The Maria Korp Case: The Woman In The Boot Story

By Carly Crawford

It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and surely no case proves that more than that of the events leading to the slow, brutal death of Maria Korp. When the Melbourne mother of two went missing on 9 February 2005, police immediately suspected her wayward husband, Joe, and his mistress, tania Herman. While Maria lay dying in the boot of her car near the Shrine of Remembrance, Korp made the fateful decision to point the finger of blame at his lover 埡nd keep his role in her actions a secret. Before long, however, the betrayed Herman decided to turn herself in,confessing to police a twisted tale of suburban swingers, predatory psychics, grand-scale deceptions, petty lies, and the outrageous manipulations of a man whose out-of-control ego and desires led him down a murderous path. Sunday Herald Sun journalist Carly Crawford followed the Maria Korp case from the beginning, and was one of the last people to have contact with Joe Korp before he committed suicide on 12 August 2005, the day of Mariaᱠfuneral. In this extraordinary, gripping account she has gathered, for the first time, all the evidence 埩ncluding statements to police by Herman and her brother, Stephen Deegan; text messages exchanged between Herman and Korp; conversations recorded by the police; Maria Korpᱠdiary entries from the months leading up to her death, and excerpts from Joe Korpᱠdiary 埡s well as depicting the drama surrounding the Public Advocateᱠdecision to allow Maria to starve to death. the bizarre death 埡nd almost as strange life 埯f Maria Korp is already one of Australiaᱠmost notorious criminal cases; the Maria Korp Case is a book you will never forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730449942

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It was a dark, secluded street, empty but for the car parked halfway along. Condensation clouded the vehicle’s windows. There was no one around. By day, the streets at the southern end of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Victoria, are abuzz with tourists and herds of joggers. By night, they are strange and still. Thursday, 10 February 2005, was no exception. It was 1.30 a.m., and although the calendar read summer, autumn’s precocious chill had driven most people indoors. The two blokes in the street-sweeping vehicle lumbering along the gutter reckoned they knew the score: a lone car; steamy windows; an empty street. Dallas Brooks Drive after dark had all the hallmarks of a lovers’ lane. Framed by towering oaks, eucalypts and conifers, the drive curls discreetly towards the picturesque parklands on the banks of the Yarra River. It is one of the quieter roads surrounding the popular Gardens in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city.

The driver of the street-sweeper pulled up behind the car, kicked his vehicle into neutral and trained its headlights on the car’s bumper. It was a sedan, a rich burgundy in colour, and fairly well maintained by the looks of it. The workers lingered for a minute or two, hoping their presence might prompt the driver to move on. It didn’t, so they manoeuvred around and went back to work. They could not have known it at the time, but they had just stumbled upon the key to what would evolve into one of the most bizarre true-crime stories to unfold in Australia.

CHAPTER ONE

It was Sunday, 13 February, when authorities finally learned of the car’s location. The sedan had come to the attention of staff at the gardening depot on Dallas Brooks Drive. Media reports said police were looking for a car just like it in their search for a missing woman. The vehicle’s heavily fogged windows and eerie permanence only added to the intrigue. It was parked in a bay diagonally opposite the depot, not far from a ticket machine, and it appeared to be in good condition. But its slick metallic finish masked a dark reality, the depths of which park worker Rick Brown was about to realise.

Early that morning, the middle-aged dad had arrived at work, curious after a conversation he’d had with a workmate at home the day before. His mate had mentioned the burgundy car near the depot, and had told him about the missing woman. Rick would not usually work on a Sunday, but Melbourne’s long, baking-hot summer days meant that someone had to tend to the Gardens’ main water features every day of the week. Rick finished work on the two fountains at one end of the parklands, then dropped into the depot for a cuppa at about 7.10 a.m. It was then that he first noticed the car and decided to investigate. His curiosity quickly turned to unease.

‘I walked up to the car and just felt like something wasn’t right,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t explain it any better than that but things just didn’t seem right.’ Strewn across the front passenger seat were pens, paper and a mouldy salad roll. A black handbag lay, upturned, on the floor. On the back seat was an open street directory, and Rick assumed the driver had been lost. So where was this driver? And why the mess? He circled the car, puzzled, and paused at the boot. Rick had no reason to do what he did next. He followed his intuition and yelled: ‘Is anyone inside?’ He waited. There was no response.

