ON MARCH 30, 2006, at 11.58pm, 15-year-old Patrick Waring was in bed in his Perth home when the door to his room was pushed open. He might have been expecting it to be his parents - but they were 400 kilometres away on holiday. Assuming it to be his older brother, Michael, Patrick looked up to find instead several plain-clothes policemen standing in the doorway.

Ordered from bed, Patrick was advised that he was being arrested for the rape of a teenage girl that had occurred earlier that day. Though he denied ever having met the girl, Patrick, accompanied by Michael, was taken to a nearby police station. Frantic calls were made to the boys' parents, who immediately started driving back to Perth.

By the time they arrived at the station, it was all over. Patrick had been charged with rape and remanded, with a bail hearing set for the following Monday.

''We were disappointed that Patrick wasn't able to be released to us over the weekend,'' father Terry Waring says in Every Family's Nightmare. ''[But] we felt that it was just a process and that we would be able to get him back on the Monday.''