02x04 - Edge and Dafter

[bunniefuu]

[tense music]

NARRATOR: This time, on ''K*llers Caught on Camera''.

In Florida, a woman meets the man of her dreams.

WOMAN: I was really looking forward to meeting him,

because I had heard all the good things

that she had said about him.

[tense music] But she goes missing.

And the police investigate her disappearance.

MAN: I asked him if Vickie was inside the residence,

and he responded with, ''I have to tell you something''.

NARRATOR: And in the UK, a happy marriage is destroyed

when a woman is found dead.

It was the whole world crashing down.

NARRATOR: And her husband is discovered

with multiple stab wounds.

[intriguing music]

MAN: It just sounds like something

bad is happening to her.

WOMAN: We know what happened because the video

tells us what happened.

MAN: I heard some g*nshots.

POLICE: Drop it.

Whatever it is, drop it.

MAN: That does not prove that I k*lled my wife.

MAN: The camera doesn't lie.

[tense music] United States, Destin, Florida.

A small city nestled in the panhandle on the Emerald Coast.

Over 100 miles west of the state capital, Tallahassee.

Home to 59-year-old, Vicki Edge, and friend, Sherrie Linn.

SHERRIE LINN: Vickie was here probably almost every weekend

during the summer, because we'd always

usually go out either after church or on Saturday.

We'd hop on the boat with all the girlfriends

and just head out.

My husband, Johnny, was our captain.

He'd happily take us wherever we wanted to go.

SHERRIE LINN: She was always the life of the party.

She loved to dance and have fun and go on girls trips.

So it was-- She was always fun to be around.

[tense music] Vickie and Sherrie met at high school.

SHERRIE LINN: We just kind of grew

up together, and knew her family and she knew my family.

And we just always did things together, forever since then.

As we grew up and got out of high school, she had one son,

I have one son.

We had all the mother stuff to go

through together, so we just always

been there for each other.

NARRATOR: Vickie was a single, successful businesswoman,

who wanted a relationship.

SHERRIE LINN In her heart, she just wanted to be--

Kind of to have that person that she was going to grow old with.

A lot of times it's not fun out in the dating world.

She wanted that to be over and just have peace and comfort

and, you know, somebody just to enjoy her--

Her older years with.

NARRATOR: In May 2020, Vickie met Jerry Odum online.

A former karate teacher, also looking for love.

SHERRIE LINN: She told me about their first date,

she called me when it was over and she told me how wonderful

it was and how charming he was.

And she felt like she connected with him.

And he was kind and a gentleman and, you know,

everything that you--

You hope a first date would be.

She was very excited.

NARRATOR: Things moved quickly.

After just four months, they were planning to get married

and buy a house together.

SHERRIE LINN: The thing that seemed a little bit strange,

I guess, was that she had told me that he had just got

a tattoo of Vickie on his arm.

And I was thinking, well, you know, that was kind of fast.

But you're thinking, you know, the wedding's

coming kind of fast, but maybe they're head over heels in love.

And if you're older, you think you don't want to wait.

You want to go ahead and build your life together.

[tense music] Due to COVID restrictions

at the time, none of Vickie's friends or family had met Jerry.

But Vickie and Jerry were planning their big day

at Sherrie's house.

SHERRIE LINN: Our place was kind of like her place,

so she felt like everybody could be at ease and just have a party

and celebrate the new chapter that

was going to start in her life.

NARRATOR: Jerry started to pay for the wedding preparations.

SHERRIE LINN: Vickie was real excited because he had given her

a check for $15,000 for us to go shopping and to get all

the stuff to set up in the back yard to make it all cute,

you know, the table, settings.

And I was, you know, really looking forward to meeting him,

because I had heard all the good things

that she had said about him.

SHERRIE LINN: And also he had taken

her shopping to go buy her the house on the lake

that she had wanted.

NARRATOR: August 7th, 2020, Vickie didn't turn

up for a session at her spa.

SHERRIE LINN: I know Vickie's work ethic.

