A Melbourne Murder-The Case Of Maulin Rathod
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00:00 [Music]
00:28 Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. July 23rd 2018.
00:37 [Phone ringing]
00:41 At 9pm a triple zero call came in from a 19 year old at a house in Sunbury.
00:48 Senior Constable Luke Cole-Keown was on shift at the Sunbury Police Station at the time
00:53 and instantly recognised the voice on the end of the phone.
00:57 "I think I killed someone," they said. "I didn't want to but I did it. He came, he didn't seem scared.
01:02 I strangled him. He's on my bed. It feels so good. I don't want to be a killer."
01:09 "Have you actually done that?" he asked. "You never believe me. Why don't you believe me?"
01:15 they bluntly and calmly replied.
01:18 Authorities were dispatched immediately and when they got to the home,
01:22 it turned out that Constable Cole-Keown had been right about the voice. He had recognised it.
01:28 The caller answered the door and it was someone the station knew all too well.
01:32 Jamie Lee Dollarguy.
01:36 As they entered the home they found 25 year old Morlyn Rathod in the bedroom.
01:40 A cord attached to a sex toy was wrapped around his neck and he was lying motionless.
01:47 "See, I wasn't lying. You never believe me. Why won't you ever believe me? He's dead, isn't he?"
01:52 Jamie shouted at the officers.
01:55 Morlyn was put into an ambulance and rushed off to hospital
01:58 and Jamie was taken down to the station for questioning.
02:01 Given what she had revealed already, she was charged with attempted murder,
02:05 intentionally causing serious injury and recklessly causing serious injury.
02:11 What had happened and how it came to be was a frightening story.
02:17 In the early evening of July 23rd 2018, 19 year old Jamie Lee Dollarguy
02:25 logged onto the popular dating app used by millions worldwide, Plenty of Fish.
02:30 Her bio read "borderline personality disorder and suicidal tendencies,
02:35 into extreme fetishes, vampire fantasies, bondage, biting people and being gang raped against her will."
02:43 She wasn't on it long, before around 7pm she got a message from a 25 year old student, Morlyn Rathod.
02:50 They exchanged a total of six messages, sexual in nature and about everything in Jamie's profile.
02:57 He told her "We'll do whatever you want."
02:59 They made a plan to meet up at her house,
03:02 with Jamie saying she would put on a costume and her favourite perfume.
03:06 Morlyn told her he would be there just after 8pm and he would text when he was outside.
03:12 With this, he closed the app and started getting ready.
03:16 Four years before this, Morlyn Rathod had made the big move from Gujarat in Western India
03:22 to Australia on a student visa to get his Masters in Accounting.
03:26 He had really started a whole new life and had settled in well at Charles Sturt University,
03:31 also working part time as a delivery driver.
03:34 He was an only child and was very close to his parents, talking to them every day.
03:39 They had even sold their bungalow to finance his move to Australia when they realised it was his dream.
03:45 As soon as they had the money, Morlyn was on his way,
03:48 and the family took some photos at the airport before he left.
03:52 Friends described him as happy-go-lucky, easy-going but hard-working and very humble.
03:58 His hard work had almost paid off and was proud to say he was just four months away from finishing his course.
04:04 His professors believed in him so much, they had actually offered him a job when he finished,
04:09 so he could stay in Australia permanently.
04:12 Jamie was now at the station and talking a lot.
04:17 She started by telling the detectives she had been having a bad day
04:21 and the second Morlyn agreed to meet her, she knew she was going to kill him.
04:25 A matter of minutes after she ended her conversation with him on Plenty of Fish,
04:29 she started making some Google searches.
04:32 "I'm going to kill someone tonight for fun. How to kill someone?"
04:36 "I want to commit murder."
04:38 "I'm going to kill someone tonight. Help."
04:41 She then clicked on a link called "10 Steps for Committing a Murder" and "Get Away With It."
04:48 At 8.07pm Morlyn arrived at the house.
04:51 She told detectives she immediately took note of his shape and size
04:55 and felt he was weak enough that strangulation would be easy.
04:59 She told him she wanted to role play and he was keen to learn.
05:03 "I told him that I wouldn't let him out of the house and he said he didn't care.
05:07 I said that I'm going to choke play and he said he's happy to learn anything.
05:11 So I said that I have like psychopathic tendencies in my head and I'm not really that safe.
