It is 10.48am on a chilly winter’s day in central Israel and accused sex offender Malka Leifer has no idea she is being watched as she waits at a bus stop, holding a bag of shopping, in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak.
The former principal of the Adass Israel Jewish school in Melbourne does not see the private investigator who snaps her photo then, and again several hours later while she strolls in the street, talking into a phone on December 14.
These images of Leifer “living a fully functional and social life” when she was supposed to be bedridden with an acute mental illness were handed to Israeli police, adding weight to evidence secretly being assembled against the 54-year-old fugitive from Australian justice.
Her grandmotherly demeanour belies the crimes she is accused of in Melbourne, where she left in ruins the lives of more than a dozen of her former students, all girls, after making a midnight dash for the airport and finding refuge in Israel’s insular Haredi community nearly a decade ago.
Hubris turned out to be her downfall, leading to her arrest this week on charges of obstructing justice for allegedly faking the psychosis that was said to have rendered her unfit to attend court, thereby blocking her extradition to Australia.
A year ago, the case seemed dead in the water. A judge had accepted her lawyers’ arguments that she could not participate in the hearings and suspended the extradition application by Israeli state prosecutors, acting on behalf of the Australian government, to the horror of her alleged victims.
Leifer was freed from home detention and restrictions on her movements were lifted. To her, it must have seemed the problems that had chased her to Israel were over. So she got on with her life.
Read the article by Jamie Walker (associate editor) and Cameron Stewart (Washington correspondent) in The Weekend Australian.