She would not miss an appointment, unless something

bad had happened.

We've got to find her, something's going on.

NARRATOR: Alarm bells were ringing.

Vickie's close-knit family, friends and staff

were concerned.

SHERRIE LINN: Everybody kind of went into action

trying to call everybody we knew, trying to figure out,

you know, who could we call, who was the last one to see her.

[tense music] Vickie had been staying with Jerry while she'd

been recovering from COVID.

Vickie's brother and sister in law,

tracked down Jerry's address in Milton.

They headed to his house to find out

if Jerry knew where Vickie was.

When they arrived, Vickie's car was in the driveway,

the license plate removed.

Vickie's sister-in-law called 911 to ask for a welfare check.

NARRATOR: At the same time as Vickie's sister-in-law was

talking to the police, Jerry Odum made a separate 911

call from inside the house.

NARRATOR: Benjamin Posey was one of the patrol deputies

called to Jerry's house.

BENJAMIN POSEY: When I first arrived on scene,

I talked with Derric, Vickie's brother,

and then also her sister-in-law.

They didn't know very much about Jerry.

He just knew that Vickie loved Jerry.

She was willing to spend the rest of her life with him.

NARRATOR: The police needed to find out

if Jerry knew where Vickie was.

BENJAMIN POSEY: We knew he was inside the house,

because we were just on the phone with him

not five minutes prior.

The garage door opens up.

I made contact with Jerry and asked

him if Vickie was inside the residence

and he responded with yes.

And then he stated, I have to tell you something.

BENJAMIN POSEY: At this point, we were in the garage.

Jerry has his hand on the doorknob in the garage door

to make entry to the house.

You could tell he was very nervous

because, he's very soft spoken.

He didn't want his voice to carry out

to where the family could hear.

And he opens the door just a little bit.

And before we make entry, he stated again, ''I have

to tell you something first.''

BENJAMIN POSEY: She's been dead for two days.

[intriguing music]

BENJAMIN POSEY: The first thing that came to mind

was she had a medical emergency, whether she had a heart attack

or there was a drug overdose of some sort.

You ask the question, where's she at?

She's in the living room.

How did Vickie die?

He responded with, ''I'd rather not say without a lawyer.''

NARRATOR: The case was escalated.

Captain Scott Jones headed to the house.

SCOTT JONES: When I went into the scene,

Vickie Edge was covered with a blanket.

I very carefully pulled the blanket back

and I could observe blood spatter on her

and I could observe a large amount of blood

near the back of her head.

However, the scene itself was fairly

contained to the living room.

It didn't look like there had been a long, violent struggle.

It looked like it had mostly occurred

there right in the central part of the living room.

NARRATOR: Lieutenant Lance Bird is an experienced crime scene

investigator.

LANCE BIRD: It didn't appear to be a natural death.

The circumstances obviously wasn't pointing towards any kind

of natural death.

SHERRIE LINN: You don't believe things like that are going

to happen, so you just don't.

You know, my, my mind couldn't go there,

that something that tragic was was going on.

NARRATOR: As crime scene investigators worked

their way through the property.

Jerry Odum was being interviewed.

LANCE BIRD: So Jerry was very, I'd say, laid back.

He was really a matter of fact.

LANCE BIRD: You could tell he really

wanted to tell us his story.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Loads of people lie at the beginning

of relationships.

There's actually a term for it in the literature,

which is called ''self-presentation lies''.

Lying about who you are or some fundamental aspect of who you

are, so that can also include things like beliefs

or how wealthy you are.

If you lie at the beginning, the question

is either do you reveal relatively early on that you've

been lying or do you keep running with it,

in which case, at some point you are almost

certainly going to get caught.

And then the question is, what do you do when that happens?

SHERRIE LINN: I think she thought

he was comfortable enough for her little dream

of a little house, away from the city where she could kind

of just be out in the country and just slow down and not

have to work so hard.

She thought he was stable.

SCOTT JONES: I could not believe what I was hearing.

