Adrian Lacroix working on his legal cases.

MURKY WATERS

When there are no answers, questions are a waste of time.

Little Howrah Beach is considered one of the safest swimming beaches in southern Tasmania. Even with tidal variations, it’s shallow for about fifty metres out from shore. But on the evening of 14 March 2011, it was the scene of a drowning. The ripples from that drowning have engulfed dozens of people.

Summer in Tasmania usually comes into its own after Christmas, with February being the hottest month and March still very warm. Daylight saving and Hobart’s 40-degree latitude make for long, balmy evenings right through to the end of March.

In 2011, Monday 14 March was a public holiday to mark Tasmania’s Labour Day, and the weather was stinking hot. Police Sergeant Mike Callinan had somewhat reluctantly buttoned up his uniform and picked up his patrol car for his 3 p.m. shift. About four hours later, he was cruising along Howrah Road above the beach, idly debating whether to stop at the next set of shops for a cold drink, when a woman leapt in front of his car, gesticulating and shouting.

‘A boy has drowned down there,’ she panted. ‘They’ve just pulled him out.’

The policeman pulled over and parked, then ran across the grassy bank beside the road and down the shallow dunes. He saw a little group of people huddled around an inert body, which was lying on the sand near the water’s edge. The centre of attention wasn’t a boy, but a small, middle-aged woman in a black-and-white bathing suit. A man in a wetsuit was standing at her feet and another man, who was wearing wet boxer shorts, was performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, assisted by a woman, who was co-ordinating chest compressions.

Sergeant Callinan checked that an ambulance had already been called, then went up to wait for the paramedics. The people delivering CPR seemed to have the situation under control, but the woman wasn’t responding. A couple of minutes later, the paramedics arrived and took over. The ambulance log said they arrived eight minutes after receiving the call.

The man in the boxers was very distressed. ‘She’s my mother-in-law,’ he told the paramedics. ‘I want you to keep trying. I’m going with you to make sure you don’t stop trying.’

The paramedics and Sergeant Callinan both tried to dissuade him, but the man grabbed his clothes and keys from a towel on the sand and pushed his way into the front seat of the ambulance carrying the inert woman.

Although there was no let-up in resuscitation, there was nothing the medical teams in the ambulance or at the hospital could do to bring her back. Adrian Lacroix had just lost his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Ann Higgins. It was the beginning of a six-year journey.

This is Ann Higgins’s story.

Elizabeth Ann Higgins, always called Ann, was born in South Australia on 2 August 1949. She grew up in a close-knit, happy family with one brother, Michael, whom she loved. The siblings had a special relationship and remained close until she died. In 1968, Ann’s close friends Phil and Barbara Tavender introduced her to Harold (Harry) Higgins. Phil and Harry had been friends since high school, and so had Ann and Barbara. In 1972, Ann and Harry married, with Phil as best man and Barbara as matron of honour.

Not long afterwards, Ann and Harry moved to Sydney, where Ann did office work and Harry took a position at the CSIRO. They had a daughter, Chantelle, in 1981. Chantelle’s sister, Rebecca, followed in 1987. Then Harry took a transfer to Tasmania with the CSIRO. They arrived in Hobart in 1984 and set up house at Roches Beach early the following year. Phil and Barbara remained close to the family. They’d speak by phone once a month, with the calls usually lasting about two hours, and the Tavenders stayed at the house in Roches Beach in 1986.

It was known that Ann had mental health issues. Phil Tavender described her as being ‘easily influenced, especially by Chantelle in the earlier years and perhaps by Bec in the later years. Ann seemed to be someone who wanted to please everybody and not cause waves.’

When the couple moved to Tasmania, various doctors diagnosed her as being bipolar and schizophrenic, and she was prescribed medication for those conditions. That sort of medication is renowned for producing weight gain and stuporous lethargy, and Ann soon began to put on a lot of weight. Phil told me that he and his wife were aware of Ann’s ‘previous mental health issues’, which she freely discussed.

In a later statement to police, Harry said that his marriage to Ann was ‘healthy’ until 1995, when Ann was hospitalised for 12 months. The handwritten pages of his statement read like a script for Days of Our Lives or The Bold and the Beautiful (except not so beautiful!) as they described how the family unravelled.

In the same year that Ann was hospitalised, their elder daughter Chantelle developed anorexia. She had several spells in hospital over the following five years. Chantelle said later, in a videoed interview, that she kept going back to hospital so she could escape the tensions at home.

Harry said that as a result of Chantelle’s illness, responsibility for caring for Ann on her discharge from hospital fell to him and Rebecca. Over the next seven years, Ann too was in and out of hospital.

Sometime around 2000, Chantelle met a young man named Adrian Lacroix. The two of them moved to Western Australia, where they secretly married.

The young couple returned to Tasmania soon afterwards, but in 2002 they had a major falling out with Harry. They applied for an intervention order against him, but the application failed, at which point they left for Western Australia again. It wasn’t until 2007 that they returned, now with two children.

By the time they came back, Harry had retired from his job at the CSIRO, and his retirement seems to have sharpened the tensions in the household at Roches Beach. Ann’s marriage to Harry was failing, and in 2010 it terminally collapsed.

Friends and neighbours had the impression that things had been going downhill in the relationship for some time, but when the Taverners visited in 1986, Phil observed that the house was in good order, and he saw ‘no signs of neglect or untoward activity’.

Ann and Harry’s more recent neighbours at Roches Beach, however, have different memories. One of them told me, ‘You’ll never understand why Ann died if you don’t understand her mental state at the time.’ With that in mind, I began contacting other people who knew her.

Tony Hickey, who lived next to Harry and Ann for twelve years, said he’d had suspicions that things weren’t good for some time. He told me he’d never been invited inside the house, but from outside he could see that it was falling into disrepair.

When Tony and his wife first moved in, the block surrounding the Higgins house was well maintained. ‘Harry was outside mowing and clearing every weekend that he was home,’ Tony told me. Harry impressed him as a really bright guy who was doing serious research and going off to Paris quite often.

Tony said that problems with the house seemed to surface after Harry retired in about 2005. ‘The block got overgrown, the bins never went out, they were surrounded with rotting rubbish, and from time to time, trees fell down, blocking the access to the property. To deal with the mess next door, we put up a high fence so we couldn’t see it. And as for the trees, I’d go over with my chainsaw and offer to cut them up. It helped them, and I kept the firewood.’

One cold day, a particularly severe storm brought a big tree down and blocked the driveway at the Higgins’s house, so Tony went over and offered to remove it. Ann answered the door, and behind her he saw Harry, crawling around on the floor, which was covered with newspapers. Harry didn’t acknowledge Tony’s presence.

Looking over Ann’s shoulder, Tony could see teenage Rebecca sitting at the dining table, dressed only in her underwear. ‘I was a bit shocked as it was such a cold day,’ Tony said, ‘but I just offered to cut up the tree and Ann agreed and shut the door.’ He later described this incident in his evidence to the inquest.

Some of this strange behaviour was explained in a statutory declaration Ann made to police in July 2010, after the couple had separated. She claimed that a couple of years after they were married, Harry had developed a phobia about the house being infected by radioactivity from the CSIRO. He would shower twice and wash his clothes after he came back from work, then rinse out the washing machine to make sure it wasn’t contaminated, she said.

Ann said that the obsession got worse after Harry retired, except that now he blamed her for being the source of the contamination because she’d touched a letter that came from the CSIRO. He decided that the family dog was also contaminated and needed constant washing because it had touched some rubbish she had handled. Ann claimed he once made her spend nine hours in the car outside while he decontaminated the house. She didn’t drive off because she was worried about her daughter Rebecca, who was inside. ‘I wanted to get back to her as quick as I could.’

Ann said in her statement to police, ‘In the morning, Harry would not let me and Rebecca get out of bed until he had finished his morning [washing] routine, and this could take hours, as if he thought he hadn’t done it properly … he’d start again.’ She was sometimes confined to her bedroom for the whole day.

She said he wouldn’t let Ann or Rebecca use the bathroom, and they had to walk on plastic bags to use the toilet, but they weren’t allowed to touch anything, including the toilet flush. Ann wasn’t allowed to use the toilet unless Harry was watching her, and he’d recently made Ann and Rebecca spend a whole day in the car because Rebecca had gastro and might contaminate the bathroom.

Even though Ann was a diabetic and needed to keep her fluid intake up, she barely drank anything when she was restricted to the bedroom so that she wouldn’t need to use the toilet. She told police that Harry had started making her wear nappies. ‘He made me tell the doctor I was incontinent so I could get incontinence nappies. I was too embarrassed to take them to the tip, so I kept them in garbage bags in my room.’ She said that once Harry had decided that the laundry was contaminated, they didn’t do any washing for a year. Sometimes they’d buy new underclothes or linen because he wouldn’t permit them to wash the old ones, she claimed.

Ann’s four-page statutory declaration detailed what she swore were the conditions at home. She said that Harry occasionally struck her and had often abused her verbally in front of the children. She told the police, ‘I was always afraid. It was my main fear that he would not let me and Rebecca out of the house. Although I was not physically restrained, I was always scared to leave because of his threats. I just wanted to throw myself under a bus. For all our life he made me think I was useless. I had money he gave me for shopping but didn’t know how to use it to leave.’

Rebecca’s presence added to the complications. Rebecca was worried about her father, but she loved him and didn’t want to hurt him by leaving. On the other hand, Ann didn’t want to leave without her.

Ann said her phone use was restricted, and Harry didn’t allow visitors (even Chantelle). He hid if people came to the door. Things just got ‘worse and worse’. Sometimes she went out to buy food with money Harry gave her, but she was stressed and always took Rebecca along to help her make basic decisions about what to buy. In a later statement, Rebecca confirmed that her mother had difficulty shopping. Ann wrote to one of her doctors, explaining that she was paralysed by fear of the consequences of making the wrong decision, which would lead to physical and mental abuse.

Harry’s view of the relationship was completely different. In an affidavit sworn after Ann’s death, he blamed Ann’s mental illness for the problems in the marriage. One source of stress, he said, was that Ann’s spending habits were erratic. In May 2010, for example, she ran up a credit-card bill of $13,570, then became frustrated when Harry tried to reduce her expenditure to a ‘reasonable level’. Other months, she was so afraid to spend money that her church friends would buy her underwear.

Chantelle’s relationship with Adrian exacerbated the conflict with Harry, who believed that the couple had married secretly so that he’d continue to support Chantelle’s studies. Harry said he was paying Chantelle $500 a week in living expenses, plus buying her nursing uniforms, covering her medical expenses, and paying her HECS fees. He said in his sworn statement, ‘We were eventually alerted by our private heath fund that Chantelle and Adrian were married.’

Money was clearly a big issue for Harry, and he was convinced that Chantelle and Adrian were trying to manipulate Ann. He said in his statement, ‘There were several instances where both Adrian and Chantelle tried to get Ann to sign money over to them … mainly related to managed funds and investments.’ Ann never signed, but Harry believed ‘they targeted her because she was vulnerable’.

Harry’s version of events was contradicted by various affidavits sworn by Ann, Chantelle, some of Ann’s neighbours at Roches Beach, and members of her church group, all of whom gave horrifying details of the abuse and neglect she alleged had been inflicted on her. The affidavits claimed she was a virtual prisoner in her home, subjected to humiliation and emotional and physical abuse. When some of the church members helped to clean out the house after she and Harry had left, they were ‘shocked at the atrocious conditions she’d been forced to live in’.

Mark Stephan, the service-station operator at Lauderdale, near Roches Beach, told me that he thought Ann might have been ‘living in the car’ shortly before the breakup, as one day she’d driven in and asked him to replace the car’s overhead light bulb. ‘I saw a lot of clothes and food wrappers and stuff on the back seat,’ he told me. He said the junk was almost up to the windowsills.

He’d also been to the Higgins house on several occasions, he said. ‘I knew the house really well, as I grew up in the house next door and went over there a lot as a young person. I went inside a couple of times when the Higginses were there, and the squalor was unbelievable, like one of the worst hoarder’s houses you’ve ever seen on TV.’

According to Adrian, Ann eventually told her GP about Harry’s behaviour, and the GP called the health authorities. Ann also confided in her brother Michael Jones, who was shocked to learn that her relationship with Harry had broken down. On 8 July 2010, a mental health team, accompanied by police, escorted Harry to a secure hospital for treatment.

