Excuse 14
‘I had the baby blues’
Hayley Azzopardi was a desperately wanted baby. Her mother had been surprised and delighted when she found out she was pregnant. Only about two years earlier, Leanne Michelle Azzopardi had given up all hope of having a baby after doctors discovered she had abnormal cervical cells. The diagnosis devastated Azzopardi because she believed motherhood would be the most important and most satisfying experience of her life. Now that she was pregnant—defying those doctors’ predictions—all her motherhood plans and dreams came rushing back.
A hard-working and successful bank worker, 31-year-old Azzopardi started her maternity leave six weeks before her big day. Her many friends were happy for her. She deserved her dream to come true. Like her father—a highly respected local community policeman who had recently won a national award for volunteer work—Azzopardi was well liked in the Sunshine community. At her dad’s cricket club—Trevor Jury had played and helped organise Sunshine’s Grand United Cricket Club for 48 years—she was always helping out with the cricketers’ lunches. If anyone needed a lift, or chores needed doing, there was Leanne. Always ready to help. ‘Very courteous’, ‘very genuine’, ‘a gentle soul’, ‘just a treasure’, were some of the things club members said about her.
When Hayley was born—on 11 June 2003—Judy Jury said her daughter’s joy at her ‘miracle’ baby was obvious.
Five weeks later Leanne Azzopardi drowned her miracle baby.
•••
About 6.30 am on Friday 18 July 2004, Azzopardi’s fitter and turner husband, Ray, went off to work. Baby Hayley was asleep, and Leanne told him she was going back to bed. She had only had two to three hours sleep in the past 48 hours. About an hour after Ray left, Hayley woke and started crying. Azzopardi decided to give her a bath, but when the baby continued crying something in Azzopardi ‘just clicked’. She held Hayley under the water for about 30 seconds…or maybe a minute. She saw her baby’s feet kicking while she held her under the water. When Azzopardi lifted Hayley out of the water, she noticed she was blue. Not knowing what to do, she patted the baby on the back. She was afraid to phone anyone in case she got into trouble. Then Hayley spluttered and her mother panicked and dunked her under the water again.
With Hayley still face down in the water—she was to be like that for an hour, maybe an hour and a half—Azzopardi sat down and wept. After that she ransacked the house—throwing clothes on the floor and opening drawers. Azzopardi then phoned Ray at work and hysterically screamed and shouted and sobbed. She told him that an armed intruder had broken in while she was bathing Hayley. She said the intruder had bound and gagged her. She did not tell him his daughter was dead. She did not tell him she had killed Hayley.
While her husband was racing home, Azzopardi phoned for an ambulance. She told the operator that she found her baby ‘floating in the water’ and ‘there was an intruder’.
With her husband, police and an ambulance on the way, Azzopardi put sticky tape around her feet and hands and over her mouth. That was meant to bolster her intruder story.
She told the local police when they arrived that she had let a man armed with a knife and a gun into her home after he threatened her. The burglar, she told them, tied her up in the hallway and pushed her head against a table knocking her unconscious. When she woke up, she freed herself and discovered Hayley had drowned. Police began searching the area. They set up roadblocks, called in the dog squad and the search helicopter.
Soon after the police search began—after a detective told her she was suspected of killing her baby—Azzopardi confessed.
Azzopardi: She [Hayley] woke, she cried, I put her in the bath and she drowned.
…
I just couldn’t stand the crying and crying.
She said that she had been thinking of hurting Hayley for a couple of days. She said the baby had cried the whole day while her husband was at work. She had tried phoning help lines, feeding Hayley and giving her a dummy, but nothing stopped her crying.
In a disturbing, bizarre aside, Azzopardi told police that a few days earlier when she was taking Hayley for a walk, a stranger had looked in the pram, told her he had lost his baby and that hers should die as well.
Azzopardi said that just before she killed Hayley, the baby had slept for about an hour but then started crying again.
Azzopardi: That was the final straw. I held her in my arms for ages, not knowing what to do. Then something just clicked and I just couldn’t do it any more.
She said she put Hayley face down in her bath for 30 seconds to a minute.
Azzopardi: I didn’t want to hurt her but I just wanted to give her a bit of a fright at first. Yes, I did think about hurting her but I just couldn’t do it. She was just so gorgeous, you know, the little faces that she made and then I put her in and then, I don’t know…something made me click, her crying, and, I don’t know.
…
I could see her legs moving and I picked her up and she was blue. I did not know what to do and I patted her on her back…She was spluttering and I panicked and I put her back in the bath.
Azzopardi told police she had lied about the intruder because she was afraid of going to jail.
Azzopardi: I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking…My brain was mentally gone.
•••
For Leanne Azzopardi motherhood had turned out nothing like her dreams.
