'Intimate terrorism': why the murders of Hannah, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey must spark change

“Lou, I think he’s going to kill me.’’ Hannah Clarke looked up from the glass of red Lou Farmer had just finished pouring. Friends since Hannah sold Farmer a pair of running shoes in 2015, the young mothers were sitting in the kitchen of Farmer’s home in the inner Brisbane suburb of Holland Park West. “I can see it in his eyes. He’s following me everywhere. I don’t think he’s going to kill the kids, but I think he’s going to kill me.’’

The children Hannah shared with her husband Rowan Baxter – Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and son Trey, 3 – were playing upstairs with two of Farmer’s children, Heidi, 5, and Max, 8. With Farmer’s third, Charlie, 11, away at school camp, the girls had monopolised the Barbie cubby house, while Max dressed Trey up in a Hulk costume.

A few kilometres away, another close friend, Nikki Brooks, was giving an affidavit to support a long-term protection order that Hannah wanted against Baxter. “I think he’s going to take them out,’’ Brooks told the female police officer sitting opposite her.

Six days later Baxter did just that, ambushing Hannah, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey outside her parents’ Camp Hill home as they climbed into the car for the morning school run. There he doused them in fuel and ordered Hannah to drive towards Whites Hill Reserve, a 170-hectare tract of bushland nearby. Hannah turned the first corner, a knife at her throat, with the children who turned her world cowering in the back seat. Seeing a neighbour washing his car, she drove across the street towards him, screaming out the window that her tormentor had covered them in petrol.

“He had her in a bear hug and she was struggling to get away,’’ Hannah’s father Lloyd Clarke recalls the neighbour telling him. The neighbour told Lloyd and his wife Sue how he tried to open the door; how Baxter set the car on fire; how Hannah was able to escape. “[The neighbour] told her to drop and roll on the ground while he hosed her,’’ Sue Clarke says.

Baxter got out the other side of the car, knife in hand, screaming at those who were running towards the car, to “get away and let her burn’’. A second neighbour, who ran out of her home carrying a fire extinguisher, told Sue that “she looked at him and saw pure evil’’. Another woman grabbed the hose and continued to douse Hannah, staying with her until she was lifted into the ambulance. “Hannah kept asking, ‘Are my kids okay?’ and saying, ‘Call my mum,’ ’’ the woman told Sue.

Baxter then stabbed himself to death with his knife. He did not live to witness the incredible strength of Hannah, who despite burns from head to toe, gave police at the scene, and again in hospital, a detailed account of what had happened. Then she died, too. Hannah Clarke was 31. Baxter, 42.

The murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children made international headlines on February 19 this year, but it’s not a story of violence that unfolded in a few minutes on a Brisbane street. This is a story of intimidation and stalking, of threats and reprisals played out slowly, over days and weeks, months and years, as Baxter courted Hannah, promised in a lavish wedding ceremony to look after her, ran three gyms with her and began raising a family with her.

This is a story of intimidation and stalking, of threats and reprisals played out slowly, over days and weeks, months and years.

Those global headlines have drawn attention to non-physical domestic abuse, sometimes known as “intimate terrorism” or coercive control, and calls for it to become a specific crime in Australia, as it is in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. While physical violence in the home can be prosecuted as assault or with injury-related charges, non-physical abuse is difficult to prosecute unless it happens in breach of domestic violence or apprehended violence orders. That means it is not widely understood by many, including victims, police, policy makers and the community more broadly.

But now, a coalition including Women’s Safety NSW, White Ribbon Australia, Small Steps 4 Hannah, Women’s Legal Service Queensland, Women’s Community Shelters, Doctors Against Violence Towards Women and journalist Jess Hill, the author of the award-winning book See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, are lobbying state and federal governments to make it a criminal offence.

Tasmania is currently the only state that criminalises this kind of behaviour, but in October the NSW government released a discussion paper on it, at the same time announcing it would establish a parliamentary joint select committee to look at legislative reform and the state’s overall policy approach. A private member’s bill had been introduced the previous month by Labor MP Anna Watson, called “Preethi’s law” after the 32-year-old Sydney dentist Preethi Reddy, who in 2019 was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, then disposed of in a suitcase. Legislation to criminalise coercive control has also been introduced into the SA parliament, but not yet voted on.

