FOUR years after being convicted for soliciting her boyfriend to kill her father with a tomahawk as she slept in a nearby room, Belinda Van Krevel was released from jail yesterday.

Van Krevel, 26, smiled as she left Dillwynia Correctional Centre in South Windsor about 10.30am, wearing a hooded purple sweatshirt, sunglasses and jeans.

Asked by waiting reporters what her plans were, she said: "I just want to get on with my life."

She was then driven away in a car by a Prison Fellowship volunteer.

Van Krevel is the sister of Mark Valera, who is serving a life sentence for the mutilation murders of the former Wollongong mayor Frank Arkell and David O'Hearn, a shopkeeper.

The original murder charge against Van Krevel was dropped in 2003 after she pleaded guilty to soliciting her then-boyfriend Keith Schreiber to kill her father, Jack, who was hacked to death in his Albion Park home in August 2000.

She tried to justify the murder by claiming her father had subjected her, her brother and her young daughter to years of abuse.

But Mr Van Krevel's longtime friend Anne Stanford, who babysat Mark and Belinda for years, testified she never saw an injury on either of them and that their father was devoted to them.

Van Krevel was sentenced to six years' jail in April 2003, backdated to 2001, when she was first placed in custody. Schreiber is serving at least 12 years for the murder.

AAP

 

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