Sins of the father: ‘He controlled whether she lived or died. It’s the ultimate control’
His father murdered his mother in cold blood in the ‘ultimate act of control’. Years on, Arman Abrahimzadeh wanted a meeting. Would his dad finally crack?
Arman is four years old and has just lost a board game. Like most children he is not yet equipped to deal with defeat and throws the board across the room. His father Zialloh hits him. When Arman flinches Zialloh shouts at him. “Stand up like a soldier!” he says, belting him again. “Stand up like a soldier!” Arman stays where he is, and his dad keeps hitting.
A few years later, when Arman is seven, he comes home from school with tears in his eyes. He is being bullied by a couple of older boys but doesn’t want his father to see that he is crying. He tries to hide his tears.
“What are you crying about?” Zialloh demands.
“Well, these two kids…”
“These two kids? Go and deal with those two kids! Man up. Don’t cry. Boys don’t cry.” Zialloh slaps Arman across the face. “Wipe away your tears. Don’t cry. Put your bag away.”
Arman is 35 years old now and he’s in a pokey 3m by 3m meeting room at Yatala Labour Prison, the high-security jail in northern Adelaide that has housed the Snowtown killers John Bunting and Robert Wagner, as well as the sadistic mastermind of “The Family” murders, Bevan Spencer von Einem. For the past 10 years, Zialloh Abrahimzadeh has also been resident here.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Zialloh says. Arman hasn’t seen his father for a decade. The first thing he notices is how old he appears. His hair is completely white as he is unable to dye it inside jail. He looks frail and despondent.
“I have been writing to you,’’ Zialloh continues. “I don’t know if you have been getting my letters? I have been thinking about you and your sisters. I see that you have achieved so much. I read about you in the papers. I am so proud of what you have done and what you have achieved. If you get the chance, give my best to the family – to your sisters, your son, your wife. Your son, your wife, how are they going? How are you going?”
Arman cuts him off. “How am I going?” he says. “Let me tell you how I’m going.”
And for once, his father is going to listen.
Zialloh Abrahimzadeh was born in Afghanistan, where he practised as a lawyer, and met his future wife Zahra on a visit to her native Iran, where they fell in love. After a brief courtship they married in 1985 and started a family. Zialloh’s brothers had emigrated to Australia and were urging him to join them here. So in 1997, Zialloh and Zahra packed up and moved to Adelaide with 10-year-old Arman and his sister Atena, 11; their third child Anita was born the year they arrived.
Zialloh’s capacity for cruelty had escalated in fatherhood, and worsened still when he arrived in Australia. He worked as a migration agent and was regarded as a pillar of the community but at home, life was hell. He frequently beat Arman and Atena, but he saved the worst for Zahra. The violence reached a defining crescendo in February 2009 when Zialloh armed himself with knives and threatened to murder his entire family. At that point Zahra and the three children packed up and left. Now homeless, they lived for several days in their car before finding emergency accommodation in a secret location through a domestic violence agency. Zahra did everything she could to protect her family – she told police of the violence she had endured; she began preparations for divorce; she secured a restraining order against Zialloh. It was of no use. At a crowded Persian New Year function at the Adelaide Convention Centre on March 21, 2010, Zialloh turned up, pulled a knife from his coat and stabbed her in front of horrified witnesses. It was Zahra’s 44th birthday. Arman’s determination to confront his father in that pokey meeting room at Yatala prison can be traced back to that very evening.
His older sister Atena, then aged 24, was at the Convention Centre with her mum enjoying the celebrations. As a child, Atena had also suffered at the hands of her father – he burned her fingers when she bit her nails and once hit her with a car aerial. Arman was at the family’s new home looking after his then 13-year-old sister Anita. He was the man of the house now that Zahra had finally left Zialloh, and he had just gone to bed on that fateful night when the phone rang. Come quick, one of Atena’s friends told him. Your dad has just stabbed your mum.
He raced to the scene. “I was trying to get into the function space through the double doors,” Arman recalls. “Imagine 300 people trying to pour out an opening that’s 1.5m wide and one person trying to get in. I felt like a fish trying to swim upstream. They were all crying, some were screaming, some felt like they were about to pass out so they were being helped by others.
“I was trying to get in and when I finally did I saw my mum [on the floor]. I saw the ambos, the police, some security guards – and as soon as I saw that my mum was being looked after, my first thought was for my sister.” Arman’s focus then shifted to his father. He wanted to confront him, not just for this one terrible act but for what he had done to him and his sisters over two brutal decades. Arman ran up to a police officer. “I want to see my dad. He’s my dad! Who are you to stop me from seeing him?” The officer was having none of it. It was a crime scene, and Arman had to stay away. Meanwhile, the paramedics were still working frantically on Zahra as she lay on the Convention Centre floor.
“At that time they were still saying mum was alive,” Arman says. “‘She’s hurt, but she’s alive’. And she was. It was only when she got taken to hospital that we were given the news that she had passed away.”
While awaiting their father’s trial, Arman, Atena and Anita lived together in the family home, effectively orphans, grieving for their mother while dealing with their father’s doggedly loyal family and isolated from sections of Adelaide’s Iranian community who were afraid of him.
