Behind the closed door

IT'S a suburban nightmare – a mother can't cope, a father gives up… and twin toddlers die from starvation and neglect. This is the story.

Their father, Brett (not his real name), holds the twins as babies.

IT'S a suburban nightmare – a mother can't cope, a father gives up… and twin toddlers die from starvation and neglect. This is the story.

Transcript of interview between Paula* and Detective Senior Constable Darren Kemball and Senior Constable Grant Hughes, 2.23pm, June 18, 2008, Brisbane City Watchhouse:
Detective Kemball: Did you deliberately starve your children?
Paula: No. No. No, I didn’t deliberately do it. I didn’t think they would get this bad. (Crying)
Hughes: …this child was skin and bones, literally skin and bones. He did not get that way in two weeks, so tell me when you noticed the obvious and extreme signs of starvation?
Paula: About two months prior.

SHE first withdrew from the sun. Closed her front door, closed her living room curtains and retreated from the outside world. She withdrew from family and friends. Stopped replying to their texts and emails; conjured excuses for why they should not drop round.

She then withdrew from her role as mother to her two youngest children, 17-month-old twins, a boy and a girl. She closed the door to their bedroom and she left them to waste away; to disintegrate like the bond she once had with her partner, and the handle she once had on her home and the control she once had of her mind. Back and further back she retreated, until she had withdrawn from life itself, found a new world inside a computer, in an online game called Second Life where the overweight and overburdened mother-of-six with the low pigtail created a digital avatar of a slim, carefree, kid-free woman with long, flowing dark hair.

While Paula, 30 years old and, by her own admission, “drowning” under the demands of motherhood, sat for hours on her computer chair in her cluttered real-life lounge room, her avatar walked through a virtual world where up to 88,200 inhabitants were meeting, chatting, nightclubbing, shopping, browsing art galleries, dancing, cooking, dating and making love. In this world, Paula bought and constructed her dream home, using in-game virtual dollars. She created an online sanctuary far different to the real-world home she moved into in October 2007 with her long-time de facto, Brett*.

Her real-world home, rented for $1450 a month, was in a quiet, well-kept patch of ­suburbia in Sunnybank Hills, in Brisbane’s south. Here she would wrangle her four real-world older children – Nicole* and her three younger brothers – while Brett, then 28, drank six beers every real-world waking evening in the main bedroom at the end of the hallway beyond the twin toddlers’ bedroom. Her Second Life home wasn’t made out of pale yellow bricks. It wasn’t L-shaped with a front door set back beneath a shadowing carport. There weren’t dirty clothes piles making mountains in its laundry. It wasn’t cockroach-infested. And there was no bedroom door closed on two children starving to death.

At 7.10pm on June 16, 2008, two police officers opened the twins’ bedroom door to find them dead in a cot. The boy was wearing a Bonds T-shirt, size 0. He weighed 4.72kg. “The head hair is fine, wavy, blond and of medium length,” the autopsy report said. The girl wore a pink jumper, size 0, with the words “Little Dreamer” on the front. She weighed 4.97kg. “[Her] weight approximated that of an average- sized two-month-old girl. It is not possible to determine the exact date [they] died.”

“Cause of death: 1(a). Malnutrition.”

Transcript of interview between Detective Sergeant Marie Bond, Queensland Police Child Safety and Nicole, June 21, 2008:
Detective Sergeant Bond: OK. Um, you said that Mum and Dad don’t sleep together. Can you tell me more about that?
Nicole: We’re all one big angry family.
Bond: Did they ever sleep in the same room?
Nicole: At the old house, yeah? They’d always sleep in the same room. Dad would sleep there for hours and then Mum would get up and Dad would be still sleeping.
Bond: Do you know anything that happened to stop them from sleeping in the same room?
Nicole: Poker.

Paula wasn’t always drowning. She kept a tidy home, her friends said. She was bubbly and outgoing, welcomed random house visits. “She’s a beautiful person, a really nice person, she’d always help you out,” said Brett’s brother in a police statement. Her cousin spoke in court of never having to give Paula information on parenting because she was “a great mum”: “[Paula] and [Brett] always, in their house, had other kids around and I used to always think how, ‘Oh my gosh, like, I would never be able to deal with so many kids’, but they used to always, you know, love having kids around.”

