How a suburban Melbourne home became a house of horrors

When an Indian grandmother enslaved by a couple in Mt Waverley was finally freed, the true horrors she suffered were revealed.

The Mt Waverley home where an Indian grandmother was kept as a slave. Picture: Alex Coppel

For eight years, the world didn’t exist outside the backyard of a suburban home for a woman secretly enslaved in Melbourne’s south east.

A sign plastered to the inside of the front door read: “Do not open”.

The elderly woman couldn’t read, she’d never learnt how, but that didn’t matter – she understood what it said.

The message had been drilled into her repeatedly by her slave masters, Kumuthini and Kandasamy Kannan, since she had arrived in Australia.

Never open the door, never talk to anyone.

Modern day slavery might not include shackles or a cage, but prosecutors argued the Indian grandmother was still trapped in a Mt Waverley home and a life she couldn’t escape.

She couldn’t speak English, didn’t know another soul in Australia – even if she had managed to open the door of the home and break free, “where the heck would she go?”.

The woman, now in her 60s, recalled it took her two different aeroplanes to get to Melbourne from her home in Tamil Nadu, in southern India several years earlier.

Her passport had long expired and she was in Australia as an illegal non-citizen after her 30-day tourist visa ran out.

Kumuthini and Kandasamy Kannan. Picture: Facebook

Beyond that, she had no way of paying for a plane ticket home – she’d made the equivalent of $3.39 a day, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past eight years.

Her daily wage wouldn’t even afford her a coffee if she could make it to the shops.

So instead, the grandmother stayed hidden in the five bedroom home.

She cleaned, she cooked, she carried groceries for the Kannans.

She looked after the Kannan’s children who affectionately called her their ‘Ammichi’ – the Tamil word for grandmother – unaware of the true horror of their nanny’s situation.

The couple had “almost total control over every basic human right and freedom” of the woman, crown prosecutor Richard Maidment QC told the jury during a mammoth ten week trial.

When paramedics were called to the Gillian Rd address in July 2015, they found the woman lying in a pool of urine, shivering on the bathroom floor.

She’d been that way for hours while Ms Kannan attended a piano recital.

She had no teeth, a dangerous Sepsis infection and weighed just 40kg.

Ms Kannan told paramedics the woman had been staying with them “on and off” but was unsure if she had any family and didn’t know her surname.

So, the emaciated and incoherent woman was taken to hospital where she stayed for more than two months – without a name or an identity.

The woman had met the Kannans in her hometown more than a decade earlier and had travelled to Melbourne twice before to perform “domestic duties” following an arrangement made by her son-in-law.

The couple filled out her visa documents for her and asked her to sign them.

After those first two trips, she was allowed to return home to her family.

But she never returned from her third visit to Melbourne and she became enslaved.

Kandasamy Kannan. Picture: Facebook

Kumuthini Kannan. Picture: David Crosling

Intermittent phone calls between the woman and her family in India were initially made and monitored by Ms Kannan, but by 2012 the communication had ­reduced to almost nothing.

When the woman’s distraught daughter asked for her mother to be returned home to them in 2015, Ms Kannan responded: “Tell her to go f--- herself!”.

In another phone conversation with the woman’s son-in-law, Ms Kannan threatened to send her body “back in a box”.

When social workers and police began inquiring about the unidentified woman in the Box Hill hospital in late 2015, she was too scared to speak.

Ms Kannan had told her “to lie” about her situation.

But slowly, the truth emerged.

The woman revealed she had been living a life of servitude for eight years during which she said she was abused and tortured.

The Kannan’s “Ammichi” was beaten with a frozen chicken, had boiling water poured over her legs and was only allowed to shower once a week.

She said Ms Kannan would often wake her up in the middle of the night by turning all the lights on and pouring oil over her.

She survived off cups of sweet tea and mashed food, after her teeth fell out and she was not taken to see a dentist.

She was also living with undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes.

She recalled she would stay locked inside the family’s home while they holidayed overseas for up to a month at a time.

The woman detailed her ordeal in more than 30 hours of recorded police interviews played to a 14 person jury.

Kandasamy Kannan outside court. Picture: David Geraghty

Kumuthini Kannan outside court. Picture: David Crosling

Prosecutor Mr Maidment said while the abuse was not indicative of slavery, it “bespeaks of a gross lack of respect, a gross lack of care consistent with the existence of a state of slavery”.

The woman was entirely dependent on the Kannans for food, clothing, for shelter, medical and dental care.

“The couple effectively controlled every aspect of her life, where she went, who she met, controlled her work and her leisure to the extent that she had any and in every practical sense,” Mr Maidment said.

He said the Kannan’s motivation for keeping the woman in their home for eight years was “crystal clear”.

“They wanted essentially to import a true, tried and tested child carer and domestic servant, knowing that they could pay her next to nothing.”

Defence lawyers for the couple had argued the woman was simply a liar who was scared of being uncovered as an illegal non-citizen.

“(she) is not a witness who you can trust and rely on,” Dr Gideon Boas, for Ms Kannan, said.

“She was not honest, she was not trustworthy, she was not reliable,” he said.

John Kelly SC, for Mr Kannan, argued the woman’s testimony was at times “physically and humanly impossible”.

After less than two days of deliberation, the jury found the couple each guilty of possessing and using the woman as a slave.

The Kannans will be sentenced on June 29.