- Shattered lives
- By Malcolm Brown
- Sydney Morning Herald
- 17/09/2003 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: Admin ( 75 articles in 2003 )
What drives a father to slay his family? Malcolm Brown, who reported on Monday's horrifying multiple murder at Wilberforce, investigates.
On Wednesday morning, November 20, 1974, legal secretary Pauline Joy Winchester was a picture of happiness, an engagement ring on her finger, waving to her beaming mother, Dorothy, who then went to her Brisbane home to prepare for Pauline's engagement party.
Pauline was to marry an 18-year-old fitter and turner, Robert Boyle. But there was a cloud over her life - another man: 23-year-old law graduate John Campbell Edwards, who had become obsessed by her and had ignored all attempts to brush him off. Her advice to him that she was betrothed to another lit the fuse. His response was to ambush her in a Brisbane mall that morning, shoot her to death and turn the gun on himself.
Nearly 30 years after that tragedy, which this reporter covered, the commander of the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area, Assistant Commissioner Bob Waites, said in the aftermath of the Wilberforce massacre that there was "a fine line" between love and hatred, and that "we see it all the time".
The scenario of love turned to homicidal or suicidal violence has been been played out time and again, the circumstances only varying superficially. But no amount of legislation, community intervention or police precautions can guarantee the murderous passions so often engendered will not be fulfilled.
The Family Law Act was implemented shortly after Pauline's death. But many relationship failures never get to the level of the Family Court.
This week in the wooded backblocks of Wilberforce, on Sydney's north-western outskirts, another relationship ended in homicidal violence.
In Australia, 55,012 divorces were granted in 2001-02 and 37,527 from July 1 last year to the end of March. These figures are fairly consistent - more than 100,000 broken marriages every two years, and thankfully the overwhelming majority of people involved react in a moderate fashion.
But hanging over the Family Court have always been the attitudes and actions of the significant minority of people who are not rational. The majority of homicide victims have known the perpetrator, and most of those have been in domestic situations.
In an introduction to a paper delivered in June, Adam Graycar, then the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote that almost two in five homicides in Australia were committed by members of the victim's family, with an average of 129 family homicides each year.
Most of family homicides occur between intimate partners (60 per cent) and three-quarters of these involve males killing females. "On average, 25 children are killed each year by a parent, with children under the age of one at the highest risk of victimisation," the report said.
Three-quarters of these homicides, known as "filicides", occurred in a residential location and just over half occurred during the day. Sixty-eight per cent of all child victims were five or younger, and children younger than 12 months comprised 26 per cent.
The paper said: "The most prevalent motives, where known, were domestic altercations (21 per cent) and jealousy/termination of a relationship - where the killing of a child by one parent is a consequence of the actual or pending separation from the other parent (9 per cent)."
In NSW, family breakdown was found to be the precipitating factor in almost one in five filicides.
If the intentions of the perpetrators are telegraphed at all, then often they fit into the catalogue of apprehended violence orders (AVOs), introduced in the late 1980s as domestic violence orders, whose use mushroomed after people became familiar with them.
There was an obvious need. In 1989, 77 per cent of women seeking such orders cited an alleged physical assault by a spouse and 23 per cent alleged they had had one death threat or a shooting threat from a spouse.
NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research figures show that in 1996 more than 20,000 AVOs were issued, ("domestic" AVOs totalling 14,068 and "personal" coming to 6256) and the total AVO figures never went below 20,000 in each succeeding year.
In 2001, the latest year for which figures are available, there were 18,853 domestic AVOs and 7480 personal AVOs.
So what are the police to do? They are surrounded by an ocean of potential violence. For the police who went to Wilberforce on Monday morning to investigate a complaint of sexual assault, it was at the outset just another domestic "situation". According to Waites, attempts were being made to repair the marriage. After the sexual assault, the mother was "considering her options" about what legal recourses she might take.
The Family Law Act, which its architect, the then senator, Lionel Murphy, so fervently hoped would streamline and humanise the system, was designed to give as much scope as possible to repair relationships. For those not inclined to shrug their shoulders and move on, there was arbitration. But at least it made divorce easier and the formal process less acrimonious. But the changes in legislation, like shifts in the Earth's crust, simply transferred the pressures elsewhere.
The outrages over the years - including the murder of the Family Court judge David Opas, and of Family Court justice Ray Watson's wife, the bombings of Justice Richard Gee's home and a Jevovah's Witnesses meeting, and in Western Australia, Norman Drummond's murder of his children and his suicide, followed in similar fashion by Ronald Jonker, and by Barbara-Anne Wyrzykowski and Mark Heath - all showed that passions can reach a point where virtually nothing can be done, apart from locking up the potential offender.
But what system could move pre-emptively like that?
The extreme response to the Family Court has simmered down but it is still present. Men believing the Family Court had been biased against them were still "pretty active", a spokeswoman for the Family Court said yesterday.
