00:00:13
Our episodes deal with serious and often distressing incidents. If you feel at any time you need support, please
00:00:20
contact your local crisis center. For suggested phone numbers for confidential support and for a more
00:00:27
detailed list of content warnings, please see the show notes for this episode on your app or on our website.
00:00:35
This episode was originally released on Casefile's Patreon, Apple Premium, and Spotify Premium feeds as an early bonus
00:00:43
for our paid subscribers. These episodes are designed to be slightly shorter, allowing us to cover a
00:00:49
broader range of cases. To receive these episodes early and ad-free, you can support Casefile on
00:00:56
your preferred platform. April 25, 1999 had been a leisurely Sunday for 47-year-old David Campbell
00:01:10
and his partner of 15-years, 45-year-old Keith Hibbins. The pair lived in the inner Melbourne
00:01:17
suburb of Collingwood in a house they designed together. Keith was an architect while David was a
00:01:23
landscaper and they'd combined their skills to create the home of their dreams. The two typically spent their weekends
00:01:30
lounging at home or catching up with friends at the pub, but they'd decided to take advantage of the autumn weather
00:01:36
and spend a day in the country. After visiting waterfalls and wineries in the Yarra Valley town of Marysville,
00:01:44
they drove back to the city with a nice bottle of red wine. On the way home to cook dinner, David
00:01:50
remembered they were out of olive oil. They'd need to get cash out to buy some. The ATM they usually frequented was
00:01:58
located on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne's CBD, just outside of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute.
00:02:06
This was on the corner of Lansdowne Street and St. Andrew's Place, a park-lined thoroughfare just a few
00:02:12
minutes from the famous Melbourne Cricket Ground, known as the MCG. It was usually easy to find a parking
00:02:19
spot, but it was busier than usual on account of it being Anzac Day. Technically, the national public holiday
00:02:26
signified an annual day of remembrance for Australians and New Zealanders who had served at war.
00:02:32
But for Melburnians, it also marked the annual Australian Rules Football match between two of the state's most popular
00:02:39
footy teams, Collingwood and Essendon. The game had been held earlier at the MCG and had drawn a crowd of around
00:02:47
73,000 spectators. Given the lingering football traffic, there were no available car spaces near
00:02:54
the ATM. Instead, Keith and David parked further down Lansdowne Street and took a longer
00:03:01
walk. After getting cash out at the ATM, they decided to walk back to their car through the Fitzroy Gardens, a 64-acre
00:03:09
urban green space filled with tree-lined pathways, an ornamental lake, and a mock
00:03:14
Tudor village. By this point, it was around 7:00 p.m. The brushtail possums came out at night
00:03:23
and David and Keith enjoyed watching them. As the couple made their way through the
00:03:29
park, two young men suddenly raced towards them. One of them asked aggressively,
00:03:36
"Hey, you blokes. Have you seen two blokes running through here or hiding in here?"
00:03:42
The young men told Keith and David that a woman had just been raped in the gardens and they were looking for the
00:03:48
offenders. David could smell that the men reeked of alcohol. In unison, he and Keith offered to call
00:03:57
the police, but the men replied that they'd already done so. David asked them what the rapists looked
00:04:04
like. The taller of the two men replied angrily, "We don't know." The younger man became increasingly
00:04:14
hostile. David began to sense that trouble was brewing. Keith asked the men why they were being
00:04:22
so aggressive when he and David were happy to offer their help. But inside, the couple had their suspicions.
00:04:55
From the 1970s to the early 2000s, Sydney earned an undesirable reputation as the gay-bashing capital of Australia.
00:05:04
For many years, gay men were targeted by gangs for nothing more than their sexuality.
00:05:11
These beatings were considered by many to be a form of sport and the perpetrators often bragged about their
00:05:17
crimes. In 2018, the New South Wales government launched a landmark special commission
00:05:24
of inquiry into these historical hate crimes and found that over those four decades, an average of 20 gay men
00:05:31
reported being bashed every single day. As many as 88 gay men were murdered during that time.
00:05:39
Many of these deaths were framed to look like suicides. Sydney wasn't the only Australian city
00:05:47
troubled by these violent hate crimes. Throughout the early 1990s, it was reported by The Age newspaper that on
00:05:54
average, a gay person was murdered in Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs every two to three months.
00:06:00
Offenders sought victims at toilet blocks and public parks known to be frequented by gay men seeking casual
00:06:06
sex. Bashings at one regional toilet block became so commonplace that authorities
00:06:12
recommended it be demolished altogether. To protect one another, gay men created
00:06:18
a warning system by writing the number plates of known bashers on the walls of gay beats.
