True crime: My father the murderer: one woman’s shock discovery
When Nina Young discovered that her father was a killer and her mum had kept it secret, her world imploded. Here mother and daughter talk to The Weekly about that deeply emotional journey.
Most families have secrets, scars from the past that everyone senses they shouldn’t ask about, but the secret Denise Young kept from her daughter Nina for 25 years was more than discarded family baggage, it was intense, shocking and life-changing.
So, it’s no wonder that when Nina discovered the truth about who her father really was, about the unvarnished horror of his crimes, it made her question her whole sense of self. “It felt like the ground had fallen out from underneath me. I thought, there’s no way Mum could know because if she knew then obviously I would know about it too,” Nina tells The Weekly as she casts her mind back to that day when everything went dark.
By this time Nina was aware that her father had killed a man. She was 15 when his face appeared on TV’s Australia’s Most Wanted and her mum called Crime
Stoppers to offer information. It was then that Nina learned that the man she knew as her biological dad, Allan Ladd, was a dangerous criminal. A man in Albury, NSW, had been found beaten to death and Allan was the main suspect.
Nina’s heart was in her mouth. She knew that her mum had left her dad when she was a baby, that Allan was a “diamond in the rough” who suffered “a terrible childhood” which caused him to behave erratically.
Denise’s marriage hadn’t worked, she was told, because Allan was violent and she had left him to keep Nina and her brother Lex safe. But a killer?
As Nina tried to take in this new information she learned that there were mitigating circumstances to Allan’s crime. He was protecting his young son, Nina’s half-brother Conan. He had never intended to take someone’s life but snapped when he saw this man in bed with his son and then went on the run with Conan in tow. When the police finally caught Allan, then nine-year-old Conan, who hero-worshipped his father, came to live with Nina and her siblings for a while. It was confusing for everyone and for Nina the start of a descent into teenage angst. Allan was convicted of manslaughter but at the same time was painted as a devoted father saving his son from abuse.
But a decade later, Nina was now looking at the court report she had uncovered and reading a comprehensive blow-by-blow description of another killing, a vicious attack and strangulation of a 28-year-old Aboriginal woman followed by the perpetrator’s careless attempts to conceal the victim’s body in a hastily dug shallow grave. It was a heinous, hideous, brutal crime that had happened before Nina was even born.
She was paralysed. She carried the genes of the man responsible, a psychopathic murderer whose capacity for cruelty seemed innate. “There was a lot of anger.
There were a lot of feelings of betrayal,” Nina says of the moment she told her mother about the new information she had uncovered only to realise that Denise had known all along. “It was a lot, because it was all there in that legal terminology. There’s no softening. And here was a list of all of his crimes laid out in front of me. I wasn’t just angry at my mother; I felt numb and sick at the same time.”
Nina started to question her own character - could she have inherited any of her father’s twisted personality? This was the catalyst for journalist Nina’s six-part 2018 podcast My Father The Murderer, which immediately topped the charts as she fearlessly investigated her father’s past and analysed her own reactions.
Denise agreed to participate in the podcast as an interviewee, though her immediate reaction was to hide away. “We’re opposite kinds of people,” explains Nina. “She’s a head-in-thesand kind of person. I’m a give me absolutely all of the information, let me research it and then I’ll describe how I feel about it kind of person.”
Ultimately Denise believed she owed it to her daughter to be involved. She felt intense guilt and this would be the start of her reparation. The podcast allowed mother and daughter to unpack a lot of their suppressed emotions. But there was more Nina wanted to say and she persuaded her mum to collaborate on a powerful new dual memoir which, for the first time, allows Denise to give her side of the story in her words.
Unmasking Allan
One of the most compelling themes of the book is the idea of isolation. Nina had always known her family was different. She barely knew her biological dad – Allan Ladd – who drifted in and out of her life and instead the family patriarch was her wonderful stepfather Pete. Her two siblings each had different fathers and though they all rubbed along, Nina sensed a disconnect. She felt painfully different from her school friends with their “normal” family set-ups.
