Kristi Abrahams throws the pregnancy kit on the kitchen table. "Have a look at this," the 18-year-old says to Liz Weippeart, the mother of her boyfriend of three months.
"Oh shit," says Liz.
"What am I going to do?"
"I don't know," says Liz, gauging that the girl expects her to solve the problem. "It's up to you."
Abrahams goes to the bedroom to tell the boyfriend, Chris Weippeart, also 18. The wiry blond charges out, seething. "She's f...ing pregnant!" He kicks a hole in the fibro wall of the dining room, jumps on his pushie and takes off to who-knows-where in the constellation of battler suburbs around Mount Druitt on Sydney's western fringe.
Liz has to go out, but when she comes back a few hours later she finds the "kids" - as she still calls them - sitting on the lounge holding hands.
"We decided to keep the baby because I don't believe in abortions or anything like that," Abrahams later says.
The couple had been introduced by Chris's younger brother, Matthew. To him, Kristi seems like a together kind of chick. She is laidback and funny. She wears nice clothes - jeans and good shirts - and has her own tidy housing commission flat around the corner in McMurdo Avenue, Tregear. There is no hint of the deprivation and depredation of her past that will later be put forward to help explain her notorious future.
The judge who last month put Abrahams away for a minimum of 16 years for the murder of her second child, Kiesha, described her as "an inevitable product of entrenched intergenerational failures". There was also a failure of those around her - family, friends and government - to see the violence visited upon her. Now that Kiesha's death has been dealt with by the courts, the sad extent of those failures can be told, along with the story of the short and chaotic life of Abrahams's first child, Ayden, who may also have been the victim of such failures.
The polite, pregnant 18-year-old who moved into Liz Weippeart's house was running from her past. She said she had no family. She told Liz she was a "bitzer", full of exotic ancestries. In reality, she was from a white, "very middle-class" mother and a violent Aboriginal father who had been in and out of jail for short stints on alcohol-related charges.
Her early life had followed a pattern where her mother would get away from the father with help from her family, then she'd get back in touch and they'd hook up again. They moved around the country, with Kristi dragged from school to school, or no school.
For all that, she was able to compensate. Former classmate Therese Smith remembers her from Tregear Public School when they were both about 10. "She was a good kid," Smith recalls. "Miss popularity. She used to get along with everybody and she seemed like a good student."
But her mother developed epilepsy, possibly arising from assaults upon her by her father, and it was young Kristi's job to look after her when she had a seizure. One night when Kristi was 10, she heard her mother having a fit. She and her three-year-old brother were the only ones in the house, so Kristi knew the responsibility to help, and to look after her brother, fell to her. She walked into the room to find her mother in bed, covered in blood, dead.
Kristi's father didn't want to take the kids after that - nor keep in touch with them. Abrahams believed her father had caused her mother's death, so she rejected him anyway, along with his family and her own Aboriginality.
Psychologist Peter Champion was asked to assess Kristi after her mother's death. He found she had an IQ of 68 - bordering on an intellectual disability. He recommended she be placed with a non-Aboriginal foster family, "knowing only her father and his family and their violence". The caseworkers, however, put the two kids in an Aboriginal group home.
When Abrahams was 11 and the bureaucracy was trying to figure out what to do with her, she was asked to write down what she remembered of her father's violence towards her mother. With an immature hand she wrote:
"The things I remember what my dad did to my mum:
1. When my dad strangled my mum when we were going out of the car. That was in Queensland.
2. When my dad had steel capped boots on and kicked her in the head.
3. When my dad had a big bottle and went to throw it in between my mum's legs.
4. My dad went to punch her on the nose and broke her nose.
5. And he kept hurting my mum ... on the head.
6. When my mum went to work and my dad was minding me and when my mum came home I had bruises all over me.
7. And when I went to school I fell off a big beam and when I went was home time [sic] he went to kick my very sore leg.
8. My dad went to kick my mum in the tummy really hard.
9. When my dad went to hit my mum in the mouth and my mum has a fat lip or mouth."
Champion assessed her again at 14 and found she still had a "significant level of intellectual disability" but because her social skills were good, "her limitations were not always obvious". She still had a "great affection" for childish things like Bananas in Pyjamas paraphernalia, suggesting her emotional needs had not been met. She had also overeaten and become obese.
