Eddie Russell died in 1999. His parents tell his story to illustrate the deadly impact of mental health and cognitive impairment on Indigenous incarceration

'I just dropped the phone and screamed': the enduring pain of losing a child

'I just dropped the phone and screamed': the enduring pain of losing a child

Ted and Helen Russell haven’t stopped telling their story. It’s almost 20 years since their son Eddie died in jail, but the justice system isn’t finished with them yet.

Eddie was 19 when the royal commission into deaths in custody handed down 339 recommendations to prevent Aboriginal people from dying in jails and police watch-houses.

He didn’t make 30. Eddie was found hanged in his cell in December 1999, almost at the end of a seven-year stretch in prison.

He’d been moved out of a safe cell, even though prison staff had known for weeks that he was at very high risk of self-harm. He’d been allowed to keep a personal item which he used to take his own life, an item that the Long Bay property officer told the coronial inquest “should have been confiscated immediately”.

Eddie’s timeline goes like this:

At six months old, he was diagnosed with serious hearing loss which affected his learning and development. His parents said he was a happy and loving kid, and they were very protective of him growing up.

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At nine, Eddie’s speech therapist said in a report, “formal assessment still shows Edward’s auditory comprehension of language to be delayed” but that he “always tried hard in therapy sessions and was a pleasure to work with”.

At 13, his “ability to interpret, recall and execute oral commands of length and complexity” was severely delayed. Eddie would get frustrated at not being able to hear what people said and found it hard to follow instructions.

At 16, Eddie told his parents he’d been sexually abused by a local Catholic priest, “Father Dave”.

In the 1980s David Joseph Perrett was in charge of Walgett parish. A number of other boys had similar stories, Helen Russell said. A group of mothers went down to the Walgett police station to report it, “but nothing happened”.

In 1996 Perrett pleaded guilty to sexually abusing young boys in north-western NSW and was given a three-year good-behaviour bond.



Last month 81-year old Perrett was refused bail after being charged with 92 historical child sex abuse offences dating back to his time in Walgett, Dubbo, Lightning Ridge and Armidale. Perrett, who told the court he was in ill-health, is yet to enter a plea.

From age 18, Eddie was in and out of detention. On sentencing him in 1993, the judge noted Eddie’s special needs would make him especially vulnerable to “abuse, manipulation and maltreatment” in jail. Eddie needed ongoing care and observation, and needed to be close to his parents, with whom he had “a very solid and close relationship”.

No matter which jail Eddie was in – Lithgow, Bathurst, Goulburn, Long Bay – Ted and Helen Russell would travel to visit him every weekend.

Their main battle was to have Eddie’s classification changed. Eddie was an E2 or maximum security prisoner. In 1993 he’d run out of the Walgett police station and hid in his parents’ van until they found him there and persuaded him to return to the station and face the charges. Eddie was sentenced to 100 hours community service for escaping, but the E2 classification remained on his record throughout his entire time in jail.

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The governor of Bathurst jail tried on several occasions to have it changed so Eddie could do his time at a nearby prison farm, close to his parents and in a much less threatening environment, but it was turned down.

“We tried and tried and tried,” Helen Russell says.

Eddie spent the rest of his sentence in Long Bay, first in the jail and then the prison hospital, where he was found dead on 3 December 1999.

“When Eddie died it was 24 hours before we found out,” Helen Russell says.

“I was at Coonamble. I was going to the post office to send money to Eddie, when this field officer ran out of the courthouse and ran after me saying ‘Helen, you have to ring Long Bay Jail’.



“So I rang the number and they said: ‘We’ve just lost Edward.’

“I just dropped the phone and screamed so loud. My brother and sister came running up. That’s how I got the message: in a public phone box, and I had to ring them.

“I still had the $100 in my hand I was going to send to him.”

Ted had started work at six am, chipping cotton, when he got the news.

“There were 30 or 40 of us. I had this little transistor radio, a wireless, you know. We used to like to listen to the news, it helped us get through the day. I kept hearing on the news at six o’clock, seven o’clock, “man found dead in Long Bay jail …”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ted and Helen, with Eddie (in photograph) and their grandson, Victor Fernando. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

“Helen’s cousin drove out and said to me, mate you got to get home. Eddie’s gone. And then I sort of knew, because I’d been listening to it all morning on the radio.”

Ted and Helen say Corrective Services flew them straight to Sydney that afternoon. They even took the family shopping for suits to wear to the service.

“They sent a car for us,” Ted says. “Corrections couldn’t do enough for us, the flights and so on. But nobody ever came to explain what happened to Edward.

“They showed us the cell where he was hanged. First they said the camera wasn’t working. Then they said he’d put wet toilet paper on the camera.”

Ted and Helen say the other Aboriginal prisoners were really upset by Eddie’s death, because “all the other fellas would look after him. They’d say to us, don’t worry, we’ve got him, we’ll look after him. They knew not to leave him alone.”

“What the boys did when we buried him, they did a collection in jail and raised $300 and sent it to us. And the undertaker in Walgett where we put Edward down said to us, here, those two plots next to him are for you. That’s what we spent the $300 on,” Ted says.



He takes a long pause.

“It’s a pain that never goes away.”

Eddie’s letter about Perrett was read aloud to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse earlier this year. Helen cried when she heard it, for the first time. Ted and Helen had come to Sydney to give evidence.

Investigations continue into what happened to Eddie and other children. Just last week, detectives came to their home to ask more questions; Helen thinks they are investigating other people apart from Perrett who were in Walgett in the 1980s.

“I wish Edward was alive to see this,” Helen says.

Eddie Russell’s story is, sadly, replicated over time. Guardian Australia’s Deaths Inside investigation found that 40% of Aboriginal people who died in custody between 2008 and 2018 had mental health issues or cognitive impairment.

Dr Megan Williams is head of Indigenous health at the University of Technology Sydney. She has more than 20 years’ experience of health service delivery and research on Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system and post-prison release.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Megan Williams has more than 20 years’ experience of health service delivery and research on Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

“People ask me, has anything changed? Well, yes it’s changed. It’s getting worse,” Williams says.

“We are criminialising mental health. Even people who are in for drug and alcohol-related things, you could say that’s a sign of a maladaptive disorder, self-medicating from an underlying mental health problem. With good care they wouldn’t go back to prison.

“Managing mental health in prisons needs a workforce of therapists who can work with Aboriginal people,” Williams says, and universities could do much more to offer that kind of training.

“We have a big Aboriginal health workforce, and they are expertly skilled. I see people with long, valuable workforce experience who would be ideal to study forensic mental health, adult workers who need upskilling. Universities can provide that sort of training, but they just don’t.”

Williams says unless the mental health sector finds ways of training the right workers in jails, things won’t improve.

“It’s infuriating, draining and demoralising to not be able to deliver the kind of workforce training that our own university research and evidence tell us is needed.

“If we know this, and do nothing about it, then as tertiary educators, as public servants, we are complicit.

“If we don’t address these needs, more people will die.”

• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Hotlines in other countries can be found here