Stephen “Shorty” Jamieson, now 58, is seeking an inquiry into his conviction for Janine’s rape and murder with his long-time advocate, lawyer and former NSW MP Peter Breen telling a court in March that there was DNA evidence that needed to be examined.
The move pains Janine’s brother David Balding, who was just 10 years old at the time his sister was abducted on her way home from work.
“It’s always hard and upsetting, but someone has to be a voice for Janine,” David tells WHO.
After finishing work on September 8, 1988, Janine, an “always smiling” teller at a CBD branch of the State Bank of New South Wales, hopped on a train with plans to spend the night at her fiancé Steven Moran’s home in Sutherland, south Sydney.
At Sutherland station, where Janine had parked her Holden Gemini, the 20 year old from Wagga Wagga, NSW, was approached in the carpark by Jamieson, 22, and four homeless teens – Matthew Elliott, 16, Bronson Blessington, 14, Wayne Wilmot, 15, and Wilmot’s girlfriend Carol Arrow, 15.
Earlier in the day, two of the boys had conspired to “get a sheila and rape her”, according to a later confession.
One of the youths pulled a knife on Janine, before she was bundled into the back seat of her own car. As the group drove west for nearly an hour, Janine was sexually assaulted by multiple members of the pack.
After pulling off the road in Minchinbury, in Sydney’s west, Janine was gang-raped, according to Jamieson’s police confession, and then Elliott and Blessington drowned the gagged and bound woman in a shallow dam in a paddock.
“While she was being raped, Janine was told she was going to be murdered,” veteran journalist and author Janet Fife-Yeomans, who covered the case for the Sydney Morning Herald, tells WHO.
The next day, Elliott and Blessington were questioned by police at a youth centre over another matter and revealed details of the crime, leading to their arrest.
Jamieson, Elliott, and Blessington were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1990, while Wilmot and Arrow served lesser sentences for being accessories to murder.
“To sentence people so young to a long term of imprisonment is of course a heavy task,” said sentencing judge Justice Peter Newman. “However, the facts surrounding the commission of these crimes are so barbaric that I believe I have no alternative.”
On March 27 this year, the NSW Supreme Court heard that Jamieson, who has a “limited ability to read or write”, claims he could not have authored his confession, that he was not present at the crime and that the “Shorty” referred to by others was another person who also went by that nickname.
The court heard that a bandana that was used to gag Janine during the attack needed to be DNA tested to see if it belonged to the other “Shorty” and if it did, it could cast doubt on the conviction.
David, whose long-despairing parents, Beverley and Kerry Balding, have now passed away, dismisses any claim of wrongful conviction.
“This was the reason the first trial was aborted, so this could be investigated, and they had the right ‘Shorty’,” says the father of two, who runs a joinery business in Wagga Wagga, where Janine is buried. “There were independent witnesses that identified Jamieson as being with them that day.”
And Carol Arrow has always said Jamieson was there. Fife-Yeomans, who with Beverley wrote the 1995 book, The Janine Balding Story, tracked down Arrow – then married with children – in 2006.
“She told me, ‘It was Jamieson,’” she says. “I have no doubt that the right ‘Shorty’ was convicted of Janine’s murder. The police knew that and so did the jury.”
With the matter returning to the Supreme Court on May 13, David says the case should have been resolved at “guilty”.
“They were sentenced, and we thought that was it, over,” he says. “They should be shown the same compassion that they showed Janine. None.”
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