Rossi exploited her role with the police force to persuade locksmiths and council officers to unwittingly assist with her bizarre criminal enterprise.
After paying more than $10,000 in rent and making extensive improvements to the dilapidated property, Mr Dixon and Ms Clarebrough were asked by Rossi to vacate the house in May 2017.
They claim to both suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression as a result of their encounter with Rossi. They are pursuing aggravated and exemplary damages against the state of Victoria, which is named as the defendant in their statement of claim.
“Rossi’s breach of her duties to the plaintiff as police officer was blatant, unjustified and a disgrace which demands condign punishment,” the statement of claim says.
“The behaviour is tantamount to fraud and in circumstances where it is committed by an officer to further a prosecution, such behaviour warrants punishment.”
A spokesman for law firm Robinson Gill, which is representing Mr Dixon and Ms Clarebrough, said the couple would not be making any comment while the matter was before court.
Rossi could be released from prison as early as June 2022, after justices Priest and Forrest decided to also reduce her parole period to one year and nine months at an appeal hearing in November.
The 59-year-old has used a string of aliases over the past 20 years, including Nora Marguglio, Rosa Spencer, Bella Rossi, Kelly Randall, Elizabeth Turner and Kim Snowdon.
In 2005, she declared bankruptcy under her former name Rosa Marguglio, owing more than $750,000 to several banks and after racking up massive debts on credit cards.
Rossi became familiar with the financial system while working as a teller at a bayside bank. At the same time, she also worked as a beautician at a nursing home in Cheltenham.
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She left both jobs under a cloud before joining Victoria Police in 1994.
Rossi’s former colleague and co-accused, Inspector David Manly, was convicted and fined $5000 in December last year after he admitted to lying under oath to investigators from the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission after being caught with a mobile phone that he claimed to have destroyed.
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Victims of corrupt policewoman Rosa Rossi sue government
Source: Philippines Alive