Later that day, Phil Tavender took a call from Michael, who also lived in South Australia, who gave him the startling news that Harry and Ann had separated, and that Harry was in hospital, having been taken there by the police. He said Ann and Rebecca were temporarily staying with a friend from the church group.

The next day, Barbara phoned Ann, who told her that Harry had punched her in the face. She said they had separated due to the deplorable state of the house. Apparently, he’d been trying to clear a blocked toilet when he collapsed.

As I waded through all the statements and statutory declarations and spoke to people on the phone, I began to think I was on the fringes of a bad TV show, not researching the drowning of a nice, ordinary, middle-aged woman. Well, perhaps not so ordinary!

Soon after the breakup, Chantelle invited Ann to come and live with her and Adrian. Ann accepted the invitation with alacrity, as it not only presented an opportunity to escape Harry but also meant she could be with her beloved grandchildren, though Rebecca, who was now 22, didn’t go with her. Ann never returned to live in the Roches Beach house. A friend of Harry’s told me that Ann’s departure had left both Harry and Rebecca homeless, and they both lived in a car for a while until they found another place to live.

Relations between Rebecca and Chantelle soured very quickly after Ann moved to the Lacroix house. Rebecca and Chantelle had an argument; Rebecca said she was trying to talk to Ann privately, but Chantelle wouldn’t let her. Chantelle claimed Rebecca hit her, and after that she obtained a restraining order to stop Rebecca coming near her, Adrian, or the children. Then Ann took out a separate order preventing Rebecca from contacting her. Rebecca says these actions caused her ‘a lot of heartache’. She became so stressed that she attempted suicide. Her father supported her through this difficult time.

Some legal issues also arose during the weeks after July 2010. Ann appointed Chantelle and Adrian to hold an enduring power of attorney for her, which would give them absolute control over her assets and affairs if it were exercised. She also changed her will, cutting out Harry and Rebecca and leaving all her assets to Chantelle, save a small bequest to each of the two grandchildren. This would have been a difficult will to execute, as under the Tasmanian Testator’s and Family Maintenance Act 1912 (s3A), a spouse or child can contest a deceased person’s will if no provision has been made for them. Rebecca could certainly have challenged the will with a good prospect of success, and Harry may also have had grounds, depending on his marital status with Ann at the time. Adrian and Chantelle were named as executors of the new will.

Ann’s life changed dramatically after she moved in with Chantelle. Adrian took a year off his work as a consultant in forensic document examination to look after her. He applied for a carer’s pension, while Chantelle continued to work as a nurse at St Helens District Hospital in Hobart. Ann was seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist. At first, she was always accompanied by Adrian or Chantelle, though the professionals didn’t see this as appropriate or advisable. Eventually, she became more independent; in the weeks before her death, she made three consecutive visits to the psychologist alone.

Adrian and Chantelle also monitored Ann’s diet very carefully, not allowing in-between meal snacks and castigating her if she was caught raiding the fridge. This was a constant source of conflict, as Adrian and Chantelle would upbraid her when food mysteriously disappeared, and she would try to wriggle out of the situation by lying.

Ann was a diabetic, and this regime could be interpreted as a caring attempt to help her regain her health and improve her self-esteem. She was quite obese when she left Harry, carrying 81 kilograms on a 158-centimetre frame. After the breakup, she lost more than 25 kilograms in less than eight months. Ann joined a gym at a cost of $52.50 a week, and Adrian took her three times a week, staying with her while she exercised. When she died, she weighed 54.5 kilograms; Phil and Barb Tavender didn’t recognise her in a photo they saw taken just before her death.

Some local observers were unimpressed by her son-in-law’s attitude towards Ann. A service station operator in Howrah told me that, when he filled Adrian’s car, ‘If Ann was with him, Adrian would brusquely tell Ann, “You’re paying for this. Get out your credit card.” No please or thank you. I thought being a younger fellow, he was always quite rude to Ann, who was elderly and always looked nervous or anxious.’

The operator told me that on occasions Adrian would fill up, getting Ann to pay for the petrol, then tell her to walk home ‘for exercise’ and drive off. It was a plausible explanation for his action, as the distance was not all that far, only about 1.5 kilometres.

On one occasion, Ann was seen walking along a road near the Lacroix home at 3 a.m. with Adrian following her at a crawl in his car. When he was challenged by a passing police officer, he explained that Ann needed fresh air and had felt like a walk, but it was too dangerous to let her walk alone at night, so he was looking after her.

Ann had always needed protection, Chantelle explained to Ann’s psychologist in a statement later detailed in court. She said this was part of the relationship she’d always had with her mother, and that since she was a young child she’d always ‘tried to protect her mother in very dysfunctional and traumatic family circumstances’.

Of course, you don’t just change from a pair of old shoes and step into a new life. There had been huge changes in the eight months since Ann had left Harry. She was not only attending sessions with the psychologist and psychiatrist, but a new GP had been signed on with a mandate to reduce the huge doses of medication she’d been taking.

At times, there were tensions in the Lacroix home, but nothing like what Ann had been used to. The grandchildren both loved having her there, so much more accessible than many kids’ grandparents. She accompanied the boy to his sporting fixtures and had time to listen to the girl. They loved her and remarked on her ‘lovely smile’.

At the same time, the kids were a bit embarrassed at having her collect them from school, and this created some tensions. As a grandmother myself, I know about that situation. If you’re a kid at a posh school, it’s embarrassing to be picked up by a slightly eccentric grandma who doesn’t fit the mould. Generally, though, life with the Lacroixes was pretty good.

At the Roches Beach house, according to Ann’s police statement, Harry had decided the fridge was contaminated and refused to let her near it, so she and Rebecca had been reduced to eating takeaway food on the bed. Now, she started cooking again, and Adrian bought her a cookbook to encourage her.

Ann’s old life was behind her. She’d been successful in breaking away. Her husband no longer lived in the deserted red brick bungalow and couldn’t exercise his will over her. She’d taken up going regularly to the gym, eating sensibly, and looking after her health.

Early in 2011, she accompanied Adrian and the children on a holiday to Coles Bay on the Freycinet Peninsula, and her friends said she had a marvellous time. She delighted in splashing in the sparkling azure waters with her grandchildren, and when she returned to Hobart, she took to swimming at Little Howrah Beach. She’d never been a keen swimmer before, but from this time on, people would often see her walking home in her wet costume with a towel, secure in her knowledge that she looked good, felt good, and was doing herself good by going for a dip. Her grandchildren went swimming with her. Her grandson said, in an interview filmed after Ann’s death, that he used to race her out to the buoy near where she drowned. He said he only beat her because he was a champion swimmer for his age. ‘She was a good swimmer,’ he said. She also enjoyed kicking a footy round the back yard with him.

Ann was trying to wean herself off all the psychotropic medication that had left her stupefied for years, and her psych-nurse daughter was a support with this. At 61, Ann was looking forward to the rest of the new life she’d forged with the support of Chantelle and Adrian.

Or that’s how it seemed.

In the month before her death, Ann had been required to give evidence against Harry in the Hobart Magistrates Court, in relation to multiple alleged assaults against her during their relationship. She had also given evidence in the Family Court about the division of marital property. She believed, rightly or wrongly, that Harry was stalking her, and she was scared that he might find her and hurt her. Chantelle and Adrian said this was why they kept her under such close protective supervision.

In a police statement that seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, or at least dark grey, Harry Higgins said that Adrian was very ‘controlling’, down to dictating what Ann ate every day. Harry’s statement, which was made on 20 May 2011, said that Ann had a dependent personality and that Adrian exploited her reliance on him. Harry said it was only after Ann drowned that he discovered she had changed her will from ‘what we had agreed upon to what is now in place’.

Harry’s version of the marriage breakup was also completely different from his wife’s. He said that in early 2010, they ‘experienced some maintenance issues with our house at Roches Beach. We needed a new septic tank at a significant cost and I was unable to repair it. I also experienced some health issues, which incapacitated me and prevented me from completing basic chores. Due to this, Ann and I decided to house sit with a view to buying a bit more time to fix things up.’ He didn’t say how the house-sitting plan had panned out, though Ann told police that he’d become angry and punched her in the arm when she couldn’t use the remote control at the unfamiliar house.

Harry went on to say that on 8 July, he ‘was admitted to Royal Hobart Hospital for heart problems and health issues’; he added that Ann went to stay with Adrian and Chantelle ‘so she could be closer to the grandchildren’. No mention of the police, or of what happened to Rebecca in this melee.

Harry’s sworn statement ended with the remark, ‘I have some concerns over the manner of Ann’s death and the circumstances leading up to it.’ It turned out later he wasn’t on his Pat Malone there.

Sergeant Mike Callinan, the police officer who attended the drowning, had been appointed investigating officer for the Coroner. He was the obvious choice, with 21 years in the job and numerous coronial inquiries under his belt.

Callinan forwarded Harry’s statement to the Coroner and attached another seven pages in Harry’s spidery handwriting. The notes included a litany of claims against Adrian — extortion, fraud, blackmail, attempted hit-and-run, demands for money, assault, and other dysfunctional family interactions. Harry either had a strong case or a strong imagination!

Judging by the claims and counterclaims lodged with various courts before and after Ann’s death, it was clear that her relationship with Harry had irreversibly broken down, but some suspected that she had simply swapped one dependent situation for another. Adrian, Chantelle and many of her friends believed she was better off out of her toxic marriage, but Harry, Rebecca, and their supporters feared that she was still open to exploitation.

On 14 March 2011, Ann spent the day slogging away at overgrown bracken and burning off fallen trees around the vacant Roches Beach house. The local council had sent several notices requiring her to clear the fire-prone vegetation on the property, which was a few kilometres along the coast from Howrah, where she was living with Adrian and Chantelle.

Her former home sat flat on a large block of land, a plain, dark-red brick bungalow, empty and locked. Its windows were like dead eyes looking out over the dishevelled garden and watching her work.

Adrian told me that Ann’s psychologist wasn’t too keen on her returning to the former marital home, as memories of the place seemed to cause her great anxiety. Ann had already experienced panic attacks and dissociative episodes, during which she’d lose track of where she was. At times, she had problems with sudden loud noises, or simply crossing the street, just stepping out in a daze without checking the traffic. The psychologist later described Ann’s symptoms as being comparable to those of other patients she had treated for ‘psychological recovery from cult involvement’.

The psychologist encouraged Ann to try to deal with the past, but not to push it. Cleaning up inside the house at Roches Beach was too risky, but working outside the house might be good for her and it might lay a few ghosts to rest at the same time. On 14 March, Ann’s neighbour Tony Hickey saw her over the fence, ‘working like a trooper’. He remarked to himself on her drastic physical change: from being ‘massively obese’, she now looked fit and healthy.

She had a hard job ahead of her. Getting rid of bracken, believe me, is very physically demanding work. I had a five-acre lot near Roches Beach that suffered from a similar bracken invasion. Unless you get the tenacious deep roots up, it’s like Medusa. Just when you think you’ve got it, another delicate little frond unfolds into a tough monster almost as you watch. Bending, pulling, lifting, burning — it’s an almost endless cycle until you get rid of those roots.

Ann’s neighbour on the other side, Megan McDonald*, had also lived next door to the Higginses for some years but had never been inside their house. When the couple were living there, she saw little of Ann and almost never saw Harry, unless he was outside cleaning up the block. ‘In the beginning, he kept the block tidy,’ she told me, ‘and then it started to become really unkempt. I did know that Harry travelled a lot for his job, so I thought he might just be away, but it was actually after he retired that things seemed to change.’ From then, she said, ‘things were very wrong.’

Megan became concerned about the state of the block. She never saw Ann, but there were lights coming on at odd times in the middle of the night, mail piling up, and a set of phone books wrapped in plastic gradually rotting away by the mailbox. The garden and grass were so overgrown that it looked impossible to get to the clothesline.

Eventually, Megan decided to take action. She told me, ‘My dog kept bringing home empty dog-food tins, and I thought he might be going through the bins next door, as I never saw them put out for collection. I decided to go over to see if there was anything wrong. I took my young boys with me, as a sort of back-up, I guess.’