Abrahams stayed at the group home (except for a couple of failed foster placements) until the age of 16, when she went to live in a girls' refuge. Two years passed before she got her own unit and started shuttling between it and the Weippeart home, where the pregnant teen stayed most nights.
Barely a year earlier, Chris Weippeart had been living with his dad elsewhere while his mum, Liz, had another baby, but he came back to Liz's place at Coffs Harbour, on the NSW north coast, when he was 17. Two days later, he collapsed with convulsions. He was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. That partly explained the way, when his blood sugar became wonky, he'd get on a roll and just start blabbing on. He could talk the leg off a donkey.
Soon after the diagnosis, Liz moved her four boys - aged 1, 5, 15 and 17 - down to Tregear from Coffs Harbour because her newborn son suffered a medical condition and needed to be close to treatment.
When Chris brought Kristi Abrahams home the following year, he thought the company would be good for his mum, but for Liz, two females in a house didn't mix: "Especially when it's my house. She was just a slob." But even though she thought Abrahams was lazy, Liz would sometimes have to leave her youngest son, and Liz had to give her credit that when she'd get home, the baby would be bathed, fed and in bed.
Not long into Kristi's pregnancy, Chris came out of his room to tell Liz Kristi was punching herself in the stomach because they'd had an argument and she wanted to abort the foetus. Liz found Abrahams on the bed, crying.
"If you're going to do silly things like that, just go and have an abortion," Liz said. Abrahams picked up her handbag in a huff and went back to live at her place. She was back a few days later, though, and Liz noted that she seemed to become less aggressive. She cut back on the cigarettes and appeared to be up for the challenge ahead. She and Chris only drank a four-pack of Vodka Cruisers every fortnight - when they got paid from Kristi's dole and Chris's part-time job.
When it came time for the second ultrasound, Chris couldn't make it because he had two cones of weed and was too stoned. That caused a row, but when she came back and told him it was a boy, he cried with happiness. They sat in the bedroom and cuddled.
Abrahams had an emergency caesarean on February 6, 2003, alone, at Nepean Hospital in western Sydney, giving birth to a blond boy called Ayden. Afterwards, she complained aggressively that the nurses kept moving her bed and hurting her wound. The nurses called the NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS) about her the day she left because she was so aggro towards them.
Two days later, DOCS officer Richard Affleck was at the door of Liz's house with a midwife and his supervisor, Bryanne Vimpani. Vimpani had been Abrahams's caseworker when she was a 15-year-old state ward, but had never formed any rapport with her as Abrahams was difficult and evasive.
They found nothing untoward with Ayden, only that Abrahams was giving the baby one scoop of baby formula instead of two. The first sign of trouble, though, came three weeks after the birth. Abrahams, claiming a toothache, had taken nearly half a sheet of Panadeine Forte. She was asleep at midday, face down on the kitchen table at Liz's house, when Chris came out. "Mum," he said, "I'm going up the doctors to see about a vasectomy. Do you think he'll give me one?"
"I don't think so. You're too young. What happens if you want more children down the track?"
"Well, she won't go on the pill and she doesn't like condoms."
When he got back, about 4.10pm, he found Abrahams still asleep on the kitchen table. "Have you given Ayden his 4 o'clock feed?" he asked her. She grunted. He told his mum the doctor wouldn't give him the snip. Abrahams overheard, got up and left in a huff with the baby. When he followed her to her unit a few hours later, furniture started flying. She threw the baby's bath at him. He smashed her coffee table. He grabbed his bag and his bike and took off, ducking to miss a red glass candleholder that smashed into the brickwork behind him.