Rowan Baxter didn’t beat his wife and children. He didn’t leave bruises as evidence. What he did is control Hannah Clarke – demanding sex every night, then ignoring her for days if she didn’t seem interested enough in him. He watched her from afar, followed her, controlled her social media and her finances, dictated what she wore and who she saw. He timed her trips home from work, verbally abused her, and stole her autonomy. And as Hannah’s resolve to leave their marriage grew, he waged a campaign of espionage, listening in on conversations, stalking her, stymying her escape plans. At every turn, Hannah’s home became a prison, for which Baxter kept the keys.

“Some magistrates don’t even recognise [coercive control],’’ says Brisbane lawyer Kelli Martin, who chairs domestic violence charity Red Rose Foundation Australia. “I went before a magistrate the other day to get an urgent temporary protection order because I was that fearful for my client’s life and … the magistrate’s saying to me, ‘But there’s been no physical violence and what’s the urgency of this application?’ ”

Dr Brian Sullivan knows more about domestic violence perpetrators than most, having spent years in America and Australia studying them and running court-ordered rehabilitation programs. Someone whose expertise is sought by universities, governments, police and the family court, he speaks softly and deliberately as he explains how it works.

“Coercive control is actually a prison for a woman. It’s an entrapment,’’ says Sullivan, senior lecturer in domestic and family violence at Central Queensland University. “The floor of that prison is a sense of a belief that ‘I’m superior to a woman, that the man is superior. And therefore, because of that superiority, I own her, she’s my property. And more than that, she’s my sexual property. So, because I own her and she’s my sexual property, the roof of this prison is my sense of entitlement. So I’m entitled to get what I want, when I want, how I want from her, because she’s mine. This is what a relationship is.’

“ ‘And if I don’t get it, the next layer of that ceiling is I turn adversarial. I turn abusive and violent to make sure I get what I want.’ The bars of that prison are things like intimidation, threats, verbal abuse, micro regulation of her every moment – what she wears, who she sees, where she goes, what she spends. Surveillance is a strong part of that, too. ‘I’ll check her phone, I’ll check her computer. I’ll check her workplace to see if she’s meeting anyone.’ I’ve worked with men who’ve installed cameras in their house that she doesn’t know about so that they can check on her during the day.’’

Hannah Clarke had never heard the term “coercive control” until a police officer explained it to her after she’d escaped from her domineering husband. Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Clarke’s family and friends

To most people, Hannah Clarke and Rowan Baxter looked like they had it all. Frank Robertson* met the couple in 2013, and trained with them twice a week. He didn’t see them socially, except for a weekend coffee after Saturday’s gym session. But over time, Baxter would seek Robertson’s advice, particularly around communicating with gym clients. The 48-year-old senior business manager still struggles with how Baxter presented one face in public, another in private. “I would never have picked it. On the outside, he was a beautiful dad,” he says. “Everything he did seemed to be for the kids. Every spare minute he seemed to be playing with the kids, building cubbies for them, running around with them.’’

It took years for Hannah’s family to see it, too – to truly understand the power Baxter held over their strong-willed, athletic, brown-eyed girl, who as a toddler told her mother she wanted to grow up to be “both beautiful and a mum’’. Hannah Clarke was both. Sunny and smiley, hard-working and above all, a mother.

“She wanted to teach primary school …’’ Sue Clarke’s voice trails off with what might have been. We’re sitting in the living room of the working-class Camp Hill home she and Lloyd have shared for 35 years, where they raised Hannah and her younger brother Nathaniel. It’s where Hannah and her children sought refuge last December, 10 weeks before they were killed. It’s a warm home; nothing fancy. Framed smiles of Hannah and her children leap from many walls. A big armchair dwarfs Sue, who says time hasn’t healed any of the pain. Lloyd doesn’t say that, but the tears that well up at a moment’s notice tell a similar story.

Hannah Clarke and Rowan Baxter appeared to have a fairy tale family life. “I would never have picked it,” says one acquaintance of Baxter’s private abuse of Hannah.Credit: courtesy of Hannah Clarke’s family and friends

Sue didn’t really like Baxter at their first meeting. He was 31, Hannah only 20. The age difference worried her, but that wasn’t a big thing, and he made Hannah smile, he’d call regularly while travelling for work, and seemed a committed family man. Lloyd thought Baxter “quite the gentleman and a bit old-school” when he arrived with a six-pack, to ask for Hannah’s hand in marriage, proposing at the beach, with a big heart drawn with shells and driftwood as a backdrop. Did Lloyd have any misgivings then over the partner of his only daughter? “No. No. No. No.’’ Adds Sue: “I would have said that she would not be mistreated; that she would not stand for it.’’