At the front porch they were greeted with a bizarre sight — the Higginses’ dog, a sort of spaniel, was lying on a chair, surrounded by dozens of empty dog-food tins. A brand-new bed, with the plastic and the price still on it, was leaning against the wall. Megan rang the doorbell, and one of her kids peered through a front window. There was no response from inside, but Megan’s son said, ‘He’s there, Mum! He’s gone to hide behind the couch.’ There was no sign of Ann.

Since Harry obviously didn’t want to chat, Megan went home and rang the council to complain about the state of the block next door. She also rang the police; it was the first of several calls she made to them.

But both authorities said they could do nothing. Letting your garden go to ruin wasn’t illegal, they said, and they suggested she call the Environment Protection Authority. When she rang the EPA, they said they’d send a letter, but she told them that would be useless, given the state of the mailbox, so they agreed to come out. Megan thinks they did come out once and left a card, but that was it. Her concern for Ann grew.

Eventually, in mid-2010, the family left. The house sat empty until some church friends of Ann’s came by and helped clean the place out. Tony and Megan saw the big cleanout, and told me that skip after skip of stuff left the house.

On the morning of 14 March 2011, Adrian says they had a family breakfast of ‘toast and stuff’ and he agreed to drop Ann at the Roches Beach block at around 10.30 a.m. It was the Labour Day holiday, and Adrian and Chantelle were going to a friend’s barbecue at 11.30 a.m., before Chantelle went to work at the hospital for the afternoon/evening shift. Adrian had made Ann lunch: salad, fruit, a couple of sandwiches, and lots of water. With her diabetes, Ann sometimes needed reminders to drink lots of fluids when she was exerting herself at the block, or even at the gym. She was no longer driving; her doctors had recommended against it, because her dissociative episodes made her so unpredictable.

The trip was only about fifteen minutes in each direction, and Adrian says he stayed for a while to help, telling Ann not to move the tree trunks or logs, as he would do that another day. After dropping her off, he collected meat for the barbecue, and a few beers.

Megan was out most of the day, returning around 5 p.m. to change and go out again. Ann appeared at her door, having seen the car arrive. ‘That day, she was as happy as I’ve seen her,’ Megan told me later. ‘She looked messy but happy and asked if she could join me for a cup of tea, which we’d done on previous occasions when she’d been at the block. We’d seen her there a few times since they’d moved out. One day Adrian had dropped her at the block and left her there all day. She either didn’t have anything to eat or got hungry because of all the physical work, and came over to ask if she could borrow some bread. I told her not to be silly; she could have anything she wanted to eat. Another day, my husband saw her wielding a sledgehammer trying to smash up something; he thought it was a fibreglass paddle pool. Big bits were flying in all directions and Adrian was there, egging her on. My husband said, “She’ll kill herself if he lets her keep doing that!”

‘Ann rarely went inside the house — I don’t think there was power or water — but she’d come over for a cuppa quite often. On that Labour Day when she came over, I had to go out again almost straight away, but I told her to come in and help herself. She said Adrian would be picking her up soon. I dashed off, and that was the last time I saw her. I’ve since wondered if she’d wanted to talk that day.’

Adrian collected Ann from Roches Beach at about 6.15 p.m., and she said she’d love a quick swim before they had their dinner, a meal of Indian takeaway they’d agreed upon earlier. It had been very hot all day, and she was covered in dust and dirt from burning off. Adrian said later that her face looked as if it had been rubbed with soot, ‘like a chimney sweep’.

At the Howrah house, the kids clamoured to go with Grandma for a swim, but Adrian told them it was going to be a very quick swim and that he’d bring Grandma home afterwards to look after them while he went across town to get their food. He wanted them to get ready for bed, as they’d had a big day. The next day was back to school, and they still had a very early bedtime for 9- and 7-year-olds, being tucked in each night by 7.30 p.m. Adrian was very strict about this.

It was a five-minute drive to Little Howrah Beach. Adrian parked at the side of the grass verge overlooking the water, which was bordered by a narrow, sandy shore. Ann got out of the car, wearing only her black-and-white bathers. Adrian reminded her that it had to be a quick swim. Fifteen minutes would be it, as the kids were home alone, and dinner still had to be ordered and collected. Ann left her towel on the grass near the car and walked down to the water.

Usually peaceful as the warm day merged into evening across the estuary, the beach this evening reverberated with the raucous noise of a motorboat and jet ski, which roared round at the northern end of the beach, restricting Ann to the less familiar southern end, where a small headland and large, slippery rocks curved around to enclose the little bay.

Ann walked out about 20 metres, where the water was only just past her waist. Adrian saw her sink down and put her head under the water and begin swimming out towards a couple of buoys about 50 metres from the shore. He decided to walk along the embankment out to the little headland, where he could enjoy the ambience of the evening, despite the motorised noise coming from the northern end of the beach.

The safety rules for personal water vehicles at swimming beaches are supposed to prevent boats operating in a ‘freestyle manner when within 200 metres of a swimmer, or 200 metres of the shore if a dwelling is within 100 metres of that shoreline’. Adrian wasn’t happy that the rules were being blatantly flouted, but Ann, who was splashing in the water parallel with the headland and a bit further out, seemed happy enough.

Adrian stood for a bit looking across the river and then checked the time. It was 6.57 p.m. He called out to Ann, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He called again, trying to raise his voice above the now idling watercraft. She still didn’t look his way.

On the third shout, he said, ‘I projected my voice even further.’ This time, she looked around. He pointed to his watch, and she started to dogpaddle toward the rocks below where he was standing. They were ‘slippery and sharp’, he said, and there was a sign warning of their dangers. He used both hands to wave her away from the rocks, indicating that she shouldn’t come ashore there but should swim back to the beach, which was about 50 metres away.

He saw her begin to swim back to the beach and turned to walk back himself. During this period, his back was turned to Ann. On reaching her towel, he looked for her, but he couldn’t see her. Peering across the water, he spotted her inert, her grey hair the only indicator of her position. She’d barely moved closer to the shore since he’d left the point. Tests later showed that the water there was about 1.6 metres deep, well within her depth if she stood on tiptoe.

At this point, Adrian made a critical decision. Looking around for help and realising it was an emergency, he decided there was no point ripping off his gear and swimming out to Ann in case he got into difficulties as well. Instead, he ran along the embankment to seek help.

By that time, the jet ski people were starting to come ashore in the failing light. One of them, a guy named Damien Moore, had seen Ann earlier, when he was waiting his turn for a ride about 6.30 p.m. He saw a middle-aged woman in a black-and-white swimsuit wade in waist deep and then dive under the water. He didn’t look her way again.

Around 7 p.m., while the jet skiers were packing up, Damien was standing beside his car, still in his wetsuit, which was folded down at the waist. Adrian saw him and realised that he was dressed for the water and obviously at ease in the sea.

Adrian claimed it took him about ten seconds to run 70 metres to where Damien was standing, but this must have been an underestimate. Usain Bolt’s world record stands at 9.58 seconds for 100 metres on a running track.

‘You need to help me,’ Adrian panted as he grabbed Damien’s arm. ‘My mother-in-law has drowned and I can’t swim.’ (Damien said later that he thought Adrian had described her as his grandmother.)

Damien was reluctant, but he knew in a drowning there is no time to waste.

‘Where is she?’ he asked urgently. Adrian pointed toward the southernmost of the two orange buoys. Damien focused on Ann’s grey head, which was rapidly merging with the grey water as the dusk advanced. He ran along the beach to the spot closest to Ann and swam out. He told me later that he felt sick as he swam. ‘I knew what I was going to find. I couldn’t see her anymore — I just swam to where I’d seen her hair.’

Adrian ran back to Ann’s towel and stripped to his boxer shorts, folding his clothes as he went. When Senior Constable Rebecca Castle arrived at the scene soon after, she observed that he’d placed them in a neat pile. Much was made of this later, with critics saying he shouldn’t have wasted time folding his clothes instead of going to help Ann. If folding his clothes as he removed them was an ingrained habit of a neat person, I didn’t read all that much into it. There were jeans, a top, and footwear. Not exactly a huge pile!

Meanwhile, Damien had reached the spot where he’d seen Ann from the shore, but she’d vanished. Then, about four or five metres from where he’d thought she’d been, her head popped up, then sank again. He dived under the surface, reaching for anything, and felt Ann’s arm. Grabbing her, he pulled her toward him, lifting her out of the water as he did so. Her eyes were open and staring, and foam was oozing from her mouth.

Damien said, ‘I gave her a couple of hard squeezes around her chest, but no response, so I rolled onto my back, pulled her onto my stomach and made for the beach.’

On the way in, he encountered Adrian, wading out in chest-deep water. Adrian checked Ann for a pulse. Nothing. ‘We dragged her up onto the beach and began CPR, with me doing the chest compressions and Adrian breathing into Ann’s mouth.’ Damien said they were at such close quarters that he could smell alcohol on Adrian’s breath. ‘I asked if he’d been drinking. He said he had.’

Adrian was calling out to Ann, or Annie, but at one point he had to take a break, as he began dry retching while doing mouth-to-mouth. Adrian told me later that the dry retching could have been due to shock along with the acrid taste of Ann’s stomach contents coming up, but he had to continue. ‘I believed her life at risk,’ he said. ‘Ann was my wife’s mother and children’s grandmother, and if I stopped, Ann might suffer brain damage.’

‘Has Ann been drinking?’ Damien asked at one point, but Adrian didn’t reply.

After a few minutes, a woman who said she was a retired nurse appeared and took over from Damien.

All of a sudden, a lot of people were on the beach. A uniformed police officer walked down from the embankment and surveyed the scene. Soon, more police arrived. An ambulance pulled up, and the paramedics took over. Adrian asked a police officer to phone St Helens District Hospital to tell Chantelle what had happened and that her mother would be going to the Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH).

Adrian went to get his clothes, which were still on the bank where he’d left them beside Ann’s towel. He said later that he wanted to accompany Ann to the hospital so that he could keep an eye on the paramedics and ensure they didn’t stop doing everything they could to give Ann the best chance of survival. He says the police tried to prevent him from dressing, even though he was wearing ‘see-through’ wet boxers, and they tried to stop him travelling in the same ambulance. There were objections from the paramedics too, but Adrian prevailed. He got into the front seat of Ann’s ambulance, and later commented that the paramedics did a good job, and that they told him he’d done well with the mouth-to-mouth. He is still very disappointed that the Coroner didn’t require any of the paramedics to give evidence at the ensuing inquest.

In his sworn police statement, Damien said that his fellow jet skier, Tas Castrisios, had told him that while he was waiting for his turn on the jet ski, he’d heard Adrian yelling at Ann to get out deeper when he was standing on the headland. Tas said Adrian had waved her out with his hands, yelling, ‘Go on, get out there and have a go!’ But Damien didn’t see anything like that. He said, ‘I did not see or hear Adrian force the elderly female into the water at any stage. She appeared to be acting out of her own free will and not under any duress.’

Chantelle got the call at work, and the hospital immediately arranged for someone to accompany her to the Royal Hobart. A friend who was a fellow nurse went with her. She reached the hospital before Adrian arrived with her mother. He told her what had happened, and about 15 minutes later a couple of doctors came in and said there was no more they could do. Her mother was dead.

Chantelle and Adrian sat with Ann for quite a while. At about 1 a.m. they returned home, after Chantelle had requested a full autopsy. A friend had been caring for the children, who were in bed. They would be told in the morning.

Early the following morning, a friend of Harry’s at the hospital rang and told him what had happened. He and Rebecca went straight to the hospital, only to be told that Chantelle and Adrian refused to let them see Ann. As Chantelle was next of kin and had power of attorney, there was nothing they could do without engaging a lawyer.

Later, in a videoed interview, Adrian wept as he recounted the fact that none of his family — Chantelle, the children, or himself — had a chance to see Ann before she died. He said, ‘I was feeling crushed for my wife that she didn’t get to say goodbye to her mum, the fact that this occurred so suddenly. I did what I could, but I still didn’t prevent what occurred.’

He added, ‘It’s a very cruel way to go.’ He compared it with the death of his grandmother, when the family had had about 48 hours to sit with her and say goodbye. ‘With Ann,’ he said, ‘we didn’t get that opportunity.’

Harry and Rebecca got none either, as they were denied the opportunity to see Ann at all.

Things moved quickly on the day after Ann’s death, Tuesday 15 March. Arrangements were made for Ann to be cremated the following morning. Rebecca and Harry’s solicitor applied for them to view Ann’s body before cremation, but the application was denied.

