What makes a father KILL HIS OWN FAMILY?
With the community still reeling from the recent tragic family killings in Margaret River and Pennant Hills, Megan Norris examines the mind of the family annihilator, the most extreme perpetrator of domestic abuse.
For three blissful years the hobby farm of retirees Peter and Cynda Miles in the idyllic countryside of Margaret River, WA, epitomised the quintessential retirement dream. Aptly named Forever Dreaming, the smallholding outside the tiny rural township of Osmington fulfilled its advertised promise to provide a “piece of paradise” for their selfsufficient lifestyle and a peaceful haven for their separated daughter and her four autistic children.
Then on May 11 this year the Miles’ pastoral dream unravelled into a terrifying and unimaginable nightmare. It left three generations dead and their close-knit community pondering the dark forces which had driven a lawabiding, apparently loving husband, father and grandfather to annihilate his entire family in the worst Australian mass murder in more than 20 years.
Now, as a shattered farming community grapples with the devastating loss of seven of their own, The Australian Women’s Weekly delves into the troubled minds of the men who turn on their own flesh and blood, to highlight a complex and rare type of family homicide that is statistically on the rise.
International studies have shown that familicides – murders where a parent kills their own children and commonly their partner too – are predominantly perpetrated by men, who often take their own lives after killing their families. These crimes are often viewed as sudden, spur-of-themoment killings, perpetrated by men who believe their own pain is too intense to be understood. But according to Melbourne-based psychologist and university lecturer Dr Helen McGrath, co-author of a new book exploring the dark psyches of some of Australia’s most horrific killers, the reality is very different.
In Mind Behind the Crimes, penned with journalist Cheryl Critchley, McGrath concludes that most of these crimes are premeditated and carried out by sane men who are unaffected by psychosis or mental illness.
“They are often men who irrationally decide that their children, and in many cases their partners, are better off dead – and when they contemplate suicide, they take their families with them, in the irrational belief that they would not cope without them or simply wouldn’t deserve to live,” she explains.
While an inquest is yet to determine the harrowing events which culminated in the tragedy in WA, the first hint of trouble emerged that fatal Friday when neighbours were woken by the sound of gunshots. Initially believed to be a farmer shooting kangaroos, a more sinister explanation surfaced when sirens were heard blazing towards the farm in response to a 5.15am Triple O call from a man police have confirmed was ‘connected’ to the property.
Police found the bodies of Katrina Miles, 35, and her children
“When they contemplate suicide they take their families with them …”
study, says perceptions of masculinity and power commonly form a backdrop to these crimes, and killing the family is often a man’s final attempt to reaffirm his masculinity and exert control over them.
Other research found these killers’ lives and decisions are driven by negative emotions like disappointment, shame, fear, anxiety and, to a lesser extent, depression and mental illness.
For men who feel they’ve failed in work, finances, family or relationships, emotions can go into overdrive, with deadly consequences for their families. While relationship breakdown is the most common trigger for filicide, the family annihilator is most commonly the disappointed father still living within the family unit.
McGrath examined the case of third-generation grain farmer Geoff Hunt, 44, who in September 2014 fatally shot his wife, Kim, 41, and children, Fletcher, 10, Mia, eight, and Phoebe, six, before driving to a dam outside rural Lockhart in NSW and turning his gun on himself. The murder-suicide of this outwardly happy, respectable family sent shockwaves through the Riverina farming district where there had been nothing about Hunt’s behaviour before the crimes to raise alarm bells.
Upon reflection, Kim Hunt’s disability support worker, Lorraine Bourke, who had helped her after a near-fatal car accident in 2012 left her with permanent brain damage, recalled a tense atmosphere at the farm the night before the shootings. Following her accident, Kim, a former nurse, had undergone a personality change – battling depression, mood swings and angry, uncontrolled outbursts which she directed at her husband.
Bourke recalled the pair arguing about finances and Kim berating Hunt for being lazy and for allegations that he had cheated when umpiring his son’s junior footie match the day before. Hunt had been unusually quiet and non-responsive, though Bourke saw no hint of the impending horror when she left him that night preparing his children’s school lunches.
Bourke discovered Kim’s body on a path outside the farm the following afternoon. Police later found the three dead children in their bedrooms, and Hunt the next day.