He rang the police. When probationary constable Natalie Raymond arrived at Kristi's unit, she saw Chris's stereo, CDs, bike parts, clothes and cut-up keycards thrown on the lawn, along with the smashed red glass. Chris introduced himself and Raymond recorded it in her notebook. "I'm Ayden's dad. His mum's not coping and she mixes her medication. She goes nuts and shit. She threw my clothes and stereo off the balcony last night and threw a lit candle at me while she had Ayden in her arms. The wax went everywhere and nearly burnt him. She's up all night with Ayden and has threatened to throw him off the balcony if he doesn't shut up and let her sleep. I don't know what to do."
Abrahams wouldn't open the door for the constable. But after consulting with the DOCS caseworker, Richard Affleck, the 26-year-old officer finished her shift expecting that the baby was going to be "removed" that night.
But after a couple of failed attempts by Affleck to visit Abrahams, the idea of removing the baby seemed to have lapsed. Abrahams moved back to Liz's with Ayden, and no DOCS worker attempted to see her there. Affleck would later blame his heavy workload.
Three days after the reconciliation, Chris got a call from an ex-girlfriend, Angela Forbes. They were still good mates. She was coming to Sydney and wanted to visit. This, however, was a problem. Liz knew Abrahams was "a very jealous, spiteful and aggressive type of girl". If Chris even looked at a female or, heaven forbid, a girl talked to him, she'd hit him across the back of the head. He'd cop it sweet. He didn't know what else to do. Abrahams was even jealous of Liz going out with friends and not inviting her: "Why don't you spend time with me?"
The impending visit led to a fight in which Abrahams slashed her own arm with a knife. She picked up a pair of scissors and went for Chris. His brother, Matthew, stepped between them and ended up getting stabbed in the hand.
So everyone was more than a little nervous when Angela Forbes arrived, but they sat around talking amicably through the tension. Chris smoked two cones, but neither Chris nor Abrahams drank anything. Abrahams held it together until 10pm when she suddenly declared she was going back to her unit and she was taking the baby.
Liz worried how Abrahams would cope because she never got out of bed for Ayden. Liz and Chris did all the night feeding. But Abrahams put Ayden in his pram and she and Chris took him back the 500 metres to the unit where he had only ever spent one night previously - the night of the big fight when the police were called.
Chris and Abrahams put him down in his own sparse room, with Tigger on the blanket and Winnie the Pooh on the curtains. About 2.30am, Chris fed Ayden a bottle of S-26 Gold baby formula, changed him and put him back down on his side.
While Chris would normally have given the baby his 6am feed, neither parent apparently woke until midday.
"Can you go check bub?" Abrahams asked.
"Okay. Stay here. I'll bring him."
Liz had been wondering where the kids were. They'd planned to meet up about 11am to vote together in the state election that day, March 22, 2003. All of a sudden Chris came tearing up on his pushbike. "Ayden's blue and he's dead and he's cold. Kristi's up there screaming and screaming. Mum, I found him and he was on his face."
When Liz arrived at the unit, she saw Abrahams sitting on the floor, cradling the baby, screaming and crying. Ayden was wearing a white suit and had two blankets wrapped around him. "He's cold, he's cold," Abrahams kept repeating. "We need another blanket."
Then the ex-girlfriend walked in, with Liz's toddler. Abrahams screamed: "Tell her to f... off! Tell her to f... off! Tell her to f... off!"
"Calm down, honey, she's going. She's got [Liz's toddler]."
Liz's best friend, Yvonne Church, turned up. Church thought it more than a little strange that the child would die pretty much on the first day he didn't sleep at Liz's house. "She [Abrahams] was supposedly crying, but she wasn't," Church would recall. "There were no tears. None at all."
But Abrahams was still holding onto Ayden seven hours later at the hospital and only reluctantly handed him over when the formalities were completed.
With the previous DOCS notifications, police thought the matter more than a little suspicious. But the post mortem found no signs of abuse and no apparent cause of death. Constable Phillip Taylor put together a brief of biblical thickness.
While it has been reported that Ayden died of sudden infant death syndrome [SIDS], the post mortem found the cause of death to be "unascertained", but that "if the matter had not been reportable [as a DOCS case] ... it would have been classified as a SIDS".
The distinction is important. SIDS is not a diagnosis. It's the label they give a death when they don't know what caused it but don't think it suspicious. SIDS and suffocation can be indistinguishable in babies under six months because they are too young to leave signs of a struggle.
