Sister Juliette Playford recalls the night her sister was murdered by her father

Juliette Playford can still remember the look on her father’s face when he tried to kill her when she was an eight-year-old girl.

“He was looking at me. And I just remember his eyes looking directly at me and me looking back. And he had the same face he always had, kind of a tight-lipped smile.”

Now the 18-year-old Brisbane schoolgirl breaks her silence and says: 60 Minutes about the tragic night when her father, Stephen Playford, drugged and strangled his younger sister, Sidney, before trying to kill her.

Juliette says more needs to be done to support children who are victims of domestic violence.

“I know what it feels like to not have support and to have no one to look up to…mothers, wives or girlfriends are considered the main victims of domestic and family violence,” she says.

“Usually it’s the kids who get overlooked. Everyone was asking my mom how she was doing, so I was just buying a stuffed animal. No one really wanted to talk to me. No one asked me how I was doing.”

In September 2015, a weekend celebration was held for the Playford family at their home in the Brisbane suburb of Kedron.

Home videos show Juliette’s family laughing together as her cheeky little sister Sydney turned six and celebrating the occasion by sewing a face into the birthday cake.

The next day was Father’s Day, and Stephen fell in love with his two little daughters and his wife, Maria.

However, behind the happy appearance, he was about to put a terrible plan into action.

“He wanted to die himself… so he justified trying to kill us,” says Juliette.

“What he was planning was a triple murder-suicide. I feel like he wanted us to be together in his own sick, twisted way.”

Stephen was a successful mining executive who traveled the world.

He met Maria in Argentina before the family settled in Brisbane to raise their two daughters.

Juliette’s memories of her childhood are mostly happy, and she says she never imagined her father would hurt her “until this happened.”

However, as an adult, he now becomes aware of his “authoritarian” father’s disturbing behavior.

“I didn’t really know what other childhoods felt like,” Juliette says.

“I believed that spanking was normal when a child was misbehaving, and I didn’t think anything different about him being the authority figure in the home. I just thought that was the status quo.”

“Looking back, I would say it was probably a little bit toxic.”

“It’s usually the children who get overlooked. Everyone was asking my mom how she was doing, so I was just buying stuffed animals.”

Stephen was also a gambler and after losing his job in 2014 he depleted the family’s money, including his daughters’ savings accounts and a deposit on a house.

Maria asked for a divorce, but he stayed after she threatened to take away their daughter.

In this environment, he began to conspire to kill his family.

Juliette remembers her father preparing chicken and Brussels sprouts for dinner one night.

Stephen often cooked for his family; it was something he always viewed as an act of care from a devoted father.

What no one knew that night, September 6, 2015, was that Stephen had laced his daughters’ food with sleeping pills.

She fell asleep in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister at their former Queensland home and was then awakened with her father on top of her, his hands wrapped tightly around her throat.

“He’s choking me and I kick him out of his grasp and I run outside and he grabs me, takes me downstairs, gets a gas canister out of the laundry room and puts a mask on me,” says Juliette.

“I’m trying to stay awake, but I’m falling asleep. I’m losing consciousness.”

The next thing Juliette remembered was being carried upstairs, her father trying to strangle her a second time in her bed, then fighting him again and running to wake her mother.

“He’s just yelling from behind the door and I’m like, ‘He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.’

“What he was planning was a triple murder-suicide. I feel like he wanted us to be together in his own sick, twisted way.”

“Obviously I’m screaming so he can hear me and he says again, ‘I’m having a nightmare. I’m having a nightmare.’ And my mom tells me to go to bed and that I have to sleep in her bed tonight.”

Stephen ran away from home, leaving Juliette and her mother to discover the full extent of his sickening crime the next morning.

“It was a Monday and school was about to start. My mom was screaming. So I ran into the bedroom and my sister was dead in her bed,” says Juliette.

“My mom is calling Triple Zero and she’s acting incoherent. She’s just screaming. So I have to tell the operator that my sister is dead and to come to our address.”

Stephen confessed and was sentenced to life in prison, but Juliette describes the pain he caused her on Father’s Day as a “never-ending nightmare”.

“He broke us. He killed my sister and murdered my innocence. I wasn’t really a child until later.”

But Juliette says navigating the long road to recovery is in many ways as traumatic as the crime itself.

She says she felt invisible in a system for adult survivors of domestic and family violence and was never treated as a victim in her own right.

“If only [there was] “You know, someone who will talk to me and ask how I’m doing and what I need,” Juliette says.

It would be three years before Juliette saw a psychiatrist, and by then her mental health had deteriorated further.

Maria, who can barely cope herself, says she only made an appointment after Juliette started harming herself.

“He felt the pain was better than the pain he was going through or living with what happened.”

Juliette says the domestic violence system has “failed” and “failed others.”

Although Conor Pall’s experience of childhood violence differs from Juliette’s story, Juliette can relate to the feeling of being ignored by a system that is unsuitable for child survivors of domestic and family violence.

His parents separated when he was 12, forcing him to live between two houses; here she became the target of abuse by the perpetrator, a man she refused to call father.

“It’s a choice I made because I thought this title was something that had to be earned and that person didn’t earn it,” Pall says.

Fearing for his life, a 16-year-old Victorian youth bravely rushed to help, but his calls for help went unanswered.

Instead of being treated as a victim, he was asked if he was the perpetrator.

“I think we are a society that likes to think that we care about children and young people, but I think we still have a long way to go to achieve that self-concept,” he says.

“I think that by design we have systems and services that are geared towards adults, particularly women, and rightly so.

“But we forgot about the child. We built systems and services predominantly around adult victim survivors.”

Pall, now 22, is determined to ensure that children are not treated as victims in their own right.

He worked with Melbourne City Mission’s head of policy, Shorna Moore, to help implement Australia’s first and only dedicated program for unaccompanied children escaping family abuse. This project, called Amplify, was run out of Melbourne City Mission’s Front Yard youth service.

Moore says this is a good first step in closing gaps in the system response to children fleeing violence, but it’s just one program in one state and more needs to be done nationally to protect children.

“We must ensure that we include children and young people in the design of the family violence system, otherwise we are failing children with their most basic human right to safety.”

Nearly 40 per cent of Australian children experience some form of domestic and family violence, and suicide is the leading cause of death in people aged 15 to 24.

These are damning statistics that National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds says must not be ignored if the federal government is to stick to its national plan to end violence against women and children.

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“If we are serious about ending gender-based violence within a generation, we need to make sure that children are not exposed to violence, and if they are, we need to respond appropriately to the healing that they need, the healing that they need. We want to ensure that these services are fit for purpose for them, and unfortunately we are too slow to move forward on this.”

Hollonds wants Canberra to listen and act on the experiences of children like Juliette and Conor’s.

“I am very concerned that due attention has not been paid to making child safety and welfare a priority over the last five years,” she says.

“This is not a party political issue. This is about our culture, the way we run our policies and service systems, and the fact that children are not being lifted up in the same way they are on other issues. So I think a cabinet minister responsible for children would really make a difference.”

For Juliette, sharing her story is the first step in a longer advocacy plan to ensure children are believed and heard.

“It ruined my childhood, but I don’t want it to ruin my life.”