Lonely sheep farmer Mathew Dunbar was hoping to find someone he could cherish and build a future with – and he was a perfect catch.
The 42-year-old was renowned for being kind and generous, and owned a remote 1,200-acre estate called Pandora worth an estimated $3.4 million in Walcha, in the Australian state of New South Wales.
Mathew was estranged from his adoptive mum while his adoptive dad, who he’d worked with on the farm, had passed away. With no children, he craved a family of his own.
Then, in 2014, he met Natasha Darcy, 46, on a dating website and was smitten.
Darcy, who had three children from her previous marriage, soon moved into Mathew’s home and started talking about marriage.
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Less than a year into their relationship, she even persuaded him to make her the sole beneficiary of his estate. She had asked for the ultimate commitment – and he went all-in.
While it’s unsure what Mathew thought about Darcy’s past, it would certainly have rung alarm bells with his friends. In 2009, she had hit her ex-husband, paramedic Colin Crossman, over the head with a hammer while he was sleeping.
Three days later, again as he slept, she took a tin of petrol from the garage, poured it on the bedroom floor and set it alight.
Colin was unharmed but tests showed he had sedatives in his system after eating a meal of tacos earlier that had been prepared by Darcy.
She had been in line for a $700,000 life insurance payout if Colin died and she was charged with attempted murder. Darcy ended up pleading guilty to destroying property by fire and signed an agreed statement of facts outlining the hammer attack. She was jailed for a minimum of nine months.
Darcy was on probation while dating Mathew, who was a forgiving man, and started to suggest to those around her that he was struggling with his mental health.
He’d suffered a leg injury that had led to an infection and been warned he could lose the limb. Darcy said this had made him depressed. By 2017, doctors told Mathew that his leg was healing well and he was out of danger, but Darcy told friends that he was still vulnerable.
She even implied that Mathew was confused about his sexuality – and had talked about suicide.
While he had fought physically and mentally to recover, there was no evidence that Mathew was experiencing any of these thoughts or feelings – but people found it hard to ignore Darcy.
Then, at 2am on 2 August 2017, Darcy called the emergency services, telling them that Mathew had taken his own life.
She told the operator she had walked into the bedroom and then gave specific details of how she had found him, including the fact there was a tank of helium in the room.
Message to her ex
Police rushed to the estate. It turned out that Darcy’s ex, Colin, had received a text from Mathew’s phone and was first on the scene. The message had read, “Tell police to come to house, I don’t want Tash or kids to find me.”
Mathew was dead and at first it did look like suicide. He was also found to have sedatives in his system. There was a blender cup and a tumbler in the dishwasher, containing the remains of a milkshake loaded with drugs – including a veterinary tranquiliser for sheep. Had Mathew sedated himself before taking his life?
Darcy said that she had been sleeping in the lounge because she was trying to avoid kicking Mathew’s injured leg in the night. She claimed she had got up to stoke the fire and accidently set off the smoke alarm.
She told officers that when the alarm didn’t wake Mathew, she went to check on him and found his body. But had he really taken his own life? Investigators started to look at the evidence.
Mathew had collected the helium cylinder from a service station a day earlier but Darcy had been in the car outside – and she had ordered and paid for it. What had Mathew believed the gas was for?
But what police found on Darcy’s iPhone and laptop left them in no doubt that she was a killer. Her extensive searches, which had started months before Mathew’s death, were chilling.
Darcy had looked up hundreds of ways to kill someone – ranging from fungi poisoning to using deadly redback spiders and snakes. She’d researched drugs, looked up whether police can see your internet history and even googled, “Is there a poison that can kill but be untraceable at autopsy?”
More shocking still, Darcy had been with Mathew while carrying out the sickening research on her phone. One time, she had been sitting on the sidelines of a rugby match – and the day before the murder, she had been sitting in a café with Mathew. Darcy’s statements in interviews were full of inconsistencies. It was clear that she had been spreading stories about Mathew’s alleged mental health issues – but police believed she had been setting a “false trail” to make his death believable. Behind the scenes, she’d been manipulating him.
Detectives concluded that Darcy had done at least two “dry runs” to try to kill Mathew. On one occasion, she’d fed him an overdose of his antidepressants, or another drug. Then she had injected an animal tranquiliser into his injured leg.
When neither tactic worked, she covered her tracks by telling Mathew he had simply passed out – and then scaled up her efforts.
The investigation concluded that Darcy had used the blender to create a deadly cocktail of sedatives in a milkshake. When unsuspecting Mathew was unconscious, she had moved the gas tank into his room and killed him.
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Darcy had wanted to inherit his property, writing in one text, “Don’t forget you need to change your will.”
She denied the killing but was charged with murder, promptly becoming nicknamed the “Widow of Walcha” by the press.
Her trial last year went on for two months. The prosecution said Darcy had been researching ways to kill Mathew since February 2017. Darcy’s defence questioned why, if she had used a blender and tumbler to make the poisoned drink, she’d put it in the dishwasher and not turned it on immediately to get rid of the evidence.
But the deadly plot was clear to the jury. In the months leading up to Mathew’s death, she had set the scene and she was known to have tried to harm her ex-husband in the past.
Darcy was found guilty of murder and incredibly, in a pre-sentencing hearing, the court heard that while waiting for trial she had written letters to try to persuade a friend to lie and say Mathew had been suicidal. The killer said she had been inspired by a plot from the US sitcom Frasier , where the characters faced a moral dilemma.
“I was watching an episode when Niles needed Frasier to lie in court and say he didn’t know Niles was in love with Daphne,” Darcy wrote in a letter in 2020. “It got me thinking, if only I could ask someone to say Mathew told them he was planning his suicide maybe a few days before he passed.”
She offered her friend $20,000 to lie for her, despite the fact they’d never even met Mathew. But the pal went to the police.
‘Callous and relentless’
In February this year, Darcy was sentenced and a statement from Mathew’s adoptive mother, Janet, was read out.
It described him as “kind-hearted”, adding, “If Mathew only had the shirt on his back, he would give it to anyone who needed it, whether he knew them or not. Mathew was my only child and now I am on my own. I have lost my rock and my life will not the same again.”
Darcy watched on, via a video link from the site she was being held at. She showed little emotion as the judge sentenced her to 40 years with the chance of parole after 30.
The judge described the killing as “stupid, clumsy and ugly” and said Darcy had spent months making it happen in a calculated plot.
“As time passed... emotional abuse and sneaky physical attacks escalated into a more focused and foolproof method to achieve the outcome she desired,” the judge said.
“The offender was callous, relentless and heartless in her pursuit to get rid of Mathew.”
Justice was finally served in the shocking case – the most chilling aspect of which was how someone as kind and caring as Mathew had his life snuffed out by someone so unfeeling that she had plotted his death quite literally under his nose.
