‘ Closest thing to psychopath’
Ten years working in South Australian prisons has forever changed Jennifer Kaschau. By the time she retired in 2016, she had met some of the nation’s most evil women and built rapport with high- profile murderers. She suffered PTSD after a savage inmate attack but is proud she never went to pieces on the job.
CONVICTED killer Angelika Gavare was holding court.
It was the middle of the night and a group of inmates had sneaked out of their beds to gather around Gavare as she recounted the murder of her neighbour Vonne McGlynn.
“She was describing how good it felt and looked to see this old lady’s blood being splashed up along the bathroom walls,” South Australian corrections officer Jennifer Kaschau, who learnt the nature of the conversation later from an inmate, tells the new national podcast On Guard.
“She said ( Gavare) was smiling when she was describing the blood splashing up on the bathroom walls and that ( police) will never be able to convict her because they’ll never find ( McGlynn’s) head or her hands.”
Indeed, police have never been able to locate McGlynn’s head or hands but Gavare was wrong about getting away with it.
Overwhelming evidence tied the single mother, from Christie Downs, to the pensioner’s murder, and in 2011 she was jailed for a minimum of 32 years.
“She was the closest thing to a psychopath I’ve met,” Kaschau, 50, said.
In a career spanning more than a decade in corrections, Kaschau has worked at Adelaide Women’s Prison, Yatala Labour Prison and the Adelaide Remand Centre.
She’s met all sorts of criminals and built rapport with murderers — including infamous “black widow” Michelle Burgess, who ordered the contract killings of her husband, Darren, and her lover Kevin Matthews’ wife, Carolyn
Matthews. After procuring a hit man by asking other mothers for recommendations during school pick- up, Burgess and hit man David Key stabbed the woman to death in her kitchen. Matthews’
three children found her dead on the bloodied floor.
It was a shockingly callous crime yet, to Kaschau, Burgess was “lovely”.
“Very friendly. Very easy to get along with,” she said, re
calling Burgess had been saddened to hear Kaschau’s cat had died.
When a litter of kittens was found soon after on prison property, Burgess asked to hand raise a kitten as a gift for
Kaschau — a cat that lives with Kaschau today.
It was a sign of warmth and human compassion that Kaschau found chillingly absent from Gavare.
“She made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“She was dead behind the eyes. You know when you look at a person, you see something behind their eyes. She was a dead fish. She was one that everybody felt sick around. You were just very careful around her because she had no remorse.”
While Gavare’s young kids slept, she broke into McGlynn’s house through the roof, carefully removing tiles to make an opening.
The court heard Gavare then bludgeoned the 83- yearold to death and dumped her body in her backyard shed.
Gavare used a hacksaw to dismember McGlynn’s body.
“I just thought, ‘ How do you do that and then go and change your kids’ nappies and feed them?’” Kaschau said. “She was one that I would keep my contact with to a bare minimum.” still