That same Tuesday morning, Adrian and Chantelle, acting as executors of Ann’s will, applied to substitute for her in one of the court cases she was bringing against Harry. The request was granted on 30 March, so that Chantelle and Adrian could continue the case against Harry on behalf of Ann’s estate.

Other family members were slower to find out. Ann’s only sibling, Michael Jones, received a text message out of the blue at 5.21 p.m. from Rebecca saying, ‘Hi, it’s been confirmed mum has died love Harry + bec.’ Michael says he rang Chantelle at her home number and on her mobile, but he got no reply. At 9.27 p.m., Chantelle sent a text saying, ‘Sorry I missed your call. I will call you tomorrow as soon as I can have a proper talk. Love Chantelle, goodnight.’

Desperate to know what was going on, Michael replied, ‘Actually, a short call now would be appreciated’, but he didn’t hear from Chantelle until the next morning. She told him how Ann had died and said that there would be a memorial the coming Friday, 18 March. When Michael asked if Harry and Bec would be going, he was told that he’d be welcome, but Harry and Bec wouldn’t.

When I spoke to Michael much later, he told me, ‘Chantelle said it was Ann’s wish never to see either of them again and that they would not be allowed to attend. I said to Chantelle that surely after 40 years of marriage, Harry should be “allowed” to attend, but Chantelle didn’t see it this way.’

He said he’d been very unhappy at the way things were unfolding. After talking to Chantelle, he decided not to go to the memorial and texted Chantelle to this effect on Thursday. When they spoke later that day, Michael said, he was ‘shocked to learn that Ann had been cremated the previous day. I couldn’t understand the rush.’ He told police later that he felt ‘even in death the events were being closely controlled’.

He also wondered when he would have been informed of his sister’s death if Harry’s friend hadn’t heard the news at the hospital and told Harry. Chantelle hadn’t made much effort to contact Michael, although he was Ann’s only close blood relative.

On Wednesday afternoon, after picking up Ann’s ashes and taking them home to Howrah, Adrian and Chantelle and their children went out to the Roches Beach house to visit Ann’s former neighbours and tell them the news.

Tony was quite surprised that they’d given a visit of that nature any priority. ‘You’d think they’d have more important people to tell before us,’ he said to me later. He told me Adrian had said, ‘You don’t have to worry about Ann anymore. She’s already cremated and she’s in a little shell on our bed right now.’

The comment about Ann being in a little shell didn’t make sense to me until I spoke again to Megan, Ann’s neighbour from the other side, who explained that Ann’s ashes had been preserved in a huge pink plastic-looking conch shell.

Megan was also surprised to receive a visit from Ann’s family so soon after her death. ‘They came to invite me to the memorial service,’ she told me. ‘I felt really surprised they had been able to take charge of the body so quickly.’

Like many others, she reflected on the rumours that surrounded Ann’s death. She said, ‘Ann did love swimming and she’d just started sea swimming, getting used to the sea. It was heartbreaking — really, really sad. Especially all the gossip. Could you cause someone to drown if you were intimidating enough? I don’t know.’

Adrian asked Tony to go over with him and look through the inside of the house, to see what a bad state it was in. Tony told me, ‘I didn’t feel like it, treading on the souls of the dead. He’s a hard bloke to say “no” to, though. Later on, when they were gutting the house for sale, he came over with a photo album, bringing the house to me, showing the terrible state the house had been in. He told me I didn’t have to worry about the steps being taken to throw everything out. “It’s all in our name now,” Adrian said.’

Megan said she was also asked to go over and ‘bear witness’ to the state of the house, which she did. ‘I must admit, it was dreadful,’ she told me. ‘The weirdest thing was a pristine white leather couch sitting in the lounge room surrounded by chaos, with lots of footprints going up the walls.’ I asked her what sort of footprints (visualising Spiderman with dirty feet!) and she said it must have been an animal that had walked in something, maybe a possum. ‘But it was that brand-new couch in the middle of all the mess and filth that really caught my eye,’ she said. ‘Adrian told me it was his and they’d been storing it in the shed.’

The pink shell containing Ann’s ashes sat on a table at the front of the memorial service, which was held in the Hobart Botanical Gardens. The pastor from Ann’s church led the service, and Ann’s church friends attended. Chantelle says, ‘It was a very moving occasion, and I’m sure Mum would have enjoyed it as well.’

Others would have attended if they’d been welcome, but they weren’t. There was talk of security guards being engaged to keep Harry and Rebecca away, and Ann’s brother, Michael, refused to attend because he felt unwelcome. He told me later he was pretty angry about how the events of the week had unfolded and that he did not want to participate in the hasty, inappropriate, and undignified memorial already arranged for his only sister.

Michael later told police in an affidavit dated 18 April 2011: ‘I have recently discovered from legal documents sent to me by Harry Higgins that Chantelle and Adrian not only had Power of Attorney, but are executors of Ann’s will and their family is the beneficiary of the will.’

Earlier that year, Ann had told Michael about giving Chantelle and Adrian power of attorney. Ann and Michael had argued about it, which was unusual in their long-term close relationship. In his police statement, Michael explained, ‘Ann and I had many conversations over the years about how our parents had treated us equally, including in their wills. Ann had always indicated that she would do the same with Rebecca and Chantelle. Obviously, she can change her mind, but I am still amazed at this change in direction for such a strongly held conviction.’

Michael also said that Chantelle and Adrian were signing legal documents at their lawyers on 17 March 2011, before the funeral service.

Michael went on, ‘To conclude, I was very concerned about Ann’s total dependency on Adrian and Chantelle. I also have concerns about the circumstances of her death, given that she was not a strong swimmer and had, to my knowledge, shown no prior interest in swimming.’

Michael told me a bit about why he made that comment. ‘When we were kids, our dad used to tell us about standing on a jetty at Brighton Beach watching swimmers, and he saw someone being taken by a shark. He told us always to be on the lookout, and Ann would never go out of her depth. She’d just splash around in the shallows.’ He pointed out that the Tavenders had gone on holidays with her and Harry, but they never saw her swim far into the sea.

It’s possible that Michael wouldn’t have known of Ann’s newfound enjoyment of swimming in the sea. She and Michael had fallen out about the power of attorney, and they weren’t speaking to each other as regularly as usual in the couple of months between her holiday at Coles Bay and her death. Many people were happy to validate her trips to the beach between January and March.

Michael went on, ‘Ann was easily led and felt guilty about things very quickly. She thought things were always her fault. She had terrible self-esteem. She always wanted to please people.’ At the same time, he didn’t think that anyone would have been able to persuade her to swim out of her depth. ‘If she was in the sea, still in her depth, and anyone had been urging her to swim out further, I’m sure she wouldn’t swim out, even if she felt intimidated by or afraid of that person. There were a couple of witnesses who gave evidence in court that Adrian had yelled at her from the shore to swim out further. One said he had a bottle of beer in his hand, which Adrian denies, but regardless, she would not have gone out if her depth.’

Michael told me that before the inquest was announced, he thought the key issues would be what Adrian had shouted to Ann from his position on the headland, and why he didn’t go straight to her aid when he knew she was in trouble.

After the shock of her mother’s death, the cremation arrangements, visiting lawyers and courts, organising the memorial and dealing with Adrian’s sorry state and the sorrow of her kids, Chantelle was hospitalised for a short period. While she was in hospital, Adrian brought in a four-page letter dated 21 March, a week after the drowning. Chantelle later gave evidence at her mother’s inquest that Adrian had urged her to sign the letter as senior next of kin, so she did so.

Chantelle was examined about the letter in court. It summarised the days and events leading up to and including the drowning. The first few paragraphs dealt in some detail with events Chantelle may have known of personally. On Friday 11 March, an arborist cut down trees on Ann’s block; on Saturday, Ann and Adrian worked on the block together; on Sunday, Ann went to church and saw friends; and on Monday 14 March, ‘Mum wanted to continue with the outside work at her property.’

The rest of the letter, up to the final paragraph and signoff, is a detailed version of every aspect of Ann’s last day, which tallies exactly with Adrian’s recollections, even down to the contents of Ann’s cut lunch and the fact that she’d kept her mobile handy while she was working on the block.

Chantelle’s letter continued, ‘Given all the information I have about all the circumstances on that day, I am of the opinion that [the] drowning was accidental in nature. Mum did not call out or indicate she was in trouble. Apparently, there was no visible panic in her movements. According to Adrian, Mum slowed down and appeared more quiet than usual. Adrian could have easily overlooked this, as on previous occasions Mum would often relax in the water by floating on her back.’ She then gave a very detailed account of what Adrian did next.

‘All in all,’ Chantelle said in conclusion, ‘the response time of the first aid was quick, approx. 60–90 seconds for commencement of EAR and CPR, and Mum was in the water for a relatively short period of time from when Adrian noticed she was getting into trouble.’

Relative to what, I wondered. The time couldn’t have been as little as 60–90 seconds, as Adrian had to run along the bank to Damien, explain the situation, and ask for help; Damien had to run on sand and then walk and swim out through the water to Ann from where he was standing, a total distance of about 90 metres. He then had to find Ann, try to revive her, and start a slow rescue-backstroke toward the shore before being met by Adrian, who had run back the same 70 metres to the towel, undressed, and entered the water. By the time they lifted her out, turned her on her side, cleared her airway and commenced CPR, it could have been as long as five minutes.

When I was a nurse, we were taught that we could save a life in three minutes, but that was in a ward, with a crash cart and a team of medical professionals to help. Drowning in the sea is particularly dangerous, because of the salt content in the water.

Drowning is essentially a matter of suffocating while in water. In the Derwent estuary, tidal seawater and fresh river water mix. As the Derwent River flows past the suburbs lining the shores and approaches the sea beyond Hobart, its saltiness increases. Many of the estuary’s beaches experience tides as well.

Simply swallowing a large amount of seawater can cause drowning, even if the victim doesn’t breathe it into their lungs, because of the ion exchange that occurs. If someone inhales salt water as well as swallowing it, the high salt concentration damages the lining of the lungs and prevents air from crossing into lung tissue. The salt (sodium chloride) acts as a barrier to the normal gaseous exchange of carbon dioxide to oxygen, i.e., the necessary activity between the air and the lungs. Usually, if the salt water is removed, the victim can begin to breathe again.

But it’s not quite that simple. If someone has swallowed water as well, it may be too late to prevent other chemical reactions from taking place because of the concentration of salt. Salt water in the stomach can also alter the balance of electrolytes. That reaction, along with the hypertonic concentration in the lungs, causes water to be drawn from the bloodstream and makes the blood thicken, which strains the circulatory system. This additional stress can lead to cardiac arrest within eight to ten minutes.

The consequences and symptoms of drowning vary widely. A drowning victim may show no symptoms and have no complaints, or they may be found dead.

Drowning victims are rarely found thrashing in water. Most drownings are unwitnessed, and the person is found floating or submerged in the water.

Those who are alive may be anxious, confused, and short of breath. Ensuring that the brain and lungs are working properly is of paramount importance in first aid to drowning victims.

When the flow of air to the lungs is obstructed, the results include hypoxia (lowered levels of oxygen in the blood) and ischemia (loss of blood flow to the extremities). These lead to immediate neurological problems, including swelling of the brain and dangerous increases in intracranial pressure. About 20 per cent of near-victims sustain neurological damage; this is the most common reason why near-drowning victims cannot be revived after rescue.

Ann’s autopsy was conducted on 15 March at 1 p.m. by forensic pathologist Dr Donald Richley. It indicated that Ann hadn’t swallowed any water, as the contents of her stomach were recorded as ‘approximately 150 mls of dark opaque partially digested food fragments … without drug residue or pill fragments.’ Dr Richley said the stomach lining was ‘autolytic’, which means it was self-destroyed, probably by a bit of gastritis, which is more common in older people, but he didn’t relate this to any ingestion of salt water and didn’t consider it remarkable otherwise. Ann’s lung tissue produced copious amounts of blood-tinged frothy fluid when cut.

He states that CPR was reportedly commenced about two minutes after Ann was brought from the water and continued by paramedics until she was pronounced dead at the Royal Hobart Hospital. He found no evidence of any drugs in her system and no cerebral abnormalities. The report observed she had ‘marked pulmonary congestion and oedema, mild hypertension and type 2 diabetes’.

