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Aussie love triangle ends in murder

Bernadette Liston’s daughter Jennifer was just 12 years old when she found her mother murdered on the floor of their suburban home.

It was a horrifying scene that no-one – let alone a child – should ever witness. The 46-year-old millionaire mum-of-four had been the victim of a relentless and frenzied attack.

‘Bernie was bludgeoned 20 times, mostly with the lid of a safe, and a knife blade bent on contact with her ribs. Her killer meant business,’ Bernadette’s sister Margaret Meer explains.

She had been shot, stabbed and her throat had been slit, plus several of her fingers had been broken, possibly as she tried in vain to protect herself.

Now 20, Jennifer has shown extraordinary courage in dealing with her mother’s murder and the tragic scene she encountered at the family home south of Adelaide, where she found her body in October 2002.‘Her mother would be proud of her,’ Margaret smiles. But the family’s heartache continues after Bernadette’s lesbian lover Francis ‘Frankie’ Marshall was this month found not guilty of her murder.

It follows a sensational trial that exposed a bizarre family love triangle in which Bernadette had a child with her lover’s brother, Daryl Purcell, and the two fell in love.

Bernadette first met Francis in 1993 at an Adelaide hospital after her two-year-old son Andrew suffered serious injuries in a near-drowning accident. Francis was in an almost identical situation – a child she was caring for at the time had also nearly drowned.

When Andrew – who was awarded more than $3 million in compensation for the accident – died two years later, the lesbian love affair began.
‘Bernie was grief-stricken,’ Margaret says. ‘The boy Francis cared for also later died. That brought them together.’ The couple were determined to have a child of their own and turned to one of Francis’ brothers to assist with artificial insemination. When that failed they sought assistance from Daryl to help with natural conception.

‘People have commented to us that because of this it’s a sordid story but Bernadette was not a tawdry woman,’ her brother Terry Liston says. ‘She was loving and generous.’


How it turned ugly

• Bernadette and Francis fall in love.

  • The couple decide to have a baby.

  • Wanting the child to share both their genes, they ask Francis’ brother Daryl to have sex with Bernadette.

  • Bernadette and Daryl fall in love and secretly plan to buy a house and marry.

  • Bernadette is found murdered in the home she shares with Francis.

  • Francis is charged with her murder.

  • The judge finds her not guilty.

Daryl agreed to father their child and had sexual intercourse with Bernadette about five times before a daughter, Rebekah, was conceived and born in July 1998.
And Daryl and Bernadette ended up falling in love.

‘I know without a shadow of a doubt that my sister intended to leave [Francis], with Rebekah,’ Margaret says. ‘The judge accepted that she and Daryl were planning to buy a home and marry.’

While Francis repeatedly denied any knowledge of Bernadette’s plans to leave her for her brother, a letter that Bernadette wrote to her sister Christina just days before her death spelled out the breakdown of her lesbian relationship.
‘Frankie and I are having some problems at the moment,’ she wrote. ‘It is certainly a horrible feeling to feel something so special fall apart and slip away. I don’t know if we will get through this...’

On the day of Bernadette’s murder, Francis says she took Rebekah, then four, with her on her fortnightly visit to family graves at an Adelaide cemetery.
‘Francis wasn’t scheduled to look after Rebekah that day,’ Margaret says. ‘They arrived home a short time after the police got to the murder scene.’
Told of Bernadette’s murder, Francis punched the wall – an act, the prosecution alleged, was designed to cover up an injury to her hand they claimed could have been incurred in an assault on Bernadette earlier that day.

In August 2008, armed with circumstantial evidence, the police charged her with the murder.‘Francis was interviewed by the police on six occasions between the murder and her eventual arrest, then we had to wait another two years until the trial started,’ Terry says. ‘It has been a complete nightmare for our family.’
During the three-week trial in which Francis, 63, pleaded not guilty, the court heard salacious and grisly details about the murder and the love triangle between Bernadette, Francis and her brother. The prosecution alleged Francis had found out about the affair in the week before the murder.

‘They claimed that the thought of losing everything – Bernadette, Rebekah and her lifestyle – provided that motive,’ Margaret explains.

Although the judge, Justice Margaret Nyland, conceded there was motive, she said it didn’t stack up to a guilty verdict. ‘Suspicion piled upon suspicion does not equate to proof beyond reasonable doubt. I am therefore obliged to return a verdict of not guilty.’

Bernadette’s family are stunned by the verdict.
They are angry the prosecution was unable to put evidence sufficient to enable the case to be decided by a jury, and would like to see the system changed. ‘We don’t want any other family to ever go through this,’ Margaret says.
Margaret has lodged an application for custody of Rebekah, who’s now 12. ‘She is only just starting to realise some form of natural childhood,’ she says. ‘We are in shock her mother – our sister – was brutally murdered and no-one has been brought to justice.’

By Debi Marshall