They died forgotten: how gambling and alcohol shut the door on twins' lives
- From:The Australian
- September 17, 2013
The twins who had been dead a week when their bodies were discovered in their cot at their home in Sunnybank, Brisbane, in 2008. Source: TheAustralian
FOR months before his twin toddlers starved to death, their father walked past their closed bedroom door a half-dozen times a day, on his way to get a beer from the fridge or out to work or to his nightly poker game.
Not once did he open the door.
Despite not having seen the youngest of his six children for up to eight weeks, the man - then a respected 29-year-old project manager with one of Australia's best-known engineering companies - made no attempt to check on the twins.
His indifference towards his infant children was driven by a growing contempt for his partner. Severely depressed, she had begged for help - pleas he dismissed as the whinging of an attention-seeker.
When he finally admitted, sobbing, to police in June 2008 that he was a "bad father", it was far too late. By then, the 18-month-old twins had been dead for a week in their cot in their home in a southern Brisbane suburb, which, from the outside, fitted in with the rest of the respectable neighbourhood but, on the inside, had become a squalid mess.
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