This Story Will Break Your Heart! No Movie Can Match This Tragedy! True Crime Documentary That Reveals a Painful Real-Life Mystery

Hello everyone and welcome back to True Crime Stories. I know many of you use these episodes to fall asleep. So before you drift off, I'd love it if you could leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from around the world. Also don't forget to like and subscribe if you're enjoying the episodes. A mother spends the final week of her life fighting to save the man she loves. She reaches out to his family. She takes him to a doctor. She speaks on his behalf because he can barely get the words out. Right up until that last morning she holds onto the belief that if she can endure a little longer and find more help, everything will turn out alright. She has no idea that the person she is trying so desperately to save will be the reason her three children grow up without their mother. This is the story of Amanda Jane Harris. It begins with love and ends in a kitchen in a quiet Australian suburb with a knife, a fire, and three children who witnessed it all. Amanda Jane Harris was born on September 23, 1981 in New South Wales, Australia. Stability was something her early childhood often lacked. Her parents separated when she was still a child and for a time she lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings. When she was around eight or nine, her living arrangements changed again. She went to live with her brother and grandmother, Barrel Curry. Barrel became one of the most important people in Amanda's life. Their connection went beyond being grandmother and granddaughter. As Barrel would explain after everything that happened, Amanda was also her best friend. In 2000 at the age of 19, Amanda made a choice that would shape the rest of her life. She relocated to Victoria to live with her mother and stepfather. There around 2001 she met Daniel Martin Eckersley. Daniel had been born on October 15, 1979 in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. His childhood too had been unsettled. His parents split up when he was five, and his relationship with his father remained strained for years, weighed down by his father's history of alcoholism and violence. His father died in 2015. Daniel had shared a warmer relationship with his mother, but her death in 2004 devastated him. According to his own account, that loss led him back to heroin. He also had an older sister Nicole, although the two had grown apart and remained estranged for years. Daniel left school after year 9. He described himself as an average student who frequently got into trouble, and he spent time in juvenile detention during his teenage years. Yet he also managed to bring a measure of stability to his life. He trained as a baker, completed his apprenticeship, and developed a career in the trade. Eventually he worked for established bakeries and supermarket chains, including a period as a baker at Coles. Beneath that steady employment history, however, lay a long involvement with drugs and alcohol that had begun at a disturbingly young age. Daniel started drinking sometime between the ages of 10 and 13. His alcohol consumption was heavy and regular. He began smoking cannabis at 13 or 14. By adulthood, he was using between two and four grams of high potency cannabis every day and growing his own supply. He began taking heroin as a teenager and entered a methadone program at approximately 21. Over the years, he also used emphetamines sometimes intravenously, misused prescription medication, and obtained quidipine and benzodiazepines illegally. He experimented with LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, ecstasy, cocaine, and inhalants as well. Describing the year before the events that would determine the course of his life, he told a psychiatrist that he had been drinking six to twelve bottles of beer a day alongside his regular cannabis use. Amanda's family did not remain unaware of these problems for long. Soon after the relationship began, they noticed Daniel's irritability and quick temper. Relatives said he made them feel unwelcome. At family gatherings, he was inclined to argue. He appeared to dictate what Amanda was and was not allowed to do. He seldom visited her relatives, and when she did, he would call repeatedly to ask when she was coming home. Amanda's mother came to believe that shopping was the only reason he permitted Amanda to leave the house. Amanda's sister, Louise Flynn, remembered seeing bruises on her sister's body. Amanda always had her explanation for them. The violence also extended beyond the relationship itself. Around 2009, Daniel damaged walls and furniture in a house he shared with Amanda and her mother. He assaulted her mother's partner and threatened him with a knife. He was convicted of criminal damage and intentionally causing injury and received a community-based order requiring anger management, mental health treatment, and treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. In a separate account of Amanda's brother, Mark, said Daniel had once threatened to slit his throat and stab him. Then in 2010 or 2011, Daniel was assaulted outside a gym. He returned to confront the men responsible, carrying a knife and a hammer or a sledgehammer. No one was injured, but he was convicted of weapons and cannabis offenses and served approximately four months in prison. Despite all of this, his record contained no conviction for serious violence against an intimate partner. Victoria Police also had no officially recorded family violence incidents, involving Daniel and Amanda before 2018, and despite everything that worried