BREAKING up the family
In June this year, 98-year-old Anne Hamilton-Byrne died at a dementia care facility in Australia. The news made headlines because, in the 1960s, Hamilton-Byrne was the leader of a notorious cult that set out to “adopt” children to create a “master race”.
The night Operation Forest task force leader Lex De Man learnt the FBI had arrested Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her husband Bill at their US bolthole, he was overcome with emotion.
“I walked out of the room and I broke down for about 10 minutes,” he tells of the moment it had taken him almost four years to realise. “I threw chairs everywhere, because that was four years of memories of the police officers who’d been damaged by it, the pressure they’d been under to move it forward and get it done, and the admiration I have for the survivors, the children, who came through what most of us would find an