Baxter’s son from a previous relationship says that’s how his father would have planned it. Isaiah, 22, is softly spoken, heartbreak his constant companion. “Please don’t use my surname. I’m going to change it … I don’t want to ever use his surname.’’ The tears he sheds are for Hannah and her children, not the father he calls a monster. “No one knows what he was really like except me, my mum and Hannah,’’ says Isaiah. “He was awful.’’

Until he was 18, Isaiah split his time between his mother’s home and that of his father and Clarke. “My parents never went to court. They couldn’t afford to, and they were never married,’’ he says. “I also think my mum was scared and just agreed to what [he] wanted.’’ Baxter once said he’d murder Isaiah and his mother, too. “There was a time when I was about 10,’’ he says. It still hurts to say. He remembers his parents arguing. “And he said, ‘If you keep this up I’m going to lock you in the car and gas you both.’ He said that to both of us.’’

There was another time too, a few years later, when his father put rope in the back of his car, which he would tell Hannah was to kill Isaiah and his mother. “I’m not sure if he was going to hang us or choke us. But he would have done that. Look what he did to Hannah and her kids.’’ Baxter confirmed the story when Sue and Lloyd Clarke confronted him about it one time, but dismissed it as “years ago’’. He told others about it, too, including his friend Dave Kramer, who he and Hannah had met in their gym in 2015. Kramer asked him if he could ever see himself planning to kill someone else again. “No. No. No. No way,’’ was the response.

Over years, Baxter controlled every part of Hannah’s life; what she wore and where she went, to whom she spoke and for how long. He convinced her she had postnatal depression after the birth of their second child, and wouldn’t allow her to buy clothes. He demanded their home be impeccable, always, and that she find time to sunbake each day, so that her skin remained bronzed. He’d watch her some nights from outside the kitchen window, trying to unnerve her, and go through her handbag regularly. Any lack of enthusiasm for nightly sex meant the children were punished by having their toys confiscated or a planned trip to the beach cancelled. He’d ignore Hannah, sometimes for days, until Aaliyah pleaded with him to end the silence.

Lloyd and Sue Clarke at a vigil after the death of their daughter and her children. “Are my kids okay? Call my mum,” Hannah told rescuers at the scene of the attack.Credit: Getty Images

On the morning of December 5, 2019, Hannah’s friend Nikki Brooks and a second friend were waiting to join the Mums and Bubs class Hannah taught at the gym she and Baxter leased at Capalaba, 10 kilometres from their home in Carindale on Brisbane’s southside. Brooks says Hannah arrived in the gym carpark, shaking. “I’m looking at her and trying not to say anything until she gets the kids out of the car,’’ she says. Once inside the gym, they turned the music up loud; Baxter would somehow be listening. With the music blaring, Hannah collapsed into Brooks’s arms. That morning, Baxter had discovered she’d called her mum Sue on her sister-in-law Stacey’s phone. “He knows everything I say, everything I do,’’ she told Brooks. “I’m never going to get out without him knowing.’’

Brooks knew her friend couldn’t live like this any more: “We’re out of there,’’ she told Hannah. She pulled out her phone and googled “tracking devices”, studying what they looked like before going to the car park and searching Hannah’s vehicle. “I had no idea what they looked like,’’ she says. She didn’t find anything that matched the online photographs.

Brooks then followed Hannah home, making Vegemite sandwiches while her friend packed. “Hann just got a trash bag and furiously threw in anything they needed.’’ Each child could choose three toys; they both smiled at three-year-old Trey’s choice of a car and a plastic crab. Then Hannah wrote Baxter a letter. “It was a note not to incite,’’ Brooks says. “Even as awful as he would be, as unrelenting as he was, she would always talk politely about him in front of the kids.’’ Hannah told Baxter she loved him but was struggling and needed a few days away, that the children were with her, that she would never take them away from him, because he was their dad. Next stop was Aaliyah’s school, where the six-year-old was plucked out of her year 2 class. “She never asked a question,’’ Brooks says. “She just looked relieved.’’

