Darkness descends: depression is being blamed for WA familicide

Depression is being blamed for the WA familicide.

Peter Miles with daughter Katrina.

At 10.21am on the day before she was shot dead, 58-year-old grandmother Cynda Miles confided to close friend Cath Miller that her husband Peter’s depression was getting “worse and worse”.

For several weeks before that, neighbours and friends had hardly seen Peter Miles, the 61-year-old hobby farmer and handyman from the idyllic Margaret River wine region who is now — inexplicably to all who knew him — branded one of Australia’s worst mass killers.

These are some of the details held by homicide detectives as they prepare a report for the WA Coroner. They have statements from family friends including Miller, who yesterday declined to comment further to Inquirer.

Police have listened to friends describe Peter Miles as occasionally taciturn, occasionally cheerful, prone to sadness over the years but particularly troubled in the past eight weeks. He knew he was very ill.

Those who saw him recently at or near his 12ha farm at 1422 Osmington Road noticed he recently had put on weight, and some thought he was behaving unusually. A handful of people also knew he had been prescribed antidepressants that did not seem to be working and that he had ­recently increased the dose or changed medications in an ­effort to recover his mental health.

In a Facebook message last Thursday morning, Cynda Miles — a bubbly woman active in the Margaret River community and ­devoted to environmental causes — wrote to Miller, her neighbour, to say Peter would be unable to do a job they had discussed.

“Peter seems to be getting worse and worse so I don’t know that he is going to be able to do the yeomans plough — can you find someone else?” she wrote. “Really sorry to let you down but I thought better to let you know than hang on hoping he ­improves.”

At 11.11am the next day, Friday May 11, as news spread of seven deaths in a gruesome murder-­suicide nearby, Miller messaged Cynda Miles: “Just checking to see if you are all ok.”

There was no reply. About 5.15 that morning, a man believed to be Peter Miles had made a two-minute call to triple-0 from the Osmington property.

When two police officers ­arrived from Margaret River about 45 minutes later, Peter Miles was dead, slumped in a chair on the veranda of the main farmhouse, with a rifle between his legs. The officers then went inside, where they discovered the body of Cynda Miles in the living room. The full horror was revealed when they entered a nearby converted shed, where Peter and Cynda’s daughter, Katrina Miles, lived with her four children. The body of Katrina, 35, was in a bed alongside the body of her eight-year-old son, Kaydn. The bodies of Katrina’s three other children — Taye, 13; Rylan, 12; and Ayre, 10 — were found in their beds.

All died of gunshot wounds.

Peter and Cynda’s adult son Thomas lived at the farm but was not there at the time of the ­murders. Police quickly ruled out anyone else being involved. They suspect Peter Miles murdered his wife, his daughter and his four grandchildren in a horrific act of violence that has made global headlines during the past week but remains incomprehensible to ­local residents.

Katrina Miles with her children (from left), Rylan, Taye, Kaydn and Ayre; Peter Miles in February.

Desperate for answers, some friends believe Peter Miles’s depression — perhaps exacerbated by the medication he was taking — ­ruined his capacity for rational thought. They point to claims that some antidepressants can trigger suicidal, and even homicidal, thoughts. “This wasn’t part of a pattern of domestic violence,” says one close friend.

There are three clear themes in many of the recent cases of familicide in Australia: mental illness, a rural or regional setting and ready access to guns. The perpetrators are mostly men.

One such case involved NSW farmer Geoff Hunt, 44, who murdered his wife Kim, 41, and their three children — Fletcher, 10, Mia, 8, and Phoebe, 6 — before killing himself at the family farm in Lockhart. A coroner who examined the 2014 murder-suicide found Geoff Hunt, who was depressed, killed his family out of an “egocentric delusion” that they could not cope without him once he carried out his intention to commit suicide.

“Because of his emotional ­dependence on his wife and essential self-image of his position as the head of a family that he believed was dependent upon him, his distorted logic led him to conclude that the children and his wife would not cope without him,” coroner Michael Barnes said.

In 2016, in the South Australian town of Port Lincoln, Damien ­Little, 34, shot dead his two children, Koda, 4 and Hunter, nine months. He then drove off a wharf, killing himself. His family said he had not sought treatment for his depression because he did not want to ­appear “weak”.

