'I would love that to be our boys' legacy': Ralph and Kathy Kelly's kindness mission

Thomas had been flatting in Sydney since starting a cadetship at the accounting firm Hall Chadwick five months earlier. He shared an apartment with Ralph, whose hotel consultancy business took him to the city a few days a week. Normally both father and son returned to Burradoo on weekends, but this Saturday - July 7, 2012 - Thomas had stayed in town to celebrate a friend's birthday. The party was at Kings Cross, the city's rowdy bar and nightclub district, but he had assured his parents he would be careful.

By the time Kathy and Ralph reached central Sydney, it was well past midnight. In William Street, the major thoroughfare leading east from the CBD, the footpaths were crowded with revellers walking towards the Cross. Traffic was gridlocked, so the couple took another route to St Vincent's in neighbouring Darlinghurst. As they parked the car, they were optimistic that everything would be okay. They imagined Thomas telling them jokingly that they shouldn't have bothered coming so far. But at the entrance to the hospital's emergency department, two police officers were waiting.

"Are you Mr and Mrs Kelly?" one of them asked.

The Kellys now live in a pleasant house on Sydney's lower north shore. Kathy smiles as she swings open the front door on a warm autumn day. Accompanied by a couple of bouncy dogs, she leads the way inside and introduces me to Ralph, who is wearing a pink polo shirt. He smiles, too, and offers to rustle up some coffee. We sit at a table in their back garden and I tell them I vividly recall the first time I saw them on a news bulletin. Their composure was what struck me: the way they held themselves together in the glare of the TV lights.

"It was really strange," Ralph says, "because off-camera, we were just complete wrecks. But something comes over you." Kathy says they knew from the beginning that they had to use the media to get their message across: "There's no point in just being a bubbling mess and having nobody understand what you're trying to say."

Kathy and Ralph have been through so much in the past seven years that people sometimes ask how they get out of bed in the mornings. Kathy sees it as a legitimate question. "There are plenty of days when I don't want to be here," she says. Despite their sadness, or perhaps because of it, she and Ralph have decided to tell their story. Too Soon, Too Late, to be published by Allen & Unwin early next month, is dedicated to their three children, only one of whom is alive to read it. The book is bracing in its honesty, though I am to discover that the Kellys are, if anything, more candid in person than on the page. "We just want people to know what the experience has been like," Kathy says.

At the hospital that night, the police ushered them along a corridor to a small waiting room, where a registrar from the emergency department told them that Thomas had received a serious head injury and was in surgery. The registrar said they should prepare for the worst. Later, a neurosurgeon plied them with information they found difficult to absorb, then said gently: "You need to understand he has very little chance of surviving."

Some time after 3am, Kathy and Ralph were allowed into the intensive care unit to be with their son. Thomas's face was unmarked but his hair was red with blood. The words "No Bone" were written on a bandage on the left side of his head. This was where part of his skull had been removed to relieve pressure caused by the swelling of his brain. He was breathing with the help of a ventilator, and his eyes, which were open, were flat and lifeless. The Kellys knew at some level that Thomas was lost to them but they did not admit it, even to themselves. For the rest of that long night, they held his hands and talked to him, telling him how much they loved him and wanted him to recover.

In the morning, an intensive care specialist explained that the back of Thomas's head had slammed against the ground, forcing his brain forward against the front of his skull. The damage was catastrophic. More testing would be done, but she was certain that his brain had died. Kathy found herself looking at the doctor's shoes: red ballet flats, with sparkles on them. They made Kathy think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. That day and the next, before Thomas's life-support was turned off on Monday night, relatives and friends streamed in to say goodbye to him. Kathy's sister, Kerrie, went from Sydney to Burradoo to collect Thomas's siblings, Madeleine, then 17, and Stuart, 14.

Thomas had signed up to be an organ donor when he got his driver's licence a year earlier but Kathy, overwhelmed by emotion, came close to withholding consent. It was Madeleine who ensured that her older brother got his wish. "Absolutely we did the right thing," Kathy says, looking back, "but it took a 17-year-old to convince me at the time. I don't think you're in a very clear thinking space when you're in that environment. There needs to be much more education."

When the ventilator was disconnected and Thomas's heart stopped beating, Kathy and Ralph thought their hearts would break, too. But they did what they have been doing ever since: kept putting one foot in front of the other. "You think you'll be wailing on the ground, hysterical," says Kathy, "but you don't behave like that." With Madeleine and Stuart, they left the hospital and checked into a hotel. They bought pizzas for the kids and turned on the TV, because everyone was too tired to talk. Then the hospital called. Could the Kellys come back to formally identify Thomas's body? This time, they were met at the entrance by a couple of strapping plain-clothes police, who escorted them downstairs to the morgue. Afterwards, the same cops rode up in the lift with them. Ralph noticed that one of them had tears on his cheeks.

