A never-ending crime

I'm very interested in writing about the effect of violent crime on the relatives of its immediate victims, because this is often overlooked by the media. This interest stems from my awareness of the following case. I have known one of the family members for almost 20 years.

Garry Connell doesn't cry as he talks about the murder of his mother, sister and brother 30 years ago.

"It doesn't worry me talking about it, as long as I don't stop and dwell on it," the 47-year-old recruitment executive says. "Most of the time I can detach myself and just go through the facts as though it was a book or a movie."

But he has been dwelling on it more than usual since last September. That is when the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions called to say the man who had killed three members of his family was applying to get out of jail. On March 7, John Ernest Cribb, sentenced to life in prison in 1979, will appear before a judge of the Supreme Court and ask for what is known as a "sentence redetermination".

In August 1978 Cribb was on parole after serving part of a sentence for armed robbery. He broke into the Connells' Baulkham Hills home and when he came out at about 3pm, Valda Connell, 39, had just come home in her car with two of her six children, Sally, 10, and Damien, 4. Cribb kidnapped them and drove north. It was a Friday and later he rang Valda's husband, Paul, and said he had been having an affair with Valda, who had now run away with him. Garry said at first the police thought this might be what had happened, despite its implausibility.

"My parents were close," he says. "We were a strong church-going family. We said the rosary every night."

They heard nothing until they were on their way to church on Sunday morning. Then Paul Connell and his other children learned the bodies of Valda, Sally and Damien had been found in a car boot near Swansea. Cribb had raped Valda and then killed her children and her with a knife.

"You just keep on keeping on," Garry says of the time following the deaths. "You get up and you get through another day. My next youngest sister started cooking the meals and cleaning the house. Dad went though a roller-coaster of ups and downs, and he wasn't always thinking straight. I finished school three months after it happened. I felt I had to be strong. After a couple of months, everyone stopped talking about it because they thought it was going to upset the others. You think, 'I won't say anything because it might upset so-and-so.' So you say nothing at all. And after a while it gets harder and harder to talk about mum and the kids."

After his arrest, Cribb was placed in a ward for the criminally insane at Morisset Hospital, from where he escaped with another man. Before they were captured, they kidnapped two 17-year-old schoolgirls from outside the Hakoah Club in Bondi, took them to a hotel, and committed sexual assault. Cribb later sent the girls Christmas cards from prison. The crimes were emotionally devastating for the Connell family and their relations.

"None of us had counselling at the time," Garry says. "It wasn't the thing then. We were told to suppress it, and that was the way we coped with it. That's sad. It would have been much better if we'd been at least able to talk about the happy times, because it was a fantastic childhood. Up until that day."

In her victim impact statement prepared for the forthcoming application hearing, Maggie Cooper, the sister of Paul Connell, writes of some of the effects of the deaths: "I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome ... I have suffered debilitating bouts of depression [which continue]. I have witnessed the gradual mental breakdown of my mother, Iris."

Says Garry, "One of the saddest things I saw was my mum's mum and dad, my grandparents, who were lovely, lovely people. My grandfather was never able to say my mum's Christian name again for the 10 more years that he lived. They went to the cemetery almost on a daily basis. Their lives became about maintaining the graves."

In 1993, 15 years after the crimes, Cribb applied for a sentence redetermination for the first time. The application was heard by Justice Newman, who had to consider the nature of the crimes plus other factors, including Cribb's behaviour in jail. Cribb had become a Christian in 1982. Several psychiatrists and psychologists reported he was a reformed character, as did a number of Christian ministers, prison visitors and prison officers. (Cribb had married one of his visitors.) One Christian minister said Cribb would work with him if he got out of jail.

However, in the previous year Cribb had written a letter to the court claiming he had not raped Valda at all, and that the murders had been "instigated" by her refusal to admit Sally was his daughter. Justice Newman found these claims to be "grotesque lies". They contradicted the claim Cribb had reformed, and represented "an attempt to manipulate a situation where the prisoner might obtain his release" and a "lack of contrition". They indicated that "well-meaning persons from the community who have supported his application have probably been duped by the applicant's claims of reformation". Newman dismissed the application.

The Connell family were shocked by the false claims in Cribb's letter.

Says Lee McCallum, Valda's sister, "The lies he told last time, about Sally being his child, were just horrible. You never get over it. I try never to think about Val. But when Cribb makes these applications, it brings it all back."

It is impossible for most of us to imagine what the Connells have been through. Asked to give some idea, Garry says, "It comes back all the time. You hear words. Nearly every TV station has a program on nearly every evening and there's the word murder or rape that comes up in conversation. Although you become more desensitised to those words, something still triggers the memories two or three times a week. And when this happens it becomes front of mind again, it makes you rethink the whole thing."

With the approaching application, he faces the problem of telling people he knows what happened to his family. "A lot of people I regard as close friends have absolutely no idea," he says. "It's not the sort of thing you suddenly bring up in conversation and say, 'Guess what happened to me 30 years ago."'

The family has decided to talk to the media to put their view that Cribb, in Garry's words, "should just rot in hell and they should throw away the key".

At first his father, Paul, did not want to bring further attention to the family. But he soon agreed that the hurt involved would be worth it if it helps keep Cribb in jail. Says Garry, "Usually we don't talk about it, but recently I spent two or three hours with him to discuss going to the media and it was really hard. He said a lot of things he'd never said to me before. I realised he's still very much in touch with it all. There's not a day goes past when he doesn't stop and think, 'Why did this happen to us?' and 'When will this ever end?' They're the two questions he keeps asking."

Members of the family have met the Opposition spokesman for police, Michael Gallacher, and, this week, the Attorney-General John Hatzistergos.

It is not known what arguments Cribb will make in his forthcoming application. His solicitor, Jack Graham, told the Herald, "I don't believe any publicity could assist him in any way at all. All it does is give the gutter press the opportunity to persecute him and make his life more difficult than it will otherwise be."

Other sources say that within the past few years Cribb has completed the intensive CUBIT (custody-based intensive therapy) program for sexual offenders, and last week was examined by a Crown-appointed psychiatrist, Dr Stephen Allnut.

Nicholas Cowdery, the Director of Public Prosecutions, says, "The case submitted by the Crown on his application will include details of the crimes, which the Crown will maintain include those falling in the worst category of cases of murder and therefore warrant life imprisonment without release."

The criteria used in considering an application are complex. Cowdery says the judge will have to take into account "the crimes themselves, any other crimes committed by the applicant, any recommendations that have been made by the sentencing or other court before, and the age, conduct, attitudes and prospects of the applicant. Because an order for redetermination is ultimately discretionary, the most important criterion the judge will consider is the public interest - not the level of interest the public have in the matter, but what is in the public's best interest for its own protection, all relevant factors having been weighed and balanced."

Whether Cribb stays in prison or not, the pain will continue for the Connells. Says Garry, "I read an article that said one of the tragedies of homicide is that although the victim dies, the pain involved doesn't finish until the last living relative dies. That can be decades after the event. Having lived that, I see it's so true. My younger sister's about 41. She's already lived 30 years of this. She may live another 30. That'll be 60 years. The effect of that day goes on."

-- Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 2008

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