“What now?’’ Hannah asked. Brooks wavered; she wasn’t sure. “Let’s go to McDonald’s at Wynnum West,’’ she said. Brooks knew surveillance cameras monitored the 24-hour entrance, so Baxter would be caught on camera if he found Hannah via her car or mobile phone. Sure enough, by the time they arrived at McDonald’s Baxter was calling, again and again. Bundling the children from Hannah’s into Brooks’s vehicle, they ignored the calls and left Hannah’s phone in her car, then drove the short distance to a place Baxter had never visited – Brooks’s home. When Brooks popped back to the McDonald’s car park later to check Hannah’s phone, she found 14 voicemails and 38 text messages. “And he was just sobbing, Haaannnaaahhh.’’ Delete. Delete. Delete. “Hannah didn’t need to hear that because she’s just the nicest person in the world. That would have tugged at her.’’

The next day, Hannah moved in with her brother and sister-in-law, Nat and Stacey. The day after, she went on to her parents’ home. Sue and Lloyd moved bunkbeds into the room Hannah had growing up, welcoming their elder child and grandchildren home with open arms. And they all waited for Baxter’s next move.

Hannah Clarke and her children. She told a friend: "I’m too young for this shit. I’ve got my life ahead of me with the kids."

A former police officer who served on the personal protection teams for political leaders Julia Gillard and Anna Bligh, Grant Killen knew Baxter was brazen and dangerous. He met with Hannah two weeks before her death, at the request of a domestic violence service which asked him to review her security. The 43-year-old has the clean-cut police look and the clipped, precise language to match. “I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve been assaulted, strangled, bashed – but if there’s one thing that keeps me up at night it’s his type of behaviour,” he says of Baxter’s MO. “That type of perpetrator. The ridiculous amount of possessiveness. A personality where ‘I am the best and if I don’t win, no one else will’.”

Killen, who has looked after the cases of 3500 women and children as managing director of special protection and security company Concentric Concepts, knew Baxter was spying on his wife because of his constant ability to know where she was and what she was doing. “People are under the impression there’s this James Bond 007 spyware that’s inserted on the phone but it’s not like that,’’ he says. “It can be as simple as having shared emails and using Google to track your location, being friends on Facebook, having shared accounts, and knowing iCloud passwords. They are probably 99 per cent of things when it comes to tracking.’’

Knowing that cutting off Hannah’s phone would incite Baxter, he gave her a disposable, prepaid phone – a “burn phone” – and told her to leave her own at home. He also separated the estranged couple’s social media accounts and iCloud passwords. “Her exact words to me were: ‘I’m too young for this shit. I’ve got my life ahead of me with the kids. We’ve got so much to do.’ She’d decided to draw a line in the sand.’’ Leaving the meeting, Killen knew Baxter was more than a menace, but even in his world of violence, intimidation and abuse, he couldn’t countenance what would happen next. “That he was going to set the kids and her on fire,” he says. “We are normal people in a normal world and cannot fathom that type of behaviour.” It’s the only time his voice teeters on emotion.

“There was no stopping him seeing the children."

Baxter’s behaviour became more erratic after Hannah’s escape, and she asked her mother whether she should pen a will. She and Nikki Brooks talked about the possibility Baxter would “beat her up”, go to jail, then be deported back to his hometown of Tauranga on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. Hannah said she could heal from that, then raise her children without looking constantly over her shoulder. She continued to share the children with him, in an agreement that Lloyd and Sue helped broker. “There was no stopping him seeing the children,’’ Lloyd says, and they went out of their way to drop them off and pick them up. “But then he started being ridiculous – saying he wanted them 100 per cent [of the time].’’

One night, in the lead-up to Christmas, knowing Lloyd planned to take the family to visit his 96-year-old mother a few hours west of Brisbane, Baxter refused to return Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey. “He strung us out for four hours,’’ Lloyd recalls. “We were fighting and crying and trying to work out what to do to bring the kids home.’’

Eventually, Baxter demanded Hannah meet him at a local service station to collect them. “I thought he was going to take the lot of them,” Lloyd says. “I was petrified. I thought he was going to get Hannah in the car and then drive off, so I went and grabbed this bloody big pocket knife I keep in the work car. I wanted to just be in the background. I was so worked up about it.’’ He was talked out of it by his daughter.

