‘Any time I hear a siren, I say a prayer’
Alicia McCallion’s story is shocking, but all too familiar: she was murdered by a man who professed to love her. Edward Gay reports.
The moment Millicent McCallion turned the key in the lock, her daughter’s dog burst through the open front door.
It was part of Millicent’s morning routine, to let Snoopy, a german pointer-cross, out of her daughter’s sleepout. Alicia, known as AJ, started work at the recycling depot early.
But on the morning of December 12, 2012, Millicent noticed her daughter’s overalls strewn across the floor. Inside, she found AJ face down on the floor, next to the bed.
This country’s shame
The McCallions’ story is both extraordinarily shocking and all too familiar. AJ was murdered by Karl John Eddy, a man who once professed to love her.
Like AJ, half of all women killed in New Zealand die at the hands of an intimate partner.
The Homicide Report ,a Stuff data investigation, shows that, in 2019, 12 women were allegedly killed by men with whom they had been in a relationship, making it the worst year for fatal partner violence in a decade.
While our homicide rate is low by international standards, we consistently outrank other developed nations in family violence statistics. On average, nine women are killed by partners or ex-partners every year.
And like the vast majority of their killers – nearly 85 per cent – Karl Eddy had previous convictions: 68 in total, and some related to violence against previous partners.
A tense relationship
At 21, AJ was working in a tattoo parlour. Across the road, in the window of a cafe, stood Eddy.
He was 17 years older and had children with a previous partner. He stared at AJ, watching her work. He penned a note: ‘‘I really like your smile and this is my phone number.’’
‘‘Seeing how she was so young, I felt like the senior tattooist should have stepped in and told him to bugger off,’’ recalls Millicent.
AJ made the call. She would sneak out at night to see Eddy.
‘‘I didn’t even know about it and someone said: ‘Who’s Alicia’s new boyfriend?’ I said: ‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend.’ Mothers are always the last to know.’’
Eddy was unemployed. He moved into the McCallion family home in Papakura.
There was tension when money went missing. A skill-saw belonging to one of AJ’s older brothers also disappeared before Eddy and AJ moved out.
But Eddy’s lack of work meant the couple struggled. AJ took up gardening and growing vegetables in an effort to save money. But she eventually asked her parents if they could move back into the sleepout.
Peter McCallion recalls asking his daughter: ‘‘Are you sure you want to bring Karl?’’ AJ said she was sure.
Before they moved back, Peter built an internal wall, blocking Eddy’s access to the rest of the house.
Initially he thought Eddy was another casualty of the global financial crisis. But then Peter realised: ‘‘He was a guy who thought the world owed him a job, but he didn’t have to work for it.’’
Breaking up
In early December 2012, AJ found the courage to break up with Eddy. She and Snoopy stayed in the sleepout, and Eddy moved back in with his mother in Manurewa.
Peter later asked his daughter if Eddy might hurt her. She told him Eddy loved her. ‘‘She still thought he would never hurt her.’’
Everyone noticed the change in AJ after the split. She seemed happier and her confidence was returning.
Meanwhile, Eddy still hoped they would get back together. He spoke of plans to buy a car and attend an anger management course.
He applied for a job at the recycling centre where AJ worked. He would turn up unannounced and ask her colleagues not to tell her he was there.
He bought AJ a wedding ring. He sent a text saying he would drop it off, along with some of her clothes. AJ responded: ‘‘I don’t want the ring.’’ She made it clear she didn’t want them to get back together.
Peter helped Eddy move furniture back to his mother’s place. During one of the trips, Eddy asked if AJ had a new boyfriend.
‘‘He made the point: ‘You know I’ve never been harmful to her . . . There’s a lot of people out there who would do harm to someone.’
‘‘I think he was trying to plant the seed in my mind that if something did happen to her, it could be someone else.’’
Around the same time, Eddy began threatening AJ. He told her he would smash her head through a wall, and that if she ever got a new boyfriend he would kill them both.
Later, evidence at his trial showed he had also set about creating what Justice Rebecca Ellis would describe as an ‘‘alternative reality’’.
He told his niece that AJ had texted him, complaining about being stalked by a man at her work. It was the beginnings of an amateur effort to divert police attention elsewhere.
December 12, 2012
Some time after 3am, Eddy parked about a block from the McCallions’ home and approached on foot through an orchard that backs on to the property.
It was still dark, about 4am, but AJ was already up, getting ready for work.