Dr Richley gave the cause of death as being ‘marked pulmonary congestion consistent with drowning’ accompanied by ‘mild atherosclerotic coronary vascular disease, type 2 diabetes’.

His report paints a picture of a middle-aged woman in pretty good health for her age, who went for a recreational swim and drowned. He wasn’t asked for his statement and report until 12 April 2011.

What interested me more than the pathology results was how Ann’s next of kin had got the body released so quickly for cremation the following day, particularly in view of the fact they had asked for an autopsy because they wanted a full coronial inquiry. It appeared from the autopsy report that the Coroner had ordered one anyway. So how did they find an undertaker to pick Ann up from RHH, choose a coffin (which is still necessary for cremation), sign all the legal papers for release and cremation of the body, organise the cremation for the same day, pick up the ashes in the pink conch shell, drop them at home, and travel to Roches Beach to see Ann’s neighbours between about 3 p.m. on Tuesday 15 March, when the autopsy would have finished, and the following afternoon?

And who authorised the release of her body if her death was being investigated?

On 30 March 2011, Adrian and Ann were granted their application to be substituted parties in a case Ann had been running against Harry. And in the fortnight after the memorial, Adrian began to clear out the Roches Beach house with a view to making it ready for sale. Tony Hickey recalled seeing ‘about ten skips’ of rubbish taken from the house.

When I did a virtual tour on the real estate listing, I could see why so much had gone out. The inside consisted of bare concrete or wooden floors, with not a stick of furniture, no window coverings, and most of the light fittings stripped out. In the space where the kitchen used to be, the ghost outlines of the cupboards and sink were imprinted on the vinyl floor covering. A plastic s-bend pipe sticking up from the floor was the only indication that this had once been a family kitchen. In the former lounge, a gaping space in the wall signified the fireplace or heater, and the exposed bricks, a crumbled cement hearth, and empty chandelier attachments bore witness to the complete gutting of the house.

With typical hyperbole, the agents described the house as ‘offering exceptional potential and a multitude of exciting options — a blank canvas, ready for total renovation, this could be your next project.’

Yes, if you liked a challenge! The empty house was sold on 4 July 2013 for $363,000 — a bargain for four bedrooms in ‘a highly sought after prestigious area’, offering ‘an extraordinary opportunity to completely renovate and modernise a large family home’.

With my interest now piqued, I decided to have a look at Ann’s next home, Chantelle and Adrian’s place in Holland Court, Howrah. Although a unit, it was more like a semi-detached house, spacious and spotless. A large back garden hosted a clay chimera fireplace, a sandstone built-in barbecue, and outdoor furniture. It had a lovely view. Inside, polished timber floors gleamed, the stove-top and the arc of glass forming the range hood above it sparkled, and there was a state-of-the-art bathroom complete with porcelain egg bath and glistening stainless-steel taps and towel rack (no towels, though). Clearly, whoever lived there in November 2016, when the house was listed for sale, was the Tidy Fairy. The rooms looked almost uninhabited, bench tops empty, no pictures on walls, beds made but no clothes anywhere. The TV remotes were in evidence, and two different office or study areas were being used. It wasn’t what I’d call a comfy house, but it was certainly clean.

Chantelle and Adrian had bought it in March 2008 for $193,000 after they returned to Hobart from Western Australia. It was sold in January 2017 for $145,000. That was either a buyer’s bargain or a fire sale.

I began to wonder how the family had lived in the intervening years, from when they came back from Western Australia to the death of Ann in 2010. Adrian is listed as a consultant on a website of forensic handwriting analysts in a company established by his father, former police officer Steve Dale, who was a forensic handwriting analyst for the Tasmania Police for 29 years. The website describes Adrian as a second-generation forensic document and handwriting examiner and notes that he trained ‘under the former Head of the Forensic Document Examination Section of Tasmania Police. Mr Lacroix received training in the examination of handwritten images, machine generated images and the other facets of documentary evidence.’ He completed his training in January 2002.

I wondered why he’d changed his surname to Lacroix. Could it be that he didn’t want people to know he’d learnt his craft from his dad? In my other life, before books, I ran a consultancy with my husband and kept my former surname in case our clients thought they were dealing with a ‘Mum & Dad’ company. It was all part of the PR smoke and mirrors.

On the website, Adrian listed where he had worked in Western Australia from 2004 to 2008, but there was nothing since. He said he wasn’t available in 2017 because he was studying law. So did they buy that nice townhouse and live on Chantelle’s income? It would be a bit difficult, especially as their kids were going to the most expensive private school in Tasmania — around $5530 per term for the two of them, and there are four terms, not three. And when Ann came to live with them, in 2011, Adrian stopped working as a professional and applied for a carer’s pension.

In the early days after Ann’s death, Adrian and Chantelle seemed to be working as a team, joining forces in legal actions against Harry and Rebecca, clearing the Roches Beach house ready for sale, tidying up Ann’s legal affairs, maintaining a campaign to have an open inquest, and engaging high-powered lawyers for advice and representation in the various court actions afoot. But before long, cracks began to appear; while the inquest was still in progress, the couple separated, the children going with Chantelle. The family home was put on the market.

By 7 March 2014, things had deteriorated to such an extent that Chantelle sought and was granted a 12-month family violence order (FVO) against Adrian. Adrian didn’t admit anything, but he didn’t oppose the order. Like many fathers, he felt he was being treated unfairly and he appealed many of the orders made in several courts. He always seemed to be able to engage expensive lawyers. The FVO was later extended to a two-year order lasting until 5 March 2017.

Later, I ventured to remark to Adrian that he seemed to be facing a lot of legal issues following Ann’s death and his split with Chantelle. He responded, ‘For your information, there is no “long list of litigation matters”. The individuals who have found themselves on the responding end of my litigation were those who caused wrongs against me that needed to be remedied by the Court.’

But this wasn’t true of his litigation in connection with Ann’s story. The continuing thread there was Adrian’s deteriorating relationship with the police — and the inquest.

On the face of it, Ann’s death seemed to be clearly an accidental drowning. No other person was in the water with her until she was beyond saving. She appeared to have entered the water of her own free will, splashed about within her depth, got into difficulty, and slid quietly under the water, which is very common in drownings.

But Adrian’s actions began to be questioned, even though he’d been on the shore, 50 metres away. The chief source of questions was information supplied to Detective Sergeant Mike Callinan, who’d been allocated the task of preparing a brief for the Coroner.

Adrian had been critical of Callinan’s role on the day of the drowning, saying, ‘He did nothing to help, he just stood there. He failed in his duty.’

But there was no reason why Callinan should have done anything. He had responded to the call from the road, called the situation in, ensured that someone had called an ambulance, and observed that appropriate resuscitation was being applied. Although Callinan didn’t know it at the time, Adrian had a bronze medallion in lifesaving and the person doing chest compressions was a retired nurse and trained first-aider. After Ann and Adrian left in the ambulance, Callinan obtained names and contact numbers for the bystanders, whom he later interviewed as witnesses.

Still, in spite of all the evidence, Adrian remained convinced that it wasn’t appropriate to appoint Callinan to investigate the incident. In various documents Adrian submitted to the courts, he stated that Callinan ‘displayed appalling lack of judgment and common decency; persistently ignored obvious truths; provided affidavits [from witnesses] that he must have known contained false and misleading information; hid and withheld information … from the Coroner’ — the complaints ran on and on. These complaints filled 31 pages of one document submitted to the courts, finishing with the claim:

It is submitted that Sergeant Callinan’s conduct as Investigating Officer in this matter has led to the matter being considerably more complex than it ought to be and has unnecessarily increased the emotional and financial burden on grieving family members as well as the load of the Coroner and the people of Tasmania.

Adrian also lodged a formal complaint, something that causes no end of hassle to the police. He said Callinan should be ‘demoted and banished to Queenstown’ as part punishment. At times during his investigations, it seemed likely that Callinan would have welcomed a posting anywhere that Adrian wasn’t!

And what had Callinan done to deserve Adrian’s wrath? Adrian told me that police cars have first-aid and resuscitation equipment on board for just such emergencies. Callinan’s first alleged sin was that he didn’t get this gear from his vehicle and take over the revival efforts before the ambulance arrived. My inquiries have indicated that most police cars simply carry a hand-operated airbag attached to a plastic facemask, which is intended to save the police from performing unprotected mouth-to-mouth and risking infection. It is usually in the car so that police can provide resuscitation if no one else is doing so until help arrives. Callinan didn’t know if he had one with him, but in any case, the situation seemed to be under control.

Callinan committed his second, more grievous sin when he said at the end of his formal statement:

On completion of this investigation I am left with some concern over the amount of time it took the deceased’s son-in-law, Adrian Lacroix, to respond to Higgins’s situation and following on from that, the actions taken by him upon realising she was in trouble. It is my view that the death of Elizabeth Ann Higgins may have been prevented by more direct and timely intervention.

Ouch! Unfortunately for Adrian, others expressed similar views. To cite various sworn statements, Ann’s brother, Michael, said, ‘I also have concerns about the circumstances of Ann’s death, given that she was not a strong swimmer.’ Harry Higgins said, ‘I have some concerns over the manner of Ann’s death and the circumstances leading up to it.’ Tas Castrisios, a witness on the beach, recorded, ‘My thought at the time was that the male was reckless to encourage the elderly lady to swim out so deep when she could obviously not swim well. I was also disturbed by the manner he was speaking to her.’ Ann’s pastor wrote to the Coroner expressing the opinion that ‘the full facts of this sad occurrence have yet to see the light of day’.

Onlookers seemed to misconstrue some of the actions taken by Adrian and Chantelle, including the speed of the cremation, their engagement in Ann’s legal actions, and their rapid assumption of ownership of the Roches Beach house. There was much speculation, voiced and unvoiced.

Stuart Tipple, a well-known Sydney barrister engaged by Chantelle, wrote to the Coroner 17 months after Ann’s death, asking when the Coroner would be holding an inquest and pointing out that ‘the family has been subjected to rumour and innuendo, including that the deceased committed suicide.’ (It wasn’t obvious why that would be problematic, as it was one of Adrian’s hypotheses; he was keen to have Ann’s medical and psychiatric history taken into account.)

Though no date had been set for an inquest, extensive investigations were already being conducted, though they were kept under wraps and most people weren’t aware of them. For example, a witness told me later that when he went to the police office to provide a statement, he saw paperwork about Adrian’s finances ‘spread over a table as big as a large dining table’. He said there seemed to be several interlocking company and private documents, which were creating a lot of police interest. ‘Why would they be investigating Adrian’s finances?’ he asked.

I’d been wondering about how he made ends meet, as he didn’t seem to have a regular job.

Most of the suspicion and innuendo swirling around Ann’s death seemed to be directed at Adrian Lacroix. Hobart isn’t a big city, and people talk. Over the next few months, the Coroner sought information from Ann’s doctors, neighbours, friends, ministers, and relatives. There were more than 50 affidavits, submissions from lawyers and other interested parties, pages and pages of doctors’ reports about Ann’s health and psychiatric history, letters and emails to and from the Coroner, results of police investigations, and other information that was quietly assembled into a brief for his consideration. It seemed a plethora of information for a simple drowning, suggesting it wasn’t so simple.

After pressure from the family and their lawyers, the inquest was finally scheduled to commence on 27 May 2013, more than two years after the drowning. Adrian delivered 30 pages of submissions to the Coroner, Magistrate Glenn Hay, listing a large number of ‘persons who may have contributed to the cause of death’, including Mike Callinan, Harry Higgins, Rebecca Higgins, psychiatrist Dr Stonefield*, Ann’s GP, Dr Redhill*, and all the people operating the jet ski on the beach that day.

Adrian, on the other hand, had acted commendably. Describing himself in the third person, he wrote:

From the moment Adrian Lacroix first noticed that Ann was in trouble, until the time he and Mr Moore rescued Ann from the water, [he] acted as fast as he possibly could to respond to the emergency in the most appropriate way in the circumstances and to try to save Ann’s life.

This was one of 30 paragraphs detailing his actions to assist Ann. Other witnesses, including eyewitnesses who questioned his recollections, were designated ‘mischievous and devious’. In other words, they were lying.

