A catastrophic failure of child protection protocols in New South Wales (NSW), Australia has sparked widespread public anger after a damning independent review revealed two vulnerable foster children were placed in the home of a convicted triple killer, despite an explicit warning raised with official child protection services.
The NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) launched the review after Sydney radio outlet 2GB broke the story of the shocking placement last month. The investigation uncovered that a concerned individual first contacted the state’s official child protection helpline in December last year to flag that convicted serial killer Regina Arthurell, formerly known as Reginald Arthurell, was already living with one foster child.
Rather than launching an urgent risk assessment, department staff dismissed the warning based on unsubstantiated assumptions about Arthurell’s age, wheelchair use and existing supervision arrangements. Shockingly, just three months later in March, a second foster child was approved to move into the same home.
Arthurelle’s criminal record is one of the most serious in New South Wales justice history: the 50-year-old (who transitioned from male to female while serving a 24-year sentence for the 1995 murder of his fiancée) has three separate homicide convictions. In 1974, he was found guilty of stabbing his stepfather to death, followed by a 1981 conviction for killing a man during an armed robbery, before his 1995 conviction for bludgeoning his fiancée to death with a wooden plank. He was released from custody prior to the foster placement.
The DCJ’s official review concluded that child safety was never made the central priority of the decision-making process that led to the placements. The investigation confirmed existing departmental policies and protocols were completely ignored, and required cross-checks within the department’s own case management system were never completed.
“The offender’s history stood out as a clear indicator that they should not have been residing with children without a thorough, holistic risk assessment,” DCJ Secretary Michael Tidball stated in the official review report. “The safety of the children was not placed at the centre of decision-making. The review identified significant failures in casework practice, highlighting shortcomings in risk identification and assessment, triage, and safeguards within the child protection response for the children.”
Following the release of the review’s findings, two senior child protection workers involved in the placement decisions have been suspended from duty. Tidball has referred the full report to the DCJ’s internal conduct division to launch a formal misconduct investigation, though no official findings against the workers have been published at this stage.
NSW Minister for Families and Communities Kate Washington described the incident as an unacceptable failure that should never have occurred. “I was just so sorry that it had,” Washington told 2GB. “Not only have they made a determination based on unverified information about age and capacity, you know, the fellow was a serial killer.”
Washington emphasized that the failure stemmed from individual wrong decisions that directly violated departmental rules, not a lack of system capacity or resources. “To be really clear, we had capacity in the system at the time for an investigation to be undertaken, we had the resources,” she said. “It was wrong calls made at the wrong time, but they are working in very difficult, complex environments. Our DCJ child protection caseworkers see the worst of the worst in our society, they walk into homes where parents are harming their children. There are difficult decisions made daily by our case workers, but we do expect them to follow department policies and procedures, and that’s what didn’t happen on these occasions that led to this awful situation.”