Thomas had not been in a fight, it turned out. He'd had dinner in the city with a young woman from Hall Chadwick - her name was Shaneez - then they had taken a taxi to Kings Cross. The cab dropped them near the intersection of Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road at 10.05pm. A closed-circuit TV camera captured Thomas walking along the pavement holding hands with Shaneez, while with his other hand he held his phone to his ear. He was getting directions to the spot where a friend was going to meet them before they went together to the party in a private room at the Trademark Hotel. "Look up to the Coke sign," the friend said, to help Thomas get his bearings. Then Thomas's phone went dead. It was 10.07pm.

Police told Kathy and Ralph that someone had walked up to their son and, without provocation, punched him in the head. The reason Thomas's face wasn't bruised was that he was taken completely by surprise and offered no resistance to the blow, falling straight back onto the footpath. The attack had not happened within view of a camera, and the assailant had disappeared into the crowd. The police asked the Kellys if they would make a public appeal for information that might lead to an arrest.

Ralph recalls being baffled by that first media conference: "As we were walking in, the head of the media for the police said to me, 'By the way, this will be going live on some of the TV stations.' I thought to myself, 'Why would it be going live? Thomas's is not the first death at Kings Cross and it probably won't be the last.' There were 30 or 40 media in the room and I was sitting there thinking, 'I don't quite understand what's going on here. What's the interest in this?'"

Kathy understood. Thomas was a teenager having his first night out on the town, and he had been fatally injured by a stranger two minutes after getting out of a taxi. Also, the middle-class Kellys didn't fit the usual profile of those who ended up on the news as victims of violence. "We probably came across as an everyday family," Kathy says. She knew what people watching at home would be thinking: If it happened to them, it could happen to anyone. Andrew Scipione, the then NSW police commissioner, says Thomas's death shifted public opinion. This was an enough-is-enough moment. "It wasn't a turning point, it was a tipping point," Scipione says.

When the Kellys returned to Burradoo, a semi-rural enclave between the towns of Bowral and Moss Vale, they were swamped with sympathy. "Every man and his dog was coming to our door," Kathy says. "It was lovely but it was awful at the same time." For her, dealing with a procession of visitors bearing food and flowers was quite a helpful distraction but Ralph just wanted to be left alone. He retreated to his study, which had a view to the road at the front of the house. One day, he says, "I walked in and looked out the window and there were 25 or 30 people just standing there. Members of the public. I think because it had been on the news so much, people had just come. I was kind of like a rabbit in the headlights. I didn't know what to do. So I crouched down and pulled the curtains across. Which may sound a bit strange, but we'd been thrust into a situation that we didn't know how to manage."

Madeleine and Stuart, who were on school holidays, desperately craved normality. Kathy says it was almost as if her two younger children were in denial: they barely mentioned Thomas's name. "I couldn't understand it myself," she says, "but I just needed to protect them in every possible way." Like Thomas before him, Stuart was a boarder at one of Sydney's oldest and most expensive schools, King's, at North Parramatta. Little more than a week after Thomas's death, Stuart returned for the new term.

Kathy, 57, is a warm and loquacious person. English-born Ralph, 59, is more reserved but has always been a besotted, indulgent father. When the children were young, he would return from work trips laden with expensive gifts despite Kathy's protests that he was spoiling them. At barbecues, he would play cricket with the kids rather than talk to the adults. Kathy, a stay-at-home mother, was the family disciplinarian. The difference in their parenting styles was a source of tension in their relationship, which they freely admit has had rocky periods. "We've probably thought a thousand times over the years that we shouldn't be together," Kathy says.

For a while after Thomas was killed, Ralph completely lost his moorings. "I spent two months sitting in my study drinking wine," he says. "Night turned into day and day turned into night. I just couldn't cope." His friends tried to contact him but he didn't respond. "I just shut the world out. The only people I spoke to were the police." Business strategist David Anstee, his closest friend, had been due to leave for Europe to watch the Tour de France just after Thomas was attacked. He cancelled the holiday and called Ralph every day. Weeks later, when Ralph finally picked up the phone, Anstee told him that Thomas's death had caused a groundswell of outrage. The community was demanding action to curb alcohol-fuelled violence in the streets of Sydney. Anstee, who had addressed a packed meeting at Sydney Town Hall, thought it was time Ralph joined the campaign.

