is procedural
and bureaucratic and perhaps works, perhaps doesn't, but you know,
it doesn't change the fact that for this man, in
this case, the handling just failed. There was a proposal
at one point to put him on what's called a
detention order. This was debated up and down the prison system.
(22:52):
A detention order would be an order which would allow
them to keep him in prison even though his sentence
had ended. It's a pretty big thing to do. It's
kind of like extra judicial detention if you like.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's not isolated, though, there's plenty of criminals who remain
behind bars purely from state governments enacting legislation that stops
them from being released.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
That's right. That tends to be one off legislation for
people who were just a danger to society. So this
detention order was considered for Shawn Price and rejected for
reasons I'm not sure of. But again, you know, he
was supposed to be on a ten year supervision order
and yet he was allowed to live out in the community.
This was an egregious failure by the system in Victoria.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
After the break, we examined what Seawan Price revealed in
his police interviews and how his behavior in the interview
room exposed who he really was when he's finally he
hands himself in. But when he's finally sat down and
police interview him about what had happened to marsa vug
did what did he say? What did he actually admit to?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
He admitted to doing it, he said, I think the
phrase is he said he'd seen this girl talking to
a bird like snow fucking white, and he told her
that she was all yuppy and shit, and that's why
he wanted to kill her. He had this incredible chip
on his shoulder about people who were he perceived to
be wealthy and successful, and this young woman fit that mold,
(24:21):
unfortunately for her in his twisted mind, and off he
went and killed her. So he admitted to the murder. Oddly,
he resisted for a long time admitting to the rape
in the bookshop, whether or not he thought that was
didn't counters rape, or whether he thought there was some
(24:41):
kind of defining thing in his mind that he should
resist that. Then he pleaded guilty to it, and then
later he came back, you know, years later, he came
back and tried to appeal at representing himself. He tried
to appeal that added sentence for the sexual assault, and
that was thrown out as well.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Just I mean, we don't know the answer to this,
as we don't know the answer to many things with
this case. But do you think that him having spent
time behind bars as a sexual predator taught him that
maybe he didn't want to go back in as a
sexual predator again, that perhaps it's better life in jail
to be seen as a murderer rather than a sex offender.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
I think for him, as you say, we don't know,
we don't know what was going on in his mind.
We do know his words were essentially I knew I
was going back for a long time, so I wanted
to bust an up before I went back in. Hence
the sexual assault on day three of his rampage. I
think for him he refers to assault as a natural
(25:46):
high sexual assault. I think he'd never killed anyone before
and he wanted to see what that was like. I
think often with sexual killers and sexual abusers that the murder,
the torture, the pain, the fear is it's more about
that than about the actual sexual act, if you like.
(26:09):
He refers to he sees it as being the thrill
he gets. All the high he gets is from the torture,
not actually from the sexual act, if you like. So
for him, perhaps the murder was just an extension of that.
It's noteworthy. I suppose that it's a woman that he's talking,
not a man, so I think there's a sexual element
(26:31):
to that as well.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I mentioned this kind of earlier, but I wanted to
touch on the fact that so growing up, his parents
did eventually separate and his mum is living in New
South Wales and his dad in Victoria, where he eventually
commits a lot of those crimes. But there is suggestion
that perhaps he's behind crimes in New South Wales also
because you would sometimes go and live with his mother,
and that he'd potentially been connected to some crimes there too.
(26:53):
Has that ever been fully investigated in the timeframe, especially
in the aftermath of what happened to Marsa.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Look, as far as I know, there was some speculation
around that, but from what I can see and from
what I know, there's been no serious effort by policing
New South Wales to investigate those alleged crimes in New
South Wales.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I think what's really interesting about Sean Price is to
look at it from an outside perspective. Just knowing what
he's done and the reasons for him, the ones he's
given himself for doing what he did, he seems like
such an unhinged human being who's really suffering with some
very deep mental health issues. But when you hear police
(27:36):
interviews with him, he seems very rational and reasonable. When
he's explaining the things that he's done, he's almost unemotional
about it to a point, but he does say, like,
for example, when he's been in court, he has talked
about the fact that he feels like he shouldn't be
locked up for life. He knows there's something wrong with
him mentally, and that he should be able to prove
that he is a decent member of society, and that
(27:56):
he should be taking his medication. Like, he seems very
rational and reasonable when you do see him in this setting,
but then he can be completely unhinged.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Also.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
I mean, he's tried to fire his legal team and
claim a whole bunch of stuff. But is that really
interesting that the fact is that he does seem to
really quite understand himself in those situations.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Well, I actually met him. I met Sean Price. I
was the investigations editor at the Age, and I got
a call from a guy saying, in fact, he dropped
some stuff off at reception for me to look at.
