Despite the detective’s protestations – this was no ruse – she asked the supposed “policeman” on the other end of the phone for his badge number and details, and hung up. Then, sceptically, Alison called the police station. Yet even when the Sergeant confirmed the call was legitimate, she still didn’t quite believe what she was hearing. It was only when she arrived at the emergency department of The North West Regional Hospital in Burnie, Tasmania, that the tragic reality began to sink in. Her husband had tried to kill their two sons.
Alison tells The Weekly in the December issue that time stood still when she learned that her precious little boys, Fletcher and Spencer, then aged eight and five, were clinging to life after their father Paul Brian Edward Connelly, loaded two LPG gas bottles into the boot of the family car and set it alight, with the boys buckled up in the backseat.
Spencer and Fletcher
“Someone came along and whisked me off into a room with doctors, police and hospital staff all firing questions at me,” Alison recalls of that fateful evening in December 2012.
“All I can remember is asking them, ‘Where are my boys? Can I see my boys?’ From that moment on, time stood still. Everything became a blur and our life became about getting through each day and each night.”
Spencer was so badly burned, he was in an induced coma. Fletcher was awake, but unrecognisable.
“It didn’t look like him or sound like him. His face was swollen and his hair burned,” Alison tells The Weekly. “He said to me, ‘Mummy, I did the right thing. I dropped and rolled’. He’d learned about fire safety at school the week before. It probably saved his life.”
