Crime Immemorial

On Saturday, June 14th, 1997, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Bilynda Williams was planning on going for a night out with her sister Kadee to a friend’s birthday party not far from their home in Moe, Victoria, Australia—a relatively small town about 80 miles from Melbourne. Bilynda had two children: Breehanna, who was two-and-a-half, and Jaidyn, who was fourteen months old.

Although Bilynda had already set up a babysitter for both children at her sister’s home, her boyfriend of one year, twenty-eight-year-old Greg Domaszewicz, generously offered to watch the kids that night. Since Greg was quite fond of little Jaidyn, and had babysat both children on several prior occasions without incident, Bilynda readily agreed. Though Breehanna would still be spending the evening with the original babysitter, Jaidyn would be under Greg’s care for a couple of hours, after which he was supposed to drive the child to Kadee’s house to pass the rest of the evening with Breehanna and two cousins, under the watchful eye of the original babysitter.

That afternoon, knowing that it was supposed to rain later, Bilynda dressed Jaidyn in warm clothes, and then packed a bag with extra diapers, a bottle, and snacks. Greg showed up in his car, Bilynda and her two children climbed inside, and Greg drove them all to Kadee’s house, arriving there at about one-thirty p.m. Bilynda and Breehanna stayed at Kadee’s, while Greg drove back to his place with Jaidyn strapped in his car seat.

According to Greg, he worked on his car all afternoon, and claimed that Jaidyn had spent the time playing with Greg’s three dogs in the backyard, and wandering in and out of the house through the open back door. When it started to rain, Jaidyn retreated to the garage and played there, and at around the same time, approximately two o’clock, Greg allegedly received a phone call from a friend of his, which went on for about an hour and revolved around rumors the friend heard about Greg wanting to kill him.

Greg supposedly sorted this argument out and hung up the phone, at which point he found that Jaidyn had fallen down in the garage and cut his lip. He phoned Bilynda and told her what happened, and the later account of Greg’s neighbor Alan Sparks seems to back up this sequence of events, as Alan alleged that he saw Jaidyn in the yard with a bloody lip. Bilynda later confirmed that she heard Jaidyn’s voice in the background during this phone call from Greg, which occurred some time after three p.m.

Throughout the later afternoon and evening, though, Bilynda supposedly phoned Greg as many as twenty more times to check up on her son, but got no response. Additionally, a friend who dropped by Greg’s place at around seven-thirty p.m. saw that Greg’s car was not in the driveway, and he consequently passed by without stopping, assuming that Greg was not at home.

By the time eight o’clock rolled around, Bilynda, Kadee, and Kadee’s boyfriend were on their way to the birthday party, but Bilynda was becoming increasingly concerned at her inability to get hold of Greg. The group drove by Greg’s house, but also noted that his car was not there. Bilynda was starting to feel deeply uneasy, wondering where Greg and Jaidyn were.

At around this same time, Greg’s next-door neighbor Mariann McKinnon phoned Greg to ask about some money he owed her. Of course he didn’t answer, and though Mariann called several more times in the ensuing two hours, she was also unable to get in touch with Greg.

At ten p.m., though, Greg called Mariann back. He told her he didn’t have her money yet, but asked if she had any extra diapers he could borrow and what size she thought Jaidyn would be. Mariann told him she didn’t have any diapers, but told Greg to go down the road to the convenience store to get some. The conversation apparently only lasted a few more minutes, and nothing untoward seemed to be going on.

Bilynda, meanwhile, called Greg yet again from the party at eleven p.m., and this time was finally able to get hold of him. When asked if Jaidyn was all right, Greg said something to the effect of, “Shit’s happened,” telling Bilynda that Jaidyn had got a minor burn from standing too close to a space heater and that Greg had taken the child to a local hospital, Moe Casualty, to have ointment applied to the wound. He then told her that the nurses there hadn’t treated the injury properly, and that he had been obliged to take the child to another facility, Maryvale Hospital.

Bylinda didn’t really like the sound of this, and after hanging up the phone, told her sister Kadee that she was going to cut the evening short and go back home to make sure everything was all right. Kadee, though, persuaded her to stay, telling her that Greg was probably just making a big deal out of nothing. Dubious, Bylinda called Greg back, and Greg seemed to confirm this, reassuring her that Jaidyn was just fine, and that the burn wasn’t as bad as it had first appeared.

