The Overnight Daycare ‘House Of Horror’
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What was the environment like at Bluemoor Family Daycare?
Five-year-old Hayley and seven-year-old Laura Jane are happily playing with toys at Bloomore Family Daycare in Batemans Bay on the New South Wales south coast. It's a centre that offers overnight services to parents and takes kids up to 14 years old. It's pretty remote, run from the family property of the only carer there, David Tuck. He's a jovial man in his 30s, charismatic and approachable, and Hayley and LJ's parents feel comfortable leaving their kids in his home. But within hours, Tuck will start grooming them. They realise he has some pretty unusual rules, like an open-door policy for the toilets and no underwear while sleeping. The girls also quickly realise that every night someone sleeps in the big bed with him.
Soon it's their turn and at first they think it's special to be chosen, lucky. It takes just one night for them to realise the truth. I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. A warning, this episode does involve discussion about child sexual abuse and suicide. Please take care while listening. For years, parents trusted David Tuck to look after their children at his family daycare service in Batemans Bay. It's only now, decades later, that the extent of his horrific abuse is being revealed, earning him the title of one of Australia's worst pedophiles. He was aged between 32 and 37 when he ran the centre between 1994 and 1999, and it's believed he had more than 55 victims.
He also had access to children across his career, running school holiday camps, in youth detention, as a gymnastics instructor, as a school bus driver for intellectually disabled children, and as a carer for intellectually disabled children. He lived and worked across not just New South Wales, but Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and South Australia. The true extent of his victims is unknown. Partly because he died in 2001, just as police were starting to catch up to him. This isn't just a story about Tuck and his crimes. It's also about the failure of local authorities to take allegations seriously. Our guests today are currently in court with Yoruba Dala Local Council, trying to hold them to account for allowing him to operate in the first place and for so long.
One of the other big glaring failures is the fact David Tuck's name was suppressed and shrouded in silence for years. That was changed in 2025, thanks to legal blocks overcome by journalist and victims advocate Nina Fennell and news.com.au. Laura Jane and Hayley were just two of Tuck's victims. This is their story. LJ, Hayley, thank you for joining me on True Crime Conversations. You told your story publicly for the first time just last year. Can you tell us about why and how you made that decision and what it's been like since sharing your story?
We made the decision to come forward in the media because we had not been able to say our abuser's name for over 20 years. Hayley and I had many discussions about the fact that he'd never been named publicly in the media. And we decided that it was time. We wanted to reclaim our story, and part of that was naming him, not just for us, but for all of his survivors, so that they'd never have to type his name into a Google search and nothing came up.
To even be able to say his name, you had to go to court, didn't you?
We didn't. There was some historical suppression orders, which were lost, I guess, in decades of no one speaking out. But the journalist that we worked with, Nina Fennell, was able to navigate that and realise that, you know, they were no longer in place.
What has it meant to be able to say the name David Tuck publicly?
How did David Tuck groom his victims?
Has it made the difference that you were hoping, being able to say his name?
Definitely. I think since we did our first article around 12 months ago, we've connected with numerous other victim survivors. And this is not just from the childcare and the experience that we had, but previous victim survivors of his as well.
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