It was the stench emanating from beneath the front door of the modest four-bedroom house at Parafield Gardens which gave the first putrid clue to the horrors which lay inside.
When uniformed police looking for five children feared to have been abused knocked on the door on a Sunday night in June, 2008, they were confronted by a scene of appalling squalor and deprivation.
Living among piles of rubbish, filthy bedding, faeces, maggots, flies, cockroaches, dirty dishes and mountains of unwashed clothes, were five adults, 15 children ranging from infants to teenagers, a piglet and seven dogs.
The appalling discovery triggered an wide-ranging inquiry into what would become known across SA as the infamous “House of Horrors”.
The case exposed serious failings within the state’s child protection system which still remain 14 years later.
Court hearings would hear how five of the children had been beaten, starved, forced to stand for hours against walls and fed food scraps left behind by the other children and, on occasions, dog food.
At the height of public outrage over their appalling treatment, the state’s welfare department was derided when it said their eventual rescue by social workers was a “cause of celebration” as it showed how well the child protection system was working.
One department representative told reporters that social workers who visited the house the night 12 children were taken to hospital had sat with its occupants on its floor and eaten a meal as “it was so clean”.
It was also said that residents who had claimed it was “a pigsty” were “media grandstanding” and that “the mother has done remarkable job, she should be given a medal”.
This drew an angry response from one neighbour, who told The Advertiser she saw human excrement smeared on walls and “filthy” bare floors with no bedding, furniture or appliances such as a fridge or washing machine.
“They have got nothing, absolutely nothing,” she said. “How can kids live like that?
“They’re just sleeping on floors. The place just stank. How anyone can say it is hygienic enough for children is beyond me.”
Three years later when the perpetrator of the most of the dreadful abuse – former Victorian woman Tania Staker – faced court, the full extent of what had happened inside the house was finally revealed.
The sordid saga began in 2003 with the decision by the mother of 12 children from various fathers to move to SA from Geelong when she came to the attention of authorities.
Neighbours had complained to a residential tenancy tribunal, saying they were fed up with being verbally abused by Staker and visitors to her squalid public housing property. They described it as an unhygienic eyesore, with its backyard filled with car bodies, tyres, junk and soiled nappies.
As official scrutiny increased on Staker on how she was caring for her children, she brought them to Adelaide. She progressively was joined by her brother Michael Quinlivan, her sister, partner Luke Armistead, his stepfather Robert Armistead and Armistead’s former partner, who had five children with him and two more with other men.
The group ended up in two Housing SA properties in Adelaide’s north – one at Elizabeth Grove, the other at Casuarina Dve, Parafield Gardens. With 21 children ranging from infants to teenagers to accommodate, they moved between the two houses.
Neighbours started to become concerned in 2006 when they began seeing toddlers in soiled nappies playing at night-time outside the Housing SA property at Parafield Gardens.
One resident rang police several times while two notifications were received by the Department of Child Protection between May 2006 and June 2008. No intervention was taken at any stage.
All this changed on June 22, 2008, when Armistead’s former girlfriend took her five-year-old son to the Lyell McEwin Hospital at Elizabeth Vale, where he was found to be suffering from malnutrition, scabies and hypothermia.
The heavily pregnant woman, then 28, told medical staff she had six other children who also may be in a similar condition. Nurses called the police, with patrols sent to Parafield Gardens to check on their welfare. They instead found Staker’s 12 children inside the filthy house.
Patrols were dispatched to Elizabeth Grove where four other children were found to be seriously ill. A fleet of ambulances was dispatched, with residents told to stay inside while a total of 16 children were taken to hospital from the two properties.
The mother of the five-year-old boy already receiving treatment at the Lyell McEwin Hospital was driven to the Elizabeth Police Station.
Detectives interviewed her for several hours before charging her with serious criminal neglect for failing to provide food, shelter and medical attention to her children.
The following morning, The Advertiser was the first media organisation to attempt to speak to four adults who remained inside the Parafield Gardens property with 12 children who had been returned from the Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
Speaking from behind its closed front door, an unidentified woman said they had been examined and discharged into her care. “We haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong being done here, they’re fine. If there were any concerns they wouldn’t be here, they would be in child protection.”
During a media conference, then families and communities Minister Jay Weatherill revealed six of the children remained in a serious condition in hospital. Mr Weatherill, who later would become the state’s premier, said he was shocked at the number of children in “such poor health”.
“It’s fortunate the mother sought medical help for one of her children,” he said.
“We have some gravely ill children and I am concerned that we could have had a death in this situation.”
Despite Mr Weatherill’s concerns, it was not until the following day that police descended on the Parafield Gardens property.
Detectives, forensic investigators and uniformed officers donned personal protective equipment before going inside the house. Others went into its backyard, strewn with car bodies, dirty mattresses and piles of rubbish, taking videos and photographs of the mess they encountered.
A RSPCA inspector removed two dogs, leaving behind a piglet, 12 rabbits and five more dogs, including two Maltese Shih tzu puppies bought from a pet shop days earlier.
It would be another two days before social workers arrived in two Toyota Tarago vans and two Toyota Camry sedans which they used to ferry the 12 children, Staker, the two Armisteads and Quinliven from the property. Using hoodies, towels and blankets to hide their faces, they carried the children to the waiting vehicles.
Within weeks all four were arrested and charged with serious criminal neglect, including aggravated endangering life and aggravated creating a risk of serious harm.
Staker pleaded guilty on the first day of her trial while the three men opted to go to trial, with juries finding all of them guilty. Charges against Staker’s sister were dropped when she found to be mentally unfit to stand trial. Various court hearings heard horrific details of the abuse perpetrated on the children of the woman who raised the alarm by taking her young boy to hospital.
It emerged Staker had been the principal instigator because she was jealous of the woman and resented her children living in the same house as her and Luke Armistead, their father. Sentencing her to 10 years in prison in 2011, then Supreme Court judge Kevin Duggan described the abuse as “beyond comprehension”.
“Each of you embarked on a common purpose of treating the children in a particularly cruel way,” he said.
“In your own statement, you said that you came to hate and resent (the children’s mother) and her children while they were living with you. For some reason she was prepared to inflict suffering upon her own children.”
The identity of the mother is permanently suppressed.
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