December 24, 2025 • 44 mins
For nearly half a century, Australia was engaged in a shameful and shocking practice that would tear babies from the arms of their mothers, sometimes before they ever even laid eyes on their precious little faces.
Today, Amelia Oberhart shares with us the journey of her discoveries about her mother’s life before she was born in her podcast, Secrets We Keep, Shame, Lies and Family…and in the process of unveiling her own story, found the buried stories of women whose numbers will shock you.
THE END BITS
Guest: Amelia Oberhardt
You can listen to her podcast Secrets We Keep here.
Host: Claire Murphy
Executive Producer: Gia Moylan
Audio Producer: Scott Stronach
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
For nearly half a century, Australia was engaged in a
shameful and shocking practice that would tear babies from the
arms of their mothers, sometimes before they ever even laid
eyes on their precious little faces. For decades, women who
found themselves pregnant without a husband to protect them in
(00:26):
this country would be subject to a society that shunned
them for their immoral behavior, who rejected them for not
being a good girl, who believed that their babies were
better off being raised by a married couple. Some were arrested,
forced into labor homes until their due dates. Some were
(00:47):
coerced into signing papers they thought were to discharge them,
only to later find out it was for an adoption.
Some just did as they were told, knowing they had
little power in a system where the doctors, nur vers,
social workers, and religious authorities held all the cards. When
those taken babies eventually grew up, they would find out
(01:09):
that they weren't given up, but essentially stolen, and for
many of these mothers and children, it would create fractures
that have never healed, and the fight for recognition and
justice continues. For journalists, Amelia Oberhart, seeing a strange picture
of her late mother at her wake, posing with a
man she didn't know, a baby in her arms. She
(01:33):
wondered if her own family was a victim of this
systemic violence against single women that happened to countless others
spanning the decades from the nineteen forties to the nineteen eighties.
Could that little one in the photo be a long
lost sibling? Was her own mum one of those victimized
by the attitudes of the times. I'm Claire Murphy and
(02:05):
this is True Crime Conversations, a Mumma Mere podcast exploring
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. For those who remember
then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's apology in Parliament in twenty thirteen,
it may have been the first time you'd heard about
(02:26):
the process of forced adoptions, a practice that occurred in
maternity hospitals across the country from the nineteen forties through
to the nineteen eighties here in Australia.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No collection of words alone can undo all this damage
or make hold the lives of families fractured by forced adoption.
But by saying sorry, we can correct the historical record.
We can declare that these mothers did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
This is not the apology to the star all in
Generations by then PM Kevin Rudd in two thousand and eight.
Although there are many similarities in these two shocking practices,
they are the same but are also very different. In
forced adoptions, young women from many different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds,
(03:18):
from the poorest to the wealthy, found themselves in similar situations,
sometimes without anyone to support them, finding that the men
who had impregnated them were either not wanting to take
responsibility or were locked out of the process due to
them not being officially married. Sometimes these young women kicked
out of their homes by parents too ashamed to admit
(03:40):
their daughter had had sex outside of marriage. The hospitals
would organize for a married couple who were looking to
adopt to take a baby born of an unwed woman,
but while some willingly gave their children up for adoption,
many did not. The ways in which these women were
lied to, coerced, threatened, and shamed have left many of
(04:05):
them broken and angry, and the children, who are the
innocent byproduct of a time are themselves confused and looking
for answers that remain hidden behind walls of documented secrecy.
Amelia Oberhart has been documenting the journey of her discoveries
about her mother's life before she was born in her
(04:25):
podcast Secrets We Keep Shame, Lies and Family.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I'm Amelia Oberhart. I'm a journalist from Brisbane. The photo
of my mom made me realize I never really knew
her at all. I've spent over a decade trying to
find answers and some sort of closure over my mom's
early death. In that process, I found out much more
about the time she was living through.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
And in the process of unveiling her own story, found
the buried stories of women whose numbers will shock you,
she joins us. Now, so, Amelia, let's go back to
(05:09):
the beginning of where this story started for you. Because
you're at your mum's wake it's more than a decade
ago now, and your friend has quite generously helped you
put together a slideshow of photos from your mum's collection,
and this picture pops up of a teenage version of
your mother standing next or another young man holding a baby.
(05:30):
She's wearing a wedding ring. You look at this and
you say to your friend, who the hell is this man?
And who is this baby? Now, obviously through the journey
of your podcast you have figured that story out, But
at that time, and in that moment, in the moments
immediately after, where did your mind take you? What stories
were you telling yourself as to what was happening in
(05:51):
this photo? Because your mum is holding this little baby
like it's her own.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
It looked like a family portrait. And when I turned
to my best friend asked, and she said, that's your
mum and your dad and you as a baby. And
I looked at her and she says, to me, now
the look on my face when I said, that's not
my dad and that's not me, and we both sort
of it that moment turned around and stared into the
eyes of all the family and friends. Jaws were on
(06:17):
the floor, and everyone was quite rattled by the photo,
and I could tell straight away it wasn't meant to
be in there. We continue to watch the slide show,
but in that moment, they knew I was going to
start asking. I could see those wheels turning around me.
I saw a few of my mum's friends approach family members,
and I could see that it was already being discussed.
(06:39):
What's the story we're going to tell her obviously that
whole album was never meant to make it to daylight,
And it was actually up the back of the cupboard.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
In her bedroom.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
We were all up at the Sunshine Coast because that's
where she'd passed away, and my friend had come back
from New York and had gone to her home and
was getting photos together and she spotted this random photo
of them.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
That's where the photos or were.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So the fact that out of all the thousands of
photos in her bedroom, this one made it into the slideshow,
It's like she wanted it to be there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
So what story did you tell yourself before you started
to find out the real details of where that photo
originated in the story behind it?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
I think because we'd done the death certificate the day before,
and they had asked the question of you know, normal things,
first name, last name, date of birth, and then they
said how many marriages, and me and my brother said one,
and the family said two. And then he said age
at first marriage and they said sixteen. Because I had
never ever ever heard that she'd ever been married before,
(07:39):
and let alone as a teenager. I had already sort
of sparked something. Something was already going plus grief, plus
organizing a funeral, plus not sleeping, all those sort of things.
Then when that photo came up, my immediate thought was,
this is the first husband and that is their baby.
The fact then that that photo came back the next day,
timestamped nineteen seventy three, making seventeen, I couldn't fathom the
(08:04):
coincidence of her being married at that age, of it
never coming to light, and of this photo being timestamped
holding a newborn baby exactly at the age she would
have had it. I mean, I think I originally thought
that baby is a family member. She's had that baby,
and then it's been rearranged into the family somehow.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
That was my first thought.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So obviously your first questions go to your mum's family
to figure out what's going on here. In your mind,
you're wondering, if you have a long lost sibling, what
stories do they start to tell you about this photo.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Her family are a very Catholic, extremely private family for
those reasons. I don't even know if they would know.
There's a lot of siblings and huge gaps in age.
There was a mixture of answers. Some people in the
very close family circle told me she had a baby
and it died at one and then the other story
(09:02):
was that there was never a baby, and then there
was a story that she had a miscarriage.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
So there was a.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Very strange dynamic happening. But also at the same time,
I was just constantly being told to stop asking questions,
let it go, stop asking questions. You're crazy, you know,
there's nothing to it. Move on with your life. And
I kept getting mixed answers from her close friends that
were saying similar things that she had had a baby
(09:28):
in it had died, or you know, that they just
didn't see her for a period of two years of
her life. She essentially went missing and no one had
seen or heard from her. Someone else said she'd been
pulled out of school halfway through the year and no
one knew where she went. So there was just so
many mixed messages coming from everywhere, and no one would
give me a straight answer. And I think, as a
benefit to all the women that ended up on this podcast,
(09:50):
it's lucky that no one gave me a straight answer.
But it all could have been solved very easily if
this whole idea of donas, don't tell and we don't
talk about anything, throw everything under a rug and stamp
on it. If that hadn't existed, maybe she'd still be alive.
And also maybe I would have had my answer twelve
years ago.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
When did you start to entertain the idea that your
mom might have been one of the many, many Australian
women who were caught up in a process known as
forced adoption. It's what we call it now. Back then
it was a very different story. When did you start
to entertain the idea that she might have been caught
up in that.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Over the years, as I started to ask a lot
of questions, I also was met often with people that
had these stories where they'd say, that's quite likely, you know,
because my cousin ended up being my sister, or you
know that my mom's mom was actually her sister and
it was her grandmother that brought her up. I started
to recognize very quickly every single person I hypothesized my
(10:51):
mom's outcome with had a story or knew someone with
a story, and I started to think, this could have
happened to my mom. The Catholic there's these informal adoptions
taking place left, right and center. There's rearrangements in families
happening all over the place. It is extremely likely that
she was pregnant obviously forced to get married, and then
(11:13):
that they couldn't handle it, or they were too young,
or something's happened and they've had to give away the baby.
