An investigation into the murder of gold coast mother-of-three Kelly Wilkinson will look into whether her death could have been prevented. The review is being conducted by the domestic and family violence death review and advisory board.
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00:00 Her family were saying that Ms Wilkinson, prior to her death, was frantically going
00:08 to police stations seeking safety for herself and her children and was being ignored or
00:15 was being turned away and had to go to multiple police stations and wasn't getting any kind
00:20 of response.
00:22 Obviously, such a circumstance is appalling.
00:27 Now you say that her high levels of fear were relevant to assessing risk.
00:33 That seems obvious.
00:34 Is it not always the case in practice?
00:38 Well what happens is that women have lived with perpetrators often for many years.
00:44 They're very attuned to perpetrators and escalating risk.
00:50 And so when a woman who is a victim of domestic violence is presenting to a police station
00:57 with high levels of fear, with a history of domestic violence, and quite frankly in this
01:02 case there were also four very serious charges as well, criminal charges that the police
01:08 could have easily seen in the history of the matter.
01:11 If a person is presenting in those circumstances, you really do have to take that seriously.
01:18 And unfortunately it would seem from reports of the family that that was not the case.
01:23 Now there will be this investigation into whether her death could have been prevented.
01:27 Kelly Wilkinson's family wants an inquest into this case.
01:29 You do too.
01:31 What would you like to see highlighted here?
01:35 There were multiple issues of systemic failure.
01:38 I think that we need to know why the police were turning her away.
01:43 We need to understand why the perpetrator was given watch house bail when he was not
01:48 supposed to be.
01:49 He actually killed Miss Wilkinson whilst he was on bail.
01:54 We also need to consider more widely the issue of possible contagion.
01:59 This was the third woman in 12 months who had been killed by fire in Queensland.
02:06 Obviously a horrific death and we need to understand that more carefully about whether
02:13 there were other circumstances involved or that could have contributed to this issue
02:19 as well.
02:20 As well as what other interactions Miss Wilkinson may well have had with other service providers
02:24 and understand what their responses were.
02:27 And Angela, with each tragic case, with each inquest, we hope to get a better understanding
02:32 of DV.
02:34 How can the community better respond to this?
02:39 Well there's a couple of things that they can do.
02:41 There's a need to understand that many victims, or most victims of domestic violence actually
02:45 don't go to service providers or even the police.
02:49 So it's around us ourselves actually being able to, when somebody discloses domestic
02:55 violence, to be able to reach out to believe them and to support them.
02:58 We need to sort of continue our prevention approaches but I think that we have to upstep
03:04 our approaches to high risk offenders as well.
03:08 In this case Miss Wilkinson had four charges.
03:11 There were four charges against him.
03:14 They're described as very serious domestic violence charges.
03:18 Obviously a detective was involved in making those charges against him prior to her murder.
03:25 Why was she required to go to all these other police stations?
03:29 Why wasn't there some much more coordination around her case to provide safety for her
03:35 and increase her circumstances of safety?
03:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]