To catch a killer

Tonight’s Australian Story sounds like chilling stuff.

It details the 2006 NSW case of a man who killed his wife, and the grief-stricken mother (pictured) of the victim who suspected him.

All the time she was grieving he was lying. Police even asked her to abet them in nailing him, including going along with his sham.

‘The whole thing was acting … at the end of every day I had to scrub myself clean. It was like just to get him off me, just to wash away the filth,’ recalls a family member.

When the child started saying things like ‘Daddy hurt mummy. Daddy went bang and mummy went flop’, the pressure on the two was almost too much to bear.

8:00pm tonight on ABC1.

Press Release:

How do you mourn the death of your daughter while holding the hand of her killer?

When Jody Galante was reported missing in January 2006, her griefstricken husband, Mark appeared on national television pleading for help in finding his young, pregnant wife.

But other family members were struck by the fact that his tears weren’t real and his sorrow seemed a sham.

‘We started to notice that whenever he cried, supposedly cried, he always put his hand up to his eyes. And after a while we realised that there were no tears,’ says Jody’s mother, Julie Hand on Australian Story.

When Jody’s body was found one week later, NSW Police confirmed that they were investigating a murder … but how to catch the killer?

Police asked Hand and Jody’s sister, Tina Good to help them – to observe, to report, to keep tabs and to keep secrets.

In the glare of the media and in the company of family and friends, the two were seen to be supporting Mark, dealing with their own sorrow and caring for Mark and Jody’s five-year-old child.

In reality, Hand and Good were leading double lives.

‘The whole thing was acting … at the end of every day I had to scrub myself clean. It was like just to get him off me, just to wash away the filth,’ recalls Good.

When the child started saying things like ‘Daddy hurt mummy. Daddy went bang and mummy went flop’, the pressure on the two was almost too much to bear.

In Australian Story, Jody Galante’s family finally talk about the aftermath of her death and the desperate race against time to protect their youngest relative from a psychopath in the family.