On September 17, Stewart wrote in a letter to her friend Angela Batley of her "horror" at what had happened, how much she loved Kimel, her "shame" at the damage she'd done to his children, Amber, then 27, Fred, 25, and Jordan, 16: "There is not a single part of me that wants him dead," she wrote. "I want my life back. I want our life back. I miss him so much some days I can barely move." But there were those who, having observed the marriage, were not surprised by the tragic turn of events. "It was never going to end well," says friend Victoria Bergin, who has known Stewart since she was 14. In an early prison telephone conversation, Stewart's ex-boyfriend Jason Gooden told her, "This was going to happen, Dan. You've been under too much stress for too long. It just didn't surprise me when I heard it, you know." But, says Stewart now, if anyone was going to end up dead, "I thought it would be me. I tried to commit suicide multiple times in that relationship. I think with the Seroquel overdose, that is what I was doing. I didn't want to die, but I knew there was no way out, that mentally I was never going to be able to escape". So how does a personable middle-class woman, who's widely acknowledged to be exceptionally intelligent, wind up in prison for a stabbing murder of which she has no memory?

Danielle Stewart passed a happy early childhood, the elder of two daughters born to public-servant parents John* and Emily* Stewart, in Evatt and then Curtin, Canberra. She and John were close in the way that fathers and daughters often are. "He was a wonderful dad when I was little," she tells me. "Always taking me to swimming lessons at 5am every day. He'd come to every sports carnival - I was sports-mad - read me books at night before bed, sing to me, help me with my homework. He did all the things that dads do. He drove me and my little friends everywhere and they all loved him. He was always so funny and full of fun and joking with us." But when Stewart was seven, a neighbour in the NSW south coast town of Batemans Bay, where the family was building a holiday house, began to abuse her sexually. "He was in his 50s and I used to go over there to watch TV as we didn't have one. His wife used to give me cookies and milk and he'd take me upstairs when she went out. At first, it was for six months, while we lived there. Then it would happen on school holidays. He was an estate agent and he'd let me and my friend play in the new house up the street, which was for sale and unoccupied, and he'd abuse us there. He was a predator. He did all sorts of things to us whenever he could get me, or us, alone. This happened regularly until I was 10." It was the worst moment of my life. In one instant, my entire life had changed and Chaim's had ended. When she was 11, Stewart's mother died of cancer. John had sent her away for the weekend with the family of a friend. Her friend had an older brother, who was about 17 or 18, says Stewart. She spent each night locked in the ensuite bathroom of the hotel room she was sharing with the siblings in a desperate bid to escape his unwanted attention. (Over the course of the next few years, she confides, she wouldn't always manage to keep him at bay.) Emily died while she was away. "Dad didn't tell me until we'd got back from the train station," she says, "until I'd prattled on to him about all the presents I'd brought back for her."

Further compounding her grief, John remarried just six months later to a woman with three younger children. To a grieving child it was an unacceptable betrayal, and, at 12, Stewart took an overdose - "300 pills of unknown origin", she says. "I didn't want to die, but I wanted the pain to stop. It was relentless and debilitating and terrifying. I used to get into trouble just for being upset. "After Mum's death, Dad fell apart. Like his dad, he suffers terribly from depression and for years I was terrified he'd kill himself. Dad is not strong; he needs support. He needs a strong woman." One day, Stewart's maternal grandparents turned up at her house, saying that they'd come to take her away to live with them for a while down the NSW south coast, in Eden. John had said nothing to her of this plan and, distraught at the thought of moving away from her friends, Stewart told them she wouldn't go. "Dad told me I had to leave," she says. "I was too hard to handle, apparently, and I was upsetting my step-siblings. He found me a youth refuge. I refused to go there, too, and ran away." "Dan wasn't that bad," says her friend of 24 years, Elle O'Brien. "She was just acting out her grief. Her father should have done more to bring her into the family. She struggled a lot with that rejection by her dad."

