there_is_no_place_like_home
sab When Steven Fraser picked up his children from his estranged wife, he told them to kiss their mother goodbye. It was something he had never done in all his access visits.

Over the next two days, the NSW Supreme Court was told yesterday, Fraser killed his three children, drugging them and drowning them in the bathtub of his Carringbah unit.

Late one Saturday night in August 2001, he gave his sons, five-year-old Ryan and four-year-old Jarrod, doses of Mogadon before drowning them, the court was told.

He placed Ryan on a mattress in the lounge room, and wrote on his face in felt-tip pen, "I love you Ryan, RIP xo". He laid Jarrod out in the main bedroom, leaving a similar message on his face.

The next day Fraser killed his seven-year-old daughter, Ashley, the court was told. She struggled violently, the court was told, and Fraser hit her on the back of the neck to subdue her. He laid her on the bottom bed of bunks and, on the wall in the room, wrote, "There's no place like home."

Fraser had spent several hours the previous day pleading with his estranged wife Maria to take him back. She had begun a relationship with a new man, the court was told.

The next morning when Fraser's mother arrived at the house, a toy monkey hung from the ceiling by an electrical cord. A knife had been placed through it and tomato sauce used to look like fake blood.

When detectives arrived, they found Fraser in the bath, drinking milky liquid from a tumbler, the court heard. He was extremely agitated and tried to put his head under the water.

Fraser was taken under police guard to Sutherland Hospital where police allege he said: "My children were my world, I killed my kids to protect them. My children are in peace now."

Fraser has pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis he was suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the killings.

He stared ahead blankly while Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, QC, outlined the allegations against him, yesterday, telling the court he killed his children because he wished to punish Maria for getting a new boyfriend. Mr Tedeschi said there were human emotions at play, not mental illness.

But counsel for Fraser, John Stratton, told the court that while there was no question his client had killed his children, the question was why he did it.

"Because of a mental abnormality, the accused's ability to judge right from wrong was impaired," he said.

The trial continues

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/20/1066631353787.html?from=storyrhs



what a world, what a world...
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oldephebe God. There is NO response I can make to that.

I almost forgot about that story

Geez.

Look, I separated from my wife, and she had custody of our little boy and she began a relationship with a man..you deal

you just deal
You thank god you still have access to your kids and you moniter the situation to make sure it's a healthy environment for your kid and keep the lines of communication open with the mother of your children.

Jesus!!

What is the deal with these guys breaking down because they can't face the fact that sometimes poeple (you're wife, you're EX-wife) just simply need to move on. Don't harass them, pay support and or alimony and get on with your life.
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Lemon_Soda All I know is that I am not the type of man that would do this.

oldphebe, you will know what I mean when I say this is an appalling atrocity performed by a selfish hellkite, and my own indignant obstreperous rancor cannot adequately convey my disgust.
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stork daddy i wish i could say as confidently as the two of you that i know what i am and am not capable of. 050616
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oldephebe LS - Yeah man I dig.

Stork Daddy - I don't know man...maybe if you just let the love you have for this woman keep you from doing anything rash to her or your children if you ever find yourself in that situation. Me? I had to accept the fact that I started taking her for granted and helped to drive her into the arms of another man. But she was lost to me well before she started afriendship that started out as meeting for coffee and winding up as cuddling in the afterglow of two people unable to summon the affection and fealty for thier respected spouses whose grim trudge up the porch stairs into a lifeless and sepulcral home, to a mate that had along ago desecrated the temple of matrimony by a series of neglectful and self-centered acts.

So...eventually I learned to be really happy for her and even became kind of friendly with her mate, they were in fact more compatable then we ever were. Me and my obsessive auto-didactism and dry interminable discourses and she just wanted to be paid attention to. I tried to take her primal, feral energy and nature and shear it off, take everything that I first loved about her and have her discard it to suit my anitquated preferances. I wanted her to become a bibliophile, I wanted her to dress like some Bryn Mawr Co-Ed from the 1950's.

When I began to meditate upon the signs of her sadness, the appeals she'd made to me that there was something causing great fault lines in the bedrock of our relationship and that something was ME. Once I accepted my responsibility, that my immaturity and hubris and autistic inability to process certain emotional cues that were expected of me and or call it emotional detachment - it had be amongst the core reasons why our marraige had become rotted out from the inside (well OK all things rot out from inside, or most things right?)So once I accept THAT burden of responsibility my rage and vengeance melted away, I was still somewhat bitter about things but I didn't let myself carry it to bed, I gave it back, I put it down, for it was much much to heavy to carry.
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misstree people can be driven
off of cliffs
when blinded by tears
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AeonFlummox where do you go when you have no "home"? no place to call home...? 050619
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palm except maybe grandma's.


[seen on the bedroom wall of one of the ladies at the residence]
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oldephebe Yeah I get that. You've rendered another palpably visceral image again mtree. Well put.

I guess she she had to step from the shattered frame of our imaginary idyllic lives. She couldn't live in the plasticene world I'd created.

I am/was such a dope. Even the light that fell upon our home, even the light that shone through our windows seemed like it was wounded.


She's was trying to convey her anguish and torment, living in a house that was under seige by the twin torrents of our respective accumulated grief. She was trying to say to me that her heart was lashed with every beat. And I hid, I barricaded myself behind the fraudulent moral and cultural claims and knitted a nice wall of hubris around myself.
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Lemon_Soda oldephebe,

It is mutual understanding, tolerance, and trust that allow relationships to last.

You were one of two. Not one of one. Blaming yourself is pointless unless you choose to blame her too. This I would not suggest. You were right on the money when you said that you've come to be happy for her and her new mate. You should extend that privelage to yourself, aswell.

It is as much a folly to mourn the past as it is to set conditions on future happiness. You, your fine mind, your shining star, the only person I have never met that I actually look up to, DESERVE your happiness. Take it. Empty your hands of this stuff so you have something to grasp it with.

(normally I just would have kept my nose out of it but I sensed it had been afflicting you more than usual as of late. Forgive me if I have offended you.)
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nomme) "mental illness can happen to anyone" 050620
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oldephebe Wow.

OK man if you say so.

I respect/admire your writing as well.

But god...whatever pedestal you put me on is impregnated with voracious hordes of termites, it'll fall, collapse...and me in my moth eaten suit of amalgamated angst, the obstructions of guilt and grief that impelled me to roll around in the raptures of torment, some of it yeah...self-imposed...

But yeah thanx anyway man.

Not offended, kind of "at sea" about what there is to admire about this whole syntax of sadness that has deteriorated into a kind of pennance where I ascend the stairs in my sad leaning tower to rifle through the pages of a past now turned to coarse parchment paper, that have been handled so much, so many many times that soon they will crumble and all times, all ages all the epochs of my self-imposed suffering will bleed into one chaotic yawp and yeah I'm still carrying around the burueau, the drawer, the letters that line the bottom of it's drawer and well...
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I'm...completely unable to finish a coherent thread right now. Thanx for your insight and your kind words LS
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noone special where's home? 050621
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megan home is where the heart is 050621
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noone special does that mean someone is my home? 050621
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megan if your heart is with someone, then i suppose
places are too transient, things are fleeting
but people can also fail you
you take your chances with wherever your heart is
or at least that's my view of it
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littledoseofperfection you have a home, it's with me 050707
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from