Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language and adult themes.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

Oh, there they are.

After Leigh's death,

I came across lots of letters which she'd written to her children.

It shocked me to the core

that a mother could write a letter like that to her daughter.

One day in 2015...

..I received a letter from the UK.

On the front it says: "Thinking of You."

I opened it...

and there was a picture of a phoenix.

"Like the phoenix I will arise from the ashes,

"and sleep will obey me and visit thee never,

"for my eyes are upon thee forever and ever.

"I have served my life sentence of shame and blame.

"Now it's your turn to suffer the same."

"Your nemesis, Lee Sabine."

What the fuck?

Who says that sh...?

It really does make you think,

what was going on in her mind when she wrote these things?

It seems it didn't take very much to incur her wrath.

Anyone who crossed her was in danger.

(ANGELIC THEME MUSIC)

Every homicide is unique, but in this case it was absolutely bizarre.

So, we have an unidentified, freshly-killed male body.

May have been there for weeks, possibly months,

who's died from a blow to the head.

At this point in the investigation, Leigh Sabine is the prime suspect.

Leigh had died three weeks before the body was found.

She didn't fit the profile of a killer,

but forensic examination of the packaging wrapped around the body

found a piece of hair that was a positive match for Leigh Sabine,

linking her to the murder.

Now, I had reasonable grounds to forensically examine her flat

to see if there was any evidence of a violent attack,

to prove if the killer is Leigh Sabine.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

I attended the scene to look for any forensics at all.

Hair, fibres, blood, fingerprints.

We looked everywhere.

Skirting boards, architraving,

behind cupboards,

the boiler in the kitchen.

Even the DNA team looked under the floorboards for blood.

We knew that the property had been steam cleaned,

and that a lot of the furniture had been given away

to neighbours and friends.

I had the hoover.

Rhian had some jewellery.

Another friend, she had a frog, which was a weight for a door.

We cleaned the place up really well.

You've got to keep searching for that evidence.

It is like finding a needle in a haystack.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

If you're charging me with assault, he says to my mother...

He gave them... Come on, Jane.

After I was charged with assault on my mother,

the shit hit the fan,

and my parents disappeared again.

Are you their mother? No, I'm not their mother,

and I've answered that one before.

My mum says to Marty and I,

"We can't keep living like this. We're all going to the UK.

"We've got air fares, we've got all the tickets done.

"We'll drop you at this hotel.

"We'll pick you up at ten tomorrow morning, and we're out of here."

I thought, "I've still got a chance at a family here," you know?

Next morning, I was all pumped.

Let's go! Went out.

Nothing.

It's just...no-one there,.

And I waited and waited.

And then I realised once again...

"Yep, they've gone."

Yeah.

Just smacked me around a bit.

Mm. Mm.

And then Jane told me Marty went to the UK with his girlfriend.

Martin was very much involved in helping them escape

because he wanted the relationship to continue.

Oh, it's like someone's stabbed you in the heart, really.

I think all of us felt that we were rejected again.

We turned to drugs and alcohol just to waste ourselves, you know,

so that we didn't have to think or feel.

I went right back to an abusive relationship

and drug and alcohol abuse.

There was no-one and nowhere to turn to.

We've never been a family, we're just five people

that have lived different lives, but got the same name.

The good thing is that you're living with your parents,

not relying on foster parents, or anything,

cos they never really treated you the same as their own kids.

It's just good to have your own parents.

When Martin went to the UK...

..I never heard from him again.

(INTRIGUING MUSIC)

After two days, looking for hairs, fibres, blood

and fingerprints...

..we found absolutely nothing.

And whilst it was disappointing to have no forensic evidence...

..the report opened up a number of theories in my mind.

My first theory was steam cleaning had taken place,

so DNA and fingerprints would have been destroyed.

The second theory was,

whilst we suspected the murder had taken place within that flat...

..it could have taken place somewhere else altogether.