The two made appointments to see politicians, police, drug and alcohol experts, corporate types, school principals, media executives, anyone they thought could help. "People were very generous with their time," Ralph says. "I'd say: 'Why have you agreed to meet with me?' And they'd say: 'Because we have children Thomas's age and it could have been us.'" Ralph and Kathy launched the Thomas Kelly Youth Foundation in 2013, giving it a simple goal: "To ensure all our children get home safely." The plan was to offer practical assistance to young people in the streets of the city at night, as well as to advocate for legislative change. Ralph had rediscovered his sense of purpose. "In many ways I became obsessive with what I was doing," he says. "It kind of took over my life."

Kathy, meanwhile, felt increasingly isolated. She got the impression that, once they'd stopped delivering casseroles, some of her friends and neighbours were avoiding her. She didn't really blame them: no one knows what to say to a person whose child has died. Still, her capacity to clear a footpath was disconcerting. "They'd cross the road to get away from you," she says. Kathy sometimes felt that Thomas's death had pushed her and Ralph apart. Her husband was "doing things for the foundation and saving the rest of the world" but seemed incapable of responding to the distress under his own roof. "All I had been wanting was for Ralph to put his arms around me and let me know that he was going to be there to look after me," she says. "I was in tears all the time and he could not put his arms around me and make me feel better."

Almost two years after Thomas was killed, Ralph went on a weekend retreat for fathers of homicide victims. "I didn't think he would ever do anything like that, not in a million years," Kathy says. "He didn't believe in counselling and all that sort of stuff." As she expected, the retreat was an ordeal for him. "He was ringing me saying, 'God knows why I'm here. I can't stand being here.'" But something good came of it. "He came home and said they'd told him that he needed to learn to hug me." Kathy pauses. "And that made such a huge difference to our relationship. We still had ups and downs. We still argued about how many presents he bought the kids and things like that. But at the end of the day, I think we got on much better."

Kathy and Ralph had put their Burradoo house on the market in 2011. It was a lovely old place set in manicured grounds, with a clay tennis court and heated swimming pool, but the mortgage repayments were steep. After Thomas's death, with the house still unsold, the couple started sliding into a financial hole. Ralph's hotel consultancy business had languished while he was bunkered in his study. He says that even when he went back to work, "I'd sit in meetings, thinking, 'This is so irrelevant.' I just couldn't focus and I couldn't connect, and my clients started to leave." The foundation was his only real interest and soon he was devoting all his time to it. School fees accumulated. Bills from the tax office went unpaid. "We had all this debt mounting," Kathy says. "God only knows how we got through it, but we did."

Police identified Thomas's killer as Kieran Loveridge, an 18-year-old with a criminal record. When the murder charge against him was downgraded to manslaughter, the Kellys were devastated. To argue that Thomas had been killed not by Loveridge's fist but by the impact with the footpath seemed to Kathy and Ralph to be absurd - like saying a person who'd been fatally shot was killed by the bullet, not by the person who fired the gun. Loveridge pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, and in November 2013 was sentenced to a minimum term of four years' imprisonment, or six years without parole. In addition, he was sentenced to 18 months' jail for four other assaults he had committed the night he attacked Thomas.

An outcry ensued. Newspapers thundered that Loveridge had been let off too lightly, and hundreds rallied in protest in the CBD. The Kellys launched an online petition demanding sentencing reform. The clamour intensified when, the month after Loveridge's sentencing, 18-year-old Daniel Christie was fatally injured in a one-punch attack just metres from where Thomas had been hit at Kings Cross. The then NSW Liberal premier, Barry O'Farrell, responded to public pressure, returning from his summer holiday in January 2014 to announce that his government would introduce a mandatory penalty of at least eight years in jail for one-punch attacks resulting in death where the offender was affected by drugs or alcohol. The state director of public prosecutions appealed against the "manifest inadequacy" of Loveridge's punishment for his night of violence, and in July 2014 his sentence was increased to a minimum of about 10 years' imprisonment, or about 14 years without parole.

"Hate is probably an understatement," says Ralph, when I ask how he feels about Loveridge. "But you try to put it away, out of your brain. I don't think it's good for your health to harbour thoughts like that."

The NSW Government also tightened laws governing the consumption of alcohol in the central Sydney entertainment precinct. Bars could no longer admit patrons after 1.30am or serve drinks after 3am. Bottle shops across NSW had to close at 10pm. The so-called lockout laws were highly divisive, welcomed by many but condemned by others as a death-blow to Sydney's once-vibrant nightlife.

