Dismembered neighbour buried under kids’ cubbyhouse
Abe Maddison |
A killer seeking to have her sentence cut has revealed she ambushed her elderly neighbour before dismembering the body with a circular saw and burying it under her children’s cubbyhouse.
In 2011, Adelaide woman Angelika Gavare was convicted of the 2008 murder of Vonne McGlynn, 83, and sentenced to a 32-year non-parole jail term.
She applied to the Supreme Court of South Australia in 2024, seeking a shorter non-parole period after making statements to police about the crimes as a result of the state’s “no body, no parole” laws.
Gavare, 49, murdered the pensioner as part of a plan to use her identity and steal her house and money.
In a judgment delivered on Thursday, Justice Sandy McDonald rejected Gavare’s application, saying any move to change her sentence would provoke community outrage.
The judge also detailed the information Gavare finally revealed to police about her horrendous crime.
In an interview with police in 2018, Gavare admitted she hid in her neighbour’s home and ambushed Ms McGlynn, holding her in a headlock until she went limp.
She hid the body in the backyard and ransacked the home, then left the house to collect her children from school.
Gavare used her car to move the body to her home and, five days later, cut up the body with a circular saw.
“She placed the body parts in plastic bags in manageable sizes and packaged the head and palms separately to avoid any identifying features,” the judge said.
The killer buried the bags under her children’s cubbyhouse, before putting some in her council bin on December 9, 2008, the day before police searched her home for the first time. The bin was subsequently collected.
“Gavare used a baby pusher to move the larger body parts to an area along the creek opposite her house,” the judge said.
“She hid a large bag of Ms McGlynn’s remains under some tree roots in the creek.”
Police told the parole board Gavare refused to co-operate for 10 years before providing “an apparently full and truthful account of her role in the murder of the victim”.
“The Parole Board should consider the timeliness of this co-operation, and the grief that inflicted on the family for 10 years – especially not knowing what happened to all the remains,” a detective wrote.
“Failure to assist police prevented the recovery of all the missing body parts.”
Justice McDonald noted the sentencing judge told Gavare “it would be a small comfort perhaps to be able to conclude that your actions were the product of madness”.
“Unfortunately they appear to be nothing more than the actions of a greedy, narcissistic and deceitful woman completely devoid of any moral insight or empathy,” the sentencing judge said.
Justice McDonald ruled it would be “entirely inappropriate” to grant Gavare permission to apply to have her sentence quashed and a new sentence imposed, because it “would lead to an understandable sense of community outrage”.
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