On July 3, 1999 Barbara-Anne Wyrzykowski took her five children for a drive in the family's seven-seater van, out to a remote track in dense state forest about fifty kilometres south-east of Perth, in Western Australia. There she killed them and herself with the exhaust. The children were Mark, eight, the twins Sarah and Luke, five, Jessie, four, and Jayde, one. All six died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She was twenty-five.
What journalists established about her afterwards was that she had had a troubled childhood, that she had given birth to all five children between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, and that a close friend had recently killed herself. She was described as suffering deep and untreated depression, and a heated argument with her de facto husband on the morning of the killings was reported as what tipped her over.
The case did not stand alone, and that is what made it a matter of public argument in Australia. Nine months earlier, in October 1998, Ronald Jonker, thirty-two, had gassed himself and his three children on the northern outskirts of Perth. Three weeks after Wyrzykowski, an unemployed laborer named Mark Heath drove his four children to an isolated bush track about two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Perth and connected a hose to the car's exhaust; all five were found dead on July 24. Twelve children had been killed by a parent in three separate incidents inside a year, in the same region of one state.
Commentary at the time noted that the tabloids had largely dropped the language of evil individuals and had been unusually sympathetic to the parents, and that the explanations offered were individual ones: a psychological flaw, a specific provocation. One analysis argued that this avoided the social conditions the three cases had in common, and pointed out that counseling hotlines in Western Australia were then taking about three hundred and eighty calls a day. A police spokesman, announcing the discovery of the Heath family, said that life is never so black that you have to take your own children's lives.
What is known of her rests on press reporting from 1999 and the commentary that followed. No inquest finding has been published, and the descriptions of her state of mind come from friends and reporters rather than from any medical record. Her ashes were placed in the old ashes section, now rose gardens, at Midland Cemetery in Perth's eastern suburbs.