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

The bodies were discovered on Friday on the commune-style property where they had lived for the past three years in Fulligans Road, Pericoe, 50km 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 the Gary Bell and the three children - Jack, 8, Maddie 7, and Bon, 15, months - since last Sunday last week.

Ms Wilson said that the children's mother, Karen Bell, 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, 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. He wouldn't let me look in the car."

Ms Wilson said it had then fallen to her to tell Karen that her children were dead.

"We went to Peter's place and rang the police straight away. I was waiting for the police to tell her, but then she rang me."

A friend had told her she had heard about the discovery of the bodies through the media.

"I can't believe I had to tell her. Do you know how hard it was for me?

"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, but later she had realised it was better for Karen to hear it from her than from a stranger.

"If I could take back my words I would, but I can't. I couldn't lie to her either," Ms Wilson said.

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.

Police have refused to say whether or not any note was found with the bodies in the car.

The Bell's nearest neighbours in Fulligans Road, Ian and Dianne Auld, who live several hundred metres away, said that Karen had driven to their home 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 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 we're friends and she knew she was safe."

She had later driven Mrs Bell back to Bega to stay with her mother and father.

Mr Auld said that during all of last 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 their 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 that had confused people was that Gary had taken Karen's surname of Bell when they married about five 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.

Mrs Auld said Karen had visited the property with her mother and father on Sunday, two days after the bodies were discovered, to lock it up securely and to pick up some precious items.

She had also taken their two dogs and a cat with her.

Another neighbour, Tony Boller, who has lived on the 500 acre communal 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.

"He had a hand made gun," Mr Boller said, and he had also heard him threaten to shoot anyone who came near his place.

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 through the back door, 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 where the Bells had lived for the past three years is a one-hour drive over dirt roads from Eden with no mobile phone reception and no mains power or electricity.

Above the name Bells on their letter box, someone had scrawled the word Hells.

On a business card, the Bells had listed their address as:

Five Bells Two Creeks, Fulligans Road, Pericoe.

Mr Auld said the company which owned the property was ASIC-registered as Two Creeks Pericoe Pty Ltd.

It consisted of a 200 acre common area with the other 300 acres divided into 30 shares of approximately 10 acres each.

Houses had been built on most of these lots and over the years shares had been bought and sold as in any normal property transaction.

But while the external boundaries had been surveyed, the boundaries of the internal lots were far less precisely known.