Irma and Gregor Palasics with Irma’s brother, Denes (left), when they lived at Red Hill. Photo: Supplied by family.
CONTENT WARNING: This article refers to graphic content.
Jurors have heard a man describe how he was forced to listen to his wife’s “dreadful screaming” after two men broke in and tied them up, before he freed himself and found her dead in their hallway.
Two police officers were filmed interviewing Gregor Palasics as he lay in a bed at Calvary Hospital just hours after his wife, 72-year-old Irma Palasics, had been killed on the night of 6 November 1999.
His face could hardly be seen in the video, which was shown to jurors in the ACT Supreme Court trial of the two men accused of murdering her, but he often gestured with his hands or fiddled with the microphone that sat on his chest.
Gregor said he had been switching channels while watching television and decided to get up to take a shower when the front door’s security light came on around 9:30 pm.
He then noticed two masked men inside the home. One ran at his wife in the lounge room, while the other “jumped at me like a tiger”.
“He fighting me and push me down and I want to save myself [sic],” he said.
The balaclava-wearing man hit him with something like “a big stick”, sat on his chest and asked him, “Where is the money? Where is the money?”
“I haven’t got any money,” Gregor said.
“I tell you truth. I say kill me, kill me, but I can’t help you.”
He said the man rolled him over, tied his wrists and legs and put something in his mouth before he heard the two intruders opening doors and cupboards through the house.
He eventually managed to move into the kitchen and found a knife in a cupboard, which he used to free himself, before he found Irma face down on the carpet in the hallway.
“I go to my wife … my wife in the corridor … sticky paper all around in her neck, very tight, all sticky paper … over the mouth, everything,” he said.
“I tried to go to cut the tape… ‘Come on, come on, come on, get up, get up, get up’. She don’t answer me, she die.”
He then called Triple Zero. A police officer asked what he did next.
“I just sit down. What could I do? I can do nothing,” he said.
In addition to the interview, jurors were shown a video of the crime scene walk-through of the Palasics’ home. Cupboard doors were left open, with their contents pulled out and strewn across the floor.
Also, the body of Ms Palasics was seen lying face-up on the floor of a hallway with a hand on her chest. There were red stains on her clothes and dark stains on the carpet around her body.
Irma and Gregor Palasics, pictured in the 1970s. Photo: Supplied by family.
Gregor said he did not see what happened to Irma after the intruders ran towards them, because one pushed him down and hit him while the other took his wife away. But he said he could hear her scream for 15 minutes from the corridor.
“Dreadful screaming,” he said.
He said the intruders found the “secret place” in the drawer under the wall oven in the kitchen, where he and his wife had $30,000 cash.
The police questioned whether the intruder who asked him for money had an accent.
“He just talk Australian,” Gregor said, adding it was “not a European”.
He also said he used to go to the Hungarian Club in Narrabundah while he and his wife would play the poker machines twice a week at the Kaleen or McKellar soccer clubs.
When asked if he told anyone at the soccer clubs about money, he said, “I don’t know”.
The interview was played when Superintendent Matthew Reynolds gave evidence in the trial on Tuesday (24 February), as he was one of the officers who spoke to Gregor that night.
He said Gregor had suffered a cut to his tongue, which made it difficult to hear him.
Meanwhile, Gail Cantle told the jury she was working as a victim liaison officer with police when she spoke to Gregor in hospital on 10 November 1999 and recorded him telling her he saw one of the intruders drinking from the fridge.
“He was too scared to move in case they came back for him,” she wrote in her notebook.
Jurors have heard Gregor died of unrelated causes in 2004.
The allegations against the two accused murderers, 70-year-olds Steve Fabriczy and Joseph Vekony, were outlined when the trial began in February.
Mr Fabriczy has pleaded guilty to one count of burglary as he admitted going to the Palasics’ home on 6 November 1999, but pleaded not guilty to murder. Mr Vekony pleaded not guilty to charges that included murder and two counts of burglary.
Jurors have heard about the 1998 burglary at the Palasics’ home, the hidden compartment in their kitchen, as well as from the couple’s daughters.
The trial continues before Justice David Mossop.
