Victoria Bitter: The Jaidyn Leskie Story

Payback

It was some time before dawn on June 15, 1997. That much they were sure of, though peering back through the haze of booze and dope, none of them could recall with any real precision what time it was. Time was never a big concern to Kenny Penfold and the rest of the boys from Moe. In this played-out coalfield on the fraying edge of Victoria in southeastern Australia, time is barely relevant. It's something you kill with a few cones of dope, or torture slowly with a couple of cans of Victoria Bitter and a game or two of Nintendo. It's something the magistrate gives you when you bash a mate in a drunken rage or get nabbed with a vial of meth in the pocket of your jeans. But it's not something you pay any real attention to.

Penfold and the boys would later say, they had more important things on their minds that night. They were on a mission to avenge the honor of Kenny's sister, Yvonne, or, at least throw a terrible scare into her ex-boyfriend, a dimwitted lout who claimed to believe that he had been visited by aliens. For years, Yvonne and Greg Domaszewicz had been enmeshed in a manic and occasionally violent on-again-off-again relationship, and though Domaszewicz was now involved with another woman, and was even playing dad to her 20-month-old son, he still refused to stop harassing Yvonne. Just a few weeks earlier, in one of those classic Moe moments, Domaszewicz had rammed Yvonne's car while it was parked in the driveway outside her house. Fortunately, she wasn't in it at the time. All the same, the way Kenny Penfold saw it; Domaszewicz's act was tantamount to a declaration of war.

Now it was payback time. Kenny, Yvonne and the boys had it all carefully planned. A few days earlier, their friend Tubby had slaughtered his pet pig, Darren Millane. The black and white porker had been named in honor of the Aussie Rules football hero of the same name. They had the pig's head with them as they navigated the nearly empty streets toward Domaszewicz's house, and their goal was to toss it through Domaszewicz's window.

Pig's head in yard

By all accounts, they executed their plan with gusto. After waiting anxiously for Domaszewicz to drive away, Penfold and his crew launched their attack, shattering the front window of Domaszewicz's bungalow and, according to their account, sending the bloody pig's head sailing into the front room before they scampered away to meet Yvonne in the getaway car.

Perhaps it was, as they would later claim, just a vicious prank, an act of vandalism committed by a mob of directionless young people. It certainly would have been treated that way in Moe, if it hadn't been for one fact:

The same night Yvonne and Kenny Penfold and the others launched their assault on Greg Domaszewicz's house, a little boy disappeared. His name was Jaidyn Leskie, a tow-headed 20-month-old, the same boy Domaszewicz had been playing dad to.

Jaidyn Leski

Within hours of his disappearance, authorities would launch a massive search, combing the paddocks and bush, the banks of a nearby lake. With each passing hour, the mystery would deepen, and with each day, it would become more apparent that the little boy would never return home alive.

In time, all of Australia, it seemed, became fixated on the events in Moe, a town that, some journalists have claimed, challenged and mocked the view Australians had of themselves. Before it was all over, all of Australia would know Kenny and Yvonne Penfold. They'd meet Tubby and all the other odd and slightly malevolent characters that peopled the story. In coffee shops and groceries and feed stores all over the country, they'd discuss the seemingly bizarre behavior exhibited by Domaszewicz and the little boy's mother, Bilynda Murphy, in the hours after little Jaidyn's disappearance.

Months later, all of Australia would grieve for the little boy when his limp and battered body would be pulled from the frigid waters of a popular local fishing spot, his arm broken unset, the shattered bone had started to knit painfully on its own - the back of his skull cracked like an egg.

But when it was all over, all of Australia, it seemed, was baffled and mystified. Though a suspect had been arrested and tried, and though there had seemed at first to be staggering evidence, ultimately the case collapsed. The death of Jaidyn Leskie, the little brown-haired boy who loved to play mechanic in Domaszewicz's backyard, remains unsolved.

Did Domaszewicz kill him, perhaps in a momentary fit of frustration? Did Yvonne or Kenny or one of the others do it? Was there, as some have suggested, a police conspiracy to cover the crime, or was it simply that in a place like Moe, where poverty and drugs and a certain kind of sullen desperation grow like weeds, a place where it goes without saying that a boyfriend might smash his ex's car or that her brother may seek revenge with the blood-soaked head of a pig, these things just happen?

There is a certain comforting sameness to most crime stories. In the hands of a skilled writer, everyday people are transformed into heroes and villains, and it's easy to differentiate between them. The stories often begin the same way: with horror. In a good crime story, we identify with the suffering of the people involved. And in the end, when the killer is unmasked and justice is done, the writer and reader both feel as if a demon has been exorcised.

This is not one of those stories. There are no heroes. The villain, or villains are still out there somewhere, and at least for the moment they seem to be beyond the reach of the law. No demons have been exorcised, and Jaidyn Leskie, a little boy whose only crime was being a little boy in a place where that's harder than it should be, is still waiting for justice.

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