She was frightened, too, and worried constantly about her children, particularly Aaliyah, who’d grown fearful of her father. On another occasion when Baxter was driving around Brisbane with the children in the back seat, Aaliyah asked if they could FaceTime their mother. “Mummy, Daddy’s driving and I don’t know where we’re going,’’ she said, in a running commentary that allowed Hannah to work out where they were. “Hang on, we’re on the freeway. We are now taking this exit. Dad’s just taken the exit now.’’ Lloyd looks down, the hurt contorting his face as he describes his clever eldest granddaughter. “I wish I could see what she would have become. She could have done anything.’’

Once they’d escaped to their grandparents’ home, Aaliyah knew to keep the front door locked, in case her father dropped by without notice. Hannah, Lloyd and Sue looked over their shoulders, scanned the street before leaving for work. But still Sue and Lloyd tried to placate Baxter, even inviting him to visit on Christmas Day for a couple of hours. They were his children too, Hannah told Lloyd, and he shouldn’t be barred from seeing them unwrap their presents. Baxter arrived at 5am, before they awoke, and stayed all day. He was charming and didn’t put a foot wrong – except for turning a two-hour invitation into a 12-hour one.

Then on Boxing Day, having begged Hannah to let him see the children at a local park, Baxter snatched Laianah as they all walked towards her car, taking her to his vehicle and speeding off to a friend’s house in northern NSW, where he ordered Hannah to bring Aaliyah and Trey. A witness saw the abduction unfold and alerted police, providing the evidence for a police protection notice. Police had to wait until he returned three days later to go to his house to forcibly remove Laianah.

The “devoted dad” image Baxter had so assiduously built was about to be shredded.

This incident meant Baxter had to appear in court, and respond to the police protection notice that would serve as a precursor to a long-term protection order; one he would breach several times. The “devoted dad” image Baxter had so assiduously built was about to be shredded. Everyone would know he wasn’t what he claimed to be. His training partners at the gym. His friends. His colleagues. Everyone.

Two days later, on December 28, Hannah underlined their separation by texting gym members, explaining that she was no longer part of the business and would now be training elsewhere. Baxter saw the life he’d built after moving to Australia 12 years earlier slipping away.

The couple’s friend Frank Robertson* was in Sydney with his family, about to board a holiday cruise, when Hannah’s text about the gym came through. He knew they’d been going through a rough patch because Baxter had confided in him. But Hannah leave the gym? It had to be a joke. He called his mate.

“To Rowan, that was the biggest slap in the face because he no longer controlled the communication and it exposed him,” Robertson says. “There was no facade anymore.’’ Robertson consoled Baxter, then sent him a text as he boarded the cruise boat. “My thoughts are with you mate. Stay strong and we’ll catch up when I’m back. Focus on the future. While it hurts now, things will get better.’’

But they didn’t, and back in Brisbane in mid-January, Robertson took Baxter to breakfast. “He was obsessing about the kids, over and over and over. There were no rational thoughts. He was a shell of the person I knew.’’ Baxter declined Robertson’s efforts to get him a job (the gym had ceased operating after Hannah left) – and Robertson left breakfast fearful his friend would take his own life. “I really cared for the guy. And that is what I struggle with the most. How could I have loved someone who has gone and done the most unthinkable thing in the world? It just tears me to pieces. That wasn’t who I knew, or who I thought I knew.’’

Dave Kramer says he tried to talk to Baxter, too, as his friends’ marriage was crumbling. Baxter told him a week or two before Hannah left him that she wanted time apart. Kramer suggested that might help them both – but Baxter was firm. “She doesn’t know what she wants,’’ he told Kramer. “You need to stay out of it. I need to keep my family together.’’ He later repaid Kramer by accusing him publicly of “messing’’ with his wife, sending numerous accusatory texts to joint friends. It was rubbish. But Baxter wanted to steal back the narrative, and he spun the yarn until Kramer thought it better not to respond to Hannah’s texts a fortnight before her death. He lives with that regret. “To think she passed thinking I didn’t want to talk to her really tears me up.’’