her relatives. Amanda stayed with him. She loved him. Together, they had built a family, a son born in 2009 and two daughters born in 2011 and 2016. By 2015, another problem had entered their relationship, pain. Daniel had injured his left knee years earlier, and a workplace incident in 2015 aggravated it. He underwent arthroscopic surgery that June. A worker's compensation dispute followed. He returned to work, injured the knee again in August 2016, and had a second claim rejected. While appealing that decision, he ended up on extended unpaid leave. Chronic pain, the loss of income and continuing legal disputes began to pile up around him. To manage the pain, his general practitioner, Dr. Will Venn Reed, began prescribing Tromadol in 2016. In August 2016 and June 2018, Daniel received Tromadol prescriptions on almost 120 separate occasions. By late 2017, the combination of long-acting and immediate release doses in his prescribed regimen allowed him to take approximately 500 milligrams a day. Daniel later admitted that his actual intake was much higher, sometimes reaching 700 to 800 milligrams daily. He supplemented his prescriptions with tablets obtained from friends. From time to time, he also took oxycodone supplied by friends, although he said he stopped because it made him angrier. By the end of June 2018, something in Daniel had begun to change. He later told others that he had become intensely suspicious. At times, he thought he needed to go to a psychiatric hospital. His moods fluctuated with his Tromadol use. An extra 50-milligram tablet was reportedly enough to leave him feeling disturbed. His daily consumption had risen above 600 milligrams. On July 1st and July 3rd, 2018, he called the police, apparently seeking help. During each call, he changed his mind and instead told the officers that his neighbors were dealing drugs. He never told his doctor about any of this. On July 1st, Amanda telephoned her grandmother, Beryl. She said Daniel was extremely agitated and in trouble and asked Beryl to come to Victoria to help. When Beryl spoke directly to Daniel, he repeatedly rambled about troubles from his past catching up with him. Beryl began making arrangements for the journey. Over the following days, Amanda used social media to contact Daniel's estranged sister, Nicole, someone she had not spoken to in years. She told Nicole that Daniel was on the verge of a breakdown, that his depression was severe, and that everything had been weighing on him since his workplace injury. On July 4th, Amanda took Daniel to see Dr. Van Reed. Both were in tears during the appointment. Amanda did most of the talking because Daniel struggled to get his words out. He described depression connected to being out of work and losing his income. He acknowledged using alcohol and cannabis to cope, although he said he had stopped. The doctor identified no suicidal thoughts, hostile thoughts, delusions, or obvious symptoms of psychosis. The diagnosis was adjustment disorder with anxiety and depression. The doctor prepared a mental health treatment plan, referred Daniel to a psychologist and prescribed the anti-depressant Desvene Lafaxine, sold under the brand name Pristique, at a dose of 50 milligrams. Daniel later said that on the first day, he took two or three times that amount, hoping a larger dose would have some effect. There is no record that he attended an appointment with a psychologist before what happened three days later. On July 5th, Daniel turned up without warning at the barricome of his friend Wayne Hall. His behavior was strange and he claimed someone had poisoned him. At one point he drove away in Hall's car before returning in tears and distress. Amanda arrived to collect him. He was drinking beer despite having started a new medication, and she asked him to stop. Witnesses saw the couple crying and embracing before they left together. On July 6th, Amanda sent Nicole another message. Daniel was doing all right, more or less, she said, and the medication would need some time to begin working. She described the week as long and exhausting. That same day, neighbors heard an argument coming from the couple's house and noticed Daniel behaving oddly. On the morning of July 7th, Amanda again tried to contact her mother and Daniel's sister. She could not reach out there of them. By then, Daniel's thinking had become paranoid and disorganized. He had convinced himself that food and household products were contaminated, and a delusion was taking hold that would soon turn deadly. He believed Amanda was poisoning him and their children. That Saturday morning, Daniel began emptying the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator, throwing food and cleaning products outside. Around 10 o'clock, neighbors heard a heated argument and door slamming. Their son opened his bedroom door and saw his father smashing kitchen items with a hammer. Daniel even broke the oven controls while moving food out of the house. Then he turned violent. Daniel punched Amanda. When she fell, he kicked her. He took a knife from a kitchen drawer and stabbed her repeatedly in the kitchen and dining room as their older children watched. Their son tried to pull his father's hand away to stop him. Daniel kicked the boy towards the door. After the attack, Daniel fetched a cigarette lighter and set a fabric couch a light close to where Amanda lay. While doing so, he also touched the lighter's flame to his older daughter's shoulder. He then put all three children in the family dog into the car and drove away. He never called an ambulance. He made no attempt to get Amanda help. Animals heard the smoke alarm and smelled