The Family's unravelling began on 14 August 1987, when Victorian police raided the property at Lake Eildon and removed the children being raised there as Anne Hamilton-Byrne's own, their hair bleached to uniform blondness, their births documented by falsified records that listed cult doctors and nurses as parents. The children's accounts of scheduled beatings, starvation diets and dosing with tranquillisers, and in some cases LSD as initiation, drove a police taskforce named Operation Forest.
Anne and her husband William fled abroad and were arrested by the FBI in the Catskills in 1993, extradited, and in 1994 convicted only of charges relating to the false registration of births, each fined 5,000 dollars, an outcome the lead investigators publicly lamented as the system's failure to reach what had actually been done. Civil claims by former child members were later settled. The story has since been told in every register: survivor memoirs, the investigative book The Family by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones, Jones's 2016 documentary of the same name, and a television drama, while detectives and survivors reunited on camera decades later. Hamilton-Byrne, by then lost to dementia, died in a Melbourne nursing home in 2019 without further charge, and the case remains Australia's canonical example of how charisma, respectable professionals and forged paper could build an invisible institution around children for twenty years.