The Kellys suddenly found themselves accused of everything from grandstanding and wowserism to corruption: they were said to be in cahoots with everyone from Kings Cross property developers to the operators of The Star casino at Pyrmont (which the government had exempted from the laws). The size of the backlash took the family aback. Ralph got death threats. Stuart, who had publicly supported his parents' campaign to make the streets safer, came in for criticism on social media. "They were getting all sorts of crap thrown at them," David Anstee says.

Thomas had been a shy and slightly insecure fellow. Stuart, on the other hand, was a gregarious individual, known since early childhood for his ability to make people laugh. In his final year at King's, he was captain of his house. On the surface, he seemed to have coped with the death of the brother he had also regarded as his best friend. "But I look back and think it was probably bravado, a bit of an act," Kathy says. "Maybe he was feeling sad for a very long time and we couldn't see it." A particular conversation stays in her mind. "He said to me one day, 'You don't get it, Mum. I'm an introvert.' I said, 'Don't be ridiculous, Stuart. You're the most outgoing, funniest young man I've ever known.'" She wishes she had listened more closely to him: "After Thomas died, something changed deep in his personality."

The Burradoo house eventually sold in 2015, Stuart's last year at school. After his graduation, the family celebrated by taking a European holiday but Kathy says Stuart was restless. "He said, 'What the hell am I doing here with you guys, looking at churches and Christmas markets? All I want to do is go home and go back to the gym.'" He had talked about studying aquaculture and moving away from Sydney, where he felt he would always be associated with the lockout laws. But during the holiday he changed his mind and decided to do a business degree at the University of Sydney. He accepted a scholarship to St Paul's, an all-male residential college within the grounds.

Kathy and Ralph helped settle him into the college on February 22, at the start of the 2016 academic year. The next morning, each found several missed calls from him in their phone logs. Ralph contacted Stuart, who said he was fine, but late that afternoon he asked his parents to collect him from a medical centre near the university. When they arrived, he was sitting outside in the gutter with his head in his hands, and as soon as he got into the car, he started sobbing. Kathy and Ralph hadn't seen Stuart like this since the day Thomas died. They demanded to know what had happened. He said he would never tell them.

The Kellys say they have since been told that Stuart and other first-year students were subjected to "hazing" - that they had been held down while alcoholic drinks were poured down their throats in an initiation ritual. (The attack on Thomas had left Stuart with an aversion to alcohol.) The Kellys have also heard that Stuart was harassed about the lockout laws, which were back in the news because a review of them had recently been announced. It seems possible, too, that he was given a hard time over a story published the previous day by Sydney's Daily Telegraph, in which Ralph was basically accused of profiteering from the Thomas Kelly Youth Foundation.

Because Ralph had moved from running his own business to working full-time as the foundation's chief executive, its board had paid him a salary of $125,000 the previous financial year. The Telegraph claimed this was more than half the foundation's annual revenue. Ralph says the proportion was much smaller: the newspaper's calculations failed to take into account the more than half a million dollars the foundation's sponsors paid directly to the Salvation Army, which then operated the foundation's cornerstone Take Kare program. (From July 2016, Ralph stopped receiving a salary, having returned to running his own business.)

Don Markwell, the current warden of St Paul's, who says he has profound sympathy for the Kelly family, tells me a series of investigations "have found no evidence of anything inappropriate happening to Stuart". In any case, Stuart refused to return to the college. He went home to the Sydney apartment the Kellys were renting and stayed in his room for 10 weeks. Then he took a part-time job in the stores department at Royal North Shore Private Hospital and his morale appeared to gradually improve.

Ralph was puzzled but not panicked when he went to wake Stuart for work at 6.30am on July 25, five months after the disastrous night at St Paul's, and found that he wasn't in his bed. Kathy's car was missing, so Ralph thought Stuart might have gone to the gym. But he didn't answer calls or texts, and at 8.30am the Kellys called the police. Four hours later, Stuart's body was found in the car, which he had parked under a Norfolk pine near Mona Vale beach. He had taken an overdose.

This time, Ralph couldn't allow himself to fall in a heap. "I knew that if I stopped, I would never get up again," he says. With Stuart, he had felt a special bond: "Both the boys were very close to me but probably Stuart had become closer and closer. You'll see in photographs, he's always sitting next to me. We did everything together." David Anstee says Ralph tried to blame himself for Stuart's death, saying his campaign for a safer Sydney had made his younger son the target of abuse. Anstee disagreed: "I said, 'Ralph, I know Stuart was put under pressure, but you haven't done this.'"

