Sven Huebner
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Sven Huebner Australian citizen who was convicted in 2005 of the murder (later reduced to manslaughter on appeal) of a female friend, Linda Roberts. The victim's decomposed naked body was found by a walker in bushland at Mackenzie in November 2001.
Huebner, also pleaded guilty on June 1 2005 to charges of torture and other related charges stemming from an attack on university student Melissa Gazsik, 18, in May 2000.
He has been described by the Queensland judiciary as having 'deviant interests'.
Huebner's then girlfriend Amy Louise Maher, 24, was sentenced to 18 months' jail for being an accessory after the fact of Roberts' manslaughter and three years and six months' jail for the attack on Gazsik.
Public sympathy rightly lies with Elwyn and Noelene Roberts, who lost their daughter, and with their son David, who lost his only sibling.
They have had to sit by as Linda's reputation was tarnished by allegations she died during bizarre sexual conduct. They have endured the betrayal of her so-called friends Huebner and Maher, who feigned ignorance of her death to callously help search for her and cry at her memorial service.
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[edit] Huebner's Convictions
Huebner was convicted of five offences of violence: disabling to commit an indictable offence, torture, assault occasioning bodily harm in company, deprivation of liberty and manslaughter. In respect of the first three offences, he was sentenced to four years imprisonment and in respect of the fourth, two years imprisonment. Those sentences were concurrent, but cumulative upon a sentence of 12 years imprisonment imposed on the fifth count, manslaughter. All offences were declared to be serious violent offences, with the result that Huebner must serve 80 per cent of the 16 year total before he becomes eligible for parole.
[edit] The Manslaughter Charge
The manslaughter charge related to the killing of Linda Roberts. Huebner and Amy Maher, had gone to trial on a charge of murdering Ms Roberts. Each, while accepting that she had visited the house they were living in on the day she died, 18 August 2001, denied any involvement in her death. Her naked body was found in bushland in November 2001, badly decomposed, with a rope noose and some plastic near it. On the third day of the trial, Maher made an admission inconsistent with her previous denial of knowledge of what had happened to Ms Roberts. Because of that development, on the fourth day of the trial Huebner pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but the Crown did not accept the plea.
[edit] Huebner's Version of Events
In the ensuing murder trial, Huebner gave evidence to the effect that on the day of her death, Ms Roberts had come to the house he shared with Maher so that he could show her some bondage techniques. (He had some experience: he had engaged in bondage practices with his sexual partners, tying them up and being tied up.) Huebner claimed that when Ms Roberts first arrived, he and she had engaged in some play wrestling. In the course of it, she had sustained a laceration to her head, which bled a little, and he had received a scratch on his temple. Then he showed her various ties and knots, culminating in his tying a rope around her neck, while she knelt on the floor, and attaching the other end of the rope to a curtain rail. Huebner said that he left her in that position, with her elbows tied behind her back, in order to go and get some drinks. When he returned, he found her slumped forward with her weight against the rope. He released her and attempted to revive her, but realised she was dead. He took her body into the bathroom and removed her clothes. There, for some unexplained reason, he made a cut on one of her legs. He washed the body; he accepted that he might have told Maher he had done so in order to remove any of his hairs from it.
Huebner placed Ms Roberts’ body in a suitcase. He and Maher used Ms Roberts’ car to take the body to bushland, where they carried it some distance from the road and left it, to be found some three months later. Huebner removed the rope and some gladwrap he had wrapped around the cut he had made to the leg, leaving those articles and the suitcase elsewhere in the bush. He and Maher then drove the car to a video store from which Ms Roberts had borrowed a video earlier that night. They left the vehicle, with the video tape in it, outside the store so that it would look as if she had gone missing there. Huebner threw Ms Roberts’ keys and purse in a nearby industrial bin. He and Maher returned to their home, changed and went out again by car at about 2 am, stopping at a nearby service station to make some purchases so that the time of their being there would be recorded as some form of alibi evidence. Then they drove about, disposing in various places of Ms Roberts’ clothes and jewellery and the clothes the applicant had been wearing.
On their eventual return home, at about 5 am, Huebner used a programme to alter files on his computer to make it seem as though he had been home earlier the preceding night. The next day he went back to where he had left the suitcase, retrieved it, and took it to another location. On that day he also sent text messages to Ms Roberts’ mobile telephone about some supposedly forgotten sunglasses, to create the impression that he was unaware of her disappearance. Later he took part in searching with her family and friends for her body, and he attended a memorial service for her. When interviewed by the police he gave an account of Ms Roberts visiting the house and departing unscathed at about 11 pm. All of those acts of concealment and deception were done, Huebner claimed, out of an apprehension that he would not be believed as to the manner in which Ms Roberts had met her death.
[edit] The disabling, torture, assault and deprivation of liberty charges
After Huebner and Maher were arrested for Ms Roberts’ murder, another young woman, Melissa Gazsik, came forward and gave an account of an experience she had had a year earlier at Huebner’s hands. She had met Huebner in 1999, when they were both students at a Brisbane university, and they had become friends. In May 2000, Huebner told her that he and Maher had a surprise for her to cheer her up and arranged to meet her for that purpose. He took her on his motor bike to bushland near Capalaba, where they found Maher waiting for them. On seeing Maher, Ms Gazsik went to hug her. While she was doing so, Huebner grabbed her from behind, using an arm round her neck to choke her. She resisted, kicking and scratching; he lost his grip but then got a one-hand hold on her neck from the front, and applied pressure, causing her difficulty in breathing. She managed to push him away but fell, face down, to the ground. Huebner straddled her, and again used a one-handed grip to choke her from behind while Maher sat on her legs. Then she was rolled over and Huebner sat on her chest, pinning her arms, and continued to choke her while Maher held her legs down. She struggled for breath and passed out.
When Ms Gazsik came to, Huebner was no longer applying pressure to her throat. He put a plastic bag rolled into a ball into her mouth and gagged her with some other object. Her arms were tied behind her back with Velcro strips while other strips were placed around her shins and thighs. Huebner and Maher laid her down, thus restrained, under a tree while they went through her belongings.
Ms Gazsik began to experience what she described as shock. Huebner and Maher covered her with their jackets and lay on her to keep her warm. Then they removed the leg restraints, got her up and took her to where there was a sheet on the ground between two trees. Above it was a rope attached to some sort of pulley system. Huebner put a noose over Ms Gazsik’s head and tied it, then used the pulley system to raise the rope, and her neck with it. He took the gag out of her mouth and told her that if she said anything or tried to escape, he would pull the rope tighter and strangle her.
After some 15 minutes had passed, Huebner informed Ms Gazsik that he had done these things because he loved her and needed to teach her a lesson. After she had promised that she would not tell anyone about what had happened, he took the noose off. The three of them embraced each other. Huebner invited Ms Gazsik to join him and Maher in a threesome, an offer which she declined. Maher presented her with a teddy bear with a card reading “We love you and we’ll always be there for you”.
[edit] The Judge’s Findings
Huebner was convicted of murder at trial, but that verdict was set aside on appeal and a verdict of manslaughter substituted. Later he pleaded guilty to the offences against Ms Gazsik and was sentenced in respect of those offences and the manslaughter at the same time. The judge had before him, among other things, submissions made on an earlier, adjourned sentence hearing; the transcript of Huebner’s evidence at his trial for murder; Huebner’s statement to police; and the judgment of the Court of Appeal. He made a number of findings adverse to Huebner.
In particular, in respect of the four counts involving Ms Gazsik, the judge found that, although Ms Gazsik accepted that Huebner and Maher were motivated by a desire to help her, because she had been told that by Huebner, there was “no reason why Huebner should be believed on this or any other aspect of his evidence which is not against … his own interests”.
Instead, he found that “the more probable explanation” for the assaults on Ms Gazsik was Huebner's “pursuit … of his interest in bondage and, in particular, bondage taken to a point at which there was a risk of death or at least such a risk that the person subjected to the bondage had a real fear of death”.
The apology that Huebner offered Ms Gazsik was likely to have been an attempt to placate her so that she would not complain to the authorities, rather than any expression of remorse.
As to the killing of Ms Roberts, the judge again rejected Huebner's version, for a number of reasons: because it was diametrically opposed to his account to the police; because his conduct in many respects, including his failure to seek help for Ms Roberts, his disposal of her body and his attempts to escape detection, demonstrated his determination to preserve his own interests by any means; and because his version was inherently improbable. The Judge did not accept that Ms Roberts had gone to Huebner’s residence to be shown bondage techniques. Having looked at the e-mails which had passed between them, he concluded that Ms Roberts expected a quiet evening with Huebner and Maher, but it was probable that Huebner “taking advantage of the deceased’s trust in him and, without her consent, placed her in a position in which her life was in real danger”.
The judge thought it likely that Huebner’s account of a wrestling incident was a concoction in order to explain the scratch to Huebner’s face and some blood stains in the room where Ms Roberts was killed. Huebner's conduct was “the abuse of a relationship of trust and confidence by an older man so as to place a young woman in jeopardy through pursuit of his deviant interests”.
