Black widow: Robyn Lindholm found guilty of murdering another lover
By Adam Cooper
September 26, 2019 — 12.24pm
A former stripper with a history of having men kill for her has been found guilty of the murder of another lover.
Robyn Lindholm, a femme fatale currently serving a 25-year jail term over the 2013 murder of gym owner Wayne Amey, has been found guilty of murdering partner George Templeton, who went missing in May 2005 and whose body has never been found.
. Robyn Lindholm with her then-boyfriend George Templeton.
Lindholm's trial in the Supreme Court, which concluded on Thursday when the 46-year-old was found guilty, heard she had Mr Amey kill Mr Templeton so she could get one lover out of the way so as to pursue a relationship with the other.
More than eight years after Mr Templeton went missing she had two other men murder Mr Amey.
Lindholm – who was also once in a relationship with gangster Alphonse Gangitano, who in 1998 became one of the first victims of Melbourne's gangland murders – now faces having her prison time significantly increased for Mr Templeton's murder.
In 2015 she was jailed for 25 years, to serve 21 years before she is eligible for parole, for having Torsten Trabert and John Ryan murder Mr Amey, whose body was found between boulders on Mount Korong, in central Victoria, in December 2013.
Trabert and Ryan had attacked and stabbed Mr Amey, 54, in the car park under his Hawthorn apartment block about a week earlier.
Mr Templeton and Lindholm, who used the name Collette when she worked as a stripper, were both associates of another exotic dancer, Shari Davison, who went missing in 1995 and whose body has never been found.
Lindholm was charged with Mr Templeton's murder in 2016. Mr Amey was never charged.
Mr Templeton, who was previously known as George Teazis, had convictions for drug and weapons offences and was reportedly a standover man but was also running his own carpet laying business at the time of his disappearance.
In Lindholm's trial over the past seven weeks, the jury was told her desire to be with Mr Amey in 2005 was the reason Mr Templeton, 38, was attacked in his Reservoir home.
The trial heard Mr Templeton was drinking brandy with Lindholm and one of her friends on the night of May 2, 2005 when the two women went for a drive and returned to find him and his Holden ute gone.
Prosecutors argued Lindholm had her friend drive her to meet Mr Amey, with whom she was having an affair but that the trip was actually intended to give Lindholm an alibi while she had someone enter the Reservoir house and kill Mr Templeton.
The rendezvous never happened and lead prosecutor Ray Gibson, QC, argued it was Mr Amey and another man who attacked and killed Mr Templeton while Lindholm was out.
Mr Templeton's body was never found. His ute was discovered in Fitzroy about a fortnight after he went missing. Investigators found blood splatters on the couch and in the lounge where he was drinking brandy.
Mr Gibson told the jury Lindholm began an intense affair with Mr Amey in 2003, and that she wanted to be with him rather than Mr Templeton, so had the latter killed.
"She wanted him out of the way. He was an encumbrance, he was an anchor around her neck," Mr Gibson said in his closing address.
"He was suspicious, had a strong personality and he stood in the way of her being able to pursue her relationship with Wayne."
Police retrieve Wayne Amey's body from its hiding place on Mount Korong in December 2013.CREDIT:JIM ALDERSEY
The trial heard that over the following years Lindholm separately confessed to Mr Templeton's murder to her friend, two other lovers, another woman, and a fellow prisoner.
The lovers reported to police Lindholm often sang about Mr Templeton swimming with fish in the sea, and said she claimed Mr Templeton was violent and raped her.
The prisoner claimed Lindholm told her she stabbed Mr Templeton during sex. According to the prisoner, Lindholm said: "I slit his f---ing throat as he came, it was the best orgasm I ever had."
Lindholm denied any involvement in her partner's disappearance and death. She pleaded not guilty.
.Defence counsel John Kelly, SC, told the jury the prosecution case hadn't been made with sufficient reliability to shift the presumption of innocence, and that the witnesses who said Lindholm confessed couldn't be trusted.
The friend was a perjurer, Mr Kelly said, the two later lovers were ice users with criminal histories who fabricated their stories, and the prisoner's evidence was "nonsense".