What should have been a straightforward case of a tragic but accidental death was never going to be simple, because so many reputations, family relationships, financial arrangements, and professional positions were perceived as being under threat. Anyone the Coroner judges as ‘an interested person’ is entitled to appoint legal representation to look after their interests at an inquest. There was an impressive array of legal clout — Adrian had engaged Greg Melick SC; Chantelle, Stuart Tipple; Dr Redhill, Ms Sandra Taglieri; and Dr Stonefield, Ken Proctor SC. The Coroner, Glenn Hay, was assisted by Peter Barker SC, a gruff, larger-than-life figure well known in the Hobart legal scene. It seemed the tragedy of a simple drowning had assumed Harold Holt proportions.

The Coroner had recognised Harry Higgins and his daughter Rebecca as ‘interested persons’, and they elected to represent themselves, which gave them many opportunities to cross-examine witnesses if they wished. With all the instructing solicitors opposite their barristers filling the bar table, the long list of witnesses to be called, the strong media interest, and the palpable anger and emotion emanating from some quarters, the Coroner must have felt he’d drawn the short straw.

Nonetheless, he commenced the hearing by explaining the purpose of an inquest. He explained that if a death is to be the subject of an inquest, the inquest starts from the time a body lies in the morgue. Proceedings are adjourned after the autopsy, and the police investigate the death on behalf of the Coroner. Much later, in his finding, His Honour said:

It should not be forgotten that an inquest is a fact-finding exercise and not a method of apportioning blame to any person. In an inquest it should never be forgotten that there are no parties, there are no charges, there is no prosecution, there is no defence, and there is no trial, simply an attempt to establish facts based upon the balance of probabilities. It is an inquisitorial process, a process of investigation quite unlike a trial where the prosecutor accuses and the accused defends with the magistrate holding the balance. To that end, the procedure to be followed in this inquest has had less rigidity to it compared to other proceedings.

Here, I need to explain a little about the standard of proof in inquests, which is important in order to understand how findings are arrived at. That standard of proof is based on a precedent-setting divorce case in 1938, Briginshaw v Briginshaw (60 CLR 3360), which had nothing to do with an inquest, but everything to do with the standard of proof! In civil matters, proof is based on the ‘balance of probabilities’, but a higher standard of proof is required for criminal matters, which must be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

In Briginshaw v Briginshaw, the High Court refined the balance of probabilities test, stating that a tribunal should

feel an actual persuasion of [an event’s] occurrence or existence before it can be found. It cannot be found as a result of a mere mechanical comparison of probabilities independently of any belief in its reality … [A]t common law … it is enough that the affirmative of an allegation is made out to the reasonable satisfaction of the tribunal. [My italics.]

This creates problems at times for coroners. Relatives and other interested parties may expect coroners to be more definite in their findings and apportion blame for the death under investigation. This isn’t the Coroner’s role, and most states have provisions forbidding it in their Coroners Acts. The Coroner can’t name any person who could be guilty of an offence. That information, citing ‘a person known to this court’ must be referred to the DPP for further investigation.

The Briginshaw principle requires special care in cases where serious allegations have been made, or where a finding is likely to have grave consequences. Importantly, despite some confusion on this point, the standard of proof under Briginshaw continues to be based on the balance of probabilities. Evidence admitted in an inquest cannot be ‘taken as read’ in any other court. It has to be proved all over again.

Magistrate Hay explained the standard of ‘reasonable satisfaction’ — a beguilingly simple phrase, but one that can create practical challenges in its application. It requires the Coroner to consider the seriousness of any allegations, the general likelihood of particular events having occurred, and the gravity of the consequences that may follow a particular finding. ‘Reasonable satisfaction’ should depend upon evidence rather than inexact proofs, indefinite testimony, or indirect inferences.

The Coroner made it clear that he was aware of the ill feeling that had surrounded Ann’s death. He said: ‘There were a significant number of complaints made by members of Ms Higgins’s family against others in the family’, and it had been necessary to consider ‘how those complaints may possibly have impacted upon Ms Higgins’s state of mind at the time she entered the water on that day’. In particular, he had to address the allegations by Harry and Rebecca that Adrian and Chantelle had engaged in ‘unusual and inappropriate controlling behaviour … over Ms Higgins with the sole purpose of gaining total control over her finances, assets and money’. The Coroner continued:

I was fully conscious that within the family of Ms Higgins there was a fracture of opinion and view about what circumstances may have contributed to the cause of death of Ms Higgins. Among other things, an important reason for me to conduct a public inquest into the death of Ms Higgins has been to attempt to allay rumour or suspicion aimed at individuals and to permit the family to vent those concerns at least to the degree where they may be relevant to the public interest. However, the remoteness of possible contribution to causation cannot be permitted to extend the scope of this inquest.

He reminded himself of a guiding principle: ‘that the Coroner isn’t obliged to act upon speculation of “intra-family ill-will” in the absence of cogent, admissible, and acceptable evidence’. In other words, allegations and counter-allegations could be aired in the court at His Honour’s discretion, but the Coroner wasn’t obliged to act on them unless he considered they were evidence.

The inquest began on 27 May 2013 and received written submissions, but then adjourned after two days. There were repeated delays after that, sometimes due to lack of free court space or the unavailability of interstate counsel, but the vast majority of delays were due to Adrian. Adrian was having mental health issues and had been hospitalised in a mental health facility, and he asked to be excused from giving evidence under oath. His barrister tabled questions about whether his client could properly instruct him; on the first day of the hearing, his barrister gave notice that ‘there may be some queries about Mr Lacroix’s capacity to give evidence rationally and capably’. Adrian also made submissions through his barrister that his mental health was sufficiently precarious that his evidence wouldn’t be productive to the inquest.

After re-convening briefly, the inquest adjourned again in August 2013. Adrian’s barrister gave oral evidence based on a psychiatrist’s opinion to the effect that ‘Mr Lacroix lacked capacity to give evidence because of mental health issues and any evidence given by him may well be inherently unreliable as he may be overwhelmed by a stream of questioning to the detriment of his mental health’. The Coroner wasn’t prepared to rely on oral submissions to this effect and adjourned again until November, when he would require Adrian’s psychiatrist, who lived in Melbourne, to provide direct evidence to the court to support these submissions.

On 28 November, Adrian’s psychiatrist didn’t appear and neither did Adrian, leaving his barrister holding the baby. Unknown to his own barrister or the Coroner, the reason for Adrian’s no-show was that he had asked the nearby Supreme Court to remove Coroner Hay and establish a new inquest. It was an ex parte application, made in the absence of the other party, in this case the Coroner. It was the first of three separate applications Adrian made to the Supreme Court that His Honour should be dismissed from hearing the inquest due to bias and ‘a severe conflict of interest’. All these applications were dismissed, but the inquest had to stop after each application until the Supreme Court delivered a judgment. The first judgment wasn’t made until December 2013, and the next hearing wasn’t listed until March 2014, after the long holiday break. At that point, Adrian returned with a new barrister, no longer relying on his fragile mental state as a reason to not give evidence.

The delays upset other witnesses and inconvenienced the legal representatives, but His Honour gradually managed to work through the eyewitnesses and others during the stop-start progress.

He heard that since Ann’s separation from Harry, she had improved her lifestyle by losing weight, getting fit, and becoming active in exercise, walking, gardening, and swimming. But there was also evidence that ‘some of her medical advisers [had] difficulty in promoting her appropriate health care due to likely unnecessary interference by Mr and Mrs Lacroix in and about that treatment’.

There were also tensions in the household. On more than one occasion, Ann had done intrusive things such as reading Adrian’s private papers. When he confronted her about her behaviour, she had lied.

Chantelle gave evidence that on the night before Ann’s death, she had come home from work about 11 p.m. and found Adrian upset after one of these confrontations. Chantelle said, ‘He continued talking to my mother and me about my mother’s untruths until about 4 a.m.’ As a result, Ann had little sleep that night, then she headed off to Roches Beach for a full day’s physical work. Ann’s neighbour, Megan, gave evidence that Ann and Adrian had arrived between 7.30 and 8 a.m.; Adrian said it was about 10 a.m., but the Coroner found this ‘less than convincing’. Megan also told the court when she last saw Ann about 5.30 p.m., she ‘looked stuffed’.

The Coroner inferred from this evidence that by 6 p.m., when Adrian came to pick Ann up, she was ‘most likely very tired from lack of sleep prior to and her physical exertions during the long hot day’.

There was evidence from several of the eyewitnesses who were jet skiing at the northern end of the beach, including Damien Moore, Niktar Nikitaras, Georgina Nikitaras, and Tas Castrisios. I later interviewed some of them myself.

Nik Nikitaras said he was in his boat when he first saw a man of about 40 with somebody he described as an ‘elderly female’ walking to the southern end of Little Howrah Beach. A short time later, returning from a ski run, Nik was reversing his boat and looking toward the southern end of the beach when he noticed a lot of splashing, which continued for about ten seconds. His impression was that the splashing was to be expected of a person who was unable to swim or swimming ‘not very well’. Nik pointed out the splashing to nearby Damien Moore, who said it was probably ‘the old lady trying to swim’. The person splashing was alone in the water, between the buoys and the rocks at the southern end of the beach. Nik didn’t take much notice of her, as she didn’t look as if she was in difficulty.

Nik’s wife, Georgina, also noticed the woman splashing about and saw a man who appeared to be watching her, sitting above the water on a rocky area not far from the woman. About fifteen minutes later, Georgina was taking her kids to the car on the road by the beach when she heard a man calling out something like ‘Help! I can’t find her, she’s gone under!’ When Georgina looked around, she saw Adrian talking to her friend Damien Moore. She gave evidence that Adrian was ‘freaking out’. She watched Damien run towards where Adrian was pointing, and then she saw Adrian take off his clothes before going into the water. The Coroner said later, ‘She observed he did not appear to be moving very fast as he removed his clothes. While this was happening, Mrs Nikitaras telephoned for an ambulance.’

After Ann had been brought in, Georgina went across to the little group on the shore and ‘assisted Mr Lacroix by showing him a more appropriate method [of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation] by tilting the woman’s head back and holding her nose’.

In his affidavit sworn 16 March 2011 and evidence later given to the inquest, Damien Moore said that he had seen an elderly lady in a black-and-white swimsuit walk out to about waist depth and then dive into the water. He saw her splashing about like a ten-year-old. He told me later that he wasn’t concerned about her, as she seemed to be just enjoying herself, having some fun and splashing around. He was getting ready to leave the beach when he felt someone grab his arm. He told me he’d heard no yelling or running or panting; the first he knew of the situation was when Adrian grabbed his arm. Damien’s recollection was that Adrian said,‘You need to help me. My grandmother has drowned and I can’t swim,’ or words to that effect.

(It’s unlikely that Adrian would have referred to Ann as his grandmother, but Damien stuck to that recollection in spite of being badgered in the witness box by barristers for the Lacroixes.)

Damien asked Adrian where she was, and Adrian pointed and said, ‘Near the orange buoy.’ Damien told me later that, squinting out over the water, he could barely see a crown of grey hair, which seemed to be floating near the buoy. He headed straight into the water and swam toward the buoy. He told the court the grey hair had vanished, and Ann was underwater, unresponsive, by the time he located her.

Swimming for the shore, he encountered Adrian, who was standing in chest-deep water. There was disagreement about this, with Adrian claiming that he swam out and helped Damien bring Ann in, but when I spoke to Damien later, he insisted that the evidence he gave the court was correct: it was only as he neared the beach that he encountered Adrian. They both then dragged Ann onto the beach and began CPR, with Damien doing the compressions and Adrian the breaths.

One of the crucial beach witnesses was Tas Castrisios, who was part of the jet-ski party. Tas told the court that he was standing in waist-deep water at Little Howrah Beach about 6.15 or 6.20 p.m. when he heard a man yelling. He says he saw an elderly lady standing and splashing in the water. At first, he thought that the lady couldn’t swim, because she was hesitating to go in the water and not seeming to want to go any further. He said a man on the grass bank was yelling very loudly and sharply at her, saying, ‘Go on, get out there, get deeper’, or words to that effect. Tas thought the man’s tone was aggressive, and he considered it inappropriate for anyone to speak in that way to an elderly person.

