John Ure, born and raised in Adamstown, was a NSW Police detective in the Hunter throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
We asked John to contribute reminiscences about his experiences.
DURING my time as a detective, I investigated several cases of women killing or wounding their partner. A knife was the weapon most often used, undoubtedly because the attacks were generally unpremeditated and a knife was the weapon closest at hand.
The attacks were usually in response to long-term physical abuse, however one such case was provoked by what would now be identified as coercive control (but was then labelled "diminished responsibility", which could only be raised as an after-the-fact mitigating defence to reduce the severity of the punishment).
Early one morning in 1975, I was called to a Lake Macquarie home where I saw the body of a 44-year-old man (I'll call him Steve - not his real name) lying across a double bed, clad only in underpants. His upper body and face were covered with blood and there was blood on the bed all round him, as a result of the 15 stab wounds he had suffered to the neck and face.
His 33-year-old wife (I'll call her Alice) was seated on a lounge in the adjacent room being comforted by a policewoman. I was told that about 4am she had been found outside her next-door neighbour's kitchen door in a distressed state, after the neighbours were woken by the sounds of a female voice moaning.
An examination of the scene indicated that the only plausible explanation for Steve's death was that Alice had stabbed him. My partner Detective Sergeant Geoff Carter and I took her to Newcastle Police Station, where she was interviewed and admitted stabbing her husband repeatedly. She was formally charged with murder.
But what would provoke this small, meek woman into committing such a violent, frenzied attack on her husband while he lay sleeping?
Alice had an unstable life. Born in Scotland in 1941, she received a rudimentary education before migrating to Australia in 1959 and settling in Wollongong with her elderly aunt, her only relative in Australia. After two years she moved to Sydney and for the next five years worked at menial jobs and lived in studio flats or a share house.
During this time she fell pregnant to a married man, awaiting a divorce, and the child was adopted after birth. Some time later she again fell pregnant to a married man and lived with this man, who was now separated, for a few months before being left to raise her new daughter alone.
In 1969 she met Steve through an introduction agency advertisement in a Sydney newspaper and, after corresponding for a time, she moved to the Lake Macquarie area to be with him.
They were married in March 1970 and lived in a caravan at his parents' home for a year before buying their own home. Their daughter was born in July 1973.
Steve was not normally violent towards Alice - she told us that he only ever hit her once, some years earlier, in response to her hitting and chasing his pet dog away from the dinner table.
To an outside observer Steve was not a bad man: he was a fit, active tradie, popular with his neighbours and his tradie mates. But, as Alice told us (and this was not disputed), he controlled her. He regularly threatened to have her first daughter taken from her if the child did anything that displeased him and was constantly telling the child that she would be sent away. He also told Alice that she was a "very sick woman" and needed psychiatric help.
And because of her isolation and friendlessness, she felt powerless against these threats. Alice told us that during an argument just before they went to bed that night, Steve told her that he intended taking her older daughter away from her and putting her in a home and that he would prevent Alice from seeing either child again.
She told us: "It was a terrible thing I did, I'll never forgive myself, but he said he would fix it so I would never see her again and I didn't know what else to do. I knew that if I didn't stop him, he would take her away from me. I had to do it."
Such was the domination - the coercive control - that he exercised over her that, after laying in bed thinking about his threat to deny her access to her children, she got out of bed, went to the refrigerator and then suddenly came to the totally irrational conclusion that the only way to prevent losing her daughters was to get a carving knife out of the kitchen drawer, walk back into the bedroom and stab her husband repeatedly.
Perhaps if back in the 1970s we had recognised that domestic abuse goes beyond just physical abuse, but also includes the denial of a partner's rights to respect, dignity and freedom from fear, then perhaps you may not be reading this story.
Steve may have recognised that his treatment of Alice was wrong. Alice may have summoned the courage and confidence to seek help. But that did not happen.
Hidden Element
The federal government commitment to end domestic violence within a generation, announced this week, is very welcome and long overdue. This commitment must include confronting the hidden element of domestic violence - coercive control. Non-violent control of a woman by her partner or former partner is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years we have devised a new term for it. Governments in many countries, including Australia, recognised that coercive control is not only morally wrong but also legally indefensible. Coercive control is a form of domestic abuse that involves denying victim-survivors their autonomy and independence. It can be physical, sexual, psychological or financial.