"There's no way you can synthesise these accounts. There's no way you can reconcile them," Mr Kelly told the jury.
"There's no way you can weave them into a coherent narrative. They are, each of them, we would say, patently absurd and very inconvenient to the prosecution case."
But the jury of nine men and three women on Thursday found Lindholm guilty after deliberating since Tuesday.
She stood trial more than a year ago but that jury was discharged without reaching a verdict. A suppression order meant she could only be referred to LR during her trials. Media can now name Lindholm and report her background. The jury wasn't told of her prior conviction for murder.
Justice Christopher Beale remanded the former junior ice skating star and avid equestrian to return to court for a pre-sentence hearing on October 24.
Lindholm stared straight ahead when the jury announced its verdict, and showed no emotion. She quietly said "I love you" to a family member seated in front of the dock as she was led back into custody.
Lindholm previously pleaded guilty to murdering Mr Amey in a joint criminal enterprise with Trabert and Ryan.
The two men were both found guilty of murder and Trabert was jailed for 28 years with a minimum of 23 years, and Ryan was jailed for 31 years, to serve at least 26 years.
Lindholm was in a relationship with Trabert when she arranged for him and Ryan to kill Mr Amey.
She and Mr Amey broke up in about 2010 but became involved in a property dispute over a farm they had owned in Bittern, on the Mornington Peninsula.
Trabert told police he and Lindholm had sex next to a creek on their way back to Melbourne after they and Ryan dumped Mr Amey's body. The trio were all ice users at the time.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/black-widow-robyn-lindholm-found-guilty-of-murdering-another-lover-20190926-p52v5t.html lots of pics too bad Australia doesn't have the death penalty. Don't use drugs if you do quit. The murderess has hagged out over the years.
The making of a murderess: Is Robyn Lindholm Australia's deadliest woman?
How did a loved and happy, high-achieving girl turn into a cruel, vengeful killer now serving back-to-back sentences for murder?
MAR 21, 2020 8:00AM
Robyn Lindholm
The Supreme Court of Victoria, in Melbourne, is not a place for romance, but as she sat in handcuffs before a judge, Robyn Lindholm sent meaningful looks towards her lover.
Hunched and rough-faced, Torsten Trabert, also in chains, sat just a few feet away, on the other side of an armed guard. The love-struck brute flirted back, seemingly oblivious to the sombre proceedings going on around him.
It was the closest the couple had been since they were arrested two years earlier, after homicide police chased them through one of Melbourne's inner suburbs.
The dog squad finally tracked them to a drain where they were hiding in water up to their necks.
Lindholm, a blonde former stripper, eventually admitted to ordering the murder of her ex, and Trabert, a truck driver, was found guilty of inflicting the fatal blow.
As they awaited their jail sentences, they knew it was the last time they would see each other for years, possibly forever.
Trabert, or "Toots" as he called himself in the soppy letters he wrote from jail, seemed happy just to be near Lindholm. Given what we now know about Lindholm's record of slaying her lovers, he was perhaps safer locked away.
Robyn Lindholm was arrested after being found hiding in a drain.
Robyn Lindholm was arrested after being found hiding in a drain.
The trial heard how Lindholm had asked a succession of boyfriends to kill her ex, Wayne Amey.
She made the request of Kyle Elliot, then Aaron Ardley and finally Trabert. Aaron had agreed to do it, telling the trial that Lindholm had him under a "spell". But he was injured and it was Trabert who finally carried out the deed in December 2013.
Lindholm's lawyer, John Kelly, asked for leniency because she was remorseful. But Justice Lex Lasry didn't buy it.
"I am sure that you are ashamed and embarrassed," the judge said.
"But the real question is whether you genuinely regret what you have done. I frankly do not see any sign of that."
Lindholm was "angry and vengeful", Justice Lasry said. Killing Wayne was futile and unnecessary, and dumping his body on a lonely mountain top was "callous", he said.
He jailed Lindholm for 25 years and Trabert for 28.
A third accomplice, John Anthony Ryan, was sentenced to 31 years. Lindholm got a discount for pleading guilty. Trabert did too because he led police to the body, wedged between boulders at Victoria's Mt Korong.
The trial heard the trio went out drinking after hiding the corpse.
The earliest Robyn is due for release from prison is 2049.
The earliest Robyn is due for release from prison is 2049.
After the sentences were handed down the lovers were parted, Lindholm to her cell, Trabert to his.
But nearly six months later, on May 31, 2016, detectives visited Lindholm in prison. She was charged with murder, again the victim was a man she'd once loved.
Police believed they had cracked the mystery of her missing former fiancé, George Teazis, who vanished in 2005.
When he sentenced her for George's murder, Justice Christopher Beale noted Lindholm had had an idyllic upbringing.
She had been close to her father, and her mother visited her twice a week in jail. In fact, her mother moved to Melton so she could be closer to the maximum security prison where her daughter was being held.
"You did not want for affection from your parents and they would go without to ensure your material needs were met," Justice Beale said, raising the question: what had turned Lindholm from a loved and happy, high-achieving girl to a cruel, vengeful killer now serving back-to-back sentences for murdering two men she once adored?
The newspapers called her a Black Widow and Femme Fatale. The headlines are clichéd, but accurate. In each case, Lindholm seduced a new lover and enlisted him to murder the old. Now that suppression orders have been lifted in her second secret trial, we know the person who helped kill George Teazis was Lindholm's second victim, Wayne Amey.
Torsten Trabert received a discount in sentencing for leading police to Wayne Amey's body, wedged between boulders at Victoria's Mt Korong.
Torsten Trabert received a discount in sentencing for leading police to Wayne Amey's body, wedged between boulders at Victoria's Mt Korong.
Born in 1973 in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley, Robyn Jane Lindholm was an animal lover with honey-coloured hair who wanted for nothing.
Her father, Raymond, was a welder, her mother, Dorothy, a nurse.
"She received considerable affection from both parents," her lawyer John Kelly told her plea hearing.
"Despite the fact that financial constraints were significant, she describes her parents on occasions going without in order to provide for her."
Her early school years were spent at Kilvington Grammar School. Later she attended Malvern Girls High, in a desirable part of town.
At the age of 13 she won the Victorian Ice Skating Championships. An injury cut her sporting career short but she applied herself in school and was accepted to study science at prestigious Monash University. She hoped to transfer into veterinary science.
Lindholm studied hard for about 18 months but when she didn't get the marks she needed to be a vet she shifted into a technical institute course in animal husbandry.
At 19, however, she dropped out and got a job at a car dealership, and later started working at Crown Casino.
The leggy blonde was popular in the high-roller Mahogany Room and attracted the attention of underworld figure Alphonse Gangitano, a key figure in Melbourne's gangland wars, known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street.
"She became enamoured of the lifestyle in terms of its luxuries," her lawyer John Kelly said.
Robyn's ex boyfriend Alphonse Gangitano – known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street – was a key figure in Melbourne's gangland wars.
Robyn's ex boyfriend Alphonse Gangitano – known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street – was a key figure in Melbourne's gangland wars.
Seduced by a world of wealth, Lindholm began working as a stripper, which helped pay for the large mortgage she took out at the age of 20 to buy a 30-hectare rural property at Glenhope, north of Melbourne.
Her life changed in 1998, when Alphonse was executed in his home.
Lindholm moved on with George Teazis (also known as George Templeton), who had done a brief stint in prison in 2003 but, other than that, was a hardworking businessman who ran a carpet laying company with his brother, Nick.
"George and Nick worked together as an exceptionally close team – brothers working hard to create a better life," George's sister-in-law, Deborah Teazis, said in court.
They were a close-knit family and they accepted Lindholm into their lives. George loved seafood and steak, often "with a hearty Greek salad and a cold beer on a hot day".
Deborah remembers Christmases spent watching George take control of opening the oysters, "but eating more before they actually made it to the table".
On May 2, 2005, George performed his ritual of drinking Metaxa brandy to commemorate the anniversary of his father's death.
