true crime

"I'll never get over what I saw in there": What we now know about the incestuous Colt family.

It was a standard day at the school playground.

That was until a child was overheard saying his sister was pregnant but his family didn’t know who the father was. Or, more specifically, which brother was the father.

So, in mid-2012, police raided a rural New South Wales caravan ‘camp’. What they didn’t know at the time, was that what they discovered would end up being one of the most horrific cases of an incestuous family in Australian history, rendering the rest of the world speechless.

The family clan, which consisted of 38 members, were surrounded by squalor, incest, and child sex abuse.

Inside the caravan camp. (Image: Nine News).
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"I'll never get over what I saw there" a female police officer told another colleague, according to The Daily Mail.

The Children's Court judge's made the rare decision to make the details of the case public, despite the nature of them.

12 children were removed from the property, which included five of Betty Colt's 13 children, with only one of the 12 not being inbred.

A caravan on the property. (Image: Nine News).
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The children were found illiterate and malnourished, some with facial deformities. Others could barely speak, and there was no understanding of basic living needs. A toothbrush and toilet paper was unheard of to them.

Homozygosity, the name for a child whose parents have identical gene patterns, caused these aforementioned deformities and intellectual disabilities.

One of the boys in the large family had walking problems and severe psoriasis. Another had eyes that weren't aligned. Other issues included  hearing and eye impairments.

A nine-year-old girl didn't know how to clean herself, or use a toilet.

Inside the property. (Image Nine News).
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Inside the confines of the property lines, was a living nightmare.

The children had black feet from never washing them, their hair was unkempt, the tents were littered with cigarette butts and rotting food; enough of it for a kangaroo to be found sleeping on one of the beds.

Martha and Charlie, the sister and brother of Betty Colt, reportedly slept among buckets of faeces and urine, according to The Daily Mail. Their 'marital' bed was inside one of the nearly destroyed tents.

Inside the tents. (Image: Nine News).
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Their children were allegedly having sex with one another.

After the Colt children told the authorities of generations of alleged sexual abuse dating back to the early 1900s, from the ages of 12, the female adults in the group insisted that outsiders fathered the children - one being a Swedish man.

The DNA tests proved this was a lie.

One of the girls' tents. (Image: Nine News).
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"Betty Colt's children Bobby, Billy, Brian, Dwayne and Carmen exhibited features indicative of neglect when they were taken into care," Judge Johnston of the Children's Court said.

"They were lacking basic life skills... Their living environment was inadequate and their health and dental needs had been severely neglected.

"Additionally, their schooling and educational needs had been ignored, contributing to their developmental delay and deficits in intellectual functioning."

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Leader of the family, Betty Colt, might have been a victim of incest herself, the judge also said.

When a DNA test was conducted on her 16-year-old son Bobby, it revealed that his DNA consisted of an incestuous relationship between a full brother or father.

Eight family members are charged with sex abuse and/or incest.

Video by MWN