Denise, whose work included tutoring prisoners, told Nina a little about Allan quite early on, notably that she had met him in prison, which in itself was shocking enough and not something Nina could readily share. “When I was in primary school, I knew that my parents had met in prison and I remember saying that to a teacher who thought it was horrifying! So I did feel like an alien,” she says.
Understanding her parents’ unique union has been key to Nina’s therapeutic exploration, and in their adult relationship Denise has been incredibly open with her daughter, trying to break down those barriers of secrecy that she now realises caused so much damage. It’s also a narrative that has resonated with other women in abusive relationships who have contacted both Denise and Nina since the podcast.
Back when she met Allan, Denise was a teacher and sometime actor with a passionate belief in the power of education to give people a second chance in life. Allan was the offender she was tutoring - a bright, charismatic man who she later discovered was a convicted murderer.
“I think the minute I saw him I thought, ‘oh, I’m in trouble here, I should leave right away and not come back’,” confesses Denise. “But I didn’t. Despite being 30, I was very immature. I’d married straight out of uni at 20 to a very controlling, guru-like figure, and had spent 10 years with him play-acting. We wrote plays and performed them touring all over New Zealand and in a way, I’d lived in the world that was not real.
“Allan was tall, dark and handsome with a brooding quality. He was my Heathcliff [the tortured antihero of Emily Bronte’s classic 19th century novel Wuthering Heights]. I’ve always had a sort of attraction to that kind of man. Unfortunately.”
Denise says she felt “hypnotised” by Allan and admits that part of the appeal was the frisson of danger involved. “I think everybody who’s had a relationship with a prisoner, and there are many women, I’m afraid, who go into prisons and fall for the danger and secrecy, feel that almost Victorian sense that this is forbidden but nevertheless incredibly exciting.”
Allan was more than forbidden fruit; today Denise tells me that he was a master of control. “I felt as if my ability to make choices, my ability to break it off, was almost switched off. As I gradually found out more things about what he’d done, I knew that I should break it off. But something else seemed to drag me forward and I can’t explain it really except that he was a bit like a snake charmer. Like all sociopaths or psychopaths, as Nina would now call him, he had an incredible ability to understand what might be going on in your head and anticipate it and play on it.”
The more Nina investigated the world of her father, the more she understood how her parents ended up together. “Mum always tries to see the best in people and is always looking to help them. Sometimes I think her kindness and her generosity are things that people take advantage of. So I think Allan was the perfect storm – handsome, smart and funny. She was there as a teacher and he was intelligent and ready to learn. I think people like Allan are very good at picking the right victims and I think he would have seen Mum and realised that he could manipulate her very easily, which is what he did.”
Denise had a son from her first marriage and was in a relationship and living with her current husband, Pete, at the time, but none of that mattered as she fell head-over-heels for Allan. Pete was hurt and bewildered.
“He tries to tackle problems head-on so he said, ‘I want to meet this bloke, I want to see what it is that you’re going for’,” recalls Denise. Pete visited the prison to meet Allan and came away pleading with Denise. “He said ‘I don’t know how you think this is going to work’.”
He was right, of course, but Denise was having none of it. Even when she learned the truth about Allan’s murder conviction, she felt powerless
“Allan was tall, dark and handsome. He was my Heathcliff... I was hypnotised.”
– Denise Young
“Allan has all the traits of a psychopath - he thinks he’s the victim.”
– Nina Young
to walk away. “I think at that point when I finally knew that he’d killed a woman and that she was Aboriginal, I went away and I thought, I have to break this off. I felt dreadful for the family, for the woman. But then I went through all these other things.
“Alarm bells were going off but they were being smothered. I can’t find a genuine excuse for that. Allan would tell me ‘oh but I’ve changed, I had anger problems’. He said something that I’ve heard other prisoners say since, that it wasn’t a conscious act, it was like he was hovering above watching, unable to stop himself. I know that should have been even more of an alarm bell, but I think by then we’d been in love for a year at least and I thought he’s going to be a new person, this couldn’t happen again and that I was strong.”