It was the strangest reason for murdering

someone I've ever heard.

LANCE BIRD: He was just a matter of fact about it.

Didn't didn't cry, didn't have really a whole lot of emotional,

you know, he wasn't breaking down or anything like that.

It was just detail after detail.

NARRATOR: Jerry Odum's weapon of choice was significant.

Back at the crime scene, police discovered

the m*rder weapon, covered in blood

and the original packaging.

SCOTT JONES: When we found the bat,

it still had a receipt taped on it from Walmart, which would be

crucial for locating, hopefully, some video surveillance

to indicate that he was the person who purchased that bat.

[intriguing music]

[tense music] The receipt helped the police

to pinpoint the exact date, time and location where

the baseball bat was purchased.

LANCE BIRD: You can see them coming through the entry

door in this green yellow jacket,

walking through the entrance.

We were able to follow him around the store

with different surveillance cameras throughout the business.

He's walking through and he's looking.

The baseball bat area is going to be in that aisle or this row

up here.

So you can see him walking straight to them.

You can see when he's up here, he's picked one out.

NARRATOR: Jerry Odum swung the bat

vertically, not horizontally.

LANCE BIRD: He's moving it around trying to figure out

if that's going to be the one that he thinks is going to be

able to actually k*ll somebody.

He's not acting any way out of the ordinary.

To me, it doesn't seem like it's bothering him

at all, what he's about to do.

I don't think at this point he knew when it was going

to happen, but it doesn't appear that it's bothering him

at all what he's already got in his mind

that he's going to end up doing to miss Edge.

LANCE BIRD: The video footage shows us

that the statement he gave us was confirmed,

and we also helped us kind of put it together of his mindset

for the whole thing.

NARRATOR: Jerry Odum purchased the baseball bat eight days

before Vickie was m*rder*d.

DR. JULIA SHAW: What we're seeing in the circumstance

is someone who is struggling to plan ahead beyond the next step.

He's lying about who he is in order to get in with this person

and/or start this relationship.

DR. JULIA SHAW: And this is the same where he's using a baseball

bat to k*ll this woman, which obviously is

a ludicrous strategy to try and remove

himself from the situation.

So he's using consistently short term strategies.

NARRATOR: When you examine the footage,

it's striking how much he reveals in the interview.

DR. JULIA SHAW: In some ways, you

could say he seems to be incredibly honest

and he's done some work really thinking

about how it got to this point.

And he made the decision, I'm going to tell them everything.

Probably because he thinks, a, he

gets to unload all of this and b,

he's probably going to get a more

lenient sentence for complying.

DR. JULIA SHAW: All the things he is saying

are entirely plausible explanations

for how it got to this point.

They're not reasonable explanations,

but they are plausible.

Looking back at it, I think that maybe because he did give

her the check, I think he was setting himself up to get found

out if there wasn't any money.

SHERRIE LINN: He had written her a check that in a few days

we were going to find out was not any good.

So I think that he was just backing himself into a corner

and.

I guess he was a coward.

SCOTT JONES: So at this point, with his bizarre confession,

we now have to determine whether this was a premeditated act

or was this something that happened in the heat of moment.

The difference between those is very large.

The difference between first degree m*rder, which you can

receive the death penalty for or second degree m*rder, which

is a lengthy prison sentence.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: Mark Alderman is assistant state attorney

for the First Judicial Circuit.

MARK ALDERMAN: In the state of Florida,

premeditation involves a person making

a conscious decision to k*ll.

And between that conscious decision and the act

itself, there has to be enough time for reflection.

And that is ultimately a question for the jury

as to is there enough time for reflection.

That was one of the other things that stood out

about this case was the length of time between him buying

the weapon with the intent to use it

and then him using it on Vickie.

It was eight days previously, which is a huge amount of time

to be planning to do that.

That's incredibly cold blooded.

NARRATOR: Jerry's interview also helped shed light on why

he chose a baseball bat.

