Hayley Wormleaton, from Blacktown, watched her nan be stabbed to death

Hayley Wormleaton will forever live with the memory of seeing her grandmother and young cousin being murdered by her uncle in front of her. READ HER STORY

Hayley Wormleaton will forever have to live with the memory of seeing her grandmother and young cousin being murdered by her uncle in front of her.

It was the chilling climax to years of growing up in a home of family violence that, until then, Hayley had considered normal.

“The night started off normal too, like every other night, but then my uncle had come home and he clearly wasn’t acting himself,” Hayley told the Saturday Telegraph.

“I had gone to my bedroom, I heard my nan call out for me. I walked out of my bedroom door, he was sitting on the lounge next to my nan. He had a knife.”

Hayley, now 27, remembers the night in 2015 like it was yesterday.

Hayley Wormleaton is determined to break the generational cycle of domestic violence. Picture: Julian Andrews

“I asked him what was wrong and he just looked at me. I knew I had to get help because he just wasn’t acting normal,” she said.

“I ran out of the house to try to get my neighbour to help us but at that time it was already pretty much too late.

“I had knocked on my neighbour’s front door, as I turned around to run back my nan had run out of the house.

“She was on the bottom of the stairs and my uncle was on the top of the stairs holding a knife. He wasn’t answering my nan when she was asking him what’s wrong. He just stared at her.

“She then took a step to the left and he chased her to my neighbour’s front lawn and that is where my nan was murdered. On the front lawn.”

Hayley was pulled inside to the safety of her neighbour’s home but the screaming and banging continued outside.

Forensic police look for clues outside the house where a Hayley’s nan and cousin were killed.

“I was worried because I knew the younger kids were still in the house,” Hayley said, admitting she struggles every day with anxiety and PTSD.

“I then heard banging on the front door and without thinking I opened it. It was a young child. I pulled her inside, she was frantic and she was screaming. I kept asking where her brother was.

“I told her it was going to be okay. Police were coming.”

The two girls sat trembling on the lounge, all the while Hayley was on the phone to the police operator.

Flowers left outside the house.

Drug utensils left in lane nearby.

“It seemed like a lifetime but I finally heard sirens. I subconsciously thought the police are here. I’m safe so I opened the front door and the police swarmed my front lawn.

“They all stopped in a row and kind of backed off a little and then I knew that it was bad. I then went to walk out to the front doorstep and I saw another young child.

“I started calling out and said if you can hear me please move. He didn’t move. I was screaming his name. A neighbour came up and told me to get back inside because it wasn’t safe.”

The child, aged just eight, did not survive.

Two years later Hayley’s uncle was sentenced to at least 30 years in jail for killing his mother and a child in a drug-induced psychosis at Lalor Park.

The 36-year-old had pleaded guilty. He was found to have cannabis and ice in his system and told police he had been drinking.

Hayley said there was a lot of domestic violence in the household.

“I think it goes through generations,” she said.

“My nan went through domestic violence through her upbringing my pop … my mum, her brothers, so then us growing up it was accepted as what someone would call ­normal.

“It was normal for me to wake up in the middle of the night with things being smashed and doors being kicked and yelling and screaming. I would wake up and go to school the next day and act like nothing was wrong.

Back lanes in the area of the murder. Picture: John Grainger

My nan used to have a saying: ‘Whatever happens at home stays at home’ so we knew that we didn’t tell anyone, it was normal to us, so we didn’t think it was appropriate to be telling people our business behind closed doors.”

However, she learned after her nan’s passing that she had tried multiple times to get help from government services to protect her family.

“It’s so sad, I have found a whole box of paperwork of hers where she was writing to government services over a number of years trying to find a better way for us to live, relocating and she was trying to protect us,” she said.

Today, Hayley is passionate about helping other victims of domestic violence.

“It’s really important to me, I want to talk at schools, to students and to tell them that violence is not normal, it’s not okay,” she said. “We become members of a club. The club that no one wants to be a part of. Once you’re a part of it you are a member for life.”