Tas gave evidence that the lady was swimming toward the rocky point in what he described as an awkward ‘doggy style’ — ‘more or less whatever she could do to stay afloat’. The Coroner later summarised his evidence:

[Mr Castrisios] said he heard the male yelling out to the female in a forceful and encouraging manner, telling her to swim out further. The man was holding a stubby in one hand but was using both hands gesturing forwards, waving her out into the water. She was in Mr Castrisios’s line of sight from the beach, and he estimated that she would have been in water over her depth. He thought the male reckless to encourage the elderly lady to swim out that deep when in his view she was obviously not swimming well. He observed she was swimming away from the man toward a bright-orange buoy off the shore.

Tas said he left the beach soon after this and didn’t observe anything else that was relevant, but he did think it strange behaviour. After he got home, his friend Nik Nikitaras sent him a message to say that the lady had drowned, and Tas wrote down the words he says he heard Adrian calling out, in case anything came of the drowning.

Adrian vehemently disagreed with most of the evidence the Howrah Beach witnesses gave the court. He has told me they were all wrong, and that Detective Sergeant Callinan ‘colluded’ with these witnesses to put Adrian in a bad light. In a 30-page submission he filed at the Magistrates Court on 3 May 2013 after reading the affidavits of Nik, Georgina, Tas, and Damien, he went into great detail about how mistaken these witnesses were. He told me later that that someone had moved the orange buoy so that it was in a different position to where he said it was in his evidence, casting further doubt on his version of events. Most of his affidavit detailed his own actions to save Ann.

He said that before Ann disappeared, she was swimming normally, alternating between freestyle and breaststroke, and at times turning over and floating on her back.

He said in his affidavit that he quickly removed his clothes and watch and swam out to help, arriving at the spot where Ann had last been seen at the same time as Damien. Adrian said in his affidavit that he didn’t believe Ann intended to cause herself harm. He believed she may not have realised how physically tired she was after doing heavy gardening all day in the heat. He said that he didn’t at any stage call out to Ann to ‘go deeper’. In fact, he did quite the opposite, reminding her that this was supposed to be a quick swim and encouraging her to return to the beach.

During the inquest, quite some weight was attached to Adrian’s own capabilities as a swimmer. He’d described himself to several people as a very competent swimmer, having completed a bronze medallion in lifesaving and several first-aid courses.

When I heard this, my first reaction was, ‘Well, so what?’ I have a bronze medallion in lifesaving, which I was awarded about 55 years ago. Doesn’t mean I’d be any good saving a drowning swimmer these days! As a former nurse, I also know how to do CPR, but it usually doesn’t work if the victim’s airways are full of water.

Sergeant Callinan further blotted his copybook with Adrian when he told the court that, following the initial investigation, he was ‘left with some concerns over the amount of time that it apparently took’ for Adrian to go to Ann’s aid.

Adrian’s barrister asked in cross-examination: ‘Your concern is that he took the decision to go and get Mr Moore rather than the decision to do something else?’

Callinan replied, ‘Yes.’

Adrian had briefed his counsel to try to make the most of what he alleged was Sergeant Callinan’s response at the time, where Adrian claimed he should have gone back to his police vehicle to fetch the ‘soft bag’ and return to relieve Adrian. In fact, the ‘soft bag’ that was in the car that day wouldn’t have been any use, as it was later found to be missing a vital component.

In any case, Callinan later told Mr Tipple, for Chantelle, that, ‘In fact, I will take the opportunity to say at this point that Mr Lacroix was actually doing a very competent job of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.’

Researching a story like this, I’d normally attend the inquest to hear the evidence for myself. In this case, though, I heard the story well after the stop/start inquest had concluded. I was able to obtain copies of all the witness affidavits, but Adrian wasn’t inclined to share the transcript with me.

I was curious about why so many people — including, it seemed, Adrian — could infer that he was the object of any suspicion at all. I made contact with him through a mutual friend. Until then, I’d heard about the case from others, but not from the man under the microscope. I was at a loss to understand how he could have been considered to have contributed to Ann’s death when she was alone in the water and he was 50 metres away on the grass between the sand and the road. It all sounded a bit Houdini to me.

When I first met Adrian, he was earnest and loquacious. He was in his 40s, small and a bit pudgy, younger-looking than his years, with a bit of a hunted look about him. The meeting had taken several attempts to set up during one of my regular family visits to Hobart, and I finally connected with him an hour before I had to head out to the airport. Adrian seems to leave a lot of things to the last minute, although I thought maybe he was coping with his considerable legal load by only doing things when they became imperative.

He wanted to tell me about what he called the ‘intimidation campaign’ the police had been waging against him since Ann died. In particular, he went into great detail about an incident when he was breathalysed while getting petrol, arrested and handcuffed, taken to the police station, strip-searched, deprived of his clothes, assaulted while naked, and left on a concrete floor for hours. He alleged that ‘a mate’ of the police had seen him heading for the petrol station and tipped off the police patrol. He suggested that his complaint against Sergeant Callinan might have triggered the police action.

At the time, my sympathies were with Adrian. When I later asked a police officer why Adrian was breathalysed while his car was stationary at a petrol pump, I was told that it’s a public area, and drivers can be breathalysed in or out of the car.

I asked why Adrian was arrested, given that his test was negative. The police officer replied, ‘He wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t assaulted the police.’ I was told that Adrian had crawled under the car, then got into his car and locked himself in.

One of Adrian’s court actions was to try to make the police release the CCTV footage of his alleged beating and subsequent treatment. A lawyer who was engaged to assist him in this action told me she had seen the footage. He also had to answer charges in the Magistrates Court. Police dropped some of the charges, but he was found guilty of others.

Other court actions were brought by Adrian and Chantelle, at first together but later separately and against each other. Some of these court actions related to Ann’s estate and her will, and others in the Family Court on Ann’s behalf, but there were also applications for AVOs in the Magistrates Court and so on and so on. At some point, Adrian began a law degree at the University of Tasmania, but when he had time to attend lectures was a mystery to me.

When the inquest was over but the finding hadn’t yet been handed down, I decided to contact some of the witnesses from Howrah Beach and others with whom Adrian had had dealings.

I was interested in why Tas Castrisios had said under oath that he saw Adrian encouraging Ann to go further out. Adrian said Castrisios was mistaken. Adrian later participated in a videoed re-enactment of his actions on the day, which I have seen, starting at the point where Ann’s towel was on the grassy bank. Adrian walks around to the point, talking to the camera about how Ann was enjoying herself in the water. Using both hands, he shows how he says he shooed Ann away from the slippery rocks below where he was standing. He says he pointed to his watch to signal it was time to go and then made shooing motions towards the beach. In the video, he points to the sign saying ‘Dangerous rocks.’

Castrisios’s evidence was a key factor in the interpretation of Adrian’s actions at that crucial moment. He not only described the shooing motions, to which Adrian admitted, but also said that he clearly heard Adrian shouting at Ann to go out further, which Adrian denies. In the video, Adrian says he turned his back in order to walk back to Ann’s towel, and didn’t sight her again until only her hair was visible.

I spoke to the police about Adrian’s claim that every patrol car had resuscitation equipment and found it wasn’t so. A lot was made at the inquest and elsewhere of the observation by Senior Constable Rebecca Castle that Adrian appeared to have folded his clothes neatly before entering the water to assist. As I am married to a Tidy Fairy, I thought this was a bit mean. Perhaps that was just how he took his clothes off, no matter what the urgency. I can vouch for it in my house — mine on the floor, my husband’s neatly folded on the chair!

I spoke to the garage owner where Adrian often filled up with petrol, and he confirmed that on at least one occasion Adrian had used Ann’s credit card to pay and then left her there to walk home for exercise. Coincidentally, when I rang the garage, the garage owner told me Damien Moore was there, so I had a chat to him too. That’s Tassie for you.

Michael Jones, Ann’s brother in South Australia, was very approachable and seemed like a nice man who’d experienced a traumatic loss, made more difficult by the conflicts that followed Ann’s death. He and his sister were close, and he feared that after she left Harry, she was still having her life controlled, just by a ‘different ringmaster’.

Michael had been badly put out by the constant adjournments during the long-running inquest. On several occasions, he’d flown to Hobart only to be told that there would be only one or two days of actual hearings. When legal proceedings drag on and on, it intensifies the suffering of the living victims, as I call those left behind. Adrian’s efforts to have Coroner Hay dismissed and start a new inquest weren’t Michael Jones’s favourite topics.

I also spoke to Ann’s neighbours and friends in South Australia and Hobart. They were all very concerned about her apparently sad life and unexplained death. The memories they shared with me confirmed some of the information in the affidavits sworn by Ann’s doctors and psychologists and given as evidence at the inquest.

Her doctors particularly noted that Ann was almost always accompanied by either Chantelle or Adrian during consultations and that she often brought several pages of handwritten notes to discuss. The Coroner found that medical evidence suggested those pages were likely to have been prepared by someone else. Usually, the sessions didn’t allow time to go through these notes; in any case, they mainly dealt with Ann’s past, and most of her treating professionals were keen to move her into a frame of mind embracing the future. All were hoping the inquest finding would bring resolution and allow everyone to move on.

Adrian seemed to place a lot of weight on the possibility that Ann had experienced a dissociative episode because of the noise from the jet ski, aggravated by her having to swim at the unfamiliar southern end of the beach. He was also quick to cast doubt on Ann’s previous medical care and her medications (or their withdrawal) in connection with Ann’s drowning. The list of possible contributors to Ann’s death in Adrian’s later submissions to the Coroner was extensive and detailed.

Adrian was at first friendly and helpful to my research, but when he realised I was talking to witnesses, police, politicians, friends, and family members, he became quite hostile. He wrote to me, and to others about me, in quite a threatening manner. At one point, he wrote a long letter headed ‘The Perverted Coronial Inquiry and Inquest’ and sent it to 22 politicians, barristers, legal representatives, public servants … in short, to Uncle Tom Cobley and all, but not to me. It was sent on to me, as I knew about half of the recipients personally. The letter included this paragraph:

I intend on writing to the Attorney General of Tasmania and Premier of Tasmania and request that he provide full and frank disclosure regarding his relationship with Ms Robin Bowels [sic] of Victoria and his recent communications with her regarding the said Inquest.

This was prompted by the fact that I had written to the premier on his behalf, asking why the finding from the inquest was taking so long. I told Adrian I’d received a letter acknowledging my question, and this apparently led him to conclude that I must have ‘a relationship’ with the premier (who was at school in Tasmania at the same time as my sons!) because Adrian himself hadn’t received replies to letters he had written. I suggested to him that he may not have worded his inquiries so nicely!

The long-awaited finding was finally delivered by the Coroner on 4 May 2017, almost four years after the inquest had begun.

Coroner Hay devoted 22 of 79 pages in his finding to a section headed ‘The Conduct of Mr Lacroix’ and illustrated it with some long direct transcripts from the hearing. In introducing this section, the Coroner wrote: ‘The conduct of Mr Lacroix in and about the events at Little Howrah Beach was the subject of significant evidence in the inquest and is to be examined closely.’ In what followed, he put Adrian’s actions before, during, and after Ann’s death under a high-powered microscope.

Of the evidence given by other witnesses at the beach, he said:

I had no reason to reject any part of their evidence. They are independent witnesses of tragic events where some differences in observations or perceptions might be expected. Where there were inconsistencies between them, they were of little relevance. They weren’t shaken in any material degree in cross-examination and their oral evidence did not differ in any marked sense from the content of their affidavits created at a more contemporaneous time.

It appeared that he was accepting the evidence of Tas Castrisios about Adrian yelling at Ann to ‘get deeper’ into the water. The finding quoted this exchange between Tas and Mr Peter Barker, the counsel assisting the Coroner:

Mr Barker: Now the man was yelling out to the elderly lady you tell us; go on get out there, get deeper —

Tas Castrisios: Correct.

Mr Barker: Is that your recollection?

Tas Castrisios: That’s it. Exactly it.

Mr Barker: And you say that you remember that because of the manner he was speaking to her? What was it about the manner, the way in which he was saying that, that gave you that impression?

Tas Castrisios: It was very aggressive and rude. It’s not something which I would speak to an elderly person … It was at the top of his voice — yelling very loudly and that sharpness in the tone is what made me turn around particularly to think ‘Who is it? What was it?’ … That tone in his voice was very loud — shouting ‘go on, get out there, get deeper’. And I wrote the words down when I went home. I had a feeling this would go further.

