Victoria Bitter: The Jaidyn Leskie Story

Grishka and the Aliens

Six months after Jaidyn's birth, Bilynda began seeing Greg Domaszewicz. She had met the sometime mechanic when Domaszewicz briefly shared a garage with Brett Leskie. Kadee would later tell writer Robin Bowles that she had engineered the meeting, at least in part to break up Brett and Bilynda. She couldn't have picked a more unlikely foil for Brett.

Greg Domaszewicz

Short and slight, he stooped when he walked and his most defining characteristic was an untamed wisp of mousy blonde hair. Still Domaszewicz was an odd character in a town that was full of them. On the dole more often than not, and with a real taste for booze, "Grishka" as his Russian mother called him, had a reputation as a practical joker. Bowles, in her book Justice Denied, describes him this way: "He was fond of stupid practical jokes on people to make himself look better when it became apparent that he hadn't rolled their cars, lost their power tools, dobbed them in (informed on them) to police or whatever." Though he had done well in school in Moe, the overall impression he gave was of someone who was "inarticulate and not very bright."

At the same time, even those who knew him best had a hard time telling when he was being serious and when he was joking. He claimed to be an ardent believer in UFOs and insisted to at least one friend that he had once met visiting aliens. He claimed, Gleeson reported, that he had discovered that the extraterrestrial visitors had a serious distaste for two Australian delicacies prepackaged chocolate milk and the ubiquitous Aussie sausage rolls. According to some reports, he made a practice of eating at least one sausage roll a day to keep the aliens at bay and, it is said, he kept a container of chocolate milk on the roof of his rented cottage to deflect a sneak attack by air.

Such idiosyncrasies might have seemed harmless, maybe even endearing, but there was also a darker side to Grishka's character, one that some say manifested itself in brooding obsessions, particularly when it came to one woman in particular.

Yvonne Penfold and Greg Domaszewicz had been partners and enemies in a wildly dysfunctional romance since Yvonne was a teenager. Pretty in a hard-edged Moe sort of way, Yvonne Penfold suffered from emotional and psychological problems. Her relationship with Domaszewicz did little to ease them, particularly when the couple lived together. In fact, she would later admit, she was forced to seek professional help and ultimately began taking a prescription anti-depressant, Aurorix, mixed with sleeping pills to get her through the rough patches with Domaszewicz.

The record of the couple's stormy romance can be found in the local police blotter and court files. Repeatedly, the couple filed complaints about each other, and in more than one case, there were allegations of brutality. In one bizarre episode, Yvonne Penfold had Domaczewicz's pet pig slaughtered and served it to him as pork chops, authorities would later say. Penfold claimed she did it because the pig was eating the couple out of house and home. Domaszewicz always insisted she did it to punish him for some indiscretion. In another instance, Penfold later told authorities, she and Domaszewicz had gotten into a fight and he had throttled her, then locked her in his bathroom. She was so outraged that she pounded against the glass door of the shower until it shattered, carving deep gashes in her arm and splattering the bathroom walls with tiny droplets of her blood. During that struggle, it was later said in court, Penfold squirted Domaszewicz with a noxious substance that he described as capsicum, or pepper spray.

That incident would come back to haunt both of them as Domaszewicz was convinced, though Penfold denied it, that it had been provided to her by a police officer in Moe, Sergeant Russell Fraser, a self-described family friend of the Penfolds, who would later be forced to deny what Domaszewicz had long suspected in private; that he had a long-running affair with Yvonne Penfold. Despite the denials, Domaszewicz was so convinced that something illicit was going on between the cop and his sometime girlfriend, that, as Robin Bowles later put it in an interview with Crime Library, he slowly began amassing what he took to be evidence of some other alleged indiscretions on the part of the officer.

As often as they lodged complaints and as often as they obtained restraining orders against each other, the couple quickly violated them, arranging secret meetings near Blue Rock Dam, one of Domaszewicz's favorite fishing holes.

Even Domaszewicz's budding romance with Bilynda Murphy did little to cool the intemperate ardor he had for Penfold, authorities would later say. Although by 1997 he was deeply involved in his romance with the single mother, he still allegedly obsessed over Penfold. He told one friend, Gleeson reported, that he had even limited his sexual activity with Murphy, preferring to save the traditional missionary-type encounters for his true love. There were also frequent telephone calls, authorities would later disclose. Sometimes, as Penfold would claim, the calls were abusive. Other times, they were conciliatory, and in some cases, they were simply bizarre, such as the time, Penfold claimed, that Domaszewicz offered her $20,000 (AU) to have his child.

By June 1997, Penfold had decided to take the advice of her brother, Kenny, a small time hood with a record of arrests that dated back as long as anyone could remember for offenses ranging from assault to drug possession, and end her relationship with Domaszewicz once and for all. In truth, Kenny Penfold had never liked Domaszewicz. Though he had learned to temper his rage after seeing his sister from time to time with bruises, allegedly inflicted by her domineering boyfriend, he had never warmed to Domaszewicz, and at best, the pair shared a cold and mistrustful truce. Kenny Penfold and his crew, Tubby Hopkinson, Dean "Deano Dum-Dum" Ross and even Darren Wilson -- who had, it was said, longed for Yvonne -- all nurtured ill will toward the scrawny Russian mechanic.

Perhaps, says Bowles, that ill turned to something more ominous when one night in June, when Domaszewicz, driving by Penfold's house, spotted a few sport utility vehicles outside. Convinced that his true love was entertaining gentlemen callers, Yvonne Penfold would later surmise, Domaszewicz decided to take action. He rammed his car into the trunk of her parked car, forcing it into the garage door before speeding off.

In most places, such a brazen attack would prompt a call to the local police. But not in Moe, at least not on Austin Street, where Yvonne Penfold lived. There, it was an act of war that demanded retaliation. And it would come soon enough.