00:06:24
Victims were often reluctant to report the crimes, making the statistics unclear, but for members of the LGBTQIA+
00:06:32
community, the threat of violence was an everyday reality. Keith Hibbins and David Campbell were
00:06:39
openly gay and presented themselves as such, often walking around arm-in-arm. As David later told author Steve Dow,
00:06:48
"Most people know that we're gay without our ever having to say it." They were all too aware of the looming
00:06:55
threat of violence with David alone having been the victim of at least four gay bashings in the past.
00:07:03
There was a particular area within the Fitzroy Gardens that was known to be a hangout for gay men.
00:07:09
Therefore, when they were approached by two young men who were acting overtly aggressive towards them, David and Keith
00:07:16
were immediately suspicious of their story that they were trying to catch a rapist.
00:07:21
Instead, David thought they might have been gay bashers. He exchanged a knowing look with Keith
00:07:28
who said, "We've got to get out of here. Run." David and Keith took off towards Lansdowne Street. The other two men
00:07:40
started chasing them. As they ran past a light pole, David's foot became caught on its concrete base
00:07:46
and he tripped over. He tried to pull himself back up, but before he managed to do so, something
00:07:53
made contact with his mouth and nose. He couldn't tell if it was a fist or a foot.
00:08:00
David was then pushed face-first into the ground where the men struck him numerous times in the legs, hips, and
00:08:06
face. He heard one of them say, "I'm going to [ __ ] kill you." Keith saw what was happening and rushed
00:08:15
back to help. "Leave him alone," he demanded. This brief distraction gave David the
00:08:22
opportunity to get up and to run away. With a surge of adrenaline, he continued bolting towards the safety of Lansdowne
00:08:29
Street. He could feel that one of the attackers was hot on his heels. Once they reached the street, David
00:08:36
sideswiped straight into the oncoming traffic. He ran into the middle of the road,
00:08:42
desperately waving his arms in an attempt to flag someone down. By the time he got to St. Andrew's Lane
00:08:49
on the other side, the attacker was gone. A married couple named Paul and Michelle
00:08:55
Rogers pulled over. "Somebody help us, please," David pleaded. "I've been bashed."
00:09:03
Keith didn't take the straight path out of the gardens. Instead, he ran at an angle into the darkness with the taller
00:09:10
of the two attackers pursuing him. An accident years earlier left Keith with a broken arm and a leg which had
00:09:17
been screwed back together. As a result, he wasn't particularly agile and ran in a way described as
00:09:24
being like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Keith pushed onward until he emerged
00:09:31
from the gardens further north up Lansdowne Street. From the seventh floor of the nearby
00:09:38
Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, a woman peered out of a window and it noticed what was unfolding on the street
00:09:43
below. Keith Hibbins was pinned up against the car while the two younger men were,
00:09:49
quote, "punching the crap out of him." From the woman's view, it looked like the attackers had restrained Keith by
00:09:57
the shoulders and were beating him with their fists and elbows. She thought they must have administered
00:10:03
at least 20 blows, describing one of the men as a bloody animal, savage. At no point did she see Keith fight
00:10:12
back. At street level, a passerby heard Keith screaming for help and saw the attack
00:10:19
unfolding. As the two men continued to beat Keith, they were also heard verbally abusing
00:10:26
him. The passerby called for an ambulance, panic in his voice as he told the operator,
00:10:33
"They're getting stuck into someone up here. Make it quick." Within minutes, Keith Hibbins fell to
00:10:44
the ground unconscious. Meanwhile, around the corner, David Campbell stood outside the entrance of
00:10:51
the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute. The couple he'd flagged down, Paul and Michelle Rogers, were doing their best
00:10:59
to console him as he explained what he and his partner had just been through. Suddenly, the two attackers came running
00:11:06
towards them. David immediately fled into the medical center while Paul Rogers did his best to
00:11:13
block the men from entering. Paul and Michelle could smell alcohol on the men's breath and noted that they
00:11:19
were slurring their words as they heatedly tried to talk over one another. They aggressively tried to push Paul out
00:11:26
of the way to get to David, yelling that a woman had been raped in the park. One of the men asked rhetorically,
00:11:35
"What would you do if you approached two guys, told them that, and they ran off?"
00:11:41
He told Michelle that she was protecting a rapist. Michelle said that David was gay and he
00:11:47
wasn't responsible. One of the men replied, "He would say that, wouldn't he?" While the other sneered, "Likely story."
