Kellie Carter-Bell, who spent a decade as an anti-violence advocate after enduring 23 years of brutality, described the death of her grandniece Jayda Lou-Eve Allen Bonner, 21, as a loss she could not prevent.
“I shared my story with you to try and save lives, but I couldn’t save my own niece,” Carter-Bell said in the column by crime writer John Silvester.
Jayda’s boyfriend has been charged with murder, and the case will now go before the Supreme Court. Carter-Bell described Jayda as “a shining light” and “our Little Dora the Explorer who was intrigued by nature”, with “an aura about her and an Indigenous connection to the land”.
The column details three generations of family violence. Carter-Bell’s sister Sissy married Dennis Bruce Allen, known as Mr Death, who bashed her, cut her throat and left her in the boot of a car. Sissy died by suicide in prison in 1986. Carter-Bell herself entered a violent relationship at 13 and later married career criminal John Marshall, who stabbed her in the back and slashed her face, arms and back at the store where she worked.
Carter-Bell helped raise her niece Jade Allen, Jayda’s mother. Jade was born addicted to drugs and was abducted from hospital by her father as a baby. As a teenager she was groomed and was pregnant at 17, telling the columnist: “My son learned to crawl over to me when he was bashing me on the floor.”
Carter-Bell said comments on Jayda’s GoFundMe page suggested the family would spend donations on drugs. “What sort of person attacks people consumed with grief from the death of a loved one?” she asked.
The columnist argues family violence crosses class boundaries, citing cases including pharmacist Ron Crawford, who was acquitted of hiring a hitman to kill his wife, and Julie Ramage, killed by her estranged husband in 2003 in a case that led to a change in the law on provocation.