It's a highly subjective distinction. So Taylor was asked what he thought. He wrote at the time, "My gut feeling is that it was a SIDS case. I honestly feel the parents didn't do anything adverse towards Ayden. I just think they didn't have the sound knowledge towards parenting. I feel they tried but unfortunately when kids have kids, these things happen." And that was it. No inquest was held, although a senior coronial official said, after reviewing the file since Kiesha's death, perhaps there should have been one.
A few months after Ayden died, police were called with a report that Abrahams had "self-mutilated" during a domestic. They said she appeared to still be grieving. During this time she also cut up Chris's jeans and the pair of expensive runners his ex-girlfriend had given him the night that Ayden died.
"She turned into a different person," says Matthew Weippeart. "I understand she was hurting, but she was just different. Very different. Definitely more aggressive, more bitchy."
The relationship with Chris Weippeart continued off and on. A month after the self-harm incident, they conceived again. The child was born in April 2004. Her name was Kiesha. And while Abrahams had told Liz she hadn't felt like a mother to Ayden - didn't feel anything towards him - because she'd had a caesarean, she pushed Kiesha out by herself and even managed to breastfeed her for a few weeks. She was glowing. "She treasured that little girl," Liz says.
The couple had moved to another unit, on Popondetta Road in nearby Bidwill. Neighbour Michelle Green couldn't fault Abrahams as a mother. "The child was always well dressed, clean. Yeah, she got a smack, but that was normal. I smack my kids. She was always in winter clothes when it was cold. She bathed her and fed her. She was a normal mother."
Abrahams confided in Green that she wanted to ditch Chris and that he had harmed their first baby. And Green found it easy to believe. She thought Chris was a fruitcake. But it was Abrahams who found herself in trouble with the law. During one of the couple's off periods, when Kiesha was nine months old, Abrahams approached a young woman, Donna Markwick, out the back of a townhouse near Liz's place in Tregear. Abrahams called her a slut and accused her of having it on with Chris. She punched Markwick in the head till she fell, then she kicked her a couple of times and left.
Abrahams was convicted of assault but she resumed the relationship with Chris - until six months later when they started blueing because they were out of cigarettes. She told him to leave for good, so he started packing his bags and she followed him into the room to keep arguing. Meanwhile, they heard Kiesha, 15 months, crawling up the hall towards them. Abrahams stormed out towards the toddler. Chris saw her pick up Kiesha by the neck and carry her to the lounge room where she dumped her on a child's sofa. When Kiesha started crawling away again, Abrahams picked her up and bit her on the right shoulder. Kiesha screamed.
Chris left and called the police.
When they arrived, they took Kiesha's right arm out of her shirt and saw the bite mark.
"How did this happen?" the policeman asked.
"She bit me, so I bit her back," said Abrahams, who could offer no sign of injury on her own body. Later, Abrahams pleaded guilty to assault and received a 12-month bond, but Kiesha was taken from her and returned to the care of Chris and Liz.
Kiesha hadn't been there long, though, before Abrahams came around to see Chris with some paperwork. "Christopher didn't read it and he just signed it without me knowing," recalled Liz, who has never seen the document, but has been told it declared Chris to be incapable of raising a child.
"Two days later, DOCS came around and said, 'We've got to take Kiesha.' I said, 'I beg your pardon?' " recalls Liz.
She asked Chris why he didn't show her the paperwork before signing.
"Mum, I didn't think."
Kiesha was taken to live with a foster family, with whom she was apparently contented and happy.
Neighbour Michelle Green would watch Abrahams get ready for her supervised access visits. "She used to look so forward to it. She was up first thing getting herself ready, making the house spotless."
Abrahams attended anger-management classes and entered into a "parental care plan". But her efforts to regain her child might have been derailed by being arrested twice for driving without a licence. She had met Robert Smith, a shy guy with a chronic low mood and a Holden Commodore. The sort who, when a colleague at the giant liquor warehouse where he worked might say "G'day", would scurry on by without a word. He'd later say she'd lock the door on him when they argued so he couldn't escape from her. One time he scaled the first-floor balcony to get away.
