Revealed: KillJoy, Stan review: a family fractured by horrific violence

Content warning: contains discussion of extreme family violence

The crime at the heart of Stan documentary Revealed: KillJoy is a horrific one. On 31 January 31, 1985, local pharmacist and father of three Alan Stuckey rang the police station in Lismore and said ‘you’d better come up, I’ve just shot my wife’.

Arguably the worst was still to come: found guilty of manslaughter and given a sentence of three years, he was out after 22 months. He then moved back into the murder house with his three children.

It’s quite a hook for a documentary, but KillJoy doesn’t dwell on it. Promoted as ‘the story of family homicide told from the perspective of the child’, what it delivers is a mix of true-crime drama and personal struggle, moving back in time from that shocking crime to uncover the life of the woman who was murdered, and then following her daughter as they struggle to come to terms with the legacy of that crime.

Kathryn (who as an adult uses they/them pronouns) was only three months old when their dad killed their mum Carolyn. For much of their adult life they lied about it, not wanting to deal with other people’s reactions. Growing up, Carolyn was never discussed; numerous scenes in this documentary have Kathryn for the first time learning details about her mother’s death and meeting her friends.

Carolyn was a young teacher when she met Alan Stuckey. He was eight years older and already a successful chemist; the future Miss Lismore quickly fell for his charms. He was serious, religious and liked tennis. She liked books and the theatre. She joined the local theatre club, had a major role in a Noel Coward play – which was filmed, the snippets shown both revealing and haunting – and fell in love with her co-star. They had an affair, they were found out, she swore it was over. It wasn’t.

There’s a not-so-nice reminder here of just how much of a trap marriage was back in the 70s and 80s. Divorce was still scandalous, social death in communities where religion still held sway. Sneaking around involved leaving notes on each other’s cars; when he suspected the affair was back on, Stuckey hired a private investigator to gather evidence. Once he had it confirmed, he confronted his wife. Then he called the police to tell them she was dead.

Watch the Revealed: Killjoy trailer.

Looking back from 40 years in the future, much of what followed is hard to comprehend. As her husband, he still had control over his dead wife’s body; he promptly had her cremated with no service. The local police are still fuming about how the case was handled, while Kathryn – reading the court transcripts for the first time – is stunned. His defence was based on the idea of ‘provocation’, the idea it was Carolyn’s fault he shot her three times with a bolt action rifle. The judge, saying the killer was of good standing in the community and unlikely to reoffend, gave him little more than a slap on the wrist.

It’s at this point, roughly halfway through KillJoy, that the focus shifts and Kathryn’s story takes centre stage. Their childhood is quickly skimmed over, a clearly unsettling and confusing time with a domineering father and a refusal to discuss what had happened. Moving away as soon as possible in the hope of leaving it all behind, they found the sleepless nights and anxiety only grew worse.

KillJoy was filmed over a number of years; one sequence later in the documentary follows Kathryn as they struggle with the realisation that they’ll soon be older than their mother was when she died (which took place in 2016). The as-it-happened footage of her struggling with the issues of her childhood is moving and powerful, but narratively it’s in a different register to the much more event-driven first half.

The result is a documentary that shifts from a traditional true-crime story to an emotional portrait of a person shattered in the wake of a brutal crime. You need both halves to get the full picture, and the final call to focus more on the victims of family violence does eventually bring it all together. Tonally though, it’s still a little jarring if you were expecting this to be about the actual period where they were growing up in their father’s care.

Kathryn is now a family violence researcher at Melbourne University; they’ve also taken her mother’s middle name as their surname, becoming Kathryn Joy. It’s one more step in their efforts to reclaim their mother’s life from their father’s violence and a system that put his needs ahead of his victims. Putting a face to the survivors of these crimes is this documentary’s strongest achievement.

Revealed: KillJoy premieres on Stan on 8 September.