On the 2nd of December 2010, 24 year – old, Phoebe Handsjuk who was livening at the prestigious Valencia building in Melbourne with her partner of two years, 43 year – old Antony Hampel was found dead in the refuse compactor room on the ground floor of her apartment block, having fallen 11 floors through the building’s garbage chute. Phoebe actually survived the 30-meter fall down the garbage chute, but with her right foot almost completely severed she bled to death in a dark and locked room over the next five to ten minutes. There was blood all over the room. She presumably crawled, trying to find a way out.
The first and last time anyone saw her is when a fire alarm at 11:43 a.m. has the entire building evacuated. It was a false alarm and she returns to the building seven minutes later. CCTV captured her entering the building. For the next six hours no one saw Phoebe. Antony left for work at 9:00 a.m., Phoebe was sleeping. Security swipe records show Antony arriving home. He had been home between 7:06 and 7:09 p.m. Despite plans for her and Antony to head out to dinner with her father, she wasn’t there. Her handbag and keys were on the bench. There were two glasses on the table and shards of broken glass. On the floor the apartment was a mess. Later police would find blood smeared on the door, architrave computer mouse and study discs.
The building’s concierge makes an awful discovery: Phoebe’s body is found on the floor of the refuse room.
Around this time, eleven flights up, Antony had ordered takeaway food for one. When it arrived, he was told there were police at the front of the building. He heads downstairs to report Phoebe missing.
Antony Hampel is from a prominent legal family. His father is a retired Supreme Court judge and stepmother a County Court judge. Antony made his name running an Event management company.
The pair had split four times for the six weeks. She recognized that it was going nowhere and she wanted to get out of it.
Phoebe’s autopsy revealed she had a blood alcohol level of 0.16 three times the legal driving limit. She’d also taken one or two sleeping tablets, commonly known as Stilnox, increasingly linked to unintentional bizarre behavior. Coroner Peter White controversially ruled Phoebe’s death was an accident that the alcohol and Stilnox had caused it.
Phoebe’s grandfather, retired Detective Sergeant Lorne Campbell has suspicions regarding the circumstances surrounding her death. He began to ask questions of the police and to make his own enquiries. Investigators were certain that Phoebe was dead, so they refused the paramedics request to check her for signs of life and therefore Phoebe’s actual time of death could never be determined. They failed to collect all the CCTV footage from the building, which had the potential of capturing anyone else involved in Phoebe’s death and they neglected to seize her phone and the computers in her apartment, not bothering to look there for clues. They didn’t even test the blood they found on the computer mouse.
Phoebe’s grandfather, retired Detective Sergeant Lorne Campbell independently collected from the last sighting of Phoebe, captured her outside her apartment on CCTV footage, to reenacting her inconceivable final moments climbing into a garbage chute. He used a replica of the chute. Phoebe’s close friend, and her match in height and size, struggles even though completely sober. She tried to keep her balance. There was nothing to latch on to.
Channel Nine’s Under Investigation conducted an experiment with a model of the same age and build to see if she could lift herself into an exact replica of the chute.
After multiple failed attempts she was eventually able to climb inside the 22cm latch but only with her arms directly above her head. The chute is actually a meter high, a meter from the floor.
The coroner, Peter White, said that Phoebe dumped a bag of rubbish down the chute, even though it was never recovered. Relying on her, so-called enthusiasm for climbing, coroner White said that at this stage in a sleepwalking or confused state Phoebe got into the chute feet first and without any awareness of the danger began to climb down towards the ground floor, before plunging to her death.
But experts exposed police investigation with an experiment proving it would have been ‘virtually impossible’ to climb into the chute on her own.
There have been no known reported incidents of a cause of death such as this, in the history of Australia.
Phoebe Handsjuk’s family since the day of her death to this day has been fighting for impartial investigation. If she somehow died by accident, it wasn’t proved.