At Eddy’s trial, the pathologist suggested he punched AJ in the face, causing her to stumble. As she turned her back, he grabbed her and they struggled, breaking the wardrobe doors off their hinges.
He stabbed her in the abdomen three times, before cutting her throat with a serrated knife. She died almost instantly.
Eddy took her phone, and headed back to his mother’s house.
He used the phone to send a series of texts to himself. He then threw it out of the car as he drove down the motorway.
He got rid of the murder weapon in the same manner, tossing it into trees near the Takanini motorway off-ramp.
Only hours after the murder, he phoned the McCallion family home to say he was worried
about AJ being stalked by a man at her work. ‘‘It’s too late Karl, she’s already dead,’’ Peter said.
Eddy was immediately a person of interest. He attempted to build an alibi, saying he had taken a sleeping pill and slept through the night. However, when detectives checked his bottle, they found there were no pills missing.
There were other obvious holes in his story. Online banking records showed Eddy had checked his account in the early hours of the morning. He had been up all night.
The following day, he posted on Facebook a Stuff article relating to AJ’s death.
Addressing the McCallions, he wrote: ‘‘i carnt imagine how u are feeling at this moment like you i carnt get over she has gone . . .’’
Three days later, he was arrested and charged with murder.
From his own mouth
The Crown’s case was compelling. His fingerprint, in AJ’s blood, was found on the door to the sleepout.
There was other evidence, namely the words that came from his own mouth.
‘‘If Karl had never said anything, kept himself out of it, there’s very little forensic evidence,’’ Millicent says. ‘‘It was actually his mouth that got him into the biggest trouble.’’
On the day of the murder, Eddy told family and friends that AJ had been stabbed and her throat had been cut. It would be some time before that information was in the public domain. The details could only have been known by the killer.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty.
At sentencing, Justice Rebecca Ellis said: ‘‘I have no doubt that Alicia McCallion was the best thing that ever happened to you. You, however, were the worst thing that ever happened to her.
‘‘You are a person who resorts to violence when you become angry and your ability to justify your behaviour to yourself suggests that some of the normal checks and balances that stop people acting on their feelings of anger are missing in your case.’’
She said Eddy’s 68 previous convictions spanned 26 years and included possessing weapons, threatening to kill, breaching protection orders and assaulting a woman.
‘‘Although none of your previous convictions come anywhere near the gravity of the present one, they disclose a disturbing pattern of anger and aggression . . .’’
She sentenced Eddy to life in prison with a minimum nonparole period of 17 years.
AJ was murdered less than two weeks before Christmas. ‘‘The court case itself was tough,’’ says Millicent, ‘‘but the first Christmas was even tougher . . .
‘‘What the grandchildren couldn’t understand was . . . there were gifts from Auntie AJ and they were like: ‘How come we’ve got this when she’s dead?’ . . . We had to explain she bought them before she was killed.’’
Meanwhile, Eddy had told his mother that he had bought bikes for his children’s Christmas presents, and they were hidden in the attic of the McCallions’ sleepout.
Eddy’s mother called Peter, asking for the bikes. ‘‘I had a look up there and there was no sign of bikes, it was all his rubbish. So we went out and bought the bikes for the kids.
‘‘It must be hard for them to live with it too. Well, not everyone’s Christmas had to be ruined.’’
‘You don’t get closure’
For a time after the murder, Millicent was overwhelmed by her loss.
‘‘As a mum, I felt like I had to be strong for Peter, strong for my sons, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren. Probably to the extent that I actually forgot that I was allowed to be sad, I was allowed to cry.’’
It will take a ‘‘really big miracle’’ for her to one day forgive Eddy. ‘‘As a Christian I still fight with myself because I hear so many other people whose children have been killed and they have said: ‘We forgive the perpetrator’. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t.’’
She still talks to her daughter. One of the ways she remembers AJ are the tattoos on her own arms, designed and inked by her daughter. ‘‘I was her guinea pig,’’ she laughs, ‘‘like with her hairdressing. I was a guinea pig for that too.’’
She gets angry when people talk to her of ‘‘closure’’. ‘‘That’s just BS, you don’t get closure, you just learn to live with the hole, and your life is different.’’
Eight years have passed since the couple found the body of their murdered daughter. Even now, when they hear sirens, they are taken right back.
‘‘Nowadays, any time I hear a siren, I say a prayer.’’