DR. JULIA SHAW: One thing that we don't talk about

very much, for obvious reasons, because we're

focusing correctly on the victims of these kinds

of extreme crimes.

But people who perpetrate these crimes also

often come away with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder,

because they're having flashbacks to what they did.

DR. JULIA SHAW: So if you've k*lled somebody,

of course it's not unlikely for you

to have psychological consequences for the act

that you perpetrated.

And so, trying to minimize that seems like correct,

because you are going to otherwise be scarred

for life by what you just did.

NARRATOR: Jerry also explained what happened

after he m*rder*d Vickie.

LANCE BIRD: You would think somebody who had just

done that to somebody that they cared for, that you would be

wasn't able to get along with your life like normal every day.

Hey, I'm going to go just eat a dinner and then, you know,

just hang out like I would any other day,

after just murdering somebody.

Knowing he was going to have to go back and deal with it,

it was obvious that he had planned it out.

And it didn't bother him one bit.

NARRATOR: The next day, Jerry headed back home.

NARRATOR: An interview with the neighbors

confirmed that Jerry had spent the day with them,

while Vickie's body was lying in the house.

NARRATOR: Vickie's body had been lying

in Jerry's house for more than 30 hours

before it was discovered.

MARK ALDERMAN: Jerry Odum, you know,

he could have called the police after this happened,

but he did not.

You know, two days later is when the police show up at his door.

So at the end of the day, I'll never know

what he ultimately intended.

I mean, he took some steps to try and cover his tracks,

in some ways.

He put her phone in a bucket of water.

He took the license plate of her car,

trying to hide the fact that her car was in the driveway.

[jerry's voice]

MARK ALDERMAN: He claimed that he

was planning on calling the police,

but just didn't get around to it.

I don't know if that's true or not,

but had her friends and family not looked for her

and, you know, been very active in trying to find her,

he would have had several more days to do whatever he was going

to do, whether it was, you know, trying to hide the body

or dispose of evidence.

NARRATOR: Jerry had no previous convictions,

but a police interview with his former girlfriend

revealed a chilling pattern of behavior.

NARRATOR: There was clearly a disturbing similarity

between Jerry's relationships.

But this time, why did he resort to m*rder?

DR. JULIA SHAW: Maybe his ego is so fragile

that he felt that the only way to get past the situation

is to remove her from the situation from his life.

Jerry Odum fits the profile of a vulnerable narcissist.

In other words, he is presenting as amazing, as wealthy, as rich,

but he doesn't quite believe it.

And that is a toxic mix, which can lead to someone

doing terrible things.

NARRATOR: The evidence was overwhelming.

The case never went to trial.

NARRATOR: In February 2021, Jerry Odum pleaded

guilty to first degree m*rder.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

SCOTT JONES: The video surveillance

was crucial in proving that this was a premeditated m*rder.

In the video, as you've seen, you

can see the bat was bought specifically

for the purpose of murdering Vickie Edge, which proved

definitively that this was a premeditated m*rder and not

a heat of passion type of crime.

NARRATOR: Ultimately, Vickie's close relationships with family

and friends led to the discovery of her m*rder.

MARK ALDERMAN: The fact that people cared about her

and missed her almost immediately from the day she

was k*lled is ultimately what led

to Jerry Odum being convicted.

SHERRIE LINN: I want Vickie to be

remembered for being a strong, intelligent woman, that

was very giving.

A lot of the people in our community

are always going to remember Vickie.

She was always so happy and full of life

and made everybody around her happy.

And it was just always peaceful.

We're all missing her a lot.

And I wish she could have got to have the life

that she was dreaming about.

NARRATOR: In the case of Vickie Edge,

she never really knew what her partner was like until the very

last moments of her life.

Jerry Odum's fear of being found out

led him to a lethal solution.

His behavior fits with research on our darkest character traits.

DR. JULIA SHAW: The dark triad is a cluster of what are

called dark personality traits.

What that means is that all of us are on a spectrum,

on psychopathy, on narcissism, and on machiavellianism.