05:17 And he said he's not scared," she said.
05:20 Morlyn said as long as she didn't hurt him, he was up for anything.
05:24 Jamie told him he could just tap and she would stop.
05:27 "He seems to be thinking it's all a game," she told the officers.
05:31 She got behind him and started choking him.
05:34 Jamie said she had two personalities.
05:38 "One's mean, one's nice. They're both me.
05:41 One is caring and the other is destructive.
05:43 I was hoping he would run away. Call the police," she said.
05:47 Just a few seconds later he started to panic and tapped her.
05:50 But instead of stopping as she'd promised, she only squeezed harder,
05:55 wrapping her legs around his body to get a tighter grip.
05:58 She whispered in his ear, "It'll be okay. It'll all be over."
06:03 At this point, after attempting to wriggle out of her grip for several seconds,
06:07 Morlyn was now lying on his stomach and Jamie was sat on his back.
06:12 He suddenly went limp and Jamie said she then tied the cord from the sex toy around his neck.
06:18 "What was your intention?" the officer asked.
06:21 "Murder," she replied.
06:23 Just before calling the police, Jamie made some more searches online,
06:27 looking for ways to be admitted into hospital.
06:30 She told them she had had an urge to kill,
06:33 comparing it to the feeling of someone who wants to smoke a cigarette.
06:36 As she was talking more and more, the story was getting more disturbing as it went on.
06:41 And the police then got a call.
06:44 Morlyn hadn't pulled through and had succumbed to his injuries
06:48 just a few hours after getting to the hospital.
06:51 A young Indian student has been killed after an online date went terribly wrong.
06:59 Live now to Dean Felton. And, Dean, take us through what happened here.
07:03 Well, Mitch, the victim has been identified as Morlyn Rathod,
07:09 a 25-year-old accountant living here in Melbourne, on a student visa.
07:13 He died in Sunshine Hospital overnight after being found critically injured on Monday night.
07:19 He'd gone to a house in Sunbury to visit a 19-year-old woman who lived alone at the address.
07:24 The visit arranged through an internet dating site.
07:27 The woman's home was a supported residential service,
07:30 visited frequently by carers.
07:32 Neighbours told me this afternoon that police, too, were frequent visitors to the address
07:37 to quell noisy and sometimes violent disturbances there.
07:40 And not surprisingly, Morlyn's friends are in deep shock
07:43 at the sudden and violent death of this young man.
07:46 He was a very humble personality, very jolly in nature.
07:50 He used to crack jokes and he loved to play cricket.
07:54 And the woman in custody over the attack on Morlyn,
07:57 she's expected to have her charges upgraded to either manslaughter or murder.
08:04 After this, Jamie Dollaguy's charges would swiftly be upgraded to murder.
08:09 What she had done, although shocking, was not actually surprising to those that knew her.
08:15 Some carers who had worked with her even described her as a shape-shifting demon girl.
08:21 Jamie had lived in state care since she was 10 years old,
08:24 with frequent visits from social workers and her criminal record starting when she was young.
08:29 She often spent long periods in juvenile detention.
08:33 In the years before she turned 18, Jamie had carers living with her 24 hours a day,
08:38 seven days a week, in a house owned by the Department of Health and Human Services.
08:43 They said they were terrified of her and her unpredictability.
08:46 But when she turned 18, however, they all stepped away,
08:50 and she was living alone and unsupervised.
08:53 As soon as they left, neighbours said the police were there for a lot of various reasons,
08:58 including noise disturbances, fighting and welfare checks.
09:03 She would often bring them cakes and cards after their visits to thank them,
09:06 and they had grown to know her fairly well.
09:09 She was a massive social media user and would upload numerous times a day.
09:14 Sometimes the pictures were simply her playing around with filters and sharing her artwork.
09:27 And sometimes they were lengthy paragraphs about her childhood trauma,
09:31 sexual abuse and the issues she had with her body.
09:35 She said she hated skinny pretty girls and wanted to torture them.
09:40 She would self-harm and put batteries into her body,
09:43 resulting in her having more than 100 operations to remove foreign bodies.
09:47 One of her friends said she claimed to have a demon inside her,
09:50 and sometimes believed that she was a wolf.
09:53 One moment she appeared happy and was smiling,
09:56 the next she was going ballistic, snarling and growling like a wolf and biting people.