The virtual tidal wave of enmity that taxed the then chief justice of the Family Court, Elizabeth Evatt, to a point of desperation is no longer evident. But the frustrated passions, whether specifically Family Court-related or not, remain volatile and are likely to go off in other directions.
One of these is the nihilistic impulse, where a person, normally a man, decides to wipe out himself and all those closest. In 1985, psychiatrist Harold Leyton, who had mounting financial difficulties and was confronting a sexual harassment allegation, shot dead his wife and two sons in their beds at their Chatswood home, tried to burn his house down, and committed suicide by slitting his wrists.
At Wilberforce this week, the father apparently decided to enforce his conjugal rights. His wife escaped the massacre; she was in the company of police who arrived home with her, only to witness the slaughter of her family.
Family relationships might be seen to have something to do with immortality, the hallowed place in someone's mind of the sacredness of his or her own genes. It is an area where the object of the frustration can become more important than life itself.
My late father, a country-based lawyer, was pursued for decades by a man who had lost a custody dispute to the woman whom he had represented. "I would rather handle a black snake than a family law matter. Nothing the other side does is any good. Nobody will concede anything," my father said.
In some of these circumstances, if the party cannot win, then he, or she, will kill. One such murder was that of Margaret Case, who divorced her husband, a Darwin mathematics teacher, Arthur Colin Case, in 1991, then moved to Adelaide to get away from him, and got the Family Court to issue an injunction to prevent him approaching her. Case went to Adelaide, bought a rifle, telling the salesman he wanted one "suitable for killing pigs", and shot Margaret dead.
On several occasions the Family Court has provided the venue where the final acts of vengeance have taken place - because it was a venue both were required to attend.
At the Parramatta Family Court in 1996, a Jordanian migrant, Hoss Majdalawi - whose marriage with Jean Lennon had broken up - had reached the brink. The first official indications of trouble were in 1994 when she took out an AVO against him, and in the next two years there were moves apart, moves together, breaches of AVOs, threats of suicide and increasing desperation.
On March 21, 1997, Majdalawi approached her saying: "Don't make it difficult for me to get access to the kids. I only want access." When she replied, "No way, no chance," he fired five shots into her, then gave himself up to security staff.
In Victoria, Robert Clive Parsons took issue with his former de facto, Angela, to whom he had been paying maintenance for five years. She told him she wanted more, and unless she got it he could not have access to his children. At Warnambool Family Court on December 10, 1997, he stabbed Angela 41 times, including eight times through the heart, screaming as he did so: "It's over now, bitch! It's over!"
The problem, of course, is that it is only one of the parties who has taken it on himself, or herself, to decide that it's over.
On Wednesday morning, November 20, 1974, legal secretary Pauline Joy Winchester was a picture of happiness, an engagement ring on her finger, waving to her beaming mother, Dorothy, who then went to her Brisbane home to prepare for Pauline's engagement party.
Pauline was to marry an 18-year-old fitter and turner, Robert Boyle. But there was a cloud over her life - another man: 23-year-old law graduate John Campbell Edwards, who had become obsessed by her and had ignored all attempts to brush him off. Her advice to him that she was betrothed to another lit the fuse. His response was to ambush her in a Brisbane mall that morning, shoot her to death and turn the gun on himself.
Nearly 30 years after that tragedy, which this reporter covered, the commander of the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area, Assistant Commissioner Bob Waites, said in the aftermath of the Wilberforce massacre that there was "a fine line" between love and hatred, and that "we see it all the time".
The scenario of love turned to homicidal or suicidal violence has been been played out time and again, the circumstances only varying superficially. But no amount of legislation, community intervention or police precautions can guarantee the murderous passions so often engendered will not be fulfilled.
The Family Law Act was implemented shortly after Pauline's death. But many relationship failures never get to the level of the Family Court.
This week in the wooded backblocks of Wilberforce, on Sydney's north-western outskirts, another relationship ended in homicidal violence.
In Australia, 55,012 divorces were granted in 2001-02 and 37,527 from July 1 last year to the end of March. These figures are fairly consistent - more than 100,000 broken marriages every two years, and thankfully the overwhelming majority of people involved react in a moderate fashion.
But hanging over the Family Court have always been the attitudes and actions of the significant minority of people who are not rational. The majority of homicide victims have known the perpetrator, and most of those have been in domestic situations.
In an introduction to a paper delivered in June, Adam Graycar, then the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote that almost two in five homicides in Australia were committed by members of the victim's family, with an average of 129 family homicides each year.
Most of family homicides occur between intimate partners (60 per cent) and three-quarters of these involve males killing females. "On average, 25 children are killed each year by a parent, with children under the age of one at the highest risk of victimisation," the report said.
Three-quarters of these homicides, known as "filicides", occurred in a residential location and just over half occurred during the day. Sixty-eight per cent of all child victims were five or younger, and children younger than 12 months comprised 26 per cent.
