There are still no answers as to whether a Floreat couple accused of starving their ballerina daughter will ever be criminally prosecuted after their convictions were sensationally quashed. The parents — who cannot be named to protect the identity of their daughter — were released on bail after successfully winning an appeal in April.
On Friday, prosecutor Jehna Winter told the WA District Court that the State was ready to proceed with a five-week retrial but it could not be heard until the middle of 2027 because of a backlog.
In 2024, a jury found both parents guilty of severely starving and infantilising their teenage daughter, keeping her in a “Peter Pan” state and refusing to let her grow up. The girl, who was home-schooled, weighed just 28.1kg when she was forcibly hospitalised in 2021, days shy of her 17th birthday. Her growth had been stunted, puberty had been delayed and she had a condition known as lanugo — a soft, feathery hair covering that can develop in people with eating disorders to keep them warm. She was placed under the protection of the Department of Communities.
In November 2025, her mother was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, while her father — who also admitted to forging his daughter’s birth certificate — was jailed for 6.5 years. Both parents immediately appealed for a retrial following their sentence.
The mother failed a bid for bail in November after arguing that she suffered a miscarriage of justice because she fell ill during her trial. She argued that her trial was “fundamentally miscarried” when District Court Judge Linda Black refused her application for an adjournment after falling ill. Instead, Justice Black — who had been handed a doctor’s note that stated she was suffering either food poisoning or a stomach bug — ruled the trial could proceed without her physically present in the courtroom, and watch from a remote room on video link. About an hour into giving evidence, the case was adjourned when the mother flagged she was struggling to follow the matter and was “kind of half dozing off”. She returned three days later, appearing to have recovered.
In ruling against bail, Court of Appeal Justice Robert Mazza said that he was unable to find that “the ground has such strong prospects of success as to amount to exceptional reasons for a grant of bail pending appeal”. “The fact that I have reached this conclusion at a relatively early stage in the appeal should not be understood to mean that the ground is without prospects of success,” he said. “After full argument before a coram of three judges, it may be that the ground is made out but, at the risk of repeating myself, on the basis of the arguments and analysis so far put to the court, I am unable to conclude that ground one has sufficient merit to justify a grant of bail pending appeal.”
In court on Friday, the child’s father was represented by a stand-in defence lawyer who requested an adjournment so the man could secure his own legal representation. The mother did not attend court and the matter was adjourned for six weeks to June 5.