Rick admitted that at the time he probably looked like a twit, talking to the rear end of a car, but his hunch would later prove to be correct. He took down the registration number, NIW306, and alerted the khaki-clad Protective Services officers who guard the nearby Shrine of Remembrance, a grand war monument adjacent to the Gardens. The officers, employees of the Victoria Police, notified force command, and by about 10.30 a.m. police were sealing off the scene with blue and white tape. This was the car they wanted. It belonged to Maria Matilde Korp, the mum from the suburbs who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances four days earlier, on 9 February 2005.

Even the fragrant tranquillity of the Royal Botanic Gardens could not dilute death’s stench that Sunday. The glaring sun pushed past the gnarled old gums and pines, casting a scattered shadow over the crime scene. For the homicide detectives who assembled under the patchy light, the smell was as familiar as it was offensive. The pungent odour lingered long that day. A subtle breeze carried it up to 5 metres from its source, which detectives believed was concealed inside the boot of the car, a 1995 model Mazda 626. The source, of course, was assumed to be a dead body.

The technical support crew was called in to open the car. While police waited for their arrival, they processed the scene. Wearing gloves and blue overalls, officers from the Crime Scene Unit scoured the area surrounding the car, checking rubbish bins, storm-water drains and gutters. They took close-up photographs of the vehicle’s locks, long shots of the scene itself, and detailed notes about the car’s appearance. In his notebook, Senior Constable Darren Watson recorded the specifics:

Motor vehicle parked 610 mm from gutter of Dallas Brooks Drive, surrounded by parkland.

All doors locked and windows shut. Boot closed and locked.

Nil visible damage/scratches to doors and boot locks.

Nil visible damage/scratches to door lock and surrounds, windows and door seals.

Interior surface of window heavy with condensation.

Smell of decomposition around boot.

By 1 p.m., the techs were on-scene. Police had no key to the car so they had to force entry by picking the lock. The car alarm shrieked, drowning out the peaceful call of the parklands’ bellbirds. Watson popped open the car boot using the release lever beside the driver’s seat, then, flanked by detectives, lifted the boot lid.

Inside lay Maria Korp—bruised, bloodied and sprawled diagonally across the floor. Her face was badly bruised. Blackened blood encrusted her nose and mouth, and the right side of her face was hugely swollen. Her blouse had ridden up around her chest and the shirt’s short sleeves exposed a severely swollen right arm. Maria’s Mediterranean skin was frighteningly pale and her usually full rosebud lips were parched and split. There was a red tartan blanket inside. And that smell. That sickening odour of decay. Every police officer looking inside that car boot believed they were looking at a corpse.

Then her chest moved.

CHAPTER TWO

Maria’s exposed midriff expanded and contracted rapidly with her sharp, shallow breaths. Watson spoke to the victim, reassuring her that an ambulance was en route, although it was clear that she was unconscious. Detective Sergeant Mark Colbert called the Metropolitan Ambulance Service, which immediately dispatched two ambulances. The patient’s dire condition required a top-level emergency response, known as a Code One. With lights and sirens blazing, a specialist crew left its base at The Alfred Hospital and tore down the busy city roads, skilfully weaving between trams and traffic. The hospital was just a few kilometres south of the Gardens. Within six minutes, paramedics were at the scene and treating a woman precariously close to death.

Maria’s heart, weakening with every beat, could barely push the blood through her arteries. Her blood pressure was so low that her blood vessels had retreated from the surface of her skin—paramedics had to insert the saline fluid drip through a blood vessel in her neck because those in her arms and legs were impossible to locate. Her skin appeared pale and clammy, her heartbeat was faint and quick. Her body’s tissues had experienced blood deprivation due to the dramatic drop in blood pressure. This state is often associated with dehydration, haemorrhaging or burns; in this case, it was dehydration. Blood had spilled from a wound in the swollen right side of her head and her right eye was badly bruised. Her swollen right arm appeared to be broken.

