"I could be next": Abused women fearful of Rowan Baxter copycats
Hannah Clarke’s brother has opened up about the horror he had faced after hearing the traumatic way his sister and her children were murdered, while a women’s legal service reveals there has been an increase in calls from women saying their partners have threatened to kill them the same way.
Ms Clarke and her three children were brutally killed in Brisbane last week after her estranged husband, Rowan Baxter, doused them in petrol and set them alight.
Speaking to 7.30, her brother, Nathaniel Clarke, said the things that “cut me the deepest” is that Baxter made them suffer.
“It wasn’t quick. It was planned and executed,” said Mr Clarke.
“He had a plan that night when he called the kids and he was a blubbering mess. He knew what he was doing then. He had it all planned out, he knew what he was doing the following morning.
“He couldn’t even do it quick. That’s the worst thing. He made them suffer, and her.”
Angela Lynch, CEO of Women’s Legal Service Queensland, said the service had been inundated with calls since the incident.
“We’ve had clients and women saying that their perpetrators and their partner is saying they’re going to do what he did to them. They are fearful and something inside them has said, ‘I could be next’,” said Ms Lynch.
Mr Clarke said the day his sister was killed was “the worst day of my life”.
“I was out in the paddock working, and the bloke I work with called me in and said, ‘Look, you’ve got to take this, it’s personal,” said Mr Clarke.
“I took it and my wife couldn’t get the words out. I got: ‘You need to come home’, and then silence. And my heart broke. I didn’t know if it was my kids, I didn’t know what was going on.
“And then the next thing she said is: ‘He killed them all’.”
Mr Clarke then called his father who had told him that his sister was in intensive care.
“I didn’t know the magnitude of what had happened,” said Mr Clarke.
“It had been explained on the phone what sort of had happened, but I didn’t know the whole nation had already stopped.”
Mr Clarke said looking back, there weren’t many signs over the years that Baxter was a toxic individual.
“He seemed at the start like a good bloke,” said Mr Clarke.
“There were a few things but you didn’t see, obviously, what we’ve seen now. You couldn’t have seen that from the start.”
He said one of the “small things” was that he and his sister suddenly started having less contact.
“You think something’s wrong but you can’t put your finger on it,” said Mr Clarke.
“You just sort of think, ‘Oh, it’s just family problems between you and your sister’ … but to look back, in a big picture over a timeline, you can now see triggers, I suppose, of, ‘OK, this makes a lot more sense now on what he was trying to do’.”
Mr Clarke said his brother-in-law’s controlling nature was more obvious in the last two or three years.
"He was the type of person that had to win everything, had to be the best at everything, really didn't like when he wasn't," he said.
"He had to control every moment he was in.
"To be one of those people, it does make you selfish, and that was it. It was all about him."
Mr Clarke said he never imagined that Baxter was capable of carrying out such a brutal attack.
"Hannah had her suspicions that he might try to do something to her, but we all thought, 'No, he couldn't'.
"It was just a vicious attack to make her suffer as long as he could. And that was it. It was just — I still can't get over it."