Author teaches the healing power of happiness

By NAOMI LARKIN

Sandy MacGregor is a happy man.

Few people could make that claim if their three teenage daughters had been murdered, shotgunned after opening the door to an acquaintance.

The death of his daughters changed Mr MacGregor's life, turning the former Australian Army colonel and Vietnam veteran into an author and teacher whose work focuses on forgiveness.

Mr MacGregor, who works with homicide and suicide support groups in Australia, is in New Zealand promoting his book Creating Happiness Intentionally.

In 1987 his three daughters - 19-year-old twins Jenny and Kirsty and their 16-year-old sister Lexie - were with a girlfriend at their home in the northern suburbs of Sydney.

It was 9.30 on a Friday night and their mother, whom they lived with and who was separated from Mr MacGregor, was at a wedding.

Jenny opened the door to Richard Maddrell, a 27-year-old student she had met at university. Maddrell declared his love to her before raising his shotgun and shooting her at close range. He turned to the girls' friend and shot her.

Kirsty began to run, Maddrell reloaded and shot her. At that point Lexie came downstairs and he killed her before leaving.

"It was over in about five minutes. I just didn't believe it. My background being military, I know what shotguns do, I know what weapons do. It was denial straight away," Mr MacGregor said.

Maddrell was declared a paranoid schizophrenic and found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity.

Four years before the murders, Mr MacGregor had started learning how to harness the power of his subconscious mind after his son Andrew used the technique to control asthma attacks and to help his recovery following a motorbike accident.

The method involved tapping into the subconscious mind through meditation.

But in his devastated state Mr MacGregor was unable to return to it for some months. When he did begin meditating, he got a "thought."

"It was like a voice saying to me, 'If you persist in being hateful, angry and revengeful you're going to end up like that,' that if I talked to myself about hatred, anger and revenge I would end up another victim.

"I decided I was going to work with acceptance, cooperation, unconditional love and forgiveness.

"Four years later I had got over it [the deaths]. I was absolutely fine."

Mr MacGregor realised his final stage of forgiveness three months ago when he visited Maddrell in prison.

"I had to teach him that I wasn't condoning his actions or making the offence any the lesser. But I was bringing to mind the part of him that was in me. I said: 'Richard Maddrell, I unconditionally forgive you for the murder of Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie.'

"That was pretty emotional. I could hardly gasp out their names but at the end of it I felt euphoric, lighter, I felt the monkeys were off my back."

But his teachings hold no weight with New Zealand's tougher sentences campaigner Mark Middleton, whose step-daughter Karla Cardno was raped and killed by Paul Dally in 1989.

"That sounds all very nice and PC to me but ... I live in a much more different world and his children's killer is locked up for life.

"I'm talking about a very different category of person - highly predatory, dangerous and violent, who will not rehabilitate and is just a danger to everybody else and themselves."

Middleton received a nine-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, in February after being convicted of threatening to kill Dally.

He plans to bid for a seat in Parliament on a ticket of tougher penalties for criminals.

Mr MacGregor and Middleton have debated the issue on Australian television.

"It is so much different in my case, where a man ... wants no forgiveness. So all I've got to say, is why the hell should we?"