The nation was horrified by the 2007 starvation murder of a little red-haired girl we now know simply as Ebony. Glen Williams went in search of the tragic girl nobody knew.
No-one around the tranquil holiday hamlets of Hawks Nest and the adjoining Tea Gardens on the NSW Mid North Coast remembers ever catching a glimpse of little red-haired Ebony.
In fact, neighbours in her idyllic street, with the magical beach at one end and the river flowing at the other, didn’t even know she existed.
They didn’t know that inside the holiday house rented by her family, behind the bedroom window with its constantly closed curtains, a young girl lay, locked up and ignored.
Weighing just nine kilograms when she died, she’d been left to starve on a mattress stained with her tears and waste.
Some recall her father.
“He was a homeless-looking bloke who had nothing to do with any of us,” a local, not wishing to be identified, tellsWoman’s Day. “He’d play the pokies at the golf club. No-one saw his wife. We didn’t know they had kids. They weren’t part of the community. They were only here eight weeks.”
Ebony’s loveless nightmare ended in her faeces-soiled bedroom on November 3, 2007.
Over a period of weeks she had been starved to death while her family went about their business, emotionally immune to the girl slowly dying behind her locked bedroom door.
Ebony’s father didn’t call an ambulance until six hours after her death. He told police his wife hadn’t attempted mouth-to-mouth because of “black vomit and bull ants coming from her mouth”.
After Ebony’s death, her older sisters were taken into care. Her Valium-addicted mother was found guilty of her murder and her father found guilty of manslaughter.
Both are due to be sentenced this week.
What do you think should happen to the house where Ebony died? Leave your comments below.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
