Rachelle Louise gives exclusive look inside Simon Gittany's secret life
Rachelle Louise, the girlfriend of killer Simon Gittany, has proclaimed her boyfriend's innocence despite a Sunday Night investigation uncovering evidence to the contrary.
Gittany, 40, is expected to be jailed for up to 20 years on Tuesday for the murder of his fiancé, Lisa Harnum, who was killed in 2011 after plunging to her death from Gittany's 15th-floor balcony.
The Sunday Night investigation revealed a telephone call in which Harnum is heard trying to placate Gittany's control and rage.
"I am not having a go at you,'' she says in the recording of the phone call," to which Gittany replies: "We can do this nicely or we could do it a different way."
"I always wait at home for you," Harnum pleads.
"Like, I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything without your permission, without asking, without you being OK with everything, and I don't do anything other that what it is you tell me to do. Nothing."
The Sunday Night investigation also revealed the heartbreaking text message exchange between Lisa Harnum's mother, Joan, and Gittany on the morning she was killed.
"Let me speak to Lisa. Simon. Why are you doing this? Please let me talk to her or let her come home," the flurry of desperate, unanswered text messages from Joan Harnum to Gittany reads.
"Please let me know if she is OK. If you believe in God, Simon, please let me talk to Lisa.. this is a mother begging for her child."
Gittany's current girlfriend, Rachelle Louise, says she was the woman who initially gave Simon Gittany's phone number to Lisa Harnum when the couple first met.
Despite the evidence against Gittany's version of events, she told Sunday Night she "knows" her boyfriend is innocent.
"I know Simon. He is an honest person. He does not lie to me about anything. He has been completely transparent and honest with me."
“I don’t make a statement based on something Simon’s told me. I have worked through the case completely,” she said.
She admitted CCTV video showing Gittany drag Harnum back into his apartment just 69 seconds before she was killed was "horrifying", but said Gittany was just "acting instinctively" and trying to stop her from running away.
When Sunday Night's Ross Coulthart asked Louise if Gittany had ever stopped her from leaving their apartment, she responded:
"He’s never stopped me like physically restrained me from leaving, but he’s stopped me from leaving like, stood at the door.
"I know that he doesn’t like to leave me to leave the apartment so I purposely said ‘I’m leaving the apartment’, and he was like ‘No you’re not leaving’ and I said ‘Yes I am’."