Martin and I, we lived with Leigh and John.

They had this really nice apartment in Reading.

We had our own little space.

Reading in the '80s, it was just, like, wow!

We were only young kids, but we loved it.

There were pubs everywhere, pub culture was huge.

The cars, the little cars, the tiny streets.

And then the bobbies on bicycles, you know?

Martin was a great pool player.

We'd go down to the local pub and he would thrash them all,

the locals. (CHUCKLES)

And it was, like, "Yeah, that's my man." (LAUGHS)

Martin became a different man because he was happy

and full of life, when he'd come in and sitting around the dinner table

and have a family to talk to.

And they treated him like he was the only child,

like this long lost son that had come back and returned,

and very spoilt.

He enjoyed being with his parents,

but, again, there was that sadness

that he didn't have his siblings.

He felt he'd betrayed his sisters and his brother by going to England.

I couldn't believe he went.

I know he wanted a mum and dad.

We all did.

He was just such a softie.

He just wanted that family situation.

He wanted what everybody else has,

but he had his blinders on.

It just wasn't what he imagined.

As the investigation went on, something wasn't sitting right with me.

This body had been recently killed,

but before it was found, Leigh Sabine was weak, she was dying of cancer.

Um, there was no way she'd have been able to commit such an act.

I started to go back through the evidence,

you know, review it with the team.

Started looking at the body, looking at the wrappings,

and that's where I noticed the Tesco carrier bag.

Nothing unusual about a Tesco carrier bag,

only this one had a barcode on it.

And the date on that barcode was 1992.

Er, you know, which was a significant time away from 2015.

Now, I understand that people hold on to carrier bags for a long time,

but 20 years, I just thought that was really unlikely.

So, the body, er, when it was found was wearing a pair

of St Michael's pyjamas.

We spoke to Marks & Spencer and what they told us

was that those line of pyjamas were discontinued in the early '90s.

Initially, we believed that this body is probably recent,

yet everything else is telling me

that this murder may have taken place some years ago.

Martin and I just settled into local life.

Martin had formed a really close relationship with John.

John would talk about how he missed

sports days with his kids and his sons.

So, it was all happy families, except for Leigh.

She was jealous of the relationship that Martin had with John.

When I got home, she'd either be, you know,

loud and vivacious and happy.

Other days she'd be like, you know, really dark,

moody, stroppy, short.

And I'd think, "Ooh," you know, "what's wrong with her?"

Had she had too much to drink,

or had they been fighting, her and John?

John was upset with not having his other children around him.

But it was the opposite for Leigh.

It's almost like she'd had children but they were more pets, you know,

that she'd had and then discarded.

She didn't have a motherly bone in her body.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

As investigators, you think you're getting the story,

and then more information would take you in a different direction.

I went back to the pathologist just to run through

some of the things we were finding and some of the things

that were troubling me a little bit.

Could it be that the body could have been there a lot longer?

And the pathologist said there were possibilities.

One thing which he did speak about was the vacuum-packed theory.

He explained, if that body had been wrapped so tightly...

(PARCEL TAPE RIPPING)

..and around and round and round.

Taped, sealed, bound,

and if it had been bound with no air inside that packaging...

..that would have prevented any bacteria, prevented decomposition,

kept the body really well preserved.

It's almost far-fetched, isn't it?

There was skin on the body, there was hair on the body.

The organs were intact. There were no maggots.

Right up until this point of the investigation,

I'm working on the basis this is a freshly killed male body...

..but could this body have been dead for quite some time,

far longer than we initially thought?

(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)

When I spoke to the undertaker,

the undertaker said, "Oh, I've got a theory, Lynne.

"She is proper vacuum-packed, you know, like a piece of meat."

He said, "I do think she's used something to suck the air out."

"Oh, I got the Hoover," I says, "in the back of my car."

I am so glad it never went in my house

cos that would have been a horrible thought,

to think that I had brought that into my house.

