THE DAY DANA VULIN WAS SET ON FIRE Five years on, the Perth woman tells how she fought back from death’s door.
Five years on from a savage attack, Dana Vulin tells how she fought her way back from death’s door
It was a summer’s night in 2012 when Dana Vulin went up in flames. In a savage, unprovoked attack, Natalie Dimitrovska, then 27, doused Vulin with methylated spirits and set her alight. Her motivation was the mistaken assumption that Vulin was having an affair with her estranged husband ( Vulin had recently met the man, but denies ever being romantically involved with him). So began the fight of her life for Perthbased Vulin, who suffered burns to more than 60 per cent of her face and body. “When the doctors told my family I would die, I lived. When they told me I would be lucky to survive, I thrived ... would not let myself go,” writes Vulin, 30, in her memoir, Worth Fighting For. The following extract recounts the night of horror. In the early hours of Feb. 16, I woke up to the sound of Natalie in my house. I’d fallen asleep on the couch. It was a hot night and I’d drifted off without a top on—wearing only loose army pants that came halfway down my calves. Across from
me stood Natalie, with her arms crossed, wearing black pants, a black singlet and a black hat. “Hello, Dana,” she said as I opened my eyes. She’d forced her way in through the sliding doors from the private balcony at the back of my unit. The lock on the door had been broken for a couple of weeks. I’d locked myself out of the apartment and had only been able to get back in by climbing onto my balcony from the side of the building. I would later learn that was how Natalie got in as well.
I got up, shocked, and covered my boobs with my arms. “Natalie!” I yelled, “what the f--k are you doing? Get out of my house!” She just stood grinning at me, eyes wide and glassy. She was high. “Where is he?” Natalie asked. I was still groggy. “What do you mean?” “My husband,” she demanded. “I know he’s here.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. Still half-asleep, I got to my feet and stumbled about, looking for something to put on, and finally found a top on my bed. I walked back into the living area and found Natalie had let someone else into the apartment, a tall, heavily built guy.
The man stooped down and was playing with my dog, Killer. I had no idea who this guy was at the time, but later I’d find out his name was Daniel Stone. His eyes, like Natalie’s, were widened by drugs, and cold. He was grinning, but his smile was awful—cruel like his eyes, and smug in a really chilling way. He knelt down to keep playing with Killer. As if sensing my discomfort, the man looked up at me and winked.
“Just tell me where my husband is,” Natalie screamed, and I realised that she thought I was hiding [ her husband] Edin somewhere. At this point I still thought that if I could just calmly explain to Natalie that I wasn’t having an affair with her husband then the misunderstanding would clear itself up and she would leave. I had no interest in the man whatsoever, I had barely even met him, but I could not make Natalie understand that.
I moved across the room to give myself space, putting the bench that divided the kitchen area from the lounge room between us, because she wasn’t calming down. She ranted and raved at me while, in the background, Daniel Stone calmly took a phone call.
At that point, Natalie noticed the glass candle on my dining room table. She snatched it up. It was a methylated-spirits burner, a kind of candle made of clear glass where the wick draws fuel from the chamber within. I’d bought the candle for a bit of mood lighting in my apartment, but Natalie had other ideas. She held it tight, lit it, and then whipped out a glass crack pipe and used the candle to start heating up a rock of crystal meth. I couldn’t believe it. As the sharp,
“She’d forced her way in through the sliding doors”
chemical smell filled up my apartment, it occurred to me that this was the behaviour of a proper ice addict.
She’d probably been high every time she’d called me. It would explain her irrational behaviour, her paranoia, her threats. Ice lets users stay awake for days and days upon end. After days without sleep, a person can enter a state of psychosis. A user can enter a state of total delusion, fixating on fantasies, carrying out the most frightening actions, all without stopping to think about what they are doing. Much later, in court, it would be revealed that Natalie and Stone had been watching my house all night, smoking crack pipe after crack pipe, waiting to catch me alone.
