BRENDA Bondy was delighted when her new husband Wayne McBride acted like a doting dad from the moment their daughter Alecia was born.
But as the young mum went on to discover, McBride had sinister reasons for wanting to be close to their baby – and Brenda has revealed how she later turned detective to put the monster back behind bars.
“Wayne seemed like a doting dad, but he was just covering a sick urge to prey on his own baby girl,” says Brenda, of the evil man who killed and sexually abused his own six-week-old daughter.
“He is a depraved monster.”
Looking back to the start of their relationship, Brenda believes she was groomed by her first husband.
She was a wide eyed 16-year-old and McBride a “superficially charming” 25-year-old chef who swept her off her feet when they met at their local pool hall.
She says her family loved him too.
The couple married when Brenda turned 18 and their beautiful daughter Alecia arrived four months later.
“We were lucky because Alecia was an easy baby,” says Brenda.
“Most men would run a mile rather than change a nappy but Wayne was very hands on, possessive even.
“She only fussed when Wayne held her, which was odd, because he did so much for her,” she adds sadly.
“With me or my mum, she settled easily.”
The couple were living with Brenda’s parents in , , in 1985 while they had their daughter.
The new mum returned to work at her marketing job just five weeks later, determined to start saving up so the couple could move into their own place.
“Wayne worked nights so he said he would look after Alecia during the day,” says Brenda.
“When I started back at work he would sit up with her after I went to bed.
“He would put her in the bassinet beside me before leaving for his evening shift and in the morning, he’d take over when I went to work.”
This childcare routine lasted for just one week before Brenda made a phone call she would never forget.
“I called Wayne at lunch as usual to ask how Alecia was,” she says.
“He replied in a monotone: ‘I think the baby is dead’.”
Brenda remembers screaming, running out of her office and jumping into a taxi in floods of tears to take the short, five mile journey home.
She found her then husband sitting in the lounge with baby Alecia slumped on his lap.
“I grabbed her and she felt so cold,” says Brenda.
“Wayne told me her neck was broken because he had fallen down the stairs with her in his arms.
“I frantically began but it didn’t work.”
Brenda next rushed outside in the freezing rain to meet an arriving paramedic but it was too late.
Alecia was taken to hospital where a doctor told her distraught mother there was nothing they could do, that her baby girl was gone.
“I sobbed, praying it was a bad dream,” recalls Brenda.
A police officer later arrived at Brenda’s home to break the news that McBride had been arrested for .
“Detectives asked me about our sex life,” Brenda says.
“I was confused, what did that have to do with anything?”
And a week later, autopsy results revealed a brain haemorrhage had killed Alecia, with detectives telling her shocked mother there were signs of sexual abuse too.
From news reports and her parents, Brenda earned that while she’d slept McBride raped Alecia while she was at home and asleep in bed, before tossing their baby across the room into a cardboard box when she cried.
He then put the seriously injured infant in her bassinet beside Brenda and headed to work.
When McBride returned home from his night shift and Brenda headed out to work herself, she thought her baby was sleeping in her bassinet – instead, she was dying.
“What Wayne had done only really sank in when a detective showed me autopsy photos,” says Brenda, who broke down in tears and felt sick.
“He asked: ‘Have you seen these injuries before?’
“I hadn’t and I wondered if his possessiveness over Alecia had been because he was trying to hide abuse.”
Brenda, who dressed Alecia in a white knitted outfit to bury her in a tiny white coffin, sobbed: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you’ when she said her final goodbyes to her newborn.
McBride was jailed for life for killing Alecia and given a non-parole term of 15 years.
Though McBride wasn’t charged with sexual offences, the judge mentioned Alecia’s rape during the trial.
Brenda, who went on to marry again and have a son and a daughter, said: “I was disgusted at the leniency.”
The monster was released from prison in 2009 after 24 years in jail but breached his parole conditions after being caught in the back of a van with a sex worker 18 months later.
Full parole was granted to him in April 2024, much to Brenda’s alarm.
“It made no sense that a man who’d done such sickening things to a baby could be released,” she says.
“I was concerned that women and children were in danger, so I spied on him on-line.
“In January 2025 I saw he had a new Facebook friend and looking at her page it was clear she was a sex worker.”
This breached McBride’s parole conditions and he was locked up once more when Brenda reported him.
Now in his 60s, the killer was freed again in May 2025, with his ex-wife campaigning for tougher sentences for offenders against children.
Brenda has told her children all about their big sister Alecia, who would be 41 today.
“These men, like Wayne, they can appear superficially charming,” she says.
“I was just a child when we met.”
“There are deluded people in the justice system who believe men that rape and kill children can be rehabilitated,” adds Brenda.
“But some crimes are so evil that the perpetrators must be jailed forever.”
