FOUR YEARS TO BEGIN INVESTIGATING A SUSPICIOUS DEATH!

She was a prudish, 42-year-old mother of three, sailing from Sydney on a P&O cruise in the Pacific with family and friends. Dianne Brimble never lived to enjoy a day at sea. She died on the first night from toxic levels of a so-called date-rape drug in the company of strangers. Among her last words, heard at 3am by a woman in a cabin adjoining that of four men, were: “I’m not like that and I don’t do that sort of thing.”

P&O’s reputation has been tarnished by her death amid evidence that cruises were promoted to men using lurid postcards that implied that women wanting sex would be waiting for them on its ships. P&O staff have admitted that couples often had sex in the ship’s public areas and ran around naked.

Police have been severely criticised for failing to bring charges arising from the death of Mrs Brimble, a divorcee from Brisbane. Years after male DNA was found under her fingernails, a homicide squad has only now taken over the investigation into her death. It is has taken Jacqueline Milledge, the coroner, eight weeks to draw out what was kept from the police for four years. Mrs Brimble died in 2002 after she had been given toxic amounts of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, also known as GHB or fantasy in cabin D182 on the Pacific Sky. Details of Mrs Brimble’s humiliating death in the company of four men she barely knew have emerged in the Coroner’s Court in Sydney.

Australians have been shocked and angered at the testimony of witnesses at the inquest. These include Leo Silvestri, 39, an unemployed man who lives with his father in Adelaide, one of eight “persons of interest” to police still investigating the death. Mr Silvestri told officers who boarded the Pacific Sky in New Caledonia that Mrs Brimble’s death had ruined his holiday and that he wanted an apology from P&O. He told police then that she had pressured him for sex after taking the drug. According to police records, he told them: “I just brushed her off. I didn’t want to speak to her. Breath — yuck. Ugly dog, just go to talk to someone else. Ring the RSPCA .” Mr Silvestri told the coronial inquest that Mark Wilhelm, another of the men in his cabin, had given Mrs Brimble the drug, explaining that it would maker her “ten times hornier” than she had ever been.

In a tearful statement to the security officer of the Pacific Sky, Mr Wilhelm claimed that he had had sex with Mrs Brimble on a top bunk in the cabin. He said that she then wanted sex with Mr Silvestri, who had taken his usual dose of sleeping pills and was asleep below. Photographs were taken by one of the men of Mrs Brimble having sex. At about dawn, Mr Silvestri claims, he was awoken by Mr Wilhelm, asking for his help with a woman who was unconscious on the floor of their cabin. They put in her the shower to revive her. “She was alive then,” Mr Wilhelm said. But she appeared not to be breathing after the shower.

The inquest, attended by Mrs Brimble’s former husband Mark and eldest son Sebastian, also heard the testimony of Bobby-Jo Vial, a passenger who was 19 at the time of the cruise. She said that Mr Wilhelm had begun a relationship with her on the ship, two days after Mrs Brimble had died. She told the coroner that another of Mr Wilhelm’s companions had propositioned her mother. Katherine Taylor, the security manager of the Pacific Sky, told the coroner last week that it was common to see couples having sex in open spaces on board and that security officers encountered 15 to 20 naked passengers every night. Mr Silvestri’s companions, including two men who shared his cabin, are due to testify at the inquest, which continues.

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