Whispering Wall murder: Horror now haunts a place of magic

The drumbeat of dead Australian children who have become weapons in their father’s violent campaigns to destroy their ex-partner’s lives cannot go unchallenged.

Kobi Shepherdson, who died this week. Picture SA Police

The Whispering Wall is a magical place where for more than a century almost every child in South Australia has marvelled at how a hushed sentence can travel audibly across its 140m diameter.

Since its completion in 1902, the Barossa Valley reservoir and its curious dam wall have been a drawcard for school camps and family visits to the tiny rural town of Williamstown, a place that until this week was associated with nothing other than happy times.

But there are places in South Australia whose names are heavy with meaning, and for all the wrong reasons. The Whispering Wall is now one of them.

“He wasn’t even from here,” local MP Stefan Knoll tells The Weekend Australian. “But in the same way that people say Truro or Snowtown and everybody automatically associates those towns with just one thing, sadly I fear there will always be a link in people’s minds with the terrible thing that happened here this week.”

The “he” Knoll refers to is Henry David Shepherdson, the savagely violent father of the little girl now known nationally as Baby Kobi.

This poor girl suffered the cruellest of deaths, a fate comparable to that of four-year-old Darcey Freeman, whose brute of a father hurled his daughter off Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge in 2009.

Nine-month-old Kobi was murdered when Shepherdson strapped her into a baby carrier and jumped over the safety rails of the Whispering Wall about 4.30pm on Wednesday.

They plunged 36m to the rocky and waterless base of the reservoir wall, both dying in the process, as horrified onlookers watched in disbelief and rang ­triple-0.

Paramedics quickly arrived and did everything to save Kobi, but she was gone.

Despite the vagueness that surrounded its initial reporting and the initially studied silence of South Australia Police as to the circumstances, the deaths were one of those incidents that no one in South Australia believed was an accident.

This is a place most South Australians have visited and know well. The Whispering Wall is the top-rated attraction — almost the only attraction — on the Trip­Advisor listing for Williamstown, where hundreds of people have uploaded photographs posing happily and safely with their children on the dam’s fenced wall.

A family lays a tribute by a roadside sign at the Whispering Wall in the Barossa Valley. Picture: David Mariuz

The sinister and deliberate ­nature of what happened this week was quickly confirmed, with news breaking on Thursday that Shepherdson, a former West Australian who now lived in Adelaide’s inner west, had a long history of domestic violence.

This was a calculated, horrendous act.

The extent of Shepherdson’s violence was underscored on Friday with fresh revelations from court documents that only last year he had threatened to do what he did this week — to kill his daughter — but that the charges levelled against him were dropped.

The entrance to the still-closed Whispering Wall had become a makeshift shrine to Baby Kobi.

Flowers and teddy bears were placed on the ground, along with a white plush toy dog on which was written: “Sleep soundly Kobi the monster can’t get you now.”

Local couple Mark and Theresa left a thoughtful note with their flowers. “Words seem inadequate to express the sadness we feel at the tragic loss of Kobi,” it read. “During times of loss we find ourselves troubled by things we do not understand. There are no answers to comfort your grief.”

The ripple effect from what happened is significant across the Barossa, even though, as Knoll says, the region had no tangible link to Shepherdson other than being the venue for his crime.  In that sense it is comparable to the two other notorious South Australian crimes Knoll referenced: the so-called Truro killings of the 1970s, where five of seven murdered women were found buried in shallow graves in the country town of the same name; and Snowtown, where the infamous bank vault was used to store the remains of many of the 11 ­victims killed across Adelaide’s northern suburbs in a murder spree that spanned the 1990s.

“Coming to the Whispering Wall has almost been a rite of passage for kids in South Australia but now we are going to have to create some new and happy memories here to rub away the memories of this,” Knoll says.

“It is such a beautiful place, somewhere you always associate with children having fun, then suddenly it has become the venue for something so awful where a defenceless baby lost her life under the most dreadful circumstances.”

“People will find it hard not to make that link. When you say Whispering Wall from now on people will automatically make that link.”

Knoll is joined by Barossa mayor Bim Lange in lamenting the impact this will have on the small and tight-knit towns that make up the Barossa.

Lange said the region had spent the past month grieving the loss of four locals on the roads in a hellish Easter holiday period, and that this week’s tragedy was too much for many people to bear.

Kelly Wilkinson was set alight in front of her children at their home in Arundel on the Gold Coast. Her estranged husband Brian Johnston has been arrested and charged with her death Picture: Facebook

“The Barossa is a quiet and peaceful place where everyone knows everyone and things like this hit all of us very hard,” Lange said.

The horror of what occurred is also compounded by the number of witnesses, not just visiting families during school holidays but also some of the SA Water staff who work at the reservoir and who have not yet returned as it remains a crime scene.

Knoll, who is quitting politics at next year’s election, is a young father of two children aged eight and four and says that as a parent he has “no comprehension” of what has just occurred.

“I don’t think that as parent you can even begin to understand it,” he says.

“There has to be cultural change. The cultural change around how we treat domestic ­violence is extremely important.”

Former South Australian senator and Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja agrees, and says she is enraged by the drumbeat of dead Australian children who have become weapons in their father’s violent campaigns to destroy their ex-partner’s lives.

Stott Despoja says the murder of Baby Kobi and alleged murder of Queensland mother Kelly Wilkinson in front of her children just days apart shows Australia is in the midst of a crisis that cannot go unchallenged. “The issue of violence against women and children is a national emergency,” Stott Despoja told The Weekend Australian. This week has brought more suffering and grief. The nation is mourning the senseless death of a baby girl.

“We are horrified by the murder of a woman with her children present. Trauma has a long tail. The effects of this violence are generational.”