Barbie

My name is Barbie Burns-McCarthy, my sister Fiona 15 years old, was murdered back in 1990 alongside a young man called John Lee.

Fiona and John's murder is currently a cold case and has been for the last 25 years.

 

I was 12 years old, I was introduced to a world of words that I'd never had to deal with before which was 'homicide', and 'stabbing' and all those awful sort of thoughts, and being as young as I am, and parents not willing to tell us too much information, I had to imagine what that would be like. Imagine what Fiona looked like, what she went through, what being stabbed looked like, or felt like.

 

There was a lot of fear there because I could see my mother and my father both grieving terribly. I didn't want to upset them when they weren't upset with my grief, so it was about dealing with that on my own and as a child, it's really quite difficult.

 

Children need understanding. You need to make it age appropriate, which is fine but if you don't, they're just gonna have these visions, these imaginations of what really happened because they haven't been given the real information of what happened at the time.

 

When I returned to school, I was in Year Seven at the time there was no support services at all. No teachers put their hand up to say if you need someone to talk to or anything like that. You know, at school I would choose to hide myself in a corner or stay in the stay in the library at play time so I didn't have to be with people. It just really consumed my mind a lot because I got bullied at school a lot about Fiona being stabbed.

We had a lot of poor media presentations, saying that Fiona was in cults because she had 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' books in her bag. So, it was dealing with the bullying from school, just all those sort of things.

 

It's important for parents to be in contact with the school and get an understanding of what services they've got available for your child. If someone, if even a teacher let me know that they were available I probably would've taken them up.

 

My parents became very fearful of myself and my siblings safety; I was not allowed to ride a train until I was 18. I was not allowed to go in a car with a person that they didn't know. You know, until I was 18.

I think it's really important not to put the fear in your children that the same thing is going to happen to them. 

 

We live on, but we still have that grief inside.

 

Your child may continue to play and hang around with their friends and do all those things that children do but not to take that as them being okay.

If you're not in a position to offer your child support or explain certain things that you find very hard to deal with, find them the help, because they're just gonna grow up in life until they're old enough to understand.

 

I found in my experience, I've chosen in later life to isolate myself from social situations because as a child and teenager when this happened to me it was more about people wanting to know details and questions and things like that.

And the last time we did a media release I had a parent tell my child, who was five at the time, that they weren't allowed to play with their child because their family was from a bad family because they had a murder victim.

 

Family members who are victims of crime, murder, are given this stigma that they're not good people. That they must be amongst that sort of lifestyle. But you know, crime doesn't care who you are. It doesn't matter what walk of life you are from. It doesn't matter, you know, rich, poor, good, bad, it comes to anyone.