A podcast series on the short life and brutal death of Phoebe Handsjuk.
The mysterious phone number and a list of strange things in Phoebe's case.
George and Felicity Hampel try to see the best in people.
George Hampel spent 17 years as a Victorian Supreme Court judge and, on his retirement from the bench in 2000, told an interviewer "I'm a great believer in human nature.
"Despite seeing the pathology of human nature for 42 years, I don't have a sour view. I still think that essentially people are good".
It was an attitude that had tough-on-crime tabloid newspapers swearing the judge was soft on criminals.
His second wife, Felicity, a justice of the County Court, took a similar approach. A republican and former president of civil liberties lobby group, Liberty Victoria, she said in an interview on her appointment to the bench in 2005 that she admired George's ability to do "what he believed was right ... even if he knew it was going to make him unpopular".
In 2011 she was proclaimed "among our worst judges" by a News Corp columnist after giving a suspended sentence to a truck driver who had run a red light and killed two boys.
George and Felicity Hampel are also the father and step-mother of Kristina Hampel and Antony Hampel, the boyfriend of Phoebe Handsjuk at the time she died.
Kristina was arrested in 2014 after cameras that police had hidden in her South Yarra home filmed her dealing drugs and possessing a prohibited weapon. Citing the embarrassment to her family, a magistrate let her off without a conviction.
As for George's son Antony, an events promoter, his high-flying parents were at his side throughout the trauma following Phoebe's death.
They were at the apartment when the Handsjuk family came to talk days after the tragedy, Felicity gently telling mother Natalie that, legally speaking, Ant was Phoebe's next of kin. George Hampel insisted repeatedly to Phoebe's father Len on their first meeting that week that Phoebe's death was a suicide because she had been a deeply troubled young woman.
George, now a law professor at Monash University, picked up Ant's iPhone (which he regularly loaned to Phoebe) from a repair shop a few days after the death. The whereabouts of the iPhone at various times would become a bone of contention at the inquest.
Two months later, George Hampel accompanied his 43-year-old son to a police interview, refusing to leave his side despite the interviewing officer requesting that he do so.
Since his retirement from the bench, George Hampel has been a professor of advocacy and trial practice at Monash University. In 2006 he became a member of the Order of Australia.
As a judge, he was perhaps most famous for sentencing one of Australia's worst mass murderers, Julian Knight, to life in prison, after he had pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and 46 attempted murders in a sniper-style shooting in Melbourne in 1988.
But unlike Ivan Milat, a NSW-based mass murderer of the same era, Hampel granted Knight a minimum sentence. In this case, 27 years.
Hampel said as he sentenced him that Knight's "condition is likely to improve as you mature over a period of years when you will cease to be a danger to the public''.
When the time for a parole application came about, the narcissistic Knight began working towards his release.
But the state government decided he had not achieved the required maturity. In 2014, it passed a one-off piece of legislation to keep Knight in prison until he died, or was too frail to be a threat. Knight challenged the legislation in the High Court.
Hampel said, presented with similar circumstances, he would have passed the same sentence again. He insists that passing tough sentences was easier than light sentences.
"It takes a bit more thinking and a bit more courage to be a bit more merciful".
Hampel's mercy towards another murderer so enraged a bereaved father that it prompted him to set up an organisation to lobby for tougher sentences.
In 1992, Tracey McNamara met her one-time boyfriend, Noel Meyers, to tell him she was ending their liaison. Meyers bashed her so brutally she was placed on life support. She subsequently died in hospital. Hampel sentenced Meyers to 14 years in prison, with a minimum of 10.
Her father, Noel McNamara, was so enraged by the sentence, which he viewed as inadequate, that he set up the Crime Victims Support Association. The group has relentlessly lobbied for tougher judges.
But Hampel's most enduring enemy resulted from another decision.
