Grandmother of child who died in hot car warned authorities toddler was ‘in danger’, inquest told
The grandmother of a young girl who died when her mother left her in a hot car told protective services the child was “in danger”, an inquest has heard.
Darcey-Helen Conley, aged twoand-a-half, and Chloe-Ann, 18 months, died on 23 November 2019 at Waterford West, south of Brisbane, after the car they were in reached an estimated temperature of 61.5C.
Their mother, Kerri-Ann Conley, had left them in the car outside her home since 4am after returning from a drive to a friend’s place and using the drug methamphetamine.
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Conley pleaded guilty in February 2023 to two counts of manslaughter and was sentenced to nine years’ jail. She will be eligible for parole in November 2024.
The Queensland coroner’s court opened a five-day inquest at Brisbane on Monday and heard from Deanne Power, the mother of Darcey’s father, Peter Jackson.
Power said she had warned Queensland’s Department of Child Safety more than a year before the girls’ deaths that Conley was possibly using cannabis and methamphetamine while keeping Darcey in unsanitary living conditions.
“I said that [Darcey] was in danger living with her mother … I said Peter [Jackson] had a phone call from the daycare lady saying Darcey had no lunch,” Power said.
She said before the girls’ deaths, child safety workers were played a phone message in which Conley admitted falling asleep on the couch and leaving Chloe in the car all night.
Some of the issues the inquest will examine include the appropriateness of the response by the Department of Child Safety, and adequacy of its policies and procedures before the girls’ deaths.
Peter Jackson’s cousin, Tamara, told the inquest she became angry when the department decided to return Darcey to Conley’s care.
“Previously Kerri-Ann had admitted she was buying urine online and doing false drug tests. She said this in front of [a child safety support worker] but nothing was done,” Jackson said.
Jackson said she had shown police a text message from the same child safety support officer that told Conley to “stay off that shit if you can”.
“They clearly knew she was using,” Jackson said.
Darcey’s great-aunt, Deborah Jackson, told the inquest Conley had been leaving the hospital after Darcey was born to use drugs in her car and had to be let back in by security guards.
“One time she went to her drug dealer and did not get back to the hospital until 3am,” Jackson said.
Peter Jackson, who last year filed personal injury and negligence lawsuits against the Queensland government, was also due to give evidence at the inquest on Monday.
• In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186. The crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14.Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
always took immense pleasure in the public’s enthusiastic responses to his novels and worked tirelessly on each book, never wanting to disappoint a single reader.”
“I shall miss him hugely, not only as a wonderfully talented writer who gave joy to millions, but as a dear friend of enormous compassion and integrity,” she added.
Born Christopher John Sansom in 1952 in Edinburgh, the writer was the only child of an English father and a Scottish mother, whom he described as “traditional Presbyterian” and conservative “with a small and a capital C”. He developed socialist political leanings in his teens, and went on to study history at Birmingham University, attaining first a BA and then a PhD, with a thesis on the British Labour party’s policy towards South Africa between the wars. Later, he retrained as a lawyer and worked as a solicitor in Sussex, until he became a full-time writer.
His debut novel Dissolution, the first in his Shardlake series, was published in 2003, a classic closed-setting mystery set in a fictional monastery in Sussex on the eve of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. It was an immediate bestseller and was nominated for two categories in the 2003 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards. Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter called it “extraordinarily impressive”.
Six further Shardlake novels were published, and Sansom was working on the eighth in the series, Ratcliff, when he died. “His worsening health made progress painfully slow: his meticulous historical research and his writing were always so important to him,” Rejt said.
“The problem with history – and the further back you go, the truer this is – is that there are all sorts of gaps,” he told the Guardian in 2010. “With Tudor times, information is sparse: things have single or contradictory sources.
But where there are established facts, I do everything I can to insert the story around them.”
More than three million copies of the Shardlake novels have now been published, making it one of the most successful crime series of all time.
Antony Topping, Sansom’s agent, said: “Chris did not seek the limelight, preferring to be known through his novels, and so in comparison with his fame and reputation relatively few people were lucky enough to know the person behind the work. He had an immense, far-reaching and deeply humane intelligence. His fans can see this in the novels but he applied it equally in his everyday dealings with friends, in his politics and his charitable acts.”
“He had a loathing of injustice of any kind and a special contempt for bullies,” Topping added. “At the same time he had a joyful and piercing sense of humour which he would spring on you, with an attempt at a straight face, when you were least expecting it.”
Sansom’s final published novel was Tombland, in which Shardlake is working for the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth in 1549, two years after her father Henry VIII’s death. Shardlake is sent to Norwich to investigate a murder case involving Elizabeth’s distant relative, John Boleyn, and his estranged wife.
“Shardlake is a superb creation, who gains more substance with each new book”, wrote Stephanie Merritt in her Guardian review of Tombland. “He questions and challenges the political shifts of his age while remaining entirely plausibly shaped by them.”