A Mother's Story

by Rosie Batty

  I call Natasha. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to do dinner,’ I hear myself say, fighting back tears. ‘Something has happened. It’s bad, really bad. Luke’s been hurt. I think I’m going to have to go to hospital. Greg is here. He’s hit him in the head with a cricket ball. It’s bad, Natasha. I’m scared. It’s really, really bad.’

  She tells me she is on her way and hangs up the phone.

  A man drives into the car park in a black ute. I have never seen him before. Seeing me, he stops, winds down the window and asks if I am okay.

  I tell him there’s been an accident. My son. Hit by a cricket ball. His father is there. I don’t know where the ambulance is. He offers to go and wait at the road to direct the ambulance down the drive.

  Minutes pass, I don’t know how many. Each one feels like an hour. I am pacing, cursing every second the ambulance isn’t there. Finally, I hear sirens in the distance.

  Natasha arrives and crosses the car park towards me. ‘What happened? Are you okay? Where’s Luke?’

  I have no words. She puts a comforting arm around me. I am shaking with fear.

  I look across to Cameron, and he has returned to his car. He is herding his boys into the car, telling them to stay inside, to keep the doors closed. Why isn’t he coming over here? Why hasn’t he come to tell me it’s all going to be okay? That it’s just a knock to the head and all will be fine once the ambulance arrives?

  I tell myself over and over that Greg would never hurt Luke. That Greg loves Luke more than life itself. That right now, Greg is over there comforting Luke, taking care of him. Like the time Luke fell off the monkey bars when he was little, and Greg bundled him up and took him to hospital. Or the time Luke fell as a toddler and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table, and Greg was there to comfort and calm him down and tell me to get ice. I will look back on this in an hour and laugh at how I overreacted. And yet, I cannot go near the nets.

  ‘What’s happening?!?’ I keep shouting at Cameron across the car park. ‘What’s going on? Is Luke all right?’

  I see the flashing red and blue lights of an ambulance as it races along Flinders–Mornington Road, then a plume of dust as it turns into the driveway.

  The ambulance. I have something constructive to do at last. I will show them where my boy is, they will come and find that he is unconscious from a cricket ball to the head, and we’ll go to hospital and everything will be okay.

  I run towards them, frantically waving my arms, willing them to hurry up. As they drive towards me, they seem to slow down. ‘Over there!’ I am shouting. ‘In the nets! My son! My son!’

  As the ambulance drives past me, I collapse on the spot, my legs buckling underneath me, my body unable to cope. Natasha drops down beside me. She is urging me to stand up, to go to the ambulance. But I can’t move.

  ‘Come on, Rosie,’ she says. ‘We need to go and speak to the ambulance. To check up on Luke.’

  But I want to leave the ambulance officers to do their job. I want to give them time to get to Luke and make everything all right. And so we sit, with the clubhouse between us and the cricket nets, and I am rocking and Natasha has her arm around me and I am numb.

  I hear shouting coming from the other side of the clubhouse. And I am suddenly aware that the car park is full of police cars. I don’t know where they have come from, and can’t understand why they are there. Surely they haven’t come to arrest Greg now. Surely they understand that the first priority is to get Luke into an ambulance and off to hospital.

  None of it makes sense.

  ‘Come on Rosie, we need to speak to the ambulance officers,’ Natasha is saying. ‘You have to get up.’

  I know she is right but I still cannot move. My legs feel like lead. Natasha helps me to my feet and my first steps towards the clubhouse are tentative. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to see.

  As we round the corner of the clubhouse, we are met by a paramedic. She seems to panic when she sees me. She knows my name, but I don’t know how or why. ‘Rosie, you need to come with me, you need to move back, back behind the clubhouse,’ she is saying. And I look at her, confused. There’s nothing wrong with me. Why is she tending to me? Why isn’t she in the nets tending to my boy?

  ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you with Luke?’ I begin.

  She cuts me off. ‘You can’t be here, Rosie, you need to move back.’

