True Crime Conversations · Mamamia Podcasts

Darryl Used To Be A Violent Man. Now He Stops Them.

·1 hr 9 min·4 clips

Daryl says violence was his “first language” after a childhood marked by abuse, rape, and fear.

1. True Crime Conversations follows Daryl Gardner and the 2023 supermarket moment with his mother’s abuser in his old hometown. 2. Gemma Bath hosts Daryl Gardner, who is now a mental health clinician and founder of Rolling With The Punches, and his mother appears as a central figure in his story. 3. The episode asks how a boy raised around extreme violence became a violent man and later used a second chance. 4. Daryl says he was born in 1983 to a mother who was about 15 or 16, and he describes her background as a dysfunctional family in Albury. 5. He says his mother’s own mother tried to make her miscarry, which he identifies as his earliest exposure to violence in utero. 6. Daryl describes his stepfather moving into the home when he was one or two and presenting controlling behavior as love. 7. He says the abuse escalated from verbal abuse to physical abuse and then to sexual abuse, including repeated rape of his mother. 8. Daryl describes the home as “like living in a war zone” and says he learned to read cups being set down, doors shutting, and body language for warning signs. 9. He recalls his mother being hit so hard that her orbital bone or jaw fractured after she tried to get help through a church visitor. 10. He also describes a swimming-pool assault where he says he was kicked into the water, pulled out by the hair, and beaten in front of the stepfather’s family. 11. Daryl says he talked like an adult as a toddler because he wanted the violence redirected toward himself to give his mother a break. 12. He says the stepfather later murdered another person, and he links that fact to a newspaper article and a nine-year manslaughter sentence. 13. Daryl describes Ken, his mother’s later partner, as kind, fair, loving, and safe, and says Ken showed that conflict could be resolved without violence. 14. He says that influence was not enough on its own because much of him was still locked in the violence he had already lived through. 15. Around age 10 or 11, Daryl says he found paperwork showing Ken had legally adopted his sister, which made him feel unwanted and unloved. 16. He says boxing at the PCYC in Albury gave him safe, controlled contact with violence and a place to belong when he was struggling at home. 17. The conversation turns to Daryl’s later violent offending, including pushing, grabbing, choking, verbal threats, and assaults in relationships. 18. He says he once planned to kill his father with a gun, used anabolic steroids and amphetamines, and tried to become a “monster” so he would not get hurt. 19. The interview is direct, reflective, and unflinching, with Gemma Bath pressing him on why he could hurt others after hating violence as a child. 20. Listeners interested in domestic violence, trauma, and rehabilitation will likely stay, while people avoiding graphic abuse accounts may skip it.

As heard by us

A supermarket encounter opens into a sober look at violence, accountability, and change.

True Crime Conversations takes a supermarket encounter and keeps it grounded in what follows: violence, survival, and the choice to stop. Daryl Gardner returns to his old hometown in 2023, sees a man he realizes is his mother's abuser, and feels the old anger come back.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a true-crime story about choosing restraint at the hardest possible moment.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from True Crime Conversations