The bondage-loving millionaire brutally murdered for his $15m fortune
Source: Honey.nine.com.au.
AUSTRALIA – An eccentric multi-millionaire with a penchant for rubbing people up the wrong way, Peter Shellard had plenty of enemies. So, when the 56-year-old was found brutally murdered in his bedroom wearing just his boxer shorts with his legs and arms bound by rope and a pair of handcuffs nearby, Victoria detectives weren’t exactly short of leads.
As Nine’s true crime show, Murder Calls reveals tomorrow night, his long-term girlfriend, Shirley Withers placed a distressed and hysterical call to police on the night of May 7th, 2005 after discovering his bloody body at the house they shared.
“My god. My partner is tied up on the floor and there’s blood everywhere”, she told emergency services. Minutes later, police and forensics were surveying what the head of the investigation describes as a “not just startling but puzzling crime scene”.
Shellard had made his phenomenal wealth from trading luxury cars and expensive real estate. He’d moved to an exclusive part of Melbourne a few years before, and didn’t exactly hit it off with his new neighbours. One morning they woke up to find he had deliberately torched the historic garden of his late nineteenth-century house. Later, he erected a wire fence around the property, bought some chickens and filled the raised garden with shipping containers for his car business.
“He was just outrageous”, second wife and mother to his three daughters, Liz Shellard tells Murder Calls. “He was far from conservative and he loved breaking all the rules.”
But Shellard was also battling his own demons. He suffered from bipolar disorder resulting in severe mood swings that contributed to his sometimes erratic behaviour. He had also been trying to make his new found love for bondage pay by attempting to poach staff from his favourite club — which he frequented every other night — in the hope that he could set up his own money-spinner.
Police knew, however, that the murder was more than just a case of neighbourly rage or a sex game gone wrong. The autopsy revealed defensive bruises where the businessman had tried to put up a fight, a significant bleed on the brain caused by a blunt instrument and no sign of markings from the rope on his wrists or ankles. It had simply been draped across the body.
They immediately realised his girlfriend — who also worked as the entrepreneur’s book-keeper, ran a fashion boutique funded by Shellard and owned a house he had bought for her — couldn’t be ruled out, so checked his will to find out who would inherit his vast estate. She appeared to be off the hook when his daughters turned out to be the sole heirs. But her strange behaviour made officers think again.
“According to Shirley, there was another will that left everything to her and she turned up at the house to find it”, the head of the investigation reveals.
“She wanted access to the crime scene.”
When the signed will she claimed to have typed and witnessed wasn’t in the safe, detectives decided to listen in on her phone conversations.
It wasn’t long before her story began to unravel as she claimed to Shellard’s close friends that her support had made all the difference to his illness.
His phone records in the days before his death said otherwise. He had noticed money was missing from his accounts, told friends that he suspected Withers and had even revealed to his ex-wife he was “scared” and “feared for his life”.
“I wondered if this was the bipolar talking to me or the real Peter talking to me”, his friend, Dale O’Sullivan says.
By this point, toxicology tests had found traces of morphine in Shellard’s blood and heroin in his urine.
“Peter wasn’t a drug user”, O’Sullivan adds. “That’s when we knew it was murder.”
Shellard’s hunch was right. His girlfriend — who was twenty years younger — had indeed stolen nearly a million dollars from her lover. Her boutique was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and she was cashing cheques to keep it afloat while also subsidising a secret lifestyle.
But, forensics were throwing up different leads — a cigarette butt when neither the victim or suspect smoked. And a bloody fingerprint on the house phone.
DNA said they belonged to two “low-level” drug addicts, Stanley Callinicos and Sophia Stoupas. Police knew the pair had to be connected to Withers, but how?
With her phone still tapped, they soon had evidence linking the three. In a disturbing phone call, she admitted to Shellard’s friend that she knew who killed him.
“They’re greedy, dirty little druggies”, she said. “I’ll f—— kill them with my hands and I’ll make those b——- suffer.”
So, cops planted an undercover ‘hit-man’, offering to kill the pair for a price, to collect more evidence and it wasn’t long until she confessed the whole story.
Fully aware that her boyfriend suspected her of stealing, Withers knew that she was in trouble. She recruited her new friends, who had been feeding her secret drug addiction by selling her amphetamines and heroin, to teach him a lesson. She told the pair a sob story about him taking her house from underneath her, and revealed his obsession with bondage, before they broke in to his house and attempted to tie him up.
The break-in went wrong when Shellard fought back and bit Stoupas’ finger, hence the bloody fingerprint on the phone.
She hit him over the head before Withers injected him with a syringe of heroin to keep him quiet. When they returned to the house later, he was dead.
Withers was sentenced to 13 years for manslaughter; Callinicos and Stoupas jailed for six.
“She was so good no-one noticed, not even Peter”, O’Sullivan tells the Murder Calls cameras.
Murder Calls airs on Channel 9 in Queensland and NSW at 8.40pm on Wednesday, and in Western Australia, Victoria and South Australia at 8.30pm on Thursday.
See more and larger photo’s: Honey.nine.com.au.
