Category: “A Voice For Veronica”

I knew very little about Veronica Knight when I began to write her story. In her three years as our informal foster daughter, we just enjoyed life and she quickly became part of our family. Although she was sixteen and almost an adult, she was childlike in other ways. We sensed that her so-called intellectual handicap, as it was called in the seventies, was at least partly the result of being confined to care homes and lack of regular education and encouragement. In other ways, she was insightful and smart. More recently I have had contact with one of her teachers, who described her as his ‘brightest student’.

Veronica’s last letter

Why my husband and I did not ask her more about her background, I am not sure. Perhaps it felt insensitive to interrogate a teenager about the years she never mentioned. Veronica was a ‘now’ girl: “What will we do now?” she would ask several times a day. We knew that she had spent several years in Minda Home, and that in Adelaide, to mention Minda was a pejorative in any context. She never mentioned any family members and I did not probe.

Sadly, Veronica became famous in a tragic way when her body was discovered in the Truro bush on Anzac Day in April 1978. It would emerge that she was the first victim of two serial murderers who received a great deal of publicity as their evil deeds were exposed (one had died in a car crash before the eventual arrest of the other one, who was charged and convicted). Veronica’s name was in the media and her movements on that last fatal night were detailed for all to read. She had been shopping in the city, was separated from her friend and accepted the offer of a ride home while she was waiting for the bus. Her last decision was a poor one. I knew that what was not in the newspaper reports was that she wanted to buy clothes and gifts for her imminent trip to visit our family in Melbourne where we were then located. Despite the information on her train ticket and our details in her belongings, the police never contacted us.

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It was as near to “hearing a voice” as I can remember. I had finished writing my own lengthy story and was struck by the fact that Veronica had only needed two paragraphs to document her part in my life. Veronica Knight, as dear as a daughter, had been like a member of our family for about three years in the 1970s. We were newly married and living in Adelaide; Peter worked as a residential care worker with troubled young men and I was teaching at a Lutheran secondary college.

We met Veronica when her hostel contacted us and said she was looking for a church or youth group. That was the beginning, and before long, she had become part of our family through informal foster care and an enthusiastic participant in the life of our church. In 1974, Veronica was nearly sixteen. She had no family and was mildly intellectually disabled. Lovable and cheeky, she lived life with gusto that belied her abandonment as a child and consequent status as a ward of the state.

Soon after she turned eighteen, she disappeared forever. As the tragic events of the Truro serial, tandem murders of 1976-7 emerged in Adelaide some years later, we had to absorb the shocking fact that she had been the first victim.

Forty years later, a lifetime had passed and our own children had grown up and given us many grandchildren. Veronica was a memory tucked into her special corner of my heart. Until I wrote about her and was shocked by how little I knew. Soon after, I was in hospital, recuperating from a knee operation. I began chatting to one of the nurses who then showed me a book she had written about losing her mum to cancer (tinyurl.com/np69s). She was touched that I downloaded it and read it in one night, but it set me thinking.

What had I experienced in my life that was deeply human and might resonate with others, as had nurse Leigh’s simple story? That was when I heard a voice, at least in my head, that said, “Write about Veronica”.

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