All of a sudden, we were looking at a murder

that had occurred many years ago,

when the prime suspect, Leigh Sabine,

was not too frail, ill, to have committed such an act.

After I found that Leigh was at the centre of things,

I started to reflect

on something she'd told me,

which I hadn't really registered at the time,

and it was that one of her sons had died.

And what I found strange was it was almost like a throwaway remark.

It didn't seem to be something which bothered her a great deal.

We'd been living together for about six months.

I came home from work, and Martin said,

"I've got to tell you something. Mum wants you to move out."

And I said, "What? What?"

And he said, "Mum doesn't want you here anymore."

And I said, "Oh, my God!

"What am I gonna tell Mum and Dad? Where am I gonna go?

"Like, what can I do? But what have I done?

"I haven't done anything." And he said, "Yeah,

"she's just gone off on one and she doesn't want you to be here.

"She wants you to move out."

And I started crying. I just didn't know what to do.

(ARGUING)

Martin was giving them what for, telling them,

"What the...is going on?"

Why were they doing it again,

and why were we all the way over here in the UK

for this to happen to him again?

(ARGUING)

It was the first time that I'd ever really seen him that angry.

He said, "If she goes, I go too, and you lose me."

John was very emotional.

He was saying,

"But, Leigh, you cannot do this." Like, "Why are you doing it?"

She just said, "Because I can."

I thought, "What an evil bitch!"

And Martin really saw his mother for what she was.

In that moment, I felt Leigh would do anything to be in control again.

I just remember packing my suitcase,

and off we went into the dead of night.

I just didn't know what to do.

Martin stood by me and he said, "I'll never go back."

After that, Martin just went downhill.

His whole life just revolved around drinking.

He would get really dark.

Our relationship spiralled down,

and so we just ended up breaking up.

He moved back to New Zealand.

And one day I get this phone call out of the blue

that Marty passed away.

In 2000, Marty had been found deceased...

..and...

..he had taken his own life.

I couldn't believe that Marty had pa...

I just never thought he would do that.

He was just a fun, easy-going, gentle soul.

That really knocked me around for ages, that,

because I felt like I'd let him down.

Even though I'd had nothing to do with him for years,

I felt like I'd let him down.

On the day of his funeral, I just cried and cried and cried,

and I just couldn't believe it.

When he went back to the UK

to see them and they shit on him again,

I totally believe he never got over it.

It might have been not the thing

that drove him over the edge in the end,

but, man, it would have filled the cup, you know?

We all can only take so much.

Yeah.

Martin phoned me a few days before he killed himself.

He'd often phone every now and then, he'd drunken dial.

He called me by the nickname he used to call me, you know,

and I sort of said to him, "Oh, Martin."

I said, "Oh," you know. I said, "Stop it!" I said, "You're drunk."

He told me that he loved me and that he'd always love me,

and then that was it.

In my heart of hearts now, when I look back on that phone call,

that last phone call,

it was his goodbye, that he'd had enough.

He'd actually had enough.

So, yeah...

Sorry.

I understand why he took his life.

Not that I think it was right,

but he felt it was right for him.

He was tired of believing in people.

No-one can hurt him where he is now, so that's good.

Mm.

I could never forgive my parents for what happened to Marty.

They destroyed a beautiful soul.

(PHONE RINGS)

After Marty had passed,

I received a phone call and it's my mother.

And she said somebody had knocked on her door,

and it was two policemen,

and they had informed her that her son had died.

I said, "Yes," and I told her how he had died.

And she says, "Oh. But why would he do that?"

I was just speechless.

It's, like, "What the fuck, lady?"

It's, like...

"Because of you."

Not long after my mother passed away,

Mary West was cleaning out my mother's home,

and came across all these letters she had written to all us children.

I just couldn't believe what she was saying in them.

Just crazy talk.

Jane's ones were bad.

Jane was the ugly duckling.