This was something he did every year, and he asked Lindholm to buy the brandy for him. Lindholm and George had been together for seven years and she was familiar with the tradition.
At work that day, George was in a good mood, and clearly looking forward to his night of brandy and reflection, telling his brother Nick he was, "planning on putting a big chunk in it".
That night, Lindholm made George dinner. Her friend Kate* was also at the house, and George's son Ross was playing Xbox in the bungalow out the back, where he lived.
By the time he finished his meal, George was well and truly drunk, according to Ross. After they ate, Lindholm and Kate smoked some weed with George, and then the women went to Kate's house.
"George was drunk, possibly stoned and certainly vulnerable," Justice Beale said.
When Lindholm returned later that night, George had vanished. There was no sign of a break-in. His ute was missing too.
At 2.43am, she received a text from George that read: "Got problems, need a lift, will call soon." He was never seen again.
Investigators found blood on the couch of George and Lindholm's lounge, but George's body was never recovered.
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Soon after George disappeared, Lindholm severed ties with his family and started living with her new love interest, Wayne Amey.
She moved into his penthouse in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and enjoyed the "high life".
As far as anyone could tell, Lindholm was in love with Wayne. Her nickname for him was Batman and she planned to settle down with him and start a family.
She began working at his gym, and together they bought a farm at Bittern, a rural town south-east of Melbourne. But several years on, cracks began to show in their relationship, and in 2010 they split.
Things turned nasty when they tried to divide their assets. Wayne's lawyer, Craig Henderson, said that Wayne was being threatened, and that Lindholm and Wayne's relationship had ended because Lindholm had an affair.
Her new lover, a man named Kyle Elliot, admitted to threatening Wayne. He confessed Lindholm had asked him to kill Wayne quite a
few times, and they'd often argued about it.
"It became clear Mr Amey was anxious about his own safety," said Justice Lasry.
In March 2012, Kyle was jailed for other crimes and by August that year, Lindholm had started dating a man named Aaron Michael Ardley.
He was obsessed with her, and when she asked him to kill for her, he readily agreed.
"After what me and Robyn talked about, I was under a spell," Aaron said.
Aaron began following Wayne and conducting his own surveillance work. He lurked around Wayne's favourite restaurant and began lifting weights.
When Crown Prosecutor Gavin Silbert asked him what he was in training for, Aaron replied: "To be a killer."
Lindholm with George Teazis. The pair were engaged to be married before Lindholm ordered his death.
Lindholm with George Teazis. The pair were engaged to be married before Lindholm ordered his death.
Lindholm gave Aaron a security pass that would let him into the basement car park of the building she had once lived in with Wayne.
Aaron went there three times armed with knives. But in January 2013, Aaron suffered a brain injury, so couldn't carry out the murder. Lindholm had to find someone else.
By this point, she was heavily using methamphetamine. She moved to a flat in Melbourne's north, and it was then that she met Torsten Trabert.
He moved in with her and, although he was married, the pair began a torrid, sexually charged relationship.
Born in Germany, Trabert had moved to Australia with his parents in 1970.
He'd always had a low IQ but years of drug abuse had caused mild brain damage. The handwriting in the love letters he sent to Lindholm is that of a child.
In 2013 he was out of work, addicted to methamphetamine and madly in love. When Lindholm asked him to kill for her, Trabert agreed.
On December 10, 2013, Trabert and John Anthony Ryan drove to Wayne's apartment building in Hawthorn. Using a swipe card Lindholm had given them, they entered the underground car park and waited for Wayne to return. When he did, they beat him and forced him into the boot of their car.
Trabert drove the car to the flat he shared with Lindholm. A neighbour heard mumbling from inside the boot. It was Wayne, begging for his life. "You don't have to go this far, I'll do anything," Wayne pleaded.
Trabert asked the neighbour to help "finish it" but he refused.
Two days later, Trabert, Lindholm and Ryan drove to Mt Korong and hid Wayne's body. Then they spent several hours drinking at a hotel.