A penniless 12-year-old, Stewart spent a few nights sleeping rough before returning, defeated, to the family home in Curtin. But there was no warm welcome in wait: there, she found her bags packed and waiting for her. John drove her straight to a local, short-term youth refuge and it was here that she'd spend the next three months. "The other kids were pretty messed up," she remembers. "It was co-ed, so there was lots of illicit sex - and alcohol. You had to look after yourself." When Stewart again returned home, where she would stay until the end of year 7, her problems only intensified. "I felt so alone, unloved, misunderstood," she says, "and as the problems at home got worse, I got worse. I was sneaking out of the house, drinking, drugging. I missed my mum so terribly, I just wanted to be with her." She attempted suicide. "I used a razor in my bedroom downstairs. There was no internet back then and I didn't know how to do it [properly]." On her 13th birthday, John threw Stewart out again. Once more homeless, she ended up at her friend Elle O'Brien's house, where the girl's mother fed her spaghetti bolognese and home-baked cake, an act of kindness Stewart says she'll never forget. She stayed here for the next four years. Then, at 16, and a student at Narrabundah College in Canberra's Kingston, Stewart became a student of the Grafton-born poet and jazz enthusiast Geoff Page, who immediately recognised in her writing talent. "She was leagues ahead of anyone I've encountered writing contemporary poetry at that age," he says. "She had some of the same virtues as Sylvia Plath, a real feeling for adventurous imagery. There was a lot going on in her brain at an intense level and she had the talent to turn it into something moving."

In 1994, Page helped her publish an anthology of poems, called I for Icarus, which was well received. Later, he'd write to her while she was in prison. After finishing high school and a brief period studying performing arts at Melbourne's Monash University, Stewart moved to Bondi in Sydney to share a flat with her stepsister, Myfanwy Thompson, who was a year younger. Jason Gooden, in a statement he made to police about her during this time, said, "When we were together, Danielle was the fittest person I ever met. She never took drugs, except for prescription drugs, and was a manic trainer who exercised all the time and was obsessed with dieting. She rarely consumed alcohol socially, but was okay on a couple of drinks. There were several times when she had more than a few drinks and became seriously distressed. She would get a wild, terrified look on her face." She also, said Gooden, became distressed on the "many" occasions that her father failed to show up for a dinner arrangement. "On one occasion, she became highly distressed and hysterical and I had to comfort her all night while she lay curled up in the foetal position. Danielle had this constant hope that her father might do something for her." In 1998, Thompson died suddenly after falling off a cliff in Bondi while under the influence of ecstasy. "She was gorgeous, my best friend," says Stewart. "Her boyfriend had got into dealing ecstasy. I couldn't handle seeing her wasted all the time, so I'd moved out with other friends." Then, three years later, Myfanwy's younger brother Tristram died of an aneurysm after earlier being diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was in a state of intense emotional fragility that Stewart - by now 24 and drifting from one menial job to the next - met 50-year-old Chaim Kimel in a nightclub in late 2000. "He was very charismatic, very gregarious, very charming, very generous, strong and creative," she says now. "He loved his children and they loved him." Quickly, she went to work for him in his furniture retail outlet, Eclectica, in Mosman. "We got along, even though I was this little girl from Canberra and he was this older Israeli Jew. We had a common interest in books and art, music and food."

Kimel introduced her to his family, to whom he was exceptionally close, and offered her a security she'd never experienced before; the couple started living together. Says his daughter, Amber Rubenstein, now 34, "When I first met Danielle, we quickly became friends. [At first] I respected her intellect, her humour, her confidence, her maturity, and I liked her obvious affection and care for my father." "He was the father figure she'd been missing," Stewart's grandmother and closest ally, Elaine Craker, tells me. Elle O'Brien is less circumspect in her summing up. "I was always disturbed when she was with him," she tells me. "She wasn't herself, she lost her strength. She was a beautiful, smart young woman with a great future, but he treated her like a little girl and told her what to do. He treated her like a possession and she was under his spell. He was a very egocentric man." Admits Stewart now, "I loved him. I still do. It is a love-hate thing and it won't ever go. With those types of personalities, there is that level of attention, you become their entire focus." "He was very personable," says Craker carefully, "but he [could also be] demanding and overpowering. He would take over."

