International murder casebook: Brutal murder of 6-year-old by parents

In August 1993, a little boy - John Ashfield, aged 6 - was beaten to death with a hammer to his head. His mother, Gunn-Britt Ashfield, then 25, led the assault; her boyfriend, Austin Allan Hughes, then 20, was a keen participant. According to evidence presented to the court in December 1993, Ashfield became enraged when she heard that John, who was in Year 1 at East Nowra primary school on the NSW south coast, touched his three-year-old sister in an inappropriate way. Her boyfriend agreed the boy could not be allowed to “get away with it”.

He didn’t. Less than 24 hours later he died in Shoalhaven Hospital, his tiny body covered in more than 100 bruises from his parents’ savage beating, a beating that ended with Hughes putting the Nowra telephone book against John’s head, and hitting him with a hammer. They were each sentenced to 21 years in jail, reduced to 19 years on appeal, with a minimum of 14 years. Fourteen years since she beat John to death, his mother, who has changed her name in prison and now calls herself Angelic Karstrom, will apply for parole. Hughes has also applied for parole. His case will also be heard next Thursday. In 2004, the NSW Parliament passed laws that made it an offence for media outlets to publish the name of a dead child who had been the victim of a crime, no matter what the circumstances.

This law prevented The Weekend Australian from printing this story, ostensibly to protect the victim, John. The newspaper’s parent company, News Limited, backed by groups including the NSW Homicide Victims Support Group, and the Victims of Crime Assistance League, has lobbied against this law since it was enacted, believing that it protects only the killers from being identified. The NSW Parliament passed a bill amending the law, making publication permissible in some circumstances, such as if the next of kin agrees. John’s sister Melissa, 17, did not want her mother released. “I have not seen my mother since I was 11,” she said.

“The last time I saw her (in prison) I pulled her hair and slapped her. I have flashbacks to what happened. She tried to blame me. She tried to get us to help her bash John. She tried to say that John touched me. He never touched me.” Melissa says she remembers the day John was beaten, “clear as anything”. When he swang in from school that day, August 5, Hughes confronted him in the kitchen. He told police he kicked John on the bottom to the side of his foot “the way you kick a soccer ball”, slapped him around the head and sent him to his room.

But that was not the end of it: Ashfield and Hughes decided John needed to be taught a lesson. They went into his bedroom and started beating him. A frenzy soon developed: they punched him with their fists, and beat him with the white aluminum rod that held up a curtain. John was sobbing: “I’m really sorry, don’t do this to me, I’m sore, I’m sorry.” Hughes mocked him, saying: “You scream like a little girl.” When John continued to sob, Hughes took a girl’s dress out of the cupboard and shoved it over the crying boy’s head, forcing his arms through the sleeves.

“He started crying and carrying on,” Hughes would later say, in a statement to police. “He was crying: ‘Get it off, get it off, I’m not a girl’.” Death came slowly: Ashfield would later tell police that Hughes had put the phone book against John’s head, and repeatedly beat him with a hammer until John was limp and dazed, unable to sit up on the bed. When it became apparent that John had lost consciousness, his mother dunked him under a cold shower, then a hot shower. Several hours passed before Ashfield took her son to Shoalhaven Hospital.