Religious zealots, kidnapping, jail and a Hollywood ex … how the love of salt-of-the-earth parents turned a crazy upbringing into something special.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Jacki Weaver tracked me down, not the other way around. It was 2017. The Hollywood actress was 70. I was 25, a university dropout running a three-star motel in Bundaberg. The Honeymoon Suite was occupied by a decorated meth dealer. I was a long way from Los Angeles, let alone heaven. “I mentioned to a friend that I might seek you out,” she wrote via email.
“The adolescent Michael who I loved was complicated, but sweet and devoted,” she wrote in her email to me. “That Michael bore little resemblance to the dictatorial young man that he became in his 20s.” Michael consumed vast quantities of illicit drugs. Nearing bankruptcy, he began trafficking them. He divorced his first wife and remarried a younger woman from a rich family. This second marriage was brief. In 1976, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Michael, 30, was committed to a psychiatric hospital.He met Carrie, 33, at group therapy the same year. She was a beautiful brunette with olive skin and intense brown eyes.
The Shelleys were repeatedly arrested for vagrancy and sent to Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane. Social workers suspected they were suffering a, French for “madness of two”. Michael accused them of being “feckless feminists”. Elijah was underweight. He was placed into a foster home in the city’s north. A 1983 clipping recording Elijah’s return to his foster parents following his kidnapping by Michael that sparked a five-day national manhunt and media storm.Michael and Mary disappeared into the Blue Mountains. They had two more sons: Saul and Joshua. In 1985, the Shelleys went back to Brisbane to attempt another kidnapping of Elijah. They were both ultimately arrested. Saul and Joshua were placed into foster care. Saul had nearly died from neglect. Joshua was malnourished.
“The love that organically develops between a foster child and a foster mother is priceless, because it is not payback for a biological debt,” she wrote in an A4 notepad. The words THE BOOK OF LOVE were printed neatly on the cover. Lech and his sister Hannah in Wondai, 1994. They were joined at the hip – and dressed in colour-coordinated outfits.Steven and John hailed my mother’s womb as if it contained baby Jesus. Mum needed to get a caesarean, due to her age, and the fact that she had suffered six miscarriages. The miracle was matter-of-fact. I was born in January 1992.
Steven, John, and Hannah knew they were fostered. But they weren’t bothered by the circumstances of their births. At the end of the day, they talked like a Blaine. They dressed like a Blaine. And they played sport like a Blaine. As far as they were concerned, Michael and Mary Shelley were on another planet.
John vanished. Steven came up the driveway. Hannah used his arrival as a decoy to sneak back inside the house. Mum followed. She called the police again. Mary studied the insult of her son’s name badge:Steven was 18, but the accounting student was wise beyond his years. He reciprocated Mary’s hug. She didn’t measure up to the female goliath of his childhood imagination. “You can’t just rock up out of the blue like this,” he said.
For almost two decades, the word “kidnap” had been used to deny Mary’s maternal urges. “Hannah was kidnapped from us!” she said. Hannah was temporarily sent to live with a friend. We went home from the motel. At night, Mary’s white dress was frequently seen fluttering out the front. She left threats and dead flowers. Mum suffered from insomnia and panic attacks. John suffered suicidal ideation. Michael stalked Steven at university.
“LENORE + YOU ARE ENDANGERING YOUR LIVES IN THIS LIFE AND IN THE NEXT,” wrote Michael. “ETERNITY IS FOREVER!” In the spring of 2003, Hannah and I stayed at home alone while my mother attended to a quick errand. Hannah was 13. I was 11. She watched TV. I sat at the computer in the dining room. Mary Shelley rushed up the driveway. She stared inside. I grabbed the cordless phone and ran to the lounge room.Hannah thought she’d stumbled upon a suicide. Then Mary’s eyes slid open. Hannah screamed.
Steven evicted Mary from the room. They had an argument out the back, eyes opened but blinkered. He was blind with hate. She was blind with love. Michael was his wife’s keeper only with psychiatrists. For decades, he had prevented her from taking mood stabilisers. To the naked eye, Michael seemed like the saner spouse. Mary had acted as his messenger and his scapegoat. Over the past five years, she had spent 99 nights in police watch houses.
In 2006, the Shelleys fled to South Africa. Michael began stalking Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner. He blamed the archbishop for causing the AIDS epidemic by showing compassion to homosexuals. Michael was arrested. He spent six months in various South African prisons and refugee camps.
Steven, then 26, was a craft beer salesman in Perth. He had become a marathon runner. The Shelleys stalked him and his girlfriend, Prue. Michael sent letters annotating Prue’s defects, supposed proof of her unfitness to be a mother. “I will never love you,” Steven told Michael near Fremantle Beach the same year. “You think you’re an angel. You’re just a narcissistic arsehole.”
“Okay, Jenny Craig,” said John. “You haven’t seen ya son in seven years. And the first thing you do is hang shit on me for being fat? That’ll do me.” Hannah and her daughter Lennie, named in tribute to her mother, in Alice Springs, 2021. The siblings remain tight-knit., my father died suddenly of a stroke. He was 61. Michael Shelley hailed the death of his nemesis as proof of divine intervention. Two years later, my mother was diagnosed with a fatal and incurable brain disease. I was 21. It was my job to sell the house and organise a nursing home placement.
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