PERTH, Australia, Sept 10, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – A 24-year-old man killed his
wife, three toddlers and mother-in-law at their suburban family home, where
he remained for several days before turning himself in, Australian police
said Monday.
The alleged murders are the third such family tragedy to rock Western
Australia state in recent months.
Police charged Anthony Robert Harvey with the murders of his two-year-old
twins Alice and Beatrix, his three-year-old daughter Charlotte and his 41-
year-old wife Mara in the southwestern city of Perth.
Harvey, who lived in the home, is also alleged to have killed his mother-
in-law Beverley Quinn, 73, after she arrived at the same address the next
day.
Western Australia Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told reporters no
firearms were used in the attacks which police believe were carried out with
several weapons including “a blunt instrument and knives”.
“We’re alleging that the murders took place over two days,” he said.
“The mother Mara and her three children were all murdered over a period of
time on the third (of September), and that Mrs Quinn was murdered the
following morning.”
Dawson said the two women were allegedly attacked in the kitchen while the
children were killed “in other rooms of the house”.
“We are alleging that Mr Harvey remained at the… house for some days”
before heading north, he added.
Police found the bodies of the five victims at the unassuming detached
family home after Harvey walked into a police station in a remote mining area
some 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) north of the city on Sunday — a week after
their deaths.
A Facebook profile believed to be Mara’s showed her cradling a newborn in
her arms, with a man reported to be Harvey beside her, and stated that she
was engaged in August 2014.
A real estate listing showed a modest three-bedroom house and a standalone
garage.
– ‘Her girls were her world’ –
Mara Harvey’s sister Taryn, also Quinn’s daughter and the children’s aunt,
wrote about her heartbreak at the killings.
“There are no words to explain the emptiness and loss that we are feeling,”
she wrote in a statement released by police late Monday, adding that Mara’s
young children “were her world” and she was “so proud of each of them”.
“This world is a sadder place with the loss of these five beautiful people
but Heaven has gained five new angels.”
Earlier a friend of Mara’s told Fairfax Media she was “pretty unlucky in
love before she met him… so (when they got together) it was like ‘yay, now
she gets to start a family'”.
A neighbour told national broadcaster ABC he had returned from a holiday to
“silence in the street”.
“We noticed that the house next door was pretty quiet, which was unusual,”
said Richard Fairbrother, who lives next door to the family’s house.
“We could hear and see the kids playing in the backyard quite often.”
Other neighbours spoke of a shocked community that had been close, calm and
peaceful.
Dawson said it was the third tragedy involving multiple deaths in a family
home in his state since May.
In July a man allegedly killed his mother and two siblings. A grandfather
shot dead his wife, daughter and her four children in a murder-suicide in
May.
Harvey is expected to return to court on September 19.