Melbourne 1980 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

A double murderer who killed women decades apart and in different states will likely die in jail. Darren John Charas murdered young Jalong mom Annette Stewart, but it took nearly 30 years and another killing for him to be caught.  Darren John Charas will almost certainly die in prison.

 It took Victorian police nearly 30 years to build the case that would put him there. And when the breakthrough finally came, it had nothing to do with anything anyone investigating this crime in Jalong had done. On the morning of the 18th of March 1992, a man let himself into a house on Hope Street in Jalong West. He’d been trying to reach his former housemate for 2 days.

 She hadn’t answered her phone. She hadn’t shown up for her shift. The front door was unlocked, so he walked through to her bedroom and found her face down on the bed, naked. An extension cord pulled tight around her neck and hooked under the mattress to keep it taut. There were deep wounds across the back of her head.

She was 29 years old. Her two children were staying with their grandparents that weekend, the way they sometimes did. Detectives spoke to her killer within days of finding her body. They had no reason yet to look twice at him. And even if they had, in March of 1992, there was no forensic lab on Earth that could read DNA off what he’d left behind in that room.

 He walked out of that interview and went home. This is what happened to Annette Stewart and everything that had to go wrong and then finally right before anyone made him answer for it. Annette Marie Stewart was 29 and by every account the kind of person who made room for people. She worked at the Winchester ammunition factory at Point Henry on the southern edge of Jalong and she was raising two children on her own.

 Justinta, 13, and Aaron, 10. People who knew her would later describe the same thing again and again. She didn’t hold anyone at arms length. If a person needed a coffee, a couch, or just someone to listen, she gave it, often without asking too many questions first. It was a kindness that made her easy to like.

 On one particular Monday night, it would also be the thing that got her killed. On Monday the 16th of March, 1992, Annette clocked off her shift in the late afternoon and drove home to Hope Street, a quiet residential pocket about 5 km from the center of Jalong. The kids were with their grandparents for the night.

 The man she was seeing, Keith Peneli, came by that afternoon with three friends to help sort out her TV antenna. The four of them spent a while up on the roof, got the aerial working, then came in for coffee. They didn’t stay long, less than an hour. When they left, Annette was in good spirits with no idea that one of those four men would be back before the night was over.

 He knocked on her door that evening and told her it was his birthday and that he had no one to spend it with. She’d met him for the first time only hours earlier during the 40 odd minutes he’d spent up on her roof. A near stranger dressed up as a friend of a friend. She let him in anyway. They sat in her living room and had a few drinks. He smoked.

 They talked the way people sometimes do late on a Monday night when neither one particularly wants to be alone. When it got late, he asked if he could crash on her couch instead of walking home. She said yes and went to bed. About an hour later, he got up. He walked into the living room and picked up the household iron. Then he carried it into her bedroom where she was already asleep.

 He struck her in the back of the head three times hard enough that she never woke up. He set the iron down, took an extension cord from the wall, wrapped it around her neck, and held it there for several minutes until she stopped breathing. Before he left the room, he hooked the cord under the mattress to keep it taut. Then he walked out of the house.

 On his way down the street, he pulled off his gloves and dropped them into a bin. Then he went home. Two days passed. Annette didn’t answer her phone on Tuesday morning. She didn’t turn up for her shift. People rang the house. Nothing. Wednesday, the same silence. Her former housemate, who still had a key to the Hope Street property, drove over on the morning of the 18th to check on her.

 He let himself in, walked through to the bedroom, and found her exactly as she’d been left 2 days earlier. He called the police. When homicide detectives arrived, they found no sign of forced entry anywhere in the house, no broken windows, no damaged locks. The killer had left the door unlocked on his way out.

 There were no defensive wounds on Annette’s hands or arms, and nothing had been brought into the house from outside. But he had left things behind. The crime scene team bagged the bedding. They collected cigarette butts from the lounge where someone had clearly been smoking that night. They lifted hair fibers from Annette’s body.