00:11:59
The two offenders returned to the spot where Keith Hibbins lay unconscious in the street and waited for the police to
00:12:05
arrive. They presented themselves to the officers immediately, identifying themselves as 27-year-old John Whiteside
00:12:14
and 23-year-old Christian Peter Deeba. Whiteside and Deeba outright admitted they were responsible for the beating.
00:12:22
As far as they were concerned, they were just doing their civic duty. A woman had been raped and today had
00:12:29
apprehended the culprits. Air-conditioning technician John Whiteside was operating on little sleep
00:12:38
when a friend picked him up to go to the Anzac Day footy match at the MCG. An avid sports fan, Whiteside had stayed
00:12:45
up late watching the World Cup cricket on television. Still, he managed to get ready in time
00:12:52
to have a few drinks at a pub around the corner from the ground before the match
00:12:55
kicked off. It was there that Whiteside and his mate met up with some mutual friends, one of
00:13:02
whom was Christian Deeba, a recent economics graduate who worked in the accounts department of a security guard
00:13:09
company. The group headed to the game together, where they had a few more drinks before
00:13:14
returning to the pub after watching Essendon beat Collingwood by eight points. Keen to carry on, they decided to head
00:13:22
further into the city for more drinks before calling it a night. At around 7:00 p.m., the group of six
00:13:30
began walking down Wellington Parade along the southern perimeter of the Fitzroy Gardens.
00:13:36
There, they came across a young woman who was slumped on the ground crying hysterically.
00:13:41
She was barefoot and wearing just one sock while the strap of her singlet top had slipped off her shoulder.
00:13:48
The group approached to see if she was okay, but as they did so, she yelled, "Are you going to rape me, too?"
00:13:57
In an apparent state of panic, she threw her wallet at them saying, "Just take it and leave me alone."
00:14:06
John Whiteside, Christian Deeba, and their group of friends didn't know what to do.
00:14:12
One of them gave the woman his jacket before Whiteside draped his Collingwood scarf around her neck.
00:14:19
A jogger came over and told the group he'd run past the woman earlier and heard her arguing with two men.
00:14:26
While the group had discussed what to do, the woman continued to sob uncontrollably.
00:14:32
They opened her wallet to check if she had any ID and learned that she was 23-year-old Evgenia Sionis.
00:14:39
The group offered to hail her a taxi, but Evgenia said no. She wanted the police instead.
00:14:48
A member of the group called emergency services requesting both the police and an ambulance. Evgenia continued crying.
00:14:57
One of the men asked her if she'd been raped, but she didn't give a clear answer.
00:15:02
They pressed on asking if she'd been sexually assaulted. She said yes, she had been assaulted by
00:15:09
two men. John Whiteside and Christian Deeba didn't wait around to hear more. With the police and paramedics on the
00:15:18
way to tend to Evgenia, they set out on a mission of their own to find the men responsible.
00:15:32
After arriving on the scene to find Keith Hibbins unconscious and battered on the street, police took Whiteside and
00:15:38
Deeba into custody. Both of them cooperated fully with all procedures and had no hesitation in
00:15:45
giving their version of events. Their recollections matched each others, but differed significantly to David
00:15:52
Campbell's and other witnesses who'd watched the attack unfold. Both Whiteside and Deeba said they were
00:16:00
shocked upon finding Evgenia Sionis. Whiteside described her as being so frightened that it was scary.
00:16:08
Someone close to him had been raped and this prompted an emotional reaction. While he admitted he probably should
00:16:15
have just waited for the police with the rest of his group, his thought process at the time was that the safest thing to
00:16:22
do was to look around for the offenders. Whiteside and Deeba claimed that they weren't aggressive when they approached
00:16:30
Keith Hibbins and David Campbell to ask if they'd seen anyone running past. Deeba recalled,
00:16:37
"We were as calm and rational as you can get. It was only when Keith and David started
00:16:44
acting nervously and decided to sprint away that Whiteside and Deeba suspected they were responsible for the rape."
00:16:51
Whiteside told the police, "The two gentlemen just acted very, very strange and when they started to run
00:16:59
off, that wasn't a good look. It looked like they did it." Neither John Whiteside nor Christian
00:17:07
Deeba mentioned attacking David Campbell after he tripped over or threatening to
00:17:12
kill him. Deeba said he'd simply grabbed David and asked why he was running away.
00:17:19
When David took off again, Deeba said he chased him for a while before giving up.
00:17:25
He looked up Lansdowne Street and saw that Whiteside had caught Keith. Deeba told the police,
00:17:32
"I thought I'd help a Johnny because I was dead set convinced that they knew something about this girl getting raped.
