Murder charge against Cy Walsh is another in Adelaide’s long history of heartbreaking mental illness cases
CY Walsh will face court on Monday over the alleged murder of his former Adelaide Crows coach father — another in South Australia’s long history of heartbreaking mental illness cases.
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EVERY case that goes before the state’s courts is a tragedy, but few are as heartbreaking as those involving matters of mental incompetence.
On Monday, Cy Walsh is due to face the Supreme Court accused of murdering his father, former Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh.
He has already pleaded not guilty by reason of mental incompetence, and his future hinges on the court’s acceptance of that plea.
If it is accepted, Walsh will face a lifetime of supervised mental health care, most likely in detention. If it is refused, he will have to stand trial for murder.
Walsh is presently one of eight people remanded to James Nash House because they are considered mentally unfit to enter pleas to, or stand trial over, serious charges. But SA’s history is pockmarked by dozens of incidents, born of illness, that have seen ordinary people turn against those closest to them.
THE MASKED GUNMEN
The ominous handwritten letter Natalie Genine McAvoy found in her letterbox in January 2002 warned that her life was “about to change”.
The next day, two masked men burst into McAvoy’s home in Craigmore and at gunpoint forced her to drown her three-month-old son, Nathan, in his bathtub.
Having undergone a mother’s worst nightmare, McAvoy collapsed and was later found unconscious by her husband Gerald.
The true horror, however, was yet to come — her encounter with the masked men had never happened, and was instead a delusion caused by her mental illness.
The ominous letter, and several others she had received prior to it, had all been written by McAvoy herself in a desperate attempt to stave off the impending tragedy.
One of just 100 post-partum depression sufferers whose illness turns psychotic, McAvoy had been beset by paranoia, mood swings, hallucinations and delusions.
In July 2003, the Supreme Court found her not guilty of murdering Nathan by reason of mental incompetence.
Deemed unlikely to reoffend, she was allowed to serve her lifelong limiting term in the community and left court with her supportive husband by her side.
HAND-IN-HAND
He walked into the offices of the City of Tea Tree Gully, held up his bloody knife and asked the shocked staff if they would please call the police.
“I’ve just killed my wife,” Roman Ignatius Jadrych told them.
It was November 2002, and Roman and his wife Janina had been walking their dog. Without warning, he produced the 40cm carving knife he’d taken from their kitchen and stabbed Janina 40 times, finishing his attack by cutting a “Z” into her cheek.
Despite Roman’s statement to council staff, Janina survived, and as the Supreme Court would later learn, she had forgiven him the very moment the knife pierced her flesh.
Roman had worked for years as a psychiatric nurse and in the cruellest of ironies, had experienced a breakdown of his own mental health. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder.
Roman’s bail conditions banned him from approaching Janina, a restriction neither she nor their children would accept. She petitioned first the Magistrates and then the Supreme Court to let him come home and when she won, accompanied him to every hearing, walking hand-in-hand with him.
In 2005, Jadrych was found not guilty by reason of mental incompetence and allowed to serve his 10-year limiting term at home.
A DAD’S BURDEN
As his 75th birthday approached, Frank Harton worried about who would care for his intellectually disabled son Chris after he was gone.
In February 2008, he opted to end both his anxiety and Chris’ life by using a .22 calibre sawn-off rifle.
“Since my boy was young he’s lived with me ... everything we do, we do together,” he told a court. “He relies on me to do things and I’ve been worried about him, thinking what’s going to happen to him when I’m gone.’’
Chris, 47, who had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old boy, survived the shooting — albeit with a broken jaw — and Harton was charged with attempted murder. Three psychologists agreed Harton had been suffering from a depressive illness with psychotic episodes, rendering him mentally incompetent at the time of the offence.
The Supreme Court ordered he serve his eight-and-a-half-year limiting term in detention, and Harton is currently seeking a relaxation of his licence conditions.
ERODED BY LOVE AND TRAUMA
Day after day, Beverley Eitzen watched her teenage son Peter violently destroy her home and treasured possessions.
She remained devoted to him despite it all, as Peter’s disability left him with the mental capacity of a toddler. And so she endured the damage to her house, the broken furniture and doors, the cupboards and refrigerators locked for safety, as her son grew more violent.
What Eitzen did not realise was that far more than her home was being destroyed — her emotional state was eroding as well.
In the end, it was chronic depression, not Eitzen, that killed Peter in July 2009.
A traumatised Eitzen, who had intended to kill herself as well, drove her son’s body to the Mount Barker Police Station, where she was arrested and charged with murder.
Eitzen’s illness was chronic depression, and three psychologists reminded the Supreme Court just how debilitating, dangerous and life-altering that condition can be. They said she had become overwhelmed, helpless and concerned about her son’s safety, resulting in a significant impairment of her faculties.
In June 2011, the court found Eitzen not guilty due to mental incompetence, and she began her lifelong limiting term in the community.
A QUESTION OF RISK
It took Andrew Brown mere minutes to carry a piece of furniture inside — and when he stepped back into the yard, his beloved wife Joyce was dead.
It was May 15, 2010, and the couple’s daughter, Vicky Wagner, had used a knife to murder Joyce with 146 stab wounds.
In the days that followed, Wagner’s traumatised family learned of her decade-long battle with mental illness — a struggle that had been kept from them by authorities due to privacy laws. She had been receiving treatment for schizophrenia since 2002, and her illness was full blown the day she mutilated her mother.
In July 2011, Wagner was ordered to spend the rest of her life in mental health detention. Her sister, Michelle Chamberlain, watched tearfully from the Supreme Court’s public gallery. Unfortunately, Ms Chamberlain’s personal trauma was set to intensify.