Paramedics fitted the patient with a spinal collar for stability, then moved her into the specialised intensive care ambulance. They delivered fresh air to her ailing lungs using positive pressure ventilation, a process by which an oxygen bag attached to a breathing mask is hand pumped, acting as an external lung. Paramedics pushed and pushed, fighting to keep her alive, but it was all too late: Maria had been entombed in the boot for more than 102 hours—just over four days—enough time for the potentially lethal dehydration to take hold.

During the Melbourne summer, top daily temperatures often reach a muggy 35 degrees. Fortunately, over the four and a half days that Maria lay inside the boot, the daily maximums were much lower—between 20 and 22 degrees. Had they hit their regular highs, surely she could not have survived for as long as she had. Nevertheless, conditions inside the boot were stifling. With her body tissues being starved of water and dwindling blood flow to her brain, Maria’s consciousness had faded. Consequently, her body would have stopped moving, causing her muscles to break down. The excess proteins from the deteriorating muscle tissue would have been released into the blood and this would have blocked her kidneys. From that point, she would have suffered multi-organ failure and, eventually, her entire system would have shut down.

Paramedics arrived back at The Alfred and Maria was admitted to Trauma Bay 2. There she was injected with a muscle relaxant to paralyse and stabilise her body for treatment. While Maria was in this medically induced coma, doctors flooded her system with broad-spectrum antibiotics and 4 litres of saline fluid to counter the severe dehydration she had suffered. They also ran tests. Her CT scan revealed swelling to the brain. Toxicology was negative—there was no trace of drugs, illicit or otherwise, in her system. Her cognition was severely depressed, so she was oblivious to the flurry of emergency medical activity around her. Associate Professor Mark Fitzgerald, Director of the hospital’s Emergency and Trauma Centre, made the provisional diagnosis that the patient’s brain had been starved of oxygen—she had endured a hypoxic brain injury. And, judging by the mark on her neck, she appeared to have been choked. Maria Korp was critically ill, with only a 25 per cent chance of survival. And someone had tried to kill her.

As late summer’s psychedelic sunset danced over Melbourne, forensic physician Dr Morris Odell hurried towards The Alfred’s Trauma Centre. He was the doctor on call that afternoon, so it was he who was called in to perform the forensic examination. On the phone, police had explained that a woman who had been missing for several days had been found unconscious in the boot of her car. Details of the patient’s medical history were unclear, but overall Maria had been a fit and well woman prior to the events that landed her in hospital. Detectives and physicians briefed Odell in a corner of the trauma bay where Maria lay only metres away. She had low blood pressure, the hypoxic brain injury, severe bruising and swelling to the eyes, and a ligature mark around her neck. A doctor with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Odell’s task was to explain this human crime scene.

Odell carefully assessed Maria’s body in four stages: her head and neck, her upper limbs, her torso and, finally, her lower limbs. After taking scrapings from underneath the victim’s fingernails, he proceeded with the examination. Odell discerned no fewer than twenty-two distinct injuries—bruising, swelling, abrasions and pressure sores. Maria’s body was a sickening palette of red, blue and black. With help from an assistant, Odell marked the most significant injuries on a generic chart of the human body, making explanatory notes in the margins.

In the following days, police would explain that they had evidence to suggest that Maria had been in the car boot for the duration of the time she was missing, and that the strangulation attempt may have involved a struggle on a concrete floor. Detectives also showed Odell a photograph of a carry-bag strap similar to the one they believed had been used in the strangulation bid. Odell used these details and his own medical observations to explain what might have happened to the victim.

Odell noted several abrasions on Maria’s scalp. At least one on the right side was the size of a matchbox. There was a scar on the upper right side of the forehead and a scab on the front of the nose. All these injuries could have resulted from a struggle on a concrete floor. On his chart, he drew a line around the figure’s neck to signify a band of broken skin. The ulcerated area was thickest around the throat, where he recorded the width as 1.5 centimetres. It tapered to become thinner at the rear. But in stark contrast to the photographed strap, there were no texture marks on the victim’s skin—and the strap in the photo featured a clear cross-stitch pattern. Odell had several explanations for the disparity. The body’s natural healing capability was chief among them. He noted: ‘Changes to the appearance of the injury over four days as a result of physiological process; rolling, twisting or attenuation by stretching of the original strap as tension was applied to it; the visible injury was an abrasion which was the result of friction between the textured surface of the strap and the skin. This may not necessarily reflect the total area of contact if there were pressure areas not subject to frictional movement.’

