Jew World Order

Heather Glendinning sits on the hill overlooking her home town of Port Denison and lays a blanket over her youngest daughter Jessica, who is sleeping beside her.

The mother-of-three is not enjoying the sweeping vistas of the ocean and the quiet Mid West fishing village.

Instead, she is distressed and begging the friend who is sharing a drink with her not to leave. They part company anyway, but he calls the next day to check she is OK.

She seems fine.

That was last Friday night and what happens over the next 48 hours has ripped apart two families and sent shockwaves through this small community and the rest of the country.

On Monday evening, Hazel Glendinning knocks on the door of her daughter’s home in Damia Circle in Port Denison.

She lives just a few hundred metres away from her 46-year-old daughter and is trying again after getting no response at the house earlier in the day.

Ms Glendinning’s rented home is fairly new but becoming rundown.

The letterbox is leaning against fence, the basketball ring has been knocked over and is lying in the front yard and a scooter has been abandoned in the driveway.

As Mrs Glendinning walked into the house, she is confronted with a horrific scene. The bodies of her two beautiful grandchildren – 12-year-old Jane Cuzens and 10-year-old Jessica Cuzens – lie motionless in the hallway. The girls have suffered terrible injuries. The shellshocked grandmother raises the alarm.

When police officers enter the house, they make another gruesome discovery. Heather Glendinning’s body is found in the bathroom. She has also suffered extensive injuries.

Police immediately cordon off Ms Glendinning’s home, the street and a playground adjacent to the house in the Bluewater Gardens Estate and officers prepare to launch a manhunt for a murderer.

Forensic officers and Major Crime Squad detectives quickly fly in from Perth to begin dissecting the horror inside 14 Damia Circle.

Hardened officers are left visibly shaken when they emerge from the house. Insp Bill Munnee describes the crime scene as one of the worst police have encountered.

Harley Cuzens, a livestock manager in Broome, is given the devastating news that two of his children and his ex-partner are dead.

He races to be reunited with his surviving daughter Grace, 13, who lives with his parents Bill and Lesley Cuzens in Perth.

For the Cuzens family, the deaths of Jane, Jessica and their mother are the tragic end to a bitter long-running legal fight with Ms Glendinning over hundreds and thousands of dollars of assets.

Three months ago, the former couple came face-to-face when they represented themselves in their latest Supreme Court hearing.

Ms Glendinning claims in court documents that she was a member of a business enterprise with Mr Cuzens and his parents from March 1997. She claims she was frozen out of the partnership in 2001 and the Cuzens family refused to pay or compensate her for her work.

The court’s most recent judgment also revealed Heather Glendinning and Harley Cuzens were involved in a Family Court dispute.

But the legal fight to get what she thought she was owed became almost an obsession for Ms Glendinning, according to some who knew her.

Robyn O’Brien, who met Ms Glendinning when their daughters became friends at Coogee Primary School in 2006, said she spent many hours working on the court cases.

She described her as an “intelligent, hard-working and resourceful woman” who was undertaking a “difficult battle”.

But the friend, who spent last Friday night with her in Port Denison, said she had become so obsessed with her legal fight that she rarely stopped talking about it.

Confrontations in a courtroom are a far cry from the days when, as a glamorous young couple, Harley Cuzens and Heather Glendinning socialised in the moneyed circles of Perth’s equestrian world.

Through the 1980s onwards, WA showjumping led the nation with the sponsorship of business tycoons Alan Bond and the late Laurie Connell, attracting the best riders and owners to compete in Perth.

Mr Cuzens became a top showjumper, competing all over the world.

“He was an absolutely fantastic rider, wonderful and a gentleman,” former Olympic equestrian M’Liss Henry said. “We are all really upset for him. He’s a gentle guy and doesn’t deserve this.”

Ms Glendinning’s parents Hazel and Tom migrated to Australia from Aberdeenshire in Scotland in 1962, three years before Heather was born.

They lived in Perth for a time, including Willagee when Heather was a pupil at Melville Primary and Melville Senior High schools.

Kelly De Florenca, who was a classmate at Melville SHS, remembered Ms Glendinning as “a nice girl who got into lots of mischief but had a really good fun personality”.

When she was Harley Cuzens’ partner, Ms Henry described her as very beautiful.

“She has stunning eyes, very olive skin, stunning,” she said.

Ms Henry taught the couple’s children Grace, Jane and Jessica to ride. “They all rode very well,” she said. “Harley always got the best horses for his girls.”

At Christmas and New Year, the couple would join dozens of other equestrian families in big get-togethers on one of their farms in West Swan.

“They were great while they were together,” Ms Henry said. “Then I think it all got too much as it does with young people these days. They sort of moved on which is sad.”

According to her friends, Briohny Robinson and Angela Basak, Ms Glendinning left Mr Cuzens.

“She just had to get away,” Mrs Basak said. “We never went into the full details, I never asked. You know, she wasn’t one to go and blab.”

With their parents now apart, the three sisters found themselves torn. The custody of the children after this is not clear.

One friend of the Cuzens family, who asked not to be named, said Mr Cuzens had custody of the three girls and, when the two youngest children said they wanted to go and live with their mother, he let them.

Meanwhile, Grace may have attended a primary school in Broome, where her father was living, last year before going to live with her paternal grandparents.

But Ms Basak said she had always known Ms Glendinning to have custody of all three girls.

Angela Barak, Briohny Robinson, Deirdre Smorenburg and Heather Glendinning became friends in early-mid 2000s when their children were at Coogee Primary School.

All but Ms Smorenburg were single mothers and the tragic news from Port Denison has shocked the women, who supported each other through parenthood and banded together to take their kids on days out.

“We would go for picnics at Serpentine and would see all the kangaroos there,” Ms Robinson said. “We would spend the whole day there and the kids could run amuck. Or we would just go down to the beach, anything that was free.”

Ms Robinson said Ms Glendinning lived rent-free in a friend’s old fibro house in Coogee because “they knew they wouldn’t get much for it anyway”.

Mrs Barak said Ms Glendinning struggled financially and lived on a parent’s pension as the legal battle against her former partner, her studies as a nurse and caring for three children took up all her time.

Ms Robinson said Ms Glendinning was a “lovely mum” who never smacked or told off her “caring and respectful” children.

But their contact with Ms Glendinning fell away when she moved to Port Denison to be closer to her parents and old friends.

Ms Glendinning admitted to friends in emails that she was leading a “reclusive” life in Port Denison, while it seems her desire to win her court action against the Cuzens family was turning into an all-consuming obsession.

Although she studied nursing for seven years at Edith Cowan University, Ms Glendinning had not worked much since moving to the Port Denison area.

Unable to afford a lawyer and relying on her parents, Ms Glendinning studied law and ethics by correspondence in 2009. On top of that, she regularly travelled the 360km to Perth to pore over legalese at the State Law Library.

While friends may have been concerned that her obsession, no-one imagined it could come to this.

This week, the manhunt for the person who killed Ms Glendinning and her two children never materialised. On Thursday, police said no-one was involved in the deaths, leading two devastated families and a shocked community to reach a horrifying conclusion.