I mean, that's what I had thought, well up until
we started the podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
What insight did you get during this time where you're
investigating into your mum's early life and the influences that
religious institutions had on her and the decisions that she
would have had to have made during her younger years.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
My mom passed away from alcoholism, and anyone that's no
one ll loved someone with an addiction knows the varying
ways relationships breakdown, and also the desperation you feel in
wanting to understand why, why did this take a grip?
Why are you no longer here? I think in seeking
out her earlier life, I started to understand her because
(11:59):
the last part of her life, in which normally people
have those conversations, she was quite far gone. But I
started to see her as this bright, vivacious young girl
who was very popular and very smart and found herself
in an impossible situation where she discovered she was pregnant,
and that had come from some close friends of hers
that Tommy, they were with her when she found out.
(12:19):
She was obviously then taken to the family home and
then locked away from everyone for a while while decisions
were made and things were arranged for the wedding. Is
what I've been told, And I mean putting myself in
a position of being sixteen and pregnant, how terrified. Having
come also from a devout Catholic home in which morals
standing and the Bible and the Church is your overrarching
(12:44):
everyday sense of morality is coming from the Church and
your parents feeding you that every day. So to have
committed the sin of sex outside of marriage, committed a
sin where you're now unwed and pregnant and you're sixteen
or seventeen. When I hear about it, I can feel
the shame she would have felt. That's not how society
(13:05):
works now. But then the shame that they likened being
unwed and pregnant too was you were better off being
a murderer, and that sort of comprehension that that's the
way that social standings looked at you. It's so hard
to get your head around.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
So many years pass and you're still asking questions, but
your mum actually gives you the tools to unlock the
mystery because she has left the name of the man
that she married in documents for you to trace. Tell
me about finding the man in the photo.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I obviously had a copy of the death certificate, and
on the death certificate it read Michael Davies. I mean,
Michael Davies couldn't be a more common name in Queensland,
and that was assuming he still lived in Queensland. So,
you know, as I had children of my own, I
really would go on these tangents of desperately trying to
find him because I think I was trying to rectify
(14:05):
with myself the mom I didn't want to be, and
in order to be the mom I wanted to be,
I needed to heal this wound or understand her. So
every time I had a child, I would start googling.
And that was over nine years. I've had kids, not
nine of them, just three and nine years. So over
the nine years, you know, i'd Google him and LinkedIn,
and as technology evolved in more things like Instagram came
(14:27):
about or LinkedIn, I guess as an example of something
that I didn't have when I started, I still couldn't
find him. We ended up going down to the state archives,
and there I trolled through every divorce because it was
all public record through the Supreme Court until nineteen seventy six,
found a Davy's divorce. Out of every single file in there,
the Davies divorce that had their same initials was the
(14:50):
only file that was missing by a clerical error, they
told me anyway, So that was a dead end. Then
I ended up trolling the electoral role. I had an
idea that that the photo that we found was taken
on the balcony of their home. A family member had
told me, oh, this is where they lived at Irana Hills,
and so I knew they'd lived at Irana Hills. I
knew I had a name, and I found them on
(15:11):
the electoral role. I traced them on the electoral role
for a while. Then you know, he falls off in
nineteen eighty two or something. He must have moved somewhere else.
So yeah, I'd gone through all these process I'd gone
to burst ess and marriages. I'd gone to the church
in which they got married, and that's where I got
the marriage certificate. Once I had the marriage certificate. I
had way more details, and then obviously pitched the podcast,
(15:33):
got it up and running, and they found him within
like an hour.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
So I was like, Nys.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I've been knowing this for twelve years, so it just
goes to show, you know, good producers make everything. So yeah,
they found him, and then we contacted him and I
flew to Cans and met with him.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
So you head up to Cans to see the man
in the picture. Were you nervous to now, after all
this time, find out exactly what had happened with your mom?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Back then, I was like sick to my stomach, and
you know, equal parts wanted to run away and can
the whole thing and be like, I don't want to
do this anymore. And equal parts knew I was either
going there to find a long lost sibling or I
was going there to find closure, and either way, I
knew I had to go and I had to piece
(16:21):
together the puzzle in its entirety for my own benefit,
for my children's benefit, and for my future because it
had just played with me for so long. So I
was sick to my stomach with anxiety and definitely wanted
to run away, but sort of just tried to chune
out as much as I could till I got there,
And when I got there, I just rambled.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
I got the answers. It was the best thing I
ever did, for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
All Right, tell us what happened to your mum? Who
is the baby in the picture, and what did the
man in the picture explain to you had actually happened?
Putting together all of those rumors that you'd been told
from various family members.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So varying degrees of it were true, she'd sort of
run away from home. They'd found themselves pregnant. She was well,
he says, sixteen, but just turned seventeen. She finds herself pregnant.
Quite far along, they go and tell both their sets
of parents, who were devout Catholics on both sides, and
they decided that they would get married. She was locked
(17:21):
away for a period of time, and then his mother
and my grandmother called him to tell him she'd had
a late miscarriage and was in hospital. And he says
he doesn't really know any of the details. It was
all being handled by the mums. I mean retrospectively. I
think he's remembered some more details around it. But yes,
she had a miscarriage and ended up in hospital for
(17:43):
a considerable amount of time, and then they were still
forced to go ahead with the marriage. I think he's
a beautiful man and a divine human, but I think
that she would have thought that now she'd lost the baby,
the marriage would not have to go ahead, But because
of the shame and the Catholics and all of that,
it was made to go ahead. And I think that
(18:03):
that did inevitably create some problems in her life.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
We'll touch on that again a little bit later, but
through all of this you start to uncover stories of
women who had found themselves in a very similar situation
to your mum back in the sixties and seventies, very young,
either still a teenager or in the early twenties. They're
not married back then, as you mentioned, very shameful from
(18:31):
a societal perspective. But some of these women have different
endings to your mum's story in that they did give
birth to a little baby. And one of the first
women that you spoke to about this die revealed to
you details of a story that could potentially be told
(18:51):
thousands and thousands and thousands of times by Australian women
during those decades. What did I tell you?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
I told me that she'd found herself in Sydney and pregnant.
She was training to be a veteran surgeon and was
working for a Catholic doctor. She didn't tell anyone she
was pregnant and didn't really know what was going to
happen because women back then were so uneducated in sexual
education and birth, so they really had no idea what
was coming for her. And then she went into labor.
(19:22):
The Catholic doctor takes her to the hospital and it's
there she thinks he made them aware of her situation,
which was that she was single or unwared.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So this guy was her boss at that stage.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yep. She then gives birth on a sterile, stainless steel bench.
The baby's ripped away from her. She's left bleeding and
lying on a steel bench alone, shivering. And you know
when she talks in the podcast about how cold she was,
she physically started shivering while she was telling me. That's
how visceral the response was to even voicing what had happened.
(19:58):
She genuinely started shaking. And then someone comes in at
some point and says, your baby's died.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
You can go home.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Sign these discharge papers, go on with your life, and
so she tried to go on with her life. She
told not a soul, not one single person in the world.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
The father of that.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Baby was in Canada. She just didn't see a reason.
What was the point. She'd lost the baby tragically and
she had to move on. And forty years later, she's
sitting with her son on a couch having their nightly
cup of tea, and she gets an email, and that
email's title is I Think you could be my mother.
And in that email, a man goes on to describe
(20:35):
details of his birth at the time where it was.
She said, her entire body just went into a state
of shock. And at the bottom is a photo. He says,
this is a photo of my granddaughter. I've always wanted
to know where she got her hair. And I sits
down and looks across at a picture of herself at
four and looks at this little girl and they could
(20:57):
have been twins. And I mean that story it was
haunting and terribly, terribly sad and not uncommon. And since
Die's story, we've heard from hundreds of women that were
told their babies had died or were disabled or needed
to go to orphanages for whatever reason, only to find
(21:17):
out that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So these discharge papers that Die was signing to allow
her to leave hospital, were they actually discharged papers?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
No, they were adoption papers.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Has she ever tried to look back into her situation
and find out how that could have happened?
