Victoria 1992 Cold Case FINALLY Solved — The Arrest That Shocked the Entire Community

A double murderer who killed women decades apart and in different states will likely die in jail. Darren John Chalmers murdered young Geelong mum Annette Stewart, but it took nearly 30 years and another killing for him to be caught.  On the morning of the 18th of March,  1992, a man let himself into a house on Hope Street in Geelong West, Victoria.

 He had been trying to reach his former housemate for 2 days and she had not answered the phone or shown up to work. The front door was unlocked. He walked through to the bedroom and found her face down on the bed, naked, with an extension cord pulled tight around her neck and hooked under the mattress. She had deep  wounds to the back of her head.

 She was 29 years old and her two children were at their grandparents. Police interviewed her killer within  days, but they let him walk. In 1992, no forensic lab in the world could read DNA from what he had left behind. He stayed free for 28 years, long enough to build a new life and kill again. This is what happened. Annette Marie Stewart was  29 years old.

 She worked at the Winchester Ammunition Factory at Point Henry  on the southern edge of Geelong and had two children. Her daughter Jacinta was 13. Her son Aaron was 10. On Monday, the 16th of March, 1992, she clocked off her shift in the late afternoon and drove home to Hope Street in Geelong West, a quiet residential pocket about 5 km from the center of town.

The kids were spending the night with their grandparents. The man she was seeing intimately, Keith Pengilly, came over that afternoon with three of his friends. They were there to fix her TV antenna. Up on the roof, the four of them sorted the aerial out and then came  back inside for a coffee. The group stayed less than an hour.

When they walked out,  Annette was in good spirits. One of those three friends came back that night. He knocked on the front door. When Annette opened it, he told her it was his birthday and he had nobody to celebrate with. She had met him for the first time roughly 6 hours earlier. He was a friend  of Keith’s.

 She had spent maybe 40 minutes in the same room as him while the antenna was being fixed and that was the extent of their history. She let him in anyway. It was late on a Monday night. She sat with him in the living room and they had a few drinks. He smoked cigarettes. They talked. When it got late, he asked if he could crash on her couch rather than head home.

Annette agreed and went to her bedroom  to sleep. About an hour later, he got up from the couch. He walked into the living room and picked up the household iron. Then he walked into her bedroom. She was asleep, naked, in her bed. He swung the iron into the back of her head three times.

 The blows knocked her unconscious. She never woke up. He put the iron down. He grabbed an extension cord from the wall. He wrapped  it around her neck. He pulled it tight. He held it there for several minutes until she stopped breathing. Then he hooked the cord under her mattress to keep it taut after he let go. He left the bedroom.

He walked out of the house. On his way down the street, he took the gloves he had been wearing and dropped them into  a bin. Then he went home. Two days passed. Annette did not answer the phone on Tuesday morning. She did not show up to her shift. People rang the house. No answer. Wednesday, the same. Her former housemate, who still had a key to the Hope Street  property, drove over on the morning of the 18th of March to check on her.

He let himself in. He walked through to the bedroom and found her exactly as the killer had left her 2 days earlier. He called police. When homicide squad detectives arrived, they began processing the scene. There was no 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. Nothing had been brought to the scene from outside. But the killer had left things behind. The crime scene team bagged the bedding. They bagged cigarette butts from the lounge where someone had been smoking that night. They lifted hair fibers from Annette’s body.

Every one of those items went into evidence storage. The autopsy showed a sustained attack, lacerations, bruising, and abrasions across her face, neck, and body. Fragments of plastic from the iron were embedded in her forehead. This was not a quick blow. This was somebody who had stood over her in her own bed and continued.

What the evidence told investigators was two things. First, the killer was almost certainly someone Annette knew. She had let him in willingly. There was no sign she had been woken by a stranger breaking in. Second, the attack  was not planned. The weapons were improvised from whatever was sitting inside her house.

 No knife brought from outside, no rope in a bag. The killer had decided to do this once he was already in the living room. That widened the suspect pool  to anyone she might have opened the door to on a Monday night. Police began interviewing everyone in her orbit. Keith Pengelly, the three friends who had come to fix the antenna that afternoon, co-workers from Point Henry, former partners, neighbors who might have seen something on the night of the 16th of March.

