On 27 December 2016, Kathryn Joy turned 32 years, nine weeks and six days old: the age their mother was when she was killed by Joy’s father.
While Allan Stuckey fired his 22-calibre rifle once, twice and a third time, his three children slept in the next-door bedrooms of the family home in Lismore, northern New South Wales. The pharmacist was found guilty of the manslaughter, rather than murder, of Carolyn, a teacher, in light of the affair she had been having. He served 22 months in prison and returned home to live with his children, who had been separated and placed in the care of family and friends while he was incarcerated. By then, Joy – who uses they/them pronouns – was four years old.
That December day in 2016 was a milestone for the child, whose life had been overshadowed by grief, fear and trauma – and by the gaping hole where the truth and a support system should have sat.
“I felt like I was given a particular framing of the event: my dad had snapped, it was almost an accident,” Joy says by Zoom from their home in Melbourne, as they remember being told their mother had “done an awful thing” and planned to leave her family. But as a child they were not able to find answers; they could not simply ask their father what had happened. They weren’t allowed to talk about their mother, there were no photos of her and her name was never mentioned.
“Some people had said things to us at different ages, but those conversations were so few and far between,” they say. The absence of information “made me feel like things were not as they seemed”. Eventually, a close friend of their mother’s told Joy that there was “no way” Carolyn would ever have chosen to leave her children.
Joy was 16 and living alone with their father when they saw Carolyn’s death certificate – cause of death: gunshot wound to the head.
At 16 they were old enough to “comprehend what it means to kill someone … to really understand the implications of living in that house with him”. They pause. “It was very confusing.”
Where were the adults? asks Joy in a new documentary about the killing, the lifelong impact on them, and their attempt to piece together a full picture of their mother. “It’s not like people didn’t know that that was fucking strange – that was a weird thing, that we were growing up in the house where our mother was killed with the man that killed her.”
A ‘crime against us’
In adulthood, that confusion was joined by the sense of being “pummelled by the grief” – and, at times, Joy teetered on the edge of staying alive. The depression, they now know, was always going to emerge.
And, far from the unhelpful binaries that are so often used in talking about domestic violence, Joy says Stuckey was, is, neither “monster” nor “good bloke” and their journey is neither about “forgiveness” or “hate”. He is, instead, a source of tangled, messy and ongoing emotional pain for Joy. The consequences of family homicide never go away.
Throughout the documentary KillJoy, filmed over eight years, Joy tries to understand the mother they lost as a baby. They want to remember their mother as a person who lived, not just as a person who was killed. They meet her friends, who allow them to discover they share small traits with Carolyn – like messiness and eczema. They hear stories of her skipping class at teachers’ college, and they read the court documents about her killing. They also reveal the extent to which the violence of her death reverberates in them. The film’s release is a moment of intense vulnerability, but also of affirmation: after screenings, people told them that the story made them feel less alone.
How Joy and their two brothers were allowed back into the custody of their father and how the partial defence of provocation allowed their mother’s behaviour to be put on trial feel like problems consigned to the past. However, 39 years after Carolyn’s death, there is still no system to scoop up and wrap around children after a family homicide, and the defence of provocation has not been formally abolished in all jurisdictions.
Joy is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of children to have lost a parent, a mother, to domestic homicide. With distance from their childhood has come a clarity: Stuckey’s crime was a “crime against us”, Joy says in the film.
“We simultaneously revere children and also completely dismiss them. We’re in a place now of seeing them as almost too vulnerable to even engage with,” they say. Instead, they want to find ways to give bereaved children spaces where they can be seen as “whole human beings”, to find ways to include them in conversations about their position and their future.
‘Homicide is not the end for the child’
Joy has been working with Eva Alisic, a professor in child trauma and recovery with the University of Melbourne, on a project called Homicide at Home. Over the past four years, they have conducted a study into the impact of family homicide on children in Australia and the UK, following a similar study Alisic undertook in the Netherlands.
“There’s often an interest in the person who has been killed. But what about the children and other people who are left behind?” Alisic says. “The impact is enormous. Everything is so disrupted.”
Time and time again, she has seen how a child’s mental health is battered by the upheaval of moving homes, changing schools and media interest on top of the raw loss – and all without the person who would usually comfort the child.
Many of the people with lived experience of family homicide interviewed in Alisic’s study had never met another person in their position. Responses from authorities, they reported, were not child-centred, nor were they given agency, with assumptions often made around how “damaged” they were, or how well they appeared to be coping.
“Homicide is not the end for the child,” she says – yet so few are given a voice into how their future will look.
Key to the Homicide at Home project’s initial findings is the blinding problem that there are no data around the number of children bereaved by family homicide in Australia. By Alisic’s best “guesstimate”, the figure is between 430 and 1,200 in the past 20 years.
Not only do we not count the number of children who are left bereaved as a result of domestic homicide, we don’t count the children who are killed, says Liana Buchanan, Victoria’s principal commissioner for children and young people.
Both the film and the study are adding to a growing conversation around the notion that the children of family homicide victims are victims in their own right.
“You can’t honestly say that a child whose father kills their mother and has to live with the loss of their parents … that they aren’t a primary victim,” Joy says.
It’s a label no one wants – but it is validation and acknowledgement of deep trauma and it is a helpful vehicle to access support and help force policy changes. It is backed up by the Victorian royal commission into family violence, which – more than eight years ago – found bereaved children to be primary victims and need to be supported as such.
“We’ve got better at saying the words ‘children are victims in their own right’, but we have not translated those words into a meaningful response,” says Buchanan. Two years on from her efforts to develop a protocol around agency responses to those victims, she says no progress has been made.
For Joy, a good place to start is with the truth. Give children information and help them understand – after all, without truth, there can be no agency.
“We need to get better at having hard conversations with children.” they say. “We need to be braver.”
KillJoy is screening on Stan from Sunday 8 September
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
