Juliette Playford can still recall the look on her father’s face as he tried to murder her as an eight-year-old girl.
“He was staring at me. And I just remember his eyes just looking directly at me and I was looking at him. And he had the same face he always had on, which was like a tight-lipped smile.”
Now 18, the Brisbane schoolgirl is breaking her silence, telling 60 Minutes about the tragic night her father Stephen Playford drugged and suffocated her younger sister Sidney before trying to kill her.
Brisbane student Juliette Playford studying at home.Credit: Nine
Juliette says more needs to be done to support children of domestic family violence.
“I know how it feels not to have support and not to have anyone you can look up to … mothers or wives or girlfriends, they’re considered the main victims of domestic and family violence,” she says.
“Children are usually the ones who are overlooked. Everyone was asking my mum how she was, and I was just getting stuffed animals. No one really wanted to talk to me. No one asked me how I was.”
In September 2015, it was a weekend of celebration for the Playford family, at their Brisbane home in the suburb of Kedron.
Home videos show Juliette’s family laughing together as her cheeky younger sister Sidney turned six, marking the occasion by face-planting into her birthday cake.
Juliette and Sidney Playford.Credit: Nine
The following day was Father’s Day and Stephen was showered in love by his two young daughters and his wife Maria.
But behind the happy facade, he was about to execute a horrific plan.
“He himself wanted to die … so he justified trying to kill us,” Juliette says.
“What he was planning was a triple murder-suicide. I feel like he wanted us to be together in his own sick, twisted way.”
Stephen was a successful mining executive who travelled the world.
He met Maria in Argentina before the family settled in Brisbane to raise their two daughters.
Stephen Playford with his wife Maria and children Juliette and Sidney.Credit: Nine
Juliette’s memories of her early childhood are mostly happy and she says she could never have imagined her father hurting her “until it happened”.
But as an adult, she now recognises unsettling behaviour from her “authoritarian” father.
“I didn’t really know what other childhoods felt like,” Juliette says.
“I believed that smacking was normal for when a child was naughty, and I didn’t really think anything differently about him being the authority figure in the house. I just thought that was the status quo.
“In hindsight, looking back at it, I’d probably say it was a little toxic.”
“Children are usually the ones who are overlooked. Everyone was asking my mum how she was, and I was just getting stuffed animals.”
Stephen was also a gambler and after losing his job in 2014, he drained the family’s money, including his daughters’ savings accounts and a deposit for a house.
Maria had asked for a divorce but she stayed after he threatened to take her daughters away.
Against this backdrop, he began plotting to kill his family.
Juliette remembers her father preparing chicken and Brussels sprouts for dinner one evening.
Stephen often cooked for the family – something she always considered an act of care by a dedicated father.
What nobody knew that night, September 6, 2015, was Stephen had laced his daughters’ food with sleeping tablets.
Juliette and Sidney Playford dressed for school.Credit: Nine
She fell asleep in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister in their old Queenslander home before being woken with her father on top of her, his hands tightly around her throat.
“He’s strangling me and I get out of his grip by kicking him and I run out and he catches me and he takes me downstairs and he takes out a cylinder of gas from the laundry room and he puts a mask over me,” Juliette says.
“And I’m trying to stay awake, but I fall asleep. I’m knocked unconscious.”
The next thing Juliette recalls is being carried upstairs, where her father then tried to strangle her for a second time in her bed, before she again fought him off and raced to wake her mother.
“He’s just yelling through the door and I’m saying, ‘He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me’.
“What he was planning was a triple murder-suicide. I feel like he wanted us to be together in his own sick, twisted way.”
“Obviously, I’m screaming, so he can hear me and he says again, ‘I’m having a nightmare. I’m having a nightmare’. And my mum just tells me to go to bed and that I should just sleep in her bed tonight.”
Stephen fled the home, leaving Juliette and her mother to discover the full extent of his sickening crime the following morning.
