Killing Jodie

Killing Jodie (2007), a true-crime book by the Australian journalist and author Janet Fife-Yeomans, chronicles the 1987 killing of Australian sex worker Jodie Larcombe and subsequent efforts by police to obtain enough evidence to charge her murderer, Daryl Suckling. Fife-Yeomans followed the case for years as a reporter for The Australian newspaper.

In 1987, 21-year-old sex worker and heroin addict Jodie Larcombe lives in the St. Kilda inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She is last seen by her family in mid-November shortly before she is incarcerated for a short period of time in Pentridge Prison. Released on December 22, she is never seen or heard from again after December 26. Authorities conduct thorough searches of hospital and banking records, but it is as if Jodie has disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Meanwhile, Daryl Suckling, the 50-year-old caretaker of the remote country estate Wyrama Station in the neighboring state of New South Wales, frequently stays at his niece Shirley's house in Melbourne on weekends. It is on one of these weekend trips that Daryl meets Jodie. They begin to have a sexual affair, though the relationship is transactional, as Daryl frequently gives Jodie money to buy heroin. Daryl claims that the last time he saw Jodie was on Christmas Day. She took out her dental plate so she could give him oral sex, leaving it in Daryl's glove compartment. Daryl then drove her to St. Kilda so she could buy heroin. She got out of the car saying she would only be gone a half-hour. According to Daryl, after forty-five minutes he drove away.



According to Shirley, some of her valium and anti-anxiety lorazepam pills went missing on Christmas Day. She checked Daryl's bag and found them, but did not remove them. The next day was his mother's birthday, and Daryl was there at her house from around 10 a.m. until mid-day.

On December 27, Daryl gets a flat tire on the way back to Wyrama Station. He calls James Wembridge, the local mailman for the area, and asks to meet him on Arumpo Road. When James arrives around six p.m., he notices a huge travel bag in the backseat laying on sheets of drop cloth. Daryl tells James not to open the passenger car door. Then on December 30, James sees that the inside of Daryl's car is completely waterlogged as if someone had set a hose to it for an extended period.

Because of Daryl's association with the disappeared Jodie, police consider him a suspect, conducting a thorough search of Wyrama Station in March of 1988. There, they find a purple dress belonging to Jodie and various make-up and accessories of the same brands as the ones Jodie uses. The police also find chloral hydrate which, in combination with the lorazepam, the valium, and heroin in Jodie's system would have caused a potentially lethal combination. At the very least, this combination of drugs could have easily rendered Jodie unconscious. They also find the dental plate in the garbage can. Jodie's brother, mother, and ex-boyfriend all confirm that Jodie almost never removed her dental plate except to clean it because she was embarrassed by it. They find it highly implausible that she would have left the dental plate in the glove compartment before going to buy heroin.



Daryl is finally arrested on April 3, 1989. He remains in custody until May 16, 1990, before being released on bail. Although he is set to go to trial, authorities drop the charges due to the lack of evidence. Despite the incriminating statements and items found at Wyrama Station, without a body, prosecutors fear it will be extremely difficult for them to obtain a conviction.

In 1992, Daryl is arrested on an unrelated matter. According to his cellmate, Bob Collins, Daryl repeatedly makes references to Jodie Larcombe's disappearance, calling her a "missing person" while using sarcastic air-quotes. He also flat out tells Bob at one point that he "did it." When Bob relays this information to authorities, Detective Peter Lennon asks if he will keep in touch with Daryl and agree to install listening devices in his car. Collins agrees.

When Daryl is released in 1993, Bob picks him up and lets him stay at his house on the Central Coast. There, Daryl meets Bob's girlfriend, Amelia Pasic. After taking a liking to Amelia, Daryl suggests to Bob that they drug her and take her to a hotel where they will take turns "doing whatever we wished with her." Daryl adds that they would need to kill her and bury her body in the ground.



Pretending to agree to the plan, Bob has Detective Lennon and his associates attach a listening device to his body. As Bob and Daryl drive around, Daryl brags about having killed and mutilated Jodie, boasting further that the cops know he did it but can't do anything about it. On June 2, 1994, Daryl is re-arrested for the murder of Jodie. Two years later, Daryl is tried and convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. On the day he files an appeal of his conviction, Jodie's mother commits suicide. To this day, Jodie's body still hasn't been found.