Chapter 12

A Nightmare Relived

The funeral was over, Lewthwaite was awaiting trial, and the media had found other stories to chase. It seemed to the Hanns family as if the world had kept going and somehow left them behind. Friends had stopped calling, many didn’t know what to say, and some had kindly suggested that Gwen and Peter should be getting on with their lives now. Neighbour Monica Tranter couldn’t believe the neighbourhood talk. There were rumours that Lewthwaite was Gwen’s boyfriend and people asking whether he lived in the street. Others talked of drunken all-night parties and abusive family rows. Nobody said anything to Gwen, of course. Everyone avoided her. Some even went as far as crossing the street to get away from her.

Each time Monica headed for Gwen’s place, she was stopped by someone. One woman in particular had delayed Monica to tell her that she knew Lewthwaite and had seen him.

‘That’s great,’ Monica had said. ‘I’ll tell the policeman who was asking for people who knew him. He’ll be glad of the help.’

The woman had stopped dead in her tracks and muttered she wasn’t absolutely sure.

It seemed that everyone had an opinion. There were even those who said Gwen had been grieving too long because ‘Nicole was adopted. It wasn’t as though she was her own.’ Gwen and Peter had adopted Nicole in September 1968 when she was four weeks and three days old. Their son, Anthony, had been adopted a few years before Nicole. He had been two and a half weeks old. Gwen loved both children as unconditionally as she would have had they been her natural children.

Gwen was on the bus the first time she heard a group of women talking about her. They chattered about their disbelief that she could lie in bed and not hear the window glass break. Gwen sat chilled and began to question whether they were right. She had always heard the cries and sniffles of her children in the night, yet never been disturbed by other noises.

Monica Tranter was determined to keep Gwen and Peter active. Most days, she met up with Gwen as soon as the kids left for school. They would clean Gwen’s house, and then go and clean Monica’s. Over bottles of sparkling wine and glasses of Bacardi or Scotch, they sewed, made curtains and painted their houses. She was convinced that trying to get them interested in things helped. She did her best to be there for Gwen.

Gwen and Peter had changed. First, they smoked heavily now. Gwen could smoke three cigarettes between her home and her doctor’s surgery in the next suburb, Merrylands. Even friends who smoked were beginning to notice and back away a little. Secondly, they were arguing a lot. Gwen needed to talk about Nicole and to fight against Lewthwaite. Peter needed to block the murder from his mind. Gwen could talk to anyone about Nicole, even strangers in the street, and that was the last thing Peter wanted to be doing. It took 12 months for Peter to start talking again about anything at work. At home he couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. Monica became Gwen’s outlet, and Peter joined the scouts with Anthony.

Anthony was also struggling with the changes Nicole’s murder had brought to his life. Going back to school wasn’t easy for him. It was lonely. Apart from a few close friends, like his neighbour, Kevin, no one wanted to play with him. All the regular boys with whom Anthony had played soccer and football in his free time wanted nothing to do with the nine-year-old. To make matters worse, Anthony’s teacher had moved him to the front of the class and away from his friends. He couldn’t understand what he had done wrong.

Gwen watched as her son became more depressed about school. Finally, she went to see his principal. She wanted to know why her son was being treated differently and why he was being punished by being moved away from his friends. Had he become disruptive?

‘Apparently not’, the principal explained. The teacher was unaware how she should best react to Anthony’s situation so she had brought him closer to her.

Anthony’s trips home on the school bus were also different without Nicole. Mostly, they were quiet. It had been an impossible task to get his sister to sit in her seat on the bus. She was always swinging from one seat to another and up and down the aisle, talking to the bus driver and playing with the door levers. Anthony had only been back at St Simon Stock Primary School for one or two days when one of the older children cornered him on the bus.

‘Where’s your nutty sister?’ he asked.

Thinking he hadn’t heard about Nicole’s murder, Anthony replied, ‘She’s not here.’

‘Good. Makes the bus ride home better!’ he hooted.

Anthony eyed him up, but he knew he was too big to punch without getting flattened. He picked up his Stanford schoolbag; it was made of aluminium and fibreglass and was strong. Taking a big swing, he thudded the boy a few times. He was about to beat him again when other boys stepped in. They grabbed Anthony and held him off. The big boy was told about Nicole and he apologised. He hadn’t realised to whom he had been speaking.

