4

FIRES

Detective Lex de Man’s pager burred. He was at home but on call for the Victoria police arson squad. A Catholic primary school in the hills had been set on fire, and one of the school’s buildings was burnt out. It was December 1987, the summer bushfire season in the south-east of Australia. It was just another fire, just another job.

Lex had joined the police in 1968 as a teenager. Before that he was working for a supermarket chain and volunteering as a country firefighter. Interested by the emergency workers he met on fire grounds, one day he walked into a Melbourne suburban police station on a whim after seeing a recruiting sign.

Lex’s parents came to Melbourne from Holland in the 1950s, and at first his father didn’t want him to be a cop because of the European post–World War II mentality that uniforms — whether military or police — were corrupt. When Lex sat down to dinner with his parents and three brothers, and announced that earlier that day he had applied to be a police cadet, his father got up and walked out of the room. ‘We had a pretty frosty relationship there for about 18 months. I went through the police academy, and six months later I couldn’t shut him up about how proud he was because he’d realised that Victoria Police wasn’t like the Netherlands police. It wasn’t an offshoot of the military; it tried to be an organisation that does its best for the community.’

Lex found he liked being a leader. Since he left the police, he has been a local government mayor and councillor, and also held a senior position at the same fire service he still volunteers for, the Country Fire Authority. ‘I’ve always had this desire to lead not because I’m not a good follower but because I think I have a clear understanding when I’ve got a task to do of how to do it. I think it came from a couple of teachers — if you want to get something done, if you show the way and you guide people, you get people to do what you want to have done, but you get them to enjoy doing it. That to me is the art of leadership.’

Lex knew the hills — a mystery to many in Melbourne, down on the ‘flat’ — because of his volunteer firefighting. He got to the fire site with another detective and started asking questions, and he found out pretty quickly about a young man by the name of Roland Whitaker who had been fingered a few times for lighting fires, shoplifting, and cutting car brakes. He was a bit of a wild one, apparently. Smoked a bit of dope. He’d been through the children’s court for trying to drive a stolen car through a caryard’s chain fence in the middle of the night.

The boy had been to the school but was now 17. Lex asked a bit more about him. A local senior constable said to him: ‘I think before you go any further, you should actually know that Roland’s parents are tied up with this religious sect called The Family.’

‘He told me some very fanciful story,’ says Lex. ‘Or what I thought at the time was fanciful.’

Roland’s real name — or at least the name he goes by now — is Adam. He estimates he has had as many as five names in his life, and two different dates of birth. He landed in The Family in 1970 as soon as he was born, when he was given, in hospital, to Liz Whitaker. Then, when he was three, he went to Uptop as a ‘foster’, without the Hamilton-Byrne surname. He would become a persistent thorn in the cult’s side. But at the beginning he was, in his own words, ‘a commodity’.

Adam was born Darren Gillon. He thinks his mother and father met in the psychiatric ward of a major Melbourne hospital. His mother, who was Dutch, could not keep him because of her mental-health concerns.

The cult’s adoption scam was devastatingly simple, yet it required a lot of people to be complicit in the fraud. Melbourne hospital social worker Maie Davie was a member of The Family. Maie heard about all the babies up for adoption around Melbourne. They were usually from single mothers or mentally ill mothers. She then told Anne about the child and where it was. Anne delegated a couple from the cult to adopt the child using false names, addresses, financial details, and statements given on affidavits.

And so it was with Adam. His nominal parents — the people he considered his parents — were Don Webb and Liz.

Anne became Adam’s beloved ‘Aunty Anne’. As he grew up, he wanted to emulate her because he was in awe of the control she exerted over others. He thought she was quite magnificent. ‘The power that she had was very enticing,’ he says. He and his young friends at Uptop — his new family — thought that Anne was some kind of queen, and the Aunties and the Uncles were her servants. ‘She was top dog. As children, we thought she was beyond the Queen of England. We revered her.’