 Every piece went into evidence storage. The autopsy filled in the rest. A sustained attack. Lacerations and bruising across her face, neck, and body. Fragments of plastic from the iron embedded in her forehead. This wasn’t one panicked blow. This was someone who had stood over her and kept going. From what they had, investigators drew two conclusions.

First, Annette had almost certainly known her killer. There was no sign she’d woken to a stranger breaking in. She’d let him in herself and let her guard down enough to go to sleep with him in the next room. Second, none of it had been planned. The iron and the cord were both already inside the house. Nothing had been carried in for the purpose.

 Whoever did this had decided to do it only after he was already sitting in her living room drinking her coffee. That single fact widened the suspect pool to almost everyone in Annette’s life. Detectives worked through the names. Keith Pangelli, the three friends who’d come to fix the antenna, co-workers from the factory at Point Henry, former partners, neighbors who might have seen or heard something that night.

 One of the three friends told them he’d gone straight home that afternoon and never returned to Hope Street. Nothing contradicted him. No one had seen him come back. The street had no security cameras of any kind. His statement was filed alongside dozens of others and he walked out of that interview room and got on with his life. Even a name wouldn’t have helped much in 1992.

 DNA testing barely existed as an investigative tool. Australia’s first conviction built on it was only 3 years old, and the science that did exist needed samples far larger than anything collected from Hope Street. Whatever detectives had, they sealed and filed. There was nothing more the technology of the time could do with it.

 The gloves he dropped in that bin were never recovered either. Council rubbish collection had run its ordinary schedule in the two days between the murder and the discovery of her body. The bin was emptied before anyone knew there was a reason to check it. Whatever evidence those gloves carried is somewhere in a landfill outside Jalong today and has been for over 30 years.

 Detectives kept circling back to the same handful of names. Penelli’s alibi never wavered. All three of his friends backed each other up. Interview after interview, year after year. Nobody’s story cracked. Annette had simply known too many people. And in a case like this, everyone she’d ever let into her life became technically a suspect.

 But a name on a list isn’t the same thing as a name you can charge. By the end of 1992, the investigation had stalled. By 1993, it was cold. Subscribe now if you want to see exactly how a case this cold was eventually cracked because nobody working it in 1993 could have guessed where the answer would come from. 15 years passed.

 Justinta and Aaron grew up in Jalong without their mother, aging through every birthday and Christmas she missed. Eventually they both moved away out of Victoria up to Queensland and started families of their own. Their mother’s case became a folder in a filing cabinet, pulled out every so often by whichever detective had inherited it, looked over and put back.

In 2007, coroner Ian West held an inquest into Annette’s death, as Victorian coroners are able to do when a suspicious death has never led to a charge. West reviewed the entire file, heard from the original investigators, and went back through the statements of every person of interest still on record.

 In his findings, he named one man as the sole suspect, Craig Cameron Rogers, a co-orker of Annette’s from Point Henry. She’d known him for about 2 years, and in the days before she died, she’d told colleagues she was angry with him. The coroner also found that Rogers had downplayed how close he and Annette really were when he was first questioned, only admitting to more of it years later.

 But he denied killing her in every police interview and again at the inquest itself. No physical evidence tied Rogers to the bedroom on Hope Street. The coroner named him anyway based on circumstantial threads and a pattern of dishonesty running through his earlier statements. No charge was ever laid. No prosecution followed. A coronial finding isn’t a criminal conviction.

 There was no trial, no jury, no chance for any of it to be tested in front of one. There was only a public document in a case where nobody had actually been accused of a crime in a court of law. For Rogers, that distinction didn’t matter. The finding followed him regardless, to work, to the pub, to family occasions where people had already made up their minds about him.

 He had effectively been under suspicion since 1992. The inquest had simply made it official. He would carry it for another 13 years before anyone else was ever named in connection with Annette’s death. 2,000 km away in Perth. The man who had actually killed her was living an unremarkable life. He had a job.

