Victoria Bitter: The Jaidyn Leskie Story

Gone Missing

Though it was officially a missing person's case, police in Moe immediately summoned homicide detectives from Melbourne. The cops may have held out hope that Jaidyn would return alive, but not much. The investigation was headed by Inspector Roland Legg, a man of few illusions. As bizarre as the circumstances seemed, Legg quickly became convinced that the pig's head crew had nothing to do with the boy's disappearance. It was, he insisted, simply a coincidence.

Clothes found with Jaidyn's body

By the time Legg made it to Moe, Domaszewicz had been questioned for hours. In all, he was asked more than 1,800 questions, and although he hadn't slept or eaten, as Bowles would later note, he never made a serious misstep during the interrogation. As strange as his story sounded, he stuck to it. But Legg remained suspicious, and he became convinced that Domaszewicz was behind the boy's disappearance and murder. In fact, he would later tell the court, he believed that Grishka had killed the boy, perhaps by accident and that his first plan was to drive the dead child back to Bilynda's house, place the boy's body in his own bed in the hopes that Murphy would assume that she had injured the child in a drunken blackout. That plan, Legg theorized, was scuttled, perhaps by the completely coincidental pig's head attack.

It was all conjecture however. Police needed hard evidence and that was hard to come by. According to court records, Domaszewicz was placed under constant surveillance. Investigators convinced a cousin of his to wear a wire, in the hopes of catching Domaszewicz in a lie or confession, but they had no luck. Even Bilynda, who vacillated between a firm conviction that her boyfriend was innocent and dark doubts about his character, tried to ferret information out of Domaszewicz. She later told authorities that the intimate letters she sent to Domaszewicz were designed to trip him up and make him confess to her. Despite their efforts, though, Domaszewicz seemed to remain unshaken.

But many had doubts. Even his newfound mate, Darren Farr, became suspicious of Greg Domaszewicz. By July, Domaszewicz was in custody. In one of the more controversial aspects of the case, according to Bowles, on July 29, nearly eight weeks after Jaidyn's disappearance -- after Domaszewicz was already in jail and after police had thoroughly searched his house -- Bilynda and some friends went to the house to retrieve a few things. To their surprise, they found a bag in plain view, they claimed, containing the same clothes Jaidyn had been wearing when she had dressed him that June morning. Mixed in with the clothes was a baby's bib that still stank of vomit. Tests on the bib would later reveal that the DNA did not match Jaidyn's. But who it came from, how it and the other articles of clothing found their way onto Domaszewicz's bed, remains an open and nagging question.

The significance of that discovery was lost in the furor over the discovery that was to come a few months later. On New Year's Day 1998, six months after Jaidyn's disappearance, the little boy's body was found submerged in about 20 feet of water at Blue Rock Dam, the same spot where Grishka used to fish and where he and Yvonne had so often violated the restraining orders they had sought against each other.

Blue Rock Dam area

Family members would later say the boy seemed bigger than they remembered him, as if perhaps he had grown, and his hair, which had been so terribly shorn by that last haircut Domaszewicz had given him, seemed longer than anybody remembered it. Even more chilling was the fact that the boy's arm had been broken, and that, though it had never been set, it had begun to knit together, slowly and painfully. According to the coroner, the bone could have been broken as long as 72 hours before the boy's death, a death caused, she concluded, by blunt force trauma to the back of the little boy's head. What's more, there were traces of Benzhexol, an anti-depressant popular among many in Moe, including some in the Penfold clan, which some have speculated might have been given to the boy in a futile effort to ease the pain of the shattered limb. Taken together, the evidence suggests the boy was alive for some time after his disappearance, Bowles contends. If that were the case, it was unlikely that Domaszewicz was the killer. "He was under constant surveillance," she says.

But there was one other piece of evidence. In addition to the clothes and the bottle and the muesli bar that Bilynda had packed for her son the day he disappeared, authorities found a crowbar. Perhaps it was the same crowbar the killer had used to bash the little boy's skull before using it as a weight to sink the tiny boy's remains in the chilly water near Blue Rock Dam. But it was almost certainly the same crowbar that Paul "Lizard" Lietzau had left leaning against the retaining wall in Domaszewicz' backyard the day before Jaidyn's disappearance. Whether the crowbar was still leaning against the wall on that Sunday morning in June when police arrived to search Greg Domaszewicz' house for clues to Jaidyn's disappearance is not certain.

Police reports on the matter were inconclusive, and a crime scene photograph was unclear and open to interpretation. It would later become a pivotal issue in the case. If the crowbar was there on the morning after Jaidyn's disappearance, then it defied logic that Domaszewicz would have been able to shake the tail police had put on him long enough to kill the little boy and then dump his body and the crowbar in the lake, the defense would argue. But if the crowbar was already missing, then perhaps, just perhaps, Domaszewicz had been the killer, prosecutors would conclude.

Even today, the crowbar issue remains just one of the mysteries in the case.

But authorities also turned up something else in their search of Domaszewicz' house. Stuffed under the mattress of his bed, they found $600 in bills, all of them sopping wet. To investigators, it was a significant clue. To them, it suggested that water played a part in Jaidyn's demise, water like the deep cool lake at Blue Rock Dam.