In 1987, kindergarten teacher Vicki Cleary had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Peter Keogh. Keogh, who had a number of prior convictions for sexual violence, did not like that. He responded by bringing two knives, a pair of pliers, masking tape and surgical gloves to the kindergarten where she worked.
As they met on the footpath outside the kindergarten, Cleary apparently swore at him. He stabbed her repeatedly before going for a coffee. She died from her injuries.
In the trial, justice George Hampel, allowed Keogh to argue that Vicki Cleary had "provoked" him to kill her. She was, in other words, partly responsible for her own death. The jury agreed, and found Keogh guilty of manslaughter, not murder.
(At the time, the law allowed those accused of murder to argue "provocation" as a defence. That law was changed in 2005.)
Then Hampel sentenced Keogh. He gave him a minimum term of six years' jail. He served less than four.
Cleary's brother - former footballer, independent MP and recent Lord Mayoral candidate Phil Cleary - became one of Hampel's most constant critics. In 2002, he wrote a book about his sister's death, Just Another Little Murder.
"The verdict was an act of unforgivable hurt to my family and unequivocal brutality to Vicki. I blamed Hampel unreservedly," Cleary wrote.
"To conclude that one woman's quiet . . . pursuit of personal freedom should qualify as an 'act' which might cause an ordinary man to do what Peter Keogh did, was to plunge the society into moral barbarism."
In May of 2013, Phoebe Handsjuk's family and friends gather at Mallacoota's lakeside to farewell her with a 'Viking funeral'.
A recording Phoebe's mum Natalie made days after Phoebe died. It was her first chance to speak to her boyfriend Ant. Read the transcript
After her death, Phoebe Handsjuk's belongings were returned to her mother, Natalie. Inside the boxes were many journals, including the one Phoebe kept at the time she died.
Distressed his granddaughter's death was deemed a suicide, retired detective Lorne Campbell set out to test whether someone could intentionally climb into a garbage chute.
Phoebe Handsjuk plunged 40 metres down a garbage chute, but it wasn't the fall that killed her.
The circumstances of Phoebe Handsjuk's death are unique in Australia, and very rare around the world. However, two similar cases, both in the same apartment building, occurred in the US city of Baltimore in 2010 and 2011.
Top legal, forensic and police experts have cast doubt over a coroner's finding that young Melbourne woman Phoebe Handsjuk died from a "tragic accident" when she plunged to her death down the garbage chute of a luxury high-rise apartment building.
Coroner Peter White found Ms Handsjuk inadvertently fed herself feet first into the garbage chute while drunk and under the influence of sleeping drug Stilnox in December 2010.
The expert opinions form part of a six-month Fairfax Media re-investigation of the circumstances of Ms Handsjuk's death. The first episode of a six-part podcast, Phoebe's Fall, can be downloaded today.
The controversial outcome of Ms Handsjuk's inquest has also prompted calls for reform to the Coroner's Act to make it easier and less expensive for families to appeal what they believe are wrong findings.
Her family simply wants an "open" finding.
In 2013, the Coroner specifically exonerated Ms Handsjuk's boyfriend, Antony Hampel of any responsibility for her death. Mr Hampel denied any involvement in or knowledge of Ms Handsjuk's death, and Fairfax Media is not suggesting otherwise.
Mr Hampel is the son of retired Supreme Court justice George Hampel and step-son of sitting County Court judge Felicity Hampel.
Ms Handsjuk was found dead in the ground floor refuse room of the luxury Balancea Apartment building in St Kilda Road Melbourne in December 2010. Her blood was found in the 12th floor apartment where she lived with Mr Hampel, and also near the entry hatch to the garbage chute on the same floor.
However, Ms Handsjuk did not die as a result of the impact of her 40 metre fall from the 12th floor entry hatch of the garbage chute.
A blade in the garbage compactor at the bottom of the chute almost severed her right foot before the machine ejected her and she bled to death as she tried to find her way out of the darkened, locked room.
