The Bartholomew Family Murders

On September 6, 1971, a modest remote cabin on a dairy farm outside Walunga, Australia, would become the scene of one of the country's largest mass

murders

and one of the most shocking and baffling crimes to date. date. The Bartholomew

family

was a large

family

living in In the countryside, Clifford Bartholomew and his wife Heather had been married for almost two decades at the time of the events and together they had seven children. Heather had been married once before, but had separated from her first husband, leaving her with a baby that she and Clifford raised together and the couple had a son who unfortunately died as a baby.

This loss did not stop life from going on; However, the cabin on the dairy farm was still full of life and activities. Their eldest child was a son called Neville Bartholomew who was 19 years old and helped on the farm and the youngest was a daughter called Sandra June Bartholomew who was only four meaning the house was always full of someone coming and going. , whether it was to school or work or simply helping with the many household tasks. the house and farm and clifford

bartholomew

had been able to rent this particular farm from his employer, the actual owner of the dairy farm that clifford had been working on for over 11 years and this meant that the family was quite settled in the house and on land and we were able to benefit from that stability, but about two months before September 1971, things took a drastic turn.

The rumors surrounding the events that followed make it difficult to determine exactly what caused the change, but we know without a doubt that Clifford and Heather's marriage had become incredibly strained. Some people speculate that the couple faced financial difficulties. Some people even blamed Heather for her poor household management and her mismanagement of her finances, but Clifford Bartholomew's employer would later come out to say in a statement to the press that They had been through tough times before and the couple had always coped. managed to get through them, they had a large family and Heather was a housewife, which meant there were times when money was a little tight, but it never seemed to affect them.

As we know, the marriage suffered this time another rumor, to which people at the time gave much more weight, they were rumors of an affair that a veteran had moved to the farm in the hopes of speeding up his recovery from the injuries he had sustained. received. in the service, but many blame his presence for the rift that arose between the couple and unfortunately it was a rift that would lead to so much tragedy that the man was never named and the rumors of an affair were never confirmed, but looking at the events that would happen Follow after the veteran moved on, many of the pieces of the story started to make a little more sense.

Heather began to distance herself from her husband, she became colder and ignored him when he was home and started doing things particularly from outside. It seemed petty, she did everyone else's laundry, including the veterans, but picked out Clifford's clothes so he had to wash them himself and whenever he raised concerns about her behavior and possible relationship with the veteran. she would tear him down and act even colder towards him, who can see exactly what was going on behind closed doors, but we do know that in August of that year, Clifford moved out and went to live with his stepmother in her house about five miles.

Near the farm, Clifford was hoping to fix things with his wife and didn't want to be separated from his children, so he went to the farm when he could to try to spend time. with them and every time he returned he noticed a change in his children's attitude towards him, they became more distant and cold and Clifford realized that he would lose his entire family if he did not make peace with his wife, so he asked her If you could come and spend some time with all of them on Father's Day that year. Heather agreed at first to make plans and set a time when they could enjoy dinner together, but then, on the day she changed her mind, Clifford went to the cabin.

When he found the cabin almost empty, he brought a package of six beers and some soft drinks to share with his children, so he sat with the eldest Neville and had a couple of cans with him while they waited and slowly the rest of the children began to slowly arrive and finally Heather came home and none of the children seemed particularly happy to see Clifford and neither did Heather, but she did her best to smooth things over and after they had had a big family dinner together they all went into the living room. listening to some records and watching television and when the little ones went to bed, clifford talked to heather about the possibility of returning to heather, but she was having none of it and flatly refused to allow clifford to return to the family cabin, so Clifford packed his things, said goodbye to his children, got back into his car and headed down the road.

He arrived around 9:30, he sat down and had a cup of coffee and tried to process everything that had happened and accept the fact. that his marriage was going to end with a divorce, but he was still lying there hours later trying to figure it all out and then he came up with a plan: he wouldn't lose his family if he got rid of his wife on the same day. The more he stayed up thinking about it that night, the more sense it made and then Clifford moved on to the next stage and started planning it. All he had to do was take Heather to the shed outside the cabin and he could kill her there and then no one could take her children away from him.

Clifford then got out of bed, got dressed, picked up the keys and got into his car, driving down the road in the middle of the night back to the cabin and parked near the back door, stopping at the shed, taking a rubber mallet, a rifle, a stash of bullets and then he crept into the house and headed straight to the room he and Heather used to share, but when he got there he found Heather and two of her children sleeping in the bed and he He knew he couldn't shoot her without waking the kids, so he left the rifle right next to the door in the hallway and snuck in and hit Heather on the head with the sledgehammer while she was sleeping, but it wasn't enough to knock her out and instead From that she woke up and saw her husband standing in front of her with the mallet in his hand and she started screaming, if they had been alone in the house, things wouldn't have gotten worse. more here, but Heather's sister, Winnie Mary Keane, who was there visiting at the time, heard her sister scream for help and came running when she saw Clifford hit Heather with the sledgehammer again, knocking out Heather and Winnie, In a panic, he grabbed the rifle right next to the door. but instead of shooting, she ran down the hall and out of the house towards her car, she put the rifle right next to her and started looking for the keys to start the car, but by then Clifford had caught up to her. and hit her.

She with the sledgehammer, but just like with Heather, one hit wasn't enough to knock Winnie out and she somehow managed to get past Clifford and started running back to the house, but Clifford chased her again and caught her in the middle. back of the head. with the sledgehammer and Winnie fell, he hit her a couple more times on the head to make sure she stayed down and then he went back to the car and took the Clifford rifle and then very calmly walked back to her old bedroom where she was. Heather. still knocked out and lying on the bed and then shot him in the back of the head according to Clifford's original plan, his job was already done, but all that commotion and the screaming and of course the gunshot had woken up the kids and everything Hell. had gotten loose inside the house while they were struggling to get out of there, Clifford began shooting, aiming directly at the heads of those who did not resist and hitting those who did with the mallet until they too fell and he was able to shoot them too and He then entered the room where she had been sleeping with her 18-month-old son, Daniel Bryan Sean Keane, and shot her on his way back outside, Clifford heard her moan as she still lay on the floor, so he le shot in the head and covered his body with bags.

Clifford then put some things together. He wrote a letter to the police explaining why and how he did what he had done, partially blaming Winnie for the growing problems between him and Heather, and explaining that After shooting his 17-year-old daughter Christine, he realized that He loved his children too much to leave them behind and that was why he had killed them all. He then called the police and waited to be picked up and arrested at the dairy farm he and his family had lived happily on for over a decade, there is no mention of the veteran who supposedly started all of these problems in the police reports and no It's easy to tell if he was there that night, but Clifford's plan to kill only his wife led to 10 deaths in total, seven of them were his own children, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to death by hanging, a sentence which Clifford was happy to receive, but was overturned and commuted to life in prison when his attorneys were able to muster a not guilty by reason of insanity defense through other legal maneuvers.

Clifford was then released after serving only seven and a half years of his sentence and He would remarry becoming a stepfather to seven other children who only learned of his true identity after he and their mother had passed away leaving them more than a little confused and shocked and with nowhere but newspaper clippings and jail release cards to get answers. from you.