00:17:39
Johnny was just trying to hold him, so I came up and just said, 'Listen, mate, just [ __ ] stay there
00:17:45
and wait for the police.'" According to Deeba, Keith yelled some violent things back at them, at one
00:17:53
point threatening, "I'm going to kill you, you dobber." Which was a colloquial term for an
00:17:59
informant. Deeba said their aim was simply to keep Keith in place until the police arrived,
00:18:06
but he resisted, prompting Deeba and Whiteside to throw a few punches. Deeba claimed they hadn't hit Keith that
00:18:14
hard and that the real injury must have been caused when he knocked his head on the ground.
00:18:20
He told the police, "I am a security guard, so I know you can use reasonable force to make a
00:18:26
lawful arrest. My objective wasn't to hurt him, but what else can you do? I didn't have handcuffs or anything like
00:18:34
that. I thought you could use a bit of force to make a citizen's arrest." John Whiteside contradicted his friend
00:18:45
slightly saying it was Deeba who dive-tackled Keith on the street before Whiteside stepped in.
00:18:52
He claimed that he grabbed Keith who tried to take a swing at him. Whiteside said he then hit Keith a
00:18:59
couple of times in the jaw, four at the most, but they were only short, sharp hits and not enough to knock him out.
00:19:07
Whiteside explained, "I was chucking the swings basically in self-defense. I was shaking him saying,
00:19:15
'What's going on? How come you're running away? You obviously know something.'" According to Whiteside, he and Keith
00:19:23
started to wrestle and Keith began to overpower him. That's when Deeba stepped in and hit Keith, rendering him
00:19:30
unconscious. Both men firmly denied that Keith had been hit upwards of 20 times as the
00:19:38
witness watching from upstairs had described. They both showed genuine remorse for
00:19:44
their actions, explaining they were completely out of character. Background checks supported this.
00:19:52
John Whiteside and Christian Deeba came from solid homes in good areas and were close with their families.
00:19:58
Both were well-educated, employed in respectable fields, and involved in community sports.
00:20:05
Neither had any history of violence or any form of criminal record. Christian Deeba apologized profusely to
00:20:13
the police saying it was never their intention to cause any serious harm or bash someone for no reason.
00:20:20
John Whiteside told detectives, "I'm guilty for hitting him, but I mean, he chucked the first one.
00:20:28
If this guy's got hurt, I'd be the first bloke to say sorry. But it's just the way they came across.
00:20:34
It was very sus." In hindsight, Whiteside said that while they just wanted to help, their decision
00:20:42
to pursue Evgenia's rapists was probably the stupidest idea he'd ever had. "I'm not a thug," Whiteside explained.
00:20:52
"What's happened is a mistake, and that's basically all I can put it down to. I'm sorry what happened to that bloke,
00:20:59
and I mean it 100%. I didn't mean to hurt him, and I don't think Christian meant to hurt him.
00:21:06
If we had stayed in the pub for another half an hour, none of this would have happened.
00:21:10
I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time." Keith Hibbins had been rushed to St.
00:21:18
Vincent's Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. He'd sustained serious injuries to his
00:21:23
head, neck, chest, and arms resulting in brain damage. Keith was put on life support, but
00:21:31
doctors were hopeful that he'd recover. John Whiteside and Christian Deeba were both subsequently charged with
00:21:38
intentionally causing serious injury. While all this had been unfolding, paramedics had arrived on the scene near
00:21:48
the Fitzroy Gardens and found Evgenia Sionis curled up in the fetal position crying, "Why me?"
00:21:55
She'd been reluctant to tell them much, but once at the hospital, she admitted to a doctor that she'd been raped.
00:22:04
It was 2 days before Evgenia gave her first statement to police from the rape squad.
00:22:10
She recalled that she'd been walking through the gardens when a man grabbed her from behind and forced her into the
00:22:15
back of his ute. He managed to pull her pants down without unzipping them, at which point
00:22:21
Evgenia said she could feel his semi-erect penis between her upper thighs. She broke free before there was any
00:22:29
penetration and managed to provide a decent description of the offender. He looked to be around 28 to 30 years
00:22:36
old and spoke with a deep voice. His hair was short, dark, and straight, styled in a single length.
00:22:44
In her statement, Evgenia said, "All I could think of was, 'Why me?'" While police investigated the rape,
00:22:56
Keith Hibbins remained unconscious and fighting for his life. His partner, David, stayed by his side
00:23:03
willing him to wake up. For David, life without Keith was impossible to imagine.