When the police tracked them down, they denied having anything to do with Wayne's death. But once the court process began, Lindholm turned on her accomplices, and her lover.
She pleaded guilty and implicated all three in Wayne's murder.
Robyn Lindholm and Wayne Amey
Robyn Lindholm and Wayne Amey
Trabert and Ryan refused to admit they killed Wayne, but a jury found them guilty.
A photo of Trabert, taken outside the bluestone court, captures him blowing a kiss at the photographer. He appears remorseless and smug as he prepares to be sentenced for murder.
After Justice Lasry handed down his judgement, the criminals were led away, and Wayne's family and friends were left to process their grief.
That would have been the end of it. But Lindholm's guilty plea had not gone unnoticed.
Homicide detectives, who had been unable to crack the case of her former fiancé's disappearance, started re-examining the evidence.
When police interviewed Lindholm's friends and acquaintances, they discovered she had bragged to several people that she'd had a hand in George's disappearance.
Lindholm was tried for murder. The modus operandi, the police claimed, was similar to the killing of Wayne Amey – Lindholm had been the one to order the hit, but she'd asked someone else to do her dirty work.
This time, however, Lindholm refused to admit guilt. She had an alibi, she insisted.
Her friend Kate was with her when George vanished. Kate was put on the witness stand and swore she was with Lindholm the whole time.
Under relentless questioning from the prosecutor, she stood her ground. But that night, she cracked.
Torsten Trabert blows a kiss to photographers outside court.
Torsten Trabert blows a kiss to photographers outside court.
She called the police and told them she wanted to change her statement.
Kate revealed that Lindholm and Wayne Amey had begun their affair while Lindholm was still living with George.
She claimed Lindholm had confided to her that Wayne had "paid somebody to help him get rid of George". She also told Kate to "stick to the story", court documents show.
George's blood was found in his lounge. Witnesses claimed Lindholm had talked about dumping his body in Port Phillip Bay, but this was never proved.
Despite pleas from George's family, Lindholm has never revealed what happened to him. Even after 14 years was added to her jail term, she insisted she had nothing to do with his death.
George's sister-in-law voiced the grief the family has endured and the anger they feel towards Lindholm:
"We accepted you into our family, as George's partner," Deborah told the unrepentant killer.
"We respected you as a human being."
She begged Lindholm to "do something right" and tell the family where George's body is.
"If you ever loved or cared about George, even in the smallest way, then give him peace in death and give us some closure."
Deborah and husband John took in George's children, who suffered greatly after their father's disappearance.
Deborah made a final plea to Lindholm:
"It is never too late to tell the truth. It is never too late to show you have compassion."
The killer has, however, remained unmoved. She said nothing before being taken back to prison.
When she is freed she will be an old woman. Her earliest possible release date is 2049. If she is granted parole, she will leave prison when she is 71.
Until then, Robyn Lindholm maintains her silence.
https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/news/real-life/is-robyn-lindholm-australias-deadliest-woman-murder-44643
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9432167/Mother-ex-stripper-killer-known-Black-Widow-DEFENDS-daughter-beautiful-soul.html Mummy still defends the double murderer.
10:03pm, Nov 9, 2019 Updated: 10:50am, Dec 24
The serial-killer stripper: My encounter with Robyn Lindholm
Robyn Lindholm (left) was found guilty of the murder of George Templeton, also known as George Teazis (right). Photo: AAP
John Elder
John Elder
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Back in 2005 there was a biker in jail – a professional head-cracker– who was so love-struck by Robyn Lindholm that he was known to burst into tears at the mention of her name.
Aside from the bruise to his reputation as a hard man, he got off light. At the time, Robyn Lindholm – who’ll go to her grave as “the serial killer stripper” – was beginning her side career of recruiting new lovers and admirers to kill off old ones.
I’d heard about the biker because I’d started poking around the stripping scene for evidence about a woman in the trade who’d gone missing.
Second killing led to her first arrest
In 2015, Lindholm was jailed for 25 years after she coaxed two besotted fools to murder her former boyfriend Wayne Amey. The killing, neither quick nor clean, occurred in 2013.
