THE WIDOW OF WALCHA
THE HEARTLESS KILLER WENT AFTER THE MEN SHE DUPED INTO LOVING HER
She’s a black widow killer with an even darker heart. For years, Natasha Beth Darcy had murder on her mind. She’d almost killed her first husband in 2009, and finally succeeded in murdering her boyfriend, farmer Mathew Dunbar, in 2017 in the northern NSW town of Walcha by drugging him with powerful sedatives, putting a plastic bag over his head and filling it with helium.
She tried to pass his bizarre death off as a suicide, but a series of blunders by her and fortunate coincidences would lead to her undoing. Now, as Darcy, 46, serves 40 years in jail for murder, a new book sheds light on the lengths she was prepared to go to satisfy her greed and tells of the other men who were lucky enough to escape her clutches.
Author Emma Partridge, who was drawn to the case by those in Walcha who were concerned that Darcy was going to get away with murder, followed the case and sat through every day of the trial in the NSW Supreme Court.
“Staggering details emerged,” Partridge tells WHO. “There was a bombshell bribery plot, a sickening cache of internet searches and details of two ‘dry runs’ before the eventual murder. There were also many other men she’d duped, but who had lived to tell their frightening tales.
“Everyone who knew Mathew Dunbar knew that all he ever wanted was love and a family to call his own. Perhaps that’s why he turned a blind eye to her dark past when she turned up to his property in 2014 with her two lambs and claimed they needed rescuing. Natasha dug her claws into Mathew and hounded him into making her the sole beneficiary of his multimilliondollar merino farm, Pandora.”
Darcy’s dark past included an attempt on the life of her then-husband, paramedic Colin Crossman, who would be the first on the scene after Dunbar was murdered in 2009. Darcy had set fire to their family home while Crossman was sedated with a cocktail of drugs in his system.
“The last thing he remembered was devouring a meal of tacos Natasha had served him before waking up in the emergency department at Tamworth Hospital,” Partridge explains.
Darcy ended up pleading guilty to destroying property by fire but signed an agreed statement of facts, admitting she had also belted Crossman on the head with a hammer three days before the house fire – both violent attacks were carried out shortly after she’d applied to take out life insurance on him. She was jailed for a minimum of nine months.
Once freed from jail, Darcy set her sights on Dunbar and getting his $3.4 million property. She moved into his property with her three children in October 2016 and hounded him until he changed his will to leave everything to her. “About this time Mathew was becoming increasingly depressed about the state of their relationship,” Partridge says. “Nothing had been the same since Natasha and her kids had moved onto his property.”
Darcy began researching murder methods online, beginning with information about more natural causes of death relating to poisonous spiders, mushrooms and “11 toxic plants that look like food”, before progressing to “how to commit murder”, “murder by injection” and “99 undetectable poisons”.
She continued to emotionally manipulate Dunbar, gaslighting him with cruel comments and goading him into taking his own life to the point where he indeed threatened suicide.
While he recovered in a mental health facility, the mum-of-three researched sedatives and acquired a powerful sedative, acepromazine, used on rams. On August 1, 2017, the last day of 42-year-old Dunbar’s life, Darcy blended a cocktail of drugs – including her son’s ADHD medication and the animal sedative – in a blender, before giving it to him to drink.
Once sedated in bed, Darcy used the helium to gas him to death. Her final act in her clumsy plan was to try to convince everyone that Dunbar had committed suicide. The police didn’t believe her story and neither would a jury.