And he called me and he said, you know, I've
got some complaints about the way I was handled in
the prison system. And he was referring to those days
(28:38):
in isolation. And he got through the FOI Act, the
freedm Information Act, he got the recordings of his interactions
with guards in the system during that isolation, and he'd
edited them to put paint the guards in the worst
possible life light, and he'd sent them to me, and
he said he wanted to do a story about how
(29:00):
mistreatment of people in the prison system was driving them
towards radical Islam. And this is a period twenty fourteen
when Isis is running rampage in Iraq and Syria and
there's fears in the Australian community about radicalized Islam. So
this struck me as potentially a good story. And I
(29:21):
called him and I said, look, I'm going to need
more than just the edited versions of this. I need
to hear the whole thing. I need to verify what
you're saying. And he agreed to hand them over, and
he agreed to meet me, and he came to the
Age building and we sat outside and had a coffee,
and he seemed rational. He was rational, He had a story,
(29:42):
applausible story to tell, and he was prepared to give
me the evidence. So he gave me the full six
hours of the tapes. He also gave me his DVD
of his police interview, which I watched and I noted
in my notebook he seemed edgy. He was quite a
handsome man, a very fit, lean, kind of muscular, and
(30:04):
that kind of slightly scary demeanor. He looked on edge.
I thought perhaps he was on methamphetamines or something like that.
But he was kind of clearly on edge, but also rational,
soft spoken, you know, and he had a plausible story
to tell. I parked the story. It was going to
be complicated. I was working on something else. And it
(30:26):
wasn't until a week later, or a bit over a
week later, when I saw the photos of this man
in the back of a police car. I thought, shit,
I know who that is, and I was able to
identify him. But yeah, long diversion. To answer your question,
he can come across as rational. The people I've spoken
to who dealt with him in the system say that
(30:47):
he was always oscillating between this. They described it as
love hate. So he was oscillating between rationality and extreme
and kind of unpredictable violence. He would oscillate between in
self loathing and loathing of others and anger at others.
He read a lot. Clearly a clever man. He read
(31:08):
a lot, but he found it hard to stick to things.
He exercised a lot, or he didn't and became kind
of lazy and fat. As they described him, he was
either on or off and like this kind of split personality.
And so yeah, a rational, calm, self reflective man, self
(31:30):
loathing man, in some ways also prone to these extreme
and unpredictable outbursts of violence. It made him incredibly hard
to diagnose and also hard to predict and hard to control.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
In the aftermath of what Sean Price did, obviously there's
a family who's now missing a daughter and a sister,
and in fact, her death really hit her local community very,
very hard. There were people who are very scared in
the aftermath of that and were very relieved when Sean
Price was taken into custody. But more than a thousand
people turned up to her funeral, and the family spoke
(32:05):
so eloquently about the pain and the suffering that they
had endured. What kind of legacy does the death of
Master Ugiti to leave on that local community.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Look, it's incalculable the death of a relative, a loved one,
in such a random way, and because there's no explaining it,
there's no predicting it, there's no reason for it, there's
no motive beyond I just wanted to kill someone. It
(32:38):
seems so random, so pointless, so inexplicable, and that kind
of death, I know, leads it to mark on families
and communities. Does it mean that people won't go down
and walk in that beautiful little park in Doncaster? No
(32:59):
people walk there every evening. Does it mean we have
to change the way we live our lives? Know, because
we can't. But you know it has left its mark.
It's left its mark in Melbourne. It came not that
long after the murder of Jill Maher again by man
on parole Adrian Bailey was on parole. Yeah, it leaves
(33:23):
its mark on a society. But people move on and
you know, we have to live. We live our lives
because we don't have much choice. We have to.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
I guess the one big legacy though, that legislation you
spoke about, the recommendations from the report that's known as
Mars's Law. Now, do police think that that has made
any difference those recommendations being implemented.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think it's fair to say that Mars's Law and
those those recommendations and the existence of Shawn Price has
made the authorities here more alert to the idea that
certain people shouldn't be in the community. You know, I
probably will describe myself as a civil libertarian, and I
find that a hard sentence to say. But when you
(34:09):
see the legacy of Sean Price, you see the behavior
of Seawan Price, I think, you know, there are some
people who just are bad and who need the kind
of extreme end of custodial law that we now have
in place. And those laws should be applied incredibly, sparingly
(34:30):
and with great reluctance. But sometimes they need to be applied,
and somebody like Sean Price is somebody that they need
to be applied to.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Sean Price is currently serving his forty year minimum sentence
in the high security Alaria unit of bow And Prison
in Victoria. He's made several attempts to appeal his sentence,
which have been refused, and he's been adding charges to
his rap sheet while behind bars, including one for assaulting
a prison officer. He'll be eligible for BARL twenty fifty
five when he'll be in his seventies. Will he be
(35:03):
any more suitable for a lease into the community, then
time will tell. Thank you to Michael for helping us
tell this story. You can find a link to Michael's
podcast Diagnosing Murder in our show notes. If you want
to see images from this story, head to our Instagram
page at True Crime Conversations. True Crime Conversations is hosted
by me Claire Murphy. Our senior producer is Tarlie Blackman.
(35:24):
The group executive producer is a Laria Brophy and has
been audio designed by Tina Madeloff. Thanks so much for listening.
I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on
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