Related to the ligature injury were the victim’s bruised and swollen eyes. The eyeballs themselves were bloodshot and enlarged. Odell explained in his notes: ‘[This] was a change often associated with pressure to the neck by a ligature. This causes congestion of the blood vessels above the ligature with attendant petechial [red] bruising and pressure effects on the eyes causing them to protrude and become bruised, haemorrhagic and congested.’ The swollen right arm, Odell explained, occurred when the victim’s shirt had become bunched up under her arms in the boot: ‘Probably [it was] the result of prolonged pressure on the upper arm and armpit, probably from a tight fold of clothing during the prolonged time of immobility.’

Up to seven of the twenty-two injuries could be linked to the assault. Another nine came about from blood clots and pressure sores from the four days she spent in the car boot. Skin is an organ and needs blood to stay healthy. In the absence of blood, it begins to break down. ‘In some cases the dead skin remains in position resulting in the appearance seen in Mrs Korp of blackened areas of dead skin still adherent to the underlying tissue,’ Dr Odell noted. ‘These sores were present when Mrs Korp was found and these would be consistent with her having been lying in an unconscious or semi-conscious state for a period of at least one or two days…It is certainly possible that these ulcers could have been the result of a longer period of immobility.’ The causes of the remaining six injuries were not related to the attack—there were a couple of puncture marks in the skin where paramedics had tried desperately to find a blood vessel for a drip, and a couple of others—a bruise on the knee, for example—that had no certain cause.

Odell concluded that the bulk of Maria’s visible injuries had come from spending four days, immobile, inside a car boot. The others, which were far more sinister and probably the root cause of her immobilisation, were inflicted during an assault. His assessment had given police the science to support their evidence.

CHAPTER THREE

Four days before Maria’s discovery, on Wednesday, 9 February, her young son Damian waited at the gates of Greenvale Primary School in Melbourne’s north for much longer than he ever had before. Mucking around in the playground as usual, he waited. Three thirty-five ticked by—no sign of Mum. She couldn’t be far off.

Family station wagons swung in and out of the car park, and the playground gradually emptied. Still no Mum. Damian realised that he had been forgotten. Three forty-five arrived and the final bell sounded, beckoning all the remaining kids to the administration block for supervision until they were collected. Damian hurried to the office and pulled a list of parental contact phone numbers from his diary. It was well after four by then, but the child remained composed. ‘Can you call my mum?’ he asked. The staff member’s calls to Maria went unanswered, so she tried Damian’s dad, Joe Korp, at precisely 4.23 p.m. Joe answered and promised that he would be there shortly.

Maria had never neglected to collect her boy from school before. He was her pride and joy; she would do anything for the eleven year old. Maria would routinely leave work at 3.30 p.m. and be at the school gates no later than 3.45 p.m. Her failure to arrive was unprecedented.

Joe Korp collected Damian, dropped the boy at their Mickleham home and left the house briefly. Maria’s adult daughter, Laura De Gois, passed him on Mount Ridley Road as he drove towards the highway and she drove towards the house. It was about 5.30 p.m., but this did not seem unusual to Laura—Korp came and went as he pleased.

Laura arrived home to find Damian alone. ‘Why are you home by yourself?’ she asked her younger brother as he played in his bedroom. ‘Dad picked me up from school. He’ll be back soon,’ Damian replied. Laura immediately recognised how unusual it was for Maria not to collect Damian from school. Nevertheless, she was not worried—at least, not yet. She logged on to the internet and started searching for music tracks.

It wasn’t long before Korp returned home. He burst into the study and asked Laura, ‘Have you seen Maria?’ He explained that she had not collected Damian from school and that her phone was switched off. He told Laura that he had been out driving around the suburbs to check whether Maria was stranded at the roadside with car trouble. To Laura, Korp was clearly on edge. She simply couldn’t understand it: she hadn’t seen Maria either, but at that stage she could see no logical reason to worry. She told Korp that her mum was probably just out shopping or visiting her counsellor.

