Belinda Van Krevel has been jailed for stabbing a second partner in 10 years, reopening the wounds of one of Wollongong’s darkest chapters.
In 2003, Belinda Van Krevel was sentenced to six years’ jail after she was convicted of soliciting a man, her boyfriend, to murder her abusive father, Jack Van Krevel.
In a 2001 journalist Greg Bearup wrote a profile about her family for ”The Good Weekend”. The Van Krevels is “a story about a world without compassion. A story where people are murdered and mutilated because someone ‘felt like killing someone’. A place where the normal bounds of morality have no meaning.”
In June 1998, Mark Valera (Mark Van Krevel), Belinda Van Krevel’s brother – who changed his name as an adult out of a deep dislike for his father – approached a shopkeeper by the name of David O’Heard, who he had seen pottering in his garden earlier that day. He asked him if there was any accommodation around, perhaps a boarding house?
“I had it in my mind that I just wanted to kill someone that day,” he later told police.
David O’Hearn was brutally murdered in his Albion Park home on 12 June 1998. His head was smashed in with a wine decanter. He was then decapitated, with his head later found in the kitchen sink. His hand was cut off, his trousers pulled down and his penis mutilated, and he had been partially disemboweled. Valera had used O’Hearn’s hand to draw several satanic pictures on the living room walls. David O’Hearn’s family later confirmed that he was gay.
That same month, he made contact with Frank Arkell who asked Mark over, for reasons unknown. He was murdered in a similarly callous, violent and calculated fashion. Frank Arkell (former Wollongong Mayor and former member of the New South Wales State Parliament) was murdered in his Wollongong home on 26 June 1998. His head had been smashed in with a bedside lamp, the electric cord wrapped tightly around his neck. Tie pins were stuck in Arkell’s eyes and cheeks. Arkell had been mentioned in the Wood Royal Commission’s report; he had been embroiled in child pornography and pedophilia scandals in the years leading up to his death; and he had been acquitted of child sex offences six months before his murder, but investigations were continuing with further charges to be laid.
Three months after both murders, Mark Valera arrived at the Wollongong Police Station and confessed to the crimes. He was just 19 years old and 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 trial in 2000, Valera claimed that his father (Jack Van Krevel) had sexually and physically assaulted him during his childhood, and as a result, his anger led him to kill. He claimed that David O’Hearn had been propositioned by him and this caused flashbacks of his troubled childhood. He also claimed that Frank Arkell (an alleged pedophile) had done the same, and that he was trying to ”save a child from suffering”.
In December 2000, Valera was found guilty of the murders, and was later sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He later appealed the sentence, but the appeal was rejected. He is now serving his sentence at Goulburn Correctional Centre.
“You could just see it coming’,” Belinda Van Krevel told Greg Bearup for the ‘’Good Weekend’’ in 2001 of her brother’s killings. “Mark was that angry, it had been building up for years and it was like he was going to explode. We suffered years of abuse from that bastard, my father. I mean, he held a gun to Mark’s head one day and said that he was going to blow his brains out and Mark peed his pants. He would always say to Mark that he had dark skin and that he wasn’t his boy and that he didn’t want him.”
Less than two weeks after Mark Valera became the third youngest person in NSW to be sentenced to life without parole, 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 Jack Van Krevel’s daughter, Belinda Van Krevel, had ”asked” Keith Schreiber (her boyfriend and Valera’s friend, who was also a suspect in the David O’Hearn murder) to kill her father because he was molesting her 4-year-old daughter and blamed him for Mark Valera’s imprisonment. She was with her daughter in the next room during the murder. Keith Schreiber was stabbing her father to death while her daughter was listening to those screams.
Schreiber was found guilty of the murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 12 years. He will be eligible for parole in 2012.
Belinda Van Krevel pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years imprisonment with a non-parole period of three and a half years, after serving six years for soliciting her boyfriend to murder her father at his Albion Park home. Belinda Van Krevel was released from prison in 2007, saying “I just want to get on with my life”. Allegedly, the same year Belinda Van Krevel has been banned from seeing her daughter by the child’s grandparents, who say they are “terrified” of her.
In 2010 she was arrested and charged with assault and theft. She was given a 15-month jail term – not the first time she’d been sent to prison, in fact – for stealing an elderly woman’s handbag and punched her in the face.