Baxter was sobbing on the evening of February 18 when he called to say goodnight to Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey. “Is it weird that I felt bad?’’ Hannah asked Nikki Brooks in a text later that night. “Like, not bad enough to go back or let him have the kids but I still felt bad that he was that upset.’’ Brooks replied with lightning speed: “You’re a good person. I’m glad that you don’t get joy out of his suffering.’’ This isn’t your fault, Brooks told Hannah, adding a heart emoji for emphasis.

“Thanks, I needed to hear that,’’ Hannah texted. “I am feeling bad. I don’t like other people’s suffering, but at the same time he brought it all on himself. It could have been so different.’’ Brooks said Baxter needed professional help. “It’s a shame all those times you were sad and miserable, he didn’t show you the same empathy,’’ she wrote. “You couldn’t save him babe, but you did your damn best.’’ It was 9.19pm on a warm Brisbane night. Hannah signed off with two emoji kisses.

Twelve hours later, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey were dead, and Hannah was in hospital, fighting for her life. “He planned it all,’’ Brooks says now. “Looking back, he was crying because he was saying goodbye to those kids – and she f…ing felt bad!’’

Hannah Clarke worried constantly about her children, particularly Aaliyah, who’d grown fearful of her father.Credit: courtesy of Hannah Clarke’s family and friends

Tiny red flags, in hindsight, provide clues Baxter wasn’t the person he appeared. “The first thing I ever found unusual was that they had a joint Facebook account,’’ Frank Robertson says. “It was called RowanHannahBaxter and I just looked and thought, why would you have a joint Facebook account?’’ Hannah’s parents originally wrote off Baxter’s demand that his wife not wear shorts or parade around in a bikini as “him being a bit of a prude’’. His investment in the finicky details of their October 2012 wedding looked like genuine love. “He wanted to oversee it, where it was, how fancy it was, what was served at the meal,’’ Sue says.

Baxter rarely spoke of his dysfunctional upbringing in New Zealand, but in unguarded moments painted a picture of a lonely, cruel and sometimes violent childhood. His life here, with Hannah and their picture-perfect family, was all part of building something where everything was ideal, and he was in charge.

The handful of incidents that stand out, with hindsight, include Baxter’s road rage against anyone who didn’t look Caucasian. He needed little provocation and seemed to delight in chasing drivers through traffic lights, in having ugly, nasty confrontations. Sue and Lloyd only saw it once, as passengers in his car; but since their daughter’s death they’ve heard about other cases.

Nikki Brooks continues to revisit another episode when, just out of their teens, she and Hannah went on a cruise together. Hannah and Baxter had been dating for about six months, and on one occasion when Baxter called, Hannah and Brooks were in hysterics over something. “Hannah was laughing hard into the phone and I remember him getting the shits really bad. And hanging up.’’ He later told Hannah she became immature around Brooks.

Two other things play on Sue’s mind, too. When Hannah was pregnant with Laianah, she saw Baxter slam the back gate into her daughter’s leg. “She had a massive bruise down her leg. He was annoyed at her.’’ Perhaps it was easier to pass off, back then, because Hannah didn’t respond. Or another time, Baxter slapped his hand on Hannah’s thigh, hard, while laughing. “I looked at her and she just smiled,’’ Sue says. “She’d never let on.’’

But as time went on, Hannah couldn’t hide the hurt and fear and control Baxter had over her life. Finally, in June last year, she told friends of her plan to escape. “I remember the day,’’ Lou Farmer says. “She said, ‘I’m going to leave him Lou. I’m going to do it.’ ’’ Farmer told her that many families successively co-parented. “You can still be a family, but not together.’’

Slowly, over the coming months, Hannah began talking about getting things together, in readiness to leave. “About four times she actually did try and leave him and that’s when we knew he had started bugging stuff,’’ Farmer says. He always knew what was going to happen. So Hannah’s friends stopped texting and grew innovative. They’d put the children in Farmer’s pool and chat with the giggles of children as a backdrop.

Hannah Clarke told Lou Farmer (right) she feared she’d be killed – just days before it happened.Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Clarke's family and friends

At the gym, they’d only ever talk with the music turned up loud. Hannah’s car, they knew, was a dangerous place to make or take calls. “Her Bluetooth picked up another phone in the car, [and] we knew he was throwing his work phone in there, putting it on record, then later listening to the phone calls,’’ Farmer says.

