Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  While her father was attacking her, he told her it was because he loved her and that he was also going to Newcastle to kill her former husband.

  He said to her, ‘We are all better off this way. This is the way it has to be.’3

  John Walsh fled after the attacks and was captured while staying in a motel in the town of Hay in the Riverina. Walsh, who was seventy at the time of his sentencing, showed no emotion as he was given two life sentences for murdering his grandchildren, at least fifteen years for murdering his wife and at least twelve for trying to murder his daughter.4

  Surely he was feeling something that day? Regret? Sadness? His face gave nothing away.

  As Walsh had pleaded guilty before the case got to trial, I heard some of the facts about it for the first time when he was sentenced. The court heard Walsh believed the murders were a ‘mercy killing’ because his wife was unwell and he had planned to kill his grandchildren because no one would be around to look after them.5 He had also planned to kill himself.

  As the sentencing remarks unfolded, the judge went into the details of the tragic murders, describing how Walsh repeatedly bashed his fifty-two year old wife with a hammer and a block of wood and stabbed her. Justice Lucy McCallum said he then filled the bath with water and woke his five year old granddaughter, whom the judge called ‘JH’, telling her she had to go to the toilet.

  ‘She was half asleep so he carried her to the bath where he pushed her underwater and held her down until she drowned. He said that JH had struggled against him but not strongly and that she had kicked a little and then she went quiet. He laid her body out on the bathroom floor to let the water drain out of her pyjamas before putting her back in her bed,’ Justice McCallum said.6

  Walsh then woke his seven year old grandson, who the judge called KH, and told him that he had to go to the toilet. The judge said as the boy was walking back to his bedroom, Walsh hit him repeatedly on the back of the head with the hammer, put him in the bath to make sure he was dead and then put him back into his bed as well.

  The judge said, after killing the little boy Walsh drowned the family dog in the bath, wrapped it in plastic and put it under a bed because he thought there would be no one left to care for it when he left the house.

  Justice McCallum said Walsh was not remorseful and committed brutal, criminal acts. There were audible gasps in the public gallery when some of the horrendous details of the murders were revealed for the first time.

  Everything went quiet when Justice McCallum got to the bit about the killing of the family dog. The judge paused for some time after that bit of information. Even though the brutal murder of the other family members was awful, killing the dog as well somehow seemed to highlight how senseless this man’s crimes were.

  I looked at Walsh in that moment and struggled to comprehend his motive. I thought about how my grandparents used to babysit me when I was a child in Cobar and what a gentle and kind man my grandfather Don Wells was and how I trusted him.

  Grandparents usually dote on their grandchildren and have a special relationship with them. This man was physically not unlike my grandfather, who had introduced me to horses as a young child and made excuses to his wife, Doris, for the awful mess I made pretending to cook in their kitchen. Sitting up close to John Walsh, I thought he looked no different to the older men you see sitting outside cafés and hotels in country towns.

  Justice McCallum described John Walsh’s actions as ‘wicked in the extreme’. She said he abused the trust of his grandchildren, used a high degree of violence and inflicted terror that no child should know.

  Outside court Shelly Walsh said, although she could never get her mother or her children back, whatever justice was left for them had been achieved.7

  As I held my ABC microphone up near Shelly Walsh’s face outside court after her father’s sentence, I thought about how her world had been taken away from her. Her mother and her children were gone. And her own father had tried to kill her too. Even though he was now going to stay in jail, had she had any real victory?

  That’s the thing about punishment for a crime. No murder sentence, even if it is jail for life, will take away the loss and suffering for the family and friends of a victim.

  The stress of a long-running court case for some families can be overwhelming. It changes their lives and can drain their finances.

  When I filed my first story on John Walsh’s sentence, the radio editor on the day was concerned about the horrific content and questioned if we should be running it at all. That’s like a red flag to any reporter who wants their story run, so I immediately spoke to the news director. Every other media outlet in Sydney was in the court and we would be the only ones without the story. They agreed to run it, but it was a good reminder of the dilemma faced by newsrooms almost every day when running crime and court stories. Our job is to report the facts but how much should we sanitise them?