In the five years since the twins died, lawyers, judges, police officers, psychologists and Paula and Brett’s friends and family tried to pinpoint the single moment that led to the destruction of the couple’s almost 13-year “high-school sweethearts” relationship. They found everything and nothing. They found the 21st-century and they found a cigarette butt on Paula’s living room floor. They found alcohol and bitterness and gambling addiction and cycles of abandonment and exactly how hard it is for a mum on her own to get six kids into a people carrier. They found the Australian suburbs. They found a summer of hell where minor events spiralled into messes that spiralled into catastrophes. Brett loses his licence equals difficult school drop-offs equals bored kids equals restless kids equals difficult grocery shops equals bad take­away food equals a hundred little reasons to fight and argue and drink and resent.

They found concerned neighbours who heard Paula shouting at her kids, chasing them down the street, pleading with them to behave; neighbours who saw that Paula was drowning but didn’t know how to help, didn’t know their place in a stranger’s world, didn’t want to interfere. They found a rising nationwide problem of isolation within seemingly idyllic communities and a country where the Australian Institute of Family Studies recorded 14,984 substantiated cases of child neglect in 2011-12 alone. Psychiatrists found a woman suffering a severe depressive episode. A Supreme Court judge found a dad who confessed to being a “piss-poor father”, a man who failed his duties and whose behaviour bordered on wilful blindness.

“We all feel guilty,” said the twins’ grandmother outside court. “Anybody and everybody who went to the house or lived around there, we all feel guilty. And yes, we should all have done more.”

A Queensland Police constable lived in a house directly opposite Paula and Brett. He told the court that since he saw them move into the street, nine months before the twins were found dead, at no stage did he become aware there were babies in the house. Nobody in the neighbourhood was disturbed enough by the twins’ crying that they alerted authorities.

In the wake of the discovery of the twins’ bodies the couple’s remaining children were put into care. At hearings in the past two months, both parents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and both were sentenced to eight years in prison. The disintegration of a once-joyous Australian family suburban unit was complete.

The landlord of the house visited in the summer of 2008. He saw clothes piled up, “in the laundry, up against the door, on the beds, all over the lounge. It just seemed excessive, like someone wasn’t able to keep up with it”. The landlord expressed concerns to his wife that Paula wasn’t coping. “I thought she must have been depressed,” said one of Paula’s cousins. “Maybe finding it hard to adjust to having new kids. I thought I would just leave her for a while. I also thought that maybe I should show up and do some housework for her and see how she was going and watch the kids so she could go to the shops and be by herself, but I didn’t.”

The street is in a nice enough neighbourhood. Quiet, suburban, working class. You unwittingly park your car tyres on the edge of an elderly neighbour’s lawn and he says, “Excuse me, sir, I mow this lawn, could you kindly park up further?” The Runcorn Tavern is a five-minute walk down the road. There were possibly only two nights in the month of May 2008 that Brett wasn’t down the pub playing poker. He’s an educated man who excelled in high school, an experienced soil tester, working then as a project manager for a large resources company, earning $75,000 a year. But everything changed in that long, dark summer of 07-08.

Detective Kemball: When do you think that your children’s weight loss was a problem?
Paula: ...Around my birthday.
Kemball: In April?
Paula: Yep.
Kemball: What have you done in relation to that since April?
Paula: Not a lot. I was trying to talk to [Brett] about trying to give them up.
Kemball: What do you mean by “give them up”?
Paula: To give them away to somebody to, you know, to care for. I just felt that I couldn’t cope any more with them. I knew I wasn’t coping.

The twins had been a surprise, born December 27, 2006, despite Paula having been implanted with a contraceptive device. In March 2007 she posted messages in a ­MySpace online chat forum: “I am @ peace with my life and having a ball. As [an] only child, I always wanted a larger family.”

When Paula was a little older than one, her biological mother left her in the care of a foster mother, Kerry*, but reconnected with Paula in her teens. “Even my own mother gave me up,” Paula’s ­biological mother would later say. “It was very hard for me to play that motherly role that my mother never gave me. That’s probably where I failed [Paula] as a mother.”

Detective Kemball: When you wanted to get rid of the children, to give them to someone else. Why? What did you think would happen to those twins if you didn’t do that?
Paula: If I didn’t do it? I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know. I kept telling myself that tomorrow I was going, you know, I was going to fix them. I was going to do everything right. I was. I just don’t know how long. How this just got out of hand. How long it went.

Around May 2007, Paula’s online messages began to take on a darker tone: “I am finding I am drowning since I had the kids.” “I have never been so big, I need to get my life in order and then I feel everything else will fall in place.”

In December 2007, she posted messages on the Bub Hub online forum: “I would like to know how other parents of large families cope from morning to night. I just can’t get everything flowing nicely anymore in a routine, it is just do whatever, and at the moment it is killing me.”