smoke as the family's cars sped away. An off-duty firefighter who lived nearby called emergency services and rushed into the burning house. He found Amanda face down near the flames with blood on the floor and the knife beside her. Grabbing her by the legs, he dragged her outside and checked for signs of life. She was already dead. Believing the children might still be trapped inside, he went back into the smoke before being forced to retreat. Sarah Cruz extinguished the blaze and confirmed that nobody else remained in the house. Paramedics arrived shortly before 11 that morning and pronounced Amanda dead at the scene. Daniel told the children not to say that their mother was dead or that he had stabbed her. Witnesses saw him driving recklessly, revving the engine until smoke appeared and trying to open the doors of a stranger's vehicle. He drove to Wayne Hall's house. Hall was not home so Daniel spoke to a female neighbor while holding one of the children. She noticed how agitated he was. He then kicked open a side door at Hall's home, drove his car into the garage and shut the garage door to hide it. He took off his clothes and shoes, changed into Hall's clothing, washed his hands and placed his own clothes in a container outside before setting them on fire. He left on foot with the children and dog, wandered around neighboring properties, and then came back. When Wayne Hall returned at approximately three in the afternoon, he found Daniel and the children lying on a bed-watching television. Daniel claimed Amanda had disappeared or gone to live somewhere else. Hall challenged that account. He believed Amanda had been killed. One of the children repeated the story Daniel had coached them to tell. Their mother had taken her own life. Daniel then told Hall that he believed Amanda had been poisoning him and the children, and that it had something to do with the pills. He also made an ominous statement that nothing would happen before seven o'clock. He never explained what he meant. Police located Daniel at Hall's house and forced their way inside to arrest him at around three-fifty that afternoon. A forensic medical officer examined him that evening and found him unfit to be interviewed by police. He was taken to Casey Hospital under Victoria's Mental Health legislation. By midday, the following day, however, doctors decided he was no longer actively unwell and revoked the assessment order. He was transferred into custody. That rapid recovery would later become an important piece of evidence that he had experienced an acute temporary psychotic episode rather than a chronic mental illness. Daniel indicated early on that he was willing to plead guilty, sparing the children from having to give evidence at a murder trial. He formally pleaded guilty to Amanda's murder on April 29, 2019. The case against him was overwhelming. The children's accounts, forensic evidence from the house, the knife of the fire, witnesses who observed his behavior afterwards. His own statements about poisoning and his efforts to destroy his clothing. Two forensic psychiatrists, one engaged by the defense and the other by the prosecution, concluded that Daniel had been suffering from severe acute and temporary psychosis when he committed the crime. There were persecutory delusions, disordered thinking, emotional instability, possible hallucinations, and a complete lack of insight into how irrational his beliefs about Amanda had become. Both doctors identified Tromadol as a possible cause, potentially made worse by the newly prescribed anti-depressant. Justice John Champion made one point clear. Psychosis explained the killing. It did not excuse it. He found that the violence demonstrated a clear intention to kill, and that Daniel's guilty plea acknowledged his actions had been conscious and voluntary. The psychosis reduced his moral culpability for sentencing purposes, because the court accepted that he had not known Tromadol could provoke a psychotic reaction. Fishery action was extremely rare, and he had never experienced anything like it before. The judge weighed the serious aggravating circumstances. Amanda had been attacked without warning inside her own home, knocked down, kicked and stabbed again and again. Her children had watched. Her son had been kicked when he tried to protect her. Daniel had started to fire beside her body and burned his daughter with a lighter. He had never sought help for Amanda. He had fled with the children, forced them to repeat a false account of her suicide, and tried to destroy evidence. Against those circumstances, the court considered his psychosis, his lack of awareness of Tromadol's risks, his early guilty plea, his genuine remorse, and his swift recovery. On January 30, 2020, Justice Champion sent in Daniel Martin, accuracy to 18 years in prison, with a minimum of 14 years before he could be considered for parole. The judge said that without the guilty plea he would have imposed a 22-year sentence with an 18-year non-parole period. Allowing for the time already spent on remand, Daniel could become eligible for parole around July 2032, with a full sentence ending around July 2036. As of the latest reports, no successful appeal or early release had been publicly reported. At the center of the case was an ordinary knife with a single cutting edge and a partially serrated blade, approximately 120 millimeters long, and 27 millimeters wide. It was found bent beside Amanda's arm, a detail consistent with the force used in the attack. The fatal wound measured approximately 6 centimeters in length and entered the right side of her chest. Forensic examination established that