  Coming out of court that day, I overheard someone in the public gallery say, ‘At least the bastard can’t hurt anyone else now.’

  John Walsh came into my world again on 3 January 2017. At the age of seventy-seven, he was again charged with murder.

  His cellmate, seventy-one year old convicted killer Frank Townsend, was bashed to death with a sandwich press stuffed into a pillow case in Sydney’s Long Bay jail. Townsend had been released in 2016 after serving his sentence for the manslaughter of Belinda Trad, whose body was found with gunshot wounds in 2010. He had gone back to jail after breaching his parole conditions. Walsh and Townsend were cellmates in a section of the jail for elderly and frail inmates.8

  Kiesha

  When the prison van arrived at the Supreme Court on 18 July 2013 for the sentencing of Kristi Abrahams for murder, a group of women carrying placards ran after it shouting abuse at her. I watched them from where I was waiting outside the court in King Street and wondered what the thirty year old sitting inside the van was thinking.

  That day came almost three years after Abrahams and her de facto partner Robert Smith buried her six year old daughter Keisha’s body in bushland in Sydney’s west.9 The little girl had died after years of physical abuse.

  The group of self-declared supporters of Keisha, some of whom were neighbours and some others who barely knew her, had turned up at the multiple court appearances for Abrahams and Smith, even before they were sentenced. The supporters wore purple T-shirts and carried placards with Keisha’s name and photo on them. They were like a chorus of hatred in a Greek Tragedy, commentating on the morality of a child killer.

  During one Abrahams court appearance, a woman screamed out at her, ‘I never even knew her and I loved her more than you.’

  The court sheriffs usually tried to seat the supporters on their own, away from the media and Keisha’s family members due to the high emotion and aggressive atmosphere in the gallery.

  It reminded me of the tirade of hatred and abuse heaped on Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton by perfect strangers when she was wrongfully convicted of murdering her nine-week-old daughter Azaria at Ayers Rock in 1980. Each day as I left court during Kristi Abraham’s appearances in suburban local courts when she was first charged, I thought about the Lindy Chamberlain case.

  I also thought about the long waiting lists for adoption and friends who had tried for years to adopt and how Keisha’s death resulted from senseless neglect on many levels.

  At first, her family captured public sympathy when they called triple 0 and reported Keisha missing from their Mount Druitt home in western Sydney in August 2010. They joined police in a public appeal for help to find her and made statements on television sobbing and holding tissues to their faces.

  Kristi Abrahams said, ‘If anyone has seen her, can they please contact the police.’

  ‘Last time I saw her was, we were watching a movie together, you know?’ Robert Smith said. ‘Anyone, someone must know something. Please come forward. She’s beautiful, you know? Funny, always happy.’10

  But former neighbours alleged Kri
sti Abrahams lied to them even though they tried to help her find her daughter. It would later be revealed that about a fortnight before the public appeal, Keisha had been physically harmed by Abrahams who did not bother to call an ambulance or get medical help for her daughter’s serious injuries. Robert Smith knew the child was injured but also failed to get medical help.

  A few days after she died, Abrahams and Smith had put her body in a suitcase and left it there for several days before burning it and burying the remains in bushland near Shalvey in Sydney’s west. The couple then tried to destroy evidence that would link them to her death by throwing away their clothes, shoes and mobile phone SIM cards.

  They bought children’s toys that included a Tinkerbell poster to make it look as though the little girl was still alive.11

  Eight months after Kiesha disappeared, Kristi Abrahams told an undercover police officer a story about her death.

  Abrahams sat in the dock, hunched over with her head down, when the video of her conversation with the officer was played to the Supreme Court on 27 June 2013. The video was not released by the court until the day she was sentenced a month later. In the video, in which she broke down at times, she told the officer that on 18 July 2010 she ‘nudged’ her daughter who was lying on the floor, with her foot, to try to get her to put on her pyjamas. Abrahams said Kiesha then jumped and hit her head on the bed. She said the child went ‘funny’ and ‘like jelly’ but was still breathing so she put her in the shower to try to wake her up. Abrahams said Kiesha kept making strange noises which she thought would go away.