Marty's ones were bad,

calling him gutless and soft,

and when she had him, he was weak.

Children were a burden to her.

She didn't care about any of us.

Everything was about her.

How could she write such horrible...

horrible, nasty,

mean, evil stuff?

She had a whole life with no kids

to do whatever she wanted to do, enjoy her life.

I just don't know why...

why she had so much hate.

Towards the end,

she said to me, "You could write my life story for me."

It didn't appear that she had a good upbringing herself.

Leigh told me that she grew up in the Rhondda,

which is a mining valley in South Wales.

It was tough because, literally, there was no money.

Leigh had been abandoned as a young child.

Her mother had left her father

when Leigh was about three,

and Leigh had been taken into care.

It had been a painful time for her.

She used to say that she'd been abused when she was in care.

She didn't go into detail about it.

It left her, as often happens with children like this,

as though she was emotionally stunted.

I felt she had never been taught how to be a mother.

When she was about 15, she went to live with her aunt,

and her aunt encouraged her to sing.

Lee's aunt modelled her appearance on the singer, Deanna Durbin.

"I wanted to look nice my first time out in Vienna."

"Oh, now, looks very nice. Very, very pretty."

Bought her clothes,

make up, etcetera,

so that she did echo Deanna Durbin.

That could have been when Leigh tried to build up this persona,

and rather than live in the real world...

..she chose to fantasise about what she wanted her life to be.

There was no doubt that she was an absolute storyteller.

The stories of her life were totally mythical.

She wasn't actually Lee Sabine from New Zealand.

We found out her name was Ann Evans.

She was a lady who was born in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales.

She grew up in that area.

Can you believe she lived in the Rhondda? It's only up the road.

A valleys girl? Good God, well. I wouldn't have...

I mean, you, obviously, you can tell my accent.

You would never have known that from her...

No, definitely not, no. ..Her accent.

No fucking way.

Fuck off! We always thought she was from New Zealand.

I would never, never in a million years,

have thought that she was from Rhondda Valley.

And they say you can't take the valley out of the...

the girl from the valley. You can, obviously, yeah.

Everything she said was untrue.

Absolute lie.

She just lived in a different world to everybody else.

I remember one day out of the blue, my mother rang.

She said, "Your father passed a couple of years ago."

And I says, "Oh, how did he pass?"

And she said, "Oh, he had a lot of medical issues."

I says, "Oh, that's really sad."

And she's, "Oh, I never truly loved him."

I hung up.

Why she even felt the need

to tell me she never truly loved him, I don't know.

I remember, Lee and John had moved in.

Would have been about '97.

My father said, "New neighbours." I said, "Oh, that's nice.

"Have you met them?"

"Yes." I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "Oh, I don't like her."

"Something about her that I don't like."

"She's too in your face. Oh, I don't like her."

John was just...quiet.

He was very quiet. Sat in the background.

He spoke, but she did most of the talking.

We did full proof of life enquiries for John Sabine.

DVLA, National Health Service,

passport enquiries.

John had only been living there three, four months, at the most?

He wasn't there long, put it like that.

There was only a handful of times I ever had any interaction with him.

I'd never met John Sabine, but Lee said that he'd left her

because, "Darling, that's what Italian men do."

We were able to prove that on the 10th of February 1997...

..John and Lee Sabine had moved into 57, Trem-y-Cwm in Beddau.

Both of them had signed the tenancy agreement.

A couple of months later, 9th April 1997,

he'd actually been physically seen by a doctor,

who recorded that meeting.

But since April 1997,

no-one had ever seen or heard of John Sabine.

When I looked back at the death certificate Mary West had uncovered...

..it was for a John H Sabine.

He was a male who was born in 1929.

However, looking at this document, John Sabine was born

on the 5th August 1930.

So, you had the same name, John Sabine,

both born in the London area,

but the date of births were actually out by one year.

