Inside the Mum and Daughter Murders

Police have charged a man with the murders of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter Khandalyce.

Karlie Pearce-Stevenson loved being a mum, her friend Emily Ballard tells WHO. The last time Ballard saw the Alice Springs single mum and her daughter, Khandalyce, was during a catch-up drinks around 2006. “My last memory is Karlie and Khandalyce playing,” Ballard, 26, tells WHO. “Karlie was so happy.”

Within two years, both mother and daughter were dead. Three months after the discovery of the skeletal remains of a young girl in a suitcase off a highway in Wynarka, South Australia, police announced a shocking breakthrough in the case: the girl was Khandalyce. Through her identification, they were able to determine that the remains of a young woman found five years ago, 1,100km away in NSW’s Belanglo State Forest, was Pearce-Stevenson.

Now, police have arrested and charged a NSW man with Pearce-Stevenson's murder. He was reportedly an acquaintance of Pearce-Stevenson, who had left Alice Springs with her daughter in 2006 to travel Australia following a dispute with her mother.

Police say both Pearce-Stevenson and her girl suffered violent deaths.

“I just started crying,” Pearce-Stevenson’s friend Samantha Camwell Devlin, 26, tells WHO. “I couldn’t believe it.”

On Oct. 27, police revealed that a female used the dead mother's phone to dupe family members into believing mum and child were still alive. Police also say a woman impersonating Pearce-Stevenson attended a Centrelink interview in Adelaide and between 2008 and 2012 almost $100,000 was spent or withdrawn from Pearce-Stevenson’s bank account. One man and at least two women have been involved in the fraudulent transactions.

“Karlie was happy, friendly, kind and giving,” says Devlin. “She would give anyone anything that she could.”

For more pick up a copy of this week’s WHO.