‘Cases that stay with you forever’: They see women killed by violence, and this is what they want you to know

Joanna Glengarry has performed 5000 autopsies on people who died in hundreds of ways. She describes forensic pathologists as a robust bunch, yet some of these deaths stay with her.

They are the cases in which no amount of science can explain the horrendous violence inflicted on women with everything to live for.

Many of these killings made national and international headlines, but the New Zealander who now heads up forensic pathology at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has seen the carnage up close.

Some hit home because she and the victim of a crime that outraged a community had so much in common – as was the case with Auckland accountant Jo Pert, 41. Dr Glengarry did her autopsy after Pert’s daylight killing during her regular jog.

“She was my age, she was just out for her afternoon run, and she was stabbed multiple times,” says Glengarry, a fellow runner. “The man [who murdered her] had decided that his goal for that day was to kill someone.” He had previously assaulted two women.

Others stay with Glengarry because her investigation reveals no one must have known about a woman’s drawn-out suffering. These are the women referred for other reasons than death by homicide, but whose skin, bones or organs reveal how they really lived.

“Medicine in general teaches you to compartmentalise, probably even more so in this profession; we really tend to self-select – we’re a relatively hardy group,” says the former surgeon.

“I can count on one hand the cases that have really affected me over the course of my career, and two of them certainly did even before they hit the media: Eurydice Dixon and Aiia Maasarwe.”

Not long after she left New Zealand’s national forensic pathology service in 2017 for Australia, Glengarry was abruptly introduced to a scourge that continues to defy national efforts to curb it.

She did autopsies of both 22-year-old Dixon, a performer who was stalked, raped and killed in June 2018 while walking home through a city-fringe park, and of international student Maasarwe, also raped and killed viciously (seven months later in January 2019) after getting off a Bundoora tram.

It is “just the brutality and randomness” of these crimes against women going about their lives that struck Glengarry as she documented them. She was heartbroken to have to shave Maasarwe’s lush hair to expose the extent of damage, causing more distress to her devoted father.

“I remember dreading the court cases as well because I knew having to describe the injuries would be a huge thing for the community, and especially for the families,” she says.

Yet sitting in an office decorated cosily to feel like home and scrolling through her case-file history, the femicides that did not cause a national outcry also catch Glengarry’s eye.

“See that, they are two older ladies killed by their husbands that didn’t make the media: an older lady, 78, with an elderly husband who beat her to death, and a woman sent to the coroner as an ‘unexpected cause of death’ who had ligature marks and bruising around the neck – she had been strangled,” she says.

It is the hidden toll of violence that Glengarry and her pathologist colleagues also wish to expose and discuss.

She is part of a national effort, including Victoria Police, to have women’s suicides strongly suspected to be linked with family violence reclassified as homicides so statistics better reflect reality.

States around Australia are grappling with how to capture this phenomenon, and submissions to a federal parliamentary inquiry into the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide closed on March 13.

Glengarry’s colleagues Dr Heinrich Bouwer and Dr Paul Bedford share her sense that the community does not have a complete understanding of how much gendered violence we live among, or its true impact.

For Bouwer, one case illustrates what goes unseen. A woman’s body arrived at the mortuary so heavily concealed under layers of clothing that “it took time to understand the extent of her injuries and that they weren’t one-off”, he says.

“Gradually, it became clear there had been a long pattern of harm, and what struck me most was how hidden it all was, even from people close to her.”

The effect of the case endures. “Being confronted with that kind of sustained violence, even indirectly, isn’t something you just walk away from unaffected,” he says. “It shifts your sense of what people can be living through without it being [recognised].”

That patient’s death was recorded as homicide, but Bouwer recalls that the wider world of violence in which she lived was not investigated or reported “in a way that reflects what had actually been going on”.

“It is the type of case that stays with you forever,” he says.

Bedford summarises what he sees as the core issue bluntly: “Gruesome, horrible things are tolerated,” he says. “[Violence against women] is almost acceptable in Australia. That’s where, to me, the real problem is: cultural attitudes.”

In March the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed 2024-25 marked the highest recorded family violence offender rate nationally since family and domestic violence data was first published in 2019-20.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s most recent national survey on attitudes towards violence against women found 23 per cent of respondents agreed “that much of what is called domestic violence is a normal reaction to day-to-day stress and frustration”.

Bedford says his general observation is “that there are males who think they have rights, and their duty as a man is to control women”.

“There is just a massive disconnect in equality. It is purely and simply wrong,” he says.

Over Easter, his team examined the body of 53-year-old mother of two Eva Lasrini, after she was found dumped near the Princes Highway at Little River on April 4. Her 67-year-old estranged husband, Allen Keys, of Patterson Lakes, was charged with murder as he allegedly tried to board an international flight.

Lasrini’s death was listed by the national advocacy group Counting Dead Women as the 14th Australian woman to die by violence in 2026.

Since then, a 54-year-old woman was found dead at a property in Mareeba, Queensland, after which a man known to her was charged with murder, and 27-year-old Christine Hunter was found dead in car in the Northern Territory, after which her 33-year-old partner, Blayze Noble, was charged with murdering her while the Sunshine Coast pair were on a road trip.

Other than continuing to promote greater community awareness of the scale of, and need to act on, violence against women, Joanne Glengarry’s message to those fortunate enough not to be directly affected is to check in clearly with anyone they fear is.

She urges people to be alert to bruising in unlikely places, such as the soft skin of the upper arms – which can happen from being grabbed and held hard – and on the neck or the cheek, marks unlikely to have happened accidentally.

Most importantly, her work has taught her that people should never shrink from asking someone outright about their welfare if the person’s behaviour or demeanour suggests violence might be present in their life. “People are really reluctant because they don’t want to get involved in case they’re wrong,” she says.

“Of course its tough to raise that, but if you care for that person, do it.”

She vows to reveal the truth for those who have lost their lives. “I really do feel like we get to be that voice after death, to tell [the community] what the medicine says,” she says.

“The body may keep its secrets from those around us during life, but after death it doesn’t. And it’s up to us to tell the story of what happened.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.