  Why are the police trying to arrest Greg now, of all times? Why aren’t the paramedics in the nets with Luke?

  If they arrest Greg now, I think to myself, it’s just going to antagonise him and it won’t be nice for Luke – here in public, at the cricket ground, in front of his friends. Luke will be embarrassed. So I start shouting at the police. ‘Leave him! Just leave him! This is not about him! It’s about Luke. Just let the ambulance get in there and help my boy!’

  There is more shouting. I am forced to return behind the club house. I turn momentarily, and that’s when I hear the gunshots. Two distinct cracks ringing out in the night air. I freeze on the spot. My mind seems to seize up. Because you can only take in so much – your brain can only process so much.

  I hear a voice, I don’t know whose, and it is saying, ‘They’ve shot Greg, they’ve shot Greg.’ And I am hit by a force I cannot describe. I slump to the ground. There in the grass, by the clubhouse, I sit, unable to speak, unable to move. Mariette hands me a cigarette and I smoke it.

  *

  At some level I know that the police are going to come and tell me that Luke is dead. I know it with a certainty but at the same time I refuse to accept it. I’m not in denial so much as being drip-fed by my mind, allowed to process only the bits of information that it feels my body is capable of dealing with. In the confusion following the shooting, police are running everywhere.

  I look up to see Constable Topham. He kneels down, puts a hand on my shoulder and asks if I am okay.

  ‘Paul!’ I say, relieved to see a familiar face. ‘There’s been an accident. Some sort of mistake. Luke’s hurt and they’ve shot Greg.’

  He looks at me gravely, clearly being careful to choose his words. I look at him, confused.

  ‘It’s not looking like that, Rosie,’ he eventually manages. ‘There’s pretty strong evidence to suggest it was no accident. He had a knife.’

  I hear the words but am not able to process them. But what about my boy? My baby boy.

  Shaking, I pick up the phone to call my friend Ben. I get his answering machine. ‘Luke’s really badly injured,’ I say. ‘Call me.’

  And without anyone telling me, I know. I know that Luke is dead. Of course he is dead. He has to be dead. There is no other possible outcome. I feel numb.

  Two police officers approach.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I say, before they can speak, staring beyond them. ‘You can’t tell me. You have to tell Ben.’

  I call my parents in England. It’s early morning there. ‘Luke’s been killed. Greg has killed him. You need to come.’ The words spill out of me. I don’t remember their response.

  I ask about Greg and someone tells me he’s been seriously injured. ‘Just let him die!’ I say to no one in particular. ‘For God’s sake, just let him die. He won’t want to be alive.’

  A policeman called Wayne comes and sits down next to me. He puts a hand on my shoulder, a gesture of tenderness that I remember to this day. He didn’t know me, but he knew enough to know not to speak. What words do you even use? At a certain point, he convinces me to get up from the ground and go and sit in the back of the police car. He explains we are all witnesses to a major crime, and as such, we all have to be kept separate until our statements can be taken.

  I don’t know how long I sit in the back of the police car. A matter of hours. My phone keeps buzzing with a barrage of texts and phone calls until eventually the battery goes flat.

  I sit there thinking I should cancel the work appointments I had scheduled for the next day. And then I think how, in a matter of minutes, I have b
ecome one of those people; one of those horror stories. I’ve joined those ranks – of the mother whose three little boys were driven into a dam by her husband, of the mum whose little girl was thrown off the West Gate Bridge. I am one of those worst-things-that-have-ever-happened stories. That is my life now, it is my journey and there is nothing I can do to turn any of it back.

  At some point, I need to go to the toilet. Wayne explains he has to escort me, and so he walks me into the clubhouse. As I enter, I am met with a wall of blue uniforms. Police seem to have materialised out of nowhere. There are plain clothes, uniformed and high-ranking officers, and I look on, bemused. What are they talking about? Why have they gathered in such numbers? Why, when Luke and I needed police to protect us, could we barely muster their interest, but now, when it is too late, there is a small army of them? I feel my hackles rise.

