WHERE does it really begin and end, the pathetic story of Jaidyn Leskie? Not when he’s born, although the portents are ominous enough: the birth is the week of the Port Arthur massacre.
Not the night he disappears from a house in Moe in June, 1997, starting a search that runs longer than the one for a prime minister thirty years before.
Not when the tiny body floats to the surface of a lake on New Year’s Day, 1998. Nor when the sordid squabble over where – or whether – to bury the remains is settled, so he can be laid to rest at last.
The truth, elusive in all this, is that the black farce played out for more than six months was only the public part of a story that started long ago, and which isn’t finished yet. It is not only the story of a battered baby, but of where he came from … from a place of broken families and broken hearts, shattered trust and stunted dreams.
It’s an ugly soap opera with real blood and real bruises. It’s a tragedy, a morality tale, and a love story gone wrong. Like all dramas, it turns on sex, betrayal and death. It goes something like this …
IT’S the late 1960s. She is the policeman’s daughter in a mountain town in far East Gippsland. He works in the timber mill, the district’s only industry apart from sheep and cattle. If it’s not love, it’s near enough, even if her parents aren’t too keen on the idea.
Which is how Pam (‘don’t use my maiden name, for my dad’s sake’) comes to be married at nineteen in the old Presbyterian church in the main, and only, street of Swift’s Creek in 1970.
Despite the rumors, she is not pregnant. It’s not until nearly two years later, in the Omeo hospital, that she has her first child. They call her Katie.
Married life is fine – for a while. To hear Pam tell it, as soon as she’s pregnant, her man chases women, drinks, and belts her. ‘I ran into that many cupboards and brooms,’ she laughs mirthlessly twenty-five years later. ‘Once I told the truth about how I got a black eye, and nobody believed me. Even his own mother told me to get out. She’d put up with the same thing for ten years herself.’
Between drinking and fighting, there are reconciliations. Bilynda is born three years after Katie, at Bairnsdale. Then comes a son, Glenn. But babies don’t make it better, nor does the first of many shifts – this one to Myrtleford in 1977.
There, he goes to work in the bush at 3am on Mondays, returns on Friday nights. She dreads weekends. One Monday she hires a van and flees to a family friend at Mooroopna, then rents a house in Bendigo. He finds her, begs forgiveness, promises to give up drinking. He does – for six weeks.
She works in a motel at night. He works on her best friend, an amorous alcoholic with plenty of kids and no man. Katie, now eight, one day asks why Daddy was in bed with Aunty B. It’s a tough question. Pam answers it by dumping all his gear on her ex-friend’s doorstep, including his guns. Aunty B. doesn’t like guns ‘because her father shot himself’, Pam is to recall with grim pleasure. ‘I told her, “if you want him so bad, then you can have his stuff, guns ’n’ all”.’
Pam is to leave her husband three more times. The last time is a month before her tenth wedding anniversary. Her father moves her to Lakes Entrance, warns her that if she ever takes the bastard back, he’ll never talk to her again. This time, she listens.
But, seventeen years on, she pays her children’s father (‘I call him the sperm donor, not my husband’) a grudging compliment. ‘He did some awful things,’ she says, ‘but I will say he always had a job. Still has.’
She doesn’t add that it’s more than can be said for her three children, or most of those that hang around them. She doesn’t have to. It’s a fact of life. In her world, they learn the facts of life early. All of them.
KATIE renames herself Kadee around the time she first leaves home. She’s fourteen, a rebel, and stays seven weeks with friends, then goes home because ‘Mum would buy me smokes, and the other people wouldn’t’. This is after they’ve returned to Myrtleford, the fifth of fifteen moves in twenty years.
Kadee turns fifteen around the time they move to Heyfield. She leaves Maffra High School in year nine, bolts to another town and lands ‘the second best job I’ve ever had’, in an old people’s home: ‘I got $75 a fortnight and thought I was rich.’ It lasts nine weeks. Until the day (she says) her boss argued with Kadee’s grandmother on the golf course. Arguing seems to run in the family.
Kadee’s favourite job is sorting rubbish in a recycler’s yard, but that does not last long, either. In fact, the most constant thing in her life is the social security payments. They’ve been far more reliable than most of her men. Which is where the family’s recent troubles really start.
Kadee is sixteen when she leaves home for the second time. She takes the train from Nathalia, her mother’s eighth home in as many years, to Moe, where she’d met a girl on a previous visit. ‘Everything I owned was at my feet,’ she says, ‘and I had nowhere to go.’ She finds the girl, and arranges to stay in her flat. Three nights later they go to a party, armed with a flask of Jim Beam.
‘We spotted three guys. Gave them marks out of ten. One was gorgeous, and we gave him bonus points because his fly was undone. Another got seven, but he was married.’ They give only three points to the third (‘he was feral’) but when Kadee goes outside later, he follows and chats to her. His name is Brett Leskie. They spend that night and next day in the flat.
Two days later he dumps her. A week later she gets back with him, takes him to Nathalia on the train to see her mother, flaunts her independence by sleeping with him on the couch. Pam doesn’t like the sixteen-year-old Brett (‘I thought he was a selfish little mongrel’), and, naturally, that’s enough to make Kadee want to keep him. Pam notices him looking over Kadee’s kid sister, Bilynda. ‘She was only thirteen, but she had big norks,’ is her summary of the situation.
The pair go back to the La Trobe Valley. Kadee moves in with the Leskies, then share-farming at Yallourn North. She pays $25 a fortnight board, helps milk the cows four nights a week and Sunday mornings. She and Brett draw the ‘de facto dole’ because it’s bigger.
It’s a wonder it lasts five months. After the split, Kadee moves in with ‘a big-time junkie’ in Moe who beats her up, then she goes back to her mother at Nathalia. They move to Moruya, in New South Wales, where Pam later has the stroke that paralyses her down one side and puts her in hospital for months. After three weeks, Kadee gets itchy feet and goes to Lakes Entrance.
She runs into Brett Leskie at the local speedway car races, spends two nights with him at the caravan park where she’s living. ‘I tried like mad to get pregnant to him,’ she says, ‘because then I thought he’d have to stay with me.’ He leaves. She doesn’t see him for eighteen months.
A few weeks later, she does get pregnant – to a drug addict who doesn’t know about the baby boy born later, in late 1991, back in Moruya. They all move to Sale: Pam, Bilynda, brother Glenn, Kadee and baby Harley. They stay with friends. It doesn’t work. How could it?
While in Sale, Kadee chances on Brett in the street. He looks at the baby. She doesn’t tell him it’s not his. Later, he comes around. It’s pension day. Kadee buys a bottle of rum for the occasion: ‘I thought if we get pissed and get back on together, that’s a start.’
This time she does get pregnant, although she later miscarries. Brett’s mother, Elizabeth Leskie, says they have to get married. Kadee, happy, borrows a debutante dress that’s too small, and has it altered. The Leskies buy the rings from a pawn shop in Morwell and set a date three weeks away, 24 October, 1992.
A Baptist minister marries them in the front yard of the Leskies’ brick veneer on their new share-farm at Denison, on the flat irrigation farming country near Sale. The reception is a barbecue in the backyard. Kadee recalls spending the afternoon driving Brett and his mates around in her car ‘getting pissed and stoned’. Just another weekend, really.
She says Brett is drunk by 5pm, and unconscious in bed, alone, by 8.30pm. Kadee drives to Sale, buys beer and spends her wedding night drinking with a female friend.
The ‘honeymoon’ is spent on the farm, putting a new motor in Brett’s car. Not long afterwards, says Kadee, Brett’s parents kick him out for ‘doing donuts and burnouts’ in front of their house. They go to his sister’s at Morwell, then rent a house at Yallourn North.
Brett, she claims, starts to ‘dress up to the nines’ and stays out late while she is home with her baby boy. She suspects he is seeing other women, and cries herself to sleep each night. She demands he leaves her enough marijuana to stay stoned all day, to kill the loneliness. She is pregnant again with her second child. Kadee has problems, but lack of fertility isn’t one of them.
They argue at their joint 21st party in June 1993. They go to Lakes Entrance to try to patch it up. Kadee, eight months pregnant, says she finds Brett embracing Bilynda, now sixteen and still with ‘big norks’, in a back shed. He insists there’s nothing in it, but that night he tells her he’s ‘fallen out of love’ with her. She abuses him, tells him to leave.
He takes Bilynda with him. Two weeks later he returns with a carload of mates. Kadee’s version of what happens next is that when she stops him removing his stereo from her mother’s car, he assaults her. Two weeks later she gives birth to his daughter, Shannan.
Kadee promises revenge. If it takes her ten years, she says, she will split her husband and her sister. As it happens, it takes her only four.
CUT to early 1997. Brett and Bilynda have had two children, Breehanna and Jaidyn. Kadee, by this time with a third child by a third man, is also coping with the knowledge that her daughter, Shannan, has leukaemia. She finally hatches her plot.
Kadee knows if she can get Bilynda interested in someone else, she’ll leave Brett. Kadee picks one of Brett’s friends, a self-taught mechanic and panel-beater who runs a panel shop with Brett in Moe under a CES grant scheme. She calls him Grishka, but most call him Greg. She can’t spell his surname – Domaszewicz. Sometimes they call him ‘Doma’.
‘I stooged Brett with his best mate,’ she is to recall with characteristic bravado. ‘I kept tipping Boo (Bilynda) off about Grishka. We had a code so I could tell her when he was down the street without Brett knowing. Brett would even mind all the kids while we went down the street. Grishka knew I was using them all as puppets, pulling the strings. I said to him, I didn’t care if he stayed with Bilynda or not, as long as he split them up.’
Eventually, Brett Leskie has an argument with Bilynda and leaves town, then heads to Kalgoorlie.
This allows Bilynda to openly carry on her affair with Greg Domaszewicz, who seems fond of her 14-month-old son, Jaidyn, and often looks after him. For a while, Kadee is happy, or as close to it as she gets.
Two months later, Jaidyn goes missing.