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I think they all, in their own ways go about
trying to find peace with the situation. It's very hard
because the government, religious organizations, doctors and hospitals and medical
professionals all working in tandem, and it's very hard to
pin what happened, what went wrong, who's our tru fault
(22:00):
was it? And a lot of files went missing in
floods or extenuating circumstances. They were handwritten files. There was
often clerical errors where birth dates were recorded wrong so
that they would never be able to trace each other.
In Die's case, on the adoption papers of her son,
she was able to see them. He knew he had
(22:21):
been adopted, and the papers gave some minimal detail about
Die Smart wears glasses or something and is unwed, and
they were the details and Die not even Diane, you know,
just that was all he had when he turned eighteen
to find out where he was from, and she had nothing.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
How does he then find out that she is his mother?
If that's all the detail that he has to go on.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
He went through ancestry dot Com. His wife had tried
to get him to do it over a period of time,
and yes, he agreed to do it. He was matched
to his father in Canada's brother, and he says, there
was a woman that worked here. She broke in horses
on our property and her name was Die, and she
wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. So he comes back
(23:10):
to Australia and he googles Die veterinary surgeon and thousands
of Die veterinary surgeons come up. But right in the
middle is a picture of Die who has this amazing
curly hair. And he knew then that's my mum because
his daughter had that exact hair.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
What's it like for Dye to reunite with a son
that she never even thought had a life. It must
be incredibly difficult to reorientate your entire life's history to
understand that this person has been alive and in the
world this whole time.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I think it's impossible for me to ever be able
to articulate how dye must feel because I've never been
in that position. What she describes is just complete disorientation, joy, sorrow, pain, anger,
but elation. Oh my god, you know, I get another shot.
(24:05):
This person's alive, I have another son, I have grandchildren,
you know. But all of that process, she just says,
it's sometimes too hard to actually process. And you know,
she's going through all the right avenues in terms of
that's why she told her story and being able to
talk freely about it and lift the shame and lift
(24:26):
that I guess head fuck that it is. And she's, yeah,
desperately trying to get it all together. But you know,
he was very receptive to her meeting her. They are
still in each other's lives. A lot of the stories
don't end as well as dies. A lot of the
stories people romanticize what a reunion will be. They romanticize
(24:48):
what their mum will look like and whether they have
the same traits. You know, is my daughter out there
with my hair? But the reality is you're trying to
undo forty years of being told you were abandoned or rejected,
or that somebody else chose you, and regardless of the
language around how you were chosen. It's all abandonment, you know.
At some point there is this feeling of, well, someone
(25:09):
didn't want me because someone else chose me, you know,
and I think that finding out actually you weren't abandoned.
I desperately wanted you. I was screaming for you. They
wouldn't let me see you or hold you. They drugged me,
they took you away and told me you died or whatever.
The circumstance, which is two hundred and fifty thousand women's stories,
that child has spent its entire life not knowing that
(25:30):
was the circumstance. No one was told, well, your mum
was drugged and forced to sign some papers and then
I took you home. They were always told you were
chosen by us because we loved you. And that's not
to say those adoptive parents knew the circumstance. Often they
didn't know and had no idea that's what the mother
had been through. They thought they were doing the right
thing by adopting an unwanted child, or an abandoned child,
(25:52):
or a child that its parents couldn't care for them,
when in reality that mother desperately wanted to keep their child.
And these adoptive parents are thinking they're doing the right thing.
They've got a baby now and everyone's happy. But they've
told this child you were chosen, and then that child
lives with that narrative for forty years, and it's the
wrong narrative, you know, and that's almost impossible to undo.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Someone whose story didn't end in that positive way like
Dyas did was a woman you spoke to called Lily,
and her situation is just so shocking that a young girl,
teenage girl who is pregnant is arrested and put into
a home because she's.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Pregnant, charged with moral danger, which is the most archaic
notion that this could happen in the late nineteen sixties,
you know, it seems like something that would take place
in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
But she was charged with moral danger.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
She was living with her partner in a de facto relationship,
and they both were willing to keep the child. The
child was wanted, and they were planning to get married.
Because she was sixteen and eleven months, which was over
the age of consent, which also they tried to charge
you with. They needed parental permission, and her parents were
living in Sydney, so they had planned to go down
(27:13):
and get the papers signed, get married, and keep their baby,
but instead, in the middle of the night, she was arrested,
taken to the children's court, charged with moral danger, and
essentially locked up in a Magdalen laundry for the duration
of her pregnancy, in which their letters were read.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
No visitors allowed.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
That partner of her showed up twice to try and
marry her, and they wouldn't let him in. She also
had no idea of what was going to happen during
the birth and didn't know she wasn't going to be
allowed to keep her child. I think the trauma that
Lily endured. She was drugged, she was coerced, she was bullied.
They said, you know, you can't see a son or
your partner until you sign these papers. I think the
(27:51):
duress they put her under and what they did to
her mentally was horrendous, physically was horrendous. And then the
outcome of her story is eventually after Clara Clara's again
where they misspelled his name and miss Dewey's birthday, she
finally finds him and he just wants nothing to do
with her because he's been told his whole life. She
didn't want him, and that is a terrible, terrible tragedy
(28:13):
because she has just never recovered.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with journalist Amelia Oberheart about Australia's dark history
of forced adoptions that only ended in the nineteen eighties. Amelia,
(28:41):
can we touch a little bit on the institutions that
were involved in these processes, So where Lily was sent,
for example, the Magdalen Laundry, but there was also networks
of hospitals and other places that would take these young
women in and essentially hide them away until they've had
their baby. What were these institutions like in what roles
(29:03):
were they playing in all of this?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
So, without going into a huge amount of detail, there
was always a single women's payment in this country until
after World War II men came back. They had venereal diseases,
that's what some say, and tuberculosis had riddled the country
and it made for a huge spike in infertility. So
you have no IVF and no options if you are
(29:28):
to find yourself in a position where you're a young, married,
good couple that cannot have children, and also the pressure
on a woman who is in a marriage and young
and can't have a child.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
It's shameful too. It's a double edged sword.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
I think that certain institutions saw an opportunity they would
create a social stigma around being an unwed mother, which
had not been the stigma between nineteen twenty nineteen forty.
That was fine because one had killed so many of
our men. There wasn't an issue. It was okay to
have your child. So social and religious notions start sweeping
(30:04):
through that you're this disgraceful person if you are unweaded
and pregnant, and that creates a fear because there is
no abortion unless you were going to access some neighborhood
dangerous you know, we spoke to some people that had
learned to do abortions by giving them to themselves. You know,
this was a very very dangerous option, and very desperate
women access them, some with lifelong ramifications. But unless you
(30:29):
were going to do that, or you found a doctor
that would which was very particularly in regional and rural communities,
impossible you were to have the child. You were often
sent into state or to other rural cities where you
would be put into institutions. There was religious ones. They
were the Magdalen laundries. They were hugely run through Ireland
(30:50):
and Scotland, which have the worst forced adoption history of
any Western civilization. You know the stories that come out
of Scotland and Ireland, and where the Magdalen lawn originated
from is essentially free labor. You're pregnant, you may defold
sheets for twenty hours a day for no pay. They
feed you and morally correct you. You're taking a hospital,
(31:10):
you put into the unwed mother's zone, so you would
fill out paperwork that would say you be minus was
one of them. So unwed mother baby minus is adopting.
You can't keep it. Classes you get to keep it
and you put into a different section of the hospital.
Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney was one of the
most notorious baby farming hospitals in the country. Sixty thousand
babies were said to have been taken from there, and
(31:33):
it was there that they believe a lot of cahoops
I guess, with obstetricians that had clientele that couldn't give birth,
couldn't have children or found themselves unable to, and then
obviously unwed mothers that didn't know that their babies were
going to be taken, and then the Magdalen Laundry would
take you back till your stomach went down and you
could return as a normal person into society. And then
(31:55):
you'd be discharged and you were told go on with
your life. No one will ever know this happen. You've
disgraced yourself, but now you can come good. You can
right your wrongs, go into society, find a nice man,
and go on, and you'll have other children. And a
lot of them didn't. A lot of them never went
on to have any more children, and a lot of
them obviously went on to be completely scarred physically and
(32:16):
mentally for the rest of their lives. And then a
lot of them obviously didn't bank on genetic testing where
they came and found them. But those institutions and those
numbers do not include rearrangements or informal adoptions. They were
usually religiously run where father Tom would identify a Waywood
girl who'd gotten pregnant and Mary and Tom down here
(32:38):
are desperately trying to have a baby, so they would
give her baby to Mary and Tom and say, well,
essentially she never existed to begin with, and they'll just
write a birth certificate straight into Mary and Tom's name,
and they were called informal adoptions. And there's no way
of knowing the number of those because they're not recorded.