No one disputes that Kimel was a big drinker who often indulged in cocaine. His relationship with Stewart was passionate, volatile, often fuelled by alcohol and prone to sudden, destructive turns. And now Stewart was drinking immoderately at the same time that she was taking powerful medications for depression. There were noisy fights; the police were called. On one occasion, Kimel was jailed for a night for breaking an AVO. "I'd moved into temporary accommodation and Chaim came after me," explains Stewart. "He broke into my room and stole my laptop and wallet. The police busted him on the way out and took him to jail for the night." Kimel, who was drunk, informed the police with exaggerated politeness that Stewart had called him, telling him she'd taken 14 Valium tablets. When Stewart drank, her pain, fear and anger would surface. "I'm fine when I'm not in an emotional situation," she says, "but when I'm under threat, the flashbacks can be extreme." Jordan Kimel, who's now 23, lived with his father and Stewart from the age of 10 to 16 and was in the Rose Bay apartment the night Kimel died. "There were multiple occurrences where Danielle was destructive," he remembers. "She would break prescription glasses, cut up $10,000 worth of business suits, delete important documents from my father's computer. Once, she punched through a glass bathroom window and slashed her wrists. And she'd punch my father, too." And yet there were some periods of tranquillity. In 2004, Stewart enrolled at UTS to begin her communications degree. Together, she and Kimel started an online catering company, Epicurean, using a $30,000 loan from Craker and, later that year, eloped to India, where they became husband and wife at the Taj Mahal.

"Part of the reason I married Chaim was because I was worried about my grandparents' money," she tells me. "If I left him, there'd be no legal recourse for me to get it back. He took it without shame; he never planned to pay it back." Because of that money, agrees O'Brien, "[Stewart] was trapped." In the seven years they were together, Stewart left Kimel seven times. Once, in 2005, after fleeing their apartment, she told Gooden that Kimel often came home drunk and frightened her. Craker believes that "she was suffocated and unhappy. She left him once and came [to Eden]; she didn't know what to do. He'd ring and she'd go back. I'd tell her I didn't understand why and she'd say, 'I love him.' " "I was never taught how to function as an adult," says Stewart. "I never developed any life skills, so I was really utterly dependent on him. I kept leaving Chaim because he was a narcissistic alcoholic whose only concern was his own welfare. While he could be caring, it was undermined by his desire to keep me enslaved to him. When I left him, he'd follow me and get me back. When your sense of self-esteem is so low and a learnt helplessness has set in, you don't feel able to support yourself. My friends had dropped off because they couldn't stand him. The only times I responded with violence were when I was trying to leave and he'd try to stop me. He'd hide my wallet, phone, computer, passport. Those times always ended with me being in hospital, not him. I never tried to kill him: I tried to kill myself." Indeed, the cardboard box contains records of at least six admissions to hospital because of overdoses taken by Stewart during the marriage. Long before her trial, she repeatedly told doctors her husband was controlling, he'd smashed her head into a door, and she had nothing to live for.

A report by psychiatrist Dr Rosalind Foy describes "chronic feelings of unworthiness", "depression, anxiety, inability to trust people". She describes Stewart as "terrified" of losing Kimel. Foy diagnosed a borderline personality disorder related to childhood trauma. Amber Rubenstein, by now concerned for her father's physical and emotional wellbeing, told him repeatedly to stay away from Stewart. "He told me he'd made a commitment to be there for her and loved her unconditionally," she recalls. "He was convinced unconditional love would cure her." In 2006, while separated from Kimel, Stewart met a Melbourne university professor and moved to Victoria to be with him. Quickly, she discovered that she was pregnant with the professor's child. In a statement the professor made to police on December 13, 2006, he said, "Danielle was in a complete panic over what she had done by giving up her life in Sydney. She did not want to raise the child with me and she did not want to be a single mother." A week later, she returned to Sydney. Kimel had said he'd take her back - providing she terminated the pregnancy. She had her second abortion in six months - the first had been to Kimel - an event that sent her spiralling into a deep depression. By this time, Stewart - apart from studying at UTS and running Epicurean - was working part-time at a Sydney ad agency, Holy Cow! "I was also trying to manage Chaim and my escalating cocaine addiction. And the alcohol dependency," she says. "I was working like a dog, paying the bills, trying to keep the family together. He never did any work."

