Real life: My grandson saw his mummy’s murder

Denise, 66, from Ballarat, VIC, shares her true life story.

My daughter Sharon was in fits of giggles as she bounced on the trampoline with her little boy.

“Look at me, Mummy!” Aron, four, beamed.

The pair of them were inseparable.

“You were born to be a mum,” I grinned, watching them in the yard.

It was true.

Aron was such a kind, happy little boy and that was all down to Sharon. Knowing she was a good mum gave her the confidence she’d lacked growing up.

When she was a child we’d discovered she had a learning disability. You’d never have known it when she was playing with her three big brothers or talking to people, but she had struggled with her schoolwork and it had made her feel different.

She went on to find work in a factory and had Aron when she was 25.

Her relationship with the dad didn’t work out. And as a single mum, money was tight.

“Come home for dinner and save some cash,” I offered.

It became a regular thing.

Every afternoon she picked up Aron from kindy and came over to eat with her dad, John, and me.

But when she went back to an empty home, she got lonely so she joined a dating site.

“Don’t take anyone home, only meet them in public,” I warned.

She had about half a dozen dates and then she started chatting to a man called Jason.

“It’s really sad. His fiancée died in a car crash seven years ago. He hasn’t dated since,” Sharon said.

‘Poor man’, I thought.

They hit it off.

“Look, he sends me pictures of flowers,” Sharon, 29, said, showing me.

She decided to meet him in person and came to see me afterwards.

“He was filthy!” she shuddered. “His hair and clothes were dirty, and he had missing teeth. I won’t be seeing him again!”

We had a bit of a laugh about it.

“Back to the drawing board,” I smiled.

Months later, I was visiting a friend when John called me.

He sounded in an awful state.

“I think something terrible has happened to Sharon,” he choked.

On his way back from golf he’d spotted police in Sharon’s street. Then her neighbour had called him and said they were actually at her house.

I raced over to her house and officers were waiting with John when I arrived.

He looked broken.

“What’s happened?” I cried.

“I’m afraid your daughter has been murdered,” an officer said.

I screamed in shock.

“Where’s Aron?” I cried.

Thankfully, he was safe.

Aron’s paternal granny, Anne, had popped over to Sharon’s house and found the kitchen splattered with blood.

Sharon was dead in her bedroom, a thick knife wound across her neck.

I was reeling in shock, but there was more.

“Aron was alone with his mum’s body for three hours,” the officer said.

When Anne had found him, he was traumatised.

“A big man came last night and he bashed Mummy with a baseball bat. She won’t wake up,” he’d told Anne.

Later that day, police dropped Aron off with us.

He clung to us, still terrified.

“He saw some of what happened,” the officers confirmed.

I felt sick.

A detective told us their suspect was Jason John Dinsley, the filthy online date she’d met for coffee.

It turned out that during their disastrous date, Sharon had been embarrassed to be with him at her local coffee shop so they’d ended up going back to her place.

To get rid of him, she got a friend to call her with a fake family emergency, then she’d dropped him off at the train station.

“That’s how he knew where she lived,” the detective said. “He took a cricket bat to her home, broke in and killed her because she’d rejected him.”

He’d tried to rape Sharon at knifepoint too but failed.

The full horror was too much to take in.

Worse was that Dinsley had 140 previous convictions, and was out on parole for rape.

A few weeks before he killed Sharon, he’d failed a drug test. He should have been arrested immediately, but instead the parole board told him to report back to them in two weeks.

In the meantime, he murdered our daughter.

“How can a violent sex offender be allowed to roam free?” John said.

Over 1000 people came to Sharon’s funeral. I was so distraught, but I had to be strong for Aron. He clung to me, not fully understanding what was going on.

Afterwards he suffered awful night terrors and feared the dark. He had to see a psychologist and over time talked about what he’d seen.

“Mummy screamed like an eagle when the bad man hit her,” he revealed.

It broke my heart.

John and I went to court to see Dinsley plead guilty to murder, aggravated burglary and attempted rape.

I’d built him up in my mind to be this great big hulking brute. He was pathetic though, like a weed.

He was jailed for 32 years.

Afterwards, we campaigned for stricter parole conditions.

The coroner found Sharon’s murder would have been prevented if his parole had been cancelled after the failed drug test.

We miss Sharon so much. There’s a gaping hole in our lives and that’s thanks to a system which failed to recognise what anyone with common sense could – Jason Dinsley was too dangerous to be out on

the streets.

Our saving grace is that Aron is doing incredibly well, despite what he’s been through.

He’s nearly 10 now – a happy, outgoing boy, and a credit to his mother.

He talks about her often.

At the cemetery, he always kisses her headstone and takes a little gift.

“Do you think Mummy loved penguins?” he asked me recently.

“She loved all animals,” I smiled.

So, we scoured the shops until we found a little penguin garden ornament. It’s solar powered and shines at night.

It reminds me of the star Aron’s picked out in the night sky for his mum.

“She’s shining down on me,” he says.

Sharon’s hopes and dreams were that her little boy would grow into a good man, the kind of man she hoped to find when she went looking for love.

Instead, she found a monster who robbed her beautiful little boy of his devoted mummy.