The first disappointment was that she had to have a Caesarean birth but that was overwhelmed by her wonder and happiness at having a beautiful, healthy baby daughter. Three days later another part of her motherhood dream was spoilt when she was told she could not breastfeed Hayley. She was also upset that she had to stay a few days extra in hospital. Another thing that was not part of her perfect motherhood script.
It was when Azzopardi returned home, however, that the gulf between her rosy expectations—her long-dreamt dreams—and the reality of motherhood widened alarmingly. Hayley—she would later say—would sleep most of the day and cry most of the night. Just a couple of days after arriving home, Azzopardi told a maternal and child health nurse her emotions were ‘variable’. The nurse talked to her about ‘baby blues’ and gave her some pamphlets on post-natal depression. She also told her the telephone number of a 24-hour government-funded counselling service for depressed new mothers.
Lonely, sleep-deprived, losing weight and depressed, Azzopardi called that number eight times over the next few weeks. She could only get through a couple of times and only after waiting on hold for ages. (The average wait for callers who managed to get through to the besieged telephone counselling line was eight minutes.) On one of the times she managed to get through, Azzopardi talked to a counsellor for nearly an hour. She told her what she could not tell her husband or mother—even though both of them were trying to help her—that she was not coping, that she felt lonely, exhausted and depressed.
It seemed she could only make those admissions anonymously, over the phone. Face to face she couldn’t do it. When a maternal and child health nurse came to see her just 11 days before Azzopardi killed her child, Azzopardi managed to give the impression of someone who was tired but coping, certainly not depressed. Her house was immaculate. In hindsight, the extraordinary neatness of Azzopardi’s house in the new housing estate of Caroline Springs, seemed strange for a new mother struggling to cope with a demanding baby. It was important for the daughter of the highly respected policeman to keep up appearances, at least a façade of confidence.
Azzopardi’s parents did their best to help. Six days before their granddaughter was killed, Judy and Trevor Jury happily babysat Hayley overnight to give Leanne and Ray a break. Mrs Jury enjoyed her first and, as it turned out, her only chance to take care of her granddaughter—to feed her, to bath her. She remembered her daughter phoning a few times—checking how things were going, saying how much she was missing her baby.
Six days later Mrs Jury had the worst day of her life. First, she and her husband found out that their ‘miracle’ granddaughter had drowned in her bath. They raced to their daughter’s house. There a policeman offered to give them a lift. Mrs Jury thought it was a kind offer to take her to see her traumatised, grieving daughter in hospital, but as they drove she realised they weren’t going to a hospital but to the local police station. Confused, worried, grieving, the truth only started to dawn on her when a policeman quietly told her, ‘Post-natal depression can cause terrible things’. Her suspicions were fully and horrifically confirmed when she heard Leanne had been charged with murder, with murdering five-week-old Hayley, with murdering the miracle grand-daughter Mrs Jury had bathed and fed just a few days earlier. To see her daughter in prison, in solitary confinement, was bad enough, but to hear that the other prisoners—even murderers and drug-dealers—considered her the worst of the worst, was almost too much to bear.
In the four nights and four days she was in the Melbourne Custody Centre, Azzopardi’s life was an unremitting hell starting from soon after she arrived when one of the prisoners yelled out, ‘It’s the fuckin’ baby killer’. Azzopardi was besieged with an unrelenting barrage of abuse. All through the nights, the women prisoners vented their vitriol at the new inmate, the baby killer. One repeatedly and seriously threatened to sexually assault her with a broomstick. Others screamed out ‘You’re dead’ and ‘We’re going to kill you’. There was also the incessant banging. Such was the threat to her safety, Azzopardi was kept isolated from the other ‘protection’ prisoners. When she was leaving the prison for her Supreme Court bail application, a guard told her not to get her hopes up—judges didn’t give bail to baby killers. The trip to the court was another nightmare. She was separated from the other prisoners in the transfer van but that did not stop them spitting at her. When she arrived at the court, Azzopardi was covered in spittle. Her experienced solicitor had not seen anything like it.
Inside the court, Justice Bill Gillard heard that Hayley’s funeral had been delayed so her mother—even though she was the girl’s killer—could go if she was granted bail. The judge finally agreed to granting bail, saying he thought there was a reasonable chance a jury would find her not guilty of murder. Despite her admissions—to killing her baby, to trying to pretend an intruder did it—the judge found that it was likely a jury would find her only guilty of infanticide.
A controversial, unashamedly sexist crime, infanticide only applies to mothers who kill their children younger than a year old. To find someone guilty of infanticide, a jury has to accept the reasonable possibility that the accused mother killed her baby as a result of her post-natal depression, her ‘baby blues’. While life imprisonment is the maximum term for murder and most murderers in Victorian courts can expect a sentence of about 16 years depending on the circumstances, the maximum sentence for infanticide is five years. At the time of going to press, there were moves in Victoria to let fathers use the defence, and to extend it so that the victims of the accused can be up to two years old.
