‘I couldn’t save my own niece’: Anti-violence advocate’s heartbreak over Jayda’s death

October 23, 2026 — 11:40am

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This story contains the name and images of an Indigenous person who has died.

I have seen cops who have faced gunmen and didn’t blink, rescuers who have plucked people from raging seas and deadly bushfires and citizens who have risked their lives to save others.

But one of the bravest people I have met is Kellie Carter-Bell, who survived 23 years of brutality, somehow managing to avoid becoming another fatal statistic in Australia’s shameful epidemic of family violence.

Ten years ago, Kellie was brave enough to tell me her story, and she has spent the past decade working as a passionate and powerful anti-violence advocate.

Now she is back in the media for all the wrong reasons. Kellie’s grandniece Jayda Lou-Eve Allen Bonner, 21, is dead. Jayda’s boyfriend has been charged with murder.

How Jayda died will now be a matter for the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean she should be reduced to an exhibit in her own case.

“I shared my story with you to try and save lives, but I couldn’t save my own niece,” Kellie says.

This is the journey of three generations of women fighting for their lives having been subjected to almost unimaginable violence. And that is the core issue. We don’t want to imagine it. Too many of us see it as someone else’s problem.

First there is Kellie.

Her story is too sick to be a horror story and too real to be a drama. She was one of six sisters – three have died, two from drug overdoses and one from suicide.

Her sister Sissy married drug dealer and multiple murderer Dennis Bruce Allen, known as Mr Death. It was a contract with the devil. Allen bashed her with a gun butt, cut her throat and stuffed her in the boot of a car, instructing associates to dump her in an industrial rubbish bin.

Allen’s sister-in-law Wendy Peirce told me: “Dennis opened the boot. Sissy was in there with her throat cut. It wasn’t ear to ear, but she lay there just gurgling. It was awful. I was helpless.

“He just slammed the boot shut and I spun out. He told someone to drive her somewhere and just leave her in a Dumpmaster. I got her dropped off at........

© The Age