The Daoud Family Murders

This 1981 shooting is one of the reasons why gun control was introduced in Australia

Ask any police officer, and they’ll tell you that domestic violence incidents are among the most common and potentially dangerous jobs that they’re called to attend. Often volatile, and almost always emotionally charged, they’re unpredictable and at times involve extreme violence.

In Australia during the early-1980s, domestic violence (also known as family violence) was a mostly hidden issue. A crime that occurred behind closed doors and one seen by many as a private matter and not something that should be of concern to others. Thankfully, this attitude has changed, and while domestic violence is still under-reported it is at least now treated as the crime it is, and dealt with as a mainstream criminal justice issue.

Image: Artem Furman — Deposit Photos

InSeptember 1981, John Daoud was just nine years old when his father broke into his family home and shot dead his mother, his three brothers and his sister before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life.
The massacre was a final act of revenge from a man who had violently abused his wife for years. It was also the start of a lifetime of pain for the young boy left behind.

The Daoud Family

Fouad and Soussan Daoud arrived in Australia with their four young children from Lebanon in 1969. The family settled in suburban Sydney where several extended family members were already living. Their fifth child, John, was born just a few years later.

Soussan Daoud — Sydney Morning Herald

Soussan had learnt to sew shortly after arriving in Australia and had quickly found work as a seamstress with a local clothing manufacturer. She worked long hours, five or six days a week, right up until the day John was born, and was taken by ambulance from the factory floor to the labour ward to give birth.

She was a conscientious worker and a good employee, but with a new baby to care for there was little chance she be able to return to the factory any time soon. Not wanting to lose such a good worker, her employer, in a move that was well before its time, decided to provided her with a sewing machine, and from that point on, she did most of her work for them at home.

Fouad too had initially found work in a local factory, and from the time they arrived in Sydney held down a steady job until a workplace accident in 1977 left him with a spinal injury that prevented him from undertaking any strenuous physical labour. The injury resulted in him being awarded a workers compensation payout of $25,000, which was a considerable sum of money in those days, but from that time on, he carried out little in the way of paid work.

Outwardly, the Daouds appeared to be a typical migrant Australian family. They were pleasant to their neighbours, generally lived a quiet life and almost always kept to themselves. Yet, appearances can be deceiving, and the family’s life in Australia was far from idyllic. Money was always tight, and they just never seemed to have enough of it to go around, a situation made considerably worse by the fact that Fouad liked to gamble, often losing what little cash the family did have playing cards, and betting on horse races.

Over the years, the family had been evicted from several rental properties for failing to pay their rent. Fouad’s compensation should have been enough to set them up nicely. But as it was, he wasted almost $15,000 of it gambling leaving his family with just $10,000 to put towards a deposit on a house; a traditional brick bungalow that they purchased in First Avenue, Campsie.

Violence in the home

Soussan worked hard to keep a roof over their head and put food on the table, but with her husband always gambling away any money she managed to put aside just getting by was tough. Added to which, Fouad was a man with a savage temper and he was often abusive and violent towards his wife, so it’s little wonder that their relationship deteriorated and ultimately fell apart.

Years in a violent and unhappy marriage had to have been hard on Soussan, but with little support available to her, she mostly kept quiet and put up with her husband’s gambling and abuse for the sake of her children.

As time went on, Fouad’s violent outbursts and violence escalated. Eventually getting to the point where the local police were regularly being called to attend the family home. Yet, as was typical at the time, when the police arrived they did little more than order Fouad out of the house for a few hours to cool off before allowing him to return home. At one point, in 1980, Fouad beat Soussan so savagely that she needed to be hospitalised, but even then he managed to be avoid being charged with assault. Then in December that year, in a violent rage, Fouad threw his wife and children out of the house and onto the street.

This was the last straw for Soussan, she had finally had enough. Out of desperation and fear that the family would lose the house she’d worked so hard to keep, Soussan turned to the courts and filed for divorce. By March 1981 she had obtained a restraining order against her husband and a family court order giving her sole occupancy of the house. As well as protecting Soussan, the court orders restricted Daoud’s access to his children, allowing him to see them just once a week each Sunday and strictly prohibiting him from going anywhere near the family home.
“He tried to get her to take him back,” Mr Patrick Sattout, Soussan’s cousin, later told a Sydney court. “But she put her foot down for the first time in her life.”

Despite the court orders, the police continued to be called to the house over the following months as Fouad kept showing up unannounced to verbally abuse Soussan and demand money. For their part, the police approach to enforcement changed little. They would turn up and remove him from the house, but it was of little deterrence as not once was Fouad charged with breaching the court’s orders, and predictably, he’d go away when ordered to do so and just turn up again later.