Naively and with her head hovering in the clouds, Denise gave in to her emotions. After Pete left, she even took her son Lex in to meet Allan, and the two got on famously. “Allan said he wanted to be a father. He said he loved children, that he couldn’t wait for us to have a family.”
Baby Nina
The couple spent hours fantasising about their future together and Nina, Denise says, “was very much a planned baby”. She pushed the detail of Allan’s crime to the back of her mind and when she told her parents about her burgeoning relationship, Denise was pretty economical with the truth. “I kept the illusion for them that he had committed something more like manslaughter,” she writes. “I believe I told myself that as well.”
Denise’s father was horrified but her mother was more understanding. “All her life she had been a rescuer of lost souls,” explains Denise. “We always had waifs and strays coming home, so she embraced the notion. She felt, like me, that there was room for forgiving somebody who could change.”
Even though he was given a life sentence, as a model prisoner Allan was released after just seven years, and by that time Denise was six weeks pregnant with Nina. “She had been conceived when he had time off during work release.” He came out having gained entrance to study at Murdoch University in Perth, and was eager to set up his new life with Denise and grow their family.
“I felt really tentative and said maybe we should live separately. But he said, ‘oh no, let’s get on with it’. I can see now that I was perfect – I had a house, I had a job, I had everything that he could just simply slot into. He had to meet my friends and hang out with people who were maybe academics, and he managed that pretty well at first. But later on, he accused me of being ashamed of him, of trying to hide him away.”
They married and Allan was there at Nina’s birth. “He was terribly excited. He was like any expectant father. He said we’d have 11 such wonderful experiences,” recalls Denise.
But in the next two years Allan’s violent nature emerged and Denise fled. “I think it was when Lex told me that Allan had dropped Nina from a great height into the bassinet because she was crying too much, when I realised the kids have been damaged, I have to get out of this.”
But Allan never really left this mother and daughter. “From 14 to 21, Nina was very troubled,” says Denise.
“I think I was massively in denial saying that’s not why I’m hurt, that’s not why I’m confused about my own identity, but obviously that’s what it was,” admits Nina. “Mum tried to get me to speak to a counsellor, to help bridge that disconnect, but I think I was really out of control for a few years there.”
Saying sorry
The podcast was exactly the outlet Nina needed to examine what she was feeling. In the most heart-stopping episode Nina travels to the tiny Norseman community in WA, where her father’s worst crime took place, to learn about the woman he had murdered and apologise to the family.
I ask Nina why she felt she had to say sorry. “I felt like the apology should be on their terms and not mine, and in their culture the sins of my father are my sins,” she explains. “It felt important. I don’t feel that I’m responsible for his crimes, but I do feel responsible to try and make amends in any way possible.”
Nina did connect with the family in a meaningful way, though they didn’t want to be in the podcast.
“When Nina went to Norseman I felt the most proud of her,” says Denise.
Following the release of the podcast, Allan wrote a letter to Denise from jail in which he attacked Nina, saying her apology to his victim’s family was “ripping open old wounds to satisfy her journalist’s agenda”. Nina says she expected the reaction. “By that point I was pretty aware that Allan has all the traits of a narcissist and a psychopath, and obviously narcissists are always going to see themselves as the victim in every situation and try to manipulate other people against the person he perceives is attacking him.”
Nina has since heard more terrible stories of abuse from others Allan has hurt. “If you look back through his timeline there really wasn’t a period where he wasn’t hurting people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more victims come forward after the book is published,” she notes.
Nina says she is now free from the curse of her father’s history and has achieved some sort of closure. As far as she knows, Allan is still in jail.
Nina has a daughter of her own with long-term partner David. “Being a mother has been completely-lifechanging,” she says. “She’s only six but I really want to explain everything I can to her in a way that’s appropriate to her age. That’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve taken from my own upbringing. You don’t wait till there’s a right time to tell a child something because you might be waiting forever.”
As for her own relationship with her mother, it is now closer than ever. “There aren’t any secrets anymore,” she sighs. AWW
My Father the Murderer by Nina Young & Denise Young, Viking, is on sale now.