WARNING: Graphic and distressing content
When police sergeants Peter Venz and Danny Rehe discovered Nikitah Beadman in a shipping container in a Gold Coast backyard in November 2012 she was on the brink of death.
Having endured months of abuse from her boyfriend of one year Robert Galleghan, Beadman was found by the offices bound to a trolley and gagged, having been raped, tortured and left for dead.
“When the doors opened we’ve seen the trolley, like a fridge loading trolley, and we could see a body strapped to it,” Sergeant Danny Rehe told A Current Affair four years on from that horrific day.
“That’s when we went inside and probably saw the most horrific thing we’ve seen. My heart actually sank … It was evil and depraved what I saw.”
With Beadman’s permission, the show aired chilling footage from the rescue, and the officers recalled the scene as they discovered it.
“She had a blue yoga mat strapped around her head with wire and she was wired all the way down the shopping trolley. The wire was so tight it was just cutting into her skin,” he continued.
“We were getting no movement out of her, we were getting no response out of her. Her dress was up, her private parts were exposed.”
“The first thing I did was kneel down, because there was nothing I could do, but was to hold her hand and tell her I was there and that we were trying to help, and reassure her and calm her. That was all I could do,” Sgt Rehe said.
“It was bound around her face so tight that there was no way she could breathe. We removed that just to find more, more horror. He had her mouth stuffed with her underwear, and that was wired and the wire was cutting into her cheeks so tight, and the wire was also chained around through the trolley.
“What sort of person leaves someone that they’re supposed to love strapped to a trolley, in a shipping container, down the back of the house in the bush, and go off to the police station to make a complaint knowing damn well that she’s probably going to die in that shipping container?”
Police made the devastating discovery after several witnesses at a party earlier that night had seen Gallagher throw his girlfriend against a wall and slam her head into a coffee table.
Beadman has tried to leave on numerous occasions but Gallagher threatened her and her family.
“I knew what was going to happen,” she told A Current Affair. “He always said he’d bury me out there.”
Four years on, it’s not only the psychological trauma but also has a number of physical injuries she is still recovering from.
“I have got a twisted backbone and two rotated ribs, that in any sort of movement or any sort of exercise could pierce one of my lungs; I have got multiple sprains all through my back; I have got sciatic nerve damage; I have also got nerve damage in my right arm, that I still couldn’t use for a year-and-a-half after — which was from the wire,” she told the Nine Network.
Galleghan was charged with torture, common assault and threatening violence and will remain in jail until 2021.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, contact 1800 Respect (1800 737 732) or 000 in an emergency.