Finally, on 21 September 1981, after Fouad threatened to kill his estranged wife and children, the police told him that they’d arrest him if he went back to the house again.

Later that day, Fouad walked into Bankstown police station, about a twenty-minutes drive from Campsie, and filled out a simple application form on which he declared he had no criminal record. Then, he paid an administration fee of $2 and was issued a shooter’s licence.

In 1981 computers and digital records were unheard of in day-to-day policing, and the police officer who processed Fouad’s shooter’s licence application had no idea about the domestic violence orders Soussan had taken out against her husband. Nor did he know that only hours earlier Fouad had breached those orders and threatened to kill his family — but, he could easily have found out with a simple telephone call to Fouad’s local police station.

Sometime over the next couple of days, Fouad Daoud took his new shooter’s licence into the City where visited a gun store in George Street. There, despite his history of violent behaviour, he legally purchased a .22-calibre rifle and ammunition.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 23 September 1981, just two days after his last illegal visit, Fouad returned to the family home and demanded to see his children. Again, Soussan refused him entry and called the police. Fouad was furious, yet the knowledge that the police were on their way and that they’d threatened to arrest him was enough to get him to leave the property. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered, as the police never did arrive at the house that afternoon.
24 September 1981

In the early hours of the next morning, Fouad, 44, returned to the house. This time with his newly acquired rifle and a large hunting knife. What happened next was horrific, and the details of Fouad’s actions would need to be pieced together by detectives from police forensics and the account given by nine-year-old John Daoud.

A little before 1:45 a.m. Fouad broke into the house and made his way to a bedroom shared by his two oldest boys. There, he shot and killed his 21-year-old son, Najib, then shot and wounded another of his sons, Joseph, 18. It was a callous and calculating move that ensured the only two of his children physically capable of challenging him and potentially stopping his murderous rampage were incapacitated first.

Next, Fouad walked into the master bedroom where his youngest son, John, and his estranged wife were sleeping. There, he ignored John and shot Soussan in the head, killing her instantly.

With his wife dead, Fouad turned his attention to his 19-year-old daughter, Yolla, who, woken by the noise, had walked out into the hallway. Without hesitation, Fouad shot her where she stood, then he turned his gun on another of his sons, Simon, 15, when he too walked out of his room to see what was going on.

About this time, John woke and was confused by the commotion. He slipped off the bed and turned on a bedside lamp. What he saw next would haunt him for years. “I woke and she was dead beside me,” John told a court some years later. “I didn’t hear any shots. Then my father came at my brother Joe and fired a shot. The bullet missed and dad disappeared.”

Joseph, who’d already been wounded by his father, had come storming towards the sound of the gunfire and despite his injuries did his best to stop his father. But having lost a considerable amount of blood, he was little match for Fouad who quickly fought him off and stabbed him with his knife. Leaving Joe bleeding on the floor, Fouad left the room and went to the back of the house.

With their father out of the room, Joseph urged his young brother to call for help. Too short to reach the phone, John pulled a chair over to wall, climbed up and dialled 000, the Australian emergency number. The call was answered at 1:46 a.m. and at first the emergency operator thought John’s call was a prank, but it was soon apparent the young caller was in dire need of help.

A transcript was later released by authorities and published in several Sydney newspapers:

Operator: Fire brigade, fire brigade, fire brigade.
John: Excuse me for a minute, all right now I can.
Operator: Do you want to report a fire or just muck about?
John: I want to report a fight. My father came in our house and shot all my brothers and my sister and my brother and tried to kill my brother also.
Operator: Where do you live?
John: 15 First Avenue, Campsie. With a gun
Operator: Let me talk to your mother please.
John: She’s dead.
Operator: She’s dead?
John: They’re all dead.
Operator: Well, how come you’re still alive?
John: He never shot me or touched me.
Operator: Pardon?
John: He never shot me.
Operator: He didn’t shoot you?
John: No. Can you come over and get my brother please?
Operator: Who shot them?
John: My father.
Operator: Your father?
John: Yeah.
Operator: What’s the nearest cross street to your house?
John: Ahmm. Pardon, what did you say?
Operator: What’s the nearest street corner called?
John: I don’t know.
Operator: You don’t know?
John: No, but can you come over please?
Operator: You want a policeman to come over, do you?
John: Yes please.
Operator: You want a policeman, do you want an ambulance too?
John: I beg your pardon?
Operator: Where’s your father?
John: He’s gone.
Operator: He’s gone, he’s gone where?
John: Back home to his wife.
Operator: Pardon?
John: My brother is still bleeding. They’re brothers. Can you call the police please and tell them to come home?
Operator: Call the police for you. Yes, alright, I will get a policeman down there to talk to you. OK?
John: Yes, bye bye.
Operator? OK, bye bye.

