Justice was served last week with a father found guilty of murdering his little girl. But this is little solace to a mother trying to come to terms with such a senseless loss.
His chilling words still haunt her. “You’ll never see your children again”. They always will. And even as her former husband, Arthur Freeman, awaits sentencing in prison after last week being found guilty of murdering their four-year-old daughter, Darcey, Peta Barnes knows no court-imposed sentence will ever really feel like justice.
Nothing can ever truly make up for her losing her beloved little girl, who was callously flung to her death like a rag doll from Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge in January 2009, or the darkness that still envelops her as she struggles to battle on with life with her two sons.
But one thing is for sure. She feels no sympathy for her former love, the man who has since become a monster in her eyes. Indeed, Peta didn’t show any emotion as she sat in Court 11 of the Supreme Court in Melbourne last week, listening to evidence of how Freeman – a man who’s life she had once shared – tossed her only daughter over the bridge to her death.
Apart from an occasional shift of weight from one leg to the other and brief, succinct answers to questions posed, she remained composed when others could not.While most witnesses broke down in tears, it was what Peta Barnes didn’t do that spoke more than words ever could.
Upon entering the courtroom, she refused to walk past Freeman, as if such a gesture would acknowledge he existed – that he was a human being of worth. When he was referred to as her husband in testimony, she politely pointed out that he was no longer anything of the kind, as if the connection were intolerable. “He’s not my husband, by the way,” she quickly reminded the court.
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