  ‘When we woke up in the morning . . . she wasn’t breathing,’ she told the undercover officer. Abrahams then told him she later went with Smith to bury Kiesha’s body .

  ‘He put petrol on her . . . and branches on her,’ she said in the video.12

  Abrahams and Smith were arrested soon after they took the undercover officer to the bush grave where Keisha’s body lay buried.

  An autopsy later revealed that Kiesha had in fact sustained numerous injuries including teeth fractures and ten separate head injuries in the days leading up to her death. There was evidence she was physically abused throughout her short life, but no proof that it was her mother who had inflicted all of those injuries.13

  In June 2013, Abrahams pleaded guilty to murder, two years after she was charged and the day her murder trial was due to start. Did she lose her nerve or listen to advice from her lawyers? Inside the courtroom the day she was sentenced on 18 July 2013, it was no surprise she sat with her back to the public gallery. She showed no emotion at all but I could see her clenching her fists tightly and running her hands down the side of her neck. The verbal stoning in court reached fever pitch as she was led away.

  ‘Rot in hell!’ someone in the public gallery screamed.

  Many in court thought that a minimum of sixteen years and a maximum of twenty-two for charges of murder and interfering with the child’s body simply wasn’t long enough.

  Some of the police officers who were in court that day looked at each other when Justice Ian Harrison said Abrahams had shown remorse. They obviously did not agree. Justice Ian Harrison had his reasons. He found that the crime ranked in the mid-range of seriousness, because it was an impulsive and uncontrolled act of violence. The judge said while Abrahams had intended to cause ‘serious injury’ to Kiesha, there was not enough evidence to find that she intended to kill her. Justice Harrison took Kristi Abrahams’ experiences growing up into account, noting that her anger and resentment about her childhood affected her parenting.

  He said her childhood was frightening and tragic because she was around domestic violence. At the age of just ten, she found her own mother dead and she was sent to various foster and group homes. The judge said she was also the subject of anti-Aboriginal comments as a child, had an intellectual disability and was unlikely to reoffend.

  ‘The death of the deceased is the foreseeable and predictable consequence of preventable, cyclic abuse,’ he said. ‘The offenders’ failings are mirrored in the failings of others.’14

  Outside, former neighbour Alison Anderson said she thought Kristi Abrahams knew exactly what she was doing and there was no excuse for what she did to her daughter. The officer in charge of the investigation into Kiesha’s death, Russell Oxford, was emotional.

  ‘If nothing else comes out of today, we should all take stock of where we are in this world and go home and hug our kids,’ he said.15

  Robert Smith was dealt with by the courts separately. He was jailed for at least twelve years after pleading guilty to manslaughter and being an accessory to murder for knowing Keisha was injured but not doing anything to help her. In sentencing him on 3 May 2013 Justice Megan Latham said his actions after the little girl’s death were ‘particularly heinous’ because he put her body in a suitcase, took it to a bushland grave and set her body on fire.

  ‘These were not spontaneous, ill-considered acts carried out in panic,’ Justice Latham said.

  Outside court that day his father, Gordon Smith, said he hoped his son would use his time in jail to think about the crime he had committed.

  ‘She was a lovely little girl, lovely,’ Gordon Smith said. ‘Too bad she didn’t have parents who loved her as much as everybody else did.’16

  The sadness of this story was intensified by the fact that Keisha had been on the radar of welfare authorities for years before her death, yet was left with the couple and the abuse continued. A lot of this information was revealed when Kristi Abrahams was sentenced.

  When Kiesha was just fifteen-months old, the Department of Community Services (which is now called the Department of Family and Community Services) put her into foster care after Abrahams bit her on the shoulder. The child was then for some reason, given back to Kristi Abrahams, who had had anger-management counselling and was put on a parental-care plan.