But those religious organizations also had homes awayward girls or
(33:02):
unwed mother homes, you know, Saint Anthony's or Saint Ursula's,
and they'd send you there and you'd be with nuns
and priests for the duration of your pregnancy. They'd take
your baby and you'd be released when you were able
to go back into society. And those places have yet
often closed and often never paid for what happened, never
(33:23):
taken any responsibility for what occurred under their roof.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You do actually speak to some of the children who
are on the opposite end of this story. How do
they understand themselves and their own stories when they do
realize what their mums, their biological mothers, have gone through.
And does this leave a lasting impact on their lives too?
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Absolutely. I mean, we spoke with quite a few adoptees
over the process. The forced adoption era, or the era
of adoption that went into the late seventies early eighties,
It was very different practice to the adoptees of the
next generation because they were open adoptions. Often letters were given,
most sets of parents were involved, So you know, there
is a very big line in the sand there between
(34:11):
the practices that took place in the forced adoption era.
I think every adoptee has, you know, they're like fingerprints.
Everyone has their own story or their own reactions. But
most of the children born into that forced adoption era
have a real issue with identity. They desperately just want
to know why and how and who they are, and
(34:34):
it's often very difficult for them when the mother has
blanked out, or the mother has had their own family,
or small things like that that hugely impact their ability
to connect. When they've dreamt their whole life of finding
this person, and that person either chose rightfully which was
their choice to give up their baby, or had blocked
(34:55):
it out or had never told anyone. That's the big
theme is that they had never told their current husband,
never told their current children. It was a part of
their history they thought would never come back. And then
that creates this whole again, a narrative that is really
painful for those adoptee kids, particularly late discovery adoptees who
(35:15):
because of genetic testing find out and to quantify they've
been lied to for fifty years is very hard for
them too.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
A lot of people are going to see an alignment
here between forced adoptions and the Stolen Generations, and I
know that you do touch on this in the podcast
as well, but how did these two things actually differ?
Because they are so similar and yet so different.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
The Stolen Generations was one of my most heart wrenching
episodes and the one I am probably the most nervous
about in terms of being able to give it justice.
I mean, the Stolen Generations is a podcast in itself.
It's to try and cover that in a twenty four
minute episode is almost impossible. That I did feel it
(35:59):
would be a terrible thing for us not to give
it the attention and some light. The difference is the
laws of assimilation and the practices of assimilation, and the
way that they went about removal of children was different. However,
there is a crossover between the babies that were born
in the Stolen Generations and forced adoption, So mostly those
(36:21):
children were taken under law of assimilation, which I mean
the laws changed a lot over two hundred and fifty years,
but generally they believed horrifically that taking children from their
community and families they would better assimilate into white society,
which is just something I can't really comprehend it and
it was a heartbreaking period going into the research into this.
(36:41):
But the forced adoption was the belief that a mother
couldn't care for their child if they were single or
unwed or in a position not of you.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Know, statures.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
So some of those stolen generation mothers lost their children
through assimilation, but then they would go to the hospital
to have a baby and they would take them under
forced adoption. So that's where the crossover does occur. But
they are different issues and they're treated differently. But Leoni,
who we speak to, is stolen generations and forced adoption
and she was sent to Wales with a nurse. I mean,
(37:13):
her story is incredible and incredibly sad.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Again, Julia Gillard apologized to all the victims of forced
adoptions in twenty thirteen, and I guess a lot of
the people who were there that day and who felt
a sense of relief that finally they'd been recognized and
that people knew that what had happened to them was wrong.
But has there been any significant change in this area
(37:40):
since then, because I understanding you've touched on this many
times about the poor record keeping and the way that
these closed adoptions were set up, making it incredibly difficult
for anyone to trace their own history. Has anything changed
since that apology.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
There's a big thing about the apology that certainly could
be a coincidence or it's more sinister than that. Where
the day the apology took place, eight thousand people packed
the hall. A lot of those women desperately wanted media
coverage so that their children could understand, you know, maybe
recognize them. Maybe them being on the TV would make
(38:16):
someone know that they weren't abandoned, that it wasn't by
a choice, they were adopted. This was a big moment
for them and they had waited a long time, some
of them forty years for this day. And then that
afternoon Simon Crean called the Labor Leadership's Bill, in which
he wanted the removal of all Labor leadership positions and
Kevin Rudd to be in and so all the media
(38:38):
race from there up to Parliament House, and that night
on the news when all these women go home and
wait for their moment, it's just all about the Leadership's bill.
I mean, they say that one outlet covered that story,
you know, but it was hugely overtaken by a political circus,
and I think that created some resentment. And then out
(39:00):
of the Senate inquiry of twenty one recommendations, very few
of them have been actioned. I mean, Victoria said they
were going to do a redress scheme and that is
yet to be actioned. That was twelve months ago. They
promised that there is a sense with the mothers that
they believe they're waiting for them to die because they're
getting so old, and the compensation once you admit fault,
(39:22):
you know, you're looking at two hundred and fifty thousand
women that we know of, and so I think that
they believe that there is some sort of dragging it out,
kicking the can down the road. Also, once the Senate
inquiry was done and the twenty one recommendations were made,
they were essentially pushed back onto a state by state issue,
and then the states had to hold their own inquiries.
(39:44):
You know, Queensland still yet to hold one, like WA's
in the process of doing one now. But really it
seems to them they're just pulling it out and dragging
it out. That was, you know, ten years ago, and
we're still ten years down the track and nothing's happened.
So a lot of them are very passionate out of
royal commission and getting things done, and for their children
who are now sort of picking up that fight for
(40:05):
their mothers.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
In the process of the episodes of your podcasts going live,
I imagine this is probably a woken some very old
deep scars for women who experience this in decades past.
What's the feedback been like for you from people reaching
(40:28):
out and telling maybe their stories for the very first time.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
We've received hundreds of emails. I've received a lot of
private messages across like Instagram or LinkedIn. I was going
under my married name, and somehow people have an amazing
ability to find you, and so you know, I was
getting quite inundated, which was amazing, and I was so appreciative,
particularly of so much positive feedback. I really, I guess
(40:52):
when you put yourself out in the world and you're
so vulnerable to other people's opinions and critics, and I
was really humbled by how well received it was and
has been so far. So I had started to direct
people to an email account, so we could pull everything
into one central space, obviously, in the hopes that all
these people's stories can be heard, because they all deserved
(41:13):
a platform. I get a lot of emails from daughters
of mothers that have experienced this, saying I now understand
my mum, or listening to this, I can understand how
hard my mum's life has been, like I thank you
for taking that burden off her, or I'm getting ready
to try and talk to my mom about this. And
every time I hit under the covers at night and
(41:34):
it was like, I don't want to do this, and
I started to panic. I always came back to this
one notion that if it changed the outcome of one
family or one conversation, if it lifted that burden for
one person, it was job done. So every email that
comes it gives me this heart warming it's doing what
it was meant to and that's an amazing thing.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Just to finish, Amelia, after going through this process of
understanding all these women and stories and hearing the pain
and the heartbreak not just from these women but from
their children and their extended families, how do you now
feel about your own mum because your relationship with her
was not great towards the end, and addiction played a
(42:16):
big part in that. But how do you feel about
your mom now after going through this journey with all
these women and understanding them better.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I mean, I had spent twelve years in quite a
bit of pain and a lot of lack of understanding
and resentment, and I felt after I met Michael, all
of that resentment it melted away. I started to really
see her as a person again. I started to see
the pain that she was really in and to look
(42:45):
at it, I mean, retrospect is twenty twenty, and I
started to look back on things and situations and her
downfall with this compassion and empathy. I had never been
able to look at it like that before. I now
have my own daughter, and when I was pregnant, knowing
it was a girl, and during the period of her infancy,
(43:05):
I would just cry so much for my mum because
I desperately have always sorry, I got an emotional you know,
I desperately wanted that relationship. You know, I'd always wanted
that relationship with her, and now I had a chance
to have that with my daughter. And now I've reconciled
with my mum. Who's not here to have that conversation with.
