When a six year old girl was tragically found dead in a shallow grave, suspicion sadly soon turned to the person who should have loved her the most – her own mum
When Kiesha Weippeart refused to put on her pyjamas one evening, the six year old could never have imagined what might happen next – even in her wildest nightmares. Because although, like most little girls, she was just messing around before bedtime, she was brutally killed by the person she trusted most in life – her own mum.
After little Kiesha died, her mum, Kristi Anne Abrahams and her partner, Robert Smith, stuffed her body into a suitcase at home, keeping it there for several days before later burning and burying it in a shallow grave. Then they decided to report Kiesha missing and maintained for eight months that she had simply disappeared.
Abrahams said that Kiesha had gone to bed at around 9.30pm, after the family had watched movies together, but when she went to wake her in the morning, she was gone. Police were immediately suspicious of the story and presumed that vital information was being withheld.
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Soon after Kiesha’s death, Abrahams unwittingly owned up, by giving her account of the murder to an undercover police officer. In a secretly-recorded video, a near-hysterical Abrahams pleads with an undercover police officer for his help in avoiding getting caught.
“No way mate, I don’t wanna go [to jail] …I don’t wanna lose my family,” she says.
She is seen relating how she’d given Kiesha a ‘nudge’ with her foot when she wouldn’t put on her pyjamas, causing her to fall and hit her head against the bed. Even though Kiesha was unresponsive and felt like “jelly,” Abrahams put her in the shower and then to bed. The next morning she was dead.
Continuing to detail how they’d disposed of Kiesha’s body, she sobs uncontrollably, explaining: “We went down to the garage, he [Smith] came back with a suitcase. And then we went to the bush, and then we went there, he didn’t want me to look.”
Abrahams and Smith were arrested after visiting her bushland grave on the girl’s birthday.
Despite claiming it was all an accident, a postmortem shockingly revealed that Kiesha had been the victim of severe child abuse in the months leading up to her death. Abrahams had punched her own daughter’s jaw at least two or three times from different directions. She had also bitten her shoulder when she was just 15 months old and, when she was three, Kiesha had told a social worked that her mum had burned her with a cigarette.
Abrahams was 30 when she pleaded guilty to murdering Kiesha in July 2010 on the first day of her trial in Sydney Australia, back in 2013. She was later jailed for murdering the “vulnerable and defenceless” little girl and for interfering with her body afterwards.
“The trust placed between a parent and child is of the highest and utmost importance,” the judge told the supreme court in Sydney. The continued to say that Abrahams caused the death of Kiesha “with the infliction of a violent, lethal force on what was a vulnerable and defenceless child in her care who was entitled to expect and receive her attention.”
The court heard that Abrahams hated Kiesha because of the resemblance to her biological father, a man called Chris Weippeart. And it found that Abrahams did not intend to kill Kiesha, but to cause her grievous bodily harm.
Smith was jailed for at least 12 years in May for Kiesha’s manslaughter and for being an accessory to murder. Abrahams will be eligible for parole in April 2027.
Kiesha’s biological grandmother, Liz Weippeart, said she was happy with the sentence: “It’s finally over and done with and she can sit there and rot.” The family’s neighbour, Alison Anderson, described Abrahams as a “putrid dog” who deserved worse, adding: “What because she had a bad upbringing with abuse and stuff like that gives you the right to go take people’s lives? I’m sorry, no.”