Patti Allen-Price

Not in the Public Interest Patti Allen-Price

In 1988, as the fallout from the infamous Fitzgerald Police Crime and Corruption Inquiry echoed around the country, a beautiful, 25-year-old actress and model was found viciously beaten and strangled to death near a Gold Coast golf club. Her husband, a handsome and charismatic Islamic freedom fighter, whom she had met in Cyprus and bigamously married in Athens a year earlier, was soon arrested and charged with her murder. But after a long, protracted trial that suggested other unseen forces may have come into play, he was acquitted and set free. Four hours later he was re-arrested as an illegal immigrant and set free while awaiting deportation.

However before this could be carried out and because of anomalies in the trial, 6 months later he was again arrested on three counts of perjury and one count of perverting the course of justice for providing a false alibi. Australian legal history was made when he was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for lying to the court on the charge of beating and murdering his wife. Owing to the fact that the second trial had basically been another murder trial, the sentence was successfully appealed against on the grounds of double jeopardy, despite the judge at the second trial's summing up that it was inferred that he had obviously committed the murder, charges were dropped and he was again released.

This is the intriguing story based on the victim's mother and co-writer, Patti Allen-Price, a well-known Australian performer, and her struggle to bring her daughter's murderer to justice and a new theory as to why her killer walked free.