John ended the call at 1:50 a.m. and a radio message was broadcast to police less than sixty seconds later.

With help on the way, John went back to his brother and sat with Joseph who was still laying on the floor, bleeding out. As the two of them sat silently waiting for help, Fouad burst back into the room and shot Joe again, this time in the head. Just as he did earlier, he ignored John, turned and ran out of the room.

The police arrive at the scene

Within minutes of John’s call, First Avenue Campsie was swarming with police, and as the first officers ran up the front path towards the house, they heard a gunshot from inside. It turned out to be the final shot Fouad fired — the one with which he took his own life.

Rosario Signorelli, then a young general duties constable from Campsie Police Station, was the first police officer to arrive at the scene.

“The boy [John] opened the door, but I couldn’t push it open because there was something obstructing us,” then Sergeant Signorelli would tell a Sydney court years later.

The obstruction was the body of 19-year-old, Yolla, and John had no choice but to grab his sister’s lifeless legs and drag her out of the way before the police could get in.

Amazingly, Joseph Daoud was still alive when police got to him. The 18-year-old was quickly bundled into an ambulance and taken to the nearby Canterbury Hospital. However, his injuries were catastrophic and he died soon after arriving, leaving nine-year-old John the only family member to survive his father’s deadly rampage.

Over the years there has been some speculation as to why Fouad let John live. And the most viable conclusion anyone has been able to draw is that his youngest son was his favourite; likely because he was so young and the only person in the family who still liked spending time with his father.

A weak and ineffective system

The Daoud family murders generated a lot of media coverage over the following days and drew considerable attention to the mostly silent crime of domestic assault in the broader Australian community. In the weeks following the murders, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article that explained the deficiencies in domestic violence laws and how they effectively worked against the women they were meant to protect.

In the early 1980s, when police arrested and charged somebody with a criminal offence, it was, as it is now, typically the arresting officer who signed the police charge sheet, making the investigating officer the legal informant and principal witness to the case. However, this was not so for offences involving domestic violence. In those cases, it was the usual practice of police to have the victim, almost always a battered wife, sign the charge book themselves. Thus making the victim the legal informant, an approach that was considered by many to be unfair and discriminatory.

As the law stood at the time, a wife could not be subpoenaed to court and compelled to give evidence against her husband. A situation that was a considerable problem for police, who could be left with little or no evidence of any offence having taken place if the battered wife chose not to give evidence.

While having the victim sign the charge sheet ensured the police could not be held responsible by the courts for any failed prosecution it was an exceptionally cruel practice. As by leaving the decision about whether to press ahead with charges in the victim’s hands, the system left them open to pressure from the offender, his friends and his extended family to drop the case. Predictably, this practice resulted in many domestic assault charges being dropped at court and was a significant factor in the reluctance of police to take any formal action when called to a domestic violence incident.

Thankfully, the practice no longer takes place as the law has been changed and there is now no spousal privilege in Australia, meaning that both husbands and wives can be subpoenaed to give evidence against their spouse.

John Daoud takes civil action

In 1997, 16 years after the massacre, John Daoud, by then a 25 year old truck driver for a local Council, sued the State of New South Wales and the Office of the Police Commissioner for failing in their duty of care by issuing his father with a shooters licence.

John’s barrister, Mr David Rolf, QC, argued that Fouad should never have been issued a shooters licence as he had threatened to shoot members of his family, and the police knew this. He also told the court that Fouad had put his wife in hospital the year before the murders and that the police knew this too. And they were aware that there was a restraining order out against Fouad to protect his family. Besides which, he argued, they ought well have known, and could easily have found out, that Soussan had been granted sole ownership of the family’s house because of Fouad’s violent behaviour and ongoing gambling problem.

25 year old, John Daoud outside court in 1997 — Sydney Morning Herald

The jury also heard evidence from a psychiatrist who told the court that John Daoud, who had once been a “delightful young man,” had been forever traumatised and changed by his father’s actions and was at risk of committing suicide.

Mr Joseph Sadi, a long-time family friend, gave evidence that Fouad’s actions that night had changed John forever. “I just didn’t see that smile that he used to have before the tragedy,” he told the court.

In response, Mr Don Grieve, acting for the Police Commissioner, argued that in 1981 it was “over the top” to expect that police would have made thorough background checks. “Should that person go and interview the wife of the husband, children, neighbours, the bank manager? Where does it all stop?” he said. “How far does it have to go before he can be satisfied?”

In the end, the jury sided with John and found that the police had failed in their duty of care and should never have issued Fouad a shooters licence. John was awarded $250,000 in compensation — $50,000 each for the five innocent lives his farther had so brutally taken.

This article was first published on my Medium account. (https://medium.com/the-true-crime-edition/the-daoud-family-murders-658b18266940)