John Edwards’ ex-wives and children reveal their lives of terror
Olga Edwards carried her whole world in two containers holding the ashes of her children Jack and Jennifer who were killed by their father. The heartbroken mother had one question: “I don’t understand why they gave him a gun licence.”
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Olga Edwards carried her whole world in two small containers in her handbag, one pink, one blue, holding the ashes of her beloved children Jack and Jennifer.
The heartbroken mother who had arrived home to find her children shot dead by their “coward” of a father John Edwards had been left with one question: “I just don’t understand why they gave him a gun licence.”
As the inquest into the murder suicide also searches for answers, Edwards’s ex-wives and surviving children on Thursday revealed in emotional testimony how they had lived in fear that they could all have been Jack, Jennifer and Olga.
“I never knew them but in many ways I did,” one of Edwards’ other six surviving children, 41, told the inquest on Thursday from her home in Germany.
“They were other versions of us. They lived with John, I know what that meant. We were bonded by that alone.
“Their mother loved them so much, just like our mothers. She was the last one, the one to bear it all, a lifetime of his anger, pent-up and unleashed.”
In July 2018, Edwards stalked Jennifer from school to the home in West Pennant Hills where she was hiding from him with her mother and brother. He shot his children dead and then killed himself.
Olga, 37, committed suicide six months later.
The inquest has heard how Olga Edwards was let down every step of the way as she tried to protect her family.
Despite 24 years of documented domestic violence, Edwards was given a gun licence in June 2017. Despite reporting his assaults on Jack and Jennifer to police, there was no investigation. Nor was there an investigation into a report Olga made that her estranged husband had stalked her to her yoga class.
Psychologists who counselled the family after the parents separated in March 2016 didn’t report the children as being at risk to what was then the Department of Family and Community Services, they told the inquest.
His six former wives and partners and his other children - he had 10 children in all - were tracked down by police after the murders and they all told the same story of how Edwards made their lives hell with physical and emotional abuse and controlling behaviour so extreme he wouldn’t allow of the women to cut their hair because he liked it long.
“John Edwards worked to demean his partners and his children,” one of his ex-wives told the inquest.
The tragedy strangely brought them all together.
Like Olga, all but one were naive teenagers when they met Edwards. He was 50 and Olga was 19 when she met him online on a dating site from Russia. They met in October 2000 when he travelled to Russia.
As another of his ex-wives said, he started off being really charming.
“He could bewitch you,” she told police. “Then he would turn.”
Just a month before he met Olga, Edwards was in the Family Court getting a divorce from his sixth wife who a month earlier had been granted a three-year AVO to protect her from him. She had been moving around women’s refuges hiding from him as he stalked her.
In a chilling description of Edwards, she said he had been vindictive, sadistic and a “narcissist with an extreme delusion of grandeur. He was a crippled soul of a kind I had never seen before. When he didn’t get his own way he became a vindictive and dangerous individual.
“He did not feel any empathy or remorse.”
This was the man Olga arrived in Australia to marry in August 2001. He drank to excess and watched porn. She told police that it was after Jack and Jennifer were born in 2002 and 2004 that her husband began to display controlling behaviour.
She studied English and qualified as a solicitor but she told police she walked on eggshells at home, terrified about making her husband angry.
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“If I didn’t wear a short skirt and high heels to go shopping he would walk out of his office and would say ‘you know what I want’. I would have to go and get changed,” Olga said.
In 2011, the 41-year-old daughter was granted an interim AVO against Edwards after he stalked her to the preschool where she was dropping off her three-year-old - after 15 years of having nothing to do with him. He also gave a false name to view her house when it was up for sale.
That daughter said that two days after Edwards killed the children, Olga texted her: “I just don’t understand how they gave him a gun licence especially after your AVO. I will never understand.”
The daughter said Olga had given her the pink and blue containers with Jack and Jennifer’s ashes to hold.
“She asked me to hold them and when I did I wept, not only for my siblings but as a mother, feeling Olga’s immense grief in my hands,” she told the inquest.
Another of his ex-wives said: “John Edwards was a coward who had to take innocent children with him.”
State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan adjourned the inquest to October 16 to hear final evidence.