Residents unaware of Jiao Dan’s terrible fate

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Residents unaware of Jiao Dan’s terrible fate

8th April 2009, 6:00 WST

The short scream was enough to bring two Innaloo residents to their windows to peer into the dark.
   
Minutes later they turned away, unaware that just metres outside their warm homes a woman was about to be murdered.
   
Jiao Dan, 22, had been brimming with plans for her future when she arrived from China in December 2006.
  
Bright and hard working, she juggled her first year of a commerce degree at Edith Cowan University with a late-night cleaning job to repay her parents the money they had lent her.
   
Tragically, the overseas stint her parents hoped would enrich their only child robbed her of her life.
Dannie Adam Wright had been out of jail just one day and was returning by train to his aunt’s Gwelup home after an alcohol and drug-fuelled evening when he spotted Jiao Dan about 11pm on October 8, 2007. What happened next was detailed during Wright’s murder trial. Jiao Dan had missed her usual train after finishing her cleaning job. Taking a later train, she got off at Stirling station and started walking to her Oswald Street duplex.
   
Her pace quickened as the footsteps behind her failed to drop back and the light of the train station fell into the distance.
   
She had sometimes worried about walking home alone but always decided against troubling her friends for company, telling herself the frightful night that lay in the back of every woman’s mind would not come.
   
Tonight was that night.
   
She was just metres from home when Wright caught up with her.
   
Thick drops of Jiao Dan’s blood fell to the pavement after the first strike.
   
A slim woman, Jiao Dan didn’t stand a chance as Wright pulled her across a wide, dimly lit verge to the dark veil of a tree and continued the horrific beating.
   
A single, truncated scream was all she could manage before Wright broke the bones in her face, pulled her to the ground and began strangling her.
   
In a nearby house, that scream prompted Sarah Urquhart to instinctively check the time before going to her window and staring out into the night.
   
She was not the only resident to do so. Nor was she alone in ruling out further action after she saw nothing sinister in the sometimes noisy street.
   
At that moment, hidden in the shadows, Jiao Dan may have been clawing desperately to release the pressure of the killer’s hands around her throat.
   
It’s possible she lost consciousness before Wright pulled off her clothes and subjected her to a brutal sexual assault.
   
He left his young victim bleeding on the grass as he finally buried the Corona beer bottle he had used in the attack deep inside one of the wheelie bins that lined the street waiting for the next day’s rubbish collection.
   
Severely injured and alone, Jiao Dan remained alive for hours after the assault. Her body fought hard against the death closing in, desperately trying to heal the horrific damage.
   
But as a light rain began to fall, she lost the battle and succumbed to the pneumonia that rapidly took hold as she lay weakened and exposed to the cold night.
   
It was not until 6am that her pale body was found by a man as he came to collect a colleague for work.
   
The man lay a bedsheet across Jiao Dan’s semi-naked body, giving back some of the dignity that had been brutally taken from her, as his friend called police. Officers were spilling into cordoned-off Oswald Street as Wright awoke on October 9 thinking he would get away with his sickening crime.
   
He was wrong.
   
Within hours, forensic police came across a bloodied bottle in a nearby wheelie bin that, as fate would have it, never made it to rubbish collection that morning.
   
On that bottle police would find a bloodied fingerprint matching Wright’s left index finger.

CHRISTIANA JONES