Desperate for an explanation, Ralph turned the apartment upside down when Kathy and Madeleine were out, searching for a note. When the family packed up and moved a year later, they hoped something would turn up. But no. Suicide is sometimes portrayed as a selfish act, Kathy says. "But none of us has ever felt like Stuart was selfish. Who knows what he went through?" Ralph says he'll always carry a feeling of responsibility. How could he have failed to see the signs? "You never forgive yourself. Ever."

When Kathy was at the park with her dogs the other day, she got chatting to another pooch-owner, who asked how many children she had.

For a fraction of a second, Kathy hesitated. "You stumble every time," she tells me ruefully. "I said, 'I've got three children.' " The woman then asked Kathy how old they were. "I said their ages and then she said, 'Do they all live at home?' " Just her daughter, Kathy replied. The woman wanted to know where her two sons were. Kathy sighed and gave her the full rundown, at the end of which the woman was weeping.

The occasional speeches that Kathy gives to schools, charity organisations and corporate gatherings tend to have the same result. Members of the audience come up to her afterwards in floods of tears; Kathy's are sometimes the only dry eyes in the house. "I often feel like I must appear really cold," she says. "But I do the speaking because I want to inspire people and help them realise what they've got inside them. I don't want to stand there sobbing with a perfect stranger, and I don't want them to feel sorry for me. There's nothing nice about being pitied."

Under the Take Kare program (the initials reflect Thomas Kelly's), medically trained team leaders flanked by volunteers patrol central Sydney in high-vis vests from 10pm to 4am on Fridays and Saturdays. Their aim is to stop violence before it starts and to help young people get safely home. With Ralph and Kathy, who occasionally join the patrol, I watch one night as team members intervene in potential dust-ups, defusing tensions by handing out lollipops and bottles of water. In their backpacks, they also have vomit bags for the seriously inebriated, and pairs of thongs to give drunken girls teetering dangerously on high heels. At strategically placed Take Kare "safe spaces", worse-for-wear clubbers can sober up, charge their phones, wait for their parents to pick them up. At the Darling Harbour safe space, a teenage boy wrapped in a space blanket is clutching a vomit bag, his face ashen. A hovering friend hands the boy's phone to Kathy and says: "Could you talk to his mum?"

Kathy says Ralph still dedicates a large part of his life to protecting other people's kids. "There are times when I think the foundation is just incredible," she says, "and times when I hate it because it's taking him away from this diminishing family that we have. But I'm actually starting to understand that Ralph probably wouldn't have got to where he is now - he would not have survived - if he hadn't done what he's done."

She points out that his lobbying has achieved impressive results. A change in NSW law to allow victim impact statements by family members to be taken into account in sentencing, for instance. And the introduction of government-provided counselling for victims of crime who are facing financial problems. According to the latest figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, to September 2016, the lockout laws had reduced assaults in Kings Cross by 49 per cent and the CBD entertainment precinct by 13 per cent. There was some evidence of alcohol-fuelled violence being displaced to areas outside the lockout zone, but overall the decrease in the number of assaults was dramatic.

"There's something about Ralph," says Gordian Fulde, director of the St Vincent's Hospital emergency department. "I think it would be hard to say no to him. He has a way about him which is sincere and convincing. There's no bullshit. I think that is part of the reason why so much change has happened."

People are always telling Kathy how strong she is, but she assures me that is not how she feels inside. The sadness is with her every minute of every day, just as it is for Ralph. "We have a deep understanding of each other," she says. "I really don't think I would have got through this without him." What frightens Kathy about the passage of time is that her memories of the boys are starting to blur. She would give almost anything for perfect recall: "I get very upset when I can't remember things. Who did this and who did that. What they were wearing and when it happened." She doesn't expect bereavement to get any easier. "I actually think that the longer it's been, the harder it has got."

Madeleine is the light of her life, and Ralph's. "She is the most important thing in the world to both of us," Kathy says. For her, they would like to leave the world a better place. To this end, the foundation is slightly changing tack. The Take Kare program will continue but, from June, the foundation will have a new name, Stay Kind (reflecting Stuart's initials) and a new aim: to encourage people to be nice to one another. Beaming, Ralph says he knows this sounds starry-eyed. But Australia has a population of 25 million. One act of kindness by each of us every day and you'd have over nine billion acts of kindness a year.

"What a great country we could make this," Ralph says. Already on board is NSW governor David Hurley, soon to step into his new role of governor-general, who has agreed to be patron of this year's "Kind July", a month of awareness-raising activities to kick off the project.

Kindness! "It's exactly what this country and the world needs," says Kathy. "I would love that to be our boys' legacy."

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This story was originally published in Good Weekend magazine.