True crime: My father the murderer
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.
One woman’s shock discovery
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