‘I will never forgive,’ Hannah McGuire’s mother tells her daughter’s murderer

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An alarming number of Australian women have been killed in recent years. Find out more about their lives. Some of the cases are still before the courts.

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When police arrived at Hannah McGuire’s family home in April 2024 to tell her parents they had found their daughter’s badly burnt body in a torched car, her mother’s screams echoed through the town of Clunes.

On Monday, Debbie McGuire told a packed Ballarat courtroom those grief-stricken howls still haunt the small central Victorian town.

Hannah McGuire, 23, was found dead in April 2024 in Scarsdale, near Ballarat.

“Words fall short of conveying the profound pain, immense sense of loss and lasting emptiness I have felt since Hannah was taken from me,” the mother of three told the court.

“I am both angry and broken; every day I cry, and I ask myself, ‘Why? Why Hannah?’

“The day I found out Hannah was gone, a part of me died too.”

For the first time, a court heard how Lachlan Young strangled his ex-girlfriend, 23-year-old Hannah, in the bathroom of the home they once shared in King Drive, Sebastopol, in Ballarat’s south, about 2.30am on April 5 last year.

He then dumped her body in the back of her orange ute, before driving to Scarsdale and setting the vehicle alight with a blowtorch.

Young then tried to cover up the murder by sending a series of text messages purporting to be Hannah to her mother in an attempt to make her death look like suicide.

Prosecutor Kristie Churchill told the court that in a conversation between Young and a friend after the murder, the friend mentioned how Young had previously referred to Hannah as “hot and attractive”.

“Well she’s hot now, isn’t she?” Young responded. The evidence drew audible gasps from McGuire’s friends and family who filled the Supreme Court.

Hannah McGuire’s parents, Debbie and Glenn McGuire, outside court in July.

Young faced court on Monday for a pre-sentence hearing after abruptly pleading guilty to murdering Hannah, eight days into his trial, on July 18. He had previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

On Monday, he was forced to listen to harrowing victim impact statements from her mother, father, extended family, friends and colleagues.

Glenn McGuire, the father of the teacher’s aide, said no words could express the depth of his grief and that he often struggled with thoughts of suicide.

Hannah McGuire. A family friend said the young woman’s parents were consumed and broken by their grief.

“Her mother and I wake up every day to a world that feels colder, emptier and less meaningful without her in it,” he said in a statement read to the court by the police officer who charged Young.

“My anger is overwhelming, and sometimes I want to end my own life. What stops me is my wife and my two boys.”

Glenn said he struggles to accept he would never see his daughter walk through the front door or hear her laugh.

“I will never get another hug or a simple, ‘I love you, Dad’,” the statement said.

“As her father, I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to be there to guide her, support her, watch her grow into the incredible woman she was becoming.

A court sketch of Lachlan Young in July.

“Instead, I had to bury her … to pick out a coffin instead of [a] graduation or wedding dress.

“She was the light of my life... She was kind, understanding and full of potential. The accused took everything away from her and from all of us.”

He said the loss of his daughter had devastated her two siblings, family and friends.

“I live in grief, I live in anger, I live with guilt, and I live with the knowledge that there is nothing I can do to bring her back,” he said.

Throughout the hearing, a small box of tissues sat at the McGuires’ feet in the front row of the courtroom.

Debbie wiped tears with a crumpled tissue. Glenn was at points so distressed he held his head in his hands, while one of Hannah’s brothers sat beside his parents with tears silently running down his cheeks.

Hannah was her parents’ firstborn child and Debbie said she had been blessed to know and love her ever since.

“Hannah was more than just my daughter,” she said. “She was my best friend, my light, my pride and my greatest joy.”

Young (centre) has pleaded guilty to murder.

She unflinchingly stared down her daughter’s killer, who lowered his eyes in the dock, as she asked the court: “Why would I pour my heart out in front of someone who has shown absolutely no remorse?”

Debbie said while she commended people who were able to offer forgiveness to perpetrators of crimes, she was not one of them. She told the court the hurt she carried each day was “so heavy, it’s crippling”.

“I hope every day for the rest of his life, he experiences the most intense pain imaginable,” she said.

“I will never forget, and I will never forgive. It is a burden I will carry for the rest of my life.

“There are mornings I wake, and I forget for a brief second that she is gone, and then the immense pain and suffering the accused has caused hits me all over again.”

During the hearing, one of Hannah’s friends broke down in tears as she stood to deliver her victim impact statement. Unable to compose herself, she asked for a short break.

A family friend said Hannah’s parents were consumed and broken by their grief.