An inquest ruled the murders were the result of Hunt’s “egocentric delusion” that the family was dependent on him and would be better off dead. But McGrath observes that while suicide had been Geoff Hunt’s primary intention, he had only been “moderately depressed” at the time of his crime and like most of the killers she studied, showed no sign of mental illness or psychosis that would have prevented him from knowing what he was doing. She says Hunt was the typical “disappointed” family annihilator – a man driven by shame, whose worst fear was living alone and who was highly dependent on his family.
“Being accused of cheating would have compounded the shame he felt
about a possible separation and, when he decided to end his life, this drove his irrational logic his family had to go too – partly because they wouldn’t cope with the shame of his suicide or manage without him, and partly because he believed they were a part of that shame.”
Victorian father Robert Farquharson who deliberately drove his car into a rural dam on Father’s Day 2005, leaving his three young sons to drown, was also a disappointed offender, highly dependent on his family, and experiencing financial woes. Farquharson’s shame and inability to cope with the disappointment of his separation manifested in a revenge plot. He killed his children – Jai, 10, Tyler, eight, and Bailey, two – to punish their mother for ending their marriage. He is currently serving a minimum 33 years in prison for the horrific payback crime.
It is important that tragedies like these, which former NSW State Coroner Michael Barnes described in the Hunt case as
“the worst of crimes”, are not seen to have less criminal culpability simply because they occur in a family setting. It is a sentiment shared by anti-family violence campaigner Rebecca Poulson, who views familicides as the ultimate act of family violence, even where there is no history of domestic abuse.
In September 2003, Rebecca’s estranged brother-in-law, Phitak (Neung) Kongsom, stabbed his two small children, Marilyn, four, and Sebastian, nearly two, to death, while their grandfather, Peter, 62, fought to save them from their father’s vicious knife attack. Poulson died beside his grandchildren at his semi-rural home in NSW. Rebecca’s sister, Ingrid, had recently ended a violent relationship with Kongsom, a dependent, non-coping man, who later died in hospital from self-inflicted knife wounds.
Like McGrath, Poulson remains angry over the way the media eulogises these violent killers, remembering them as “top blokes”.
In rural Australia, where gun-related suicides are increasing among farmers grappling with the collapse of the traditional farming economy, they are more euphemistically justified as the “good bloke under pressure syndrome”.
“But they are not top blokes,” says McGrath caustically. “Top blokes don’t shoot, stab and drown their families. What they are is weak, disappointed non-resilient sane men who can’t cope with their own lives or disappointment. When they decide to take their own lives, they selfishly take their families with them, with no regard for what their wives or children might want. It becomes a case of “you’ve got to go too, because you are part of the reason I am going – you are part of my shame,” she explains.
McGrath and Critchley’s book has examined the 2015 case of another NSW father, Darren Milne, whose carefully orchestrated murder-suicide plot was driven by the same irrational, altruistic belief that his family would be better off dead.
Milne, 42, an engineer, drove his car into a tree in rural Fountaindale in a callously premeditated plan to kill himself, his pregnant wife, Susana Estevez Castillo, 39, and their two intellectually disabled sons Liam, 11 and Ben, seven, who suffered from the rare genetic Fragile X syndrome.
The suicidal father meticulously trawled the countryside for an ideal crime scene, taking photographs and dashcam videos – even organising practice runs before carrying out his deadly plan. To ensure there would be no survivors, he disabled the driver’s side airbag and rigged up two petrol bombs to ignite upon impact. But despite hitting the tree at 90kph, the bombs failed to detonate, sparing Ben the terrible deaths that killed his family.
A note on Milne’s iPad stated: “It’s not worth it … It’s only going to get tougher as time goes on.”
McGrath says Milne was an altruistic and disappointed family annihilator who believed that his wife and children had let him down and destroyed his fantasy of the ideal family.
In another tragedy the following year in the Sydney suburb of Davidson, neighbours noticed Fernando Manrique, 44, tinkering on the roof of his home. But none of them dreamed that the high-flying Colombian executive was rigging the place with a crude but lethal gas
“… they are not top blokes. Top blokes don’t shoot, stab and drown their families.”