Journalist Megan Norris Has a Portfolio That Covers Some of the Most High-Profile and Horrific Crimes in Australia. Her Special

Lisa Saad Author Megan Norris pictured with Cindy Gambino at the dam in Winchelsea, Victoria where Robert Farquharson left Jai, Tyler and Bailey to drown. Journalist Megan Norris has a portfolio that covers some of the most high-profile and horrific crimes in Australia. Her special interest in women and children who are victims of violent crime has resulted in a number of TV appearances as a media commentator on notorious murder and missing persons cases. Megan is a former winner of the EVA (Eliminating Violence Against Women) awards. www.megannorris.com Also by Megan Norris Perfect Victim (with Elizabeth Southall) Running Pink True True Blood On Father’s Day Love You to Death Echo Publishing A division of Bonnier Publishing Australia 534 Church Street, Richmond Victoria Australia 3121 In memory of Kelly East, Jessie and Patrick Dalton, Jai, Tyler and www.echopublishing.com.au Bailey Farquharson, Jack, Maddie and Bon Bell, Yazmina Acar, Copyright Megan Norris, 2016 Darcey Freeman, and Marilyn and Sebastian Kongsom. And all the other innocents who have been used All rights reserved, Echo Publishing. Thank you for buying an authorised edition of this book. In doing so, you are supporting writers and enabling as weapons to punish their mothers. Echo Publishing to publish more books and foster new talent. Thank you for complying with copyright laws by not using any part of this book without our prior written permission, including reproducing, storing in a retrieval system, transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or distributing. First published 2016 Printed in Australia at Griffin Press Only wood grown from sustainable regrowth forests is used in the manufacture of paper found in this book. Edited by Linda Funnell Cover design by Luke Causby, Blue Cork Front cover image: Don Smith / Alamy Page design and typesetting by Shaun Jury Typeset in ITC New Baskerville and Klinic Slab National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry (pbk) Creator: Norris, Megan, author. Title: Look what you made me do : fathers who kill / Megan Norris. ISBN: 9781760061838 (paperback) ISBN: 9781760061852 (ebook : epub) ISBN: 9781760061845 (ebook : mobi) Subjects: Filicide–Australia–Case studies. Children–Crimes against–Case studies. Marital conflict–Australia. Father and child–Australia. Family violence–Australia. Victims of family violence–Australia. Homicide–Australia–Case studies. Dewey Number: 364.152083 @echo_publishing @echo_publishing facebook.com/echopublishingAU In memory of Kelly East, Jessie and Patrick Dalton, Jai, Tyler and Bailey Farquharson, Jack, Maddie and Bon Bell, Yazmina Acar, Darcey Freeman, and Marilyn and Sebastian Kongsom. And all the other innocents who have been used as weapons to punish their mothers. Contents INTRODUCTION ‘Paybk u slut’ 1 CHAPTER 1 ‘You’re going to pay for your actions for a long time.’ The story of Michelle Steck and Kelly East 29 CHAPTER 2 ‘If you’d done as you were told it wouldn’t have happened.’ The story of Dionne Fehring, Patrick and Jessie Dalton 67 CHAPTER 3 ‘Nobody does that to me and gets away with it.’ The story of Cindy Gambino and Jai, Tyler and Bailey Farquharson 107 CHAPTER 4 ‘Say goodbye to your children — you’ll never see them again.’ The story of Peta Barnes and Darcey Freeman 143 CHAPTER 5 ‘Look what you made me do!’ The story of Rachelle D’Argent and Yazmina Micheline Acar 183 CHAPTER 6 ‘I can’t live without my kids — and they can’t live without me!’ The story of Karen, Jack, Maddie and Bon Bell 221 CHAPTER 7 ‘If he couldn’t have them — nobody else could.’ The story of Ingrid Poulson and Marilyn and Sebastian Kongsom 253 Family and Domestic Violence Support Services 290 Sources 291 Acknowledgements 295 INTRODUCTION ‘Paybk u slut’ Prominent Melbourne criminologist Judy Wright once told me that when women were asked to nominate the worst possible thing a partner could do to them, their answers were always the same. Far more horrifying than having acid thrown in your face, or being set on fire to suffer a lifetime of disfigurement or a horrible death, women uniformly said that the most agonising punishment a spouse or former partner could possibly inflict on them would be to murder their children. Nothing could ever top the crime of filicide (the murder of a child under the age of 18 by a parent), explained Judy; not when that crime was motivated by spite and an overriding desire to pay a woman back for ending a relationship. Surviving with the guilt, knowing that her children had been killed to punish her, was the worst kind of suffering any mother could imagine. Tragically, studies in Australia reveal that 85 per cent of all child homicides are carried out by a parent. In 2014, a ground-breaking statistical overview of the ‘tragic phenomena of filicide’ in the United States revealed that over the past three decades, American parents committed filicide approximately 500 times each year. Worryingly, supporting research from around the