Magistrate Michael Stoddart called her actions “pathetic”. In the long list of ways Belinda Van Krevel had bluntly ignored the law, a handbag snatch sits on the lower end of a crime spree that includes murder. But if last month’s petty theft is anything to go by, Australians can be sure of one thing: Over the course of two decades, Belinda Van Krevel has a perpetual inability, perhaps even a deliberate inability, to stay on the right side of the law.
In 2013, ten years later, she was handed another three-year jail term for stabbing her then boyfriend five times in their home. From a courtroom documents, one of Australia’s most notorious women, Belinda Van Krevel, whispered a message to the man she pleaded guilty to stabbing five times.
“If anyone asks why you’re sticking by me, tell them it’s because I’m sexy”, she said.
That man, Marshall Gould, whose scars from the knife attack in July last year are still visible, said he was standing by his “troubled” girlfriend because he loved her. “I’m in love with her, it’s as simple as that … she’s family to me, and you stick by your family,” Mr. Gould said outside the Downing Centre District Court yesterday.
Belinda Van Krevel, whose history was described by District Court judge Ronald Solomon as “tragic and disturbing”, was sentenced to three-years prison, for stabbing Mr. Gould five times, including twice in the neck, during a fight. The court heard Mr. Gould tried to conceal the attack, claiming he was “mugged” by three men, when asked about his injuries as he sought medical assistance. He was not charged over the story.
“I didn’t want her charged … she doesn’t remember doing it,” Mr. Gould said.
In November 2023, Van Krevel pleaded guilty to stabbing her partner multiple times in a bloody attack in his Wollongong apartment in March that year.
The court heard Belinda Van Krevel and the victim were living in the same unit complex when they began a relationship. Belinda Van Krevel began accusing him of sleeping with one of their neighbors before things turned physical on March 5, 2023. Returning home from a kebab shop, Van Krevel hit her partner in the face with a bottle, giving him a black eye. When they arrived in his apartment, Van Krevel took a knife from the kitchen.
“He thought he’d been punched in the back of his left shoulder,” Judge Haesler said.
“In fact, he’d been stabbed with a knife.”
The victim passed out. He tried to call for help when he regained consciousness, but Van Krevel took the phone from his hands. As he lay on his bed, Van Krevel stabbed him in the back a second time and shouted “you can’t get anyone better than me”. The victim was able to call triple-0 for help before the call was terminated. Police discovered the man lying in a pool of his blood. He was taken to hospital in a serious condition and underwent surgery.
In the Wollongong District Court on Wednesday, Judge Andrew Haesler handed down a sentence of six years, with a non-parole period of four years, over the most recent attack. Judge Haesler told the court the latest offence bore “disturbing similarities” to the crime she committed a decade ago. In his sentencing remarks, Judge Andrew Haesler said Van Krevel’s criminal record had to be taken into account, along with the similarity between the most recent attack and the stabbing 10 years ago.
“Her criminal history is relevant to determining the proper sentence,” Judge Haesler said.
“It indicates that this offence was not an uncharacteristic aberration.”
Judge Haesler also referred to a psychological assessment from Richard First that revealed Van Krevel had been traumatized during her first prison term in Silverwater.
“He said the cells used at the time were much like large animal cages, with regression of female prisoners, frequent self-harm and conditions that were barely humane,” Judge Haesler said.
“She did not come out of jail, on that occasion, a better person than when she went in.”
Judge Haesler also mentioned the link between Belinda Van Krevel and one of Wollongong’s most notorious murderers, her brother Mark Valera, The Butcher of Wollongong. Judge Haesler told the court both Mark Valera and Belinda Van Krevel were physically abused by their father from a young age. He said Valera was “systematically” beaten from the age of five, including instances where a gun was held to his head. On one occasion, he was beaten so badly he was taken to hospital.
“The offender (Belinda Van Krevel) used to see and hear what [the father] was doing,” Judge Haesler said.
“He abused her as well. Sometimes he beat her so bad she wet herself.”
Judge Haesler said the abuse had left Van Krevel with post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. He said there would be a finding of special circumstances to allow her to access treatment behind bars.
With time served, she will be eligible for parole in March 2027.
