In his younger days, David Grant Mathiesen swashbuckled around the trendiest sets of the Brisbane social scene, sometimes presenting himself as an airline pilot.
He wasn’t an airline pilot but in 1980, aged 26, he told that story to the impoverished family of a young woman in The Philippines, Teresita Andalis, as he tried to lure her to Australia under a domestic service visa program and at some point a promise of marriage.
That worked, and the 21-year-old Filipina came to Brisbane, with Mathiesen having taken out a $400,000 life insurance policy on her with himself as sole executor and beneficiary, along with $18,000 of special travel insurance.
It was a pretty miserable existence for Andalis, she wrote in letters to her family in The Philippines. While Mathiesen’s family had an elegant home in Brisbane, she was put up in a room in the not particularly salubrious People’s Palace and didn’t see much of Mathiesen, she assumed because he was flying his jetliner around.
Read the full story by Ean Higgins in The Australian.