00:23:10
The two had met by complete chance 15 years earlier. David had waved at Keith across a
00:23:16
crowded pub having mistaken him for someone else, and they ended up talking all night.
00:23:23
Keith was a country kid having grown up in the northwest of Victorian town of Maryborough.
00:23:29
He eventually moved to Melbourne to study architecture where he dated a few women before coming out as gay.
00:23:36
At 6 ft tall, he was known to be a bit of a party animal who loved the nightlife.
00:23:42
Even though David considered himself more of a homebody, he was instantly drawn to Keith.
00:23:48
Their connection was immediate, and it wasn't long before they'd moved in together and started building a shared
00:23:53
life. In recent years, Keith had slowed his partying ways. The couple's weekend routine typically
00:24:02
consisted of watching movies at their renovated Edwardian home that Keith had redesigned and a trip to the pub.
00:24:11
The doctors and police reassured David that Keith was going to be okay, but as the days ticked by, he still hadn't
00:24:19
regained consciousness. By Thursday, May 6th, 1999, 11 days had passed since the attack.
00:24:28
David was away from the hospital when he got a call saying it was time to come and say his final goodbye.
00:24:36
He made it there in time for Keith to die in his arms. An autopsy confirmed Keith's cause of
00:24:45
death to be blunt head trauma which resulted in dissection of the left vertebral artery and caused a fatal
00:24:51
brain bleed. Not only was this news a tragedy for Keith's loved ones, it also changed
00:24:58
things for John Whiteside and Christian Deeba. With Keith having passed away as a
00:25:03
result of the attack, the charges against them were upgraded to murder. While those involved struggled to come
00:25:11
to terms with these developments, there was still the question of who was responsible for the sexual assault
00:25:17
against Evgenia Sionis. Weeks passed and no arrests were made. Then, 1 month after the attack, Evgenia
00:25:26
made a shocking revelation. On Anzac Day of 1999, Evgenia woke up at her boyfriend's place and started the
00:25:36
day by smoking cannabis. The couple lounged around in bed for a while before deciding to go
00:25:42
rollerblading in the bayside suburb of St. Kilda. After a short jaunt around the
00:25:48
foreshore, they stopped in at the nearby Esplanade Hotel. It was 11:30 a.m. when Evgenia ordered
00:25:55
her first drink for the day, a bourbon and Coke. She had three more drinks in quick
00:26:01
succession and the booze kept flowing from there. Evgenia and her boyfriend, Tony, spent
00:26:08
the day hopping from one St. Kilda pub to the next. By nightfall, Evgenia's head was
00:26:14
spinning. She was so drunk that she was staggering on her feet. She and Tony got into his car and began
00:26:22
driving towards the CBD. Evgenia wanted to go to another pub, but Tony felt she was already too drunk and
00:26:30
they should call it a night. As they approached the Fitzroy Gardens, an argument broke out between them.
00:26:38
Evgenia became furious. When Tony stopped at a red light, she jumped out of the car saying she wanted
00:26:45
to go for a walk and get some fresh air. Tony drove onto the grassy verge and urged her to get back in, but Evgenia
00:26:53
refused. Frustrated by the whole situation, Tony drove off leaving her in the cold with
00:27:00
no shoes or jumper. Stumbling around the park, Evgenia began to cry. She collapsed onto the grass sobbing
00:27:10
until a group of passersby approached. When they asked if she'd been raped, she spontaneously said yes.
00:27:19
Everything she said from that point on was a lie. With Evgenia Sionis admitting she'd made
00:27:31
the whole rape story up, it added a whole new level of confusion to an already complex case.
00:27:37
John Whiteside and Christian Deeba maintained they had no idea that Keith Hibbins and David Campbell were gay and
00:27:44
that they'd only pursued them in an attempt to perform a citizen's arrest. But that in itself prompted some heated
00:27:52
debates. The level of violence inflicted on Keith went well beyond an attempt to restrain
00:27:58
him. Many believe that even if the men's pursuit began with honorable intentions,
00:28:04
it quickly escalated into something else entirely. To some investigators, the ferocity of
00:28:10
the attack was more in line with the vigilante justice. In the eyes of the law, vigilantism was
00:28:17
to be punished not only to uphold the law, but to deter others from similar behavior.
00:28:25
Complicating matters further was the fact that both the John Whiteside and Christian Deeba maintained they were
00:28:31
only acting in self-defense. They'd both attempted to diminish their own involvement by placing the blame on
00:28:38
Keith Hibbins himself. Whiteside said that Keith had struck him first and he was simply fighting back,
00:28:46
while Deeba claimed he'd only gotten involved after seeing that his friend was having trouble subduing Keith, who
00:28:52
threatened to kill them. While both Whiteside and Deeba continued to express sincere remorse for their
00:29:00
actions, they entered not guilty pleas. As their trial date loomed closer, the proceedings were assigned to Justice
00:29:08
Philip Cummins, a revered judge with a reputation for being particularly tough on violent crimes.
