Bali: The widow of the Bali police officer killed on Kuta beach says her husband could still be alive if Byron Bay woman Sara Connor had sought help after leaving his bloodied body on the sand.
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Connor and British DJ David Taylor will this week stand trial in the Denpasar District Court over the alleged murder of Wayan Sudarsa, a father of two who served as a Bali police officer for 35 years.
Taylor, who has confessed to bashing the police officer's head with a beer bottle on August 17, wrote a letter to Mr Sudarsa's widow saying: "I really cannot believe that my terrible actions may have contributed to the taking of another life".
But Ketut Arsini told Fairfax Media she could not forgive the couple.
She said her husband of 31 years may have been saved if Connor had sought help instead of returning to the Kuta homestay where the couple were staying.
Connor denies any involvement in the killing. She claims she was trying to intervene in a fight between Taylor and Mr Sudarsa in order to help the police officer.
But Ms Arsini said if Connor had sought help that fateful night her husband may not be dead.
"If she is such a good person, why did she leave my husband like that? If she was really trying to help, if she got help, maybe they could have saved (him). They just left him, he was found much later. No good person would do that. That's just her excuse."
Taylor has admitted to bashing Mr Sudarsa with binoculars, a smashed beer bottle and a sharp object but not to killing him.
The two were brawling on the sand after Taylor tried to frisk the police officer and accused him of stealing Connor's missing handbag.
In the letter Taylor said it had taken him a long time to find the courage and strength to write to Ms Arsini.
"I never thought in my life that I would be anywhere close to such a horrific situation as this," he said in the letter, which was written in both English and Indonesian.
"I have been waking up crying every morning for many days now but I cannot imagine the pain and suffering that you and your family must be feeling in this time. I will never throughout the rest of my days come to terms with this and it will haunt me until I myself am taken from this life."
Ms Arsini said her first impulse was to rip the letter to shreds when she knew who it was from. "But I said to myself, if I do that, I won't know what the letter says, so I calmed myself and read it."
She struggled to convey how it made her feel, shaking her head and holding her chest until she was calmer. "I still want to rip the letter, I want to rip it. I can't forgive him. We can't forgive him. Whatever they are saying, that it was an accident, they didn't mean it are all just excuses."
Ms Arsini said she was "kind of expecting" an apologetic letter from Connor after receiving the letter from Taylor. "But now, I don't need it. I'll just want to rip it anyway. Don't bother with a letter to apologise. I can't forgive them. The law will take care of them, for what they did."
Connor and Taylor both face charges of unpremeditated murder, group attack or assault leading to death, which carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in jail.
She still has so many unanswered questions. "If it was an accident, why did he (Taylor) hit (my husband) repeatedly? Why didn't they get help for him? Why didn't they report it? Why did they run away to Jimbaran? Why did they loosen his kopel (police belt), take his wallet, take his mobile phone and then destroy it? Why did they cut up his (identity) cards? If innocent, why did they do all that?"
Mr Sudarsa's cremation was packed with people his widow didn't even know. "People he had helped, that's just the kind of person he was," she said. "He was always helping people."
She tried to be strong but sometimes gets "lost in my mind". "I would be driving somewhere in my scooter and I would think of him and I just got lost in my mind. When I come to my senses, I end up elsewhere, I passed those streets hundreds of times, I just got lost in my mind,"
The thing her youngest son, Kadek Toni, misses the most is when the family would sit around talking on Mr Sudarsa's days off. "In one and a half years time I hope to graduate, to be a teacher," he says, crying. "But now my father won't be able to see me graduate."
