Travis Barnard: Boyfriend accused of raiding partner Kim Heptinstall’s super fund hours after her tragic death

The boyfriend of a young Perth woman who tragically died after routine surgery waited just six hours before allegedly using her phone to sneak into her superannuation account to make himself the beneficiary, a court has been told. Kim Heptinstall was aged just 32 when, in July 2019, she went into hospital to have gastric sleeve surgery. She was discharged from that hospital two days later. But two days after that she was dead, having suffered an apparent cardiac arrest in bed in the Woodbridge house she shared with her partner Travis Barnard. It was Mr Barnard who had rung for the ambulance just before 8am on that Saturday morning, with paramedics arriving within three minutes and spending 15 minutes trying to resuscitate Ms Heptinstall. She could not be revived, with paramedics declaring her dead at just after 8am. Prosecutors allege that at 2.49pm the same day, Mr Barnard accessed his dead partner’s Samsung mobile phone, and then the app containing her superannuation details. And he is then accused of altering those details, changing the beneficiary of that money from Ms Heptinstall’s estate to himself. Prosecutor Carolyn Moss said that attempt was “deliberate and intentional”, a deceit which pretended to be his dead partner to give himself a “stronger claim” to that superannuation. “He knew he had no right to that improved chance,” Ms Moss said. It was Ms Heptinstall’s family who alerted police, after her phone was returned to them by Mr Barnard and it had numbers of applications deleted off it — including for her superannuation and her bank. They were so concerned they hired IT experts to try and recover the data they believed was missing. And Ms Moss told a jury at Perth’s District Court that evidence would show Mr Barnard had also taken money out of Ms Heptinstall’s accounts in the days after her death. “That demonstrates a sense of entitlement, and intent to defraud, and an intention and willingness to access personal accounts for financial gain,” Ms Moss said. Mr Barnard denies the charge of using a telecommunication device with the intent of committing fraud. The trial is scheduled to run for eight days.