How It Feels ... When Your Sister Is Murdered

The Age

Wednesday January 9, 2008

Interview By Michelle Hamer

Marque Whitlock has spent 34 years wondering what his older sister's life would have been like since the chilling day when he was told the terrible news.

IT HAPPENED in 1973, two days before my 16th birthday. Maryanne was 24 when she was killed.

She had been married for three or four years but they had just split up. Maryanne then became the lover of a man who was a heroin addict and he either introduced her to heroin or promoted its use.

He was abusive, physically and verbally and as a consequence they were only together for about three months before she told him to leave.

He continued to pester her though and she felt a little vulnerable. But then he didn't contact her for a couple of weeks and she felt that it was finally over.

But then he got high and went to her house with the intention of killing her; he had a gun with him.

He had it wrapped in a cloth and put it in an outside toilet at her house. He must have thought she would be at school teaching. He must have gone into the house just to have a look around but discovered that she was asleep in bed with the flu. So he went back out to the toilet for his gun. He shot my sister three times in the head and then shot himself in the heart.

The landlord came around at 5pm. The back door was open so he walked in. He found them in the bedroom with her lying in bed looking quite calm and peaceful because she was shot in her sleep and him spread across the bed. It was obviously a horrific scene.

My family was told straight away but because I was working on a dairy farm out of Melbourne, they didn't really know how to tell me. They decided one of the family should come to get me and not tell me on the phone.

The morning after she was shot I was on the farm milking at six in the morning and a Mercedes pulled into the driveway, which is a most unusual thing on a dairy farm - for a pretty flash car to be there.

I thought it must have been someone for the boss, so I just kept milking. The next thing the boss tapped me on the shoulder and said: "Your sister's here."

My sister took me into a room next to the milking area and told me that my elder sister had been shot and was dead.

It was just the most surreal experience to be told in that environment, in the dairy with all the pumping machines going and cows ... to find out that your sister's been murdered. The fact that she died a violent death was abhorrent. I couldn't stand it.

I just went into shock. I was waiting for her to tell me it was a joke. It was 6am, the dawn was just breaking, it was freezing bloody cold and here we are; me with my 10 layers of clothes and gumboots, and cows mooing in the background and the dairy going full pelt, and my sister's telling me that my older sister was murdered.

I had this feeling of absolute disbelief. I remember trying to pack up my bag to leave and my sister's trying to be practical saying, "Where are your underpants, where are your socks, what do you want to wear?" and I'm thinking to myself: "I don't care if I wear underpants and that's all" - making decisions like that seemed to have no meaning at all. It just had no significance.

My mother was absolutely distraught and has never been the same. Even now, 34 years later, she is still governed by her emotions in a more profound way than most people - both sadness and joy. It's interesting the scar that the murder has left on her. I don't think you could wish upon a parent any worse or more traumatic incident than to lose a child. My mother just never really fully recovered. In those days counselling wasn't routine, so she was never offered anything.

The man who killed my sister was a Canadian. The police told us that they had to send a report over to Canada and his body would be sent back there.

My mother asked if it was mandatory that his parents know he murdered her daughter and the police said not necessarily. So my mother insisted that for the parents' sake, they not be told. To this day they have no idea. She said there was nothing to be gained by them knowing, it would only make them feel more distraught. It was such a generous move.

Maryanne was like a second mother to me. She was intriguing because she was from the '70s art movement. I used to stay with her and my brother-in-law quite often.

My family hadn't told me that the man who killed Maryanne was a heroin addict. About a year after her death, my younger sister Robin told me that during the autopsy they found track marks on her arms.

I remember sitting in the back of their car and I cried from the time we left Geelong till the time we got to Melbourne because I just couldn't believe that my sister had used a drug like that - and that there was physical evidence that she had used it more than once, so I knew it wasn't just experimentation.

I then found out that one reason she broke up from him was that she wanted to stop using. I'm sure she wanted to change her life but he put a stop to that.

Her death is still a source of great sadness. She was a talented artist who I've no doubt would have been in the genre of someone like Brett Whiteley.

That alone fills me with sadness; her artistic gifts and potential being unrealised and wasted.

She was volatile but at the same time incredibly joyful. She had a fiery spirit and was a very funny person. She's often in my thoughts and some of my personality traits can be attributed to her influence.

She would have brought joy to a lot of people and got a lot out of life herself. I often think: "What would she be like now?" It's hard to imagine what she would have been like at 58.

I feel great anger towards the man who killed her. I find it difficult to forgive him.

My mother is glad he killed himself. She wouldn't have wanted him alive. I would have been after him for sure. Small as I was, I certainly would have been looking for him. -- INTERVIEW BY MICHELLE HAMER

© 2008 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home