In that moment, though, I’d had more than enough. I moved across the room to snatch the burner off her. The naked flame flickered between us as I demanded she get out of my house. “He’s not here, Natalie!” I was yelling in frustration now. “Take a look around. He’s not here! I don’t even know him!” “What do you think, Stoney?” “You know what I think,” he said. “I think the bitch is full of shit.”
It was only then that I realised how much danger I was in.
I remembered all the threatening calls from Natalie and the strange man. I recognised the voice. The one who’d said, “I’m going to rape you. I’m going to mess up your pretty face. I’m going to kill you.”
I was terrified now. Taking the burner, I retreated back behind the kitchen bench, close to the front door, putting some distance between us in case Stone made a move. But it was Natalie who moved forward.
“Just tell me where he is,” she threatened, “or I’m going to burn you!”
This seemed so ridiculous I almost laughed, but instead I just cried, “What for, Natalie? What did I ever do to you?”
A second later my life as I knew it was over.
Natalie grabbed a bottle of methylated spirits from the cleaning products on my kitchen bench, removed the cap and threw the liquid all over me. Waving her hand in a zig-zagging motion, she doused me with the chemical, hitting my face, arms, chest, everything from the waist up. The methylated spirits caught the naked flame in my hand and suddenly the whole world was on fire.
The flames were everywhere: my shoulders, my naked stomach—only my boobs were protected by my tiny boob tube. The flames spread to my head, my hair went up in seconds, and when I reached up to wipe the burning chemicals off my face, my hands were already on fire. Panic took hold of me and I dropped to the floor to try to smother the flames.
My mind went back to a classroom years and years ago, when Constable Care, a cartoonish puppet who taught kids basic safety principles, visited our school. It’s something that every Perth schoolchild remembers: this big friendly puppet telling you if you find yourself on fire, to stop, drop and roll. So, in the moment, that’s what I did. This turned out to be the worst possible
thing I could have done—a big no-no for chemical burns. When I hit the floor and rolled around, all I managed to do was spread the burning chemicals onto my back, so now I was engulfed by flames. The pain was excruciating, but through my screaming I could hear Natalie and Daniel making their escape through the sliding door. They were laughing at me while I burnt alive. When I stood up, the flames were getting worse, and I could barely think through the pain. Panicked, I turned to the sink, trying to put the flames out by pouring a bucket of water over myself. I kept screaming for help, for anybody who could hear. Across the room, poor little Killer was whining in terror.
I knew I was as good as dead without help. As I fumbled with the front door I could feel the skin falling from my fingers. I managed to get the door open and crossed the hallway to the unit next to mine, kicking at the door while yelling for help. Long moments passed. There was no answer.
I screamed so loud and for so long that when someone finally came, he wasn’t even my neighbour. The guy who turned up was working out in the gym of an apartment building next to mine, and he’d heard my screams and come running. By the time he got to me the flames had gone out. There was little left for them to burn. I lay dying on the floor. I opened my eyes to find a man in gym gear squatting next to me.
“I’m Denis,” he said, in a voice so calm it immediately brought me out of my state of shock a little bit. “I’m here to help.”
He took charge immediately. “We need to get you in the shower,” he said, helping me up, but I tried to argue. “Please, no,” I begged. I was in shock, and I believed that running a burn under water is what made it blister.
Inside my ensuite, Denis turned on the cold-water tap and helped me crouch down under the stream. Even though the water was only a gentle trickle, every drop felt like a tiny knife straight onto the exposed nerve endings where my skin had been burnt away. I could see the entire upper half of my body was ruined. My hands were the worst—i remember looking at them as they curled into useless little fists before my eyes. I wept. The pain was unbearable. Denis stood beside me in the shower trying to comfort me. “Everything is going to be OK. Help is on the way. Just hang in there, it won’t be long and we’ll have help here.” I stayed conscious, in agony, until the ambulance got there. “Knock me out,” I remember yelling to the paramedics. “Please, the pain—please, just knock me out.” The pain before I finally passed out in the ambulance was worse than anything I could ever have imagined—but that would turn out to be a tickle compared to what lay ahead of me.
■
“They were laughing at me while I burnt alive”