So, with all the best intentions of Mary West,

she'd had the death certificate of a different person.

After John had supposedly left her,

when we went to visit my parents,

as soon as you open the door, this smell would hit you.

It had to be coming from Leigh's flat.

I'd say to my mum, "What on Earth is that smell?"

"Oh, she's cooking curry."

I used to say, "Mum, I cook curry. It doesn't smell like that."

It was a putrid smell.

She'd put a load of potpourri, etcetera,

to hide the smell. It didn't work, though.

Now we're focussing on John Sabine as the potential victim,

but we had no definitive proof that it was him.

We needed the DNA from his children

in order to establish identity.

I got a phone call from the police, and they want a DNA sample,

so they can identify the body.

And I said, "Good," and then they contacted me back,

and said, "We don't need one off you.

We got one off your brother.

And then I says, "But my brother's dead."

"No, no, you've got a half-brother over here."

Excuse my language but I thought, "Holy fuck!

"What else is going to come out of this?"

We were starting to delve deeper into John Sabine,

pulling his army records, and that's when we found out

that he'd actually had two children from a previous marriage

that were living in the UK.

(SHEEP BLEATING)

I'm Chris Sabine, son of John Sabine from his first marriage.

I was about one years old.

My sister would have been about two and a half

when my father abandoned us.

Back in 2015,

we were selling Christmas trees,

and the phone rang, and I picked the phone up.

This Welsh accent said, "Is Christopher John Sabine there?"

They said, "We wanna come out and do a test on you

"because we've found a body. We think it's your father.

"If we can come over as soon as possible."

I said, "When's that?" They said, "Tomorrow morning."

I thought, "Well, it's Saturday."

A Sunday. No, it was Saturday then.

Yeah.Then they said they'll be over by the morning.

They were here at nine o'clock, ten o'clock?

Nine o'clock. In the morning? They did a DNA test.

Well, I was a bit stunned by it, really,

because you thought, "What's happened?"

My mother said when I was one or two years old,

my father came back from the Korean War.

He had shellshock.

He was in hospital for a long period of time,

and he got friendly with the nurse.

Next thing you know, she got pregnant.

At the time, John was 28 and Lee was 17.

When my mother found out, she decided, that's it,

best thing he can do is sling his hook, and told him to leave.

It were one of the worst things in my life.

I never grew up with a father. There's a lot to miss.

Officers went to see Chris,

took a DNA sample kit, which comprised of a mouth swab.

We quickly fast-tracked them to the lab.

I was very conscious this was someone

who hadn't seen their father for many, many years.

We weren't sure of their relationship.

We weren't sure of the impact that a match could have on Chris.

In the mid-'80s, when I was round about the age of 32,

we get this phone call to say,

"This is your father, John Sabine.

"Would you like to meet me?" I said, "Yeah, certainly."

I couldn't believe it.

We met for over a year, and everything was nice.

We went down every fortnight to Reading,

and we always went out for dinner.

We paid one week, they paid the following.

It was very strange cos going all through my life

with no father, all of a sudden I've got a father.

I was really pleased to see him.

I think he wanted to have a family.

Not so much be a dad, but have a family.

As we got to know them both more,

it appeared that she was definitely the one in control.

John agreed with everything that she said.

He would never stand up against her. He wouldn't argue with her.

She was a bit aggressive.

One day, I rung up to say, "I've got my first child."

"You're a grandad now."

And it's almost as if he couldn't speak to me.

And that was it. Never saw him again.

Which was strange cos I thought John was very, very keen

to have a grandchild.

I don't think Lee at the time wanted him

to have any relationship back with us.

She's a very jealous person,

and it was her way or no way.

(UNSETTLING MUSIC)

So, two days, we received the results of the DNA test.

DNA that we derived from Christopher

had helped us positively identify the victim.

It showed that it was actually his father, John Sabine.

I was horrified.

I was sad. I was all these emotions.

Couldn't believe it, but I could believe it.

And I felt sorry for John.

I thought, "You poor man."

He wasn't perfect, but I felt sad for my father.

In the little time I knew him, he always seemed placid to me.

In New Zealand, when the press were going,

he would be just about crying, you know.

He was... It was too much for him.

I want it left alone. We'll leave 'em be.

All you're trying to do is to break the family up

and cause a lot of problems. Right, thank you.

When I was told to leave that home...

..my father came running out with a parrot.

It was a hanging parrot that sat on the swing.

He had pulled that parrot off the swing,

and he gave it to me and told me he loved me.

And I think that's where this softness I hold is there for him.

I don't know that my mother knew about this parrot,

but she would have hated that.

The theory was that John Sabine was killed by Lee Sabine

some time in 1997.

But there was no hard evidence.

Confirming the identity of the body gave a number

of investigative options to me,

one being the media.

You know, appealing for witnesses.

I formally named John Sabine as the victim

and that was the first time that his name had really gone out.

Welsh police have discovered the body of a man wrapped in plastic.

John Sabine was last seen 18 years ago.They lived all over the UK.

They kept no close friends, no close family members.

If you do know anything about this couple please call them on 101.

The most interesting phone call was from a lady called Valerie Chalkley.

She'd been friendly with the Sabines

when they returned from Australia in 1984 and were living in Reading.

She was a strange, strange person, she really, she really was.

Valerie Chalkley tells the story

of how she lost touch with John and Leigh.

For a number of years, she didn't speak to them,

and she says, "I get a phone call out of the blue and it's Leigh Sabine."

And she put the date around 1997.

Valerie Chalkley just asked her, "How are you? How's John?"

She said, "I've killed him."

I said, "Er..." She said, "Yeah, I've killed him.

"I've battered him with a stone frog

"because he was getting on my nerves."

And I thought, "Oh, she's having me on."

She could out with statements that were totally ridiculous,

and you know when you feel a bit of fool and think, "I feel a fool,"

and if I said, "Is that true?" she'd say, "Course it isn't," you know.

Then she goes on to talk about other things.

Changed the subject completely.

She was a show woman, she really was.

If she could have written her life story,

this is what she would have done.

This is how she would have wanted it.

People talking about her, leaving an impression.

Listening to what she told me, I wasn't sure what to make of it.

This was so bizarre, this information. How credible was this?

We weren't sure whether this was the missing piece of the puzzle,

this was actually it, or whether it's a weird story.

This ornamental frog that has been used,

potentially, as a murder weapon to kill John, we have to trace it.

How we gonna do that? It's been 18 years.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

CID contacted me and asked me if I'd ever seen this frog,

and I said, "Well, it used to be propping Leigh's bedroom door open."

I just tasked the officers to go back and speak to Lee's neighbours.

We started doing some inquiries,

and the very first place we go

is to the resident downstairs who was arrested as a suspect.

That was a sensitive inquiry cos Michelle James was quite upset

over the fact that she'd been arrested in this case.

We ask her, "Is there any other boxes belonging to Leigh?"

She said, "Oh, I think there's a box on top of my fridge."

And there it was.

Both our eyes lit up, you know, thinking, "That it might be it."

What the pathologist was able to do was produce digital imagery.

You could see where that frog had been driven into the skull.

It was a perfect overlay.

My theory is, John Sabine had gone to bed, fallen asleep.

They may have had an argument earlier that night.

And then she's grabbed that stone frog

and she's attacked him with some significant blows to the head

which have ended his life.

It just didn't seem real. It's so far-fetched.

18 years and no-one missed him, you know?

Oh, God.

Part of me thinks that my father was always feeling bad

that he had left us again.

I think she didn't wanna hear it and hit him over the head to shut him up.

She just disposed of him like she did everybody else.

She got away with murder,

she got away with so much in her life.

You know, I can't forgive someone for that.

Our father loved her unconditionally.

He had nobody else, so he stayed with her,

and he paid a terrible price.

This is the ring that my father John had on him when they found the body.

There's nothing much else.

Nothing. Nothing at all, no photos,

no nothing.

At his funeral,

there's nobody there. Literally, nobody.

It was as if he was a ghost in the area that he lived.

Nobody can ever recognise him,

nobody ever saw him, nobody ever interacted with him,

but I think that's exactly how she wanted it to be.

It was, er, coercive control.

A murder has been concealed for some 18 years,

and Ann Sabine kept up the facade that John Sabine left her,

or was with another woman, or had, indeed, died.

It's almost like Lee Sabine

was thinking ahead and setting traps for people.

The stone frog was actually sitting in Michelle's flat.

Leigh's even told Michelle James

this story around the medical skeleton.

It's really cruel, when you think of what Michelle James went through.

The impact that the murder had on Michelle was quite appalling.

If Lee had come clean,

she was dying, she couldn't have been brought to justice,

but there would have been more a sense of natural justice

if other people hadn't had to be implicated.

TV: "Mr Sabine was never reported as a missing person,

"and the circumstances of where his body was concealed

"is part of the ongoing investigation."

Going into that flat, I can't recall seeing a big freezer.

I can't recall seeing an attic door. There probably was.

Was that body in the loft?

I think it was under the divan bed.

Under the bed? No way.

The only other possible place it could have been was in the garden.

Now, whether he was in the garden shed.

The only feasible place that it could have been stored

was there was one sort of store cupboard where the meter was kept.

It would have had to be somewhere where she could have access

to the body and continually wrap it

over a period of time, you know,

to prevent the smells and prevent any decomposition.

(INTRIGUING MUSIC)

But I absolutely felt that she had duped us.

She had this secret all along and was hiding it from us.

You don't think you have a murderer in the midst,

but, obviously, there was one right on our doorstep.

I felt angry with her afterwards because she was an outsider

who'd been accepted, and she mocked that.

And she boasted that, "After I die I will be famous."

And we laughed it off.

She played a damn good part.

An Oscar should have been awarded.

She wasn't an actor; she was a liar.

I do think she was evil, and those children suffered because of her.

I couldn't leave her with all the glory

of committing the perfect murder.

Because this story is not just about a murder,

it's about our lives.

I spent the majority of my life trying to figure out

why our parents might have left,

and the reality of what they did to us.

All my life all I've wanted to do is be part of a family,

good, bad or otherwise. I just wanted to belong to something.

And all my life, I never though we...I did.

Last time I seen Lee-Ann was about three or four years ago.

Hey, sis!

Jane the same time.

(CHUCKLES) Hello!

I always wonder what our family would have been like

if we'd stayed together.

Did you guys know our mother was abandoned when she was younger?

Yep, she told Marty and I.

I don't feel one ounce of pity or sorrow or anything for her.

Sorry, I don't.

Why go and have five children and leave them,

when you know that pain?

You know that pain of desertion,

and yet she went and did it to us.

But regardless of what my mother did,

we're breaking the cycle.

I could never imagine putting my kids through what I went through.

My mother had a choice.

Everyone's got to make a choice.

Could have kept going on the same route I was.

I would either have been in jail for the rest of my life,

or I would have been dead.

I knew that the only way out for me

was if I had a child to love and look after.

That...

That would save me.

When you have a baby, the love is instant.

It's like the most amazing, beautiful thing in the world.

My kids were the best thing that happened in my life.

(SNIFFLES) Yeah.

We've all come from a horrible place

and done some amazing things in our lives.

You know, I own my own home...

..got children, got a lovely wife, you know.

And I do love my wife.

(LAUGHS)

She wonders sometimes.

I'm actually really proud of the kids we've turned out to be.

We're good kids. We have hearts.

Unlike her.

(POIGNANT MUSIC)

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