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Every Parent’s Nightmare

Serial killer Helen Patricia Moore was born and raised in the working-class far western suburbs of Sydney. It was in this same area that she would go on to murder three young children when she was just 17 years old.

Her mother, Jesse Moore, later told a court that she remembered her little girl as a destructive part-angel/part-nightmare. She said Helen was always slightly distant and a bit weird. She also explained that her daughter loved to tear her toys apart.

On top of all that, Jesse said that when Helen was 5 years old she was attacked and molested by a group of boys in the schoolyard. At the age of 6, a psychiatric patient ejaculated all over her uniform on a school bus. It was also around about this time that Jesse and Helen’s natural father divorced.

Helen herself told the court that from the age of 8 she was allegedly molested on a regular basis by an uncle, William McIntosh. She said his assaults only ended when she murdered his daughter, Suzanne. McIntosh strongly denied the allegations.

Jesse went on to tell the court that she had believed her daughter had a mental problem from an early age. Sadly, she said, no one would believe her. When Helen was 13 years old, Jesse took her to a psychiatrist after a particularly vicious fight with her brother – Helen had pulled his hair out so hard that it had almost scalped him. Instead of finding anything wrong with the child, the psychiatrist prescribed Valium for Jesse.

By the time she was a fresh-faced 17-year-old, Helen Moore had grown up to become every parent’s worst nightmare – a babysitter serial killer who murdered the children entrusted to her care.

Between mid-1979 and early 1980, Helen killed three young children and tried to kill two others. One of the survivors was left blind and permanently disabled. He died several years later as a direct result of Helen’s attempt on his life.

Helen was also charged with the murder of her 14-month-old stepbrother Andrew. That charge was eventually dropped, but the babysitter killer would later claim the toddler’s alleged cot death was the catalyst for her murder spree.

By this time Jesse had remarried, and Helen was working as a clerk at the Campbelltown Council. She was living at home with her mother, stepfather and stepbrothers Peter and Andrew at the south-western Housing Commission suburb of Claymore.

Young Andrew died in March 1979. Helen claims she was deeply distressed by the death. She had been very fond of the boy. ‘My life started to go wrong when Andrew died,’ she later said. ‘I loved my brother Andrew. I don’t know why he was taken away from me, but when he was, something happened. Everything in my life went wrong and everything I did went wrong.’

So significant was Andrew’s death, Helen later told psychiatrist Dr William Barclay, that she considered killing other children. ‘She thought it wasn’t fair that Andrew was dead and that he had lived in a clean house while her cousin Suzanne McIntosh [one of the murdered children and daughter of alleged molester William McIntosh] was alive and living in a sloppy house,’ the psychiatrist told the court.

Whatever the reason for her cold-blooded murder spree, something snapped inside the teenager’s head on the evening of 19 May 1979. On that night, while babysitting 16-month-old Suzanne McIntosh, Helen put her hand over the small child’s mouth and suffocated her while she was sleeping. ‘She didn’t put up much of a struggle,’ Helen later told the court. Suzanne’s passing was put down as a cot death. But it was only the start of Helen’s murderous spree.

On 16 January 1980, Helen was caring for 12-month-old Nicholas Vaughan, the child of a neighbour, when she thought she had suffocated the youngster. Leaving the infant for dead, she returned to watch television. Some time later, she was surprised to hear the baby crying. Helen went to another neighbour for help and Nicholas was rushed to Campbelltown Hospital.

Perhaps unbelievably – after the various mishaps that had occurred while children were left in her trust – neighbours still sought out Helen’s services. On 1 February 1980, she was babysitting three children at the home of Petene and Roger Crocker. Helen went into 2-year-old Aaron Crocker’s room and suffocated him until she thought he was dead. She then returned to the lounge room. But once again the child lived. Helen panicked when she saw blood running from Aaron’s mouth. She went to a neighbour for help. The Crockers were alerted and rushed home to find their young boy in an oxygen mask. He was being attended to by ambulance officers as they prepared to rush him to hospital.

Helen visited Aaron in hospital. She even took him flowers. The youngster was in a coma for weeks. When he finally came out of it he was blind and crippled. He died several years later.

Meanwhile, suspicions were starting to grow. The father of little Nicholas Vaughan, the boy who had survived Helen’s attack only two weeks earlier, said that when he and his wife heard what had happened to Aaron Crocker, they had their doubts about Helen – but they couldn’t bring themselves to accuse the 17-year-old of murder.

