Hot car killer mum Kerri-Ann Conley neglected daughters for months
A Logan woman jailed this week for the manslaughter of her two daughters left in a hot car had been neglecting them for months.
Police & Courts
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It was 4.10am and single mother Kerri-Ann Conley hopped into bed after a night of socialising with friends, absent-mindedly scrolling on her phone for almost two hours before falling asleep.
Outside, the sun began to rise on her black Mazda wagon where toddler Darcey and her little sister Chloe-Ann sat strapped into their car seats, the doors and windows shut tight.
It was a typical sunny November day in Logan, the sun rising about 5am and quickly heating up, hitting a maximum of 33C.
With the family station wagon parked in full sun with no shade to protect it, temperatures inside were searing – reaching more than 61C.
Aged just 2½ and 18 months, Darcey and Chloe-Ann were helpless to save themselves.
No one will ever know if the little girls tried to escape or if they cried for their mother as she slept inside the house – coming down from a drug high after smoking ice about noon the day before.
Nine hours after deliberately leaving her daughters in the car, Conley, 27, finally emerged from the weatherboard home about 1pm.
Conley walked to the car only steps from the front door and discovered two lifeless bodies still strapped in their seats.
She carried the girls inside one at a time – first Darcey and then Chloe-Ann.
The paramedics who later tried to revive them said their bodies were so badly burnt, blistered and dehydrated that their skin was peeling off as they performed CPR.
An autopsy was unable to conclude a time of death but the cause was clear: vehicular hyperthermia.
More than three years after killing her daughters in November 2019, Conley wept in the dock of Brisbane Supreme Court this week as she was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
Justice Peter Applegarth said: “One can only hope that these little girls slowly succumbed to the growing heat of the day much earlier that morning and faded into a deep sleep from which they never returned.
“The alternative of them being awake, distressed, and trapped in their seats is too much to bear thinking about for too long.”
Conley’s “abysmal” failings as a mother were laid bare in court.
They are failings she herself now admits, telling a prison psychologist “every day I eat myself alive because of what I’ve done”.
This was not the first time the girls were left to fend for themselves in the car.
Conley would regularly leave her daughters in the station wagon. She couldn’t be bothered dealing with the fuss of getting them back to sleep if she woke them while moving them to their beds.
Friends who had seen the behaviour had warned against it, bringing the girls inside themselves or forcing her to retrieve them on numerous occasions. But she didn’t heed their warnings.
The night before their deaths, Conley had taken her sleeping daughters from their beds at 11.30 and driven to a friend’s house where she socialised into the early morning before driving home with the girls about 4am.
Her own lawyer conceded that in the months before the deaths, Conley was a “chaotic drug-addicted and delinquent mother”.
She had been a regular and heavy user of the drug ice, saying it helped her to cope with the “stresses and demands” of life.
“Ultimately, your use of methamphetamine was a direct cause of the deaths of your two daughters,” Justice Applegarth told her.
“If you had not stayed up all the night before, made appalling decisions about not removing them from the car after you came home, and then crashed out, they would not have died that day.”
After her arrest, Conley told a covert police operative in prison that her children “always came first” and that her drug addiction had never affected her relationship with the girls.
Justice Applegarth described the claim as an “astounding statement” that “only a drug addict could make”.
“If a parent smokes methamphetamine, even in a tiny quantity, their children can never come first,” he said.
“Meth always wins that race.”
After discovering her dead children, Conley callously tried to cover her tracks, disposing of clip-seal bags found to contain drug residue before finally calling an ambulance.
When police arrived, she also lied to them about her movements the night before.
Crown prosecutor Sarah Dennis said Conley’s disposal of the drug bags and the lies she told police exposed that her “primal instinct” had been to protect herself and not her children.
Conley, now 30, told a prison psychologist that not a day goes by she doesn’t think of her little girls and the hurt she has caused family and friends. Her own mother no longer speaks to her and she has lost many of her closest friends.
Born 361 days apart, Darcey would now be five and Chloe-Ann four.
Justice Applegarth accepted that Conley loved her daughters and was genuinely remorseful for their deaths.
He said no sentence he imposed could bring back the girls or ease the grief of those who loved them.
Conley was taken into custody the day her daughters died and will not be eligible for parole until she has served five years in prison in November next year.
It will then be up to the parole board to decide if she should be released.
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