 That friend told detectives he had been at his own home the night Annette died. He said he had not gone back to Hope Street after the antenna visit that afternoon.  There was nothing to contradict him. No witness saw him return. The residential street had no closed-circuit television. His statement was filed alongside dozens of others.

He walked out of the interview and went on with his life. Even if detectives had left the interview with a name, the technology of 1992 would not  have helped them. DNA testing as a routine forensic tool  barely existed. The first criminal conviction obtained through DNA evidence in Australia had been only 3 years earlier.

Victorian forensic scientists could run profiles, but the science was still expensive, still slow, and still ran on much larger biological samples than what would later become standard. The detectives at Hope Street had taken what they could. They sealed it. They filed it. There was nothing more 1992 forensics could do with it.

The gloves the killer had dumped in a bin on his way home that night were never recovered. Council waste collection had run its normal schedule between the murder and the discovery of the body. That bin was emptied before anyone knew to check it. Whatever forensic evidence the gloves might have carried was gone, buried in a landfill somewhere outside Geelong.

Detectives kept working the list. They re-interviewed the Antenna Group and Pengelly. The stories held together every time. Keith Pengelly’s alibi never wavered. And all four of his mates backed up the account of being together that night. Nobody contradicted themselves badly enough to draw a charge. The pattern was the same all the way down.

Annette had known too many people. Anyone she had ever let into the house was on the list. But a name on the list was not the same as a name detectives could charge. The homicide squad had no physical link  to anybody. By the end of 1992, the investigation had stalled. By 1993, the case was cold. Subscribe so you don’t miss what finally connected him to that bedroom 20 8 years later.

15 years passed. Jacinta and Aaron grew up in Geelong without their mother. They aged through every birthday she missed, every Christmas without her. They moved out, moved away, eventually moved to Queensland and started families of their own. Their mother’s case was a folder in a filing cabinet.

 Every few years a detective might pull it out, look at it fresh, and put it back. In 2007, Coroner Iain West conducted an inquest into the death of Annette Stewart. In Victoria, coroners can investigate unsolved deaths when no one has been charged. West reviewed the full case file, heard from police investigators, and examined the statements of multiple persons of interest.

 In his findings, West named one man as the sole suspect. Craig Cameron Rogers. Rogers was a co-worker at the Point Henry factory. Annette had known him for about two years. Days before her death, she had told colleagues at work she was angry with him. Detectives had interviewed Rogers multiple times over the years. The coroner found Rogers had been closer to Annette than he had first let on.

He had played down their connection in earlier interviews and admitted more later. But Rogers denied killing her. He denied it at  every police interview. He denied it at the inquest. He had nothing to do with it. No physical evidence linked Rogers to the bedroom on Hope Street that night. The coroner named him anyway on circumstantial threads and the pattern of deception in his earlier statements.

No charge was laid. No prosecution followed. A coronial finding was not a criminal conviction. There would be no trial, no jury, no chance to test the evidence in front of one. There was just a public document in a case where nobody had been charged. Rogers carried that coronial finding for the next decade. For Rogers, that report did not sit quietly in a courthouse archive.

  It was something other people read about. Something people talked about. Something that followed him to work. Followed him to the pub. Followed him to the family barbecue. He was never charged. The only way to clear his name in a courtroom would have been a trial. And there was no trial. He had been wrongly suspected since 1992.

The inquest had only made it formal. Rogers would carry that finding for 13 more years before anyone else was named. In July 2015, the Victorian government announced a $1 million dollar for information leading to the conviction of Annette Marie Stewart’s killer. It was one of the  largest cold case rewards offered by the state at that time.

The Stewart file was also among the oldest active homicide cases on Victorian books. Jacinta Martin spoke to the media. She had been 13 when she lost her mother. Now she was 36, married with children of her own. The hardest thing she  said was explaining to her own children why their grandmother was not there.