00:29:16
For David Campbell, this was welcome news. Ever since Keith's death, he'd struggled to come to terms with what had
00:29:23
happened. In the days after Keith passed, David was so distraught that he'd been put on
00:29:29
suicide watch. He'd built his entire life around Keith, and a friend commented, "It will be very, very hard for David to
00:29:39
pick up the pieces and go on." As the months passed by, David became socially isolated and was diagnosed with
00:29:49
post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression. Speaking about David's condition, his
00:29:56
psychologist remarked, "In all my years of working, I have not witnessed such excruciating suffering in
00:30:03
a bereaved person." That pain only worsened when word got out that the defense team intended to
00:30:11
discredit David's evidence by claiming he had a phobia of being beaten up, which prompted him to run from the
00:30:18
offenders, even though they showed no aggression. In the words of the defense, "David's account should be viewed with a
00:30:26
doubt, given he had been, {quote} very distressed, depressed, and hysterical." David believed that Whiteside and Deeba
00:30:38
genuinely went looking for a rapist, but after failing to find what they were looking for, they had to direct their
00:30:44
anger and adrenaline somewhere. He told author Steve Dow that when they spotted two obviously gay men, it gave
00:30:52
them a target. This was a theory shared by others, including a senior Victorian judge who
00:30:59
spoke to Steve Dow on the condition of anonymity. He agreed with the David Campbell that
00:31:05
it had been a gay bashing and that Whiteside and Deeba had then tried to, {quote}
00:31:11
white knight themselves as vigilantes, knowing they could get a lesser penalty. The trial was scheduled to commence in
00:31:20
June 2000, 14 months after the attack. All those involved hoped that the truth would come out in court, but just days
00:31:30
before the starting date, there was an unexpected announcement. John Whiteside and Christian Deeba had
00:31:37
agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. While this would spare everyone a
00:31:44
possibly lengthy trial and the two defendants still faced a significant jail sentence, it also meant they
00:31:50
wouldn't have to give evidence. David Campbell was devastated, viewing the decision as, {quote}
00:31:58
an enormous breach of trust and a travesty of justice. At the sentencing hearing, the lead
00:32:08
prosecutor said that it was reasonable for John Whiteside and Christian Deeba to believe Evgeniy Tsionas's claims of
00:32:15
rape, but it was just as reasonable that Keith Hibbins and David Campbell believed that
00:32:21
they were being targeted by gay bashers. The problem therein lied in the ferocity
00:32:27
of the assault against Keith. The prosecutor put forward that the level of violence indicated a desire to
00:32:35
punish Keith, saying that Whiteside and Deeba were overcome with a sense of righteousness.
00:32:41
He therefore stated that the crime should be considered a serious example of manslaughter and punished
00:32:47
accordingly. At the time, the maximum amount for manslaughter was 20 years imprisonment.
00:32:56
Lawyers for the defense pointed out that Evgeniy Tsionas played a significant role in Keith's death, while downplaying
00:33:03
the extent of Whiteside and Deeba's behavior. Even though both men admitted that
00:33:09
they'd been drinking throughout the entire day of the attack, they denied being drunk.
00:33:15
Their lawyers called into question evidence given by the witness who viewed the attack from the seventh floor of the
00:33:20
nearby Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute. She said Whiteside and Deeba had hit Keith at least 20 times, while Keith's
00:33:29
autopsy found only six to eight injuries on his head and neck. They also called David Campbell's
00:33:36
evidence into question, refuting his claim that Whiteside and Deeba had threatened to kill him.
00:33:43
Whiteside's lawyer said his client was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, at which point the judge cut him
00:33:49
off, saying, "No one forced him to chase the poor deceased man and to bash him."
00:33:57
Both defense lawyers highlighted the otherwise good character and clean criminal record of their clients, both
00:34:03
of whom had admitted to the stupidity of their actions. Whiteside's lawyer said his client was
00:34:09
simply an overzealous citizen who overreacted and made a mistake, while Deeba's lawyer described the ordeal as a
00:34:16
tragic happening where best intentions went wrong. Justice Philip Cummins acknowledged that
00:34:25
Whiteside and Deeba were both men of upstanding character who didn't go out looking for violence and agreed it was
00:34:32
reasonable for them to believe Evgeniy Tsionas's claim of rape. While Cummins didn't believe that the
00:34:38
defendants purposely aimed to mislead police, he concluded that their heightened emotions had caused them to
00:34:45
downplay the extent of their aggressive behavior and lay some of the blame on the victims.
