A month before her twenty-first birthday, she was abducted from a Sutherland railway station car park by a group of homeless persons consisting of four males and one female.
These persons were Bronson Blessington, Matthew Elliott, Stephen 'Shorty' Jamieson, Wayne Wilmot and Carol Ann Arrow.
Blessington had met Jamieson and Elliott at a homeless shelter named 'The Station' in the Sydney CBD earlier that day and had proposed "Why don't we get a sheila and rape her?", a quote which became infamously known through Australian news media. The idea was agreed to. Arrow and Wilmot joined in. The victim, who was to be picked at random, became Balding.
She was driven in her vehicle to the side of the F4 Freeway at Minchinbury in Sydney's west, and during that time was partially stripped of her clothing and raped at knifepoint by Blessington, Jamieson and Elliott. Arrow and Wilmot were in the car but did not rape her. On arrival at Minchinbury, she was again raped. She was then dragged from her vehicle, gagged with a scarf, hog-tied, then lifted over a fence and carried into a paddock by Blessington, Jamieson and Elliott. She was then held down and drowned in a dam on the property.
In sentencing the defendants, Justice Newman said:
To sentence people so young to a long term of imprisonment is of course a heavy task. However, the facts surrounding the commission of these crimes are so barbaric that I believe I have no alternative other than to impose upon [these] young prisoners, even despite their age, a life sentence. So grave is the nature of this case that I recommend that none of the prisoners in the matter should ever be released.