10:00 "It is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. It's like she was possessed," someone said.
10:05 She posted to Facebook just a few weeks before the murder of Morlyn and said,
10:09 "If only they believed me when I said I'm not sane.
10:12 I live in fear, afraid of what's behind the corner. My heart is black.
10:16 I no longer feel the emotions of happiness, unless I see someone else."
10:21 And on the afternoon she did kill him, she texted one of her carers and said,
10:26 "I feel really sick with bad temptations. I want to call the police but they won't believe me. I want to cry."
10:33 Upon being charged with murder, everybody knew that it would be a complicated case.
10:38 As a result, she was assessed by some of the best clinical minds in Australia,
10:42 and they said she was one of the most psychologically damaged they'd ever assessed.
10:47 There is no doubt that Jamie Dollarguy was a profoundly troubled person,
10:52 and everybody said she was a ticking time bomb.
10:55 Despite all of her confessions and admissions, in her first court appearance,
11:00 she entered a plea of not guilty.
11:03 As prosecutors dived further into the case,
11:06 Morlyn's friends in Australia banded together to raise money
11:09 to send him back to India to be with his family.
11:12 It took him 12 days to get home, where he was cremated.
11:16 A year would then pass, as more interviews, assessments and the like were carried out,
11:26 establishing whether or not Jamie was fit to stand trial.
11:30 It was deemed that she was,
11:32 and the now 20-year-old's murder trial would begin at the end of 2019.
11:36 Morlyn's parents settled for a three-year sentence,
11:39 and Jamie's trial would begin at the end of 2019.
11:42 Morlyn's parents said although they wanted to be there for their son,
11:45 they simply couldn't afford to fly over,
11:47 so they had to wait by the phone every day for any update.
11:51 The loss had left them unable to eat or sleep,
11:54 and not being able to get to Australia had only added to their pain.
11:58 In terms of Jamie's mental health and past issues,
12:01 it was set to be a complex trial.
12:03 There was no denying that she had killed Morlyn,
12:06 she had already confessed to that,
12:08 but there were no arguments of whether her mental health issues affected her in that moment,
12:12 and whether or not the murderous intent could be proven.
12:16 As a result, her lawyers were pushing for a conviction of manslaughter.
12:20 Her defence team called in a psychologist, Dr Carroll,
12:24 and he told the jury that he did not believe that Jamie suffered from psychosis in any way.
12:30 He said that she knew what she had done was wrong,
12:32 and that she was aware of what she was doing.
12:35 He said she was in a state of turmoil,
12:37 but had a residual awareness that choking Morlyn would actually kill him.
12:42 Jamie's lawyer Sharon Lacey focused heavily on her childhood.
12:45 She spoke about her past abuse, living in care, and suicidal thoughts and tendencies.
12:51 They said that her borderline personality disorder had played a role,
12:55 and Jamie was suffering from stunted psychological development,
12:58 brought on by the trauma of her childhood.
13:02 Jamie sat quietly in the courtroom the whole time,
13:05 not looking up and not paying attention,
13:08 sometimes smiling, but mainly focusing her attention on the children's colouring book she was drawing in,
13:13 and making origami.
13:15 Sharon said her client was so damaged that no jury could be sure of her having murderous intent,
13:22 and therefore they could not find her guilty of murder.
13:25 "There's no evidence to suggest she intended to hurt him," she said.
13:29 But the prosecution said that while it was clear there was some significant trauma in her life,
13:35 as well as severe mental health issues,
13:37 she admitted to the police that she knew before he even arrived at the house that she was going to kill him.
13:43 "As soon as she got that first text, she had in mind to harm this man," they said.
13:48 And when Morlyn got to the house, Jamie admitted to sizing him up,
13:52 assessing how easy it would be to kill him,
13:55 and her own description of how it all played out,
13:58 showed that Jamie was someone who wanted to do this,
14:01 someone who was very much present in the moment,
14:04 and understood exactly what the implications were.
14:07 "It was absolutely premeditated," they said.
14:10 After an 18-day trial,
14:13 where numerous witnesses, including Jamie's carers and clinical experts,
14:17 and the tape of her lengthy police interview were shown,
14:20 it was now up to the jury to make the final call.
14:23 [Music plays]
14:27 A Sunbury woman who choked an Indian University student to death
14:31 only hours after meeting him on a dating app has been acquitted of murder.
