First she walks, now she talks: Katia Pyliotis on facing four trials for the same murder

By Richard Baker

Katia Pyliotis, her face hidden by her hair, arrives at the Supreme Court in Melbourne in April 2019.Credit:AAP

Katia Pyliotis had just helped a customer load their car and was walking down an alley back to the charity store she volunteered at in Adelaide when she sensed a group of men, in suits, closing in on her.

They introduced themselves as homicide detectives from Victoria. They wanted to talk to her about someone she had been desperately trying to forget: an old man called Eliah Abdelmessih.

The Egyptian-born widower had been found dead in his Melbourne home in September 2005 after what appeared to be a frenzied attack. The main weapons in that attack, it was alleged, were a statue of the Virgin Mary and a tin of mangoes.

Police alleged Eliah Abdulmessih was killed with this statue of the Virgin Mary and this tin of sliced mangoes.

For 11 years, Pyliotis had tried her best to put the image of the battered Abdelmessih behind her. But in May 2016, the past finally caught up with her.

She was charged with Abdelmessih’s murder, and spent the next four years tied up in one of the most remarkable and troubling legal cases in the recent history of Victoria’s criminal justice system.

Pyliotis was convicted of murder in 2018 only to have it quashed on appeal two years later. Now for the first time, she has spoken publicly about the ordeal which almost claimed her life.

The Confession is a new investigative podcast from The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. The seven-part series explores the police investigation to find Abdelmessih’s killer and the extraordinary legal process that followed.

The saga saw Pyliotis, now 40, face four murder trials and an appeal. Ultimately, she applied to the Supreme Court of Victoria for a permanent stay on the murder charge when a long-lost police diary was found, changing her fortunes and putting the focus on her accusers – the police.

Pyliotis describes her experience as a “nightmare”. She is adamant that Abdelmessih was already dead when she discovered his body back in 2005, but she could never escape the fact her DNA was all over the crime scene.

Her failure to report Abdelmessih’s death at the time and the early missteps she made under police questioning quickly became regrets. She replayed them constantly in her mind while she struggled to cope with prison life and, for a time, the prospect of a 19-year jail sentence.

“I tried to kill myself in jail. I gave up hope. It got to a point where I was saying to myself that I’d rather die than be in jail for something I didn’t do. For something that’s so bad,” Pyliotis said.

The Confession takes listeners inside a murder investigation, a jail cell and the witness box. It examines how society deals with the most serious crime – the taking of a human life – and how guilt or innocence is ascribed beyond a reasonable doubt.

All of us want the justice system to be fair. But the Pyliotis case shows just how much luck, both good and bad, can affect outcomes.

A feature of The Confession are never-before-heard, audio recordings of Victorian homicide detectives being cross-examined in 2020 about their investigation of Abdelmessih’s murder, most notably about their handling of an alternate suspect, Susan Reddie.

Eliah Abdelmessih was found dead in his Kew East home in 2005.

The recordings were released to The Age and Herald by Elizabeth Hollingworth, the Supreme Court justice who presided over Pyliotis’ application for a permanent stay on the murder charge.

Pyliotis’ lawyers had always argued that Reddie’s presence as a viable suspect made it impossible for their client to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Cognitively impaired and addicted to alcohol, Reddie had confessed to a carer at her supported accommodation that she assaulted Abdelmessih in his house on the weekend he died. The carer reported this to the police.

But the homicide detective leading the investigation, Warren Ryan, repeatedly testified that Reddie had told him days later that she concocted her confession because she thought that was what the police wanted her to say.

Ryan said he made contemporaneous notes of his conversation with Reddie in his 2005 police diary which would support his evidence. However, his diary had been lost and was not available for any of Pyliotis’ trials, and Reddie had died in 2012.

By mid-2020, just as Victoria’s director of public prosecutions Kerri Judd, KC, was preparing to present Pyliotis at a fifth murder trial, Ryan’s diary turned up. But it failed to show what he or prosecutors had been hoping for. In fact, it contradicted his evidence and called into question the adequacy of the initial homicide investigation.

This led Pyliotis’ legal team to apply to the Supreme Court of Victoria for a permanent stay on her murder charge because much of the previous police evidence now appeared seriously compromised. It was argued that another murder trial would be an abuse of process.

Across three days in late 2020, Ryan and his former homicide squad colleagues were cross-examined by Melbourne barrister Dermott Dann, KC. On the recordings, Justice Hollingworth is heard becoming increasingly testy with the evidence being given by Ryan, now with Queensland Police, and some of his former Victorian colleagues, including one she described as the “smirking superintendent”.

“I think a judge would have no trouble dismissing most of this evidence. It’s so selective and so convenient,” she says. During another exchange, Justice Hollingworth exclaims: “You’re not being asked to speculate. I’m fed up with police speculating in this case.”

Katia Pyliotis was tried four times for the murder of Eliah Abdelmessih.

Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans said the revelations in Ryan’s missing diary amounted to a “classic miscarriage of justice” when combined with previous questionable decisions made in the initial investigation of Abdelmessih’s murder.

“Every case has mistakes and errors, and probably almost every case is oppressive for at least one person, if not several people. So, mistakes aren’t that unusual and a horrible experience for someone isn’t that unusual, either,” Gans said.

“But the way the system is meant to work is that the mistakes get caught by later decisions. And what caught my eye about [the] Pyliotis [case] is the way that there’s a series of mistakes, and instead of one mistake getting caught by the next decision-maker, the next decision-makers seem to make a bit of an error as well.”

Jeremy King, partner at Melbourne law firm Robinson Gill, is representing Pyliotis in an upcoming civil action against Victoria Police. He said the case provided a unique insight into the workings of the criminal justice system and the damage done when the system fails.

“We need stories like Katia’s where we should be able to show the human cost,” King said.

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