In late September, over dinner at home, Baxter asked his wife whether she loved him. “Yeah, I love you,’’ she responded, carefully, never wanting to provoke him. “But are you in love with me?’’ Baxter persisted. “No,’’ she said. “Why?’’ he pushed.

“I love you as a friend and the kids’ father, but no, I’m not in love with you.’’ This was the Hannah of old; before Baxter stole her confidence and independence and joy. She was being brave and honest and direct – and that’s exactly what her friends told her when she relayed the conversation the next day. But Baxter didn’t believe in losing. “He just thought he’d win her back,’’ Farmer says.

Baxter went to a counsellor, then spent days abusing the counsellor to friends. He borrowed money to see another therapist, but no one’s really sure he went. He was good at borrowing money, and getting people to help him out. Friends tell of tense phone calls he made to those who quit their gym membership, demanding they return. Of not paying utility bills, of getting his mates to spend their weekends cleaning or painting the gym, of scamming free weekends and dinners by hassling those who could offer them. He was a big-noter too, claiming he’d been contracted to play with rugby league team the New Zealand Warriors (he was only ever in their training squad). But any attempt to change, if he really did try, failed. “It would never last,’’ Farmer says. “And Hann just couldn’t do it any more.’’

Hannah with friends Lou Farmer, Michelle Keating and Nikki Brooks.Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Clarke's family and friends

Hannah Clarke had never heard the term “coercive control” until a police officer explained it to her after she’d escaped, giving her a pamphlet about it. “This is my life,’’ she told her friend Dave Kramer, showing him the pamphlet. “But that’s not what I thought domestic violence was.’’

Nikki Brooks googled “coercive control” after Hannah’s death, too, because it kept popping up in news headlines. “I didn’t know what coercive control was either,” she says. “I think we need more basic terminology, so friends are thinking, ‘Is your friend’s partner jealous? Is your friend’s partner paranoid? Is your friend’s partner a bit of a bully?’ ”

It’s also a new term for Sue and Lloyd Clarke. “I do want a law to cover it but that will take time,’’ Lloyd says. He wants police to consider a checklist when they investigate domestic assaults. Does he control her Facebook content? Does he control the money? Does he go through her handbag, her phone? Does he know where she’s going? “And if they tick those boxes, then they would think, ‘We need to remove this woman from the situation.’ ’’

Sydney-based investigative journalist Jess Hill wrote a 2019 book on domestic abuse, See What You Made Me Do, which has picked up a swag of awards for the way it anatomises what she calls “a national emergency”. She firmly believes that coercive control should be criminalised in mainland Australia.

“There is no other form of torture that is permissible under law in Australia,’’ she tells Good Weekend. “I’m adamant that we need to criminalise coercive control. If we [do], it may be the beginning of a cultural change in the way that we report on domestic abuse, the way we talk about it, and especially the sorts of questions that victims will be asked, which will relate much more closely to their actual fears and experiences.’’

Paul McGorrery, a lawyer and doctoral candidate at Deakin University, agrees that criminalisation would help, pointing to laws enacted in 2015 in England and Wales, and in 2019 in Scotland and Ireland. In England and Wales, the number of recorded coercive control offences has doubled each year for the two previous years, he says. “The femicides that are prevented because police were able to intervene earlier – you can’t say there’s a woman that wasn’t killed because of this. The woman, who was able to safely escape an abusive relationship, you can’t say she would have experienced more abuse had the laws not been in effect. That makes it difficult to demonstrate that the laws work in the sense of deterrence. But what you can see is the media really shifting the narrative about family violence to understand not just its gendered connotations, but also using the language of coercive control, and that seems to be penetrating the general community’s psyche and understanding as well.’’

Not all experts are won over to the argument of criminalising coercive control, however. “I’m probably moving off the fence towards the side of no need for legislation,’’ says Queensland’s Brian Sullivan. “If a woman’s been traumatised, then expecting her to be able to document and speak about coercive control in a court situation is placing another very heavy burden on her.’’

Another complicating factor is that coercive control can be as subtle as it is cunning, and thus difficult to prove. One of the men Sullivan has worked with is an American farmer. “He would come down in the morning [and] put a shotgun shell on the kitchen table. Now, that was a very clear message to her of his intentions, and what she had to do during the day to avoid him escalating.’’ Yet in court such concerns could be easily dismissed. “ ‘He’s got guns. He’s a farmer!’ ’’

Professor Heather Douglas, author of the annually updated National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book used by judicial officers to help understand the field, is worried about other risk factors, including it being disproportionately applied to Indigenous Australians, and that people might plead guilty to it and cop lower penalties. “There might be a form of minimisation to the criminalisation,’’ she says.

