Woman ticks off heartbreaking bucket list item before cancer death

A woman wrote a bucket list as she was dying from a terminal illness. But what she had on it was truly horrific. Photo / Getty

KAYE'S daughter was just a child when she was abused by her uncle, but she only reported it to police 42 years after the disturbing crime.

She grew up battling with the horror - and couldn't even bring herself to tell her own mother until she was 19. Kaye desperately wanted to go to the police, but her daughter did nothing until she fell terminally ill years later. Reporting the sexual abuse then became her daughter's dying wish.

Kaye, who did not reveal her last name, tells of her daughter's fight for justice in a new podcast by Victoria Police, Unspeakable, which encourages victims of sexual offences to report them.

When Kaye's daughter was 19 she returned from an overseas trip and made the dreaded call to her mother about what happened to her as a child.

"She'd been overseas and she came back and she rang me one night, it was a Saturday night, and told me about it. She said 'Oh mum, you're not going to like what I've got to tell you'," Kaye revealed in the podcast.

"As soon as she said it I believed her and I said 'what do you want to do about it' and she said 'I don't want to do anything at the moment, I want you to know about it, I don't want to do anything about it'.

"She said she didn't want granny to know, that's my mum."

After her daughter told her of the nightmare she suffered at the hands of her uncle, Kaye tried to report the crime herself.

"I got on the phone and rang the Boronia Police and they said to me 'look, there's nothing we can do'," she said.

"In those days there really was no support from anybody, nowhere to go, I've never felt so alone in my whole life and I went through a marriage breakup. This was just awful. I didn't know where to go or who to turn to."

Without her daughter wanting to report the crime herself, Kaye's hands were tied.
"It was very heavy on the shoulders I can tell you. At times I didn't know what to do. Because she didn't want to do anything about it, I couldn't do anything about it," she said.

Decades later, Kaye's daughter was diagnosed with a terminal illness and had just weeks to live.

It was at that point she wrote a bucket list and on the top of it was reporting her uncle for the sexual abuse. She told police 42 years after she became a victim.

Detective Leading Senior Constable Christine Robinson was working in the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team unit when Kaye and her daughter rang to report the abuse.

"I was on response that day and allocated the task. I called the victim and I arranged to, within the next hour, to attend her address," she said.

She set up a video camera at the home and filmed Kaye's daughter as she detailed the horror.

"She gave me some indication of her illness, that she didn't have much time left. Her reporting this was on her bucket list. It had affected her for the last 42 years of her life and she needed to report it before she passed away," Detective Robinson said.

She launched an investigation right away and typed up the statement.

Shortly after, Kaye's daughter was admitted to hospital and another Detective Leading Senior Constable, Amber Coutts, took her statement and the video camera to the hospital so the daughter could read her statement in case she died before the case got to trial.

"Her doing that was such a relief. She felt that finally it was a weight off her shoulders. She told her story, put it in someone else's hands to investigate and from that point it moved very fast," Detective Robinson said.

Where to get help:

If it is an emergency and you or someone you know is at risk, call 111.
• Women's Refuge: 0800 733 843
• Victim Support: 0800 842 846
• Lifeline: (09) 522 2999
• Family Violence Info Line: 0800 456 450