A slain prostitute's boast that he was a vampire older than the city of Melbourne may ensure he will never receive justice.
Shane Chartres-Abbott is said to have made the claim to the client he allegedly raped and mutilated. He even - perhaps to show he was serious - bit off part of her tongue.
Months later the 28-year-old was dead, blown away point-blank outside his Reservoir home in 2003 as his pregnant girlfriend watched.
Mark Adrian Perry, Warren Shea and Evangelos Goussis were this week acquitted in the Victorian Supreme Court of orchestrating the murder.
The decision means that despite a decade-long police investigation, featuring a $1 million reward and an international manhunt, the circumstances surrounding the public execution remain unclear.
And in his final address to the jury, prosecutor Andrew Tinney SC was at pains to ensure they saw Mr Chartres-Abbott as a man, not a monster.
"He was no more or less than a man, a normal person in our society," Mr Tinney said.
"No doubt with his own strengths and weaknesses, his own failings, his own virtues, no doubt with friends and family who loved him.
"He wasn't a vampire gigolo. He was a man. He was a human being.
"He was gunned down in broad daylight at the front of his house, in front of his pregnant girlfriend and her father in a suburban street in our city, not in some seedy or dangerous part of the world, but in Melbourne."
At the time of his death, Mr Chartres-Abbott was on trial for raping the client, and was on the way to court when he was shot dead.
That the investigation into his death came to be known as the vampire gigolo murder case perhaps obscured Mr Tinney's point.
"The people who carried out this crime, whoever they are, were not heroes, they were not doing society a favour," he said.
"They were striking a shameful blow, members of the jury, at the very heart of our system."
The jury was told details of Mr Chartres-Abbott's bizarre claim to the woman he is accused of attacking.
She later told police he had said he was a vampire who needed to drink blood to survive and claimed he was "older than the city of Melbourne".
Mr Chartres-Abbott told the woman he had reformed his vampire ways, but the injuries she suffered suggest he might have relapsed.
The woman was found unconscious in a Melbourne hotel room, bloodied and beaten, with cuts, burns and bite marks covering her body and a chunk of her tongue missing.
A police officer described it as one of the most brutal rapes he had seen.
If Mr Chartres-Abbott presented as the most unsympathetic of victims, then the trial's star witness was equally tainted.
The career criminal, who cannot be named, admitted to being the trigger man in the murder, and implicated Mr Perry, Mr Shea and Goussis.
Mr Tinney urged the jury to see past his lack of morals to the logical sequence of events the prosecutor presented.
"The killer was not likely to be a doctor, or a quality assurance officer, or a public servant, or a sales manager," he said.
It was ultimately the jury's unwillingness to accept the killer as a truthful witness that resulted in the painstaking investigation falling at the last hurdle.
The killer said he was clad in a balaclava when he raced at Mr Chartres-Abbott and killed him before fleeing to a waiting car on June 4, 2003.
But he claimed he was just the final link in the chain, which began the night Mr Chartres-Abbott allegedly raped his client.
Mr Perry, 46, the woman's former boyfriend, was accused of ordering the hit as revenge.
The prosecutors claimed he sought out his childhood friend, Mr Shea, 42, as a conduit to the killer.
Goussis, 46, was accused of accompanying the killer on the mission and acting as his getaway driver.
The killer claims Shea put the sorry tale of the vampire rape to him over a beer at an inner-Melbourne pub and, appalled, he agreed to carry out the attack on Mr Chartres-Abbott.
"I was told that he made a shocking mess of her, bit hunks out of her ... and left her for dead," the killer said.
Before delivering his lengthy testimony, the killer wavered, threatening to refuse to give evidence.
When he finally did, he abused defence barristers and made changes to his story.
He also implicated former policemen Peter Lalor and David Waters in the killing, two men not charged.
The killer was ultimately attacked by barristers for Mr Perry, Mr Shea and Goussis as a manipulative conman who could not be trusted.
They always maintained their clients had nothing to do with Mr Chartres-Abbott's demise.
Mr Perry, Mr Shea and Goussis were cleared to cheers from their supporters in court, who also applauded the jurors as they left the room.
The men were found not guilty of murder and the alternative charge of manslaughter.
The verdicts left Mr Perry and Mr Shea free to walk from court.
For Mr Perry, it was his first taste of freedom since July 2013, when police tracked him to a Perth factory where he was working under a false name.
He had vanished in 2007 when he learnt he was being investigated for the killing.
Mr Shea had enjoyed bail since late 2013 and was pictured smiling broadly on his way out of the court building.
For Goussis, it meant avoiding a third conviction for murder.
Already serving a 30-year prison sentence for the murders of gangland figures Lewis Moran and Lewis Caine, he wept and mouthed his thanks to the jury while holding his hand over his heart.
As for the prosecution, it was left to rue the tarnished reputations of the victim and the star witness.
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