Eva Lasrini was meant to board a plane this week to visit her two beloved daughters in her home country of Indonesia.
After a year apart, she was desperate to see them and celebrate their achievements — chief among them, her daughters’ long-awaited hairdressing business.
She was reported missing on Thursday. Allan Keys, a 67-year-old man who friends say was Lasrini’s former partner, was arrested the following afternoon at Melbourne Airport, where police said he intended to board an international flight.
Lasrini’s body was found on Saturday, near the Princes Freeway and Little River Road at Little River, south-west of Melbourne. Keys was later charged with her murder.
Adeline, one of Lasrini’s two daughters, told The Age she was looking forward to doing her mum’s hair once they were reunited. Instead, she was mourning her death.
“My mother [had] such a beautiful, innocent heart,” Adeline said.
Lasrini came to Australia a few years ago speaking limited English, and was eager to fit in with Australian culture, her friends say. Her “innocence” is something they also recall; a 53-year-old woman with a big heart, who doted on her daughters, and ironically referred to her close-knit circle of friends as the “gangsters”.
“We were her gangsters, me and the girls,” friend Marcia Harley says.
“It was when the boys went and played golf, all of us girls got together and we started a cooking thing, where we would go to each other’s place and someone would cook something from another country.
“We loved her to death. She was just so innocent and so beautiful, and she would do anything for you.”
Lasrini came to Australia for love and a better life, friend Leonie Greenbury says. She loved her friends, and travelled with them around Victoria’s coastline.
“[We] took her under our wings,” says Leonie, who remembers Lasrini as funny and kind.
Lasrini shared with her friends that she escaped abuse in a previous relationship, but she was ever the optimist, making the most of life. At weekly dinners between friends in Melbourne’s south-east, before Marcia and her husband Brett Harley moved to Queensland, she’d never let anyone leave without a bowl of food – often, Nasi Goreng.
“When we used to go out to dinner, she would always pull a satchel of chili out of her purse to dump on her meal. It didn’t matter what the meal was,” Marcia says.
Brett adds, with a laugh: “Then we’d go to her house, thinking, ‘here we go, we’re going to burn our tongues’ – but she always dialled it down for us.”
It was Lasrini’s way of making sure everyone was happy, Brett says. “All she wanted to do was make everyone happy.”
Keys faced Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Saturday, when he was remanded to next appear in court on August 10.
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