Two years later she learned, second-hand, that authorities were considering moving Wagner to a lower-security facility to start a phased release program. Kept out of the official loop, she turned to The Advertiser for help and won the right to have a say in her sister’s future.
However, the family still fears that Wagner’s release is inevitable and say that will force them to uproot their lives and move house in order to remain safe.
90 SECONDS OF CARNAGE
Luc and Rika Mombers believed leaving South Africa and moving to Adelaide would give their family a safer life — a dream that took just 90 seconds to shatter.
Acutely affected by mental illness, Donato Corbo — the son of their new neighbours — shot and killed Mr Mombers in April 2011. Wielding his father’s gun, Corbo also killed Mr Mombers’ in-laws, Korbus and Annetjie Snyman, and tried to hunt down Mrs Mombers and her son.
When police officers Travis Emms and Brett Gibbons tried to rescue what remained of the family, they too were shot and grievously wounded.
Corbo’s actions were driven by paranoid schizophrenia — he believed the devil was ordering him to take up arms against the Mombers and Snymans. He was found not guilty of multiple offences, including murder and attempted murder, by reason of mental incompetence and detained for the rest of his life.
The ruling was cold comfort for Mrs Mombers, who would tell the Supreme Court of her struggle to pick up the pieces of her life.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening, it was unimaginable ... we didn’t do anything to this man for him to do such an inhuman act,” she said in her victim impact statement. “He has destroyed our lives and our happiness ... how could you kill people like that? How could you shoot at children?”
THE POSSESSED CHILD
Catherine Anne Pallin walked into a Stirling shop with a chilling request — she wanted help deciding whether her daughter was good or evil. On that day in May 2013, concerned staff and customers listened as the terrified mother explained she could normally “tell whether people were light or dark”.
They would later describe Pallin as caring, gentle and tender toward little Ayeesha, despite her fears the toddler had been possessed by an evil entity she could not detect.
The young family received assistance that day, but there was no one to help them eight weeks later when Ayeesha’s body was found at Flaxley in the Adelaide Hills.
While in a psychotic state, Pallin had drowned the two-year-old in a nearby dam to spare her an “awful life” and because it was “the best thing she could do to stop her pain”.
Although Pallin had spent time in mental heath care after the Stirling incident, she had refused to take medication upon her release because it did not fit with her “clean living” beliefs.
Charged with murder, she was found not guilty by reason of mental incompetence in December 2014. Doctors agreed she had been “unable to reason with a marked degree of sense and composure about the wrongfulness of her actions because of her acute psychotic symptoms”.
‘I KILL HUSBAND’
Elderly couple Lucia and Antonio Colella had lived together for decades, raising their loving family in the western suburbs of Adelaide.
Then, as her husband slept in July 2014, Lucia repeatedly — and fatally — attacked him with an axe and a knife.
A shocked ambulance worker, who answered Mr Colella’s medic alert bracelet, was greeted at the door by a psychotic, axe-wielding woman muttering “killing husband”.
Insight into the savage attack came from Colella’s subsequent psychiatric appointments. She reported visual hallucinations of dead people, some of whom were talking to her but she could not understand what they were saying.
“She felt scared and paranoid by this ... when she goes to sleep she sees things around her, seemingly dead people,” one report stated.
Her husband’s deteriorating condition, which required constant care, finally caused the 76-year-old to snap. Her diminutive, introverted appearances in court belied the brutality of the killing. Charged with murder, Colella, who was supported by her family throughout her case, said “no, not guilty” almost inaudibly.
In December, the court agreed with expert evidence that she had been psychotic and found her not guilty of murder due to mental incompetence.
‘NO GOOD BONE’ IN A PSYCHOPATH
Internet research convinced entrepreneur outdoorsman David Janzow of one thing above all else — that he was a psychopath.
Prior to July 2014, Janzow — a beloved husband and father of two — slipped into a depressive state plagued by manic, bipolar thoughts.
Worse still, he came to believe his four-year-old son, Luca, was also growing up to become a psychopath and irrationally concluded the boy had to die.
“I knew this was bad, but everyone would be better off,” he would later tell a psychiatrist.
“I knew murder was bad but I just had to get rid of us because there was no good bone in a psychopath.”
And so he left his marital bed, woke Luca, took him to a secluded place where he stabbed and killed him before turning the knife on himself.
Luca died from his injuries, but Janzow did not.
His “forever grieving” wife, Julia Trinne, used Janzow’s Supreme Court case to call for mental health reform.
She told the court she had no idea how bad her husband’s mental health had become and had loved him until the very moment he committed the atrocity.
Janzow said little in court but shed tears as his wife reminisced on the life, and the love, they once shared.
Prosecutors chose not to oppose the diagnoses of doctors, and Janzow was found not guilty to murder by reason of mental incompetence.
He is being held at James Nash House indefinitely.
ALIEN PARENTS
Nicholas Chattaway knew his parents were aliens sent to torture him before the imminent end of the world, because the 10 small men on his roof had told him so.
On October 29, 2014, his schizophrenia erupted in an attack on both parents with four knives and a barbecue prong.
When police came to their Torrens Park home, Chattaway attacked them too, and had to be tasered 15 times before he could be subdued.
Supreme Court documents would later reveal what drove Chattaway, 22, into a frenzy.
“On the day of the offence his parents were doing odd jobs, including gardening,” the documents state.
“His father was using a chainsaw. This freaked him out (and) the voices said ‘they are going to kill you’.”
Both parents suffered multiple wounds but survived.
Prosecutors did not oppose Justice Anne Bampton’s finding that Chattaway was not fit to stand trial.
He is being held at James Nash House indefinitely.
For information about the prevention of suicide, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, the SANE Helpline on 1800 18 SANE (7263) or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.
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