true crime

Nikitah Beadman wanted to mend her relationship. Instead she was bound, tortured, raped and left for dead.

Trigger warning: this post contains graphic details of domestic violence and physical assault. 

One November night in 2012, Seventeen-year-old Nikitah Beadman went to a party intent on building bridges with the man she’d recently left. Instead, she found herself bound, gagged, raped, tortured and left for dead in the back of a shipping container on his remote property.

Were it not for the two police officers who found and freed her, she may not have survived. Now four years on, those men have recounted the moment they discovered what Robert Galleghan did to her that night in Tallai, south-east Queensland.

Speaking to A Current Affair, who obtained the distressing footage of the rescue, Sergeant Peter Venz and Sergeant Danny Rehe described the scene as “the most horrific” sight they’d ever laid eyes on.

“My heart actually sank,” said Sergeant Rehe. “It was evil and depraved what I saw.”

“She had a blue yoga mat strapped around her head with wire and she was wired all the way down the shopping trolley. The wire was so tight it was just cutting into her skin,” he continued.

“We were getting no movement out of her, we were getting no response out of her. Her dress was up, her private parts were exposed.”

After restraining her to the trolley, Galleghan had gagged Beadman with her own underwear and raped her with wire; and act Beadman believes was an attempt to prevent her from ever having children.

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Robert Galleghan. Image: Channel 9.

The officers had been called to the property by other partygoers who witnessed Galleghan throw Beadman against a wall and slam her head into a coffee table. The witnesses attempted to stop him, but Galleghan threatened them with a knife.

It was the last in a string of abusive and violent behaviour Beadman had been subjected to by the 29-year-old, behaviour which begun just three months in to their relationship. She'd tried to leave numerous times, but he threatened her family.

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Knowing what he was capable of, Beadman steeled herself when the aggression began that November night.

"I knew what was going to happen," she said. "He always said he'd bury me out there."

Viewing the footage of her rescue for the first time, Beadman said she recalls the officers apologising to her because they didn't think she would make it. It's a memory she described as "kind of strange".

"I remember being there, and I remember seeing it from a 3D perspective … something pulled me back," she told A Current Affair.

But it's not only haunting memories that Beadman must live with.

"I have got a lot of injuries still now," she said. "I have got a twisted backbone and two rotated ribs, that in any sort of movement or any sort of exercise could pierce one of my lungs; I have got multiple sprains all through my back; I have got sciatic nerve damage; I have also got nerve damage in my right arm, that I still couldn't use for a year-and-a-half after - which was from the wire."

Robert Galleghan has since pleaded guilty to the attack and has been jailed until 2021, a notion that provides Beadman with some semblance of comfort.

"It's finally over, now I lay at peace. I thank all the people that have supported me through this," she wrote on Facebook following Galleghan's plea.

"Justice has finally been served."