This story contains the name and images of an Indigenous person who has died.
I have seen cops who have faced gunmen and didn’t blink, rescuers who have plucked people from raging seas and deadly bushfires and citizens who have risked their lives to save others.
But one of the bravest people I have met is Kellie Carter-Bell, who survived 23 years of brutality, somehow managing to avoid becoming another fatal statistic in Australia’s shameful epidemic of family violence.
Ten years ago, Kellie was brave enough to tell me her story, and she has spent the past decade working as a passionate and powerful anti-violence advocate.
Now she is back in the media for all the wrong reasons. Kellie’s grandniece Jayda Lou-Eve Allen Bonner, 21, is dead. Jayda’s boyfriend has been charged with murder.
How Jayda died will now be a matter for the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean she should be reduced to an exhibit in her own case.
“I shared my story with you to try and save lives, but I couldn’t save my own niece,” Kellie says.
This is the journey of three generations of women fighting for their lives having been subjected to almost unimaginable violence. And that is the core issue. We don’t want to imagine it. Too many of us see it as someone else’s problem.
First there is Kellie.
Her story is too sick to be a horror story and too real to be a drama. She was one of six sisters – three have died, two from drug overdoses and one from suicide.
Her sister Sissy married drug dealer and multiple murderer Dennis Bruce Allen, known as Mr Death. It was a contract with the devil. Allen bashed her with a gun butt, cut her throat and stuffed her in the boot of a car, instructing associates to dump her in an industrial rubbish bin.
Allen’s sister-in-law Wendy Peirce told me: “Dennis opened the boot. Sissy was in there with her throat cut. It wasn’t ear to ear, but she lay there just gurgling. It was awful. I was helpless.
“He just slammed the boot shut and I spun out. He told someone to drive her somewhere and just leave her in a Dumpmaster. I got her dropped off at a railway station, so someone would find her and take her to hospital. That saved her life.”
Another time, for some reason he left her overnight chained to the washing machine. Sissy saw death as her only escape and in 1986 killed herself in prison.
Wendy was no stranger to violence. Her husband, Victor, would fire shots near her feet to make her dance, leaving two in the skirting board.
Kellie came from a dysfunctional family and, craving affection, fell into a violent relationship when she was 13.
“I was beaten regularly and would go to school with two black eyes,” she told me. “When you come from that sort of life, any man who shows you affection you think you love.”
Lacking any sense of self-worth she made the same mistake as her sister, believing she could reform a bad man. She married vicious career criminal John Marshall inside Pentridge. She was 19 and believed Marshall’s claim he was innocent.
On release, he reverted to type – a violent, cowardly, pig.
‘I was beaten regularly and would go to school with two black eyes.’
Kellie Carter-Bell
They had four children and had to move to Brisbane when he became a police witness to save his own skin in a murder case.
As we know, the most dangerous time for anyone in a violent relationship is when they try to leave. Marshall stabbed her in the back – just deep enough to draw blood. Kellie grabbed the kids and headed to a refuge. The court intervention order proved useless. He slashed her clothes and the tyres on her car.
He rang to terrorise her – telling her he planned to kill her at work, wearing the clothes he was given for Father’s Day. He walked into the store where she worked, wearing those clothes, then slashed her face, arms and back, before stabbing himself in the heart.
Doctors saved him. She moved back to Melbourne and lived in fear until he died from cancer.
More abusive relationships followed until she looked at her battered face and decided to take back her own life after decades of violence.
Not only did Kellie look after her own kids but she helped raise her niece, Jade Allen, daughter of Sissy.
Jade, the mother of Jayda Allen Bonner, was born addicted to drugs because her mother was hooked on heroin.
Sick and a few days old she was abducted from the Royal Women’s Hospital by her father, Dennis Allen. Her early years normalised violence. She was in the house when Allen and half-brother Victor Peirce cut up bikie Anton Kenny with a chainsaw, putting the remains in a barrel to dump in the Yarra.
Desperate to escape as a teenager, she began a relationship with the older father of the children she babysat. “I now know I was being groomed,” she told me. She was pregnant at 17 and the subject of regular violence.
“My son learned to crawl over to me when he was bashing me on the floor.”
Like her aunt, she found the courage to escape – only to see her daughter fall into the same dark pit. For Jayda there would be no escape.
Kellie takes up the story.
“Jayda was a shining light. She was our Little Dora the Explorer who was intrigued by nature. She had an aura about her and an Indigenous connection to the land.”
All that changed when she met a man in his mid-20s.
There are those, even now, keen to victim blame. Kellie says there were comments on Jayda’s GoFundMe page that the family would spend donations on drugs.
What sort of person attacks people consumed with grief from the death of a loved one?
If you are sipping a coffee and smugly reading this thinking it is a story restricted to those on the wrong side of the tracks, you are deadset wrong. It doesn’t matter what side of the tracks you inhabit, family violence is a real and ever-present danger.
Ron Crawford was a pharmacist who in 1988 paid a hitman to kill his wife, Anne.
Despite overwhelming evidence after a cold case investigation, he was acquitted in the Supreme Court.
Crawford was accepted back into a large part of his social world as if murdering one’s wife was an unfortunate but forgivable breach of etiquette.
Julie Ramage lived in a nice house in a posh suburb, drove a sporty little car and had kids in private schools. In 2003, her estranged husband, Jamie, put his hands around her throat and slowly squeezed the life out of her.
He claimed provocation to receive a lesser sentence. The law was later changed, so other rats could not use the same tactic.
No one seemed too bothered when Edwina Boyle went missing in 1983 – except her sister Valerie Bordley, who raised the alarm when regular letters dried up.
Her husband, Fred Boyle, who strangled and shot his wife in their Dandenong home, claimed she had run away with a truck driver called Ray. Even though he knew police knew he was the killer, he had the cheek to quote to replace the homicide squad’s wearing carpet. He was a carpet layer by trade.
He didn’t get the job.
Nearly 23 years after the murder, her remains were found in a barrel Boyle had carted around with him when he moved house four times. It was his trophy.
After they were found, he was charged and convicted of the murder.
Vic Ramchen and his former fashion model wife, Jacqui Ramchen, lived in a mansion less than 100 metres from Airlie, the police officers’ college in South Yarra.
Many knew that the Ramchens’ imposing front fence hid repeated episodes of family violence. She went missing from the family home in April 1992 and her body has not been found. Vic Ramchen was the only suspect and charged with murder, but the prosecution was dropped.
Then we have millionaire social influencer and fitness guru Sam Wood, who is facing family violence charges in Queensland.
Police regularly find tracking devices in women’s cars, placed there by former partners, cameras hidden in homes, and smart, confident women who have been reduced to frightened slaves from years of relentless bullying designed to destroy self-esteem.
One woman on a date received a series of unsolicited photos from a former partner. They had been taken inside the home of the man she was now seeing.
Jayda’s body was found in her Cardigan Street flat in Carlton on Saturday, October 10.
Her partner, Liban Ali, 31, was arrested the following Tuesday. He was allowed to sleep in police custody before he was interviewed as he was apparently very tired.
He was charged and appeared in court the next day. His lawyer said the accused suffered from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
He wanted his client cared for by a custody nurse in prison. At the time, Jayda was being cared for by pathologists at the coroner’s office.
In Australia, we pride ourselves on remembering our heroes. Too often we forget our victims.
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, 13YARN (13 92 76), Yarning Safe’N’Strong (1800 959 563), or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.