The victim, 33-year-old Najma Carroll, met a violent end on July 14, 2020, her remains discovered charred and shattered by an unsuspecting bushwalker 15 days later in the Sandy Point area, her skull broken into 62 pieces.
Benjamin Troy Parkes, 46, standing trial for this heinous crime, insists his hands are clean, pointing the finger at Robert Sloan, a fellow criminal with whom Parkes had a drug-peddling pact. The twisted saga unfolded in the NSW Supreme Court, where Parkes, despite facing murder charges, pled his innocence.
The trio’s paths fatefully crossed at the three-star Hunts Hotel in Liverpool, southwest Sydney. Carroll, prosecutors claim, had sunk $8000 into their nefarious narcotics venture, a decision that would seal her grim fate. Parkes, paranoid Carroll ‘knew too much’ about their operation, allegedly conspired with Sloan to eliminate her.
According to Crown prosecutor Darren Robinson, the duo plotted Carroll’s demise, luring her under the guise of a visit to a Smithfield house, only for her to end up dead and burned beyond recognition. Parkes, however, offered a chilling alternative narrative: his only mission that night was to torch Carroll’s SUV to erase any trace of their drug dealings, a plan that took a dark turn when he arrived to find Sloan mercilessly bludgeoning Carroll with a baseball bat.
The horror didn’t stop at the murder; Parkes recounts Sloan’s cold-blooded threat to silence him, a harrowing ‘I’ll kill your family’ if he dared to speak up. Yet, in a twisted bid to cleanse his name, Parkes was caught on police wiretaps blaming Sloan for Carroll’s murder, a claim prosecutors are keen to debunk as a desperate deflection.
As the trial unfolds, with jurors urged to look beyond Parkes’ biker and drug dealer past, the tragedy of Carroll’s last months came to light. Dreaming of a simple holiday north with her superannuation-funded car-home, her aspirations were snuffed out in the most brutal way imaginable.
