Chilling crime:
Whatever Robyn Lindholm wanted, she got, writes Sue Smethurst. Her power over her lover was so strong that he even killed for her.
meet Australia’s most dangerous woman
It was clear from an early age that, one day, Robyn Lindholm would be famous. At 14, she was a rising star of Australian ice skating and appeared on the front page of the Victorian newspaper The Age, photographed in a sparkling sequinned outfit, spinning around the ice ready to launch into an axel jump.
She went on to compete at the national ice-skating championships and was hand-chosen by the Olympic legends, Torvill and Dean, to perform alongside them in their sell-out Face The Music world tour.
Yet it wouldn’t be the pretty blonde’s prowess on the ice that made her a household name.
Instead, Robyn Lindholm’s name is forever etched in the history books as a murderer. She is accused of being a femme fatale, a ruthless seductress who used sex to lure her lover into killing the boyfriend she no longer craved.
In December 2015, the Victorian Supreme Court sentenced the 43-yearold to 25 years’ jail for orchestrating the murder of her ex-boyfriend Wayne Amey, but police have now raised the possibility of her association with at least one other potential death.
Last year, she was charged with killing her former lover George
Teazis and detectives are investigating the role she may have had in the mysterious disappearance of a love rival, Shari Davison, whose body has never been found.
Daddy’s little princess
Robyn Lindholm was an attractive girl and it was clear from an early age she knew how to charm a man to get what she wanted.
When 11-year-old Robyn wanted a pony, her dad didn’t hesitate.
When 14-year-old Robyn wanted expensive ice-skating lessons, Dad opened his wallet again.
From a wealthy Melbourne family, she excelled at Kilvington Grammar and the elite Malvern Girls Secondary College, before accepting an offer to study a Bachelor of Science degree at Monash University. She was hoping to pursue a career with animals. Robyn Lindholm was no fool.
She loved horses and became obsessed with endurance riding, but somewhere along the line the leggy blonde with a bright future fell into the wrong crowd.
When she took up a part-time job as a hostess in Crown Casino’s high-roller rooms, she caught the eye of underworld czar Alphonse Gangitano, the handsome and wealthy crime boss known as “the Black Prince of Lygon Street”.
They became lovers and Gangitano introduced her to an intoxicating
She knew how to charm a man.
lifestyle of power, money, sex and drugs. He indulged her every whim and treated her like a princess. Once Lindholm had tasted the high life and excitement of the underworld, there was no going back, even after Gangitano was executed at his home.
Lyndholm began working as a stripper and was the centre of attention at the Simply Irresistible strip club, morphing into “Collette”, a highly paid escort to the Melbourne underworld. It was here she met fellow stripper
Shari Davison, who became a close friend, but who vanished in 1995.
It was also here she met her next boyfriend, underworld standover man George Teazis. She moved into his home and the pair was engaged before he, too, suddenly disappeared.
A tearful Lindholm fronted the press begging for any help to find her beloved George, but she failed to mention that before his disappearance, she had begun an affair with beefy Hawthorn gym owner, Wayne Amey.
She managed to put her grief aside long enough to strip George’s home of all furniture and assets, returning a small box of toys for Teazis’ devastated teenage son a week later.
All the while, her stripping career flourished. “Collette” was so popular she was able to buy her first property, a farm on the outskirts of Melbourne, where she could follow her other passion, breeding horses.
Sex and seduction gave Lindholm everything she could ever want, but soon enough, the evil web of murder and betrayal would begin to unravel.
Under her spell
In June 2016, Robyn Lindholm was formally charged with the murder of George Teazis, aka Templeton, who vanished in 2005 and his body has never been found.
Police will allege that she convinced her lover Wayne Amey to murder Teazis. If this is true, perhaps Wayne should have predicted his own fate.
Just months before being charged with the cold-case murder of Teazis, Robyn Lindholm was convicted of luring a later lover, Torsten Trabert, to viciously murder Wayne Amey.
Described in court as a “femme fatale”, “black widow” and “Lady Macbeth in lycra”, the stripper is a master seductress who convinced her new lover to do her dirty work, disposing of the old boyfriend who had rejected her.
When Lindholm decided that Wayne Amey, the man she had once hoped to have children with, had to die, new love Torsten “Toots” Trabert didn’t hesitate in acting out her gruesome plot.
“Mr Trabert was infatuated with her,” said Chief Crown Prosecutor Gavin Silbert QC. “He’d left his wife and children to move in with her, and he was involved in an intense sexual relationship with her.
“He couldn’t keep his hands off her and the return for her affection was that he kill Wayne Amey. It was only with the seduction of Trabert that she achieved her aims.”
At Lindholm’s instruction, Trabert and his accomplice, John Anthony
Ryan, ambushed Wayne Amey at his apartment in December 2013, bashed him with a baseball bat, then stabbed him and choked him before bundling him into the boot of a car and driving him to Mt Korong in central Victoria, where they disposed of his body.
Lindholm watched on as
Trabert and Ryan wedged Amey’s body between rocks at a remote farm, giving orders to cover him with sticks and rocks.
After Amey’s body was hidden, Lindholm took Trabert into the bush to have sex before the pair met up with their partner in crime, Ryan, for drinks at a hotel at nearby Inglewood.
Ryan later told police, “[Lindholm] was laughing and carrying on like it was nothing. She’s on top of the world. They just wanted to f***ing party and I felt sick.”
During Lindholm’s trial, Crown Prosecutor Gavin Silbert told the Victorian Supreme Court that she had approached several former boyfriends to carry out her deadly plan, but Trabert was the only one that took the temptress’ bait.
In the lead-up to the murder, she set about seducing Trabert, reaching such a sexual intensity that Trabert was obsessed with her and like putty in her hands.
In fact, Trabert was so besotted that, even while he was languishing in a remand cell after he was arrested for his part in Amey’s murder, he penned gushing love notes to his “darling Robbin” (sic).
One read: “I’m missing you so much that I can’t sleep because you are not with me ... we are so good together,
I can’t think of my life without you. All my love, Toots.”
It was signed with a love heart with the words “I love you forever” etched in the centre of the heart.
In dubious company
Robyn Lindholm’s conviction for the murder of Wayne Amey has earned her a dubious place in the annals of crime alongside some of Australia’s worst female criminals.
In 2001, Hunter Valley grandmother Katherine Knight was convicted of murdering her partner John Price. Knight, who had worked in an abattoir, decapitated her boyfriend and skinned him before cooking his body parts in a pot alongside the vegetables and gravy. Her file was marked “never to be released” and her story is now being made into a Hollywood movie.
She is joined by Valmae Beck, a mother of six, who died in jail in 2008 after taking part in the rape, torture and murder of Sian Kingi in 1987. To please her husband Barrie Watts, Valmae lured the 12-year-old into bushes on the side of a road in Noosa, saying she had lost her dog. Watts then raped and murdered the Queensland schoolgirl.
Then there’s Kathleen Folbigg, regarded as Australia’s worst female serial killer after murdering four of herchildren over a period of 10 years.
Appearing via video link from the notorious Dame Phyllis Frost Centre women’s prison, Robyn Lindholm sat stony faced and silent in June last year as detectives read the charge that she was responsible for the murder of George Teazis. She refused to enter a plea.
Although there were signs of the elfin beauty who once lured men into her web, an ugliness now overshadowed the notorious black widow who will have many years behind bars to ponder her fate.
Trabert was putty in her hands.