Abrahams spent a lot of time at Smith's place which was also on Popondetta Road, Bidwill, and where he lived with his mum and her partner. She got to know one of their neighbours, Alison Anderson, who would pop over for a yack every time she was there, which was often. Abrahams was fighting to get Kiesha back out of foster care. "I said to her, 'Prove to them you can do the right thing. Get off the drugs. Prove everybody wrong,' " recalls Anderson.
On October 15, 2006, Abrahams was arrested for having outstanding warrants for the traffic offences. Some might take all this to indicate she didn't have her act together, but two months later, DOCS returned Kiesha to her.
Anderson believes that Abrahams exaggerated Chris Weippeart's drug problem in order to blacken his name with DOCS.
Liz Weippeart says she and her son were unaware Kiesha had been returned to the mother, and has been unable to find out why she was returned. "We don't understand that and neither do the foster parents. I'm asking that, but getting no answers. It's very frustrating."
When Alison Anderson met Kiesha for the first time, the little girl was bubbly and smiling, instantly likable. Anderson's daughter Tahlia would swing her around, or maybe let her play in her toy room. Her eyes would light up - "t-t-t-t-toy shop" - with all the Bratz and Barbies. At Christmas, Abrahams bought all Tahlia's Bratz gear from Anderson to give to Kiesha.
A year after Kiesha was returned, Abrahams was heavily pregnant with her third child, a second daughter, when a nurse at Nepean Hospital observed a bruise on Kiesha's face and reported it to DOCS. The following day, the 3 1/2-year-old couldn't tell a caseworker how she got the bruise, but when asked about a cigarette burn on her body, said, "Mum hit there ... Mum did that."
It bore similarities to an event in Abrahams's own childhood. When her mother was taken to hospital having allegedly been bashed by her father, nurses found Abrahams, aged 2, with extensive bruising to buttocks and thighs. The father was charged with one count of assault but, by the time he made it to court, eight months later, the charge was dropped.
Sometimes Anderson would ask, "Where's Kiesha?" She'd see Kiesha come to the door, and Abrahams would yell at her, "Get back in there and sit down."
The hiding of Kiesha would later be revealed as a sinister factor in her abuse. Her skeleton would disclose a history of concealed wounds - to her nose, jaw and skull. Her arm bones showed signs consistent with severe twisting. The more ephemeral wounds to flesh and skin would not linger, but it appears that Abrahams kept Kiesha out of school to hide the injuries. Aged six, she had
attended school for just four days in two terms. Even then, a teacher saw bruising on her face. Truant officers who visited seven times were always met with a locked door.
"There was a time I saw her with a black eye," Anderson said. "I asked, 'What happened?' and I had [Abrahams] turn around and say, 'She hit the table.'
"I do recall when she had a sore arm but I didn't think much of it. Kids fall over. They come off bikes. It hurt her when she went to move it. I'd never seen anything else because she was always in long pants. She always had a hat on. She always had a jumper on, even in summer. I used to think she must be hot."
Anderson remembers being at the hospital on June 3, 2010, to visit a niece in labour when she ran into Abrahams, who was pregnant now with her fourth child. The second daughter, now 2, was in a stroller - but there was no sign of Kiesha.
"Not long now,"Anderson said, looking at her friend's belly. "How's Kiesha?"
"Good. She's in the car."
Anderson didn't wonder why. She waived a ring over her friend's belly and divined that the baby was going to be a boy.
Abrahams laughed. "We'll see."
A week later, Abrahams rang her father, the man who appears to have been at the core of her own unhappiness. She was crying and angry, swearing. Could he take Kiesha off her? "I am sick of her. She shits and pisses the bed. She plays up at school. I will hurt her, I really will hurt her, I will kill her."
On July 7, 2010, Abrahams gave birth to her second son. Four days later was the last time Kiesha was seen alive by anyone outside her family. When Abrahams's father rang to talk about taking Kiesha, Abrahams said she wanted her to stay a few weeks longer so she could get to know her brother.
