A moment of madness

CLICK HERE for video and story info.

ROBERT: Tell us about your mum.

CORINNE: Well...she had a beautiful smile and she always smiled, even through bad times. Um, she had pretty blue eyes and she was caring. Um, she'd give us her last five bucks.

ASHLEA: It was an accident. She didn't purposely go out there and intend to kill somebody's mother. It wasn't intentional. It was just a stupid mistake she made one night.

ROBERT: It was the night one mother took the life of another.

POLICEMAN: It was a huge hit, it was a massive hit and you knew...as soon as you see cars like that you know it's a really big hit, really fast hit.

POLICEMAN 2: Oil, glass, plastic, metal, just all over the place.

CORINNE: I felt like my heart got ripped out of my chest. (SOBS)

ROBERT: The mother who died was sober. The mother who survived wasn't. Two families bound by grief, torn apart by remorse and bitter thoughts of revenge.

SAM: Homicidal thoughts start running through your head, like everything just...the level of hatred just goes ballistic, through the roof.

ROBERT: June two years ago in the New South Wales Southern Highlands. Living near each other are the McKeown and the McMahon families. Kerry McMahon is a single mum bringing up four kids, the much-loved daughter of John and Elissa. What sort of a daughter was Kerry?

ELISSA: A little bit of a rebel but a very loving, very loving girl. We had a very close relationship. She had a very big sense of family, very big sense of family and there's nothing she wouldn't do for her kids or for us, come to that matter.

ROBERT: Kerry was 37, a bit of a battler who fought hard to keep her family together after her de facto husband died.

SAM: We don't have a dad and we relied on my mother. She was everything, like, just that one person and overnight....it's gone. Nothing gets better, nothing's gotten better.

DAMION: Yeah, you realise what you had when it's gone. You don't appreciate it when it's in front of ya.

ROBERT: How hard is it for you to be here today?

BILLY: Yeah, pretty hard but this is what Mel wants. She wants to...she wants something good to come out of it. She stuffed up, she made her a big mistake, um. If doing this program sort of saves one other family going through what we've gone through, it'd be a good thing. It's what she wants to do, so I'm here doing it for her.

ROBERT: Mel is the woman who killed Kerry. Billy Thomas is the biker she fell in love with 26 years ago when he was 19. They have two children together. How would you describe her?

BILLY: Mel, just like that - sweet, innocent kid, um, good mother, good wife, a terrific mate - that pretty much sums her up.

ROBERT: None the less, it was a turbulent relationship. Early on they split, met other people. Melissa had three more children to another partner. And then, 13 years ago, Billy and Mel got back together. It's not your classic romance but it sounds like an enduring love story. You're still there years later.

BILLY: Yeah, yeah, definitely nothing classic about us. We've had our ups and downs but nothing we can't get over. We'll get through it all, eventually.

ROBERT: Friday 10 June is definitely one of those down days. Billy and Mel were going through a bad patch. He had left her. She drove to the local pub, the Tahmoor Inn, to drown her sorrows with a friend. Melissa McKeown stays here drinking with her girlfriend for another 4.5 hours. She will later tell police that in that time she downed four or five schooners and two cans of bourbon and cola and when it's finally time for the two women to leave it's Mel who gets behind the wheel, drives 300m to her friend's place,
up the road, where she carries on...drinking. It's just after 10pm when Melissa decides to call it a night. Her friends beg her not to drive, even offering a bed for the night, but she ignores their pleas and insists on taking her car. At that time of night it's just a short drive - only seven minutes. Pissed, she drives 3km before sideswiping a silver Kia sedan with two female students inside. They're lucky to survive but driving behind them is Kerry McMahon. One second and 23m later, Mel's Ford Territory, on the wrong of the road, slam's head-on into Kerry's Ford Fairlane. Four minutes later, senior constable Andrew Meznaric and his partner, Daniel Churchill, get the code red call. This is the actual police video.

CON MEZNARIC: As I'm approaching that Shell service station, you start doing the big suck in... (BREATHES IN) ..you know, getting ready to be faced with... ..you don't know what you're going to be faced with.

ROBERT: First, they try to help Kerry McMahon.

CON MEZNARIC: When I saw the car, when I got close to the Fairlane with all the people standing around, when I saw the collision damage, you just knew it was a big hit. And that's when I saw her, just pretty much all squashed in there, still alive. There was a bloke holding on to her head and keeping her still and she was semi-conscious. Her eyes were opening and closing and looking up at me. I said, "Just stay awake, the ambulance are on their way."

ROBERT: Andrew's colleague, Daniel Churchill, heads over to what's left of Melissa McKeown's car. She has a broken nose, broken ribs, shattered knees and a fractured sternum but she's conscious.

DANIEL CHURCHILL: I put my head in the window and asked if she was trapped and she just responded with, saying, "It's my fault, I knew I shouldn't have driven, I've had too much to drink."

CON MEZNARIC: I asked a couple, a couple of guys that were hanging around at the car right next to me, I said, "Can one of youse go help my mate over there?î and the bloke standing next to me goes, "F--k that. She's pissed."