A boy called Raymond continued to bully Anthony as he grew older. Having stopped being Anthony’s friend, he ran around the playground daily, stabbing himself in the chest. He’d hang his tongue out of the side of his mouth and make gagging noises. Gwen could see Anthony was coming undone. Once again, she went to see the principal, but in the end it was Anthony who retaliated, five years later. The first time Anthony found Raymond alone at the top of the school building, he couldn’t believe his luck – there were almost two storeys of continuous concrete stairs, with only a metal handrail for protection and no one about. The then 14-year-old shoved Raymond from behind and watched him fall, but miraculously he reached the bottom without a scratch or a bruise.

A few days later, Anthony tried it again, and once again, not a scratch or a bruise. He decided not to try a third time, and instead waited for compulsory sports lessons during which he elbowed Raymond in the face and punched him at every opportunity he got. Raymond never reacted, and the rest of the school turned a blind eye.

However, school wasn’t the only area of Anthony’s life that altered irrevocably. Even his parents treated him differently. One afternoon, not long after his sister had died, he had asked Gwen, ‘Don’t you love me anymore, Mum?’

‘You know I do,’ Gwen had said. ‘Why do you ask such a stupid thing?’

‘Well, how come you never go crook at me anymore?’

‘What have you done that I have to correct you for?’ Gwen had asked.

‘Nothing,’ Anthony had shrugged.

‘Well, why would I have to punish you?’

‘Well,’ Anthony had retorted, ‘I just thought you didn’t love me anymore because you didn’t go crook at me anymore.’

At the time, Gwen had been surprised by her son’s comments. It was true their lives had changed since Nicole had died, but she was sure she hadn’t treated her son very differently. Concerned, she took Anthony for weekly visits to a psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital. She also searched every bookshop she found for material on rape because Anthony had begun asking about things he’d heard on the news. He wanted to know what a paedophile was.

‘How do you tell a nine-year-old how a man can rape him?’ asks Gwen. ‘He was an innocent little kid. He didn’t know what any of that was … I never hid anything from my children and anything they’d ask me they got told the truth about but I didn’t elaborate on the truth.’

 

It was 9 December 1974 before John Lewthwaite’s trial began, and it was over in just three days. Lewthwaite had admitted to killing Nicole but claimed it was manslaughter. The body of evidence submitted by his defence consisted of psychiatrists arguing as to his state of mental health at the time he killed Nicole. On Wednesday, 11 December, the jury retired to consider their verdict and found him guilty of murder after deliberating for two hours.

In the courtroom, Gwen listened distantly as the fragmented pieces of Nicole’s murder were pasted together by the prosecution. Muffled by a tinnitus of pain, she heard the testimonies of the ambulance officer, the doctor, neighbour Clive Ford, the police officers, Lewthwaite’s parole officers and a number of psychiatrists as they mapped out the events of the night of the murder. Throughout the ordeal, her thoughts turned constantly to recollections of her daughter.

Nicole had been blessed with angelic beauty. She had golden curls, rosy cheeks and laughing blue eyes. Without a doubt, she would have made a worthy model for any church mural. She and Peter had little money so Gwen would sew all of Nicole’s clothes from factory remnants. She never had to wear the same clothes twice in one season. She looked a treat in her fashionable hot pants and skirts. That night, the night she had been murdered, Nicole had been wearing her pink pyjama set.

‘The accused had been there before?’

One of the police officers now stood before the prosecution, and replied, ‘Yes.’

Gwen became vaguely aware that it was Lewthwaite who had peeped in her bathroom window a couple of years earlier. He had stuck his head between the frosted glass window and the gauze before asking Anthony to come closer. When Anthony had run into the lounge room, dripping wet and shouting, ‘There’s a man at the window,’ Peter had run out of the back door and she had run out of the front door. It was strange as the dogs hadn’t barked. By the time they had made it outside, the man had gone. The police had said that little boys often lied, but at the time Gwen had known he wasn’t lying.