 He had neighbors who nodded to him at the letter box. Shop assistants who knew him well enough to say hello. Nobody in Western Australia had any reason to imagine what he’d done 15 years earlier on the other side of the country in a house he’d probably stopped thinking about entirely. That’s the part a story like this rarely gets to show. While an innocent man carried the public weight of a murder he didn’t commit, the real killer wasn’t hiding in any dramatic sense.

 He was just getting on with his life, the same as everyone around him. In July 2015, the Victorian government put up a $1 million reward for information, one of the largest cold case rewards the state had ever offered. Justinta, now 36, married with children of her own, spoke publicly for the first time.

 The hardest part, she said, wasn’t the birthdays or weddings her mother had missed. It was having to explain to her own kids why their grandmother wasn’t there. She and her brother Aaron, 33, by then, doubted they’d ever get real closure. They just wanted someone standing in front of a judge. She said she’d support anyone who came forward, even if it was only for the reward money, if it helped identify the man responsible. Tips came in.

 Detectives ran down everyone. None of them held up. The case sat exactly where it had sat for years. Rogers still publicly named as a suspect, a million dollars still unclaimed, and the real killer still 3,000 km away. Still unremarkable, still free. That changed in May 2019. A 60-year-old woman named Diane Barrett disappeared from her home in Medina, a suburb in Perth’s southern corridor.

 She lived alone. The man next door was her neighbor. That evening, she’d cooked him dinner at her place. Afterward, she walked over to his house for a cup of tea. While she was there, he went into his bedroom and injected a significant amount of methamphetamine. Then he came back out and attacked her with his hands and with a metal bar and choked her to death in his own living room.

 He loaded her body onto the back of his ute and drove roughly 35 km to bushland near Caracup, southeast of the city, where he buried her under leaves and bark in a spot no one would think to search for months. Her house was found abandoned. Her dog was still inside. The television was still running.

 Her car sat untouched in the driveway. Within days, someone reported her missing, but her body wasn’t found for 7 months. In that gap, Western Australian detectives focused on the one person who’d seen her last, her neighbor. They didn’t yet have enough to charge him. They just knew he was the only one who could account for her final hours and that his account didn’t quite add up. In custody, he confessed.

 Asked why he’d done it, he said he wasn’t sure. He said he just did it. On the 6th of January 2020, Western Australian Homicide Squad detectives arrested him at a home in Wembley in Perth’s Inner West. He was 52 years old. They charged him with Diane Barrett’s murder. The arrest barely made news outside Western Australia, but one homicide unit on the other side of the country had been waiting 28 years for exactly this.

 When Victorian detectives heard about the arrest, they pulled the steward file. It had been reviewed more times than anyone could count. Over the years, it stayed open. Every name from Annette’s orbit was already on record. Every interview, every alibi, every story checked and checked again.

 What they had never had was a name to test against a biological sample. After 28 years, they finally had one. They ran it against everything that had been sitting in storage since 1992. The bedding, the cigarette butts, the hair fibers lifted from Annette’s body. None of it had degraded. None of it had been lost to a flood, a fire, or a filing error.

 It had simply been waiting. The profile matched. All of it. The bedding, the cigarette butts, the hair. The man Western Australian police had just arrested for killing Diane Barrett was the same man who had slept on Annette Stewart’s couch on the night of the 16th of March, 1992. The same man who had smoked in her lounge.

 the same man who had waited an hour, then walked into her bedroom with an iron in his hand. Victorian Homicide Squad placed an undercover officer near him in custody. And in a conversation that took place in January 2020, he confessed again, this time to Annette’s murder, walking the officer through that night in detail.

The knock at the door, the lie about his birthday, the drinks, the couch, and then the part he’d never said out loud before. Asked how long it had taken her to die, he gave a specific answer, about 4 minutes. Asked why he’d done it, he said the same thing he’d said about Diane Barrett, he wasn’t sure.

 He just did it. Craig Cameron Rogers had nothing to do with Annette Stewart’s death. He never had. The man who killed her was never a coworker, never an exartner, never anyone with a grudge to settle. His name was Darren John Charmer’s, a friend of Annette’s partner, a man she had met for the first time roughly 6 hours before he killed her and let into her home out of nothing more than an evening’s kindness.