Anne taught them about the promise of everlasting life. ‘That’s all it was,’ Adam says. ‘We were trying to fast-track inner change so we could get to another dimension more quickly.’

The comparison he gives for Anne is odd but strangely accurate — Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager, a television show with which, when he watched it years later, he identified deeply: ‘Captain Janeway was in command of the Starship Voyager and they were lost in the Delta Quadrant, and it was about their journey home. It was all about a crew that didn’t know each other, and over the seven years it took them to get home they’d become a family. That’s what it was like with Aunty Anne. She was in charge of her own starship … and we were her crew.’

Lex lingered at the fire scene, talking to local police. The senior constable said he needed to meet a police doctor called Ed Ogden if he wanted to know more about the cult because Ed had met the Uptop children after the raid. Ed lived in the hills and, that day, was at a flower show. So Lex went to the show. ‘I introduced myself to Edward, and his first words were “Don’t get involved. If you get involved, it will be with you for a lifetime.”’

Lex met Sarah, who was there because Ogden had taken her in after the raid. ‘The look on her face was a look I’d never seen before,’ says Lex. ‘It was a look between terror and bewilderment, as if she was looking straight through us, and she didn’t say a word.’ He said to his partner, ‘Something’s going on here.’

The detectives didn’t really believe what they were hearing, but it was easy enough to verify: there had been a raid at a gated compound at Lake Eildon some months before and six kids were taken into state care. The kids were not in good shape physically or psychologically. Two others had escaped leading up to the raid, including the one standing before them, Sarah. They all thought that they had the surname Hamilton-Byrne and that this woman, Anne, in her sixties, was some sort of leader or teacher or guru.

Still, it was the fire he was being paid to probe. The arson squad kept investigating it, but Lex followed his nose towards the cult and soon met the community policing people and their head, Sergeant Denise Whyte, who had been at Uptop for the raid.

Then he started looking at Adam’s maze-like family history. Don Webb wasn’t his biological father. Elizabeth Whitaker wasn’t his biological mother — and she used to be married to some big-name psychiatrist involved with LSD trials in Melbourne. In the middle of them was this Trish MacFarlane, and all of them knew the wealthy woman in the hills who was supposed to be the cult leader. And then there were the stories that Ed and the community policing squad were starting to hear about life at Uptop: the punishments and beatings and dunkings. The sheer psychological trauma of it. The despair and lack of hope the children had felt. And this mantra that members of The Family recited, where any whiff of betrayal, or even speaking to outsiders, was forbidden: ‘To thy last supper let me be allowed to stay, oh Son of God, for neither have I betrayed any secrets to thine enemies, nor have I given thee the kiss of Judas, but like a thief I pray unto thee, remember me, oh Lord, as I enter into thy glorious Kingdom.’

‘It became pretty clear that the story I’d been told about this charismatic leader of the sect started to ring a bit true,’ Lex says. He hauled in Adam and interviewed him about the school fire. His ‘father’, Don Webb, was also there — ‘I thought, He doesn’t look like a heinous criminal to me, but we went through the motions.’ Adam wasn’t the arsonist; he had an alibi. But Lex had got him up close and seen the way he thought, the way he spoke, the way he deferred. His values and perceptions seemed all wrong.

Adam nicknamed the detective ‘Lex Luthor’, after the villainous comic-book enemy of Superman. He hated him. Already the cult had said that Lex was trying to destroy everything they had because in a previous life he had hated Anne, and the hate had repeated. ‘We were told he was an evil man,’ says Adam.

The school-fire investigation went nowhere fast. Lex started talking with a feisty television journalist from Melbourne’s Channel Nine, Marie Mohr, who had already begun investigating The Family after she had followed up one of the early court cases. She had good sources in a group of ex-cult members.

