What now for the four relentless bullies who made Brodie feel life wasn't worth living?


The pain and outrage endures for Damien and Rae Panlock. Steve Butcher reports on a family living in the shadow of torment.

TWO of them will settle in beautiful, perfect Queensland and resume their lives, the other two will stay in Melbourne and chase ambitions and dreams. As they grow old they may shiver at the occasional, but ever-fading jab of conscience, their guilt salved in time with the reassurance and support of family and friends.

There will be scars for what they did to - or didn't do for - Brodie Panlock, who was viciously bullied and humiliated at a Hawthorn cafe for months. At 19, she killed herself on September 20, 2006, after suffering in silence the relentless and repeated direct and indirect physical and non-physical bullying.

Cafe owner Marc Luis Da Cruz, manager Nicholas Smallwood, waiter Rhys MacAlpine and chef Gabriel Toomey will forever have criminal convictions for their involvement. A further punishment, delivered yesterday by senior Melbourne magistrate Peter Lauritsen, of fines and costs totalling $337,000, is an expensive, but ultimately temporary one. The recent attacks on Smallwood and MacAlpine's Facebook pages are collateral damage.

Fines were the justice system's maximum sanctions under Victoria's Occupational Health and Safety Act against the workplace charges to which they pleaded guilty. Despite what many wished, a prison term was not available to Lauritsen.

Brodie's father Damien Panlock, left, and the four men who relentlessly bullied his daughter - Marc Luis Da Cruz with, inset, from top,  Nicholas Smallwood, Rhys MacAlpine and Gabriel Toomen.


For Brodie's parents, Damien and Rae Panlock, there is no such thing as ''closure'', only another night to dread, like every one since her death.

It is then that Damien resorts reluctantly to sleeping tablets and his wife lies in bed and racks her brain - for an answer to a hundred torturous questions. How could these men treat their daughter so badly? Why didn't she tell them about it? Why did she die?

''The nights we find really hard,'' Rae, 54, said. ''Once the lights are off and you lie there … and think about all those things.

''Did I miss something? Was there a conversation I didn't pick up on? Should I have poked my nose in more?

''I knew she was tired and working hard, so we'd send her home with extra food and vitamins, but she didn't like to the talk too much about the cafe towards the end. It just breaks my heart to think what she would have gone through …''

Being especially ''cuddly'' with her father is something Rae remembers, but such affection did not seem out of the ordinary.

''I wish I had seen something,'' Damien, 61, says, and stops.

Then he elaborates, with unwarranted guilt: ''We weren't there for her, that's the truth of it. If we had have heard anything - anything - we would have been down there and she would have been home.''


He suspects that was why Brodie did not tell them about what was happening to her. ''She knew what we'd do - 'That's it. Out of there.' ''

It confuses the couple that their daughter, brought up with two older brothers to stick up for herself, kept her terrible treatment private.

''I think they had got to her by that stage,'' believes Rae.

Says Damien: ''They got to her and worked on her and just absolutely pushed and pushed and pushed and totally wore her out. I think everyone's got a breaking point, and when you go past that point it's when you snap.''

Brodie was a ''bit of a romantic'' and a ''little madam'', according to her mother, a child who typically did everything from Gumnut Guides to Little Athletics and basketball.

Chirpy, compassionate and friendly, Brodie left home soon after joining Cafe Vamp - the youngest employee and, according to workmates, emotionally vulnerable - to share an apartment in Hawthorn.

''It was going to be a whole new adventure and she was going to handle it all,'' says Rae.

In WorkSafe's prosecution summary read last Friday in Melbourne Magistrates Court, barrister Garry Livermore listed an appalling litany of acts perpetrated against Brodie, mostly by Smallwood and MacAlpine, to a lesser degree by Toomey, and which were permitted, encouraged and/or tolerated by Da Cruz who had nothing in place to address workplace behaviour and bullying.

Brodie was insulted and ridiculed, teased about her looks, held while fish sauce was poured over her, teased about a failed suicide attempt, had poison put in her bag and was taunted about being unable to kill herself.

Earlier on the night she died, Smallwood had picked her up in Richmond after she offered him money for a lift.

They were then intimate at Brodie's apartment, Smallwood left and Brodie telephoned a friend ''very upset'' he had not stayed, and embarrassed at ''making a fool of herself''', said Livermore.

In his inquest findings in 2008, coroner Peter White, acting on what he had been told by a witness, went deeper into her state.

She had cried hysterically in the call, with the friend relating how Brodie had ''begged'' Smallwood to stay but he'd just got up and left.

''How embarrassing,'' the friend said Brodie told her. ''I want to die. Ash, it is over. I have had enough. It is over.'' She died three days later in The Alfred hospital of head injuries. Her parents and two brothers were there beside her in total shock.

White found that on the night she fell she felt an ''unbearable level of humiliation'' over her relationship with Smallwood, her manager at the cafe, who did not return her infatuation.

Arriving at the hospital after a midnight call from police, Damien and Rae, first with total confusion, then with sickening abruptness and incredulity, heard scraps of what others long knew but had not acted on or told them about.

''We just couldn't work it out,'' Rae says. ''You know, they're talking about this and that going on and then people started coming out with these things.

''We were told we'd have to stand up for Brodie, and Damien and I looked at each other and thought: 'What's going on here? Where have we been?' ''

They knew nothing of Brodie's intermittent sexual relationship with Smallwood or the disgraceful way he and others had treated the vulnerable teenage waitress.

Da Cruz, sole owner of the business, arrived at the hospital and saw Brodie, and when asked by Damien what had been going on between Smallwood and her, he said it was ''just a boyfriend, girlfriend type of thing''.

The Panlocks hardly speak the names of their daughter's tormenters in an interview with The Age, as if to name them is to grant them unworthy acknowledgement.

Damien is composed in his responses, only once emitting utter disdain for Smallwood - ''that piece of shit'' - when he imagines him with Brodie on that last night.

''Whatever he did to her or what he said to her left her in a total mess,'' he said. ''He [Smallwood] said in his statement [to the coroner] she was quite happy. It was a lie.''

Rae is calm, too, and replete with the sentiments of a woman worn by grief but whose decency shines.

Asked about the men who treated her daughter so badly, she says: ''I don't even know how truthfully I feel about them … I feel very cold about the whole thing.

''When they're there it's just like they're not there.''

At the inquest, sitting near the four men, as he and Rae gradually learned in shocking detail from witnesses how Brodie was treated, Damien ''felt like doing something, but I looked at them and realised they weren't worth it''.

Last Friday, when they again came face-to-face with them, and the horrific details of Brodie's bullying were aired in a packed courtroom, Damien and Rae felt they had returned to the beginning of their nightmare - when they had to clear Brodie's flat, her clothes and her smell all around, and then re-establish her room at home; when they watched a compilation video of her life shown at her funeral, and cried throughout.

Damien and Rae know that after last week's hearing and, especially, yesterday's sentencing, within days they will not be the centre of media attention. But there will always be reminders of their loss, such as Damien seeing young women Brodie's age.

At shopping centres, Rae sees mothers and daughters and pictures Brodie ''dragging me into another dress shop, my legs aching''.

She hopes similar victims of workplace bullying find help, and prays they have someone like Michael O'Grady, the WorkSafe investigator whose dedication to Brodie's case assembled such a water-tight prosecution, alongside.

And she urges all parents to ''just make sure you always have time to have that coffee'' with their children.


''I don't think the world's a great place to be at the moment,'' Rae says, ''and so spare a kind word here and there in the workplace.''

For help or information visit beyondblue.org.au or Lifeline on 131 114.

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