Zialloh, meanwhile, was sending them letters from his prison cell, the first a meandering 16-page rant in which he shirked responsibility for his conduct, arguing that Zahra would still be alive today if not for her decision to leave him and take the children with her. Even then, on the cusp of the trial, Arman yearned to speak with his dad, to ask why; to see if he took any responsibility for his actions.
In his murder trial Zialloh pleaded innocent but at the last minute changed his plea to guilty after his children all gave harrowing evidence documenting his conduct over the years. The presiding judge, John Sulan, said he had no doubt Zialloh’s crime was calculated and that he felt no shame for what he did. “Your act was premeditated and deliberate,” Justice Sulan said as he sentenced him to life in prison, with a non-parole period of 26 years. “Your continued denial of your behaviour demonstrates your lack of remorse.”
Two years ago, the now retired Justice Sulan bumped into Arman on the street and introduced himself. They arranged to meet for lunch and Arman told the judge that he still wanted to speak with his father. “It’s quite a thing for him to do but he is a very impressive young man,” Justice Sulan says. “I was so impressed with the whole way he conducted himself through the trial and coped with such an event.”
On a Thursday morning earlier this year, Arman Abrahimzadeh, now a married father of one, wakes up and cooks breakfast for his family. Despite his background, Arman has enjoyed a long string of successes in his professional and personal life. He graduated from UniSA’s School of Art, Architecture and Design in 2009 and is now a senior manager with the State Government’s planning arm, Renewal SA. He has thrown himself into public life by drawing on his past to become a powerful campaigner against domestic violence. His first foray into that space was an extraordinary speech to a White Ribbon Day Breakfast at the Adelaide Festival Centre some 10 years ago, aged in his mid-twenties, where he reduced the room to tears. Since then, he and his sisters have created the Zahra Foundation, named in honour of their mum, which holds regular fundraisers for the economic empowerment of women in abusive relationships. He has also become friends with the SA Police Commissioner, Grant Stevens, who has met him several times to discuss and implement changes to the way domestic violence cases are policed. Four years ago, he was elected to the Adelaide City Council.
Arman’s greatest moments of personal joy have come in the past few years. He married his girlfriend, Genevieve, in November 2019, and one year later they had a son, Raphael. Now that his wife is back at work, Arman is on six months’ leave so he can spend more time with his son, who often accompanies him to work at the City Council.
On this Thursday, Arman has arranged for Genevieve’s family to look after Raphael. Because today, Arman is going to the Yatala Labour Prison. He is finally going to speak with his father.
The process of visiting Yatala is not as simple as breezily arriving and pressing a bell. Before he heads out, Arman makes a return visit to the same psychologist he had seen every month in the aftermath of his mother’s death to help him work through his grief and rage. He wants to address one key question: What do I want to achieve from this? He also wants to prepare himself mentally so he can pre-empt his father’s excuses for his actions. He feels that now he is married with a child, a career and a mortgage, he is ideally placed to head off his father’s dissembling about how the pressures of family and work made him crack. The meeting will be like a chess game, where Arman will stay a move in front of his father the entire time.
“I got to a point where I’ve got married, I’ve got a kid – I am a husband and a father,” Arman says. “I knew that if I had gone to see him before this he may have used it against me. He would have said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be a husband, you don’t know what it’s like to be a dad. You don’t know what it’s like to be in a family home where you have pressures on you.’
“I felt like I had the upper hand. In a lot of the letters he wrote to me and my sisters he talked about the hardship he experienced. He talked about how he did not have a lot of family support. When we were living in Iran his family were based here in Adelaide. He would highlight that. And I thought, ‘OK, you want to talk about not having your family around? Not having a family network? Well that’s fine, let’s sit down and talk about that, because I think I’ve got the upper hand here.’
“So all these things lined up and I thought, ‘You know what? I’m in a good position to go and see him.’ Knowing my dad, I knew what he would do. I knew he would deflect and justify why he did what he did. I made sure I ticked all of those boxes, and that emotionally and mentally I was in a position to achieve what I wanted to achieve.”
The other aspect to the visit is a logistical one; the SA Department for Correctional Services spent several months with him planning the visit. Once his father agreed to the meeting, senior managers at Yatala gave Arman several options: speak with his dad over the phone; online via Zoom or Teams; face-to-face in an open room where they could shake hands and embrace if they wished; or in a room where they were separated by a glass screen.
Arman asked for the room with the screen. “To be honest I didn’t know whether I would break down and console him or get up and smash him with a chair,” he says.
Arman drives to Yatala with Genevieve, who insists on waiting outside as neither of them is sure what shape he’ll be in when it’s over. Arman signs into the jail, clears security and is ushered into the meeting room, where he waits alone on a plastic chair for his father to arrive. He doesn’t feel nervous, just focused. A few minutes later a door opens. A prison guard brings his father in, looking older, greyer and smaller than he did when Arman last saw him via video link in the Supreme Court in 2010.