Robyn Lindholm with Wayne Amey. Together they killed George Teazis. Later, Lindholm organised two men who were besotted with her to kill Amey – who had threatened to take away her farm in a break-up property dispute. Photo: Supplied
This week, in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Lindholm was told she’d spend at least 30 years in jail after being convicted of murdering her live-in boyfriend George Teazis in 2005.
It was the very week Teazis went missing that Robyn Lindholm and I were reunited, in a series of texts and phone calls that ended with her making threats, then cutting off contact.
By then, my colleague Mark Russell – a senior court reporter for The Age – and I were convinced she had knocked off Teazis, and that she probably knew something about the disappearance of a fellow erotic dancer, Shari Davison.
We waited 11 years to see her charged. By then she had killed again.
First meeting in 1993
When I first met Robyn Lindholm 26 years ago, her driver was a compact and business-like lad named Pat who kept a shotgun in the boot for country buck’s parties.
Pat told stories of peeling out, buck-shot spraying, horn-dog hayseeds giving chase, and young Robyn being the provocation. He seemed fond of her but not in her thrall.
She was 20 years old, short and petite, an ice-skating champion, newly dropped out of a science degree, moving into animal husbandry studies.
She talked to me about her dream of owning her own place in the country – horses, a quiet life. There was nothing to suggest she’d end up burying a boyfriend at the wished-for homestead.
A detached performer
Some women take to stripping as a goofy lark, smiling throughout their routines as if to say “what a hoot.” A sense of humour gets them by. Others make out like they’re doing ballet, seriously engaged in an art form. Robyn always gave off a blank remove, as if she wasn’t really there. For her, stripping was a means to a real-estate end.
She told me that once she got enough money together, she’d be out.
Robyn Lindholm, as she appeared on the Simply Irresistible stripping agency website, well after committing her first murder. Photo: Supplied
At the time, I was editor-in-chief of Truth newspaper, and an offshoot rag called World magazine that hired strippers to appear as characters in stories that were virtual cartoons. We also played pranks.
Robyn – who went by the professional name of Collette – was one of 15 strippers we hired for a stunt that was reported around the world. There was a US nuclear-powered warship in Melbourne at the time.
We called media outlets and announced a nude protest, on the docks. The women carried placards reading ”NUCLEAR FREE NUDES” and ”PUSSIES FOR PEACE”.
I recall it was Robyn’s g-stringed backside that appeared the next day in the Herald Sun and the NT News.
Soon after this stunt I was looking for a new job – and Robyn apparently began to lose her way. She held to her dream of buying a farm but the men she became attached to were dangerous, unstable and involved in the city’s volatile amphetamine trade.
There was her much-reported but little detailed stint as the love thing of Carlton thug Alphonse Gangitano, memorialised in the Underbelly series by Vince Colosimo.
As far as we know, Alphonse was the first of her boyfriends to be murdered – famously in his underpants, by a third party, in 1998.
Ten years went by more or less respectably for me at The Sunday Age. I began writing cold case murder stories with colleague and friend Mark Russell.
We had just finished The Case of the Playboy Pensioner (one stab wound to the heart, one closet with various samples of pubic hair sticky-taped to a wall of honour) and we were looking for something new.
Young mother and dancer, gone without a trace
Exotic dancer and former circus trapeze artist Shari Davison had vanished after leaving Crown casino in the breakfast hours of a Saturday morning, February 18, 1995.
Shari Davison, mother, dancer: went missing in 1995 after visiting Melbourne’s newly opened Crown casino. Photo: Supplied
The vanishing of this young woman from such a place – a woman who happened to be the mother of a baby still in nappies – put an almost mystical shiver through the public imagination.
We started tracking down people who knew her. What followed was an endless plunge into rabbit holes and a story we never wrote – and a series of contacts who ended up dead.
There were so many rumours, ratbags and depraved offshoots in our digging around, that Shari seemed to shrink further away, become less a person than a smudged icon – something like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks.