  As I return from the toilet, I hiss at Wayne, ‘I am not going to go back and sit in that police car not knowing anything while they all have their fucking arse-covering meeting in here. You go and tell them right now to come out here and you tell them to tell me what’s going on, because if you don’t I’m going to go in there and I’m going to be really angry.’

  Wayne looks a little concerned and dutifully goes inside. I am seething. I need to know what’s happening. This is my son! I deserve to know what’s happening.

  One of the senior police officers comes out to the car and explains that they have established a major crime scene. ‘Luke has been killed, Rosie. And Greg has been shot. We need to do a thorough investigation.’

  Tears run down my face as I nod.

  After a while, I can sit in the car no longer. I walk back into the clubhouse and find the sergeant in charge. ‘I want to see my little boy,’ I say, choking back tears. ‘He’s all alone out there. I need to be with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rosie, but you can’t go out there,’ comes the reply. ‘We’re looking after him, I promise.’

  ‘But I need to see him.’

  ‘Trust me, Rosie, you wouldn’t want to see him like that,’ the sergeant responds. ‘It’s not how you should remember him.’

  As I walk back to the car, I can make out the shape of a small body lying in the cricket nets. I can’t go to him. I have to leave him out there in the cold. My boy. My baby boy. Alone out there in the nets.

  24

  Eyewitnesses

  Tyabb oval is your typical playing field in semi-rural Victoria: a patch of manicured brown-green grass set among the paddocks that encircle the township. There’s the Ivor Ransom Scoreboard at one end of the oval, and large metal signs around the oval’s fence advertising the Kings Creek Hotel (Bingo on Thursdays), the Peninsula Motor Inn and Harvey Smash Repairs.

  Families from the area spend lots of time driving to and from the Tyabb oval, and standing on its sidelines. Sheltering from blazing summer sun during the cricket season and shivering on the periphery during the cold winter mornings of the AFL season. It’s a safe place, for the most part. A place where the wholesome practice of junior sport is carried out year round. It’s not the sort of place you expect your child will witness a murder.

  Of all the unbearable details of that night, 12 February, easily one of the worst is that the only eyewitness to Luke’s death was an eight-year-old boy. He had left his cricket bag at the nets and had gone back to collect it while his dad, Cameron, waited in the car park.

  The little boy ran, screaming in a wide-eyed panic across the grass to his dad. ‘The man hit the boy! He hit him with the cricket bat. He hit the boy in the yellow T-shirt in the head.’

  As Cameron would tell me later, it took a moment for him to register. At first, he thought his son was telling him he had been hit by a cricket bat. But that made no sense. He was panting there in front of him, looking perfectly normal. Then he looked across to the cricket nets and saw Greg kneeling over Luke, who was lying prostrate and motionless on the ground. Cameron says he looked on in confusion as I ran towards him, screaming for him to call an ambulance. He called triple zero, telling them to send an ambulance immediately, then he saw me fall down, get up, fall down again, wailing, yelling for anyone to help.

  Having dispatched an ambulance from Frankston, the ambulance officer asked Cameron to go to the nets and report back on the extent of Luke’s injuries. I was screaming about a cricket ball to the head; his son had come running with a story of a father hitting his son with a cricket bat. It was all happening against the backdrop of a normal summer’s evening of cricket practice, and none of it made sense.

  Cameron approached the cricket nets and came within 5 metres of Greg, who had gotten up to his bag then returned to sit down next to Luke.

  ‘Is he okay?’ Cameron asked, following the prompts of the ambulance dispatch officer. ‘Is he breathing?’

  Greg turned and, upon seeing Cameron approach, jumped to his feet and charged at him, shouting at him to stay back.

  Cameron recoiled, horrified not only at having Greg run at him, but also at the sight of Luke, lying in a pool of blood.

  ‘Is he okay?’ he asked again.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Greg replied. ‘He’s gone to heaven now.’

  Cameron was in shock – now suddenly party to a horror that had nothing to do with him. He was simply taking his boys home from cricket training.