And people who are high on the dark triad

are higher on one or all of these traits.

Psychopathy is a lack of empathy is characterized

by manipulativeness.

Narcissism is an inflated sense of self-worth,

but that can stem from either actually believing you're

amazing or overcompensating, because you don't

really believe you're amazing.

DR. JULIA SHAW: And then, machiavellianism

is more of a strategic manipulation of circumstances

to get ahead.

In other words, you're using strategy to try and convince

someone that you're better than you are

and you're manipulating someone on purpose to get what you want.

In this case, to maybe have sex and/or have this relationship.

Research on the dark triad in the context

of romantic relationships has found

that people who are dating someone who's

high on the dark triad are much more likely to be the victims

of violence and of manipulation or other toxic relationship

behaviors.

NARRATOR: And in our next case, sometimes dark traits

can remain dormant for a very long time

until stressful circumstances cause them to manifest.

NARRATOR: In the UK, the capital, London, Euston station

in the heart of the city.

In October, 2022, a man was found collapsed on the platform

with multiple stab wounds.

[police]

NARRATOR: His name, Philip Dafter.

He was incoherent, but the police were so concerned,

they wanted to check on his wife nearly



NARRATOR: They headed to the family home,

but the doors were locked.

[intriguing music]

[police]

NARRATOR: Diana Dafter was dead.

NARRATOR: Amber Haque is a journalist based in the area.

AMBER HAQUE: Diana Dafter was a 36-year-old woman.

She'd moved over to Northampton from Malawi,

and she'd worked at a care home.

Every job that Diana had was looking after people.

AUBREY MAKWE: Diana was my sister's first born.

Since childhood, Diana was a very bright kid.

So upon completing her studies at secondary school level,

she asked me if I could invite her to come and continue

her studies in the UK.

I agreed, I accepted.

Diana was really a child to us.

NARRATOR: Dalia Banda was a close friend of Diana.

DALIA BANDA: We were very close and she

was just like a little sister to me, she was beautiful.

And all the time when we have like family gatherings,

she was so bubbly.

NARRATOR: It wasn't long before she met someone.

AMBER HAQUE: She met her husband, Philip,

who had worked in the army, then went on to drive a bus

and become a HGV driver.

They got married and they had two kids together.

AUBREY MAKWE: Throughout their marriage,

they used to like social media.

Everything they were doing, they used to post it on Facebook.

You know, going to restaurants, going to fancy places.

DALIA BANDA: It looks like they were in love, that's what I saw.

NARRATOR: Life was good.

As the kids grew up, their social circle expanded

and she met new people.

HEATHER MALOPA: She was kind, she was loving, she was gifted,

she was talented.

She used to do hair, she could bake cakes.

She actually started her own little business

where she could grind like the white maize, turn it into flour.

And she used to sell it to people.

NARRATOR: Diana also had professional ambition.

HEATHER MALOPA: She has always said,

you know what, I want to go to school.

She really wanted to to be a nurse, for the love

of caring for people.

NARRATOR: In 2022, Diana's dream came one step closer when

she was accepted onto a nursing degree

at Northampton University.

DALIA BANDA: When she got her student ID, she was very excited

and she was talking about it all the time when you meet her.

She was the happiest I've ever seen her.

We thought everything is now, well, she's happy,

she's got a loving husband, she's

got two beautiful children, she's working.

Happy families, good friends.

We thought everything is going perfectly.

NARRATOR: On October 7th, 2022, everything changed.

She dropped her daughter off at school,

but this was the last time she was seen alive.

Three hours later.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: She was discovered stabbed

to death in her own home.

[police]

AUBREY MAKWE: Police say that they found

her lifeless body in the house.

It was the whole world crashing down.

[intriguing music]

AMBER HAQUE: She'd been stopped five times

and a post mortem a couple of days

later showed that she had died from a single stab wound

to the chest.

DALIA BANDA: It was just like, this is not true.

Diana is just young, she can't die now, Why?

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The police checked hours of CCTV to piece together

what happened that morning.