Laura’s explanation did nothing to ease Korp’s troubled mind, however. ‘Joe seemed anxious and agitated and was pacing up and down. I still was not too concerned about Mum,’ she would later recall.

As the afternoon wore on, Korp grew increasingly concerned. Time was slipping away, and he soon decided that it was a matter for the police. He zipped down to Craigieburn police station, a ten-minute drive away, and formally reported his wife missing.

It was 7.40 p.m. when Korp approached the counter at the station and told his story to Constable Urik Slowak. Korp told him about the afternoon’s events, adding that it was very unusual for Maria to neglect her son. In his report, Slowak noted: ‘Joe also stated that they were having marital problems and that Maria was depressed.’ Was this a simple runaway, or maybe a suicide?

Slowak made some preliminary inquiries, using phone numbers Korp had left to call Maria’s friends and associates. He called her workplace, a pantyhose factory called Kayser Hosiery in the nearby suburb of Coolaroo, but the bloke on duty could not be sure if Maria had turned up for work that day. Slowak tried a few other phone numbers with no luck.

Back at home, Korp phoned his wife’s workplace himself. As he grew more anxious, he told Laura to take Damian for a drive to go out and look for their mother. Laura quizzed him about why he could not do it himself, but eventually she agreed, and for the next hour or so she and Damian drove around the local shopping centres where Laura knew her mother shopped. Korp had contacted friends and family, who later arrived at the Mickleham home, anxious about the development. Among those who had gathered were his parents, Florence and Gus Korp, Joe’s brother Kevin and an elderly couple who were friends with Maria. Detectives would later search the Korps’ phone records. This search revealed something odd: for all Korp’s searching, there was no record of him attempting to call Maria on her mobile phone.

As word of Maria’s disappearance spread, the clues began to trickle in. Perhaps the most crucial in this early stage of the investigation came from Joe Korp’s brother, Gust. In the hours after Maria was reported missing, he called police and supplied information that turned the spotlight to foul play. The information he provided suggested that this could be much more than a simple runaway. Gust told the officers that Maria’s daughter, Laura, had heard a scream that morning. The night she was reported missing he told police that he feared Korp, his brother, might have had a hand in Maria’s disappearance.

These insights were damning enough, but Gust had more: Joe, it seemed, had a girlfriend. In addition, there had been talk of suspicious emails between Korp and this girlfriend, Tania Herman, and the recent, unexplained death of Herman’s ex-husband. Slowak noted the details on the formal missing persons report, which was filed on the Victoria Police database:

2050hrs on 9/2/05 police were contacted by Joe’s brother Gus [sic] Korp. Stated that he was concerned that his brother Joe may have done something to Maria. Stated that Joe’s stepdaughter had mentioned she was woken by screaming @0630hrs and Joe told her that she must have been dreaming. Also stated that Joe had forced Maria to change the content of her will. Also stated that Joe had rung him and said ‘Gus I think I’m fucked.’ Gus helps Joe with his computer and said that he had read some emails, which Joe sent to his girlfriend Tania Herman who lives in Greenvale. One of the emails went along the lines of ‘I have to do it alone. I don’t want you to be involved.’ Gus’ wife Patricia told him that Tania told her that she would kill Maria before she gets Joe back.

That night at about 10.44 p.m., the increasingly curious Constable Slowak, together with two colleagues including his sergeant, visited the family home at 210 Mount Ridley Road, Mickleham, a semi-rural address on Melbourne’s northern fringe. Korp, eager to help where he could, led them through the home as they searched for clues. Asked whether he knew anyone who might not like his wife, Korp did not hesitate. He supplied the name and address of Herman, whom he said was his former girlfriend. Meanwhile, the elderly woman—Maria’s friend and former neighbour, who was among those gathered at Mount Ridley Rd that night—stole a quiet moment with police. She told them that Maria had considered leaving Korp, and discreetly informed them that he was a man who should not be trusted. Laura confirmed to the officers that she had heard a scream that morning. Police left with a photograph of the missing woman and continued their investigation. Police patrolled the street in which the Korps used to live, in the neighbouring suburb of Greenvale, where Maria had friends. They later swept past the car park at her work but there was no sign of the missing woman or her car, a burgundy Mazda.