In the end, the story led us to someone else who was much like Shari Davison: small, blonde, pretty and off the rails. Robyn Lindholm. We’ll get back to that.
An inquest in 2001 found that Shari Davison had a taste for drugs, booze and bad men – and was pronounced mysteriously dead.
She had, in the weeks before her disappearance, confided that she was in serious trouble. She seemed to tell everybody, including taxi drivers.
A gang of young Greeks dealing in speed and guns around Richmond featured prominently in the inquest.
Her housemate in Footscray at the time of her disappearance was gang member and prime suspect Nick Kitsoukilias.
I managed to speak with a soft-spoken Kitsoukilias via his mobile phone. I asked that we meet, he said he’d think about it. We never spoke again. A murder blog lists him as a homicide but we understand he actually died in a bike accident in 2014.
We talked to gang member Louis Roumeliotis, whose former girlfriend did ”double acts” with Shari. At the time, he was back home living in Abbotsford with his mother, a woman in an apron and headscarf, looking much like a village peasant, worried and confused when she opened the door.
”Yes, Mama, a cup of tea would be good,” he told her, before losing the sweet demeanour, turning on me and demanding: ”I have to frisk you.”
Roumeliotis, highly-strung and quick-tempered, told a complicated tale about a handgun, 2000 rounds of ammunition, and six ounces of speed that a paranoid Kitsoukilias, under police investigation, had planted in Shari’s underwear drawer.
”He told [the police] she got it from me. They think I’ve gone and whacked her for six ounces,” said Roumeliotis.
What especially annoyed Roumeliotis was the poor quality of the speed. If the police had paid attention to how ”crap” it was, they’d have concluded ”it wasn’t worth killing for,” he said.
Then something weird happened
By May 2005, we were keen to talk with George Teazis, the gang’s standover man who had done five months prison on drugs and weapons charges. Teazis was named at the Davison inquest in an odd story where he put a gun to a woman’s head and ordered her to move home with her father.
We were also keen to speak with Robyn Lindholm. She and Davison had worked for the same agency – Simply Irresistible – and were said to have been close friends. It turned out that Teazis was living with Lindholm.
However, by the time we spoke with Robyn, Teazis had gone missing, presumed murdered. She initially agreed to meet with us – and then declined.
Soon after, people close to Shari Davison stopped talking to us. Davison’s mother, in a fraught phone call, wanted the whole matter dropped.
But other people, notably stripping industry insiders, started talking … about Robyn and George. They claimed Robyn hoped George might rise up in the criminal world and become another Alphonse Gangitano.
That was never going to happen
George just didn’t have those kind of connections and his taste for violence was largely limited to doing “run-throughs” – storming drug dens and making off with the cash and product. Low-rent, dangerous thieving that usually ends with a bullet or a crippling bashing.
When we reported that Teazis and Lindholm had suffered money troubles with bikers – being forced to kneel with guns to their heads in a car park outside a cinema – Lindholm called and left a threatening message. ”You better watch what you say.”
George Teazis and Robyn Lindholm, apparently in happier times. Photo: Supplied
We also learnt that Robyn had another boyfriend at the time, a Hawthorn gym owner named Wayne Amey. He was working as a personal trainer for a strip club owner who I’d known since the Truth days. She told me that before Teazis had gone missing, Amey had – much like that jailed biker – been routinely in tears over Robyn.
”He said George was knocking Robyn around. He kept saying he was going to kill George. It went on and on. It got scary and I stopped training with him,” she said.
I spoke once with Wayne Amey by phone. In a peculiar sulky voice he simply said ”talk to Robyn.” It reminded me of being caught up in an immature spat.
By then, of course, Amey had murdered George Teazis, only to find Robyn didn’t want him anymore.He took the foolish lover route of hanging on by staking a claim on her beloved property – only to end up buried between some rocks.
The teenage son
Ross Teazis, George’s son, was 16 years old and living with his father and Robyn in a house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs when George went missing.
He said that George didn’t want to go back to jail, that being a gangster was no longer fun. He changed his name to Templeton, and was trying to go straight, having returned to the family trade as a carpet layer.