ROBERT: Could you smell alcohol on her?

DANIEL CHURCHILL: Oh, yeah, huge. She stunk of it. Yep, just the moment I put my head in there and talked to her, all I could just smell was alcohol and it was, it was...it reeked.

ROBERT: People watch movies, they watch the news, they're always so removed from the idea of somebody who's dying. What's it like for you to be there, holding a woman's hand knowing she's dying?

CON MEZNARIC: You, um, you sort of know that you're lying to her by saying it's going to be OK and, um, you're going back through your training, about, you know, try and keep them conscious, don't let them go to sleep, talk to 'em. In the state that she was in the car, there's medically nothing I can do for her. All I can do is be there and comfort her. You see the heart rate monitors sitting on the back seat of the car and they're beeping slowly and then they stop beeping and then they start beeping again. It was, it was more personal because I was talking to her, so... Really sorry that, um...couldn't get her out. She couldn't say anything. She tried to say things to me and I think I sometimes wish that, or hope that she was trying to say something for me to pass on but... I'm really sorry we couldn't help her.

ELISSA: When she lay there dying, was she thinking of her kids? She would have been. I know she fought to stay alive but she couldn't.

ROBERT: By sheer coincidence Kerry's eldest son, Sam, was at the service station just up the road, buying cigarettes.

SAM: Just looked at the crash site and just shook me head, walked in the servo. And I said to the service station attendant, "Oh, what's happened here?" and he said a single mum had been killed in a crash or something and it didn't click at the time. There's heaps of single mums, heaps of young mums around.

ROBERT: Two hours after the crash, here at Liverpool Hospital, a sample is taken of Melissa McKeown's blood. The alcohol content is 0.189 - now that's more than three times the legal limit. Expert tests estimate that at the time of the crash, it was 0.219. That is more than four times the limit.

BILLY: Just remembering, um, the first, virtually the first words of her mouth was, "I don't deserve to be here. I should have died in that accident." That's pretty heartbroken.

SAM: Yeah, I hate her. A lot more than hate - I hate her, I hate her family, I hate everybody that calls her a friend, I hate all of her associates. If there was no law protecting them, I'd do anything in my power to make their lives hell.

CON MEZNARIC: It makes you very angry. Look what's happened, you know - a family have lost their mum just because of someone's, you know, stupid decision to go out and, you know... She's claiming that she was having a bad day. She said to me in the car, "I'm having...oh, I have had a bad day." Well, your bad day has now killed someone. Justify that to me.

ELISSA: We didn't find out till the next morning, 4:00 the next morning. I thought I heard knocking and then the policeman asked us to sit down and I knew someone was dead and then when he told us it was Kerry, I just felt the blood drain from me and I was holding onto John's arms and my knees buckled and John was crying but I couldn't cry. I was so angry that I couldn't cry. Why couldn't I cry? She was my daughter, I loved her but I couldn't cry.

CORINNE: Got a phone call at about 8:30 in the morning, off my nan, and the first thing she said to me was "Corinne..." and I said, "Yeah," and she said, "Your mum..." and as soon as she said that, I knew something was wrong and she said, "She was killed in a
car accident" and I just screamed and I couldn't talk for two hours.

ROBERT: How were your brothers?

CORINNE: A mess.

DAMION: I just felt empty. Like, what's my future? Like, um, I don't know, this feeling inside - you just feel so empty. Like, we didn't just lose Mum, like, we lost...we lost our...we lost ourselves. Like, I don't know, I can't explain it properly but...

SAM: Lost our sense of home. If you're 19 years old, or 14 years old at the time, you're used to being in a normal household, like we were used to being in a normal household, as normal as Mum made it. Being a single mother, bringing us up, it wasn't your normal household but it was normal to us. Mum had brought us up from start to scratch, like... It just, yeah, changed, took, changed everything, every aspect, everything. We went from what we were used to to just a total new lifestyle. If only she just did what she was meant to do by the law and just get in a taxi and get driven and pay the $20 cab fare.

ROBERT: When mother of five Melissa McKeown drove drunk and killed mother of four Kerry McMahon, her licence was not taken. She didn't stop offending and her victim's family saw this but could do nothing.

HOWARD BROWN: On a couple of occasions, the boys have rung me and said, if you pardon the French, "That bitch is still driving around. She's blowing the horn. She's laughing and joking with everyone. She doesn't think killing Mum is serious."

ROBERT: How can a drunk driver, a leglessly drunk driver, kill a woman and keep her licence?

HOWARD: Well, I do not understand the way police apply the law.

ROBERT: It's a law with a loophole that Howard Brown from Victims of Crime wants closed. This is how it happened. If police don't charge a drunk driver within 48 hours of a crash, that driver keeps their licence, even if they have killed someone. In New South Wales, for example, police wait for the courts to act so drunk drivers, speeding drivers, drivers high on drugs, all of them allowed to stay behind the wheel.

HOWARD: This is not the type of person you want to be sharing the road with and we should be taking their licences from them right now and preventing them from being on the roads and putting you and I at risk.