00:34:51
Justice Cummins said, "You both ran up to the two men. You were full of anger and indignation."
00:35:00
He pointed out that the defendants had no idea that Keith and David were a peaceable gay couple and that they
00:35:06
didn't wait to ask. "That is the risk of citizens' law enforcement," the judge said. "Mistakes
00:35:14
occur." He didn't find that their actions were in line with vigilantism, as vigilante
00:35:20
justice requires a level of premeditation. But he also rejected the defense that it
00:35:26
was a citizen's arrest that gone awry, saying, "This was not a citizen's arrest because
00:35:33
you punished the suspect, not apprehended him." Cummins also found that their conduct
00:35:40
wasn't in line with that of aggressive drunken sports followers. "If it had been," he said, "their
00:35:46
punishment would be more severe." Keith's decision to run, thinking he was the target of a gay bashing, was also
00:35:55
reasonable to Justice Cummins, who remarked, "The fact that his mistake was reasonable brings shame on us all. Shame
00:36:04
that our society has been so inept for so long in eliminating violence or the risk of violence against gay people, and
00:36:11
a shame that by our failure, gay people have become immune to violence or the risk of violence against them."
00:36:20
Addressing the two defendants, the judge concluded, "Your aggressive and excessive conduct
00:36:27
towards Mr. Hibbins is to be condemned. It caused the death of a human being, but the categories of manslaughter range
00:36:36
widely in culpability. Yours is in the least culpable category. Yours was the conduct of two young men
00:36:45
of good character, not looking for trouble, who truly and reasonably believed a woman had been raped and who,
00:36:52
without reflection or premeditation, sought to ensure the perpetrators did not escape before the summoned police
00:36:59
arrived, who then, in a rush of emotion, believing you had found the perpetrators, severely but briefly
00:37:07
assaulted the victim. Finally, there is the rare and perverse confluence of events which channeled you
00:37:13
towards this tragedy. The false cry of rape, your decent belief in its truth, and the socially
00:37:20
induced fear of the victims for which we all share blame. You are, of course, responsible for your
00:37:27
own actions. No one suggests otherwise. But you and the victims were under a malevolent star that Anzac night."
00:37:38
With that, Justice Cummins sentenced both the John Whiteside and Christian Deeba to 3 years in prison.
00:37:46
As they'd both already served 6 months in pre-sentence detention, he suspended the remaining 2 and 1/2 years,
00:37:53
concluding, "I propose that each of you be released immediately from further custody."
00:38:05
For many members of the public, the sentences caused outrage. At The Age newspaper, letters flooded in
00:38:12
from people expressing disappointment at what they viewed as a miscarriage of justice.
00:38:17
One reader called the case a potent cocktail in the current moral climate in which male ethos equates violence with
00:38:24
the virility. She wrote, "There is no place in the law for a subjective moral bias. It is irrelevant
00:38:33
that the perpetrators appear to be respectable, intelligent young men, or that they believed themselves motivated
00:38:40
to apprehend a rapist, or that their unfortunate victims were gay. The facts of the situation are that in a
00:38:48
state of fury, without a single shred of evidence to justify their choice of victim, they engaged in deliberate,
00:38:55
sustained physical violence causing grievous bodily harm to one defenseless human being and a death to another.
00:39:03
These are the facts on which a sentence should be based, and a mere 6 months in remand is grossly inadequate."
00:39:12
David Campbell agreed that the sentences were abysmal. While he didn't harbor any hatred
00:39:18
towards John Whiteside and Christian Deeba, David told author Steve Dow that his anger was directed towards Justice
00:39:26
Philip Cummins. "He was a gay basher," David said. "A verbal gay basher. I believe that if Keith had been a
00:39:35
heterosexual male who had children, he would have thrown the weight of the law behind it."
00:39:42
Another outraged citizen compared the outcome to a case where an indigenous child had been jailed for 12 months for
00:39:49
stealing pens, and pointed out that drivers who cause accidental deaths receive harsher sentences.
00:39:56
"How can this be?" she wrote to The Age. "These men will go on with their lives now, while Keith Hibbins' family, lover,
00:40:04
and friends are left to deal with their devastating loss." More than 300 people signed a petition
00:40:12
urging the court of appeal to impose a tougher sentence on Whiteside and Adebayo.
