Friends and neighbours talked at length at the weekend about the dramatic events which led to the discovery of the murder-suicide of three young children and their father in a car on a remote bush property west of Eden last week.

One also described the detailed planning which the father Gary Bell, 44, had put into the killing of his three young children with the doors and windows of his four-wheel drive vehicle taped and barricaded to ensure there was no possibility of escape.

The bodies were discovered last Friday on the commune-style property where they had lived for the past three years in Fulligans Road, Pericoe, 50 km west of Eden.

The most deeply affected were Tracey Wilson and her partner Peter Porada who live a few kilometres away and who found the bodies shortly after 10am on Friday.

There is still a question mark over when the family died.

No one had seen Gary Bell and the three children – Jack, 8, Maddie, 7, and Bon, 16 months – since his arrest and release on bail on Sunday last week.

Ms Wilson said that the children’s mother, Karen Bell, 33, a close friend, had called her last Thursday to ask her if she would call around at the house to see how they were.

She said she had phoned Merimbula police and asked them if they would check on the welfare of the family.

“Something’s not right. I really don’t want to go out there,” she said she had told police.

But when they refused, she had taken Mr Porada with her the next morning because she was too afraid to go alone.

“When we got there, (there was) an eerie silence,” she said.

“I went to the house. I was yelling out and there was nothing, only three dogs barking.

“Then I saw Peter looking in their car and straight away he yelled at me to get back in our car.

“I said to him, ‘They’re dead aren’t they.’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I just started screaming and screaming.”

Ms Wilson said it had then fallen to her to tell Karen Bell that her children were dead, because she had phoned after hearing of the discovery of the bodies through the media.

“I had to tell her that her kids were dead. She asked me how they died and I told her - what he did to them.”

She said it had been the hardest phone call of her life.

“If I could take back my words I would, but I can’t. I couldn’t lie to her either.”

Mr Porada was still too upset to talk about finding the bodies or their positions in the car.

“All I want to say is that the kids were at peace,” he said.

The Bell’s nearest neighbours in Fulligans Road, Ian and Dianne Auld, who live several hundred metres away, said that Karen Bell had driven to their house and woken them about midnight on Saturday to use their phone.

“She said Gary had locked her out of the house and disabled their phone.

“The police arrived shortly afterwards so she must have got a message through to them earlier,” Ian said.

“They arrested Gary and took him to Meimbula police station.

“Karen came down about 9.30 on Sunday morning to collect her car and drove off with the kids and that was the last we saw of them.”

Ms Wilson said that Karen Bell had picked up her husband when he was released on bail by police on Sunday and driven him back to the house with the children.

“He conned her into picking him up. As soon as she got him home he threw her out,” she said.

“She then came round here as she did when this happens because she knew she was safe.”

Mrs Bell had then gone back to Bega to stay with her mother.

Mr Auld said that during all of that week it had been deadly quiet at the Bell’s place.

“Usually we heard lots of noise, the kids playing, the radios on,” he said.

“I was not going to go up there on my own and investigate because Gary would rather have a fight than a feed,” he said.

Instead he had called Karen Bell’s mother and the family had asked a friend to come out.

Mr and Mrs Auld said they had seen Gary Bell bash his wife to the ground and kick her in front of the children on another occasion.

Mr Auld said that Gary had been a personable, hard working man with good building skills who had done a lot of work on the house.

“But when he had too much to drink or got involved with the bongs he was not a man to be in close vicinity with. He was a dangerous man,” Mr Auld said.

Mrs Auld, Karen’s aunt, said she could never understand why Karen had stayed with him.

“But she loved the property and was trying to keep the family together.

“He had a strong hold over her. They had been together since she left high school,” Mrs Auld said.

She said the other factor which had confused many people was that Gary had taken Karen’s surname of Bell when they married some 18 years ago.

“He was English and had a name like Poxon, which he did not like, and he wanted to take the Bell name,” she said.

Another neighbour, Tony Boller, who has lived on the 500 acre property since 1972 and raised his own family of five children there, said he had fought with Gary Bell about three years ago when he had been attacked with an iron bar.

He said that Mr Bell had also fought with other neighbours and that shots had been fired in one altercation.

Mr Boller said that after studying the aerial pictures taken of the death scene it was clear that the killing of himself and the children had been very carefully planned by Mr Bell.

The four wheel drive vehicle had been backed down hill on to a steel post set into the ground at an angle to jam the back door closed.

The muffler exhaust had been removed and two pipes led from there into the interior of the car, and also from a generator which had been set up next to the car with a lead so that he could control its operation from inside the car.

The property is a one-hour drive over dirt roads from Eden with no mobile phone reception and no mains power or electricity.