On August 9, 2006, Gooden met her for a coffee on campus. "She ordered a small bottle of champagne," he says. "She seemed withdrawn, unsettled - at the end of her tether. She told me she was getting some money together so she could escape once and for all." Two weeks later, on August 23, she and Kimel went for dinner with friends to Rose Bay restaurant Pescador. "Both Danielle and Chaim seemed to be in good spirits," said Angela Batley, who was present, in her police statement. "Everyone was in a good mood." After dinner, everyone apart from Stewart went back to Batley's house, where they carried on drinking. Stewart insisted she had to go home first, but when she turned up some time later, Batley noticed she seemed "moody". At 11pm, the couple said goodbye; Stewart drove home while Kimel decided to walk. Some time later, Batley says she felt an unaccountable need to phone Kimel. She asked if Stewart was okay. "He said, 'She's on the computer; she's drunk. I have to go.' " "I had an assignment due, I had to study [that night]," Stewart tells me. "I went home after dinner because I wanted to work. [Chaim] kept calling me and saying, 'Come and pick me up.' I'd taken a packet of Seroquel and kept saying I didn't want to pick him up because I didn't want to drink. Finally, he convinced me [to drive to Batley's]." (Why Kimel chose to walk home that night given that Stewart had gone there with the express purpose of giving him a lift remains unclear.) Jordan was at home when the couple got back to the apartment on New South Head Road. He described the ensuing events in his police statement as follows: "Danielle said to me, 'I shouldn't have gone to Angela's house. I've had too much to drink." She started playing loud music through the computer. When his father arrived, he asked her to turn it down before the neighbours complained. A silly, drunken argument followed where she would turn the music up and he would turn it down. Finally, said Jordan, his father turned off the computer.

"They were both yelling for about 15 minutes," stated Jordan. "All of a sudden, I could hear them in the corridor outside my room. It sounded like someone was being hit or punched and I heard my father say, 'Why are you being violent and attacking me?' They kept fighting and I heard Danielle fall to the floor and scream. Soon after this, I heard my father say in a tense voice, 'What are you doing? Are you crazy?' I heard my father scream three times. I saw [his] white shirt was covered in blood all up the left side from underneath his ribs towards the middle of his torso. Danielle was standing about two metres away and she had our antique knife in her hand." Eyewitness reports of the scene describe Stewart as alternately lucid and disorientated with no memory of the traumatic events that had occurred. Later, it would be revealed that her blood alcohol reading was five times the legal driving limit. Chaim Kimel died that night on the operating table at St Vincent's Hospital of two stab wounds to the anterior abdomen. Stewart was arrested and charged with his murder on August 24; she pleaded not guilty on the grounds of self-defence. She was granted bail, but her father John was unable to agree to the 24-hour surveillance condition attached to it. Instead, it took Elle O'Brien's mother, Amrit Turnbull, nine months to secure her release. From there, Stewart went to live with her grandmother. Facing 25 years in prison, she attempted to end her life twice more. One of the attempts involved taking an overdose of her prescribed medication, Seroquel. "When I took that Seroquel, I went into psychosis," she says. "It was an out-of-body experience where I thought the nurses were talking about me even though they weren't. I was watching myself from afar. It was crazy, crazy shit. I am sure that is what must have happened on the night Chaim died." The trial, which began in July 2008, was an ordeal. By now the charge of murder had been downgraded to manslaughter. "I couldn't defend myself in any way because I had no recollection of what had happened," says Stewart. "It was like I was on stage without a script. I might as well have not been there."

