Murder trauma MY DAD KICKED MUM TO DEATH
That horrific day remains etched in her memory
Christina Pusztay’s earliest memory is sitting in a highchair in the kitchen of her childhood home in suburban Christchurch and watching her father kick her mother to death.
Her 35-year-old mum Eileen Foley was cooking porridge and had asked her husband for a bit more help around the house. Owen Foley, a police officer, said he just wanted to go to the beach.
“They began arguing – loud arguing I can still remember to this day,” tells Christina, who was nearly three at the time.
“He punched her, knocking her to the kitchen floor, then proceeded to kick her in the head.” The final death blow was a kick to the temple.
The explosive episode in an ordinary weatherboard Housing New Zealand home in Richmond on the morning of July 28, 1950, happened in front of Christina, her sister Mary-Anne, four, and their baby brother John. Years later, they would discover their father took two lives that day – Eileen had been six months pregnant.
Unsurprisingly, the horrific event would scar each of the children for the rest of their lives. “Children are the silent victims of domestic violence,” says Christina, now 70, an amateur actress and singer who lives in the Auckland suburb of Remuera.
“They deal with trauma and grief, and are often separated from friends, school and possessions. They live with the shame and stigma of being the child of a murderer, but also with the guilt of not being able to prevent the tragedy.”
That morning, young Christina watched as her dad dragged her mother’s lifeless body across the linoleum floor of the kitchen towards the marital bedroom. He then apparently sat on the back steps of the house and called the local priest.
Silent witness
According to a yellowing newspaper article Christina has from ThePress, her 34-year-old father then called his colleagues at the police station at 8.55am. “My wife and I had a row, and I hit her,” he told them. “I would like you to come round straight away as I do not like the look of her.”
More than 67 years on, Christina can still visualise
the police walking into the family’s house.
“It’s a funny thing to recall, but I remember being worried because I didn’t have a nappy on,” she says. “I was confused and helpless.”
Eileen’s lifeless body was found on the couple’s bed, the sheets pulled up to her chin. Her left eye was bruised and swollen, and her nose was bleeding. According to the article in
ThePress, Christina’s father told the police, “We had a bit of a tiff this morning and I belted her. I did not think that a punch like that would kill a woman.”
Christina believes it wasn’t the first time her father had abused Eileen.
A family member had seen her with an unexplained black eye and Eileen would often take off with her children to see their much-loved maternal grandmother
Agnes Duffy in Wellington.
“After a few days, people would talk. They would say, ‘Isn’t it about time you went back to your husband?’ With no benefits and no refuge in those days, there was nowhere to go.”
After their mum’s murder, a shell-shocked Christina and Mary-Anne went to live with Agnes in Miramar.
Baby John was sent to the Star of the Sea orphanage just a few blocks away in the neighbouring suburb of Seatoun and, tragically, the sisters had little contact with their wee brother.
And despite the horror of what the children had witnessed on that cold winter’s morning, a pallor of silence descended over the family.
“No-one talked about the death,” tells Christina. “My sister and I never talked about it; my grandparents never talked about it. Their silent pain became my silent pain and for the next 40 years, I just held it in.”
When she was five, Christina and Mary-Anne were sent to board at St Brides in Masterton.
“The other girls would ask, ‘Where’s your mother?’ and I would make up stories about her being a famous actress travelling the world,” confesses Christina. She kept up the pretence until she was eight and then another girl told everyone what had happened.
“I felt betrayed, a liar and alone,” she recalls. “I became a bully, angry other children had mothers and I didn’t.”
After that, Christina would tell people her mother had died of cancer.
In 1953, Christina’s father was released from prison. Foley had served less than three years for manslaughter in a white-collar prison. At times, he’d visit Christina and Mary-Anne at their grandmother’s house in Wellington, and was strangely cordial to them.
“This I never understood,” says Christina. “I remember being about nine, walking down the road with him and asking, ‘Why did you kill my mother?’ He never answered. Again as an adult I asked, but I never got an answer.”
Christina has few memories of her much-loved mum. Over the decades, she has pieced together a picture from those who knew Eileen – a vivacious woman with a bright personality and a lovely singing voice. “She was popular among her peers and well-liked by everyone who knew her.”
Past heart break
Yet Eileen’s short life was dogged with inexplicable tragedy long before she met Foley. At 17, she arrived on a boat from Ireland, one of 10 siblings.
She married her first husband, Roy Ericcson, and the young couple would go on to have three children. Within two years, Eileen would lose all of them – Roy and one of the children from tuberculosis, one in a car accident and the third to leukaemia.
For a grieving Eileen, her second husband no doubt represented a second chance at life. Not so.
Christina can’t remember hating her father, but she did resent him for taking away her mother.
After getting out of prison, Foley tried to rebuild his life, but the gossip on the streets of Christchurch proved too much and he spent years as a seaman before moving to Auckland. He died in 1980.
It took Christina a long time to realise the horrific murder she’d witnessed as a young child would act as a catalyst for the second half of her life.
She was in her 40s and working in Auckland as a
personal assistant to a lawyer when she saw a television advertisement calling for volunteers at the Domestic Violence Centre. After doing the training, she found the courage to speak publicly for the first time in four decades about what had happened.
“That helped me to understand myself and speak freely about my life,” explains Christina. “It brought me closer to my children and made it easier for me to discuss my feelings about losing my mother.”
From there, she left the corporate world, retrained and for the next two decades ran Supportline Women’s Refuge in Mt Albert in Auckland, doing her best to change the lives of women and children left in the wake of domestic violence. She was committed to empowering women and giving them a safe space, but it was the children she was most passionate about.
Finding peace
Christina says while the homicide of children is often talked about, those who witness a parent’s murder are largely forgotten by society, yet they live forever with the scars.
“My mother’s death changed my life forever,” she tells. “I never had any real encouragement to do anything, get an education and make anything of myself. I’ve never been good at relationships. But I guess on the upside, it’s made me stronger.”
Now retired, in the last few years, Christina has discovered the joy of theatre,
gaining work as an extra in movies and television, and performing with the Marvellous Theatre Group, which she also chairs. She’s mum to adult children Joshua, 45, and Sanchia, 42, and also a hands-on grandmother to her adored grandchildren, Hartley, 21, and Phenix Rose, 12.
“To be a grandparent is an important role,” says Christina. “People forget that when one parent kills the other, you lose all the relatives on one side.”
Although Christina has few mementos of her mother Eileen, she treasures a wedding photo of her, taken in 1945 on the brink of her new life with Foley.
She also has the yellowed newspaper clippings on her father’s trial at the Magistrates Court in Christchurch and her mother’s death certificate, which states the cause of death as “subdural hematoma, caused by a kick from her husband”.
Christina dreams of one day visiting Donegal, her mother’s hometown in Ulster, Ireland. It’s a way of feeling closer to a woman she never got the chance to know. “I still resent my father for taking my mother from me and I still resent him for taking my kids’ gran away,” declares Christina.
“It took me 40 years to tell my story, but now I know that speaking out keeps the memory alive.”