Legacy of Lily Grace: why couple adopted baby found dead on a Sydney beach

When three young boys found a baby’s body buried on the beach, it sparked an exhaustive police investigation and a coronial inquest. But more than a year later, the little girl’s identity and cause of death remains a mystery

Mid-morning on the southern end of Sydney’s Maroubra beach, on the last Sunday of November 2014, and three little boys began to dig a hole.

They were Nippers with the local surf lifesaving club’s under-sevens program, which was holding a training day, and were waiting for the sprint event from which they had been eliminated to finish.

They had not dug deep in the sand before their calls of “Dead baby, dead baby” brought one of their fathers running, and Lily Grace into the world for the second time.

That’s not the name she was given by her mother, if she ever had a name. It’s been almost 15 months since her body was found in a shallow grave on one of the most popular beaches in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but a police investigation and a coroner’s inquest has concluded with more questions than answers about her life and death.

In the front row of the public gallery sat a couple who in other circumstances you might have taken, from the coroner’s frequent acknowledgment of them, for the baby’s family.

Police dig in the sand dunes after children playing on the beach found the body of a baby. More than a year later, they have made almost no progress on identifying the baby, how she died or anything else about the case. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images

And indeed, for as long as her birth mother’s identity remains unknown, Filomena D’Alessandro and police sergeant Bill Green are the closest Lily Grace has to parents. They named her, then they buried her. They didn’t know her – but as time passes it seems increasingly unlikely that anyone besides her mother ever did.

Five days after the inquest, in an office at the property management agency where she has worked for more than 10 years, D’Alessandro remembers the day Lily’s body was found. “We’re local. As soon as we heard Maroubra it struck a chord.” It was also her and Green’s first wedding anniversary.

Seven weeks later, in the car en route to the Central Coast, she read that the baby – at that point unidentifiable as even a boy or girl – was to be given a destitute burial. “I think that made me angry, more than anything else. I was like, are you serious? First we’re going to bury her, then we’re giving her ...” She trails off. “It stuck with me all weekend.”

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“She looked me in the eye and said, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ ” says Green.

D’Alessandro, who has a nine-year-old son, felt strongly that the child was owed a funeral. “Any news story that you hear of in your own suburb, your ears prick up. You listen because it’s in your backyard. I think we had a responsibility – not just us, the people around us. This baby was buried in our beach.”

Though Green now works on public transport crimes in the city, he had worked at Maroubra police station and knew some of the officers working on the case. Though he agreed a destitute burial “wasn’t decent”, he warned his wife not to get her hopes up. There were protocols around this sort of thing. Processes.

That Monday afternoon, D’Alessandro called Green at work to tell him she had organised the funeral directors.

The challenge remained securing the release of the baby’s remains. Although there was broad support from the Eastern Beaches police and the coroner’s court, no one had asked to do such a thing before.

D’Alessandro admits to “harassing” the local area commander, Det Supt Gavin Dengate: “‘What’s going on? When’s it happening?’ I was just driving him crazy.” She nods at Green. “He could probably second that.”

(Dengate later presented both of them with formal certificates of appreciation from the New South Wales police for giving Lily Grace “a dignified farewell”.)

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Sergeant Bill Green lays flowers at the grave of Lily Grace in the Garden of Innocence in Eastern Suburbs memorial park in Botany. Photograph: Elle Hunt/The Guardian

Once the child’s DNA had been sent to New York for testing, D’Alessandro ramped up her campaign for the police and the coroner’s court to let her body go. “We kept saying to them, ‘You’ve taken what you need from the little left of her that you had. Why not just let her go?’ And they did.”

In April she and Green were given approval to go ahead with funeral arrangements and were told the baby was a girl. The couple named her Lily; the coroner, Hugh Dillon, chose Grace.

D’Alessandro looks back on it now as a “long, drawn-out process”. Green, knowing the force from within, tries to impress upon her how extraordinary her achievement was in a little over four months. “To me it’s very black and white,” she says. “You do what you need to do.”

Lily Grace’s funeral service was held on 29 April at the Eastern Suburbs memorial park. Dillon, several police officers and D’Alessandro’s son (“I think Lily Grace is a person to him, too,” she says) were among the 120 or so there. Her coffin was carried by a surf lifesaver in recognition of how she had been discovered.

“If it didn’t break your heart when you saw her coffin come in, there’s something wrong with you,” says Green. “I’ve seen many, many murders. I was working in Parramatta when there were all those shootings, I’ve seen a number of deaths, and when I saw her coffin come in ...”