  At the age of three, she told a DoCS worker her mother had burnt her with a cigarette and family members and neighbours had reported their concerns about her injuries many times.

  School teachers reported bruises on her face and department officials often knocked on the door because she had only gone to school four times in her life. It’s so hard to imagine how her parents got away with that. Yet she was allowed to stay in the house with an abusive mother and stepfather.17

  Keisha’s death raised debate about where we draw the line on taking abused children away from their parents and how the welfare system let this little girl down. Talking about this case in hindsight with ABC Radio Sydney Drive presenter Richard Glover, he said it filled him with great sadness but he still struggled to understand the vigilante mentality the court watchers who followed the case had about a mother jailed for harming her own child.18

  Memorials are still held by neighbours each year in the bushland where Kiesha’s burnt remains were buried by Abrahams and Smith.

  Ebony

  The circumstances in which a seven year old autistic girl died in her own home at Hawks Nest north of Sydney are like something out of a horror movie. ‘Ebony’ is the name Justice Robert Hulme gave to the girl who was locked in her bedroom in squalid conditions and starved to death. The judge made the decision to name her at her parent’s 2009 trial to try to give the child some dignity after her death. Justice Hulme said Ebony was abandoned and so badly neglected that ‘maintaining her anonymity would perpetuate the abandonment’.19

  Ebony was found dead in her bedroom by her mother, early on Saturday 3 November 2007.

  This court case started in East Maitland with the couple’s trial, but after they were found guilty, it moved to Sydney for them to be sentenced.

  I heard in court, during her parents sentencing, that the little girl was a virtual skeleton when she died, weighing just nine kilograms, which is about a third of what she should have weighed at that age.20 Her parents didn’t take her to her medical appointments and didn’t get her the special services authorities recommended for her or send her to a special needs school that w
ould have sent a bus to collect her each day. Her room smelled of urine and faeces and there were ropes on her bed and around her door handle to stop her leaving her room. She had been forced to use her bedroom floor as a toilet.

  The sentencing judge told the court that when Ebony’s mother found her dead she said there was a black discharge and bull ants crawling from the child’s mouth. She said she held her daughter and sang to her, but it was six hours before an ambulance was called. The evidence about the ants crawling out of the little girl’s mouth had a massive impact on some people in the public gallery and they started to cry. I remember pausing a few times during the judgment with my pen hovering over my notebook and wondering how could anyone treat a living thing so badly?

  Was it ignorance?

  Denial?

  Indifference?

  A combination of all three?

  The court heard that both parents abused prescription drugs such as Valium and Panadeine Forte. Was that really an excuse?

  On 2 October 2009 her mother, as her main carer, was jailed for life for murder but the sentence was later downgraded to a minimum of thirty years on appeal.21 The child’s father was given a minimum twelve-year sentence for manslaughter.

  There are two parts of Justice Rothman’s judgment that I found so terribly sad that I have never forgotten them. The first is his reference to a neighbour who used to see Ebony through her bedroom window.

  ‘She never saw anyone with her in the room. She said she appeared to be left in the room for lengthy periods of time with the door closed.’ the judge said.22

  He noted that after Ebony’s bedroom window was broken in late 2006 or early 2007, wood was nailed over it and although the neighbour could hear that Ebony was still in there she never ever saw her again. Justice Rothman also noted that the couple had other children and carried on living their lives in the house with them as if Ebony wasn’t there.

  One thing that is particularly notable about the state of Ebony’s bedroom is that it contained a bed and a separate mattress that was on the floor. There was nothing else in the room. It had no sign of being a room occupied by a seven year old child. There was not a single toy. There were no decorations apart from a small picture on the wall of a sad-looking little girl. In contrast to the state of Ebony’s bedroom, the rest of the house was relatively clean and tidy. There were items in the living areas for entertainment such as a television, computers, a pool table and numerous books and DVDs.23