Annette had missed birthdays, weddings, grandchildren she had never seen. Every year Jacinta and Aaron had missed out on special times that should have included their mother. She and her brother Aaron, 33 by then, said they would never have real closure. They just wanted somebody brought to court. She said she would support anyone coming forward, even for the selfish reason of claiming a million dollars if it helped identify who had done this.

Tips came in. Detectives followed up on each one. None of them produced a viable suspect. None of them led to an arrest. The case remained open but static. Craig Cameron Rogers was still the named suspect in the 2007 coronial finding. A million dollars sat unclaimed. Across the country, the actual killer  was 3,000 km away in Perth.

The only people who knew what had happened in March 1992 were Annette, who was dead, and him. Four years after the reward was announced, in May 2019, a 60-year-old woman named Diane Barrett disappeared from her home in Medina, a suburb in Perth’s southern corridor. Barrett lived alone. The man at the house next  door was her neighbor.

That evening she had cooked him a meal at her place. After dinner, she had walked next door to his house for a cup of tea. While they were 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 a metal bar. He choked her to death in his own house.

Then he loaded her body into  his car and drove more than 50 km south to dump her in remote bushland near Capel, a semi-rural pocket southeast of Perth where her body would not be found for months. Her house was found abandoned. The dog was still inside. The television was on. Her car was in the driveway.

Within days, somebody called the police. Her body was not located for 7 months. Western Australian  detectives had spent that time focused on the neighbor. He was the  last known person to have seen her alive. They needed evidence to charge him. In custody, he confessed to the killing. When they asked him why, he said he was not sure.

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 the murder of Dianne Barrett. The arrest made the news in Western Australia. It barely registered in Victoria except with the Victorian Homicide Squad.

 They had been waiting for something like this for 28 years. When Victorian detectives heard about the arrest,  they pulled the 1992 Stewart file. The case had been reviewed many times across the years it had been open. The Homicide Squad had every name from Annette’s orbit on record. They had every interview, every alibi, every story gone over more than once.

 What they had never had was a name with biological evidence to match against. They had everything except the comparison sample. After 28 years, they finally had one. They compared the new suspect against everything that had been preserved from Hope Street, bedding from the bed, cigarette butts from the lounge, hair fibers from Annette’s body.

All of it had sat in evidence storage for 28 years. The DNA testing technology that had not  existed in 1992 had spent the intervening decades catching up. Modern profiling could now pull a usable genetic signature off material  that would have been useless to a 1992 lab.

 None of the evidence had degraded past the point of testing. None of it had been lost in a flood or thrown out by a clerk. For almost three decades,  it had simply waited. Victorian forensic scientists ran the profile. Then, they ran a comparison. It did not take  long. The match came back. His DNA was on the bedding. It was on the cigarette butts.

 It was on the hair lifted off her body. The man Western Australian police had just arrested for the murder of Diane Barrett was the same man who had slept on Annette Stewart’s couch on the 16th of March 1992. The same man who had smoked in her lounge. The same man who had walked into her bedroom an hour after she went to bed.

The Victorian Homicide Squad placed an undercover officer near him in custody. The conversation happened    in January 2020. He confessed. He took the officer through the night beat by beat. The knock at the door, the birthday lie, the drinks, the couch, then the part he had never said out loud. Asked how long it had taken, he was specific.

 “It must have taken 4 minutes or something like that.” he said. She stopped breathing. When the officer asked why, he said he was not sure why he did it. He just did it. For 28 years, the investigation had been looking at the wrong man. Craig Cameron Rogers had nothing to do with Annette Stewart’s death. The man who killed Annette was never a co-worker.

 He was barely an acquaintance. Darren John Chalmers. He was 25 years old on the night he killed Annette Stewart. A friend of her partner’s, not a boyfriend, not an ex, not a co-worker with a grudge. A man she had met for the first time that afternoon. She had known him for roughly 6 hours before she was dead. Chalmers had left Geelong at some point after 1992 and moved to Western Australia.