(43:26):
But I feel very much at peace, and for that,
I'll always be thankful for the podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Thank you to Amelia for joining us today. Her podcast
Secrets We Keep is LinkedIn our show notes if you'd
like to take a listen. True Crime Conversations is Amma
Mere podcast hosted and produced by me Claire Murphy, with
assistant production by Tarlie Blackman. Our audio design is by
Scott Stronik, and our executive producer is Giam Moylin. Thank
(43:57):
you so much for listening. We'll be back next week
with another true crime conversation. True Crime Conversations acknowledges the
traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was
(44:20):
recorded on
For nearly half a century, Australia was engaged in a
shameful and shocking practice that would tear babies from the
arms of their mothers, sometimes before they ever even laid
eyes on their precious little faces. For decades, women who
found themselves pregnant without a husband to protect them in
(00:26):
this country would be subject to a society that shunned
them for their immoral behavior, who rejected them for not
being a good girl, who believed that their babies were
better off being raised by a married couple. Some were arrested,
forced into labor homes until their due dates. Some were
(00:47):
coerced into signing papers they thought were to discharge them,
only to later find out it was for an adoption.
Some just did as they were told, knowing they had
little power in a system where the doctors, nur vers,
social workers, and religious authorities held all the cards. When
those taken babies eventually grew up, they would find out
(01:09):
that they weren't given up, but essentially stolen, and for
many of these mothers and children, it would create fractures
that have never healed, and the fight for recognition and
justice continues. For journalists, Amelia Oberhart, seeing a strange picture
of her late mother at her wake, posing with a
man she didn't know, a baby in her arms. She
(01:33):
wondered if her own family was a victim of this
systemic violence against single women that happened to countless others
spanning the decades from the nineteen forties to the nineteen eighties.
Could that little one in the photo be a long
lost sibling? Was her own mum one of those victimized
by the attitudes of the times. I'm Claire Murphy and
(02:05):
this is True Crime Conversations, a Mumma Mere podcast exploring
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. For those who remember
then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's apology in Parliament in twenty thirteen,
it may have been the first time you'd heard about
(02:26):
the process of forced adoptions, a practice that occurred in
maternity hospitals across the country from the nineteen forties through
to the nineteen eighties here in Australia.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No collection of words alone can undo all this damage
or make hold the lives of families fractured by forced adoption.
But by saying sorry, we can correct the historical record.
We can declare that these mothers did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
This is not the apology to the star all in
Generations by then PM Kevin Rudd in two thousand and eight.
Although there are many similarities in these two shocking practices,
they are the same but are also very different. In
forced adoptions, young women from many different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds,
(03:18):
from the poorest to the wealthy, found themselves in similar situations,
sometimes without anyone to support them, finding that the men
who had impregnated them were either not wanting to take
responsibility or were locked out of the process due to
them not being officially married. Sometimes these young women kicked
out of their homes by parents too ashamed to admit
(03:40):
their daughter had had sex outside of marriage. The hospitals
would organize for a married couple who were looking to
adopt to take a baby born of an unwed woman,
but while some willingly gave their children up for adoption,
many did not. The ways in which these women were
lied to, coerced, threatened, and shamed have left many of
(04:05):
them broken and angry, and the children, who are the
innocent byproduct of a time are themselves confused and looking
for answers that remain hidden behind walls of documented secrecy.
Amelia Oberhart has been documenting the journey of her discoveries
about her mother's life before she was born in her
(04:25):
podcast Secrets We Keep Shame, Lies and Family.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I'm Amelia Oberhart. I'm a journalist from Brisbane. The photo
of my mom made me realize I never really knew
her at all. I've spent over a decade trying to
find answers and some sort of closure over my mom's
early death. In that process, I found out much more
about the time she was living through.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
And in the process of unveiling her own story, found
the buried stories of women whose numbers will shock you,
she joins us. Now, so, Amelia, let's go back to
(05:09):
the beginning of where this story started for you. Because
you're at your mum's wake it's more than a decade
ago now, and your friend has quite generously helped you
put together a slideshow of photos from your mum's collection,
and this picture pops up of a teenage version of
your mother standing next or another young man holding a baby.
(05:30):
She's wearing a wedding ring. You look at this and
you say to your friend, who the hell is this man?
And who is this baby? Now, obviously through the journey
of your podcast you have figured that story out, But
at that time, and in that moment, in the moments
immediately after, where did your mind take you? What stories
were you telling yourself as to what was happening in
(05:51):
this photo? Because your mum is holding this little baby
like it's her own.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
It looked like a family portrait. And when I turned
to my best friend asked, and she said, that's your
mum and your dad and you as a baby. And
I looked at her and she says, to me, now
the look on my face when I said, that's not
my dad and that's not me, and we both sort
of it that moment turned around and stared into the
eyes of all the family and friends. Jaws were on
(06:17):
the floor, and everyone was quite rattled by the photo,
and I could tell straight away it wasn't meant to
be in there. We continue to watch the slide show,
but in that moment, they knew I was going to
start asking. I could see those wheels turning around me.
I saw a few of my mum's friends approach family members,
and I could see that it was already being discussed.
(06:39):
What's the story we're going to tell her obviously that
whole album was never meant to make it to daylight,
And it was actually up the back of the cupboard.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
In her bedroom.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
We were all up at the Sunshine Coast because that's
where she'd passed away, and my friend had come back
from New York and had gone to her home and
was getting photos together and she spotted this random photo
of them.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
That's where the photos or were.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So the fact that out of all the thousands of
photos in her bedroom, this one made it into the slideshow,
It's like she wanted it to be there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
So what story did you tell yourself before you started
to find out the real details of where that photo
originated in the story behind it?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
I think because we'd done the death certificate the day before,
and they had asked the question of you know, normal things,
first name, last name, date of birth, and then they
said how many marriages, and me and my brother said one,
and the family said two. And then he said age
at first marriage and they said sixteen. Because I had
never ever ever heard that she'd ever been married before,
(07:39):
and let alone as a teenager. I had already sort
of sparked something. Something was already going plus grief, plus
organizing a funeral, plus not sleeping, all those sort of things.
Then when that photo came up, my immediate thought was,
this is the first husband and that is their baby.
The fact then that that photo came back the next day,
timestamped nineteen seventy three, making seventeen, I couldn't fathom the
(08:04):
coincidence of her being married at that age, of it
never coming to light, and of this photo being timestamped
holding a newborn baby exactly at the age she would
have had it. I mean, I think I originally thought
that baby is a family member. She's had that baby,
and then it's been rearranged into the family somehow.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
That was my first thought.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So obviously your first questions go to your mum's family
to figure out what's going on here. In your mind,
you're wondering, if you have a long lost sibling, what
stories do they start to tell you about this photo.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Her family are a very Catholic, extremely private family for
those reasons. I don't even know if they would know.
There's a lot of siblings and huge gaps in age.
There was a mixture of answers. Some people in the
very close family circle told me she had a baby
and it died at one and then the other story
(09:02):
was that there was never a baby, and then there
was a story that she had a miscarriage.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
So there was a.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Very strange dynamic happening. But also at the same time,
I was just constantly being told to stop asking questions,
let it go, stop asking questions. You're crazy, you know,
there's nothing to it. Move on with your life. And
I kept getting mixed answers from her close friends that
were saying similar things that she had had a baby
(09:28):
in it had died, or you know, that they just
didn't see her for a period of two years of
her life. She essentially went missing and no one had
seen or heard from her. Someone else said she'd been
pulled out of school halfway through the year and no
one knew where she went. So there was just so
many mixed messages coming from everywhere, and no one would
give me a straight answer. And I think, as a
benefit to all the women that ended up on this podcast,
(09:50):
it's lucky that no one gave me a straight answer.
But it all could have been solved very easily if
this whole idea of donas, don't tell and we don't
talk about anything, throw everything under a rug and stamp
on it. If that hadn't existed, maybe she'd still be alive.
And also maybe I would have had my answer twelve
years ago.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
When did you start to entertain the idea that your
mom might have been one of the many, many Australian
women who were caught up in a process known as
forced adoption. It's what we call it now. Back then
it was a very different story. When did you start
to entertain the idea that she might have been caught
up in that.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Over the years, as I started to ask a lot
of questions, I also was met often with people that
had these stories where they'd say, that's quite likely, you know,
because my cousin ended up being my sister, or you
know that my mom's mom was actually her sister and
it was her grandmother that brought her up. I started
to recognize very quickly every single person I hypothesized my
(10:51):
mom's outcome with had a story or knew someone with
a story, and I started to think, this could have
happened to my mom. The Catholic there's these informal adoptions
taking place left, right and center. There's rearrangements in families
happening all over the place. It is extremely likely that
she was pregnant obviously forced to get married, and then
(11:13):
that they couldn't handle it, or they were too young,
or something's happened and they've had to give away the baby.