Detective Kemball: And what did [Brett] do in relation to you trying to tell him that you needed help?
Paula: Nothing much at all. He just… I think he didn’t believe me. Anybody could see from the state of the house, the state of me, you know.
Kemball: So if the house was so bad and you were having trouble with, you know, getting things done, why were you sitting on a computer for six to eight hours?
Paula: I don’t know. I don’t know. It was just human interaction, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have anybody else. I don’t know.

In that long, dark summer, Brett also withdrew. From his role as a father. From his role as a partner. He withdrew completely from the twins. In the two months prior to their deaths, while they lay starving in their cot, he did not once open their bedroom door despite passing it every time he exited his bedroom to leave the house for work, or to refresh himself with another beer. He would drink $30 or $40 a night worth of beer then sleep or, by his own admission, “pass out”, in his bedroom in front of a plasma TV. Nicole told police: “When we got [pay TV], Dad never came out of his room.”

Brett was drowning, too, in gambling and drink and detachment. He slept in the main bedroom while Paula slept in the lounge room, often with one of the older children sleeping beside her. He was there but not there. Present but not present. He was a ghost.

Paula: Probably six, seven times in the last few months, I kept saying to him, “Do you know what’s happening?”

The house was a void. The house was a black hole where time stopped.

Paula told police that prior to Christmas 2007 she would feed the twins a diet of mashed vegetables, fruit, cut sandwiches and cereals such as Weet-Bix, supplemented by bottle-fed milk formula.

Constable Hughes: That’s a good, responsible diet. When did they stop receiving that diet?
Paula: Um, about February.
Hughes: …And what was the reason behind the diet stopping and being [replaced by] formula?
Paula: My laziness.
Hughes: What did you think about the formula that you were giving them?
Paula: Um. I knew that the formula was OK. I kept telling myself I have to start getting these kids back to normal. I, you know, I knew that what I was doing was wrong…

Days into weeks, weeks into months. The twins didn’t see sunlight at all from late March, living most of their final 10 weeks or so on increasingly sporadic bottle formula feeds, while Paula’s four older children received a mix of home-cooked and takeaway meals.

Constable Hughes: Why do your four other children walk around healthy? I’m not particularly concerned about their behavioural problems but they are walking around healthy. They’re, living, they’re breathing, they’re walking, they’re fed, they’ve got fat on their bones. They play up, kids play up. Those four survive, these two die, because life has never been the same since the twins came along. Why did you do that? Why did you starve them and not starve the other children?
Paula: I can’t give you an answer.

Friends asked to see Paula but she politely turned them away at her front door, refused to take their calls. Her foster mum, Kerry, said in court she noticed Paula “seemed a little withdrawn” in the month of May. In a police ­statement she said Paula didn’t want to go shopping or take the kids to school. The primary school was 18km across town and they were frequently absent.

Nicole: Well, I was often away from school because I usually had headaches or I had a cold and sometimes Mum didn’t have enough food to take us to school because Dad always spends all the money on poker and then Mum got even more depressed than what she already was. So we had to stay home from school pretty often.

The Department of Child Safety was never made aware of Paula’s struggles, or of her children’s absence from school. “I used to ask her was she all right and she said, ‘Yes’,” Kerry told Brisbane Magistrates Court, to which a Legal Aid lawyer acting for Paula asked: “OK, but that was all you ever really did, just ask if she was all right?”
“Yes,” Kerry said.

Detective Kemball: Do you remember what day it was that you noticed they were not alive?
Paula: Can’t remember if it was Sunday [June 8] or Monday [June 9]. I can’t remember exactly. I’m pretty sure it was the Queen’s Birthday, it was the Monday.
Kemball: So [Brett] would have been home?

Brett was sleeping in the main bedroom. Paula woke on the morning of June 9, 2008, concerned because “too much time had passed” since she last heard her babies. She finally opened the door and entered the twins’ room.

Paula: Um, when I first went into the room, ’cause they were just laying there, I thought they’re OK and then I got closer and then both of them were laying there… Not one of them moved so I put my ear over the both of them, just put the side [of the cot] down for a second to see if I could, you know, get anything out of them, but that was it and then I walked back out. I wanted to tell [Brett] straight away.
Kemball: Did you do anything? Did you cry? Did you scream?
Paula: Um, I walked down the hallway crying. Then I went into the room and I was, like, ’cause he heard me, like, I was kind of, like, shaking and that, and he just yelled at me gruffly and said, ‘What are you doing?’ … I didn’t want to tell him while he was drinking and he’s never [sober], only for that short time when he comes in the door, but I didn’t know how he was going to act, just how he was going to cope with it.
Kemball: What do you think you were going to do if you didn’t tell [Brett]?
Paula: Every day I told myself that I was going to ring the police so that my babies had to be buried. I was never gonna hide them but I just didn’t want to give them up. I hoped that they would wake up and hope that it was a dream. It never was.
Kemball: [Paula], what do you think was the cause of your children’s death?
Paula: Not feeding them properly.
Constable Hughes: Want to take a minute?
Paula: No, it’s OK.