The paper said: "The most prevalent motives, where known, were domestic altercations (21 per cent) and jealousy/termination of a relationship - where the killing of a child by one parent is a consequence of the actual or pending separation from the other parent (9 per cent)."
In NSW, family breakdown was found to be the precipitating factor in almost one in five filicides.
If the intentions of the perpetrators are telegraphed at all, then often they fit into the catalogue of apprehended violence orders (AVOs), introduced in the late 1980s as domestic violence orders, whose use mushroomed after people became familiar with them.
There was an obvious need. In 1989, 77 per cent of women seeking such orders cited an alleged physical assault by a spouse and 23 per cent alleged they had had one death threat or a shooting threat from a spouse.
NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research figures show that in 1996 more than 20,000 AVOs were issued, ("domestic" AVOs totalling 14,068 and "personal" coming to 6256) and the total AVO figures never went below 20,000 in each succeeding year.
In 2001, the latest year for which figures are available, there were 18,853 domestic AVOs and 7480 personal AVOs.
So what are the police to do? They are surrounded by an ocean of potential violence. For the police who went to Wilberforce on Monday morning to investigate a complaint of sexual assault, it was at the outset just another domestic "situation". According to Waites, attempts were being made to repair the marriage. After the sexual assault, the mother was "considering her options" about what legal recourses she might take.
The Family Law Act, which its architect, the then senator, Lionel Murphy, so fervently hoped would streamline and humanise the system, was designed to give as much scope as possible to repair relationships. For those not inclined to shrug their shoulders and move on, there was arbitration. But at least it made divorce easier and the formal process less acrimonious. But the changes in legislation, like shifts in the Earth's crust, simply transferred the pressures elsewhere.
The outrages over the years - including the murder of the Family Court judge David Opas, and of Family Court justice Ray Watson's wife, the bombings of Justice Richard Gee's home and a Jevovah's Witnesses meeting, and in Western Australia, Norman Drummond's murder of his children and his suicide, followed in similar fashion by Ronald Jonker, and by Barbara-Anne Wyrzykowski and Mark Heath - all showed that passions can reach a point where virtually nothing can be done, apart from locking up the potential offender.
But what system could move pre-emptively like that?
The extreme response to the Family Court has simmered down but it is still present. Men believing the Family Court had been biased against them were still "pretty active", a spokeswoman for the Family Court said yesterday.
The virtual tidal wave of enmity that taxed the then chief justice of the Family Court, Elizabeth Evatt, to a point of desperation is no longer evident. But the frustrated passions, whether specifically Family Court-related or not, remain volatile and are likely to go off in other directions.
One of these is the nihilistic impulse, where a person, normally a man, decides to wipe out himself and all those closest. In 1985, psychiatrist Harold Leyton, who had mounting financial difficulties and was confronting a sexual harassment allegation, shot dead his wife and two sons in their beds at their Chatswood home, tried to burn his house down, and committed suicide by slitting his wrists.
At Wilberforce this week, the father apparently decided to enforce his conjugal rights. His wife escaped the massacre; she was in the company of police who arrived home with her, only to witness the slaughter of her family.
Family relationships might be seen to have something to do with immortality, the hallowed place in someone's mind of the sacredness of his or her own genes. It is an area where the object of the frustration can become more important than life itself.
My late father, a country-based lawyer, was pursued for decades by a man who had lost a custody dispute to the woman whom he had represented. "I would rather handle a black snake than a family law matter. Nothing the other side does is any good. Nobody will concede anything," my father said.
In some of these circumstances, if the party cannot win, then he, or she, will kill. One such murder was that of Margaret Case, who divorced her husband, a Darwin mathematics teacher, Arthur Colin Case, in 1991, then moved to Adelaide to get away from him, and got the Family Court to issue an injunction to prevent him approaching her. Case went to Adelaide, bought a rifle, telling the salesman he wanted one "suitable for killing pigs", and shot Margaret dead.
On several occasions the Family Court has provided the venue where the final acts of vengeance have taken place - because it was a venue both were required to attend.
At the Parramatta Family Court in 1996, a Jordanian migrant, Hoss Majdalawi - whose marriage with Jean Lennon had broken up - had reached the brink. The first official indications of trouble were in 1994 when she took out an AVO against him, and in the next two years there were moves apart, moves together, breaches of AVOs, threats of suicide and increasing desperation.
On March 21, 1997, Majdalawi approached her saying: "Don't make it difficult for me to get access to the kids. I only want access." When she replied, "No way, no chance," he fired five shots into her, then gave himself up to security staff.
In Victoria, Robert Clive Parsons took issue with his former de facto, Angela, to whom he had been paying maintenance for five years. She told him she wanted more, and unless she got it he could not have access to his children. At Warnambool Family Court on December 10, 1997, he stabbed Angela 41 times, including eight times through the heart, screaming as he did so: "It's over now, bitch! It's over!"
The problem, of course, is that it is only one of the parties who has taken it on himself, or herself, to decide that it's over.
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625034853.html?from=storyrhs
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