 He lived in Perth for decades. Police never picked him up for violent offending during the entire stretch. 27 years on,    nothing had caught up with him. He worked. He had neighbors. People at the shops said hello to him. None of them had any reason to know what he had done. Then, he killed Deanne Barrett. On the 28th  of January 2021, a Western Australian court convicted Chalmers of Barrett’s murder.

 Justice Steven Hall sentenced him to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 20 years. He told the court that the killing was as serious as it was possible to imagine. Justice Hall said the killing had been aggravated by Chalmers misleading police after Barrett’s disappearance, which had caused prolonged suffering for her family and friends.

He would be eligible for parole  in 2040 at age 73. It was only after the Western Australian conviction that Victorian police charged him for the 1992 killing in Geelong. In March 2023, Victorian detectives extradited Chalmers from a Western Australian prison. He appeared in Melbourne Magistrates Court on the 20th of March.

 By September, he had pleaded guilty. On the morning of the 29th of November 2023, the Supreme Court of Victoria held the plea hearing. Jacinta Martin walked to the front of the courtroom and stood before the man who killed her mother. She read a victim impact statement. She remembered her mother as a fun, loving, outspoken, and caring person to all.

Someone who would give the shirt off her back if that was all she had. Someone who judged people for who they were to her. Not because of what others may have thought about them. She did not care where they were from, whom they loved. She just cared. Jacinta listed what Chalmers had taken. Their mother, whatever words of wisdom she may have shared with them.

Because of his actions, they had been left to feel like a burden to their family. Then she looked at him. “I know telling you this will change nothing,” she said. “We still don’t have a net 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.

” She was 44 years old. She had waited 31 years to stand in that room and say those words. Director of Public Prosecutions, Kerri Judd KC, addressed Justice Andrew Tinney. “The killing was an aggressive, incredibly violent, and sustained attack,” she said. “It had happened inside Annette’s own home while she was showing him kindness.

” Judd asked for life without parole. Chalmers’ defense counsel, Amy Brennan, argued for a non-parole period. She said there was no history of family violence between him and Annette. “The house had not been broken into. Her client had shown remorse.” Chalmers himself had written a letter  to the court before the hearing.

In an unusual move, he asked Justice Tinney to put him away for as long as possible. “Not 25  years. Not 30. Please, 40-plus.” He said he deserved it and more. Justice Tinney was not persuaded that the remorse was genuine. Chalmers had twice murdered blameless, defenseless women who were showing him nothing but kindness.

“After each killing, he had gone on with his life as if nothing had happened.” In Tinney’s view, “The years of silence after each murder said more than any letter written from a cell. 27 years after strangling Annette Stewart, he had strangled another woman the same way. He had also left another man, Craig Rogers, under public suspicion  for nearly 30 years.

Had Chalmers been arrested at the time of the senseless murder of Annette Stewart,” the judge said, “the crime might have been a one-off. He was already a dangerous young man at 25. But he had not been arrested, so it had not been a one-off. Chalmers remained a dangerous person who placed no value on the life of another,” the judge said.

 On the 18th of December,  2023, Justice Tinney finally handed down the sentence, life imprisonment for the murder of Annette Marie Stewart. A second life term on top of the one already being served in Western Australia. Combined, Chalmers must serve a minimum of 36 years before any eligibility for parole. He was 56 years old at the time.

That meant he would be at least 92  years old before he could even be considered for parole, assuming he was still alive. Justice Tinney told the court that Chalmers would now, in all likelihood, die in prison. Had Chalmers been identified in 1992, Dianne Barrett would almost certainly still be alive. 27 years of freedom between one killing and the next.

Two women invited him into their lives. Two women showed him kindness. Both ended up dead. Both times he had no reason. Both times he walked away and carried on. Annette Stewart’s daughter was 13 years old when she found out her mother was dead. Her son was 10. By the time a court finally heard what happened, the daughter was 44 years old and the son was 41.

Annette had been just 29 years old when she died. Had she lived, she would have been 60 by then. A house on Hope Street, an extension cord hooked under a mattress, a bedding sample, some cigarette butts, and a few hair fibers. They sat in evidence storage for 28 years until there was finally a name and a profile to match them against.

If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.