Australian officials are eying a former couple for the 2008 Wynarka and Belanglo Forest murders of a missing woman and her baby -- the latter found slain this spring in a suitcase beside a highway.
The badly decomposed corpse of an adult female was first discovered dumped in Australia’s notorious Belanglo woodlands in 2010, although her DNA wasn't filed in an unsolved-crimes database at that time.
Five years later and several hundreds of miles away, a motorist discovered the skeletal remains of a toddler girl stuffed inside a piece of luggage left in a roadside ditch near Wynarka Australia.
Several weeks more, following a highly publicized appeal for help in identifying the “suitcase girl” and her possible relatives, a tip came in that would eventually solve both tragic mysteries.
The slain Baby Doe’s DNA was then compared with a sample taken from Jane Doe and they matched ... the murdered young woman was Karlie Pearce-Stevenson; the murdered child her daughter, Khandalyce Pearce.
Last month, more clues were uncovered in the double homicide probe which led detectives to finally call on Hazel Passmore and her former 41-year-old boyfriend, Daniel Holdom.
Police learned the pair had a troubling connection to the victims in 2008: Passmore and Holdom were still living together at the time, when she uploaded photos of the missing mother and daughter onto Facebook.
In the years since then, almost $100,000 of Ms. Pearce-Stevenson’s savings were systematically drained using her identity and banking cards, investigators also determined.
Security cameras captured a woman in a wheelchair making some of those illegal withdrawals, and it’s suspected she was also complicit in texting the victims’ family with their cell phone to feign they were still alive.
Convicted pedophile Daniel Holdom has now been charged for the “brutal” murder in 2008 of Khandalyce Pearce’s mother, Karlie Pearce-Stevenson.
The ex-lover he crippled earlier that same year in a DUI rollover accident, Hazel Passmore (below), is still being questioned. Records show her own young children died during Holdom’s 2008 drug-induced car crash.