For the next 75 minutes they sit a metre apart speaking in their mother tongue, Farsi, the only language they have ever communicated in, with Arman abruptly putting an end to his father’s meandering pleasantries. “How am I going?” Arman says back to his father. “Let me tell you how I’m going. This has been life for me for the past 12 years. You forced us out of home. You made us homeless. You made us face poverty. You isolated us. The community didn’t want to have anything to do with us. People were scared to talk to us, to be seen with us. You scared off our support network. All of those things happened because of you.
“Aside from the thing that’s led us here, to prison, let’s talk about the 22 years of hell that was our family home. So how am I? Right now I am in a good place but for the past 12 years some days have been hell. Thanks to you.”
Zialloh continues to argue that things only went wrong when Zahra upped and left, and that their homelessness was their own fault. “You had a home!” he tells Arman. “You could have come back!”
Arman fires back. “I didn’t want to come back to an abusive home where you were threatening us with being killed,” he says.
Then, just minutes into the interview, something remarkable happens. Zialloh breaks down. He is inconsolable. The man who ordered his four-year-old son to stand like a soldier after losing a board game, who belted his seven-year-old son for crying when he was bullied at school, is himself a whimpering mess.
“I know I was strict with you,” Zialloh says through the tears. “I know I had my moments, my bad traits. I did things and some of those things I am not proud of. But at that time, in that moment, I felt that it was the right thing, it was necessary. Yes, I am strict. I am not going to shy away from that. I disciplined all of you because I thought it was in your best interests. Everything I did, be it good or bad, was in your best interests.”
Zialloh tries to explain away his parenting style as cultural. “You need to understand that we as people are products of our environment,” he says. “The environment where I grew up and the way society was 30 years ago was completely different to how we are now.”
So how does that explain the fact that you ended up murdering mum?, Arman asks.
On this question, Zialloh remains in near complete denial. He has compartmentalised his life as a father and husband into two manageable boxes. As a father, his occasional brutality could be blamed on the stresses of work and parenting, of geographic dislocation, of his cultural upbringing. And as a husband, he says he only really “cracked” after his wife triggered his downward spiral by leaving him, at which point he wasn’t himself, he says.
“The act that I did that night was not intentional,” Zialloh insists to Arman. “I wasn’t well. You need to understand the problem from my perspective. At that time I wasn’t making the right decisions. I was making mistakes. For that I am sorry. I was in a different state of mind. I loved your mother.”
The words Zialloh uses to describe his final act towards Zahra are a case study in evasion. To borrow from the British doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple, who documented his many prison interviews with violent offenders in his book The Knife Went In, Zialloh has become a “marionette of happenstance” who uses the passive voice to suggest a “dishonest fatalism” about what he did at the Convention Centre that night.
Arman doesn’t really care whether his father says sorry for what he did to his mum, but he cannot bear the weasel words his father uses to deflect responsibility.
“So where is the accountability? There was no accountability. It was him just focusing on the divorce, saying it put him in a difficult position; that he had to pay lawyers’ fees in order to see his child, which should be his right as a father. The focus was always on him and the hardship he went through. He never even mentioned the hardship that mum faced, or even us, his kids.
“He didn’t make that decision [to kill Zahra] on the day she died. He didn’t just wake up and decide to put a knife under his jacket and go to the Convention Centre. As he was explaining himself and justifying it, there were so many times I just wanted to confront him and say there is a difference between love and being obsessed and losing control over someone. I know that that’s part of it. He had lost control of mum and he had lost control over the family. That’s why he decided to do what he did. At that moment he controlled whether she lived or died. It’s the ultimate control.
“It was a half-arsed apology,” Arman adds. “But that wasn’t the reason I went there. I couldn’t care less if he apologises or not. Nothing he can ever do or say will bring my mum back or put us in a better position.”
The meeting is drawing to a close. Arman has said all he has to say. During the meeting he has not called his dad “dad”, or “father”, or even “Zialloh”. He hasn’t called him anything.
His father had sobbed when Arman reminded him about the board game. He sobbed when he reminded him about being belted when he was bullied at school. He sobbed when he reminded him about the time he tried to throw his mother through a window, and the time he hit Arman so hard that drops of his blood splattered against the wall. Now Zialloh is crying because he wants to know when he will see Arman again, and whether his daughters Atena and Anita are planning a visit to Yatala too.
They’re not. And for now, and probably forever, neither is Arman. His dad starts sobbing again.
Arman does not cry once. He stands up like a soldier while his dad blubbers away. He feels a weird pit in his guts as he looks at his pitiable old man. After all, Arman figures, he is still my father. But every time he feels it, he sees an image in his mind of Zahra lying at the state morgue on the night that he, as a 23-year-old, identified her body. And he looks back at his father and gives him nothing.
“Please, I beg you, come and see me again,” Zialloh pleads. “Let’s have more sessions.”
“No, I can’t do it and I won’t do it,” Arman says. “Anything you have got to say, say it now.”
Arman gets up and leaves.
“It was hard,” he says afterwards. “It had gone through my head so many times. ‘What if he does break down? What if he cries and I need to not show any emotion?’ That’s what I had planned, purely because in his eyes, his view is that if you cry, that’s a weakness. Boys don’t cry.”
Lifeline 13 11 14; 1800respect.org.au
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout