Mark Valera

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Mark Valera
Born April 24, 1979 (1979-04-24) (age 29)
Alias(es) Mark van Krevel
Conviction(s) Murder x 2
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Mark Valera (previously Mark van Krevel) (born 24 April 1979) was convicted in 2000 of the gruesome murders of Wollongong men David O'Hearn and Frank Arkell. He is the youngest man to be given the maximum sentence, that of life without the possibility of parole.

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[edit] David O'Hearn

David O'Hearn was brutally murdered in his Albion Park home on June 12 1998. His head was smashed in with a wine decanter, his head decapitated (it was later found in the kitchen sink), his hand cut off, his pants pulled down - his penis mutilated, and he had been partially disembowled. Valera had used O'Hearn's hand to draw several satanic pictures on the loungeroom walls. In his police interviews later on, Valera claimed that O'Hearn had made sexual advances and had propositioned him. David O'Hearn's family later admitted that he was gay.

[edit] Frank Arkell

Frank Arkell (former Wollongong Mayor) was murdered in his Wollongong home on June 26 1998. His head had been smashed in with a bedside lamp, the electric cord wrapped tightly around his neck. Oddly, tie pins were stuck in Arkell's eyes and cheeks. Frank Arkell was a gay man and had been embroiled in child pornography and child paedophilia scandals in the years leading up to his death.

[edit] Confession and Conviction

Three months after the two murders, Mark Valera turned up at Wollongong Police Station to confess to the crimes. Valera (previously known as Mark van Krevel) was a 19 year old local man who had never come under police investigations before. He lived in different places around the area, including a house (with a friend) just a few houses down the street from David O'Hearn.

At his 2000 trial, Valera claimed that his father (Jack van Krevel) had sexually and physically assaulted him during his childhood, and that this led him to the two murders. He claimed that David O'Hearn had sexually propositioned him and this caused flashbacks of his troubled childhood. He also claimed that Frank Arkell (an alleged paedophile) had done the same, and that he was trying to save a child from suffering.

In December 2000, Valera was found guilty of two first-degree murders, and sentenced to two counts of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He later appealed the sentence, but the appeal was rejected. He is now serving his sentence at Goulburn's SuperMax Prison.

[edit] Further family Tragedy

Less than two weeks after Valera became the youngest person 'never to be released', his father Jack van Krevel was found brutally stabbed to death in his Albion Park home. It was later found that Valera's sister and van Krevel's daughter, Belinda van Krevel, had 'asked' her boyfriend Keith Schreiber (who was also a suspect in the David O'Hearn murder) to kill her father because he was molesting her 4-year-old daughter.

Schreiber was found guilty of the murder and was sentenced to 16 years jail. van Krevel was sentenced to 6 years jail

[edit] Belinda Van Krevel

February 11 2003

Two years after Jack Van Krevel was hacked to death, his daughter confessed to being the mastermind behind the murder. In the early hours of August 18, 2000, Belinda Van Krevel was woken by noises coming from the next room where her father, Jack, was sleeping.

They were "weird" noises - "like someone getting killed", she recalled.

But the 19-year-old did nothing about it. Instead she lay in bed with a two-year-old child listening as her father was hacked to death. Struck 25 times, stabbed a further 16, Jack took a long time to die.

"What's happening to poppy?" the child asked.

Even when the bludgeoning was finally over Van Krevel did not go to check on him. Instead she got up, put on a children's video, then waited an hour and a half before she drove to a Wollongong police station to report a possible intruder. Even after her lover, Keith Schreiber, confessed to the crime and was jailed, she denied any involvement. Until February 10. In the Supreme Court, Van Krevel, now 22, pleaded guilty to soliciting her boyfriend, Schreiber, to murder her father as he slept in his Albion Park home.

Van Krevel had initially been charged with murder and her trial had been due to start the week before. But when a key witness fell through a plea bargain was offered by the Crown. She faced a maximum 25 years' jail. Her confession was the last twist to the events in which three men were murdered in shocking circumstances.

Van Krevel's brother, Mark Valera, is the youngest person in the state to be jailed for life for the 1998 mutilation murders of alleged pedophile and former Wollongong mayor, Frank Arkell, and shopkeeper David O'Hearn. The Supreme Court was told that Van Krevel had asked Schreiber to kill her father. Schreiber said he did not know if she was serious or not, but knew "she wanted him done". Later Van Krevel told him she believed her father was interfering with a family member. She told others she hated her father and wanted him dead. And so Schreiber entered the house through a window left open for him by Van Krevel. Using weapons planted by Van Krevel - a knife, tomahawk and fire poker - he killed Jack.

The attack was vicious and drawn out. His neck was almost severed, and blood was spattered all over the ceiling and walls.

"I just wanted it to be quick ... [I said] 'die you f-----, hurry up and f------ die'," Schreiber said in his police interview. "The f------ prick wouldn't die ... resilient bastard."

Police alleged hate and greed had motivated Van Krevel to commit the crime. She knew she and her brother were the sole beneficiaries of her father's substantial estate. Her mother, Elizabeth Carroll, gave evidence that following the murder Belinda had told her she had offered Schreiber $2000 to kill her father.

When Schreiber was taken into custody she paid money into his account, wrote him love letters, and was recorded telling a girlfriend she was glad Schreiber had killed her father.

"I'm happy except for the fact that both you and Mark are in there - I miss you heaps," she wrote in a letter to her jailed lover afterwards.

In jailing Schreiber last year for a minimum of 12 years, Justice Peter Hidden described Jack's murder as "the most brutal killing", but said Schreiber's actions were to a significant degree the result of Van Krevel's influence.

When police went to the house with her after the murder, she asked them: "He's dead, isn't he? Something bad has happened, hasn't it?" On learning he was dead, she had asked : "Was he shot. How did he die?"

Saturday May 19

Six years after being convicted of soliciting her boyfriend to murder her father with a tomahawk in their Wollongong home, Belinda Van Krevel is set for freedom.The 26-year-old is the sister of double killer Mark Valera who is serving a life sentence for the mutilation murders of former Wollongong mayor Frank Arkell and shopkeeper David O'Hearn. Van Krevel has completed her parole and will be released, unencumbered by conditions or supervision orders, from Dilwynnia women's prison on May 31, News Limited reports. The original murder charge against Van Krevel was dropped in 2003 after she pleaded guilty to soliciting her then-boyfriend Keith Shreiber to kill her father Jack Van Krevel. She tried to justify the murder by claiming her father had subjected her, her brother and her young daughter to years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. However, Jack Van Krevel's longtime friend Anne Stanford, who babysat Mark and Belinda for years, testified she never saw an injury on either sibling and that their father was "devoted" to them.

— Suburban Mayhem

The black comedy Suburban Mayhem bears an uncanny similarity to the notorious Van Krevel murder saga, although the makers deny it.

Belinda van Krevel was released from prison on Friday 1 June 2007, saying "I just want to get on with my life".

[edit] References

  1. ^ SMH
  2. ^ AAP
Persondata
NAME Valera, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mark van Krevel
SHORT DESCRIPTION Australian double murderer, youngest man given maximum sentence of life without parole
DATE OF BIRTH 24 April 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Australia
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH