17

THE FUNERAL

After receiving the phone call that Tuesday afternoon in March 1984 telling me of the deaths in Heathcote, I immediately phoned my sister Margaret, who lived close by and had taken a year off teaching to perform with the Hunter Valley Theatre Company. It had been a wonderful year in Newcastle; there were so many talented people acting and dancing, singing and writing, composing and performing. All of us were leading busy, full lives. Mum was much loved as Lord Mayor of the city; she was helping Newcastle to build a new life as a centre of culture, not just a dirty industrial city, and we were so proud of her.

Margaret came immediately. First we had to get the news to Mum, who was at a full council meeting. We desperately needed her at this moment. Our doctor, Mike, came over. Shaking his head and holding on to me, he said, ‘Your tears must have been a premonition.’ Margaret relayed the news to my father and Kathy, who in turn informed the rest of the family. One by one they came and put their arms around us.

Brendan and Sarah came home from school. Sarah had just turned thirteen a day before her father’s birthday, and Brendan had celebrated his eleventh birthday the previous month. We mostly sat quietly with them. We didn’t go into detail about the events, and the children didn’t ask. It was enough that their father, stepmother and little sister were dead. Brendan said quietly over and over, ‘Not Binatia.’

Where do you begin to tell a child that one of their parents has not only taken his own life but also the lives of his own child and wife? How much should we or could we have protected them from?

We struggled for words, not yet knowing any details but already too much aware of the horror that must have unfolded in that Victorian country town. Our lives would never be the same after that awful, awful day.

I knew that Eve, Stuart’s mother, would be on her own, in shock like us, trying to absorb the terrible news. Her husband had passed away years earlier, and Stuart’s only brother, Michael, was travelling overseas with his wife Jane and baby daughter Lucy. In the evening, once I knew Sarah and Brendan were safely in the hands of my family, Margaret and I drove over to see Stuart’s mother.

Eve was sitting quietly, obviously trying to comprehend what had happened. The Mayfield police were outside, and Margaret spoke to them while Eve and I sat quietly and held hands. She told me that she felt bad for not fully accepting Raken as a daughter-in-law. Although Eve was a good Christian woman, she said she’d found it hard to accept that Stuart had married a ‘coloured girl’. I tried to give her some comfort. Perhaps people had such views, I said, but it didn’t mean Eve hadn’t loved Raken and Binatia. I am sure Eve’s ambivalence was something she’d kept hidden deep inside, but now at this moment felt compelled to share it with me. She asked me to help her locate Michael in England and gave me the phone numbers she had for him.

I tried to reach Michael and Jane in London but couldn’t get through, probably because of the time difference. We talked for a while longer over a cup of tea. Eve understood when I told her it was time for me to return home to Sarah and Brendan.

All this time, the police officers had been talking to Margaret outside. They were baffled by my knowledge of the sequence of events that had unfolded in Heathcote and the use of firearms. None of the official reporting had mentioned guns.

As I was leaving, Eve held me close and whispered, ‘You never have to be afraid again, Helen.’ She loved her son dearly, but in her heart I believe she knew that he had some very serious mental problems.

After Stuart and I separated and divorced, Eve remained a loving grandmother to Sarah and Brendan. On more than one occasion, she told me that she and Max loved me as a daughter-in-law. At some stage, she also revealed to me that Stuart had once assaulted his elderly father out of the blue. The incident occurred at a party at their home while I was in New Zealand. Eve had also been worried by other things that happened when Stuart was growing up. Max, however, wouldn’t hear of getting psychiatric help for his son. This was the 1950s and 1960s, when mental illness wasn’t easily discussed. Besides, Stuart was obviously extremely intelligent, with every opportunity in life ahead of him. It would have been impossible for either of them to entertain such thoughts about the second-born son of whom they were so proud.

Some members of Stuart’s family simply refused to believe what had happened. Eve’s only sister, Dorothy, was loved by her small family despite her eccentricities. She wore bright red lipstick, painted her nails red, and wore white pedal pushers with high heels well into her eighties. She’d once been a dancer at the Tivoli, a fact Stuart loved to reveal. Until the day she died at the end of 2004, Aunt Dorothy could not accept that her nephew’s death was anything other than a terrible tragedy. He must have been shot by burglars, or even by Raken. Eve found her sister’s state of denial frustrating, but in the end you have to allow people to deal with these things in their own way. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Dorothy that the coronial inquest indicated Stuart was the last to die. That he maliciously and wilfully killed his wife and daughter with a shotgun, then took his own life.

We spent the rest of that week in a kind of emotional fog. On a wet and windy afternoon, we went with my family to St John’s Church in Cooks Hill, where we all sat quietly in our thoughts and prayers.

On our next appointment with Dr Rickarby, I informed him of the deaths. The news shocked him to the core. Colour drained from his face, and he slumped down in his chair. The four of us sat in silence for a few minutes. I felt for him and attempted some silly words of comfort. It was an awkward momentary role reversal, but I didn’t know what else to do or say. Dr Rickarby had been through so much with us. He knew only too well the life we had fled, and I’m sure he instantly realised how under different circumstances the deaths could have been ours.

Michael, his wife Jane and their baby daughter flew home from England as soon as they were informed of the deaths, and they made arrangements for the funeral to be held at Heathcote after the autopsies. We didn’t attend, and nobody ever suggested that we should or could. My concern was for Sarah and Brendan. There were no domestic flights from Newcastle to Melbourne at the time. Even if we’d got that far, how would we have travelled to Heathcote, and where would we have stayed? An overnight train journey with two young children already traumatised by the events would have put further strain on them, as well as on Eve and Michael and his family. In any case, no-one asked or expected this of us. If the funeral had been in Newcastle … I don’t know. But it wasn’t.

How could I have dealt with the funeral? How could I have mourned the deaths of Stuart, Raken and Binatia or celebrated their lives? There would have been no words of comfort I could give their friends. Their friends didn’t know me and had no inkling of my earlier life with Stuart.

There were three coffins at the funeral, I’m told. Father and husband beside the wife and daughter he’d brutally murdered – all still together. It would have been impossible not to imagine Sarah, Brendan and me in the coffins.

Stuart’s brother Michael had made the arrangements for the funeral. He’d also tried unsuccessfully to make contact with Raken’s family on the island of Nonouti. He’d written to inform them of her death and sent them many of her possessions. All came back, returned to sender.

So, in the absence of any instructions from Raken’s immediate family, she and Binatia were buried in the same grave with Stuart, the person who’d wilfully and maliciously taken their lives. Victims of crime don’t normally share a funeral and burial with the accused. It still troubles me, even though I know it was a solution for Stuart’s family at the time. It must have been an appalling period for Michael, Jane and Eve. It’s pointless to dwell on it for too long.

On my thirty-fourth birthday, 17 March 1984, Eve’s death notice for Stuart appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. It simply stated, ‘Loved father of Sarah and Brendan Wynter – in God’s care.’

When Eve returned from the funeral in Heathcote, I arranged to meet her at Newcastle railway station to give her a lift home. It was a grey April afternoon, and she had a scarf around her head. She looked frail and old after the long train ride. We put our arms around each other and stood on the platform for a long time, unable to say anything appropriate. In hindsight, it seems surreal – I the ex-wife, the mother, the daughter-in-law who had escaped the violent son, comforting the mother of the murderer. But I felt for Eve, who had just buried her son, her daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

Eve was a very private, conservative and deeply religious lady. Michael and Stuart were her only children. She gave birth to them in the mid-1940s, when she was in her late thirties. In all the time I knew her, her home was spotless and her garden flourished even in the dirtiest of BHP polluting days in Mayfield.

For Eve, appearances were everything; she worked hard at being a respected member of her parish community. I never saw her without stockings even in the heat of summer, and her body was always straight and corseted. She found it hard to express emotion. When the children were young, she quickly distracted them if they became upset.

Eve and Max made me feel welcome, although I’d been raised in a more relaxed, open atmosphere. After 4 pm, Max produced the crystal decanter and offered me a sherry. I never declined. He loved the races on Saturday and Eve loved her church.

Eve was born in a different era from my own mother and lived as only she knew how. On our wedding day, she’d asked me to call her ‘Mother’, and I did. Sarah and Brendan benefited from their Nanna’s love. Standing with her in the cold at the railway station after the funeral was one of those moments in life where your heart opens and you reach out. Experiences like these put into perspective the mundane difficulties life throws at us. I’ve learnt that how our character and strength develop depends on how we manage the depths as well as the highs in life. Another lesson I’ve passed onto my children is that we all make mistakes. What really matters is how we deal with those mistakes, overcome them and make amends.

Years later, Eve told me she still hadn’t shed any tears over the terrible events in Heathcote. I’m not sure if she ever did. She told me that this was a dilemma for her. Perhaps her grief was buried too deep inside.

I didn’t see the newspaper accounts of the murder-suicide at the time. Many years later, I read an incredible book about domestic homicides in Australia titled Blood on Whose Hands? The book was dedicated to all the women and children whose lives were ended by the men in their lives, and was critical of the media for their reportage of domestic murders, which could even amount to complicity. Though the book was published in 1994, one of the cases was disturbingly familiar from ten years earlier. The Sun newspaper in Melbourne, the book recorded, had focused on the death of the man, a local doctor, describing him as ‘quiet’, ‘warm’ and ‘wonderful … with a keen sense of community duty’. The deaths were a ‘tragedy’, the Sun said, and referred to him as the ‘first victim’. The newspaper briefly referred to the young child’s murder and finally that of the woman, who was simply described as his wife. The man was named, his profession and characteristics given, but the murdered woman was only identified by ‘her age, attractiveness and racial background. She has no identity other than as his wife. The fact that she was a victim of his violence is lost in the proposition that they were all victims.’

For those left to mourn and long for answers, it was only the beginning again.