❤️HER NAME IS: KELLY WILLIAMS!❤️
This is not just a story about a woman killed. It’s also a story about her sister. Because without her sister, the name, her life, her death would never be known.
Her name is Kelly Williams. She was murdered on February 27, 2002, in Hawthorn, Victoria. She was only 31.
Kelly’s sister Paula Duffy has spent 23 years begging journalists to tell you about how the mother-of-four’s killer still walks the streets because he was never held to account.
When Kelly was killed, only three paragraphs were penned about her death – the headline read ‘Single mother in Hawthorne found murdered.’.
Kelly had separated from her husband and her children were very young.
She was living in inner-Melbourne and had just started dating Raffaele Disarno.
Life was pretty tough for Kelly. To cope with her marriage breakdown, she experimented with drugs, but in the weeks before her death she was getting clean.
On the day of her death, her ex-husband came to her home to collect some clothes off the line for the children, as they were staying at his place for a few days.
He heard Kelly screaming as he passed by a bedroom window. He heard a man physically abusing her. He did nothing.
It was rare for Paula and Kelly to lose contact, so she became exceedingly worried.
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A couple of days later, she went to Kelly’s home. It was locked tight. So she broke in.
The smell of the decaying body of her sister still sits deep in her memory.
“I went into the her room and found her murdered,” Paula says.
“It never leaves me. Every time I think of her, that’s the last image – she was completely unrecognisable.
“So much so that when the police came I said to them ‘I have to go back in because I just can’t believe it’s her’.”.
About a month after Kelly was killed, her lover Disarno was charged over her murder. He’d left a trail of evidence behind including stealing her items and pawning at the local hock-shop.
The prosecution believed there was no way he would be acquitted. But he was.
In a tale as old as time, the defence team painted Kelly as many things – a slut, a drug-user, a single mother who couldn’t keep a relationship together, a woman who could have been killed by any of the ‘men coming through her door’.
The jury believed Disarno’s defence and he walked free.
The case has stagnated for more than two decades – no police rewards for information, no follow-up inquest, no interest in Kelly’s story from media outlets, no responses from a long line of ministers over the years when her family begged them to listen.
In death, Kelly became a woman erased entirely. The wrong type of victim for anyone but those who loved her to care about.
Some months ago, a message from a distressed woman landed in my inbox.
It was Paula.
In that email I could feel the grief. Her words of pain and anger tore at my heart.
Kelly and Paula’s mum Monica started the quest for justice. She begged the Coroner to hold a public inquest into Kelly’s death.
Monica died never seeing her daughter’s killer convicted.
HEAR KELLY’S STORY ON THE SHE MATTERS PODCAST
Now Paula has taken on the mantle of monster-slayer.
Kelly and Paula were raised in Melbourne by Monica and their dad Jim.
“I remember playing on the front lawn with her when my dad was trimming trees,” Paula says.
“She taught me how to ride my bicycle.
“She was my idol – she was my everything.
“She was protective and nurturing. She always walked me to school – right into my class.
“She made sure I was safe – I cherished her.”
The girls grew up in an often violent home and it was Kelly who kept them safe.
“She would always take me up to the bedroom when there was yelling and fighting,” Paula says.
“She would sing songs or read me a book so I wasn’t scared.
“She’d just let me know that it’ll be all right, that they’d stop fighting soon.”
Kelly lived for her own children, doing everything she could to make sure they also felt safe and loved.
Her youngest daughter Bianca was three when Kelly died – her grief for her mum is underpinned by a deep longing for the memories she never got to make.
“The hardest part of losing her has been growing up without a mum’s love, comfort, and guidance,” Bianca says.
“You really feel it at every stage – birthdays, school events, milestones, and now as a parent myself.
“There’s always a piece missing, a moment where I’ve thought: ‘I wish my mum was here.
“I often find myself imagining what she must have gone through in those final moments, and it’s something that’s very hard to carry.
“Knowing she died in such a violent way makes the grief even heavier.”
When the jury acquitted Disarno, Kelly’s family was thrown into deep turmoil.
“Our hearts had been ripped out all over again because we were told from the homicide squad, with all the evidence, they had it in the bag,” Paula says.
“There were screw-ups during the trial, including some evidence being left out and one of the jurors even fell asleep.”
Bianca says her own experience as a mother has made losing Kelly even tougher.
“Now that I’m a mum, I can understand how hard life can be and how much she must have struggled at times,” she says.
“I wish her life had gone differently, because she deserved more from life and more from the people around her.
“I want people to understand that her death didn’t just end her story, it changed the course of my life forever.
“I deserved answers, and she deserved justice.”
After Kelly passed away, Paula fell pregnant with her first child – a son she named Max.
“I fell pregnant with a little jelly bean and, um, I’d struggled with pregnancy and so he was my little miracle man.
“He was born eight weeks premature – he fought really hard to come into this world.
“He was just the most precious little boy.”
When Max turned 13 months old, Paula was dating Brendan John Barnes.
In September of 2004, Max suffered seizures.
He was taken to hospital, where he had his first birthday.
On December 20, 2004, he died from critical brain injuries. A coroner later ruled Barnes shook Max multiple times and he was responsible for his death.
Barnes went to trial but was acquitted by a jury – the second time the legal system let Paula down.
“I was cleared by the coroner and the police – he was the only person who could have killed Maxie. But who did the jury think did it? The boogey man.”
It’s been such an unyielding road, this one Paula’s life has taken. And yet, despite the heartache, the trauma and unrelenting grief, she manages to continue advocating her precious humans.
And she knows other families are going through the same battles – legal systems that protect perpetrators, media that demean, victim-blame, erase or simply do not care about the victims.
“Two policemen got killed on the job, and within two hours, they light up the West Gate Bridge in blue,” she says.
“Within three hours, the whole of Melbourne’s lit up in blue.
“But what about our women and our children?
“If they put lights up every time a woman or a child got murdered the city would be lit up 24/7.”
Everyone who knew Kelly – from Paula and her children to her extended family, her friends and her community – will never know peace.
But they deserve to know the person who killed her will one day be held to justice.
“The worst part of not having her is the dreams – I see her knocking on the door and when I open it she laughs and says ‘Oh, it’s just pretend – I was on holiday’.
“And then I wake up and it’s not real.”
Paula has started the long process of getting an inquest into Kelly’s death. She and her family are also pushing for detectives to revisit the murder case and for a reward to be offered in return for information leading to a conviction.
They hope the Victorian Attorney-General will listen to their pleas.
“If I could speak to the police or Attorney-General, I’d tell them that this isn’t just about reopening a case, it’s about acknowledging the long-term impact of her loss,” Bianca says.
“I grew up without her, and that’s a wound that never fully heals. She deserved proper investigation and I, along with her other family members deserve closure.”
Whatever happens with Kelly’s case, her legacy will live on.
“I hope Kelly’s case and Maxie’s case can lead to change in domestic violence laws – that they are strengthened and we get a perpetrator database,” Paula says.
For Bianca, Kelly’s legacy will always be the impact of her story – and her life.
“Her legacy for me is strength,” Bianca says.
“Even without her here, her story makes me determined to be strong for my kids, to fight for them, and to make sure they always feel my love in a way I never got the chance to feel hers.”
KELLY WILLIAMS (DUFFY) MATTERS! ❤️
If you know anything about the murder of Kelly Williams, please call CrimeStoppers:
1800 333 000 or the Victoria Police Assistance Line on 131 444.
If you know anything about the murder of Kelly Williams, please call CrimeStoppers:
1800 333 000 or the Victoria Police Assistance Line on 131 444.
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