He took on Ross as an apprentice. The hours were long, and the work was hard on the knees and the back. “I don’t know where he would have found the time to do anything else. By the end of the day we were both worn out,” said Ross of the rumours that George was still hectic in the gun and drugs trade.
As far as the boy could see, his father was building a new life. They were making plans. “We were talking about buying a house and starting up a new business and he was trying to get to know the younger kids,” he told me.
Ross said it was very late, the night of May 2, 2005 when George Teazis disappeared. He’d drunk an entire bottle of brandy in memory of his father, Spiros, who’d taught him the carpet trade. As he celebrated the old man’s birthday, George was also numbing himself against the guilt he felt for not being around when Spiros had died from cancer in 2000.
The boy was there when his dad was killed
Ross was living with George and Robyn when his father went missing. Ross didn’t believe – as was widely reported – that George drove away from the house that night in his 1999 silver Holden Rodeo utility.
“He was stumbling when he came to say goodnight,” said Ross. “There’s no way he could have got the car into first gear. He was just too drunk.”
Ross was housed in a granny flat at the back of the house. He usually had his music turned up loud. He rarely heard whatever was going on inside the bungalow that George shared with Robyn. Sometimes the three of them ate together but otherwise, Ross says, he didn’t have much to do with Robyn.
Two weeks before disappearing, George called one of his brothers in tears. He’d just caught Robyn in bed with another man (presumably Wayne Amey), and they’d had a violent fight.
At around midnight on that last evening, with George full of brandy, Robyn Lindholm left with a friend named Linda. She says she came home to find the front door open and George gone.
The next morning she told police she’d received a text from George at about 2.30am saying he might be in some trouble and needed to be picked up, but didn’t say where he was calling from.
George’s belongings go missing
Ross Teazis noticed that the furniture had been moved around, and that a three-metre long rug – black with a brown circular pattern – was missing.
Over the next couple of days, Ross, then 16, says he was given a number of marijuana buds by Robyn to keep himself calm.
About a week after the vanishing, he came home to find the house had been emptied, and there was a moving van outside. Ross noticed that his father’s F100 campervan was missing, along with his motorbike, a boat, a rear-projection television, jewellery, and other assorted goods worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Ross said he was so stunned at the time, he immediately went to a friend’s home to settle himself.
Robyn Lindholm was living in a car and addicted to ice when she was finally arrested for the murder of Wayne Amey. Photo: Supplied
Later he tried calling Robyn, to claim his father’s belongings. “She eventually sent me a text … that there was some stuff at the house … it was a couple of boxes on the doorstep. Some clothes and his remote-controlled cars,” he says.
When he asked about the vehicles, Robyn told him he’d be “getting nothing… and she forwarded her solicitor’s details.”
The public plea from the apparent widow
By then, Robyn Lindholm had tearfully fronted that police press conference, calling for information about George’s disappearance. Ross and other Teazis family members attended.
They say that prior to fronting the cameras, Lindholm was seen laughing with her friend Linda. Robyn shed some tears as the conference played out, and was seen laughing again when it was over.
Afterward, Ross and family went to the Reservoir house to retrieve some of his clothes. One family member remembers standing in the kitchen, looking at the doorway, expecting George to walk in. Robyn allegedly said: ”I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s not coming back.”
The ending we’d waited for
In my last week working at The Sunday Age, in 2016, Mark Russell and I broke the story that Robyn – already in jail for organising Wayne Amery’s murder – was to be charged with the murder of George Teazis.
As for the matter of Shari Davison, 21 years lost. We understand police no longer regard George Teazis as a suspect in her murder, and have shifted their focus to Robyn Lindholm and presumably other besotted idiots. There were plenty.
Mark Russell and I are still poking around.
John Elder was a senior writer at The Sunday Age for 21 years. He is now Science Editor for The New Daily. He and Mark Russell are working a book about Robyn Lindholm, Shari Davison and other women gone missing in the stripping industry. A version of this story was previously published by The Age.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/people-entertainment/2019/11/09/serial-killer-stripper-encounter/