00:40:17
The president of the Crime Victims Support Association commented to the press, "It was inexcusable that two fit young
00:40:25
men could bash a gay guy to death, then walk free. Then you hear that someone who held up a
00:40:31
bank with a gun, didn't shoot anyone, and he got a little bit of money, got eight years in jail.
00:40:37
The whole system is a joke." The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed against the sentences on the
00:40:45
ground that they were manifestly inadequate. The DPP believed that the judge had
00:40:50
downplayed the gravity of the offense by depicting it as an almost inevitable consequence of an unfolding tragedy,
00:40:57
when the actions of Whiteside and Adebayo went well beyond those of well-motivated citizens.
00:41:05
The appeal was considered by a panel of three judges in the Supreme Court, with one concluding,
00:41:12
"The viciousness of the assault and its lack of foundation smacks far more of a desire to avenge and punish by two
00:41:19
persons disinhibited by liquor consumed than it does of misguided chivalry. It seems to me that no matter which way
00:41:28
one tries to justify or explain the facts found by the judge, the conclusion remains inescapable. That a decent life
00:41:36
has been taken because the two respondents, hitherto of good repute, decided to take the law into their own
00:41:43
hands and become, without proper justification, the judges and punishers of the deceased."
00:41:51
"Whatever good intentions may have existed when they chose to remove themselves from their own group and
00:41:56
enter the gardens, those intentions had dissolved by the time they aggressively confronted Hibbins and Campbell.
00:42:04
Thereafter, their good intentions were replaced by an unjustified desire to catch and punish.
00:42:11
Any suggestion that they were acting as citizens concerned for the rights of the
00:42:15
distressed woman became little more than a pale excuse for their unlawful conduct."
00:42:23
The other judges agreed. They ordered that John Whiteside and Christian Adebayo's sentences be
00:42:29
quashed, and that they both be sent back to jail for six years, eligible for parole after four.
00:42:37
As the sentences were delivered, loved ones of Whiteside and Adebayo began to cry.
00:42:43
While David Campbell felt the new decision recognized Keith as a valued member of the community, it pained him
00:42:50
that others were losing people they loved. Although the outcome gave him some sense
00:42:56
of justice, David told The Age, "Nobody won." The circumstances surrounding Keith
00:43:07
Hibbins' tragic death and the subsequent proceedings prompted many ongoing questions within legal circles and the
00:43:14
LGBTQIA+ community. Among these questions was what role did Evgenia Xynous' story play?
00:43:23
For her false rape claim, Evgenia was convicted of making a false report to police.
00:43:29
When asked in court why she lied about the attack, she responded, "I cannot answer that question."
00:43:37
When it was put to her that her actions led to two men being charged for murdering an innocent man, Evgenia said,
00:43:45
"I have been punished already for that. I didn't go and tell them to do that." She was sentenced to two months
00:43:53
imprisonment, which the judge allowed her to serve by way of an intensive correction order.
00:44:00
Another prevailing question was whether or not the attack on Keith could be considered a hate crime.
00:44:07
The same year that Whiteside and Adebayo were sentenced, the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby released a report
00:44:13
titled Enough Is Enough, which found that over the past five years, 66% of LGBTQIA+
00:44:22
people had experienced an assault or harassment in a public place. As one concerned citizen wrote to The
00:44:29
Age, "We may never know whether the two killers were motivated by homophobia or not,
00:44:36
but the fact that when approached by two agitated young men, Keith Hibbins and David Campbell's first instinct was to
00:44:44
run, indicates the level of fear that many gay, lesbian, and transgender people experience daily."
00:44:53
Whiteside and Adebayo served their time and molded back into the community. Neither has ever spoken publicly about
00:45:00
the case. David refused to carry hatred for either of the men who killed his life partner.
00:45:08
For him, one of the hardest things to comprehend was why Keith came back to rescue him instead of running towards
00:45:15
the light and safety of Lansdowne Street. In recognition of this courageous act,
00:45:21
the Royal Humane Society of Australasia posthumously awarded Keith Hibbins with a medal for bravery.
00:45:29
Years before Keith Hibbins was killed, a friend of David's gave him a wooden photo frame as a gift.
00:45:36
While Keith was busy working on an architectural project one day, David snapped a candid photo of him and put it
00:45:43
in the frame. He hid the frame away and didn't come across it again until after Keith's
00:45:49
death. David told author Steve Dow, "I never had worn pajamas in my life, but now I wear pajamas and I stick this
00:46:00
photo down my pajama top when I go to sleep at night. I talk to it then, and I talk to it in
00:46:07
the morning, and I kiss it."