At some time between midnight and one in the morning, but closer to the former, neighbor Mariann McKinnon claimed she heard the very distinctive sound of Greg’s car starting up in his driveway. This may have been significant, as Greg later informed authorities that he hadn’t left his house until after two a.m., when Bylinda called him to come pick her up from the party at the pub.

Regardless of which account was true, Greg did pull up in front of Ryan’s Hotel, where the pub was located, at some point between two and three o’clock in the morning. Upon arriving at the hotel, he noted that Bilynda was quite drunk, and continued to drink—possibly at his encouragement—from an open container of whiskey he had in his car. When she asked repeatedly where Jaidyn was, Greg told her that the child was still at Maryvale Hospital. Bylinda asked to be driven there, but Greg refused, telling her she was too drunk and would probably make a scene. He insisted that he would drive to the hospital himself to pick up Jaidyn later that night.

When Greg and Bilynda pulled up in front of Greg’s residence on Narracan Street, Bilynda saw that one of the front windows was broken, though the front and back doors remained locked. Upon entering the home, Greg apparently began looking through the cabinets, as though checking to see if anything had been stolen. Bylinda asked Greg to call the police, but he claimed there was no need, as he knew exactly who was responsible for the vandalism: his ex-girlfriend, Yvonne Penfold—who, incidentally, he was still sleeping with off and on. Greg phoned Yvonne and shouted at her for a few minutes, then hung up.

Shortly afterward, Greg and Bylinda went back outside so that Greg could drive Bylinda back to her own house, and at that point they spotted something utterly bizarre: there was a severed pig’s head lying in a flower bed just outside the front lounge window. This gruesome detail seemed to add credence to Greg’s theory that Yvonne was the one behind the incident, as the couple had once owned a pig whose slaughter was the cause of some dissension between them.

Greg drove Bylinda home, arriving there at about three-twenty a.m. She reportedly made a few phone calls before going to sleep, including one to the babysitter who was still watching Breehanna. She also called Greg again and told him to bring Jaidyn straight back home after fetching him from Maryvale Hospital.

At about three-thirty-five, Greg was pulled over by the police for speeding. He was given a breathalyzer, but was found to be sober. When asked where he had been, he would only say, “Nowhere.” The officer claimed that Greg had seemed “cautious,” but as there was no reason to detain him, he was sent on his way without further fuss. The police officer later reported that Greg had not mentioned anything about the vandalism at his home, and also didn’t bring up the whereabouts of little Jaidyn Leskie, an omission that would take on some sinister overtones as the investigation proceeded.

Bylinda had fallen asleep on the floor of her living room in front of the space heater, but she didn’t get to sleep very long. Shortly before five in the morning, Greg returned to her house, woke her up, and informed her that Jaidyn was missing. He told her he was sorry that he had lied about the child being at the hospital, but that he hadn’t wanted her to worry. He then asked her to come to the police station with him to report the possible abduction, reiterating that he believed Yvonne Penfold was somehow responsible, not only for the vandalism, but also for the supposed kidnapping.

The couple reported the toddler missing at about quarter past five in the morning. According to Greg’s own account to the authorities, he had left Jaidyn asleep on the sofa, with the television going and the heater on, when he went to pick up Bylinda from the pub. He said he had put the dogs outside and locked all the doors, and that no one else was present in the house at the time. He also stated that when he and Bylinda had returned to the house and spotted the broken window, he had immediately jumped to the conclusion that Jaidyn had been abducted, though for some reason he neglected to tell Bylinda of his suspicions and didn’t inform the police at the time either.

Greg’s story didn’t really add up, though, and officers placed him under arrest, holding him until they could complete a thorough search of his home and car. In Greg’s house, they found a small particle of skin on the space heater, consistent with the injury Greg claimed the child had sustained earlier that evening. They also discovered several blood spots on the bathroom wall of the home, which later analysis established belonged to Yvonne Penfold; it’s unclear how long the blood had been there, however, as it was alleged that Greg had been abusive toward Yvonne during their relationship.

Bloodstained tissues were found in a plastic bag sitting near a wheeled garbage bin in front of the house. This blood reportedly belonged to Jaidyn, although it was only a small amount, and may have been there as a result of the cut lip the child had supposedly sustained earlier in the afternoon.

Authorities also conducted a search of Greg’s vehicle, a green Falcon XC sedan with the plate number IRS 680. During the search, detectives found that the carpet on the floor of the car was wet, and there was a wet jacket found on the floor beneath the back seat. In addition, a wallet, which was soaked through with water, was recovered from underneath the accelerator pedal. Bilynda later explained the water to police by claiming that the window on the front passenger side of Greg’s car didn’t close all the way, and rain leaked in when the car was left exposed to the elements.

