Susannah was just two when her mother gave her a bath, put her in a new pair of pyjamas and slashed her throat — but she survived. WARNING: Graphic
Susannah Birch was just two years old when the person she trusted the most almost
killed her.
“My parents were Seventh Day Adventist but lived an otherwise normal life —
church, friends and work,” Susannah tells news.com.au.
“My father was a carpenter, and my mother was living at home while I was young.”
But on Australia Day 1989, everything changed.
“My father woke early and prepared to do a small weekend job for a client. My mother had bathed me and put me in a new pair of pyjamas,” she says.
“My father returned later that morning to find the cottage surrounded by police cars
“Some time while he was gone, my mother had placed me on a tea chest, cut my throat with a knife and left me laying there for an estimated 40 minutes before coming out of her psychosis enough to phone the police.”
Hospitalised for more than three months, Susannah sustained a severed laryngeal nerve and trachea and received more than 50 stitches.