I mean, that's what I had thought, well up until
we started the podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
What insight did you get during this time where you're
investigating into your mum's early life and the influences that
religious institutions had on her and the decisions that she
would have had to have made during her younger years.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
My mom passed away from alcoholism, and anyone that's no
one ll loved someone with an addiction knows the varying
ways relationships breakdown, and also the desperation you feel in
wanting to understand why, why did this take a grip?
Why are you no longer here? I think in seeking
out her earlier life, I started to understand her because
(11:59):
the last part of her life, in which normally people
have those conversations, she was quite far gone. But I
started to see her as this bright, vivacious young girl
who was very popular and very smart and found herself
in an impossible situation where she discovered she was pregnant,
and that had come from some close friends of hers
that Tommy, they were with her when she found out.
(12:19):
She was obviously then taken to the family home and
then locked away from everyone for a while while decisions
were made and things were arranged for the wedding. Is
what I've been told, And I mean putting myself in
a position of being sixteen and pregnant, how terrified. Having
come also from a devout Catholic home in which morals
standing and the Bible and the Church is your overrarching
(12:44):
everyday sense of morality is coming from the Church and
your parents feeding you that every day. So to have
committed the sin of sex outside of marriage, committed a
sin where you're now unwed and pregnant and you're sixteen
or seventeen. When I hear about it, I can feel
the shame she would have felt. That's not how society
(13:05):
works now. But then the shame that they likened being
unwed and pregnant too was you were better off being
a murderer, and that sort of comprehension that that's the
way that social standings looked at you. It's so hard
to get your head around.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
So many years pass and you're still asking questions, but
your mum actually gives you the tools to unlock the
mystery because she has left the name of the man
that she married in documents for you to trace. Tell
me about finding the man in the photo.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I obviously had a copy of the death certificate, and
on the death certificate it read Michael Davies. I mean,
Michael Davies couldn't be a more common name in Queensland,
and that was assuming he still lived in Queensland. So,
you know, as I had children of my own, I
really would go on these tangents of desperately trying to
find him because I think I was trying to rectify
(14:05):
with myself the mom I didn't want to be, and
in order to be the mom I wanted to be,
I needed to heal this wound or understand her. So
every time I had a child, I would start googling.
And that was over nine years. I've had kids, not
nine of them, just three and nine years. So over
the nine years, you know, i'd Google him and LinkedIn,
and as technology evolved in more things like Instagram came
(14:27):
about or LinkedIn, I guess as an example of something
that I didn't have when I started, I still couldn't
find him. We ended up going down to the state archives,
and there I trolled through every divorce because it was
all public record through the Supreme Court until nineteen seventy six,
found a Davy's divorce. Out of every single file in there,
the Davies divorce that had their same initials was the
(14:50):
only file that was missing by a clerical error, they
told me anyway, So that was a dead end. Then
I ended up trolling the electoral role. I had an
idea that that the photo that we found was taken
on the balcony of their home. A family member had
told me, oh, this is where they lived at Irana Hills,
and so I knew they'd lived at Irana Hills. I
knew I had a name, and I found them on
(15:11):
the electoral role. I traced them on the electoral role
for a while. Then you know, he falls off in
nineteen eighty two or something. He must have moved somewhere else.
So yeah, I'd gone through all these process I'd gone
to burst ess and marriages. I'd gone to the church
in which they got married, and that's where I got
the marriage certificate. Once I had the marriage certificate. I
had way more details, and then obviously pitched the podcast,
(15:33):
got it up and running, and they found him within
like an hour.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
So I was like, Nys.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I've been knowing this for twelve years, so it just
goes to show, you know, good producers make everything. So yeah,
they found him, and then we contacted him and I
flew to Cans and met with him.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
So you head up to Cans to see the man
in the picture. Were you nervous to now, after all
this time, find out exactly what had happened with your mom?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Back then, I was like sick to my stomach, and
you know, equal parts wanted to run away and can
the whole thing and be like, I don't want to
do this anymore. And equal parts knew I was either
going there to find a long lost sibling or I
was going there to find closure, and either way, I
knew I had to go and I had to piece
(16:21):
together the puzzle in its entirety for my own benefit,
for my children's benefit, and for my future because it
had just played with me for so long. So I
was sick to my stomach with anxiety and definitely wanted
to run away, but sort of just tried to chune
out as much as I could till I got there,
And when I got there, I just rambled.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
I got the answers. It was the best thing I
ever did, for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
All Right, tell us what happened to your mum? Who
is the baby in the picture, and what did the
man in the picture explain to you had actually happened?
Putting together all of those rumors that you'd been told
from various family members.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So varying degrees of it were true, she'd sort of
run away from home. They'd found themselves pregnant. She was well,
he says, sixteen, but just turned seventeen. She finds herself pregnant.
Quite far along, they go and tell both their sets
of parents, who were devout Catholics on both sides, and
they decided that they would get married. She was locked
(17:21):
away for a period of time, and then his mother
and my grandmother called him to tell him she'd had
a late miscarriage and was in hospital. And he says
he doesn't really know any of the details. It was
all being handled by the mums. I mean retrospectively. I
think he's remembered some more details around it. But yes,
she had a miscarriage and ended up in hospital for
(17:43):
a considerable amount of time, and then they were still
forced to go ahead with the marriage. I think he's
a beautiful man and a divine human, but I think
that she would have thought that now she'd lost the baby,
the marriage would not have to go ahead, But because
of the shame and the Catholics and all of that,
it was made to go ahead. And I think that
(18:03):
that did inevitably create some problems in her life.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
We'll touch on that again a little bit later, but
through all of this you start to uncover stories of
women who had found themselves in a very similar situation
to your mum back in the sixties and seventies, very young,
either still a teenager or in the early twenties. They're
not married back then, as you mentioned, very shameful from
(18:31):
a societal perspective. But some of these women have different
endings to your mum's story in that they did give
birth to a little baby. And one of the first
women that you spoke to about this die revealed to
you details of a story that could potentially be told
(18:51):
thousands and thousands and thousands of times by Australian women
during those decades. What did I tell you?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
I told me that she'd found herself in Sydney and pregnant.
She was training to be a veteran surgeon and was
working for a Catholic doctor. She didn't tell anyone she
was pregnant and didn't really know what was going to
happen because women back then were so uneducated in sexual
education and birth, so they really had no idea what
was coming for her. And then she went into labor.
(19:22):
The Catholic doctor takes her to the hospital and it's
there she thinks he made them aware of her situation,
which was that she was single or unwared.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So this guy was her boss at that stage.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yep. She then gives birth on a sterile, stainless steel bench.
The baby's ripped away from her. She's left bleeding and
lying on a steel bench alone, shivering. And you know
when she talks in the podcast about how cold she was,
she physically started shivering while she was telling me. That's
how visceral the response was to even voicing what had happened.
(19:58):
She genuinely started shaking. And then someone comes in at
some point and says, your baby's died.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
You can go home.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Sign these discharge papers, go on with your life, and
so she tried to go on with her life. She
told not a soul, not one single person in the world.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
The father of that.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Baby was in Canada. She just didn't see a reason.
What was the point. She'd lost the baby tragically and
she had to move on. And forty years later, she's
sitting with her son on a couch having their nightly
cup of tea, and she gets an email, and that
email's title is I Think you could be my mother.
And in that email, a man goes on to describe
(20:35):
details of his birth at the time where it was.
She said, her entire body just went into a state
of shock. And at the bottom is a photo. He says,
this is a photo of my granddaughter. I've always wanted
to know where she got her hair. And I sits
down and looks across at a picture of herself at
four and looks at this little girl and they could
(20:57):
have been twins. And I mean that story it was
haunting and terribly, terribly sad and not uncommon. And since
Die's story, we've heard from hundreds of women that were
told their babies had died or were disabled or needed
to go to orphanages for whatever reason, only to find
(21:17):
out that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So these discharge papers that Die was signing to allow
her to leave hospital, were they actually discharged papers?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
No, they were adoption papers.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Has she ever tried to look back into her situation
and find out how that could have happened?
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I think they all, in their own ways go about
trying to find peace with the situation. It's very hard
because the government, religious organizations, doctors and hospitals and medical
professionals all working in tandem, and it's very hard to
pin what happened, what went wrong, who's our tru fault
(22:00):
was it? And a lot of files went missing in
floods or extenuating circumstances. They were handwritten files. There was
often clerical errors where birth dates were recorded wrong so
that they would never be able to trace each other.