Seven days would pass before Paula told Brett his twins were dead. The day after she discovered their bodies she wrapped them in a doona cover, closed the door and ordered her four older children to stay out of the bedroom.

On Thursday, June 12, one of Paula’s best friends dropped by after picking her children up from school. There was no answer when she knocked on the front door, but a car was parked in the driveway. She called Paula’s phone and Paula picked up. Paula met her at the front door but didn’t invite her in. “I didn’t really push the issue,” the friend told the court. “I’ve got children of my own and you don’t want to disturb them if they’re sleeping or anything.”

For 20 minutes she stood with Paula at the front of the house. The friend noticed a distinct change in the once carefree, high-spirited Paula. “Well, she said that she was a little bit stressed out at the moment because herself and [Brett] had been having problems and I offered to have her over that weekend just to give her a bit of a break. She said she’d have a think about it.”

On Monday, June 16, Paula left the house briefly to drive to a supermarket where she bought a chicken to make sandwiches for her children’s lunches. She bought a bottle of Coke, a packet of smokes and some lollies for the kids.

Throughout the previous weekend, Nicole realised she had not heard the twins crying. The children cried often and Nicole told police she used to sneak into their room to calm them. “Every time I went a certain distance from the cot they’d start crying, so then I went back to them and they started laughing, playing, then I just left and closed the door so I couldn’t hear them crying ’cause I really really didn’t like hearing babies crying.”
When her mother went to the shops on that Monday, Nicole entered the twins’ room.

Nicole: And I saw their bodies and then I actually grab [my sister’s] leg to see if she was awake or something … but I was too afraid to so I left the room, slammed, and I started crying in the lounge room and I told [my younger brother] and he went in the room and then he ran out, closed the door, and he felt sick that day and he just laid on his bed all day, which is unlike him, and then my mum got home. I told her that I knew why she was crying and then she told me, ‘Why did I go in there?’, and then she started crying again… she told me that I had to tell the truth about Dad and her and she didn’t know what’s going to happen and she got afraid and upset and then that night she told me she was going to call the police…

Paula: She said, “I know now Mum why you’ve been so upset” … and she said, “Mum, if you want to know, I don’t hate you.”

At about 6pm that night Paula phoned her foster mother, Kerry, and asked her to mind the children. Kerry later told Brisbane Magistrates Court: “And I said, ‘Yes, but while I’ve got them will you go to the doctor, you and the babies?’ And she said, ‘It’s too late for that, Mum’.”

At about 7.10pm, police officers arrived at the house to find Kerry waiting for them. Sergeant Frederick Smit and Senior Sergeant Brett MacGibbon found Paula leaning against a wall in the lounge room. A television was on. She was sobbing. “Where are they?” asked MacGibbon. Paula pointed down the hallway.

MacGibbon and Smit walked down the hallway and stopped at the closed door of the first room on the right of the hallway. They turned their heads toward each other, shared a brief and bracing look, and opened the bedroom door.

Constable Hughes: [Paula], they’re your children. You have to give me an answer.
Paula: I know. In my mind I wasn’t physically, mentally trying to starve them. I don’t know. I knew that I had to get someone to them but I didn’t know what would happen when I would.
Hughes: And what did you think would happen if you didn’t?
Paula: I kept telling myself they’d get better.
Detective Kemball: What did you think would happen if you continued that way?
Paula: Umm. I kept telling myself that I … I was going to ... to fix it.

Postcript: Brett has spent the past five years working under the cloud of his inevitable sentencing. He made support payments for his kids in care, and met and married a woman with two children. When he was sentenced to eight years’ jail on September 16, he gave a melancholy and accepting smile to his family in the public gallery. Paula has already served five years of her eight-year sentence in custody. She was granted immediate parole eligibility upon sentencing and could be free in less than four months. She speaks to Nicole regularly on the phone. She wants to be a mother again to her children.

Lifeline 13 11 14, lifeline.org.au

*Names changed to protect identities.