He looks at D’Alessandro. “I think I grabbed you by the hand. You could’ve been six-foot-seven and built like a brick toilet – you still felt something.”

If it didn’t break your heart when you saw her coffin come in, there’s something wrong with you.Sergeant Bill Green

Contributions of time, money and services from the community meant the funeral cost was covered. Surplus funds went to the Royal Women’s hospital in Sydney. Lily Grace was buried in the Eastern Suburbs memorial park’s new Garden of Innocence, construction of which was fast-tracked especially.

“We tried to get the community involved,” says Green. “We really wanted to get mum to come forward.”

“She may have, that’s the thing,” says D’Alessandro. “She may have but you may not know. Afterwards – not to say we looked at the photos to say, ‘Where is she? Which one is she?’ – but I could have picked out five people on that page she could have been.”

The windswept dunes at the southern end of Maroubra beach became the final resting place of the baby, who pathologists believe was carried to term and probably born alive, outside a hospital and without medical assistance. Photograph: Gaye Gerard/Getty Images

She wondered the same at the inquest: is she around? Is she watching this? Does she want us to just go away, or does she appreciate that her daughter had a burial? Does she even know?

“That’s the thing,” says Green. “There’s a thousand question marks.”

Though both have theories about what happened that November on Maroubra beach – she suspects a young woman who’d concealed her pregnancy from her parents; he wonders if she wasn’t somehow transient, perhaps a backpacker – nothing is certain.

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But both have nothing but sympathy for Lily Grace’s mother, whoever and wherever she may be. “She’s living her own torment,” says Filomena. “Even though she’s evaded the law, it’s not something she’s got away with. She has to live with this for the rest of her life.”

A pathologist was able to determine that Lily Grace was carried to term and probably born alive, outside a hospital and without medical assistance.

Beyond that, practically nothing is known about her, including whether she died at the beach and how long she had been there, a coronial advocate, Sgt Bronwyn Lorenc, told the New South Wales coroner’s court last week.

Lorenc stood before magistrate Hugh Dillon heavily pregnant, as she acknowledged in her closing statements. She said she had been “particularly touched” by the case: “I can only imagine what the mother would have gone through.”

In his closing remarks, Dillon – wearing a black-and-pink ribbon given to him by D’Alessandro and Green – described society’s tendency to revile desperate mothers as harsh and ultimately counterproductive. “If the lesson we teach these women is that they are lepers in our midst, what incentive is there for them to seek help for their babies and themselves?

The couple in February 2015 at the Garden of Innocence of Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park. They say they had to battle bureaucracy to allow Lily Grace’s remains to be released for a dignified funeral. Photograph: Elle Hunt/the Guardian

“A decent society’s message to its most vulnerable and desperate members must be that the rest of us care and will help.”

He recommended that hatches where unwanted babies can be safely deposited be installed in hospitals, and that “safe haven” laws be introduced to protect the women who use them from prosecution, a fairly drastic step that remains controversial.

But if there is a chance they could save even one child from the same fate as Lily Grace, D’Alessandro’s in favour. “I remember hearing the day after the inquest some politician saying it was such a backward thing, and I was thinking, ‘You need to pull your head out of your clacker.’

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“‘What a stupid thing to do. ‘You’re going to have all these babies handed in, they deserve to know who their family is.’ Yeah, that’s great. We can work on that down the track. But the baby boxes are for the immediate need of women who are desperate.”

As the NSW government considers Dillon’s recommendations, a memorial day for Lily Grace will be observed on 29 April for all the children who have died without family or are yet to be found. Because even if Lily Grace’s identity is one day revealed – as D’Alessandro and Green continue to hope, against the odds – there will be other children found whose identity will never be known.

“There could potentially be hundreds buried in places that we don’t know about,” says D’Alessandro. “We didn’t find the only baby out there.”

While acknowledging the crudeness of the word, Dillon said in some ways Lily Grace was a symbol.

“There are lots of children who are living desperately month to month, and Lily Grace has in one sense been lucky enough to receive the dignity in her death that her parents were in one way in her life unable to provide,” he said.

“A lot of kids are not so lucky.”

But D’Alessandro is quick to put any perceived achievement into context.

“It’s just for her legacy, to let her death not be in vain,” she says. “At the end of the day, we gave her a funeral but we couldn’t do much to help her. We just gave her a send-off.”

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