ROBERT: Not only did Melissa McKeown keep her licence for 22 months, she was caught speeding twice during that time.

BILLY: Probably doing about 65 in a 60 zone or something, something stupid like that.

ROBERT: It was more than that. Do you find that extraordinary, that she did that?

BILLY: Christ, I do 20km over the limit just leaving my house to go to the shops. Everybody does that. Everybody forgets to watch their speedo.

ROBERT: You weren't involved in a crash that killed a woman, though. Surely that would have given you a new perspective on driver safety, wouldn't it?

BILLY: Mel wasn't speeding at the time of the accident.

HOWARD: To quote one the ambulance officers who attended the scene, he was so concerned that he would go PCA after inhaling the vapours that came off Melissa McKeown, it was quite obvious that she was well and truly drunk.

ROBERT: Enough evidence there to take her licence from the?

HOWARD: It's probably the thing that actually saved her life. She was so drunk that she was completely relaxed during the accident and that's why her injuries were not fatal.

ROBERT: One week after the crash, Kerry McMahon was buried.

SAM: The funeral was like watching your mum goes six feet under. I was just hoping it was a nightmare and I'd wake up.

ROBERT: Two weeks before her trial, Melissa McKeown got marriedto Billy. At court, she pleaded guilty, got a 25% reduction on her sentence, was jailed for five years and three months. She is eligible for parole in three years. Standing by her throughout
was Billy. Melissa, do want to speak to us at all?

BILLY: No, she doesn't. Mate, she's only just holding it together now. She doesn't need you pricks (BLEEP) harassing her, alright?

ROBERT: Well, we've got to do the story.

BILLY: No, you don't. Why do you have to?

ROBERT: Well, a person died too.

BILLY: Yes, that's right and you don't think that she suffers for it every day and our family's been torn apart?

REGAN: She used to lock herself in her room most of the time, cry a lot. You'd hear her crying during the night. It keeps us awake. It kept us awake.

ROBERT: Going to court. Seeing Melissa McKeown. Hearing her letter of remorse. How did you feel?

ELISSA: I felt like getting her all and giving her a bloody good hiding. I don't want her apologies. It's too late for apologies. You can't say sorry when you taken someone's life.

ROBERT: The McMahon family don't buy it. They don't think she is remorseful. Are they wrong?

BILLY: Christ, yeah. There's not a day goes past that Mel doesn't beat herself up over what happened. Um... To tell the truth, I don't give up flying (BLEEP) what the (BLEEP) McMahon family think.

ROBERT: That's pretty harsh. That's a harsh thing to say, to not care what they think. Do you really mean that?

BILLY: I understand the grief they're going through. Um... I've got my own family to worry about. Because of one stupid mistake and that mistake has affected a hell of a lot of people. I don't...I don't have to ask the McMahon family for forgiveness.
I don't even.....all's I'm asking, maybe they understand it. You know, what's the Bible say? "Let him without sin throw the first stone?"

ROBERT: It also says "an eye for an eye."

BILLY: Don't doubt that.

ROBERT: You wouldn't forgive, would you?

BILLY: Eventually, I might do. I don't know. Um, a bit early in the piece to forgive. If it was me, no, I probably would have taken matters into my own hands.

REGAN: She got labelled a killer, a murderer, all that sort of stuff. Getting letters like that and threats in the mail, it pretty much teared Mum apart. She didn't know how to deal with it.

ROBERT: While Melissa McKeown is in jail, Billy looks after her children, including their 5-year-old son, Matthew. How do you explain to him what's happened?

BILLY: Oh, it's a bit hard. For a while, Matthew used to ask me if I was cranky with Mummy. Is that why I wouldn't let Mummy come home? It's been hard to explain to a 5-year-old, "Mummy's in jail, Mummy's not allowed to come home."

ROBERT: Does he know Mummy killed someone?

BILLY: He doesn't understand that. We're the lucky ones. We only got a 3- to 5-year sentence. The McMahon family has got a life sentence. It's something they have to live with the rest of their lives.

ROBERT: Kerry McMahon's four children no longer live under the same roof. They've been split up and now live with different family members.

SAM: I just miss waking up in a normal household, mainly. Just waking up in your own bedroom, knowing that your brother's bedroom's next to yours and your sister's is across the other side of the hallway and your mum's is at the end of the hallway.

DAMION: 'Cause it just took everything. took everything, like....just, like, all your love. Like, how you...I don't know, I can't explain it.

CON MEZNARIC: I drive past, I always look - always look. Yep. Foot off the accelerator, you slow down a bit, you look. You think about her eyes looking at you and then put your police hat back on and keep going back to work.

ROBERT: Every Wednesday, Kerry's mum and dad, Elissa and John, go to see their little girl.

ELISSA: Hello, darling. Here we are again. Two Christmases ago, that was our first Christmas without her and all I could buy her was a gravestone. You don't want to do that your kids. You know...

JOHN: Would you please, God, bless us all, bless us all. Please keep us healthy and safe as good, as good...

ELISSA: That's enough. I hope she knows what she's done to our family. So whatever you do, don't drink and drive. Just don't do it.