Abrahams's former neighbour, Michelle Green, ran into her going into JB Hi-Fi at Mount Druitt, probably on July 28. Abrahams appeared normal and happy. "I've just had another baby. Life's good. I'm finally getting everything I wanted."
Green was glad for her. There was no hint that her friend had murdered her daughter 15 days earlier and was at that very moment engaged in the cover up. Abrahams bought toys and a Tinkerbell poster ostensibly for Kiesha, to hide the fact she was already dead. Four days later, Abrahams and Smith went to the police, claiming they'd woken to find the door ajar and Kiesha missing.
The first that Liz Weippeart knew that her granddaughter had been back living with Abrahams was when the police knocked on the door saying she was missing and they needed to search the house for her.
Alison Anderson rushed to help. She found Abrahams across the road at Smith's mother's place. "What happened? Oh my god. Who would have done this?" She sat herself down beside Abrahams. "What about Kiesha's dad?"
"Have you got a cigarette?"
Anderson handed her one as Abrahams held her second son, trying to breastfeed him, stressed out and crying.
"You sure the father wouldn't have something to do with it?"
"That f...ing dickhead. He rode past the other day and did a gun figure with his fingers while Rob was pegging out the washing."
The police, however, soon cleared Chris Weippeart. For a start, he was in hospital having a toe amputated as a complication of his diabetes.
Anderson couldn't figure out why her friend didn't get off her backside and join the hunt for Kiesha. And then she moved house and Anderson didn't get that, either. What if Kiesha found her way home and she wasn't there? She couldn't understand how anyone could go to the hairdresser and get hair extensions and red foil streaks and their nails done while all this was going down. Anderson baked for her. She scrounged baby clothes for the newborn son while the police had Kiesha's for the investigation. She took them to her gay and lesbian church at Cranebrook, the Open Door. "Our church prayed over them."
Anderson overrode her suspicions and she says it made her sick. She couldn't eat. "I used to say to her, 'Get out to the public. You've got nothing to hide. Go out and tell them and people will stop judging you.' "
But the reporters would pull up out the front and Smith would pelt their cars with eggs. He'd come running in: "Yes, I got 'em." And Abrahams would laugh. It was doing Anderson's head in.
When they did eventually speak to the media, they cried. Liz Weippeart saw her on the TV.
"A lot of flashbacks come into your head. I'd seen it before with Ayden. That's why I knew something was going on. It wasn't tears when Kiesha went missing. I'd seen it before."
Certainly the police never believed her. But in the vacuum, gossip can flourish. Chris Weippeart had his name blackened. People saw his insulin syringes and went around saying he was a junkie. Suspicion was never far away.
But nine months after the disappearance, Kristi Abrahams wailed and wept as she unburdened herself to an undercover cop. Holed up in a hotel room, the victim of a police ruse, she told the guy in business shirt and slacks that she nudged Kiesha with her foot, Kiesha jumped back and hit her head. "And then she went funny, and then I put her in the shower to try and wake her up ... She just started making weird noises. We thought it would go away, we really did."
Kiesha went like jelly, she said. She started pooing. They never went for help. She was dead when Kristi and Robert Smith awoke the next morning. The couple took the undercover cop to a bush grave that night, and at 1.12am they were arrested there. (Smith would later be jailed for a minimum of 12 years after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Kiesha on the grounds of gross criminal negligence and to being an accessory after the fact of murder.)
Chris Weippeart - now with both his dead children's names tattooed on his arms - took the news hard. He got himself on a bit of a downer. Liz would keep an eye on him, then his mates would come around and boost him up and she wouldn't see him for days on end. He'd come home to sleep and shower. But he wasn't eating the proper diabetic diet and she felt like he was a medical guinea pig with his medicines constantly being changed.
She came home one morning last November to find him dead in his bed. "People think he committed suicide because he couldn't handle it. That's bullshit. I want it cleared."
Liz doesn't know what killed him, but it wasn't drugs and it wasn't suicide. "The death certificate says 'natural causes' and 'pending', " she says. "If he can't have her down here, well, he'll go up there and have her. And that's what it is."
Lead-in photograph by Janie Barrett.
