Stranger-than-fiction: Police sat in disbelief during interview with Dunbar’s murderer - Sydney Morning Herald

Even though her home is a crime scene, crawling with police and forensic specialists, Natasha Beth Darcy giggles as she sits opposite two detectives.

It’s less than 12 hours after the mysterious death of her farmer boyfriend Mathew Dunbar and she’s now being interviewed in the living room of her estranged husband, Colin Crossman.

Police search the home of Natasha Darcy and Mathew Dunbar, which she stood to inherit. Credit:Gareth Gardner

“You’ve probably seen my coffee machine,” Darcy blurts out, knowing the police are scouring every nook and cranny of her kitchen. “Youse can give it a whirl if you like. Just press a button and a cappuccino comes out!” she says with a nervous laugh.

Detective Senior Constable Graham Goodwin struggles to maintain his composure.

It’s a stranger than fiction scenario for Goodwin; he was one of the officers who charged Darcy back in 2009 for the attempted murder of her husband Colin Crossman, who owns the house they are now sitting in.

Darcy had set fire to their family home while Crossman was sedated with a cocktail of drugs in his system. The last thing Crossman remembered was devouring a meal of tacos Darcy had served him before waking up in the emergency department at Tamworth Hospital.

Darcy ended up pleading guilty to destroying property by fire but signed an agreed statement of facts that outlined how she had also belted Crossman over the head with a hammer three days before the house fire – both violent attacks carried out shortly after she’d applied to take out life insurance on Crossman. She was jailed for a minimum of nine months.

Goodwin now sits with Darcy in August 2017 listening in disbelief as she claims Dunbar – the partner she lived with and claimed to love – was supposedly gay.

“Mathew’s gay – just to add another angle,” Darcy scoffs. “I think he had a lot of issues to do with that. Like, that was a lot of depression, was tough being a farmer, you know, being gay.”

The detectives were taken aback; Darcy and her three children had been living with Dunbar on his 1200-acre sheep farm “Pandora” for the past eight months and he had publicly professed his love and intention to marry Darcy.

Goodwin is keen to veer away from the subject, asking about Dunbar’s last movements, but Darcy is eager to bring up his homosexuality, planting the seeds to what will later be her only defence.

It was a defence that the trial judge, Justice Julia Lonergan, said she found “highly offensive”, with Darcy’s legal team trying to make out Dunbar’s confused sexuality had caused him to take his own life. On Tuesday, after a two-month trial and three days of deliberations, a NSW Supreme Court jury found Darcy guilty of murdering Dunbar.

Back on Crossman’s couch in 2017, Darcy tells police she and Dunbar had been to Woolworths on August 1, 2017, the last afternoon of his life.

“Mat loves grocery shopping. That’s one of the things I love about [him] ... he’s a great shopper,” she says. ”Oh he’s just so good and he can always find bargains and everything and yeah, it must be the gay in him.”

Dunbar had told friends Darcy had “chased him” down on a dating website in late 2014, a welcome change for a man who felt he’d always done the chasing. Darcy told police they’d met after Dunbar found her on the side of the road “walking in the rain”.

But their romance was shortlived. Darcy was sent back to jail in May 2015 for stealing a former boyfriend’s credit card and making up a false assault allegation against him in an attempt to get the charges dropped. She had also breached her parole after serving time for burning down the family home while Crossman was sedated.

But Darcy had already dug her claws into Dunbar well before she was sent back to jail, hounding him to make her the sole beneficiary of his multimillion dollar Merino farm in the event of his death.

“Don’t forget you need to change your will,” she texted him in March 2015.

She persisted the following month asking him: “Can you promise to do one thing for me this week? Call solicitor for appointment to sort your will.”

And six minutes later – when Mr Dunbar was yet to respond – she followed up. “OK, your silence says it all.”

In May, Dunbar had done what she asked. “Rang solicitor and organised will change. I love you so much beautiful xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox”.

Walcha sheep grazier Mathew Dunbar with partner Natasha Beth Darcy, who has been found guilty of murdering him.

‘How to commit murder’

Almost as soon as Darcy was released on parole, she set her mind to murdering Dunbar, the man who had helped to care for her three children for almost two years.

The first of her many online searches looking up hundreds of possible murder methods began in February 2017. They began with more natural causes of death relating to poisonous spiders, mushrooms and “11 toxic plants that look like food,” before progressing to “how to commit murder”, “murder by injection” and “99 undetectable poisons”.

About this time Dunbar was becoming increasingly depressed about the state of their relationship. Nothing had been the same since Darcy and her three children had moved onto his property.

Psychiatrist Dr Clive Stanton believes Darcy was emotionally manipulating Dunbar, “gaslighting” him with “cruel comments” and goading him to take his own life. She once asked him “if the rafters in the shed were high enough for him to hang himself”.

Darcy had suggested they sleep in separate rooms and was spending an increasing amount of time with her estranged husband Colin Crossman.

On the afternoon of June 13 – six weeks before the murder – Darcy and Dunbar had a heated argument over a loan he’d given to an ex-girlfriend.

He hastily took a gun from the sheds on his farm and sent Darcy a text, threatening never to return.

Darcy did nothing, later texting him to ask him to bring food home for dinner.

Dunbar’s closest friend Lance Partridge convinced him to hand his gun over to police.

Her “callous and nasty” response to his threat of suicide showed how little she cared for him, Crown prosecutor Brett Hatfield told the NSW Supreme Court jury in his closing address in June.

“Do you want to search the property to see I haven’t buried him somewhere?” Darcy joked to officers who had been called out to Pandora in response to Dunbar’s threats. “Mathew can be an attention seeker and I just thought he was having one of his poofter hissy fits.”

There are many who believe Dunbar’s threat of suicide laid the groundwork for Darcy’s plan.

As he recovered in a mental health facility in Tamworth, Darcy turned her mind to researching the best methods of suicide and conducted numerous searches about acepromazine, a type of sedative for rams.

On June 19, 2017, Darcy tried to source ram sedatives from three different vets without success. Walcha vet Dr Rachel Greig thought Darcy’s request was so odd she phoned Dunbar to ask whether he needed the strong sedative.

When he told her he did not, Greig was so disturbed she rang local police and made a statement about Darcy’s attempt to purchase a drug she had no use for.

“I was very concerned. I couldn’t think of any reason that she would have asked for it that was a legal reason,” she told the NSW Supreme Court during her evidence.

The town of Walcha – and all who knew and loved Mr Dunbar – were certain Darcy had taken advantage of his generous nature and his vulnerable yearning for a family of his own.

Local police had even set up a strike force looking into ways Darcy might be attempting to murder Dunbar well before he was eventually murdered.

While Darcy showed no emotion and looked down as the foreman said she was “guilty” in court two of the Darlinghurst court complex on Tuesday, Dunbar’s family and friends felt a mix of emotions.

His mother Janet Dunbar said she was relieved.

“Like I have always said, nothing will ever bring my son back but I am glad the jury reached the right verdict,” she told the Herald over the phone moments after the verdict.

“If I could only have him back for five minutes, I’d say ‘Mathew, I never stopped loving you’,” she said. “Even though we were estranged I still loved him.”

Darcy is expected to face a sentencing hearing in October.

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2021-06-15 09:45:00Z
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