In Die's case, on the adoption papers of her son,
she was able to see them. He knew he had
(22:21):
been adopted, and the papers gave some minimal detail about
Die Smart wears glasses or something and is unwed, and
they were the details and Die not even Diane, you know,
just that was all he had when he turned eighteen
to find out where he was from, and she had nothing.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
How does he then find out that she is his mother?
If that's all the detail that he has to go on.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
He went through ancestry dot Com. His wife had tried
to get him to do it over a period of time,
and yes, he agreed to do it. He was matched
to his father in Canada's brother, and he says, there
was a woman that worked here. She broke in horses
on our property and her name was Die, and she
wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. So he comes back
(23:10):
to Australia and he googles Die veterinary surgeon and thousands
of Die veterinary surgeons come up. But right in the
middle is a picture of Die who has this amazing
curly hair. And he knew then that's my mum because
his daughter had that exact hair.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
What's it like for Dye to reunite with a son
that she never even thought had a life. It must
be incredibly difficult to reorientate your entire life's history to
understand that this person has been alive and in the
world this whole time.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I think it's impossible for me to ever be able
to articulate how dye must feel because I've never been
in that position. What she describes is just complete disorientation, joy, sorrow, pain, anger,
but elation. Oh my god, you know, I get another shot.
(24:05):
This person's alive, I have another son, I have grandchildren,
you know. But all of that process, she just says,
it's sometimes too hard to actually process. And you know,
she's going through all the right avenues in terms of
that's why she told her story and being able to
talk freely about it and lift the shame and lift
(24:26):
that I guess head fuck that it is. And she's, yeah,
desperately trying to get it all together. But you know,
he was very receptive to her meeting her. They are
still in each other's lives. A lot of the stories
don't end as well as dies. A lot of the
stories people romanticize what a reunion will be. They romanticize
(24:48):
what their mum will look like and whether they have
the same traits. You know, is my daughter out there
with my hair? But the reality is you're trying to
undo forty years of being told you were abandoned or rejected,
or that somebody else chose you, and regardless of the
language around how you were chosen. It's all abandonment, you know.
At some point there is this feeling of, well, someone
(25:09):
didn't want me because someone else chose me, you know,
and I think that finding out actually you weren't abandoned.
I desperately wanted you. I was screaming for you. They
wouldn't let me see you or hold you. They drugged me,
they took you away and told me you died or whatever.
The circumstance, which is two hundred and fifty thousand women's stories,
that child has spent its entire life not knowing that
(25:30):
was the circumstance. No one was told, well, your mum
was drugged and forced to sign some papers and then
I took you home. They were always told you were
chosen by us because we loved you. And that's not
to say those adoptive parents knew the circumstance. Often they
didn't know and had no idea that's what the mother
had been through. They thought they were doing the right
thing by adopting an unwanted child, or an abandoned child,
(25:52):
or a child that its parents couldn't care for them,
when in reality that mother desperately wanted to keep their child.
And these adoptive parents are thinking they're doing the right thing.
They've got a baby now and everyone's happy. But they've
told this child you were chosen, and then that child
lives with that narrative for forty years, and it's the
wrong narrative, you know, and that's almost impossible to undo.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Someone whose story didn't end in that positive way like
Dyas did was a woman you spoke to called Lily,
and her situation is just so shocking that a young girl,
teenage girl who is pregnant is arrested and put into
a home because she's.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Pregnant, charged with moral danger, which is the most archaic
notion that this could happen in the late nineteen sixties,
you know, it seems like something that would take place
in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
But she was charged with moral danger.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
She was living with her partner in a de facto relationship,
and they both were willing to keep the child. The
child was wanted, and they were planning to get married.
Because she was sixteen and eleven months, which was over
the age of consent, which also they tried to charge
you with. They needed parental permission, and her parents were
living in Sydney, so they had planned to go down
(27:13):
and get the papers signed, get married, and keep their baby,
but instead, in the middle of the night, she was arrested,
taken to the children's court, charged with moral danger, and
essentially locked up in a Magdalen laundry for the duration
of her pregnancy, in which their letters were read.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
No visitors allowed.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
That partner of her showed up twice to try and
marry her, and they wouldn't let him in. She also
had no idea of what was going to happen during
the birth and didn't know she wasn't going to be
allowed to keep her child. I think the trauma that
Lily endured. She was drugged, she was coerced, she was bullied.
They said, you know, you can't see a son or
your partner until you sign these papers. I think the
(27:51):
duress they put her under and what they did to
her mentally was horrendous, physically was horrendous. And then the
outcome of her story is eventually after Clara Clara's again
where they misspelled his name and miss Dewey's birthday, she
finally finds him and he just wants nothing to do
with her because he's been told his whole life. She
didn't want him, and that is a terrible, terrible tragedy
(28:13):
because she has just never recovered.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with journalist Amelia Oberheart about Australia's dark history
of forced adoptions that only ended in the nineteen eighties. Amelia,
(28:41):
can we touch a little bit on the institutions that
were involved in these processes, So where Lily was sent,
for example, the Magdalen Laundry, but there was also networks
of hospitals and other places that would take these young
women in and essentially hide them away until they've had
their baby. What were these institutions like in what roles
(29:03):
were they playing in all of this?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
So, without going into a huge amount of detail, there
was always a single women's payment in this country until
after World War II men came back. They had venereal diseases,
that's what some say, and tuberculosis had riddled the country
and it made for a huge spike in infertility. So
you have no IVF and no options if you are
(29:28):
to find yourself in a position where you're a young, married,
good couple that cannot have children, and also the pressure
on a woman who is in a marriage and young
and can't have a child.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
It's shameful too. It's a double edged sword.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
I think that certain institutions saw an opportunity they would
create a social stigma around being an unwed mother, which
had not been the stigma between nineteen twenty nineteen forty.
That was fine because one had killed so many of
our men. There wasn't an issue. It was okay to
have your child. So social and religious notions start sweeping
(30:04):
through that you're this disgraceful person if you are unweaded
and pregnant, and that creates a fear because there is
no abortion unless you were going to access some neighborhood
dangerous you know, we spoke to some people that had
learned to do abortions by giving them to themselves. You know,
this was a very very dangerous option, and very desperate
women access them, some with lifelong ramifications. But unless you
(30:29):
were going to do that, or you found a doctor
that would which was very particularly in regional and rural communities,
impossible you were to have the child. You were often
sent into state or to other rural cities where you
would be put into institutions. There was religious ones. They
were the Magdalen laundries. They were hugely run through Ireland
(30:50):
and Scotland, which have the worst forced adoption history of
any Western civilization. You know the stories that come out
of Scotland and Ireland, and where the Magdalen lawn originated
from is essentially free labor. You're pregnant, you may defold
sheets for twenty hours a day for no pay. They
feed you and morally correct you. You're taking a hospital,
(31:10):
you put into the unwed mother's zone, so you would
fill out paperwork that would say you be minus was
one of them. So unwed mother baby minus is adopting.
You can't keep it. Classes you get to keep it
and you put into a different section of the hospital.
Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney was one of the
most notorious baby farming hospitals in the country. Sixty thousand
babies were said to have been taken from there, and
(31:33):
it was there that they believe a lot of cahoops
I guess, with obstetricians that had clientele that couldn't give birth,
couldn't have children or found themselves unable to, and then
obviously unwed mothers that didn't know that their babies were
going to be taken, and then the Magdalen Laundry would
take you back till your stomach went down and you
could return as a normal person into society. And then
(31:55):
you'd be discharged and you were told go on with
your life. No one will ever know this happen. You've
disgraced yourself, but now you can come good. You can
right your wrongs, go into society, find a nice man,
and go on, and you'll have other children. And a
lot of them didn't. A lot of them never went
on to have any more children, and a lot of
them obviously went on to be completely scarred physically and
(32:16):
mentally for the rest of their lives. And then a
lot of them obviously didn't bank on genetic testing where
they came and found them. But those institutions and those
numbers do not include rearrangements or informal adoptions. They were
usually religiously run where father Tom would identify a Waywood
girl who'd gotten pregnant and Mary and Tom down here
(32:38):
are desperately trying to have a baby, so they would
give her baby to Mary and Tom and say, well,
essentially she never existed to begin with, and they'll just
write a birth certificate straight into Mary and Tom's name,
and they were called informal adoptions. And there's no way
of knowing the number of those because they're not recorded.
