How their world fell apart, the morning after Valentine’s Day

“JUST keep quiet and you won’t get hurt”. This was the first thing Alicia* heard when she woke on the morning of February 15, 1986.

There was a hand over her mouth and a knife at her throat.

“I could feel the point of the knife pressing into my neck. I couldn’t breathe properly and kept trying to say ‘let go’.”

The night before was Valentine’s Day. Alicia and her 22-year-old fiance Dean Allan Allie had spent the evening visiting Dean’s parents.

“We were just a young and silly couple,” Alicia, now aged 51, says. “On weekends we liked yachting and fishing together.

“When we got home, we headed to bed around midnight.”

Across town, meanwhile, 30-yearold Jamie John Curtis’s night was just getting started.

Boozing until about 4am, Curtis and a 16-year-old accomplice got into Curtis’s vehicle and began prowling for a young woman to rape.

The first two targets they approached rejected their offer for a “lift”.

Then about 5.45am Curtis spotted a 15-year-old delivery girl on her morning paper round.

Dragging her at knifepoint to their vehicle, Curtis forced the girl into the boot of the car.

But minutes later, when the vehicle stopped at traffic lights, the girl used a screwdriver to jimmy open the boot lock, breaking free and fleeing on foot.

Undeterred, Curtis settled on a more local target: a young woman whom he had seen in the same street where he resided.

About 8am Curtis and his accomplice forced their way into the couple’s apartment, bashing Dean and binding his arms and feet before dragging him to the shower.

They then took turns repeatedly sexually assaulting Alicia.

“They raped me in the most degrading way, verbally taunting me and saying and doing the most sadistic things,” she says.

“I was disgusted, but I told myself to just get it over and done with and do whatever they say.”

In the next room, Dean was forced to listen.

When the rapes finally ended two hours later, Curtis and his accomplice abducted the couple, stealing their green HQ Holden and telling them they would release them once far enough away from the crime scene.

“An hour later we came to a clearing and a kind of valley in Gretna,” Alicia says. “The car stopped. Then I said ‘Can we go now?’”

Curtis replied “Don’t be stupid. We’re not going to let you go. You were conned.” Instead they took out a chainsaw. “Curtis said ‘ have you ever felt the blade of the chainsaw on your skin? It will be just like the chainsaw massacre movie’.

“They started it up and Curtis then told us that he was going to give us a two-minute headstart to run into the woods and then they would come after us with the chainsaw.”

For over an hour Curtis and his accomplice toyed with their victims, taunting them about how they would

like to kill them, and debating whether to do it with a shotgun, a knife or the chainsaw.

Eventually they decided to lock Alicia in the boot.

“They closed the lid and I heard Dean crying. I remember that vividly. I remember the terror and thinking this is the day I am going to die.

“I heard Dean say ‘no please’. That was the last thing I ever heard Dean say.”

Outside the car, Curtis and his accomplice led Dean approximately 30 metres from the car. A frenzy of stabbing ensued, with both men taking part until Dean was dead.

“After they opened the boot they showed me the knife covered in blood.

“They said they had killed him — and I knew deep down that they had — but I was in disbelief and shock.

“I was living my worst nightmare. These things never happen to you, they only happen to other people and I just couldn’t believe it.”

Alicia was numb. The men, however, had built up a hunger and decided to head to a Gretna pub for meat pies and more alcohol. Alicia was taken with them. “As we sat in the parked car, I slowly pulled the lock up on my door. I was going to run,” she says.

“I got the door open a little bit. But Curtis grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back while the young one started punching me.

“I began screaming and screaming as loud as I could. I could see people outside the pub but no one took any notice.”

When the trio arrived back at the murder scene, Curtis again told Alicia they were going to kill her with the chainsaw.

“I pleaded with them ‘Can’t you just do it with a knife? I went and got a knife and handed it to them and said ‘just kill me already, I would rather be dead’.”

Instead Curtis decided to rape her again. This time Alicia fought back. A struggle ensued, during which Alicia blacked out.

Hours later, a farmer who was walking through his property in Gretna stumbled upon a car with three unconscious people in it. Two males were passed out drunk. The third, a naked woman, was unconscious. Using a stick, the farmer prodded her.

“As soon as he jabbed me I was wide awake, adrenaline pumping.”

Alicia ran to the farmer’s vehicle and police were eventually called. They found two drunk males still asleep in the vehicle. Nearby Dean Allie’s body was found, with 12 stab wounds in his torso.

“I still see him in the morgue to this day” his sister Carol Allie, who later identified his body, told the Mercury. “He was the kind of person who would do absolutely anything for anyone. But he missed out on so much. He never got to become a dad, and our parents missed out on grandchildren from him.”

Alicia wants Dean Allan Allie remembered as a “real person” who was passionate about his hobbies, especially remodelling his cars.

He would have been 56 this year. * Victim gag laws in Tasmania prevent The Mercury from publishing the real name of “Alicia” in this story