‘They were terrified,’ Marie says. ‘They really thought the sect could come and kill them. They told me stories of how Anne Hamilton-Byrne had total control of their lives, their money, their careers, and their children. Horrifying stories of people being forced to leave their husbands that they loved and take up with another person.’ She learned that cult adults were repeatedly paired and split up in Anne’s quest for them to become subservient, and she learned that Anne and Bill professed to love the children. ‘Mind-control manipulation of a level that I hadn’t come across, except for other sects.’

She had met Sarah. And she had been to Uptop, in 1985, looking for Anne but had been confronted outside by an Aunty. Several of the former Uptop children we spoke to remember the day because Marie wore a red coat and it frightened them. Marie asked the Aunty, who remained out of camera shot, whether children were kept in the house. No, said the Aunty. No.

The detective and the journalist formed a sort of de-facto team, feeding off each other for information. Mohr showed Lex footage of Anne and also of the kids with white-blonde hair singing in a Family choir. ‘She wasn’t the normal reporter,’ says Lex. ‘And as I started to get the stories about things like alleged beatings and so forth, it became clear to me that there were possibly some heinous crimes committed, and I started to dig around.’

The first place the children were taken after the Uptop raid was Syd Savage’s petrol station for a toilet stop. Then they went by police bus to be fed at a kids’ welfare place. From there, it was to their new home — Allambie, a community services hostel for criminal or abused children down in the flat suburbs of Melbourne. Allambie was run by the state government. They were all able to stay in a unit together. Sarah and Leeanne, the escapees, had gone with the police to the raid and helped escort the kids away, along with Ed Ogden and Denise Whyte. Sarah moved into Allambie to be with her ‘siblings’, and then moved out to the Ogdens’, while Leeanne was living in a flat, where she had been put by welfare services.

Ben says he was bewildered and excited and scared by the outside world, and very aware that it was looking like a new beginning. ‘I think it began to dawn on me: this was actually the end of it. Or … it was different. Something new was going on.’

In bed at the welfare hostel that first night, he went over in his head all the things he had either said or not said that day. He was second-guessing his own story, as he had always had to. Then he realised he no longer had to do that — to cover things up or lie to protect himself. ‘I no longer have to check what I say. I’m not going to get into trouble if I say something wrong. And I think, to me, it’s probably when I realised the prison doors had opened for good. And not physical ones. I no longer had to live within the world that I had known. So that was a stake in the ground for me. And from that point forward … I was going to do everything I could to never go back.’

For Anouree, the raid had been a blur of confusion. ‘It was as if many tapes of film were playing in my head at the same time, and bit by bit every single strip of film became entangled with another.’ She was hysterical, she couldn’t focus, and even afterwards she couldn’t remember chunks of it.

The children were told individually that Anne and Bill were not their biological parents. For Anouree, this meant finding out that not only was Bill not her father, but he was actually her grandfather. His son Michael was her real father. This horrendous betrayal manifested in her as a profound sense of loss. ‘We had missed out on our parents’ experiences. I’d missed out on their culture, their familial culture, what they could have given to me. What they could have provided for me.’

Anouree soon figured out her real father was betrayed by the cult that prohibited betrayal. He had been convinced to give her to members of The Family’s inner sanctum. Then he was crossed again when she was taken to Uptop. ‘He had some loyalty for his dad. But I think that eroded very quickly, when he discovered about us children up at Eildon.’

She knows now that Michael suffered by having to hand her to Bill. On his own birthday. ‘He certainly didn’t have much control of his situation, let alone anyone else’s. He could see that he was not going to be allowed to look after me. So I feel so, so sorry for my Dad, ’cause he really had hardly any choice in the matter.’

Crucially, the children could be told about their parentage because the state’s laws around adoption had been changed three years before the raid, in 1984. The new laws gave people access to information about their birth families that had previously been kept secret. A 60-year-old clause that stipulated birth documents be kept sealed was overturned.