Speaking about the ornamental knife that was the instrument of Kimel's death, Stewart says simply, "The knife wasn't something I ever looked at: it was a decorative thing that I moved around the coffee table when I was cleaning the house." She was frustrated that the evidence she attempted to present of an abusive relationship was ruled inadmissible. Contacted by Good Weekend, her barrister, Belinda Rigg, declined to discuss the case. For the Kimels, it was painful to see their father presented as someone they didn't recognise. Any initial compassion they'd felt for Stewart dissolved as they packed up her things in the apartment. "There [was] a synopsis of a play [written by Stewart] in which one of her characters has secret desires to kill her older doting husband in a murderous rage," says Fred. Had there been a degree of premeditation, they wondered. "It was a university assignment, a book I was writing," says Stewart. "I heard that somewhere men kill their partners because they want them to stay, whereas women kill their partners because they want to escape. I know why I was writing about prison: because I was imprisoned long before I was [actually] incarcerated." Danielle Stewart was sentenced to six years in prison for the manslaughter of Chaim Kimel; she served only four in Berrima Correctional Centre "There's no doubt that jail saved me," she says. "It prevented me from harming myself with alcohol and drugs. I wouldn't recommend it, though."

For the first nine months, she was detained in the mental-health unit. "If I'd been in the main prison, I'd have been eaten alive," she says. "I was just crying and crying. Then they gave me a job in the kitchen. The girls I was working with were all actually smart and trustworthy and they helped me. I'm so grateful to them. They were all on murder charges, so some of them had been there for 15 years, 18 years." Her best friend on the inside was convicted on a double-murder charge. "I could trust her implicitly with everything; she was stauncher than any of the tough girls in there. It sounds weird, but we actually had fun." The threat of violence was always there, but "I managed to get a few of the heavies on side somehow and avoided the others where possible. I learnt to assimilate, to hide the fact that I was pretty and educated. I adapted where I could. In jail, I lost everything that made me me: my family, dog, business, house, studies, friends, freedom, clothes, make-up, choices. All I had was myself, my mind and my heart. I learnt to spot evil from a mile away - and evil does exist, I've come face to face with it - but I could still love. This is how I got through jail. Yes, I learnt how to operate within the system, but I could still see beauty in people, and I tried to speak to that." Stewart walked out of prison, a free woman, on June 24, 2010 and is still rebuilding her life. Her dream, she says, is to move to Spain and live in a house on the country's south coast - "where I can see Africa from my bedroom" - and realise her ambition of becoming a professional writer. She has done her time, she says, albeit not as long as Chaim Kimel's children would have liked. She lives in Sydney, where she has a lease in her name alone for the first time in her life, and she's back at UTS, finishing her degree. She asks for neither clemency nor sympathy: she is talking to Good Weekend because "I want to raise awareness of domestic abuse and help others. I want to be a good person and to make something good come out of the chaos and harm."

It has taken courage to speak out. She is mending her relationship with her father. "Dad contacted me at Christmas and cried, apologising for not being there for me and saying he's always loved me," she tells me. "I love him and I know he loves me." But there is deep vulnerability, too. "I've paid for what has happened and I've done all I can to fix the issues within myself that contributed to Chaim's death. I see both a psychiatrist and a psychologist, both of my own volition, nothing to do with parole directives. I don't drink. I don't take drugs. I take responsibility for my actions. I write when I can. I try to love my friends and family. I try to see beauty in the world and I'd like to hope, one day, that I can contribute to that beauty. Still, I love. I still love Chaim. I still love my father. In the end, love will be all I have." * Names have been changed. This article originally appeared in Good Weekend. Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events – www.facebook.com/GoodWeekendMagazine



AGEING when i am old, i know i shall be afraid to look in the mirror,

and will only be able to do so by hanging it from a string and spinning it around, so i receive only subliminal

images of myself – for i will be afraid i look like my mother. when i was young the only thing i wanted to be was like my mother.

now i am neither and she has gone, i only wish she was here for me to either look like

or not.