Fatal attraction

Rachel Barber was everything Caroline Reed Robertson wanted to be – beautiful, popular and a talented dancer. Robertson’s fascination with the green-eyed 15-year-old began when she started babysitting her siblings.

“She had been collecting information about us for a long time,” says Rachel’s mum Elizabeth. “She’d applied for Rachel’s birth certificate, she had all of our birth dates, she had detailed information about our family and we had no idea.”

On February 29, 1999, Robertson’s obsession turned deadly. In a bizarre bid d to assume Rachel’s identity, Robertson invited her to her Melbourne unit, and laced her pizza with drugs before wrapping a telephone cord around her neck and strangling her to death.

For two days, the 19-year-old kept Rachel’s body in a wardrobe, before burying her in a shallow grave at her dad’s s farm. Caroline was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2000 but walked free in 2015.