The first key footage was from the local supermarket.

Diana's husband, Philip, was seen

buying a set of kitchen knives.

Professor Coral Dando is a forensic psychologist.

After reviewing the video, she noticed something intriguing.

PROF CORAL DANDO: He's picked up a packet of knives.

He shows his proof of age ID to the shop assistant.

He makes no attempt to conceal his identity.

He's got a hood on, but he chooses

not to put that up, which is an interesting observation.

And he just quite coolly, quite calmly buys

these packets of knives and he's used his bank

card to pay for the knives.

So he's made absolutely no effort to conceal his identity.

NARRATOR: Professor Vasilios Karagiannopoulos

is a cybercrime expert.

One has to wonder who buys kitchen

knives at 9:00 in the morning without

actually buying anything else.

We can see him, he's being very casual,

as if he's shopping for his daily shop.

NARRATOR: Philip Dafter was caught

on camera again an hour or so later,

approaching Northampton station.

DR. VASILEIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: Now, in this footage,

it's later in the morning, we see

him walking to the train station,

after he has parked his car, holding a bottle.

What we can clearly see is that he has changed clothes.

NARRATOR: Philip headed to London, an hour long journey.

DR. VASILEIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: We

can see he doesn't look as calm and collected,

his stumbling about.

NARRATOR: When he got to Euston, he staggered onto the platform,

met by Transport Police.

[police]

NARRATOR: Philip Dafter was delirious and in danger

of bleeding to death.

PROF CORAL DANDO: This officer here,

who wants to assess what's going on,

to make some sort of immediate decision

about whether his life is threatened by his injuries

or not.

Because they've got to wait for an ambulance.

And that will take some time.

And they're all standing around and recognizing that this

is a man in some sort of mental distress

as well as physical distress.

NARRATOR: He revealed that his wounds were self-inflicted.

[police]

PROF CORAL DANDO: Nobody's comfortable in that

environment, because they're worried

about his physical injuries.

But they're also, we're seeing here

that Philip is in quite a lot of mental and emotional distress.

PROF CORAL DANDO: And, of course, individuals who are

like that are unpredictable.

So everybody is standing around worried about what

might happen next.

NARRATOR: The family were in shock.

AUBREY MAKWE: These things we used

to just read them in the newspapers

or hear about them on TV.

And now that has happened to me, to my family.

It was as if somebody had just taken a knife

and stabbed me right there.

DR. VASILEIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: On the face of it,

he seems very distressed at this time,

but we have seen him being very calm earlier, closer

to the time of the m*rder.

AMBER HAQUE: Philip Dafter was airlifted

to Saint Mary's Hospital in Paddington, where he

was treated for a stab wound.

NARRATOR: In his hospital bed.

Philip Dafter admitted that he alone

was responsible for his wife's death.

AMBER HAQUE: It was at this point he confessed that he had

been driven to do this to Diana, following an argument

about this car issue.

[police]

PROF CORAL DANDO: I think the police believe

that he might have scored.

I also suspect that the officer thinks that he might try

to end his life or self harm again

as soon as he leaves hospital.

And so by arresting him, that means

as soon as he leaves hospital, he can go into police custody.

PROF CORAL DANDO: We've got this sort of behavior

from Philip where he's just quite accepting of his fate.

He recognizes, I think, that he's going

to be convicted for m*rder.

I suspect it's just a carry over from the psychological distress

associated with murdering your wife.

HEATHER MALOPA: She was m*rder*d,

and you were like, why?

Everyone was asking why.

What happened?

What did she do that she had to be k*lled in that way

and no one had the answer.

Philip only had the answer, and he was not there to explain why,

why he did it.

[police]

When it comes to extreme violence,

things like psychopathy on the dark triad really help.

In other words, if you're low in empathy,

you don't feel pain when other people are in pain, for example,

it's much easier to hurt somebody.

And that combined with wanting to get ahead

or wanting to pursue goals no matter what,

and maybe thinking that you deserve more,

you deserve the world.