Victoria was the first state in Australia to modernise its laws around adoption. The changes were mainly for the benefit of the adopted person, but the relinquishing parents could also now apply for contact with their child. The changes had wide implications: from 1966 until 1976 — the cult’s formative years — more than 15,000 children from the state were put up for adoption, and it was a poorly regulated sector.

Bryan Cussen was the adoption worker charged with helping disentangle the mess. The machinations of what was happening to the children was for the most part out of the public eye. ‘It was challenging to do it in a gentle way, but they [the children] almost knew. I was just confirming it in a way. They knew what was coming along.’

Bryan’s job was to untie the cult’s systematic string of fake adoptions, now that the law allowed for it. Aside from the cult issue, a backlog of adoption information requests had developed within the government’s community services department, and very few people were getting the information they were legally entitled to. There was a wait of up to eleven years for adoptees to receive information.

‘I can still remember all of us sitting down at a table in my office,’ says Bryan. ‘Nothing is happening, so do we use this opportunity of the state election to make a stand and put some pressure on? So a few of us did the rounds on television and on radio.

‘There were the two issues running side by side. This waiting list plus The Family. That’s what caught the media’s attention. Were there other children? And there were women who were worried. It was an extraordinary time — it galvanised media interest beyond what we expected.’

In fact, there were thousands, tens of thousands, of women all over Australia who had given their children up for adoption during the years when it was not monitored well. How many had relinquished their babies then not be able to find out where they went, if they chose to? The Family’s story helped people understand what it must have been like, and how badly a mother might need to see the daughter or the son she had never seen.

A telethon was held, with the help of Marie Mohr, and women rang in from all over Victoria, talking about their stories and the impact of the long waiting list. The issue was aired on major commercial television networks. In response, Premier John Cain appointed a new minister for the portfolio and ordered a review of the whole adoption issue — and the waiting list.

Just before the election, there was a vigil for reforms to adoption policy outside a government office in Melbourne’s CBD. The children were not in the vigil but became part of the story because they garnered good publicity for the cause and helped get adoption rights prioritised in government.

When Marie had first met Sarah, after Sarah had escaped, she was rocking back and forth and only stealing glances at the reporter who had come to meet her. Marie had screened some reports about the adults who had left the cult on television. ‘That made her interested in wanting to meet me. You could see the fear. She was obviously a very bright girl, there’s no doubt about that. Very quickly we shared some laughs, but she was so wary of the world. Quite rightly so.’

The story Marie was involved in changed her life. She became very close to the children: ‘The children and I have experienced a lot of ups and downs together.’ At work, one of her bosses asked her if she was a social worker or a journalist. She said that on this job she was a bit of both. The police were also aware that she knew a lot, so they drew her in to their investigation. They also noticed that she was building a rapport with the children, whereas the police were having trouble figuring out how to relate to them — how to be with them; how to talk, how to act. Marie was more instinctive.

‘I can remember one policeman saying he wanted to see me. He’s a big, tough cop. I thought, What have I done now? I was thinking I was going to be told off for doing something naughty. We went to a private room. He just looked me in the eye and said, “What happened to those kids is giving me nightmares, I can’t sleep.” I understood exactly what he meant because it was giving everybody nightmares. My advice to him was the same advice as I gave myself: “They don’t need our sympathy, they don’t need our pity. They need our help. They need us to investigate. They need justice.” He understood that.’

But the police had big problems. Key files to do with the cult adoptions had gone missing. The government, anticipating the election, ordered a new inquiry into the cult, specifically the adoptions. And while the inquiry did begin, it was never completed.

The story, Bryan Cussen decided as he took testimonies and tried to figure out who these children were, was about slavery. ‘They were enslaved to the false dream of this woman, and they suffered the same fate that many slaves do in that they were imprisoned, they were made to work contrary to their own wills, they were physically assaulted, they were drugged, they were not allowed to live lives of their own choice. And that’s as near to modern-day slavery as I can imagine. They were taken against their will and the will of their birth parents and captured into a lifestyle that was oppressive and for the purpose of pursuing someone else’s agenda. They were made to live someone else’s pathological dream.’