the blade traveled from front to back, sharply from right to left and upwards, tearing a major artery and causing severe internal bleeding. Three other stab wounds reached her chest without penetrating the chest cavity itself. The post-mortem examination also documented additional sharp force injuries. There were defensive wounds on her hands consistent with an attempt to protect herself, bruising ulcerated areas on both legs, a burn on one ankle, and changes consistent with exposure to intense heat from the fire that was started afterwards. Amanda's toxicology results were completely negative. No alcohol, no drugs, no poisons of any kind. Whatever Daniel believed about being poisoned, the scientific testing found nothing. The fire became evidence in its own right. Investigators and later the sentencing judge concluded that Daniel had deliberately ignited the couch, in an attempt to destroy both Amanda's body and the crime scene. His subsequent action supported that conclusion, hiding the car, changing his clothes, washing his hands, burning his own clothing, and inventing a story about her disappearance. The medical records showed that Daniel had received trauma to all prescriptions on approximately 120 occasions over 22 months. And within the prescribed limits the combined doses could amount to 500 milligrams a day, before adding any tablets he bought from friends. A later forensic investigation found that monitoring of the prescription had been less than optimal, given the high doses, the potential for misuse, and his long history of addiction. The same investigation nevertheless found that the prescription monitoring system safe script probably would not have liked the misuse. His refill pattern appeared broadly normal, averaging close to the expected 30-day interval between dispensings. The additional tablets were coming from entirely outside that system. One of the most disturbing aspects of this case is the collision between two very different psychological pictures. emitters, amandas and Daniels, amandas relatives described a pattern that would be familiar to anyone who has studied coercive control, increasing isolation from family, a partner determining when she could go out and how long she could stay away, repeated telephone calls demanding to know when she would return home, bruises without a clear explanation, although she always had a story to account for them. No formal family violence report had been made against Daniel before 2018, yet the coroner later specifically classified the killing as an act of family violence, a reminder that the absence of a criminal record does not establish the absence of harm. Even within that relationship, amanda displayed enormous emotional strength during her final week. She recognized that her partner was deteriorating, she contacted relatives she rarely saw. She called his estranged sister. She took him to the doctor and spoke for him when he could not speak for himself. She continued reaching out to her family for help until the very morning she died. Her actions suggest a woman frightened for someone else rather than for herself. Someone still trying to hold her family together while it was falling apart around her. Daniel's psychological condition meanwhile represents something genuinely rare in forensic psychiatry. Two independent psychiatrists agreed that he had undergone a real acute psychotic episode, marked by persecutory delusions, disorganized behavior, and a complete inability to recognize the irrational nature of his thinking. Both considered Tramadol in combination with a new antidepressant to be the likely trigger. A forensic expert later offered a more cautious interpretation. The expert suggested that withdrawal from heavy tramadol use rather than the medication itself might fit the limited medical literature more closely, with the situation worsened by his abrupt cessation of alcohol and cannabis after years of heavy consumption. Either way the courts and psychiatrists agreed on one crucial point. This rare psychotic state explained how an intentional conscious and admitted murder had occurred. It never removed his legal or moral responsibility for ending a man's life. If people submitted victim impact statements at sentencing, each describing a different part of the same devastation, Amanda's sister Louise Flynn said she felt robbed of the future she should have shared with Amanda, including the chance to watch their children grow up together. When she first saw her sister's children at the police station, their condition shocked her. During the weeks they stayed with her, she heard them crying and screaming for their mother at night. Amanda's mother Christine Harris said she felt numb and constantly close to tears, and that she had lost much of her ability to trust other people. She sought counseling for herself and for at least one grandchild suffering from trauma. During the sentencing she broke down and shouted at Daniel in the courtroom. The three children lost both parents in a single day. Their mother had been murdered and their father had been arrested for killing her. They had witnessed at least part of what happened, and one of them had physically tried to stop it. They were taken from their home and placed with relatives. Every account described serious lasting trauma. The community later organized a fundraiser to help the family members now raising the children. One of Amanda's former workplaces remembered her as a devoted early childhood educator, loved by the children in her care. It was the same warmth she had given her own children at home. 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