world shows the majority of those offenders are the victims’ biological fathers. Determining motives for filicide is difficult and complex. However, in her 2012 discussion paper ‘Just Say Goodbye’, Dr Debbie Kirkwood, a renowned researcher in this area, says that records from the 2010 Annual Report from the National Homicide Prevention 1 2 Look what you made me do Monitoring Program revealed that 35 per cent of all child murders recorded in Australia between 1997 and 2008 had been triggered by the collapse of a relationship. International filicide studies have identified different categories for child murder, not including the killing of newborn babies, known as neonaticide. Dr Kirkwood cites a 1969 study conducted by US psychiatrist Dr Phillip Resnick, who identified five different types of child murder: Altruistic — when a parent murders a child to protect it from real or imagined suffering. Acutely psychotic — the parent who kills under the influence of a severe mental illness or in the grip of a psychotic episode. Unwanted child — killings where the children are obstacles in a parent’s life. Fatal abuse murder — resulting from maltreatment or neglect. Spousal revenge murder — killing a child to punish its mother. Dr Kirkwood says her own research for the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria shows that younger children are more at risk of fatal abuse or accidental death, and that these types of killings are more likely to be perpetrated by mothers. But she says retaliatory filicides, or spousal revenge murders, are different. Purposeful or intentional murders tend to be committed against older children and are crimes borne out of a specific intention to kill. They are crimes of revenge in which children are used by an aggrieved partner to punish a current or former spouse. Dr Kirkwood points out that while there are documented cases where mothers have also murdered their children out of revenge, international studies into retaliatory filicides have consistently shown that most child revenge killings are perpetrated by men. In such killings there is likely to be a history of violence towards the intimate partner or other family members, while mothers who kill their own children have often been the victims of family violence. In 2015 Professor Myrna Dawson, Chair of Public Policy and Criminal Justice at the University of Guelph in Canada and a member of the International Homicide Research Working Group, conducted ‘Paybk u slut’ 3 one of the most extensive reviews of filicide ever undertaken. Studying Statistics Canada data covering more than 50 years of family homicides nationally, she discovered that between 1961 and 2011 at least 1612 Canadian children had been killed by a parent. Again, she found the majority of offenders were biological fathers, who were more likely than offending mothers to take their own lives after the crime. What is telling, says Professor Dawson, is that statistics since 1991 showed there had been more reports of domestic violence leading up to these crimes, and that killer fathers were far more likely to be motivated by feelings of jealousy and a desire for revenge than mothers who killed their own offspring. The fact that males are more likely to kill their children has also been supported by a groundbreaking UK study published in August 2013 in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice by researchers from the University of Birmingham. After trawling through newspaper cuttings of cases of family homicides which occurred between 1980 and 2012, the research team identified four different types of killer whom they coined the family ‘annihilator’. Professor David Wilson, director of the university’s Centre of Applied Criminology and one of the study’s three authors, explained that prior to this study, family annihilators had received little attention as a separate category of killer; previously these types of family killers had been viewed as ‘spree’ killers or serial murderers — offenders who had simply ‘snapped’ and gone on to murder their families. But this was not necessarily the case. The most common characteristic of familicides was that 60 per cent of all family annihilators were male and that the crime was on the rise. Over half of the family homicides the researchers examined had been committed in the first decade of the millennium. And most of the offenders were men in their thirties, while 10 per cent were younger and the oldest offender was 59. In England, the trigger time for the family annihilator appeared to be the northern-hemisphere-summer school holiday period when fathers had more access to their children. The UK study also found that around half of all family murders take place at the weekend, 4 Look what you made me do particularly on a Sunday. Research conducted by the Australian institute of Criminology confirms that Sunday is the most dangerous day of the week for children, probably because this is when the majority of youngsters are returning from weekend access visits with their fathers.

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