MARGARET Simmons has yet to experience a peaceful night's sleep since her brother's brutal murder three years ago.
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The killer pleaded guilty and received a 25-year jail term, but is still withholding one grisly detail – central to the slaying – that has left her in limbo.
"He hid my brother's head. It's out there but he won't divulge where," she said.
The Drake resident, recently diagnosed with cancer, believes an answer will provide her with a sense of “closure”.
Jonathan Andrew Stenberg was an army corporal turned security contractor. At one stage he worked in Miranda Kerr's security detail.
But in July 2012, he shot and decapitated his neighbour Edward "Ned" Kelly after years of escalating tension relating to an overgrown laneway that separated their properties at Broadwater, on the NSW North Coast.
When police made the gruesome discovery, they found a hat positioned where Mr Kelly's head should have been.
During a week-long police manhunt, Stenberg spotted a poster offering work, showed up on a film set in outback Queensland and auditioned for a part on Mystery Road, a murder thriller starring Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson and True Blood star Ryan Kwanten.
Bizarrely, he scooped the role of an extra, playing a policeman, before he was finally captured in the Northern Territory.
On the day the project was due to start filming, NSW Police secured an extradition order in Darwin Magistrate's Court where Legal Aid lawyer Shane McMaster stated his client was struggling with "some serious mental health issues".
During subsequent interviews, detectives repeatedly quizzed Stenberg over the nature of the killing. He, in turn, piled more agony on Mr Kelly's distraught family by providing misleading information about the head's whereabouts.
At his sentencing in September 2013, Ms Simmons looked her brother's executioner in the eye while reading victim impact statements on behalf of herself, her two sisters and Mr Kelly's heartbroken girlfriend.
"I told him my mind was torturing me with questions about what he had done to Ned's head. I said 'these are the thoughts that punish me and keep me awake at night'.
"He had the most kind hearted soul," she said of Mr Kelly last week.
"He loved animals and had a nature reserve on his property that featured everything from wallabies, snakes and lizards to peacocks, chickens and guinea fowl."
She said that while Stenberg's attempts to "misrepresent" and "discredit" her brother during the court trial were both "heinous and despicable", she had since come to understand, with time, that it was behaviour "born from self-preservation" and to "limit culpability".
"I get that," she said. "But I hope a true and honourable person might look back now, put their hands up and say, 'I'm sorry. I stuffed up. I regret what I did and I need to unburden myself so that you might find closure and I might find it within myself'."
When asked if that was wishful thinking, Ms Simmons replied: "Perhaps yes. But on a deep level, possibly unbeknown to Stenberg at this time, it will help him heal and fix the shattered part within himself."
- This story originally appeared in the Sun Herald on Sunday, July 26.