Coroner Peter White found Ms Handsjuk entered the chute in a "sleepwalking state" under the influence of alcohol and prescription sleeping drug Stilnox, and had no intention to kill herself.
However, there were no fingerprints on the hatch near the top of the chute and Ms Handsjuk was found with her jeans around her knees.
Coroner White controversially rejected the submission of his counsel assisting, barrister Deborah Siemensma, that an open finding was warranted. Ms Siemensma had argued the evidence did not rule in or rule out third party involvement or suicide.
Fairfax Media has obtained written advice from one of Melbourne's top QC's, Ross Gillies who told Ms Handsjuk's family that an open finding should have been made.
"The Coroner's reconstruction involving Phoebe Handsjuk deliberately placing herself in the chute and endeavouring to climb down, whilst possible, is highly unlikely," Mr Gillies wrote.
Several other senior Melbourne barristers, including other QCs, have privately told Fairfax Media that an open finding was the obvious conclusion to Ms Handsjuk's three week inquest.
One of Victoria's most experienced forensic pathologists, Byron Collins, said the presence of unexplained bruises on Ms Handsjuk's body which may have occurred before her fall meant an open finding was the safest outcome.
"I don't think that one can disregard the potential of the following injuries to point to some sort of foul play with any degree of ease, " Dr Collins said.
His view is supported by the Queensland forensic pathologist, Professor Peter Ellis, who advised Ms Handsjuk's family in a report that bruises on her right upper arm "do support the application of fingertips to the inside of the arm, most often seen in the forceful holding of the arm".
Dr Collins, who reviewed forensic evidence in Ms Handsjuk's case for Fairfax Media, also questioned the basis for Coroner White's finding that she had been able to deliberately control her descent.
"I don't think that one can say with any degree of certainty whether the fall was free or was impeded by some effort to perhaps press her arms against the side of the chute to slow her fall," he said.
Transcripts from Ms Handsjuk's inquest show Coroner White was told by Matthew Lynch, the forensic pathologist who conducted Ms Handsjuk's autopsy, that he had "no view" about whether she had slowed her fall.
Dr Lynch also told Coroner White that he could not rule out bruises on Ms Handsjuk's upper body being caused by another incident prior to her entering the garbage chute.
Former Victoria Police homicide squad senior sergeant Rowland Legg reviewed aspects of Ms Handsjuk's case for Fairfax Media and said he was unable to reach a conclusion as to the circumstances of her death.
"I wouldn't be able to satisfy myself that it was suicide, third party involvement - and, there's always that other possibility too that Phoebe was affected by something that caused her not to know what she was doing," Mr Legg said.
Ms Handsjuk's family considered lodging an appeal but were advised by Mr Gillies that the laws in Victoria for challenging a coroner's finding were narrow, and the costs of making an unsuccessful attempt at Supreme Court action could be extremely high.
Ian Freckelton QC, a barrister who sits on the Victorian Government's Coronial Council, told Fairfax Media that, as the system currently stands, costs could be awarded against people who challenged a finding, even if they had a good case.
Dr Freckleton said the challenges to a coroner's finding would only be considered if a coroner had made an error of law. An appeal based on how much weight a coroner gave to a fact or evidence would not be permitted under current laws, he said.
Fairfax Media did not ask Dr Freckleton to comment directly on Ms Handsjuk's inquest because of his position on the Coronial Council.
But he said the Victorian Government ought look at providing support in "suitable cases" for people to appeal a coroner's finding and be protected from costs being awarded against them.
"It's enormously important for families and for everyone else associated with a death who might have had some role in bringing it about or be affected by it that the outcomes are right ... and inevitably there will be individual cases where one feels uncomfortable with how evidence has been evaluated."
Mr Hampel declined to comment to Fairfax Media. His lawyer requested that all communication be directed through him.
Phoebe Handsjuk delivers a poem she wrote for her grandmother's funeral in October 2010. Two months later, she would die in gruesome circumstances.