My father the murderer

When Nina Young discovered that her father was a killer and her mum had kept it secret, her world imploded. Here mother and daughter talk to The Weekly about that deeply emotional journey.

-  JULIET RIEDEN

Most families have secrets, scars from the past that everyone senses they shouldn’t ask about, but the secret Denise Young kept from her daughter Nina for 25 years was more than discarded family baggage, it was intense, shocking and life-changing.

So, it’s no wonder that when Nina discovered the truth about who her father really was, about the unvarnished horror of his crimes, it made her question her whole sense of self. “It felt like the ground had fallen out from underneath me. I thought, there’s no way Mum could know because if she knew then obviously I would know about it too,” Nina tells The Weekly as she casts her mind back to that day when everything went dark.

By this time Nina was aware that her father had killed a man. She was 15 when his face appeared on TV’s Australia’s Most Wanted and her mum called Crime Stoppers to offer information. It was then that Nina learned that the man she knew as her biological dad, Allan Ladd, was a dangerous criminal. A man in Albury, NSW, had been found beaten to death and Allan was the main suspect.

Nina’s heart was in her mouth. She knew that her mum had left her dad when she was a baby, that Allan was a “diamond in the rough” who suffered “a terrible childhood” which caused him to behave erratically. Denise’s marriage hadn’t worked, she was told, because Allan was violent and she had left him to keep Nina and her brother Lex safe. But a killer?