A Whispering of Trees

Some stories are not forgotten — they wait hidden in the shadows, whispering to be told.

A Whispering of Trees is dedicated ‘For Charlie, whose life lasted six years. For Susan, who learned to survive the rest.’

In the days leading up to the shooting, Ted Benedek told his children that to stay together, they would all need to ‘go to Heaven.’ Charlie, six, asked questions. Susan, four, clung to his words. Neither sensed the danger gathering behind their father’s calm.

As dawn washed over Victoria’s Otway Ranges on 23 June 1971, two rifle shots tore through the stillness. Ted deliberately fired both into the chest of his six-year-old son, Charlie. The bullets ripped through the boy’s small frame, shattering bone and breaking the quiet of the morning. From the back seat of the wrecked family station wagon, four-year-old Susan watched her brother die. The shots ended one life; what followed nearly destroyed another.

A Whispering of Trees begins with this unthinkable act and follows the long shadow it casts over the decades that follow. The horror did not end in the Otway forest. While Ted survived his failed suicide attempt and was quickly shielded by the law’s declaration of insanity, Susan was swept into a welfare system wholly unprepared — and unwilling — to protect her. Within days, she became a ward of the state and was placed in a home defined not by safety but by danger: a household marked by criminality, predation, and neglect.

The press barely noted the tragedy; the institutions charged with safeguarding children like Susan moved on with bureaucratic indifference. Yet for the girl who had witnessed her brother’s death, there was no moving on. Her childhood unfolded within a maze of state-run facilities, court orders, psychiatric assessments, and the quiet cruelties of adults who did not see her — or did not care to.

Drawing on court transcripts, psychiatric files, government records, and interviews with those still marked by the events of 1971, A Whispering of Trees lays bare a case that reveals more than a single crime. It uncovers a system that repeatedly failed a vulnerable child — and a woman who, despite every barrier, rose above the ruins of her past.

‘A gripping and courageous work of true crime. Rosenhain and Newbury illuminate the shadows with rare clarity and compassion.’

‘A haunting, meticulously researched account that reads with the urgency of a thriller and the heart of lived truth.’