Barrister, David Neal, used the killer excuse of infanticide to defend the defence of provocation in an article in The Age on 13 December 2004.
The debate over the provocation defence—swept up in the tide of outrage over the James Ramage verdict [see page 281] threatens a fundamental feature of a just legal system: excuses. The new punitiveness of the shock-jocks and tabloids likes simplistic solutions and harsh punishments: if you intentionally kill someone, there are no excuses, you should be convicted of murder and get a very long sentence.
Then along comes a case like Leanne Azzopardi, who drowned her five-week-old baby and the public sees a situation where excuses count.
…
While it seems intuitively and rationally appropriate to recognise the seriousness of post-natal depression, should this condition be the only excuse to murder? Why is this form of depression privileged? What about other forms of depression and other mental illnesses short of insanity?
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If the father of the Azzopardi baby had drowned her, he would have been convicted of murder. The fact that he was suffering from a different form of clinical depression would not allow him to rely on either infanticide or diminished responsibility. Why not?
…
Provocation is about human frailty. Humans are as frail as they ever were. There are situations where people are provoked beyond endurance and kill. They are rightly punished for their failure to exercise self-control. But when faced with overwhelming circumstances, the crime is manslaughter, not murder and the maximum sentence of 20 years gives more than enough scope to punish for the loss of self-control.
In the same newspaper, columnist Julie Szego noted that infanticide was a ‘curious beast burdened with historical baggage—at once merciful and paternalistic’. She said it was first introduced in Britain in 1922, after public pressure to spare mothers from the death penalty.
Infanticide rests on the philosophy that the symbiotic intimacy between mother and child makes it a relationship like no other. Therefore, the argument goes, the very act of a mother killing her child is proof of madness. Implicit is the idea of the female body as a potentially dangerous hormonal inferno.
In December 2004, the Supreme Court heard that the Director of Public Prosecutions had accepted Azzopardi’s plea to infanticide. He had accepted that her post-natal depression caused her to kill her baby.
At her pre-sentence plea-hearing, one of Australia’s leading forensic psychiatrists, Professor Paul Mullen, said he believed Azzopardi’s ‘baby blues’ had caused her to kill.
Prof. Mullen: When Ms Azzopardi killed her child of five weeks the balance of her mind was disturbed by a [post-natal] depression.
This is, in my opinion, a tragic case where a mentally disordered woman with a vulnerable personality killed her child in the context of a situation which was beyond her limited capacities to manage.
The professor’s belief that Azzopardi posed no threat to society had a disturbing qualification.
Prof. Mullen: Ms Azzopardi is in all other ways a law-abiding citizen who has presented no threat to her fellow citizens in the past and other than vulnerable children in her care is most unlikely to present any threat in the future.
He said Azzopardi was a rigid perfectionist with an idealised view of herself and her abilities. He said the yawning gulf between Azzopardi’s ‘rosy fantasy’ of birth and motherhood and reality added to her significant depression—her sleep disruption, loss of appetite, and deep feelings of guilt and hopelessness.
Azzopardi’s treating psychiatrist, Dr Anne Buist, said Azzopardi punished herself every day.
Dr Buist: She is absolutely guilt-ridden and remorseful. She misses her baby every day of her life. This was a dream for her that she wanted a baby, to be a mother. This great tragedy, whilst she was very much responsible, was very much part of an illness…not something with any intent.
In a letter read out in court, Azzopardi’s mother— Hayley’s grandma—also pleaded for her daughter.
Mrs Jury: We are trying to move on with great difficulty even though our lives will never be the same but through my guidance and support—especially being there to talk to—she [Leanne] has come a long way.
Justice Murray Kellam said he accepted that Azzopardi was deeply remorseful for killing her baby and that her initial attempts to try to hide her crime were a result of panic and horror. He said he accepted that the only reason she had killed her child was because she was suffering post-natal depression.
Justice Kellam: You have suffered considerably. Your marriage has finished. The dreams and aspirations that you had when you fell pregnant are now a memory only and are likely to remain so for a considerable period of time, if not for the rest of your life.
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This is a case where the mitigating factors are overwhelming…This is a case which calls for a merciful disposition. The community interest is not served by you being incarcerated in prison.
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I convict you and I propose to order that you enter upon a community-based order which will commence on 6 December 2004 and end on 6 June 2008.
Under the order, Azzopardi had to continue regularly seeing Dr Buist. The judge recommended that she also be monitored and supervised by a ‘most senior’ member of the Community Corrections Office.