During a search of Bilynda Williams’s home, detectives found an overturned garbage bin out front with tire tracks next to it. Inside the house, the mattress and blanket from Jaidyn’s cot had been pulled out and were lying next to the cot on the floor, though Bilynda insisted that the cot had looked normal when she left the house to go to the party on the afternoon of June 14th.

Authorities also looked into the vandalism at Greg’s home on the night of the child’s disappearance, to determine if the two incidents were related. In regards to the strange details of the broken window and the pig’s head at Greg’s residence, it seemed that while Greg and Bilynda had been engaging in their ominous song and dance about the whereabouts of little Jaidyn Leskie, several other individuals had been on a sinister adventure of their own. Yvonne Penfold, her brother Kenneth, his roommates Dean Ross and Raymond Hopkinson, and another friend, Darrin Wilson, had all been at a party nearby, and had got to talking about Greg’s alleged harassment of Yvonne during their recent breakup. At some point, Kenneth Penfold got the idea that they should go to Greg’s place to “give him a scare.”

The group supposedly drove to the Narracan Drive residence and waited in the bushes across the street until they saw Greg leave, sometime between midnight and one in the morning; at which point Kenneth and Darrin approached the house, threw rocks through the windows, attempted to throw the pig’s head through the window but were unsuccessful, tossed an axe handle into the shrubbery in front of the house, then made their way back to where Yvonne had parked the car to wait for them. The men alleged that they had heard Greg’s three dogs barking from the backyard, but had not heard a baby crying, and all denied going into the house and taking the child. Several other witnesses who were passing through the area at the relevant time later told police that they had seen two men running down Narracan Street toward a red car at around the time Kenneth and Darrin had claimed, thus corroborating aspects of their account. None of the neighbors or other witnesses remembered hearing a child crying at the time of the incident.

A little over a month following Jaidyn’s disappearance, Greg Domaszewicz was officially charged with the boy’s murder, even though a body had not yet been found. Greg’s inconsistent accounts of his movements on the night of the vanishing led police to believe that he knew exactly what had happened to Jaidyn, and was attempting to cast blame on his ex-girlfriend and her cohorts. Though the perpetrators of the vandalism were not in doubt, investigators did not believe that they had anything to do with the boy going missing, and surmised that their childish act of revenge taking place on the same night as Jaidyn’s disappearance was simply a peculiar coincidence.

On January 1st, 1998, more than six months after Jaidyn Leskie had gone missing, a man named Samuel Payne, who was enjoying a picnic with his family, spotted the partially frozen body of the fourteen-month-old boy floating in the waters beneath Blue Rock Dam, a site approximately nineteen miles from the house on Narracan Street in Moe from which the child had presumably vanished.

Jaidyn was found fully clothed, and there was also a bandage on the boy’s arm from the elbow to the wrist; the child’s arm had reportedly been broken and sloppily bandaged. A further search of the water around the dam also yielded an adult-size sleeping bag with a long crowbar tied around it with rope, and a plastic bag containing more of Jaidyn’s clothing, as well as the bottle and the green apple that his mother had left with him when she had dropped him off with Greg Domaszewicz back in June of 1997. Investigators theorized that both the plastic bag and the body had all been wrapped in the sleeping bag and then weighed down with the crowbar, but that both bag and corpse had popped free of the sleeping bag at around the same time. The coroner established that Jaidyn Leskie had died from a blow to the base of the skull.

The forensic team also discovered traces of a drug called Benzhexol in Jaidyn’s system; the medication was usually used to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but it was unclear if someone had given it to the boy deliberately, or if he had ingested it accidentally.

Greg Domaszewicz was placed on trial for the toddler’s murder in late 1998. Among the numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence presented on the stand were the facts that the boy had last been seen alive in Greg’s care; that Greg had behaved in an odd and evasive manner concerning the child’s whereabouts, lying to his mother Bilynda Williams about the boy being at the hospital; and that his movements on the night in question couldn’t be established with any certainty. There was, in aggregate, a twelve-hour period in which the whereabouts of both Greg Domaszewicz and Jaidyn Leskie were unknown.

