Killing a Dead Man

Lindsay Jellett was forty-one and lived in a group home in Ararat, western Victoria. A truck struck his stroller when he was a toddler, leaving him with an intellectual disability and epilepsy, and he took medication nightly. Staff and neighbors liked him. He went out walking most afternoons, and on May 10, 1994 he did not come back for dinner.

His body was found the next morning on a rural road a couple of kilometers from the home. A car had run over him twice, but there was almost no blood at the scene, which meant he had died before the wheels reached him. Investigators matched the tire marks, and blood and fabric traces under a car belonging to his twin sister, Judith Cengiz. The compensation fund set up for Lindsay was draining fast, its administrator had queried the spending weeks earlier, and what remained would pass to her on his death. A sedative turned up in his blood, a drug once dispensed to her by a pharmacist, though none was found in her house.

Prosecutors could never establish what killed him, since his epilepsy left another explanation open. The murder charge gave way to attempted murder, and a jury convicted her in 1996. She received ten years with a six-year minimum, lost an appeal in June 1997, and was released on parole in February 2002. Cengiz died in 2017.