The death in custody of a convicted murderer marks the closure of a long, sad chapter for the family of injured Ballarat lawyer Peter Wallis.
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"I think Peter would be happy that it was over. But I don't think it was ever over for him. He was never the same," sister-in-law Jill Wallis told The Courier.
On March 2, 1994, Wallis was working at the National Crime Authority in Adelaide when his friend and colleague, Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Bowen, sat across a desk from him about 9.15am and began to open a package.
The package, sent by drug trafficker Domenic Perre to the detective in an act of revenge, exploded.
Detective Sergeant Bowen was killed.
Peter, suffering burns to 35 per cent of his body and blinded in one eye, wasn't expected to live.
"It was shattering because you wouldn't think anything like that would happen in Australia, let alone to our family," Ian Wallis, Peter Wallis' brother, said.
"The thing I remember most was when we were taken into the room to see him, he was just a mess. I actually fainted ... because it was just so traumatic to see someone in that state."
And the road to recovery for Peter was long.
"It was 12 or 18 months later, we were sitting with him and he's picking things out of his skin, 'oh, there's another bit of the bomb'," Mr Wallis said.
"[Investigators] said to him 'you'll have stuff coming out of your body, put it in a bag and give it back to us'."
The change in his brother, Mr Wallis said, was more than physical.
Once described as outgoing and social, the lawyer stopped work and moved back to Ballarat.
"Anytime there was an event like that around the world, it would trigger Peter ... it'd bring back all these memories anytime there was an explosion," he said.
Ms Wallis added: "He was a completely changed person in many ways. He became almost a recluse."
Perre's hostility for Detective Sergeant Bowen was said to be rooted in the seizure of a multi-million dollar cannabis crop in August 1993.
He was arrested for the bombing, but charges were dropped in September 1994.
"Peter asked [police], 'are you sure you've got enough evidence on him?' And they said, 'yes, we've got enough to reconstruct another bomb'," Mr Wallis said.
"They didn't."
It became one of Australia's longest running investigations, spanning almost 25 years before Perre was again charged for the bombing in 2018.
Peter died from a sudden brain aneurysm weeks before he appeared in court.
This time, Perre would be found guilty.
Already serving time in prison for drug offences, he was handed a life sentence with a non-parole period of 30 years and seven months in October 2022 for the murder.
Perre died on May 8, 2023, on what would have been Peter's 72nd birthday.
It's a peculiarity which, Mr Wallis said, his brother's "dark" sense of humour would have found amusing.
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