He was still impressed with the kids he had met. He says they were intellectually sharp but had trouble with their emotions. These kids could think a lot, but they couldn’t feel. They were immune. Yet they slowly thawed, and began responding to the care they were given. No one was lying to them anymore, no one was hitting or threatening them. They did not need to hide. They were fed properly. ‘Everyone was just incredibly touched and moved, and these kids, they were extremely articulate. They could engage you beyond their years.’

Cussen first located deed poll changes and birth certificates. He got court records and paperwork from hospitals and found that the same names kept cropping up — Peter Kibby the lawyer, Howard Whitaker the psychiatrist, John Mackay the psychiatrist/GP, and Maie Davie the social worker. He gave his findings to the police and told the kids as much as they wanted to know.

For Ben, who had grown into a kind and gentle young man, the news of his parentage was a bombshell. He wanted answers, but he wasn’t prepared for this answer. He found out that his real mother was one of Anne’s foot soldiers: Joy Travellyn, a woman Anne had supposedly cured, in a miracle, of her spinal problem.

Suddenly he couldn’t see a future, just when he had begun to get glimpses. This was the hardest, most emotionally wrenching, thing for Ben: the apparent jigsaw puzzle of who he was and what he should believe in. ‘That was not a good moment. And it was black and white. It wasn’t fake. There was no lies involved; it was reality.’

Anne managed to contact some of the children at the welfare hostel by phone but she was found out, and social workers started listening in to the conversations. She told Ben that he may have discovered who his real mother was, but he would never know his father. Then Joy contacted him and said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to me. Don’t bother turning up on the doorstep, I’ll close the door in your face.’

He knew then that Anne had told Joy to say these things. It was cruelty upon cruelty, and Ben was devastated. ‘It drove into my mind that Anne had complete control, as much as she could, over what was going to go on.’

Ben attached himself to the husband of one of the staff at Allambie, hoping to be adopted. He was trying to force his way into a real family he saw as good and kind. He was invited away on weekends with them. ‘I was looking very quickly for, I guess, parent roles. Trying to find caregivers that I could depend on and connect with, that weren’t transient.’

The kids stuck together at Allambie, but all were damaged and entering into periods of post-traumatic stress. At least one was suicidal. They were thrilled to be out and to be able to live healthily and constructively. They all put on weight. But it was hard to adapt from a group mentality, especially a group who had shared so much pain. Ben cites Lord of the Flies. ‘In any environment where you put a group of people, there is a leader, there are followers, and people have to know their place,’ he says. The only structure they knew was Anne’s structure. ‘That was never going to work for us to continue on through life. Because it was toxic.’

The children, the cult, and its secrets were playing heavily on Lex de Man’s mind. He didn’t have a mandate to investigate anything other than a suspicious fire, but he wanted to pursue this strange new case he had stumbled upon. His boss in the arson squad indulged him and let him follow leads, within reason.

After three months, Lex and his detective partner briefed their boss on what they knew of The Family, and were allowed to continue investigating, while also working on the school fire. After six months, the school-fire case was closed. Lex kept picking away at the cult. Names, addresses, photographs. Facts.

Media attention was now fierce. Allambie and Uptop, and the better-known cult properties in the hills, were being staked out every day. John Mackay spoke to a current affairs television show, telling an interviewer: ‘Anne and Bill wanted to construct a family of these children to rear them as a family, I think for very good psychological reasons.’ This was the spin: Anne and Bill as heroes, the cult as a safety net for these children.

The Herald’s Ben Hills managed to speak to Anne by phone from her residence. In some of his articles, he painted a picture of good Samaritans and reported Anne as saying that she and Bill were victims of a ‘witch-hunt’. Hills wrote that after the raid came a ‘hysterical media campaign’, a ‘crusade’ accusing the couple ‘of every social sin’. Hills didn’t respond to a request for an interview.