But those religious organizations also had homes awayward girls or
(33:02):
unwed mother homes, you know, Saint Anthony's or Saint Ursula's,
and they'd send you there and you'd be with nuns
and priests for the duration of your pregnancy. They'd take
your baby and you'd be released when you were able
to go back into society. And those places have yet
often closed and often never paid for what happened, never
(33:23):
taken any responsibility for what occurred under their roof.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You do actually speak to some of the children who
are on the opposite end of this story. How do
they understand themselves and their own stories when they do
realize what their mums, their biological mothers, have gone through.
And does this leave a lasting impact on their lives too?
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Absolutely. I mean, we spoke with quite a few adoptees
over the process. The forced adoption era, or the era
of adoption that went into the late seventies early eighties,
It was very different practice to the adoptees of the
next generation because they were open adoptions. Often letters were given,
most sets of parents were involved, So you know, there
is a very big line in the sand there between
(34:11):
the practices that took place in the forced adoption era.
I think every adoptee has, you know, they're like fingerprints.
Everyone has their own story or their own reactions. But
most of the children born into that forced adoption era
have a real issue with identity. They desperately just want
to know why and how and who they are, and
(34:34):
it's often very difficult for them when the mother has
blanked out, or the mother has had their own family,
or small things like that that hugely impact their ability
to connect. When they've dreamt their whole life of finding
this person, and that person either chose rightfully which was
their choice to give up their baby, or had blocked
(34:55):
it out or had never told anyone. That's the big
theme is that they had never told their current husband,
never told their current children. It was a part of
their history they thought would never come back. And then
that creates this whole again, a narrative that is really
painful for those adoptee kids, particularly late discovery adoptees who
(35:15):
because of genetic testing find out and to quantify they've
been lied to for fifty years is very hard for
them too.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
A lot of people are going to see an alignment
here between forced adoptions and the Stolen Generations, and I
know that you do touch on this in the podcast
as well, but how did these two things actually differ?
Because they are so similar and yet so different.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
The Stolen Generations was one of my most heart wrenching
episodes and the one I am probably the most nervous
about in terms of being able to give it justice.
I mean, the Stolen Generations is a podcast in itself.
It's to try and cover that in a twenty four
minute episode is almost impossible. That I did feel it
(35:59):
would be a terrible thing for us not to give
it the attention and some light. The difference is the
laws of assimilation and the practices of assimilation, and the
way that they went about removal of children was different. However,
there is a crossover between the babies that were born
in the Stolen Generations and forced adoption, So mostly those
(36:21):
children were taken under law of assimilation, which I mean
the laws changed a lot over two hundred and fifty years,
but generally they believed horrifically that taking children from their
community and families they would better assimilate into white society,
which is just something I can't really comprehend it and
it was a heartbreaking period going into the research into this.
(36:41):
But the forced adoption was the belief that a mother
couldn't care for their child if they were single or
unwed or in a position not of you.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Know, statures.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
So some of those stolen generation mothers lost their children
through assimilation, but then they would go to the hospital
to have a baby and they would take them under
forced adoption. So that's where the crossover does occur. But
they are different issues and they're treated differently. But Leoni,
who we speak to, is stolen generations and forced adoption
and she was sent to Wales with a nurse. I mean,
(37:13):
her story is incredible and incredibly sad.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Again, Julia Gillard apologized to all the victims of forced
adoptions in twenty thirteen, and I guess a lot of
the people who were there that day and who felt
a sense of relief that finally they'd been recognized and
that people knew that what had happened to them was wrong.
But has there been any significant change in this area
(37:40):
since then, because I understanding you've touched on this many
times about the poor record keeping and the way that
these closed adoptions were set up, making it incredibly difficult
for anyone to trace their own history. Has anything changed
since that apology.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
There's a big thing about the apology that certainly could
be a coincidence or it's more sinister than that. Where
the day the apology took place, eight thousand people packed
the hall. A lot of those women desperately wanted media
coverage so that their children could understand, you know, maybe
recognize them. Maybe them being on the TV would make
(38:16):
someone know that they weren't abandoned, that it wasn't by
a choice, they were adopted. This was a big moment
for them and they had waited a long time, some
of them forty years for this day. And then that
afternoon Simon Crean called the Labor Leadership's Bill, in which
he wanted the removal of all Labor leadership positions and
Kevin Rudd to be in and so all the media
(38:38):
race from there up to Parliament House, and that night
on the news when all these women go home and
wait for their moment, it's just all about the Leadership's bill.
I mean, they say that one outlet covered that story,
you know, but it was hugely overtaken by a political circus,
and I think that created some resentment. And then out
(39:00):
of the Senate inquiry of twenty one recommendations, very few
of them have been actioned. I mean, Victoria said they
were going to do a redress scheme and that is
yet to be actioned. That was twelve months ago. They
promised that there is a sense with the mothers that
they believe they're waiting for them to die because they're
getting so old, and the compensation once you admit fault,
(39:22):
you know, you're looking at two hundred and fifty thousand
women that we know of, and so I think that
they believe that there is some sort of dragging it out,
kicking the can down the road. Also, once the Senate
inquiry was done and the twenty one recommendations were made,
they were essentially pushed back onto a state by state issue,
and then the states had to hold their own inquiries.
(39:44):
You know, Queensland still yet to hold one, like WA's
in the process of doing one now. But really it
seems to them they're just pulling it out and dragging
it out. That was, you know, ten years ago, and
we're still ten years down the track and nothing's happened.
So a lot of them are very passionate out of
royal commission and getting things done, and for their children
who are now sort of picking up that fight for
(40:05):
their mothers.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
In the process of the episodes of your podcasts going live,
I imagine this is probably a woken some very old
deep scars for women who experience this in decades past.
What's the feedback been like for you from people reaching
(40:28):
out and telling maybe their stories for the very first time.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
We've received hundreds of emails. I've received a lot of
private messages across like Instagram or LinkedIn. I was going
under my married name, and somehow people have an amazing
ability to find you, and so you know, I was
getting quite inundated, which was amazing, and I was so appreciative,
particularly of so much positive feedback. I really, I guess
(40:52):
when you put yourself out in the world and you're
so vulnerable to other people's opinions and critics, and I
was really humbled by how well received it was and
has been so far. So I had started to direct
people to an email account, so we could pull everything
into one central space, obviously, in the hopes that all
these people's stories can be heard, because they all deserved
(41:13):
a platform. I get a lot of emails from daughters
of mothers that have experienced this, saying I now understand
my mum, or listening to this, I can understand how
hard my mum's life has been, like I thank you
for taking that burden off her, or I'm getting ready
to try and talk to my mom about this. And
every time I hit under the covers at night and
(41:34):
it was like, I don't want to do this, and
I started to panic. I always came back to this
one notion that if it changed the outcome of one
family or one conversation, if it lifted that burden for
one person, it was job done. So every email that
comes it gives me this heart warming it's doing what
it was meant to and that's an amazing thing.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Just to finish, Amelia, after going through this process of
understanding all these women and stories and hearing the pain
and the heartbreak not just from these women but from
their children and their extended families, how do you now
feel about your own mum because your relationship with her
was not great towards the end, and addiction played a
(42:16):
big part in that. But how do you feel about
your mom now after going through this journey with all
these women and understanding them better.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I mean, I had spent twelve years in quite a
bit of pain and a lot of lack of understanding
and resentment, and I felt after I met Michael, all
of that resentment it melted away. I started to really
see her as a person again. I started to see
the pain that she was really in and to look
(42:45):
at it, I mean, retrospect is twenty twenty, and I
started to look back on things and situations and her
downfall with this compassion and empathy. I had never been
able to look at it like that before. I now
have my own daughter, and when I was pregnant, knowing
it was a girl, and during the period of her infancy,
(43:05):
I would just cry so much for my mum because
I desperately have always sorry, I got an emotional you know,
I desperately wanted that relationship. You know, I'd always wanted
that relationship with her, and now I had a chance
to have that with my daughter. And now I've reconciled
with my mum. Who's not here to have that conversation with.
(43:26):
But I feel very much at peace, and for that,
I'll always be thankful for the podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Thank you to Amelia for joining us today. Her podcast
Secrets We Keep is LinkedIn our show notes if you'd
like to take a listen. True Crime Conversations is Amma
Mere podcast hosted and produced by me Claire Murphy, with
assistant production by Tarlie Blackman. Our audio design is by
Scott Stronik, and our executive producer is Giam Moylin. Thank
(43:57):
you so much for listening. We'll be back next week
with another true crime conversation. True Crime Conversations acknowledges the
traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was
(44:20):
recorded on
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.