Peter Miles was never an extrovert but it is clear he had transformed in recent months from a happy man to one who was withdrawn and sullen. Friend Bee Winfield says a neighbour’s husband took a tool to the Mileses farm the day before the murders, and reported back: “Peter is really bad.” Neighbour Richard Dossor says he called Peter the day before the shooting to offer him some work on his farm and they agreed to meet at 10am the next day. But Dossor ­recalls thinking Peter sounded strange on the phone. “He was very vague — I thought he’d be more enthusiastic about finding a new customer,” he says.

There were other signs that things were not right.

Brent Watson, a neighbouring farmer, noticed the Mileses farm wasn’t being maintained to its usual high standard. “It was little things only a farmer would ­notice,” he says. “A little less attention to the fruit trees, things like that.”

But Peter had been acting like someone who was thinking of the future. In the weeks before the murders, he put business cards for his handyman business in letterboxes around the region and made work appointments for the days ahead.

Farmer Brent Watson says his son dropped in to see Peter a few weeks ago to ask about some logs that were stored at the back of his property. “He said to my son, ‘I can’t let you have them ­because I’m saving them for my daughter — she goes through a lot of firewood,’ ” Watson said.

There had been sadness and conflict in the Mileses’ lives, recently and in the past. In March Peter and Cynda’s 32-year-old son Neil, who lives in Perth, was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and told he would need a transplant. The couple’s eldest son, Shawn, took his own life about 15 years ago.

And the Mileses took daughter Katrina in after her marriage breakdown and supported her through child custody and access disputes with her former husband, Aaron Cockman, a local carpenter.

Information provided by the Family Court of WA this week shows the dispute between Cockman and his former wife over their children was officially settled in 2016 and they were divorced last year. However, there are signs some tension continued. At a press conference last week, Cockman spoke of the anger he felt ­towards Peter and Cynda in the months ­before the murders. And a Facebook post on Katrina’s ­account on April 23 claimed he was parked outside the Miles family property for 14 hours and he had sent her a series of text mes­sages including: “Can I talk to the kids”, “How are the kids” and “Tell the kids I will often sleep here ­because I miss them”.

Cockman’s press conference last Sunday was 23 minutes of raw pain — he spoke about his beautiful children and his tremendous sadness, but also at length about his battle with Peter and Cynda over access to his children. He ­indicated there had been accusations of abuse that kept him — temporarily — from his kids. It was a devastating insight into a rived family.

To a generation of Margaret River kids, Peter Miles was the avuncular farm manager at the town’s high school. Between 2000 and 2016, he taught students from Year 8 to Year 12 in animal husbandry, farm construction, how to grow crops and pastures, how to fix and maintain motors and ­machines, vineyard work and wetlands science.

Students under his tutelage won prizes for winemaking at the Perth Royal Show three years in a row.

Kelly Harwood, 27, remembers it was a treat to leave the classroom to muck around on the 25ha school farm. She remembers her teacher as knowledgeable and ­patient, but not overly expressive.

“He was a farmer, my dad’s a farmer and they’re all a bit the same in the way they don’t say a lot,” she says.

“Peter taught me to drive a tractor, that was a lot of fun.”

Another former student recalls Peter Miles as “a bit abrasive”.

Under Miles, the school farm was part of a resurgence in agricultural education in Western Australia. Its budget tripled from $30,000 in 2010 to just under $92,000 in 2015, the year he took leave and never came back.

Why Peter Miles left is not entirely clear. A neighbour, Felicity Hayne, recalls a disagreement with the school over sustainability prac­tices, which Peter and Cynda both valued highly.

Peter Miles told colleagues he wanted to set up his own farm. He first left his job at the school in January 2015, took a per­iod of long service leave combined with annual leave, then tacked on some leave without pay at the end of it before finally resigning in the middle of 2016. By then he and Cynda had moved out of their house in the township of Margaret River to the farm they named Forever Dreaming, purchased on Christmas Eve in 2014 for $820,000.

The undulating property had four fenced paddocks, a native bush boundary and gardens of fruit trees and flowering natives.

“Forever Dreaming is our forever farm,” Cynda Miles wrote at the time. “It is here that we will grow as much of our food as we can, sit on the veranda and watch the birds, and watch the grandchildren ­immerse themselves in the animals and everything else that happens on a daily basis.”

The tasks of establishing the farm were complete by last year and the couple had no mortgage and no obvious money troubles.

Whether there is anything to learn from the massacre began to torment Margaret River residents almost immediately, just as it did in Lockhart almost four years ago.

In that case, coroner Barnes said the community was entitled to ask questions.

“Massacres must not be swept under the carpet merely ­because they occur in the home of the deceased, at the hands of a family member,” he wrote.