On Father’s Day, 1981, Deborah Smykalla drove home to Capalaba, where a soon-to-be killer lurked. But who knew she was alone before she was found with her head in an oven, dog lead around her neck?
On Father’s Day in 1981, Deborah Smykalla drives her Volkswagon through Brisbane’s south to her parents’ house.An ordinary gesture, for an ordinary family.But as Smykalla drives home that Sunday – her parents weren’t in – something shifts in the small, once semi-remote suburb of Capalaba.
Hall recalls days of growing up in Brisbane in the ’70s, laughing as she describes her little sister on the phone over a pub lunch in South Australia.The years are happy memories. The photographs of three girls – Smykalla, Hall, and their sister Diana Walton – on outings with their mother and father under the Queensland sun are a vivid reminder of a time when they were just a “normal family”.
Smykalla had been in a relationship with Robert Cavallo for about four years until two weeks before her murder, according to reports in 1981. Newspaper articles from 1981 say Smykalla was strangled and a “post-mortem examination showed the killer took two attempts to do this”.“She was garrotted with a 45 centimetre long piece of a cord dog’s lead,”“The cord, with a loop plaited into one end, was too short to make into a noose and fit over her head.“Instead, the killer put it around her neck, possibly from behind, placed one end through the loop and pulled tight.
With scientific advances over the years, the testing could have provided answers about who had used the dog lead that night.
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