Helen Hartup and two other women were fast asleep at the Sydney boarding school, where they worked as supervisors, when a man with a bloodied knife startled them.
“I’ve already killed tonight,” Samuel Leonard Boyd warned as he ordered her, Patricia Volcic, and Olive Short to undress.
After the teenage girls in the dorm next door, Boyd asked the women if there were any 16-18-year-olds among them so he could “have sex with them.”
All three were “absolute heroes” to stop him, says Margaret Lees, Mrs. Hartup’s niece.
“He knew the layout, where the girls were, and how to get to them.
“There was no way they would let him…and I’m not sure if that’s so well known, given everything else that happened that night.”
It’s been nearly 40 years since her 57-year-old aunt was murdered, but Margaret can still smell her Innoxa powder scent as she walks past the counter of a department store.
“I have to do a double take,” she says. “I hang out and put a little on my hand.”
Helen, a nine-year-old, was “the favorite aunt,” and Margaret fondly remembers visiting her in Morpeth, in the NSW Hunter Valley.
“She wore nice clothes. I remember touching her sleeves, they were always very soft, and when I got close, she would wrap her arms around me.
“She was always very warm and so nice. She was always smiling, and she made the most incredible sponge cakes.
“She didn’t deserve what she got.”
Helen’s younger sister Patty found a job at Glenfield Park Special School in Sydney’s southwest, where she was a registered nurse.
Some children were placed there by the court, others had been abused by relatives, and many were under state care.
Boyd emigrated from Scotland to Australia as a child and soon became known to the police. His mother also worked at Glenfield School in the 1970s, where Boyd often visited and met Helen.
His first victim in 1982 was Rhonda Celea. Detectives found the mother of two at her home in Busby, naked in the hallway, a bloodied children’s dress over her face and a gaping laceration in her throat.
Seven months later, he was drinking with Gregory Wiles at the Arch Bar Hotel in Liverpool before going to the Scaramouche Disco on April 22, 1983.
The pair shared a joint in Glenfield, and Boyd claims his next memory is wondering, covered in blood.
Mr. Wiles’ body was later found beside a road with serious head injuries from Boyd’s claw hammer that had fallen into the nearby school.
That evening, Margaret, heavily pregnant with her second child, was washing her baby in the kitchen when the radio caught her attention.
“I will never forget reports of something terrible that happened at Glenfield Park School piqued my ears. No further details are available at this time.”
She immediately called her mother and asked what was wrong.
“She said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ but someone tried to call her, so we hung up.”
Hours later, Margaret called back and asked if Helen was one of the victims.
“She paused and said yes. I just remember dropping the phone.’
Margaret would later be shocked by the detective who led Boyd’s prosecution: “I have never seen so much blood in all my life and the area it covered.”
As the attack unfolded, Olive Short was awakened by a scream and a man’s voice.
She peered around her room and saw Helen, who had called Boyd by her first name, and Mrs. Volcic huddled.
Knowing the teenage girls were in danger, she ensured the sturdy door to their sleeping quarters was locked and hid the keys.
Boyd had each of the women undressed and gathered them on a bed, where he terrorized and mistreated them for hours.
At one point, Mrs. Short ran to the alarm in the hallway, but Boyd got there first, punching and stabbing her in the neck and pushing her back onto the bed.
After being “stabbed many times”, she pretended to be dead, and eventually, Boyd turned off the light and left.
The day staff eventually found her, she was taken to the hospital. Her eyewitness testimony would play an integral role in the jury’s conviction.
Margaret read in the coroner’s report that one of the reasons Mrs. Short survived was because the latter had attacked her, and the knife was already covered in so much blood that the wound on her neck was congealing.
Boyd was found that morning at a caravan park in Lansvale, disoriented, disheveled, and covered in blood.
He insisted that his last memory was buying a pack of cigarette paper with Mr. Wiles at a Casula gas station.
The next day Margaret went into labor.
Her brother Malcolm was taken to the morgue behind a glass screen to identify Helen.
“It was absolutely etched in his memory, and from that moment on, he wasn’t the same person anymore.”
Margaret’s mother was advised not to attend the hearings, where the photographic evidence would be admitted. But she was in court every day from the first trial, which was aborted and disturbing for everyone.
“Knowing was better than the stories going around in your head,” Margaret says.
Since his conviction, Boyd has tried twice to secure a non-parole period. The last time, in 2017, Margaret moved to Cairns from Darwin, and her contact was not updated on the register.
Although none of Helen’s family was upset in court, she was relieved that both Judge Ken Carruthers in 1994 and Judge Peter Johnson in 2017 understood the gravity of what Boyd had done in refusing to hand over his sentence.
“That was the only chance I had to stand up in front of that guy in court and tell him exactly what I thought of him and what he was doing to our family,” she says.
“During the time he was in prison and had time to think, I wonder if he has any idea how terrible the consequences are, not just that night, but for 40 years after that.
“He took from us the most compassionate, easy, helpful, beautiful person God has ever put on this planet.”
Above all, Margaret wants the children and grandchildren of the three women to know what they have sacrificed, and to understand their courage.
“I don’t think their children would know who their mother was, what they were doing. Those three women gave their lives for those children.”