Sandie Jessamine was 14 years old when she was sent to a juvenile prison for the first time. Feeling like an outsider growing up with her adoptive family, she had run away from home in 1973 and was sleeping in an old railway yard with another girl when they found an abandoned old trunk containing several cheques.
Arrested after attempting to cash them, Sandie was committed to an institution for six months and eventually found herself incarcerated at Kamballa Special Unit, a prison for girls.
In this edited extract from his book, The First Murderer I Ever Met, Mark Dapin tells Sandie’s story of escaping alongside teenage child killer Rhonda Hoffman.
A DAY WITH A KILLER
When Sandie Jessamine was 12 years old, she woke in fright from a nightmare about Rhonda Hoffman, an angel-faced 14-year-old schoolgirl from Cromer on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, who had murdered a toddler she was supposed to be babysitting.
Three years later, Sandie woke up next to Hoffman.
On 19 December 1971, Hoffman and an older girl, Deslie Raymond, had been looking after four young children at Hoffman’s sister’s home in Wyoming near Gosford, when Hoffman suggested that they strangle the son of her sister’s friend, three-year-old Daniel Hay.
Hoffman and Raymond waited until Daniel was asleep then choked him with a bikini cord, one girl pulling on each end. Then they stabbed Daniel with a kitchen knife and bashed him over the head with a saucepan, to make certain he was dead.
The killing appalled and absorbed Australia.
“There was something fascinating to other kids that this really pretty girl, with the blonde hair and the smile, had done this horrific thing,” said Sandie.
Sandie spent a brief period at the Metropolitan Girls’ Shelter in Glebe, where a worker mistook her for Hoffman.
She said they looked so alike that they could be twins. The word quickly spread through the system.
“So, when I arrived, Rhonda was very excited that someone who looked like her was coming.”
It was a four-bed room and, at first, Sandie and Hoffman were its only occupants.
“So, I’m 15,” said Sandie. “I’m disorientated. No one’s telling me why I’m here, or what it is. And I’m in this dorm with this girl and all I know is that she has murdered this three-year-old boy in his sleep – and I’m in bed right beside her!”
On 27 December 1974, Christmas had passed without Sandie hearing from her family, and she and three other girls decided to escape.
Hoffman did not plan to join them. She hoped she might be allowed to stay in Kamballa after she turned 18, or even that she might be released early for good behaviour.
“For me it was a last-minute, spontaneous thing,” said Sandie. “We were off on this great big adventure.”
As the staff held their morning tea meeting, Sandie and her three friends, Linda, Carol and Jenny, jumped off the trampoline, pushed a picnic table against the 3-metre brick wall and balanced two chairs on the table.
The first girl climbed the rickety tower and waited on the top of the wall to pull up the next in line.
Once they were all up and over the wall, they swam across the Parramatta River, then broke into a house and changed out of their soaking clothes.
To their astonishment, the first person they recognised was Hoffman. She had decided to follow them after all. They were happy to be together, but their reunion proved to be a disaster for them all.
The other four girls were nobodies and no threat to anybody but themselves. But Hoffman, an escaped murderer, immediately became Australia’s most wanted fugitive.
They all set off together for the Northern Beaches, where they turned up on the doorstep of Hoffman’s parents.
“Her parents were totally freaked out,” said Sandie. “They seemed a bit intimidated by her.”
Hoffman’s parents begged her to give herself up, but eventually let her have some money and the girls went for the day to Luna Park.
A murderer and her gang of fugitive friends, smearing their lips with fairy floss and riding the ferris wheel to the sky.
Afterwards, the girls arranged a lift from Kings Cross to Melbourne, but the driver of the car was pulled up for speeding and everyone in the car was taken to a police station.
The police had caught Australia’s most wanted woman.
Sandie never saw Rhonda Hoffman again. The word on the internet is that Hoffman took a new identity, married one of her barristers and became a successful real estate agent.