He reported Bill as saying people brought orphans to Anne knowing she would help them. She was, Bill said, ‘the last staging post’. To Hills, Bill denied mounting accusations of drug use — especially LSD — and any allegations of child abuse.

Trish MacFarlane fled to the United Kingdom after the raid. Her new job was as a housekeeper at Broom Farm, the homestead in Kent, for two children and two adults involved with The Family, and Anne was issuing orders to her by phone from the Catskills. On duty for the cult and far from home, she spent a lot of time in her room. She was becoming distant and withdrawn, introverted. Those who were in the house with her say she lay in bed a lot, smoking and doing crosswords. ‘There was crying going on, and getting drunk and “what have I done?” and sorrow over the ruins of what she’d had in her life and what had happened to her family,’ says a former child of the cult who was in the house. ‘Just the repercussions, I think, hit her — of what she’d done.’

Trish later said she had hit the wall. ‘I thought to myself, What am I doing here? I just can’t go on. I felt absolutely mentally and physically exhausted, and I thought to myself, I’ve worked for Anne nonstop for almost 20 years and I’ve never received a penny for it. Surely that’s enough?’

Trish quit the cult, six weeks after arriving in the United Kingdom, by simply walking out of the house she was administering for Anne. No one contacted her. She went to London. ‘Here I was in my early sixties. I’d served Anne for a third of my life because I’d truly believed she was the Teacher or the Master, and she wasn’t.’

How must this have felt? What Trish got from Anne was hope, but it was false hope. She also got what she thought was love: Anne would offer great love and friendship to the women she reeled in toward the centre of the cult. She would purport to be rescuing them from the traumas and tragedies they were going through, or she would claim to offer them a life of greater meaning and purpose than the one they were in. But then when these women, like Trish, got close, Anne would withdraw the mirage of love, and keep them hanging on.

Trish paid a terrible price. ‘I couldn’t believe that I had been such a fool for so many years.’ The path she followed was from the tragedy of her son’s death into a cult and then into a role within that cult where she enacted violence on other people’s children. What is it in human nature that makes people turn like this? Cult narratives are full of it: the charismatic leader offering salvation made me do it, made me kill, made me kill myself, made me steal, made me abuse. Made me ignore right in favour of wrong. The way Trish’s life played out put her in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she fell hard.

In February 1988, on a Saturday, six months after the raid that freed the children, police descended on Uptop a second time, as well as cult houses in the hills. They were acting on information gleaned from the adoption services and the children who had been freed. By now a small taskforce, which included members of the community policing squad, had been formed. Lex de Man was floating between them and his main job at the arson squad.

From both raids, eight Aunties were charged with making false social security claims — getting government benefits to which they weren’t entitled. Anne had told them to claim sickness benefits, invalid benefits, and aged pensions while working as nurses, they said, but the cheques went straight to Anne. Margot McLellan was charged. Joy Travellyn, Ben’s real mother, was charged. So was Liz Whitaker, who faced an extra charge over falsely claiming she had witnessed Anne giving birth to twins in the 1960s. The frauds between them amounted to nearly $AU200,000.

Lawyers for the cult cited media sensationalism and said that the women all had ‘impeccable character’. Outside the court — with the women wearing headscarves and dark glasses — they were jeered at by some of the former children who had come to watch.

The women appealed but failed, and all but one were jailed for short sentences. ‘Anne told us to claim some money when we weren’t entitled to it,’ Margot told us, just before she died. ‘To apply for it we lied, which I didn’t like doing, really. But I did, because I was told to, and we got some money from that. Then it was made public and we had to haul through the courts, which was … ghastly.’