14:35 Jamie Lee Dollaguy admitted she felt good after strangling her victim,
14:40 but a jury found she did not intend to kill him.
14:43 Hours before, Jamie Lee Dollaguy lured her prey into her bedroom.
14:47 The woman, who once believed she was a werewolf, searched online.
14:51 Ten steps to commit a murder and get away with it.
14:54 And today, a unanimous jury found Dollaguy not guilty of the crime,
14:58 but guilty of the alternative charge of manslaughter.
15:02 Prosecutors say the Sunbury woman targeted Maulin Rathod on a dating app
15:06 to act out her sadistic tendencies.
15:09 She deliberately strangled him, ignored his tapping, the panic symbol,
15:13 until he became a dead weight.
15:15 The Sunbury woman has a severe personality disorder,
15:18 caused by a childhood of appalling abuse and neglect.
15:22 The condition means she has a limited capacity to feel remorse
15:26 for killing Mr. Rathod.
15:27 Afterwards, the killer told detectives,
15:30 "I felt good for some reason, because I've suffered so much in my life
15:34 that I feel like I'm taking back what was once rightfully mine."
15:37 Dollaguy's defence team argued she didn't intend to kill the Indian student,
15:42 and in fact, she wanted the victim to stop her.
15:45 During the trial, Dollaguy smiled to herself as she drew pictures
15:49 using coloured pencils.
15:50 Today, however, she simply stared at the floor.
15:53 Her lawyers say they need until April next year
15:56 to compile all of her psychiatric reports.
15:59 Eliza Rug, Nine News.
16:02 Jamie Dollaguy was acquitted of murder,
16:09 and instead found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
16:13 Safe to say this decision left a lot of people shocked and bewildered.
16:17 Some sources say that if everything about her dark past
16:20 and violent tendencies had been told to the jury,
16:23 maybe the outcome would have been different.
16:25 But it is hard to tell.
16:27 The carers that spent even a short period with her
16:30 argued she should never be released, and is far too dangerous.
16:34 The judge said to Jamie,
16:36 "You took the life of a young person who had done nothing to harm or provoke you.
16:40 He was totally trusting and unsuspecting."
16:43 And although manslaughter carries a maximum of 20 years in Victoria,
16:49 Jamie Lee Dollaguy was sentenced to nine years in prison,
16:53 with a minimum term of five years and six months.
16:56 But she had already served just over two years,
16:59 so she could actually be out in just over three years.
17:02 Jamie Lee Dollaguy still has homicidal urges,
17:08 and she has threatened to kill another inmate.
17:11 For now, she remains locked up in maximum security.
17:14 But she could be freed on parole in just over three years.
17:19 In the court's paperwork, it said that an attribute of her personality
17:23 was a limited capacity for empathy and capacity to feel remorse.
17:27 Remorse may serve as an indicator of the likelihood of a person re-offending.
17:31 A person who is truly and deeply remorseful for their actions
17:35 is less likely to repeat them.
17:37 "In your case, due to your empathy deficit,
17:40 I am not convinced that the amount of remorse you feel
17:43 is likely to significantly inhibit future conduct.
17:46 Nevertheless, I accept that you do feel remorse to the extent that you are able to.
17:50 It follows that you must be given the benefit of remorse
17:53 in mitigation of your sentence."
17:55 Morlin's parents were horrified that people were aware she was so high-risk,
17:59 and even the social workers were scared of being on their own with her,
18:02 and yet she was still allowed to live alone,
18:04 with people coming and going as they pleased.
18:07 And, to top it all off, she could be back out in just a few years.
18:11 It is hard to know what will happen after these few years in Prisoner Up for Jamie Dollaguy,
18:16 and how this situation will be approached and handled.
18:19 This was an unsettling, disturbing and very upsetting case to look into in many ways,
18:24 and we're interested to hear your thoughts about it.
18:27 One thing we know for sure is that Morlin Rathod lost his life
18:33 in a terrifying way, with someone he had put trust into,
18:37 and his last few moments realising what was actually happening to him is unthinkable.
18:42 His father said, "We are now lonely in our old age.
18:46 We miss him, but we've accepted the truth.
18:49 Our son won't come back, but he will remain in our memory and our hearts forever."
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19:23 (gentle music)
19:25 [MUSIC]