Charas had left Jalong sometime after 1992 and resettled in Western Australia, where he lived for decades without ever being picked up for a violent offense. 27 years after Hope Street, he did it again in almost exactly the same way. his hands, a blunt object, a woman who had shown him nothing but kindness, and afterward a quiet return to ordinary life, as if nothing had happened at all.

On the 28th of January, 2021, the Western Australian Supreme Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for Diane Barrett’s murder with a non-parole period of 20 years. Justice Steven Hall told the court the killing was as serious as it was possible to imagine and that it had been made worse by Chararma’s misleading police during the search for her, prolonging her family’s suffering for months.

 He would not be eligible for parole before 2040. It was only after that Western Australian conviction that Victorian police finally charged him with Annette’s murder. He was extradited from a Western Australian prison in March 2023 and appeared before the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on the 20th of that month.

 By September, he had pleaded guilty. On the morning of the 29th of November, 2023, the Supreme Court of Victoria held the plea hearing. Justinta Martin walked to the front of the courtroom and stood in front of the man who had killed her mother. She was 44 years old. She had waited 31 years for this moment. She read her victim impact statement in full.

 She remembered her mother as fun, loving, outspoken, the kind of person who would give the shirt off her back if that was all she had left to give. Who judged people for who they actually were to her and never for what anyone else thought of them. She didn’t care where people came from or who they loved. She just cared. Justinta listed what Charas had taken, her mother, whatever wisdom she might have passed down over the decades since, every ordinary family moment that should have included her.

 Because of what he’d done, she said she and her brother had grown up feeling like a burden to the rest of their family. Then she looked directly at him. I know telling you this will change nothing, she said. We still don’t have her in our lives, but we will always have her in our hearts. All this does for us is open a chapter of our lives that remained unanswered for so long.

 Director of public prosecutions Kerry Jud KC addressed Justice Andrew Tiny. The killing, she said, had been an aggressive, incredibly violent, and sustained attack carried out inside Annette’s own home. While she was showing Charmer’s nothing but kindness, she asked the court for a sentence of life without parole. Charas’s defense council, Amy Brennan, argued for a fixed non-parole period instead.

 There was no history of family violence between Charas and Annette. She said there had been no forced entry. Her client, she told the court, had shown genuine remorse. Charas had written to the court himself ahead of the hearing. In an unusual move, he asked Justice Tiny to hand down the longest sentence available.

 Not 25 years, not 30, but 40 plus. He said he deserved it and more. Justice Tiny wasn’t persuaded the remorse was genuine. Charmers, he said, had twice murdered blameless, defenseless women who had shown him nothing but kindness, and both times he had simply gone back to his life as though nothing had happened. The years of silence that followed each killing said more than any letter written from a cell ever could.

 27 years after strangling Annette Stewart, Charas had strangled another woman the same way, and along the way he had left an innocent man under public suspicion for nearly three decades. Had Charas been arrested in 1992, the judge said this might have been a one-off. Instead, he had shown exactly what he still was, a man who placed no value on another person’s life.

 On the 18th of December 2023, Justice Tiny handed down the sentence, life imprisonment for the murder of Annette Marie Stewart. A second life term stacked on top of the one Charmer’s was already serving in Western Australia. Combined, he would have to serve a minimum of 36 years before he could even be considered for parole.

 He was 56 years old, which meant he wouldn’t be eligible until at least 92, assuming he lived that long. Justice Tiny told the court that in all likelihood Charas would now die in prison. Had he been caught in 1992, Diane Barrett would almost certainly still be alive today. 27 years of freedom sat between one killing and the next.

 27 years in which two women let this man into their homes and paid for it with their lives both times for no reason at all. A house on Hope Street. An extension cord hooked under a mattress. a bedding sample, some cigarette butts, a few strands of hair. All of it sat in an evidence room for 28 years, waiting for a name to finally match against it.

 If this case stayed with you, let us know in the comments and check the playlist for more cases we’ve covered.