‘He made our lives hell’: John Edwards’ family speak at inquest

There was barely a dry eye in the courtroom as family remembered Jack, Jennifer and Olga Edwards, who were terrorised by one man.

After her children were murdered, Olga Edwards carried them around with her in her handbag in two tiny urns, one pink and one blue.

One of them had a small portion of the ashes of her 13-year-old daughter Jennifer, an inquest heard on Thursday.

The other contained some of 15-year-old Jack’s ashes.

The teenagers’ lives were cut short on July 5, 2018, when their father John Edwards brutally gunned them down at their home in West Pennant Hills before killing himself.

It was the culmination of a long history of domestic violence inflicted by Edwards on a total of seven ex-partners and 10 children.

It set off a world of pain for Olga, who took her own life five months later.

Olga Edwards carried two tiny urns containing some of the ashes of her children in the months after they were murdered by their father.

An inquest into the tragic murder-suicide has been under way for three weeks before state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan, who is investigating how NSW Police, the firearms registry and the Family Court could have done things differently.

On Thursday, Edwards’ adult daughter recounted Olga asking her to hold the urns containing the brother and sister she never got to know.

“When I did I wept, not only for my siblings but as a mother, feeling Olga’s immense grief in my hands,” she said.

She said Jack would have recently turned 18, on September 12, and Jennifer would be 16 now.

“They will never get to grow up,” she said. “I didn’t know them, but in many ways I did. They were other versions of us. They have lived with John. I know what that meant. We were bonded by that alone.”

There was barely a dry eye in the courtroom as she spoke.

“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.”

Jack Edwards would have turned 18 on September 12.

Jennifer Edwards would be 16 if she were alive today.

It was an anger the adult daughter knew intimately.

She said one day in her childhood, “burned into my memory forever”, Edwards hurled a wooden rolling pin at her mother’s head after becoming enraged that he did not have a freshly ironed shirt.

Her mother coaxed Edwards into the shower with the promise of a fresh shirt to follow before putting her kids over the fence to the neighbour, jumping over herself and calling the police.

Now in her 40s, the woman cut off contact with Edwards for many years from age 17, but took out an AVO against him in 2011 after numerous instances of stalking.

After she realised one day she was being followed in her car, Edwards had someone drop a letter at her house saying he just wanted to bump into her at Hornsby Westfield and had gotten a friend to track her.

She and her husband were selling their house at the time, and she warned her agent that Edwards might try and come to an open house.

But after she described him and emailed through a photo, the agent confirmed he had already been through her house. He had come with another man and used a false name, pretending to be a father with his son from Melbourne.

“I can’t even begin to describe how physically ill that made me,” she said.

Days later Edwards stepped out from behind a large gum tree as she was dropping her daughter at preschool.

She panicked, getting straight back into the car, opening the window a crack to tell Edwards she was going to the police and then locking the doors and speeding away, her children crying and terrified.

Family members of Jack, Jennifer and Olga Edwards told an inquest on Thursday about the effect the devastating crime at Hull Rd, West Pennant Hills, had on their family. Picture: Jonathan Ng

“I knew that if he wanted to hurt you he would hurt you through children,” she said. “I actually feared for my daughter’s safety in this moment more than my own.”

When she arrived home, Edwards had dropped a note in the letterbox urging her not to take out an AVO.

One line read: “I think you need to give me a little respect for the fact that I don’t hassle you.”

The woman told the inquest that during the AVO proceedings the police prosecutor leaned over and said to her, “He is your father, can’t you just sort this out amongst yourselves?”

“To which I replied, ‘You do not know my father’,” she said.

John killed Jack and Jennifer with a Glock pistol, one of five guns he owned legally. Two days after the murders, the woman received a text from Olga.

It read: “I just don’t understand how they gave him gun licence. Especially after your AVO. I will never understand that.”

One ex-partner told the inquest: “He made our lives hell.”

“You had to live it to really understand that someone could behave the way he did,” she said. “He also hoodwinked so many people right to the end.”

She said after she found out Edwards was dead, “I drove off in my car and I didn’t have to check in my rear-view mirror to see if I was being followed.”

Another ex-partner recounted training her children to make collect calls from a phone box so they knew how to escape if he abducted them.

She said that in the wake of the horrific crime the big family – comprised of ex-partners, sisters, brothers, aunts, nieces and nephews – had come together.

“We are all survivors of homicide,” she said.

She recalled Olga’s mother, from Russia, inviting the family to the house to take some mementos of Jack and Jenny after Olga took her own life.

“I can still see her smoothing the imprint of Olga’s body from Jack’s quilt,” she said.