Another tragic family killing in Western Australia
By
Cheryl Crisp
22 September 2018
The discovery of the bodies of five members of the one family, comprising three generations, in the Western Australian state capital of Perth, has raised further serious questions about the social crisis engulfing the once booming mining state.
It is alleged that on September 3, the day after Fathers’ Day, Anthony Robert Harvey, 24 years old, murdered his wife, Mara Lee Harvey, 41 and their three children—Alice and Beatrix, two-year-old twins, and Charlotte, aged three and a half. The next day, Beverley Ann Quinn, Mara’s mother, was allegedly killed when she arrived, as she often did, to assist her daughter with the children and the household chores.
Police accuse Harvey of staying in the house for some days with his dead family before travelling 1,500 kilometres north to his father’s home in Pannawonica where he turned himself in.
The bodies were discovered by police on September 9, based on the information provided by Harvey. However, police did not inform Mara’s only sister, Taryn Tottman, of her mother’s, sister’s and nieces’ deaths. She and her family found out on the news.
The children’s mother, Mara, who with Harvey had previously worked for Sino Steel Pilbara mines in the state’s north as fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers, had finished a shift stocking shelves at a Coles supermarket at 11 p.m. prior to her death. She and Harvey, her husband of almost three years, owned a Jim’s Mowing franchise. The couple reportedly bought into the franchise by selling some properties owned by Mara.
Mara’s family said there were no indications of problems in the household and that the tragedy was “unfathomable.” Most neighbours in the Bedford suburb, where the Harvey…