That changed when 2-year-old Rachel Hay, who lived just up the street from the Vaughan family, died a few weeks later, on 24 February 1980. Rachel had been in Helen’s care at the time of her death. The Vaughans now knew something ‘very, very wrong’ was going on.

On 31 March 1980, Jesse Moore rushed home after receiving a phone call at work from Helen. Jesse’s second son, Peter, had taken a fatal fall down the stairs. In tears, Jesse went across the street to the Vaughans and told them she was going to call the police. By now Jesse’s suspicions were growing as well.

While Jesse and Helen were being driven to Campbelltown police station, she noticed scratches on her daughter’s hands. ‘Finally I knew,’ Jesse said later. ‘Peter was the only one who died for a reason. He died so Helen could be caught.’

At the station Helen confessed to murdering her stepbrother, Peter Moore. She was minding the boy while the adults went out for the day. She said she went up behind Peter while he was sitting on the lounge watching the morning cartoons. He managed to escape, but she caught him again. Being bigger and stronger, she held the boy down with her hands over his nose and mouth for about four minutes and suffocated him. She then went upstairs and had a shower before calling an ambulance. Just the day before, the two had enjoyed time at the zoo together.

Helen then confessed to the other murders and the two attempted murders.

When she went to trial, before Mr Justice Roden at the Supreme Court of Parramatta in November 1980, it wasn’t the court’s job to decide whether or not the young girl was guilty or not, as she had already admitted to the crimes. It was a case of establishing whether or not Helen was sane at the time of the murders.

Her defence lawyers, headed by John Marsden, argued that she could not have been sane at the time of the murders. They backed up their claims with expert opinion. Dr William Barclay said he believed Helen was a borderline schizophrenic who was sometimes unsure of reality. He added that she had hallucinations. Barclay said that in his educated opinion Helen’s schizophrenia went ‘far over the borderline and that she did not know what she was doing when she committed the last four offences’.

He also suggested that Helen had a mental disorder for which there was significant evidence of a genetic factor, adding that she knew what she was doing but did not know it was wrong.

Dr Greta Goldberg, another psychiatrist, suggested that when Helen was young she had been subjected to sexual indignities that had left her permanently scarred. Goldberg emphasised Helen’s depressed and alienated background: her parents had separated; her mother, who had remarried, was prone to rages; her stepfather was withdrawn. Goldberg painted the picture of a lonely, isolated existence full of struggles for the youthful serial killer.

Psychologist Michael Taylor also believed Helen did not know what she was doing at the time of the murders, or that what she was doing was necessarily wrong.

In return, the prosecution argued that Helen Moore knew exactly what she was doing at the time of the murders. They called on their own expert witness, forensic psychiatrist Dr Oscar Schmalzbach, who told the court that in his opinion Helen was not suffering from a mental disease. He believed she knew exactly what she was doing and that it was wrong.

After hearing all the evidence, Justice Roden simplified the arguments and told the jury what their options were. To find Helen Moore not guilty on the grounds of insanity, they had to be completely satisfied that she had been suffering a mental illness that left her unable to know what she was doing, and that what she was doing was wrong.

Justice Roden then explained that the jury could also find Helen guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and excuse the charge of murder. Still, the law of diminished responsibility did not apply to attempted murder. The decision on those two charges would have to be a ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’.

There was also a third alternative – Justice Roden told the jury they could find a guilty verdict for murder and attempted murder on all charges.

It took the jury less than two hours to return a verdict of guilty of three counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. Justice Roden sentenced Helen Patricia Moore to life in prison on the murder charges. She also received 10 years for each of the counts of attempted murder.

In 1992, Helen applied for a sentence review under the truth-in-sentencing legislation introduced in New South Wales in 1989. On 4 September 1992, Justice Loveday handed down a prison term of a minimum of 13 years and 9 months with a maximum of 25 years. This made Helen eligible for release on 31 December 1993. There was a provision, though. Helen was forbidden to be in the company of any child under the age of 16 without supervision.

Released in 1993 after serving her minimum term but having to remain on parole until the year 2005, Helen complicated her parole in late March 1995 when she gave birth to a daughter, Lauren.

She was 33 when she became a mother. She said she had no intention of having anything further to do with the father of her baby, who was, she explained, one of her first lovers.

Both mother and baby were kept under constant supervision until August 1995, when the court decided the baby must never be left alone with Helen during the parole period.

Helen and her daughter Lauren are living under 24-hour supervision somewhere in Australia. The case is regularly reviewed, but it is thought that this will be the situation until her parole expires. By then Lauren will be 12 years old.