Most of you would never have heard of a little Australian boy named John Erik Ashfield but I can still see his sweet face to this day. He is the little blonde boy sitting in this photograph.
They say that Karen Matthews fooled a lot of people, even the police, with her lies about her daughter Shannon being abducted but as soon as I saw her face on TV when the story first broke I immediately thought… ‘Nope, I do not believe her’. Because I had seen that kind of face before; the same forced tears, the same way her eyes never met the cameras and always looked away…and I knew straightaway that she was lying through her rotting teeth.
I had seen the same face on a woman named Gunn-Britt Ashfield back in Australia in August 1993. She was 25, a single mother in exactly the same style as Karen Matthews (several kids to different men) and lived with them and her boyfriend Austin Allan Hughes (20) in the NSW town of Nowra. Back then people were still reeling in horror over the murder of British toddler James Bulger at the hands of two young boys a year earlier, so when Gunn-Britt and Austin Hughes claimed that her six year old son John had been beaten to death by a group of local teenagers in a nearby park the public were horrified. The whole country sympathised with the mother – until she appeared on TV to make an appeal to the public for information…
You only had to look at her to know she was lying, just as it was obvious to many British people that Karen Matthews was lying. It did not take the NSW police long to discover the shocking truth; that Gunn-Britt and her weedy boyfriend had, over the course of 24 hours, systematically beaten the child into a coma before he died hours later in hospital. The beautiful little blonde-haired boy had endured torture to an appalling degree – this evil woman even tried to get her other children to join in with beating their brother, when she was charged she then tried to blame them for his injuries. John’s biological father, Brian Ashfield, had already made several attempts to gain custody of his son informing DOCS repeatedly that his ex-wife was a violent sadist and was neglecting the children but DOCS refused to give him neither access to his son nor custody. Brian Ashfield openly admitted in a special television interview that he had a criminal record behind him; he had been a heroin addict in the past but had entered rehab in order to improve his chances of being awarded custody of young John. But despite his being ‘clean’ and in a stable relationship DOCS refused his application for custody and little John Ashfield was left to his tragic fate.
Brian Ashfield died about two years after his son was killed, broken by what had happened to his little boy. A former drug addict he might have been, but he had loved his son and was no child abuser. Anyone who saw this father wailing over the coffin of his child at the funeral would attest to his heartbreak. Gunn-Britt has been serving time in prison and has changed her name to Anjelic Karstrom, she has applied for parole along with Austin Allan Hughes. Her other children, now young adults, want nothing to do with her and state they will oppose her parole for what she did to their brother.
The people of Nowra, hopefully, will not forget what this woman did and the way she tried to bring shame on the teenagers of that small NSW town in 1993. A lot of people in Australia may have forgotten about little John Ashfield – and to be honest I had as well – but the ugly, lying face of Karen Matthews brought it back for me. These two disgusting females and their vile crimes might be separated by 15 years and several thousand miles but they are still two very rotten apples picked from the same tree.
Related stories:
The killer story we could not publish until now
Update: Austin Hughes walks free
Copyright © 2007-2012 Cultured Views. All rights reserved.
And what people had to say…