Paul McGorrery says he’s heard the objections before, and that they can all be overcome. “Our justice system doesn’t rely on the CSI type of evidence but instead on witness statements, and a lot of cases are prosecuted on a he said/she said basis. What we’re talking about here with coercive control cases, is not one instance of him putting a shotgun pellet on the table. You’re going to see months or even years of him engaging in all sorts of behaviours, some of which can be evidenced, whether it’s through her phone records, surveillance footage, witness statements from friends and family, bank records. They’ll probably be based on an indication that he’s got control of the assets. There’s a plethora of ways to prove coercive control, including witness statements … He said/she said cases can be successfully prosecuted.’’

Alastair Nicholson, who served as chief justice of the Family Court of Australia from 1988 until 2004, agrees with McGorrery regarding criminalisation. An open discussion might raise other solutions, too, he says – protections such as alarm bracelets that track offenders being just one of numerous innovations worth considering.

Grant Killen, the former police officer who provided Clarke with her “burn phone”, has sought Queensland government money to run a trial program in which victims are protected at vulnerable points, such as when they are strapping their children into a car at predictable times like school drop-off or pick-up, or attending Family Court, by highly trained military veterans who have a “real sense of service and want to give back’’. “They also have a level of precision, observation, organisation and intelligence and can pick up cues,’’ he says. His request for funds has to date fallen on deaf ears.

“For the past five years we’ve had the same number of kids killed and women murdered and men murdered [Australian men can also fall victim to coercive control and domestic homicide], yet we pour millions of dollars into [programs to stop domestic violence]. How can we expect change by doing the same – sitting around a nice oak table discussing change?’’

Hannah with Isaiah, Rowan Baxter’s son from a previous relationship. Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Clarke's family and friends

Killen well remembers the morning of February 19. He was preparing for separate domestic violence appointments when the news warned of a car accident in Camp Hill. Later, on the radio, it was referred to as domestic violence related. Killen had three clients in Camp Hill. “I did a map search and it dawned on me that I had parked on that street when I visited Hannah. I immediately knew it was her. One hundred per cent. No doubt.’’

Isaiah, as next of kin, was asked about his father’s body. He thought of Hannah and her children, and his own mum who had suffered at the hands of Baxter. “I said, ‘I don’t want him buried in Australia. I don’t want him anywhere near Hannah and the kids.’ ’’ Last he heard, Baxter’s ashes were returned to New Zealand.

Brian Sullivan says COVID-19 has muted the domestic violence debate the nation was poised to have in the wake of Hannah’s murder, and that we need to ask ourselves whether we’re doing enough to keep victims safe. “And if this is the best we’re doing, then violence and abuse have won. These men are ruling the roost.’’

Brisbane’s Story Bridge was lit up pink in February in memory of Hannah Clarke and her children.Credit: Getty Images

A few hours after Baxter murdered his children, family and friends gathered around Hannah’s bedside inside the burns unit of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. Sue and Lloyd, Nat and Stacey invited Nikki Brooks, Lou Farmer and their husbands Tim and Simon to say “goodbye”. Farmer remembers demanding that medical staff save Hannah, “like they saved Turia Pitt”, referring to the ultra-marathon runner severely burnt in a West Australian grassfire in 2011.

But it was not possible. Baxter’s savagery had burned 97 per cent of Hannah’s body, including the soles of her feet. Farmer kissed her friend goodbye. A single tear, inexplicably, fell from Hannah’s face. Brooks remembers being warned by Sue that her friend would not look as she remembered her. “But I just saw her perfect teeth and her little elfish ears. She had the tiniest little ears.’’ Brooks spoke loudly because she wasn’t sure what Hannah could hear and wanted to make sure she knew she was there, next to her, until the end. Then she noticed the same thing: one tiny tear.

A tear of love. A tear of loss. A tear that should create a tsunami for change.

* Frank Robertson is a pseudonym.

National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service 1800 737 732. Red Rose Foundation: redrosefoundation.com.au

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