‘Anthony was one of those kids,’ says Gwen, ‘who’d tell you a lie and five minutes later he’d tell you the truth.’ Not withstanding, you could always tell when he was lying. His eyebrows would rise. They had put up curtains in the bathroom the next day, lace ones for the daytime and heavier ones to be drawn at night.

Gwen hadn’t wanted to hear the details of what had happened to Nicole the night she was stabbed or to see the man who did it. Her urge to see him had gone the day she was released from questioning by the police and had seen his photo on the news. She had never wanted to see him again. She had had to come to court to testify. Now she sat taking in little as the lawyers argued about Lewthwaite’s fate.

Testifying in court terrified the Hanns’s neighbour Clive Ford. He had only ever been in a Magistrate’s Court before. He waited on the benches outside the courtroom, smoking, pacing up and down and nervously waiting for his turn to speak. Weeks earlier, he had given young Anthony a model plane and the boy had excitedly accepted it. However, afterwards, Anthony had heard from others that Clive had been working on that plane the night Nicole was murdered. They had told him that his neighbour had watched as Lewthwaite ran in and out of his yard, and he had been angry. Anthony had smashed the plane on the road in front of the Fords’ house.

When Clive was finally called, his appearance was brief. The prosecutor read his police statement back to him and he agreed that it was the truth. His ordeal was over. Clive’s wife, Audrey, sat in the audience, watching. It was the first time she had ever been in a courtroom and she was shocked to see Lewthwaite sitting with a half grin on his face. At home, she was still leaving the hallway light on because her three eldest daughters wouldn’t sleep without it. They knew Lewthwaite was behind bars and they were old enough to realise he was interested in boys, not girls, but they were still frightened.

Years later, Audrey’s four girls were still affected by Nicole’s murder. Left alone one evening while Audrey and Clive went out for dinner, the girls jumped the back fence and raced to a neighbour’s house in their nighties when they heard someone knocking on the door. Later, they discovered the caller was a member of the Salvation Army collecting money. He was well known to the family.

Audrey sat and listened as the night’s events were relayed to the jury. The 19-year-old killer had hidden in her front yard, and then in the back. He had waited somewhere in the shadows between her maple tree and outside toilet for the neighbourhood to go to bed. Audrey could feel the hairs on the back of her neck as she realised that he had been there while she and her family had gone to the toilet. It could have turned out very differently.

It became clear that 25 June 1974 wasn’t her family’s first connection with Lewthwaite. A couple of years earlier, her husband, Clive, had mowed the school lawns. It was the job of the Parents and Citizens Association to help out with maintenance of the local school, Sherwood Grange. Audrey’s daughter Julie had supposedly gone to help her dad, but instead had played with some other kids. That night, the school library had been burnt down, and the police had come to question the Fords. John Lewthwaite and his brothers had later been convicted of that arson at Sherwood Grange, along with six other schools.

Audrey listened as Lewthwaite’s sentence was handed down. Mr Justice Slattery announced:

 

John David Lewthwaite, the jury have found you guilty of a particularly savage killing of a five-year-old girl. The wounds inflicted upon her were in the extreme ferocious. … I have exceeded what I normally say in cases of this nature because I feel your case calls for it, but in the climate the only penalty prescribed by law is penal servitude for life and so I sentence you.

 

Audrey noticed that Lewthwaite was hanging his head. He didn’t lift it once.

During Lewthwaite’s trial, Gwen still found time to visit Nicole’s grave daily where she would share the day’s events with her daughter’s gravestone. Whatever she forgot to mention, she would go home and tell the walls. Gwen didn’t care what anyone thought. It saddened her that some of her closest family and friends still hadn’t been out to see Nicole’s grave. ‘A cemetery’s not going to hurt you,’ laughs Gwen. ‘I lived out there for about two years – every day.’

As they listened to the jury’s verdict and then the sentencing by Mr Justice Slattery, Gwen and Peter felt nothing but relief. Throughout the trial, each had prayed that their daughter’s killer would be given a life sentence. It was the least he deserved.

‘It is regrettable there seems to be no future for you in society …,’ the judge stated during sentencing. It had been what the Hanns had wanted to hear. Yet, somewhere deep inside, both knew that it was only a small peak in what would be years dampened by grief and guilt over their inability to protect their daughter.