The night-shift detectives were soon alerted. As the story grew more sordid—here was a case involving mysterious screams, adultery and a suspected murder plot—it became clear that the investigation would end up in the hands of the Homicide Squad’s Missing Persons Unit, whose job it was to handle suspicious missing persons cases. A local detective on duty that night, Senior Detective Anthony Combridge, had been informed of the investigation. He briefed the detectives on shift that day, then, just after 6.40 a.m. on 10 February, he sent an email to the Homicide Squad outlining the night’s events.

Good morning. Just a quick note to let your respective officers know of a job that is afoot in Craigieburn. Maria KORP was reported missing by her husband Joe Korp. She was last seen at 210 Mount Ridley Road, Mickleham, about 0635hrs on 9/2/05…

The attending members have conveyed some concerns about suspicions of the family that she may have met with foul play. Apparently around the time she was last seen, her daughter heard screams at the premises. In addition to this, the husband’s brother had been intercepting some of the reporting person’s email and said they contained material that led him to believe that Joe Korp was going to knock the missing person.

Also it was noted that Joe’s…girlfriend’s ex-husband died four weeks ago. The members from Craigieburn have contacted all known associates of the missing person and have not been able to locate her, something that all her friends say is out of character for her. One of the friends did say that recently the missing person had been at her house and had spoken of running away from the husband but the friend noted that this too was out of character for the missing person as she would not leave her children behind…

This note is for notification only at this stage. Police members are going to follow up with both the missing person and reporting person’s workplaces to establish their respective whereabouts yesterday. Also, further inquiries on possible destinations for the missing person are pending and will be noted by Craigieburn officers…

Later that morning, police broadcast the details of the missing woman’s vehicle across the police radio, on both city and country channels. The bulletin alerted all units to be on the lookout for a burgundy Mazda with Victorian registration NIW306. The missing woman’s phone records yielded few answers for detectives. The hospitals and towing companies were not much help either. Local detectives made contact with her bank to ascertain whether her accounts had been active. The last withdrawal from her personal account had been for a sum of $150, two days before she vanished.

Maria’s supervisor at work made contact with police and confirmed that she had not turned up the day before. He also gave them something else to think about: the day before she vanished, Maria had taken the morning off work to attend the local magistrates’ court. Her reason: to ease the conditions of an intervention order against her husband.

Detectives from the Broadmeadows Criminal Investigation Unit canvassed family members. Just after 9.15 a.m., Detective Sergeant Patrick Allen had a chat with the missing woman’s daughter. The conversation only heightened suspicions about Korp. Allen took notes from the conversation: ‘Mum said if anything happens to me, you have to call the police. Has been saying this since the intervention order first taken out. A few days ago she said everything’s going to be all right (Monday night). [Maria went missing on Wednesday.]’ He continued: ‘Laura home about 5.30 p.m., Mum’s car not there. Joe agitated, worried about where Mum was. Later in the evening he’s getting even more worried. He said the police will be after me. Said this possibly after reporting M/P [missing person] to police.’

As Victoria Police helicopters took to the skies to search the Mickleham area for Maria’s car, police diligently chased down one more vital clue. They had learned about a plastic bag that Maria had given her close friend Gail Slade. Their kids attended the same school and Maria had confided in Gail the bitter extent of her marriage problems. About a month before the disappearance, Maria had given Gail a bag stuffed with evidence of her husband’s fling with Tania Herman. When police had asked Gail about it, she grew worried about her friend and what the bag might mean. Before police arrived to retrieve the bag, she peered inside and saw that it contained random receipts, a picture of Herman, a strange plastic hose and Maria’s diary written in her native Portuguese. A closer inspection would have also revealed a fake police badge in a wallet with a picture of Korp. There was also a sex card game bearing some explicit instructions (kiss my head, lick my tongue, pick up cards, give me oral, take off clothes, masturbate). The raunchy picture of Herman depicted her wearing little more than a Collingwood footy jersey and knee-high leather boots. Maria had instructed Gail to hand this bag to police should anything happen to her. That gesture alone was as valuable to detectives as the bag’s contents: it told them that Maria had reason to believe that her life was in danger. It told them that the missing woman had been living in fear.

CHAPTER FOUR

For a life that would end