Podcast special: ‘My father the murderer’
NINA Young was 26 years old when she made a horrifying discovery about her dad. She knew her mother met him while he was in prison but it was finding out why he was in jail which changed her life. Today she launches her six-part podcast series which uncovers her gruesome family history.
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I GREW up in a suburban area of Sydney, in a nice house with a wonderful mum, a stepfather and a brother and sister. It was never a secret that my stepdad was not my biological father, but it wasn’t something we dwelled on.
My siblings had different fathers to me too, but in our house, blood wasn’t important. We were a family and that was that.
I don’t remember the first time my mum introduced the idea of who my biological father Allan was, but from as early as I could remember, I knew that he was a bad man.
The day I found out just how bad, I was 26.
I was sitting at a computer, having typed his name into a legal database, and I’d just read these words: “The prisoner grabbed the woman, forced her to the ground and strangled her with his bare hands. The prisoner and the other man dug a shallow grave and buried the woman’s body.”
In that moment, I felt like I was underwater, every ounce of breath forced from my body by the crushing weight of these two sentences.
My father was a murderer.
LISTEN TO EPISODE ONE OF THE PODCAST HERE
The details of the crime were more horrific than I could ever have prepared for. As a journalist, I’m used to reading details of cases that shock and sadden me, but this was different.
The personal aspect had an impact, of course, but even if it involved total strangers, the sadistic brutality of it would have horrified me.
What that woman endured in her final moments is unthinkable. Left broken and alone in a shallow grave in the harsh, lonely bush.
Worse than that, I realised that it was this unthinkable, violent and sadistic act that set in motion a chain of events that would lead, seven years later, to my birth.
As far as origin stories go, it’s not one you want.
In 1977, my father was living in Norseman, in WA.
After meeting a local woman in a pub, he and another man travelled with her to a campsite just out of town.
At some point in the evening, my then 19-year-old father wrapped his hands around her throat and took her life with his bare hands.
He then buried her in a shallow grave, but the following morning was arrested and confessed. He was sentenced to life in prison.
It was here, inside the walls of Fremantle Prison, that he would eventually meet my mother.
Mum is an educated, gentle and creative soul with a handful of degrees and foreign languages under her belt.
A self-confessed bleeding heart, she’d seen an ad looking for volunteers to help prisoners with literacy. The day she walked into the jail, she was placed with a man named Allan — six feet, muscled and handsome.
She didn’t know it yet, but this man would change the course of her life forever — and come very close to ending it.
While Allan had never been anywhere outside Australia, he certainly spoke a different language to mum. His crass speech could not have been further from the conversations my mother, an actress and poetry-lover, was used to.
Nevertheless, something about him intrigued her.
“It was just a diabolical attraction,” my mother tells me.
“I just felt that I couldn’t fight it.”
Over the course of the next few years, they fell in love.
Behind bars, Allan was measured and remorseful. He challenged mum intellectually, telling her he was a changed man. He told her horrible stories about his upbringing; abandoned by his mother, raised by an abusive father, Allan’s childhood had been anything but a fairytale.
“He said he didn’t know much about his family, he couldn’t remember anything before the age of six, which is unusual,” says mum.
“I just felt like he was a lost soul, a motherless boy.”
It would be two years before she would learn the horrible truth about why Allan was actually in prison. By then, she was already so blinded by love that she stayed with him.
And then, in 1984, after serving just seven years of his life sentence, my father was released on parole.
Later that same year, he became a father.
I came into the world on a sunny spring morning. It was seven years, three months and 20 days after he brutally murdered a woman in the bushland, 750km from the hospital where I was born.
Some 26 years later, sitting stunned in front of a computer screen, I would discover all this for myself.
When the breath finally poured back in, it brought with it questions for which I had no answers.
Why did my mother stay with someone she knew was so obviously dangerous? Did I have the blood of a killer in my veins? Should I avoid having children?
And what of his victim, the woman whose death indirectly led to my birth. Who was she? What was her life like before it ended?
At the beginning of this year, I finally decided to try and answer these questions.
I documented that process in a six-part podcast series called My Father The Murderer, which launches today. Over the coming weeks, I’ll travel back through the past and come face-to-face with the most painful parts of my family history, and witness first-hand the path of destruction my father wreaked not only through my life, but through the lives of so many others.
Today, I’m 34.
I now know the answers to those questions. Answers, which at first, left me feeling like I was drowning under the weight of my father’s violence.
Eventually, though, it was those very answers that helped me find my way to the surface once more.
* Episode one of My Father The Murderer podcast is out now. To listen or read more, go to myfatherthemurderer.com.au
* Episode two will be available next Sunday