  When finally the ambulance arrived – having initially gone to the wrong oval in Tyabb and then missed the turn-off to the cricket club – two paramedics leaped out and made towards the cricket nets. Greg wouldn’t let them anywhere near Luke, threatening them with a knife. They retreated to their ambulance and waited for the police to arrive and contain the situation.

  Police reports from the night record that when the police arrived, they jumped from their cars and ran towards the cricket nets. Upon seeing them approach, Greg got up from the nets and met them halfway across the lawn between the nets and clubhouse, covered in blood, knife in hand.

  ‘Drop your weapon and get on the ground!’ they screamed at him, drawing their guns. Greg continued to advance on them. By now, there were four or five police officers and multiple cars. The scene was a blur of sirens and flashing lights and shouting.

  Brandishing the knife, Greg ignored police commands to get down, to drop his weapon. One of the police officers pulled out his capsicum spray – but it dissipated in the wind and had no effect.

  ‘Drop your weapon! Get down on the ground!’

  Greg kept advancing. He lunged at one of the officers. Two shots rang out in the night. Greg fell to his knees, then collapsed on the ground, felled by a bullet to his chest. The police officers approached, one of them kicking the knife to the side, guns drawn and pointed at the hulking man writhing on the ground in front of them. He had been shot, but was still thrashing. It took several police and paramedics to subdue him and restrain him until the police helicopter arrived.

  ‘Let me die! Just let me die!’ he protested as paramedics tended to him.

  When finally the paramedics reached Luke in the cricket nets, he was dead. He had been dead for almost thirty minutes. One of Greg’s shoes had been placed beneath his head, one of Greg’s shirts placed over his head.

  Greg was airlifted to hospital and admitted to emergency surgery. He died just after midnight.

  *

  I still feel sick about whether Luke knew what was about to happen. If he did, why didn’t he run? Why didn’t he scream out? Was it because Greg was his father and he trusted him implicitly? If Greg had said, ‘Turn around, Luke, and look the other way, we are going to go to another world together’ – was that something he would have done? Was there any fear? Was there a moment when he wondered where his mother was, and why she wasn’t there to protect him? It’s a thought that horrifies me and will haunt me for the rest of my days.

  I am only grateful that I didn’t see it happen. I don’t know what force in the universe made me turn my back on the cricket nets at the moment Greg killed Luke, but I will be eternally indebted to it. Had I see
n it coming, had I realised what Greg was about to do but been powerless to get there in time to do anything about it – I would be living a whole different sort of horror.

  As it is, I already torture myself daily with the what-ifs. What if we had stayed home from training that afternoon? What if I had put my foot down and said no to the extra five minutes of practice in the cricket nets? What if we had never returned from England? What if I had never met Greg?

  ‘It was premeditated,’ the homicide detectives all told me on the night. ‘You did nothing wrong.’

  But what if Luke knew it was coming? What if he was in those cricket nets, even momentarily aware of what was about to happen? What if in that moment of fear he looked for me and I wasn’t there to save him?

  I didn’t read the autopsy report, because I knew it would be too distressing. But I was assured by those who did, and those I trusted, that Luke would have lost consciousness from the initial blow to the back of his head. He would not have felt a thing. He would not have been conscious when his father cut his throat.

  It’s funny how in the most awful of circumstances you can find comfort. No matter how unspeakably heinous the situation, the human spirit finds consolation in the smallest of things. The smallest of mercies.

  25

  The Morning After

  Around midnight of the night Luke was killed, I was taken to Mornington Police Station to give a statement. The police had offered me the opportunity to put off giving my statement until the following day – but I wanted it all recorded, I wanted it out of the way. Even in the depths of shock and despair, I knew there needed to be a reckoning – and the process had to start straight away.

  And so I sat in an interview room with two detectives and I talked. And I talked, and talked and talked. They wanted the whole story from the beginning. Where and how Greg and I had met, what the nature of our relationship had been, exactly what I had witnessed at Tyabb oval.