Homeless man ‘killed pregnant woman and decapitated her partner'

Yahoo

3 days ago

A homeless Australian man has been accused of murdering a pregnant woman and decapitating her partner in a 'targeted attack'.
The bodies of Athena Georgopoulos, 39, and 50-year-old Andrew Gunn were discovered by police in a housing unit in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley at 9.55pm on Monday.
Ms Georgopolous was five months pregnant with her daughter when she was killed and had been eagerly looking forward to becoming a mother, her family said.
The head of Mr Gunn was found impaled on a spike near the crime scene, police sources told the Herald Sun newspaper.
Graffiti that read 'karma is not a menu' and 'betrayal, unpredictable, inevitable' had been sprayed on the side of the building in yellow and black paint.
Detectives are investigating whether there is a connection between the graffiti and the attack.
Armed police arrested Ross Judd, a 34-year-old homeless man, at a railway station almost four hours after the couple's bodies were found.
'The person that we took into custody was in the company of two large dogs, I think that would look fairly obvious to people who may have been in the area,' Det Insp Dean Thomas, of the homicide squad, said.
Police said the suspect was known to the victims and that the attack appears to have been targeted. But the exact nature of the relationship between the victims and the suspect is not yet clear.
Mr Judd has been charged with two counts of murder and appeared at Melbourne magistrates' court for a short hearing on Wednesday morning.
Prosecutors requested another 10 weeks to prepare their evidence because of the complexity of the case and delays in carrying out post-mortems on the victims, the BBC reported.
Mr Judd's lawyer asked that her client be assessed by a prison nurse to follow up on his medication.
Police received a call on Monday evening requesting a welfare check at the Mount Waverley unit after 'some yelling' was heard from the property.
In a second call a few minutes later, it was reported that the bodies had been found by a neighbour.
CCTV footage showed a barefooted man dressed all in black walking away from the unit a short time after the incident.
Patty Dilveridis, Ms Georgopoulos's aunt, said her niece had been planning her new life as a mother and had been with Mr Gunn for approximately three years.
'She was so looking forward to having a baby, because she was 39 [and] she never thought she could have one,' Ms Dilveridis told the Herald Sun.
Ms Georgopoulos, a former customer service representative for several electricity and insurance companies, was the primary carer for her mother Petty Georgopoulos. She was set to face a plea hearing at Ringwood magistrates' court on Sept 1 on car theft and burglary charges, the Daily Mail reported.
Her mother paid tribute to her daughter in a post on social media.
'My little heart, you left life so unfairly that I still cannot believe it,' she wrote on Facebook. 'In recent days you were so happy – we made dreams together for our little granddaughter that you were going to bring into your life.
'And suddenly, everything was erased in one night, when an [alleged] murderer cut the thread of your life and of my little granddaughter's life that you were going to bring into the world in four months.
'No matter how much they separated us, I will never stop loving you. Forever. Until we meet again, my little girl, in the light of the angels.'
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