Specifically, there was a span of about ninety minutes to two hours between the time the police officer stopped Greg for speeding in his car, and the time when Greg stated that he had returned to Bilynda Williams’s house to inform her that her son was missing. When asked to account for this discrepancy, Greg said that he had dropped Bilynda off at home, driven back to his own house for about twenty minutes, then drove to the residence of his ex-girlfriend Yvonne Penfold to stake it out, as he apparently believed she was involved in kidnapping Jaidyn Leskie.

Also suspicious was the fact that the crowbar used to weigh down the sleeping bag was thought to have been taken from Greg’s backyard; though the implement did not belong to him, a neighbor stated that Greg had borrowed it, as well as a few other tools, some time before the murder.

There was also the matter of the wet jacket and the wet wallet found in Greg’s vehicle shortly after the boy’s disappearance. Though this would seem to suggest that Greg might have waded into the water beneath the dam in order to dispose of the bundle containing the body, there was a complicating issue, as his wallet was not found to contain any diatoms, which would likely have been present had the wallet been submerged in the waters below the dam where the body was recovered. Moreover, the police officer who had stopped Greg in his vehicle on the night in question stated that Greg had not appeared wet.

During the trial, Greg’s defense team attempted to poke holes in the prosecution’s case, alleging that Jaidyn’s hair when he was found was longer than it had been when he disappeared, which would seem to imply that he had been alive for some time after he was supposedly taken. The prosecution countered by claiming that any slight difference in hair length could be accounted for by the receding of the hair follicles after death. They further pointed out that dental evidence suggested that Jaidyn had died at right around fourteen months old, the exact age he was when he went missing; and that the extraordinary preservation of the body suggested that it had been dumped in the water during the winter months, at around the same time as the disappearance.

The defense also argued that the DNA of an unknown female was recovered from Jaidyn’s clothing, but this evidence was found to have been a result of cross-contamination from an unrelated case.
The prosecution, meanwhile, painted Greg as abusive and neglectful, both toward his current and former girlfriend, and also toward Jaidyn.

After deliberating for about seventy-four hours, the jury at Greg Domaszewicz’s murder trial returned with a not guilty verdict in early December of 1998. Although jurors had been informed that they could have fallen back on the lesser charge of manslaughter if they believed that Greg had killed the child accidentally, apparently they were still not convinced that Greg had been involved in the death of Jaidyn Leskie, perhaps because they felt that there was more evidence to implicate a member of the so-called “pig’s head team,” who had demonstrably been at Greg’s residence that night with malicious intent and might possibly have taken the boy themselves.

In the face of an outcry from the media as well as Jaidyn’s family, another inquest into the child’s death was commenced in 2004, at which point the coroner announced that in his opinion, Greg Domaszewicz had been responsible for the boy’s death, either accidentally or deliberately, and had also disposed of the child’s body at Blue Rock Dam. Due to the double jeopardy laws on the books in Victoria, Australia, however, Greg Domaszewicz could not be tried for the crime again, though Jaidyn’s family members have been attempting to get the law overturned.

For his part, Greg still vehemently denies direct involvement, maintaining that one of the “pig’s head team” abducted and killed the toddler. He has told the press that he still feels as though the child’s death was due to his own stupidity, however, because he states that he should never have left the boy in the house alone while he went to pick up Bilynda from the hotel bar.

It later came to light that Greg, while in police custody, purportedly confessed to another inmate that he had accidentally killed Jaidyn. According to the inmate, Greg said that the child had been horribly injured when the car Greg was working on fell on him; investigators noted that this would neatly explain both the child’s arm being broken and the drugs found in his system. Ultimately, however, the inmate’s testimony was deemed inadmissible, and was not allowed to be entered into evidence at the murder trial.

Many years after the crime, a witness who had been fishing on the night of the incident reported to police that he had seen a green Falcon sedan with the partial license plate IRS parked near Blue Rock Dam on the night Jaidyn Leskie vanished. This sighting seemed damning, but when police attempted to replicate the circumstances, they found that they were unable to clearly see the vehicle or its license plate in their headlights under the same atmospheric and light conditions, and they were also forced to take the claim with a grain of salt, as the witness had waited so long to come forward with the information.

No other suspects have ever been seriously considered in the murder of Jaidyn Leskie, and although the double jeopardy laws in Victoria have been softened somewhat in recent years, there does not appear to be any intention by authorities to place Greg Domaszewicz back on trial.

The case therefore remains officially unsolved, and to this day is one of the most infamous and controversial in the history of Australian crime.