JUNE 2018| The Australian Women’s Weekly 99
Real life
returned, he forced her at knife-point
to drive to an isolated paddock, where
he stabbed her to death. The outgoing
young mother with everything to live
for died lonely and terriied, choking
on blood from multiple stab wounds
while Denyer tried to strangle her.
After the crime, he drove his victim’s
car back to Seaford, dumping it within
walking distance of her home, but later
returned to retrieve her purse, curious
to know the name of the woman he
had so savagely murdered.
Two weeks later, he was back on
the prowl again, stabbing and
strangling Natalie Russell in his
most brutal attack yet.
Paul Denyer’s frenzied six-week
killing spree left many casualties. But
for Debbie Fream’s baby, he left a
tragic legacy of grief and loss.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t
wonder what my life might have been
like if I’d had a mother,” says Jake,
staring at his photographs with his
mother’s striking blue eyes. “If she’d
lived, I might have been a lawyer or a
doctor, like her grandfather... I might
have been anything. Instead I’m lost.”
Jake remembers little of his early
life, though his albums reveal a happy
tot with his mother’s sociable
personality – a boy who rode bikes
and scooters with a dad who struggled
to smile on his birthdays. He recalls a
pervading sadness surrounding his
birthday, which falls 12 days before
the anniversary of his mother’s murder.
He felt it keenly as a child, though he
never understood it, because it was
many years before he learned what
had happened to his mother.
Jake’s memories of his father are of
a damaged young man who spent a
lifetime avoiding his son’s questions
about his absent mum, distracting
him with gifts and overcompensating
with monetary rewards in the hope
he might forget the gaping void in
their lives. “I didn’t only lose mymother that night,” says Jake. “I lost
my father too.”
He says his father was a good man
who tried to do his best for his son
but struggled with the grief and guilt
that only survivors of tragedy truly
understand. He sought solace in the
bottle and, for a while, used hard
drugs to numb his pain.
“It was hard for my father, raising a
baby on his own, and he didn’t cope,”
explains Jake, his voice trailing away.
“He was always palming me off onto
his mates or onto relatives. It was
dificult for me growing up with that.”
Garry’s depression sparked a
restless, itinerant lifestyle of destructive
relationships, ever-changing homes
and schools, which left Jake feeling
different – as if he didn’t belong
anywhere. School holidays were spent
with his maternal grandparents, who
answered their grandson’s questions
about his mother with cheerful stories
and half-truths. The special bond he
formed with his paternal grandfather’s
new wife, Margaret, who became the
mum he’d never had, ended with her
premature death, leaving the little boy
inconsolable.
Even when his father inally formed
a stable relationship with a mother of
four children, his son still felt lost –
growing up with someone else’s
mother, never knowing what had
happened to his own.
“Dad wouldn’t talk about it –
though I guess he was only trying to
protect me from the truth.” His cryptic
explanations were confusing: “She’s
gone, mate ... she’s not coming back.”
Jake was in Grade Three when a
classmate, who has noticed him
walking to school on his own each
morning, asked why his mother didn’t
drop him off. Did he even have a
mother, the boy asked.
The question terriied the nine year
old who had never considered this.
But the classmate wanted a story,
and as children do, Jake gave him one.
In a tale much closer to the truth than
he imagined, he spun a yarn, telling
the boy that his mother had been
stabbed 38 times in a car on a cliff
overlooking the ocean. “I was there ...
in the back seat watching,” he➝