That combination is really predictive of violent offending.

AMBER HAQUE: We already know that domestic violence

is a huge issue within violence against women and girls.

And what is so tragic about this case

and so many others is a woman is most

likely to be k*lled in her own home by someone that she knows.

In 60% of cases, women are k*lled by their husbands

or their ex partners.

AMBER HAQUE: Just six days after the stabbing,

doctors arrived to do a mental health assessment on Philip.

And he told them that this was a moment of madness

and he had been driven to do this to Diana.

NARRATOR: Philip had confessed.

But was it an emotional loss of control or a deliberate

final access control?

AMBER HAQUE: During the trial, Philip tried to claimed that he

had diminished responsibility.

Details started to come out of his mental health background.

He said he had these recurrent depressive episodes

and that in the buildup to the k*lling

he'd become quite withdrawn.

Now, it's difficult to say whether these were kind of

brought up as excuses almost to build up a picture that he

wasn't really in control or whether this was somebody who

was doing something very calculated

in the picture they were trying to put across to the jury.

NARRATOR: Digging into Philip and Diana's

relationship revealed a not so picture perfect life together.

AUBREY MAKWE: He was very jealous of Diana going to work.

At break times, he would force Diana to go home.

In his mind, he was thinking, if Diana is at work during break

times, she'll be meeting men.

Men will be talking to her.

NARRATOR: But it seemed Philip did not live by his own rules.

In court, it came to light that he'd had extramarital affairs

and Diana planned to leave.

Diana had suspicions that Philip was cheating

on her at various points.

And so we would say probably cracks were starting to show.

On the 7th of October, when Diana came home from

dropping the kids off, that was when

things really hit crisis point.

The couple started having an argument

and things began to escalate.

Philip stabbed his wife a number of times.

NARRATOR: Philip replaced the broken knife

immediately after he'd k*lled Diana,

which he later used on himself.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Why did he k*ll her?

Is it because he wanted to cover up his shame?

Is it because he couldn't see another option?

It seems to me like there was something

else going on in his mind.

And it was the line of thinking, which is most common when we're

looking at intimate partner homicide is the line of if she

finds out, she's going to leave me, if she leaves me,

she's going to be with somebody else.

And if I can't have her, no one can.

That kind of thinking, that kind of pathway

is so common in intimate partner m*rder,

that it would shock me that there

wasn't some version of that playing out here in his mind

as well.

NARRATOR: On July, 25th, 2023, Philip Dafter was

sentenced to life in prison.

The jury arrived at their verdict

after deliberating for just two hours.

AMBER HAQUE: When you look on the surface level

that it took this jury just two hours to reach this conclusion,

that's quite quick for a jury to to reach a deliberation.

Sometimes it can take days.

So it seems in their mind they were

pretty certain that this man intended to k*ll his wife.

PROF CORAL DANDO: I think it's about

trying to alleviate his own psychological discomfort

associated with his behavior.

His approach to doing that is to injure himself, drink alcohol,

and to just want to tell everybody really that he's

in some sort of distress.

But ultimately, he's responsible for his own current situation.

And there's nothing to suggest that that would

be diminished responsibility.

AMBER HAQUE: CCTV was crucial in this case.

It allowed them to make Philip accountable for what

he had done.

They were able to see that he was kind of trying to throw them

off the scent and some of his actions

in the hours following that.

They were able to get that conviction for m*rder

by proving that he was being very calm

and calculated in how he behaved afterwards.

DALIA BANDA: This pain that I have

for Diana's death it stays with me for a long time,

to be honest.

I just don't understand why and how

someone would do such kind of a thing to someone that they love.

When I think about all those things,

it still brings the pain, but Diana is no more

and that I will never see her again in this life.

It is very sad for me.

The impact of her death has been massive.

It's huge.

It has changed our life upside down.

We have now to look after the children.

I would say to whoever is watching this out there.

There is always somebody who is willing to listen,

somebody who can help you.

Please get out of it and seek help.

[end credits music]