She makes light of what must have been a humiliating experience. ‘We had our own rooms, we had our own televisions. I remember there was a three-time murderer and all these other women prisoners, and they stood around and said “What are you in here for?” Because they’d heard of us. It taught us to stand up for ourselves. I said, “I’m not telling you what I’m in here for, and I’m not interested in what you’re in here for. Here, we’re all the same.’

Margot served six weeks. ‘The officers were very good to me personally and they helped me with my physical work — shovelling soil and a few things like that.’

Don Webb and Adam were also raided, and interviewed about some irregularities with passports. By now, Lex was beginning to understand that some of the adults involved with The Family, including the Aunties and the powerbrokers, were victims too — of Anne. This was even though he despised them and knew that they were complicit in serious crimes against the government and children. ‘I was under no illusion at the time that when you had to deal with these type of people you had to adopt an attitude of compassion. And yet they allowed it to happen and were part of it. They would have known that what was going on with these children was morally if not criminally wrong.’

Lex had been the one to tell Adam that Don wasn’t his biological father. ‘In those days there was never any critical incident stress–type training, or progressive training in human dynamics and so forth, so it actually came from your gut instinct.’

Adam was aggressive. Lex was trying to keep in mind that this young guy — a handsome teenager who was rude and obnoxious to him and other police and was constantly on edge, distrustful, and angry — was a victim, but also a potential rich vein of information. He had the petty criminal history, he knew people; in fact, he knew everyone and everything. ‘He was very, very rude for a young person. But it’s not black and white. It was never black and white with these people.’

Deep down, Adam thought Lex was all right. There was a sense of respect there. His refusal to be polite and cooperative angered the policeman, but he liked Lex. ‘He was a lovely man when he arrested me. I cannot fault him in the way he treated me. He didn’t abuse me. He was a gentleman. He tried very hard to give me all the facts.’

But Adam was, in his words, ‘caught between two worlds’. Who did he belong to, where did he come from? ‘It was just all this information coming to me. Not knowing whether that was true or not. I remember thinking that Lex was the bad person and they’re telling lies. Is it Aunty Anne telling the truth or is it Lex de Man telling me the truth?’

Lex had shattered his world and his illusions. Adam was devastated, and he rolled over not long after. He agreed to talk, but he did a deal: he would tell the police what he knew in return for not being charged or questioned further over his shoplifting. Lex offered to get him out of Don Webb’s house and into Allambie with the other cult teenagers, but Adam refused. ‘I said to the rest of The Family, “Oh, I just told him everything that he knew anyway,” he says. ‘Which is the truth. I didn’t tell him anything. I only just knew what I knew, and I knew that he knew what I knew. So to me it was a win-win situation, at that time. I still think I made the right decision.’

In fact, Adam couldn’t see a life outside the cult. This was his survival instinct kicking in. He wasn’t sure of himself outside the confines of The Family, but within them, he knew he was ‘safe’.

Perhaps he considered that loyalty had limits. The loyalty of the cult members — as manifested in their vows to Anne — only gave her further permission. He wasn’t being loyal to himself, after all, but to her. So where was the betrayal, where did it fit?

By mid-1989, Lex had left the arson squad and been promoted to sergeant at the city’s Russell Street police headquarters. He was asked to write a report on everything he knew about The Family. There was a perception in the force that the case surrounding the Uptop children was a welfare problem, not a criminal matter. That it was about children who had possibly been mistreated, and that was all. Lex’s recommendation to police hierarchy was that the cult be investigated for a multitude of criminal offences: fraud, false imprisonment, assault.

And drugs. In the course of his investigations, he had learned a fair amount about The Family’s relationship to drugs. Allegations were swirling about their use of LSD. Because of this, and because police didn’t know where else to take it, his report into the cult ended up with the drug squad. The head, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Morphett, said to Lex: ‘We’re going to set up a taskforce. I want you to be on it, we’ve got a room in here for you at the drug squad and we’re going to give you a Detective Senior Sergeant and we’ll give you four detectives. You’ve got three months to clean it up.’