“It was a Monday and school was going to start. And my mum’s screaming. And I run to the bedroom and my sister’s dead on her bed,” Juliette says.
“So my mum calls Triple Zero and she’s incoherent. She’s just screaming. And so I have to tell the operator that my sister’s dead and to come to our address.”
Stephen confessed and was sentenced to life in prison, but Juliette describes the pain he inflicted on her that Father’s Day as “a nightmare that never ended”.
“He broke us. He murdered my sister and murdered my innocence. I really, I wasn’t a child afterwards.”
But Juliette says navigating the long road to recovery was in many ways as traumatic as the crime itself.
Juliette Playford with her mother Maria.Credit: Nine
She says she felt invisible in a system geared towards adult survivors of domestic and family violence and that she was never treated as a victim in her own right.
“I wish [there was] someone who, you know, would just speak to me and ask me how I was doing and what I needed,” Juliette says.
It would take three years before Juliette saw a psychiatrist and by that time her mental health had spiralled.
Maria, who was also barely coping, says it was only after Juliette started self-harming that she got an appointment.
“She felt like that pain is better than the pain that she has or living with what happened.”
Juliette says the family violence system “failed” and “is failing others”.
While Conor Pall’s lived experience of childhood violence differs to Juliette’s story, he can relate to her feelings of being ignored by a system not suitable for child survivors of domestic and family violence.
His parents separated when he was 12, forcing him to live between two houses where he quickly became the target of abuse by the perpetrator – a man he refuses to call dad.
“It is a choice that I made because I think that title is something that should be earned and that person didn’t earn that title,” Pall says.
Fearing for his life, at 16, the Victorian teenager courageously reached out, but his calls for help went unanswered.
Conor Pall has teamed up with Melbourne City Mission to implement Amplify, Australia’s first dedicated program for unaccompanied children escaping family abuse.Credit: Nine
Instead of being treated as a victim, he was asked if he was a perpetrator.
“I think we’re a society that likes to think that we value children and young people, but I think we have a long way to go to live up to that self-concept,” he says.
“I think we have systems and services that, by design, were set up for adults, predominantly women, and rightly so.
“But we’ve forgotten the child. We have built systems and services predominantly around adult victim survivors still.”
Conor Pall was a victim of childhood violence who has now become an advocate.Credit: Photo: Nine
Now 22, Pall is determined to make sure children are treated as victims in their own right.
He has teamed up with Shorna Moore, head of policy at Melbourne City Mission, to help implement Australia’s first and only dedicated program for unaccompanied children escaping family abuse. Called Amplify, it is run out of Melbourne City Mission’s Front Yard youth service.
Moore says while it’s a good first step in closing the gaps in the system response to children escaping violence, it’s just one program in one state and more needs to be done on a national level to protect kids.
“We need to make sure that we include children and young people in the design of the family violence system, otherwise we are failing children on their most fundamental human rights of safety.”
Nearly 40 per cent of Australian children are exposed to some form of domestic and family violence, and suicide is the leading cause of death in people aged 15 to 24.
They are damning statistics that the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds says should not be ignored if the federal government is committed to its national plan to end violence against women and children.
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“If we’re serious about ending gender-based violence within a generation, we need to ensure that kids are not experiencing violence, and if they do, that we respond appropriately to the healing that they need, the recovery that they need. That those services are fit for purpose for them and unfortunately, we’re very slow to move on that.”
Hollonds wants Canberra to listen to children’s experiences, like Juliette’s and Conor’s, and to act on them.
“I have been very worried about the lack of attention to making child safety and wellbeing a priority for all of the last five years,” she says.
“This is not a party political issue. This is to do with our culture and the governance of how we run our policies and service systems, and the fact that children have not been elevated in the way that other issues have. That’s why I think a cabinet minister for children would really make a difference.”
For Juliette, sharing her story is the first step in a longer plan for advocacy to make sure children are believed and heard.
“It ruined my childhood, but I don’t want it to ruin my life.”
National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732); Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; Lifeline 131 114; Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.