Mr Barker: All right. You say you wrote the words down at home. When did you write the words down?

Tas Castrisios: Maybe two hours after the incident. Once I’d received a phone call from other witnesses who were part of the friendship group [who were] boating.

Mr Barker: Right. And you regarded what you heard and the way in which those words were delivered as being important?

Tas Castrisios: Yes.

Adrian disagreed with this, and his barrister, Mr Rogers, cross-examined Tas about it.

Mr Rogers: Did you see the gentleman on the rocky outcrop yelling at the lady and going like that —

His Honour: So you are putting your hands, both hands palms forward …

Mr Rodgers: Both hands indicating to her to, as the witness would say, get into deeper water. Did you see him doing that?

His Honour: Sort of a pushing away action with both hands.

Tas Castrisios: Yeah. Well, he was holding a stubby, so he was with one hand encouraging her to get out there.

Later, when Mr Rogers was cross-examining Damien Moore about events on the beach, another bit of information fell out. Mr Rogers asked Damien to ‘recollect — without looking at your statement — as best you can and from memory now what you think he said precisely? Did he say something like “I can’t swim to get her?”’

Damien Moore: That’s correct, yeah, he said ‘I can’t swim.’

Mr Rogers: Well, sorry, say that again?

Damien Moore: He said ‘I can’t swim.’

Mr Rogers: Well, could I suggest that he might have said something more like ‘I can’t swim to get her’ having regard to — you looked at him, saw his dress …

Damien Moore: No, look, I — all I can remember is he said ‘I can’t swim.’ There was no ‘I can’t swim out there and get her.’ He just said ‘I can’t swim.’ And I wasn’t going to stand there and argue with the guy.

I was surprised at this. Part of the bronze-medallion qualification requires you to swim 400 metres continuously within 13 minutes — 100 metres freestyle, 100 metres breaststroke, 100 metres survival backstroke, and 100 metres sidestroke. You also have to perform a timed tow by swimming 50 metres, then towing a patient 50 metres within 3 minutes 15 seconds. But not when you are fully dressed — that’s a more advanced lifesaving qualification.

At the inquest, in transcript quoted by the Coroner, Mr Barker gave Adrian a hard time about why he hadn’t ripped his clothes off and swum out to Ann as soon as he knew she was in trouble.

Adrian’s affidavit of 20 April 2011 said that when he first observed Ann in difficulty, she ‘appeared to have stopped moving. She wasn’t swimming.’

Mr Barker: And your reaction to noticing that was what?

Adrian: I immediately looked around the beach to see whether I could see anybody else that could assist me in the emergency situation — where she needed assistance.

Mr Barker: What assistance did you think that somebody might be able to provide that you would not be able to provide?

Adrian: Well, I was fully clothed. I was by myself. I had my shoes on, my jeans on, my shirt on, my jumper on, and when I looked around the beach the only person that I could see at that point was a gentleman who was in a wetsuit, who was appearing to be about to leave the beach area. It’s the only person that I could see at that point. And I needed assistance with helping to retrieve Ann from the water.

Mr Barker: Did you call out to her at all?

Adrian: I — I focused my attention on the gentleman in the wetsuit and running over to him as quickly as I could to ask for help.

His Honour: Could you just answer the question though: did you call out to her?

Adrian: I didn’t call out to Ann, no — because she was motionless. She wasn’t moving.

Mr Barker: I’m just wondering whether the circumstances might have provoked you to call out to her Ann, ‘Are you all right?’ or something like that — to confirm your suspicions that she was in trouble?

Adrian: Well, it would have been wasting time. I mean she clearly … I didn’t call out to Ann, no — because she was motionless. She wasn’t moving.

Adrian then went through his approach to Damien, and Mr Barker began the following exchange:

Mr Barker: Did you say to him ‘You need to help me. My mother-in-law has drowned and I can’t swim?’

Adrian: No, I didn’t. I said I needed help. I said that I was fully clothed — because he was reluctant. He looked at me as though, well, he was reluctant initially, and I pointed out the obvious — that I was fully clothed and I needed his help in the situation. He was in a wetsuit and he was in a position to help me.

Mr Barker: You were in fact at the time a good swimmer yourself. You had been swimming since infancy?

Adrian: Yes.

Mr Barker: You had several first-aid certificates? And you had previously been awarded a bronze medallion?

Adrian: That’s correct.

Mr Barker: By the Royal Lifesaving Association. And you had been in the past a competitive swimmer?

Adrian: That’s correct.

Mr Barker: Why didn’t you go in the water and pull her out yourself?

Adrian: Because I needed assistance, and there was assistance available on the beach. Mr Moore was there in a wetsuit. He was wearing a personal flotation device, which is a wetsuit. It allows for buoyancy. And I needed Mr Moore’s assistance. Had I have gone in by myself, Mr Moore would have left the beach, because he was preparing to leave the beach, and I would have been there by myself attempting a solo rescue. And when I had got Ms Higgins back to the beach, I would have been there by myself and in a position where there was nobody else on the beach and it was getting dark. And I was fully clothed. I wasn’t in a position to race straight into the water and attempt a water rescue.

Mr Barker: What was so special about your clothes?

Adrian: Well, there’s nothing special about my clothes. I was just fully clothed. I had shoes on. I had socks on. I had jeans on. I had a belt on. I had a shirt on — a buttoned-up shirt. I had a jumper. And I was fully clothed. I wasn’t in bathers. I wasn’t in shorts. I wasn’t in a position to enter the water immediately.

Mr Barker: It would be but a matter of moments to get rid of the majority, if not all of your clothes, wouldn’t it?

Adrian: That wasn’t the issue of getting rid of my clothing. The issue was getting assistance, ensuring the ambulance was on the way, and being able to perform a water rescue, and being in a position to be able to resuscitate if need be.

Mr Barker: Wasn’t the priority getting her out of the water?

Adrian: Yes. That’s part of — part of the process of retrieval and recovery is retrieving her from the water, but you need to be thinking what are you going to do if the person is unconscious and you get them back onto the sand and they need resuscitating. The ambulance would need to be on the way because there is an emergency situation. And that’s an important part of the process in any kind of emergency situation — is that there’s assistance being used if it’s available. It would be incorrect procedure to do a solo rescue when a person is available on the beach in a wetsuit and able to assist with the rescue.

When Mr Barker persisted, Adrian pointed out that jumping in the water and drowning himself wouldn’t have helped Ann. She wasn’t struggling. She was motionless in the water.

Mr Barker seemed sceptical. He asked, ‘At what risk of drowning would you have been? It’s not Bondi beach with a recalcitrant drunk, is it?’

Adrian repeated that, as he was fully clothed, he would have been at considerable risk of drowning, with shoes on and the heavy clothing he was wearing. (He’ll make a good lawyer, I thought. He knows how to repetitively stonewall a question!)

Mr Barker responded somewhat incredulously. ‘A former competitive swimmer with a bronze medallion, you thought you were at risk of drowning by swimming that short distance to recover someone who is motionless?’

Adrian repeated his reply again. ‘With clothes on, of course. That’s how double drownings occur. That’s how people in rescues actually end up drowning themselves.’

But Mr Barker wouldn’t let up. He said, ‘In response to seeing Ms Higgins in difficulty at point “B” on that map, you could have waded in your clothing most of the way out to her?’

Adrian replied, ‘And potentially drowned myself. Yes.’

‘Wading? You could have drowned yourself, could you?’

Mr Barker’s questions continued in this vein. Clearly, Adrian wasn’t going to convince him that it would have put his own life at risk by wading out to Ann fully dressed, and, just as clearly, Mr Barker wasn’t going to be able to demonstrate with any certainty that Adrian’s evidence was a rationalisation for a failure to act.

The Coroner found:

Mr Lacroix’s recollection of what happened earlier that day is very poor and leads to a concern that his detailed evidence of events on the beach is at least in part tainted by reconstruction. All of the evidence leads to concern that Mr Lacroix did not react to the situation at the beach as might be expected of a reasonable person. The evidence from Mr Castrisios is that Mr Lacroix had a very loud and sharp voice … It was a very quiet evening with no wind, and witnesses had no difficulty in hearing Mr Lacroix address Ms Higgins when she was swimming. Upon all of that evidence a loud alarm raised by him at the time he was aware Ms Higgins was in difficulty was, in my view, likely to be heard by Mr Moore and/or Mrs Nikitaras. In my view it would have been most appropriate for him to have done so. But clearly he did not, instead choosing to move towards Mr Moore a considerable distance away, raising no alarm until he touched him.

Mr Lacroix was the closest person to Ms Higgins in what appeared to him to be a possible drowning episode, and in those circumstances the medical evidence and the application of common sense is clear that time is then of the essence … [If he had called out to the others on the beach,] he could well have gone to the more immediate aid of his mother-in-law and hopefully with the knowledge of reasonably immediate back-up from others.

The Coroner concluded that when Adrian had allegedly called out to Ann to swim away or swim deeper, she had swum into water where she was out of her depth. She may have become anxious after the long day she’d had and possibly couldn’t swim back to the shore, or even keep herself afloat.

From all of the evidence, the Coroner said, ‘it is more likely than not had Mr Lacroix gone more immediately to the aid of Ms Higgins then the recovery of Ms Higgins from the water could have been attained sooner, with a consequent earlier introduction of CPR resuscitation and her chances of survival thus enhanced. However, other than an enhancement of resuscitation prospects, I am unable to find had he acted with more haste that Ms Higgins would not have drowned.’

The Coroner also concluded that Damien and Adrian had met up about 35 metres from the beach, halfway to the orange buoy, in about 1.4 metres of water. He explicitly rejected Adrian’s claim that he had reached Ann at the same time as Damien, saying, ‘I find that is highly unlikely given the haste with which Mr Moore proceeded and the steps he had to undertake for retrieval compared to the lack of haste by Mr Lacroix and his steps taken in removing and stacking his clothes.’

Indeed, he went further. He said:

I prefer the evidence of Mr Moore, Mrs Nikitaras, and other witnesses when it is in conflict with the evidence of Mr Lacroix in and about the events leading up to the recovery of Ms Higgins from the water … I find it more likely than not that whilst Mr Lacroix was standing on the rocky point as Ms Higgins was swimming, she responded to his loud and aggressive voice, it was either an encouragement to go deeper or a warning to stay away from rocks. The effect was that she swam away from him and the rocky shore and that she likely swam towards a greater depth of water, most likely over her head.

The Coroner also noted that, while Ann was ‘certainly capable of swimming, it was likely she wasn’t a “good” or competent swimmer and that she would probably have been more comfortable swimming in her own depth’.

The Coroner also heard evidence from Chantelle. He seemed especially interested in the letter she had signed on 21 March, a week after her mother’s death. This was the letter detailing Ann’s activities in the days leading up to the drowning.

At the stage when I read that letter, I didn’t know Chantelle, but I did know Adrian, and I could tell that the style and content of the letter was Adrian to a T. As I read it, I was surprised that, given his background as a forensic document examiner, he’d made no effort to put the letter in his wife’s words, but expected the recipients to accept it as being from Chantelle.

There were also letters from Chantelle asking whether the Coroner would be in a position to determine any medical issues that may have contributed to Ann’s drowning, such as a seizure, stroke, heart attack, cramping, or a possible disassociation episode. The letters raised concerns about Dr Redhill’s changes to Ann’s hypertension medication.

By the latter stages of the inquest, relations between Adrian and Chantelle had deteriorated and the couple had separated. Chantelle now attempted to resile from much of her evidence given in the earlier part of the inquest. The Coroner said ‘I note that, upon advisement from her subsequent legal counsel, she no longer adopts these submissions.’

In the closing days of the inquest, Mr Barker read out to Chantelle the four-page letter to the Coroner and asked, ‘Was there something you wanted to say about that letter?’

Chantelle: He wrote that. I was in hospital. It was Friday after Mum’s death … I had salmonella. I was there for about six days.

Mr Barker: And how did it come about that your husband was writing this letter apparently attributing it to you?

Chantelle: Because he said they need to know the facts.

Mr Barker pointed her to the last page of the letter, where her signature appeared, and asked, ‘How did you come to sign it?’

Chantelle replied that she’d signed it ‘because he said I needed to sign it. I was really, really sick.’

Mr Barker asked why Adrian was bothering her about the letter when she was so ill. At that point, Mr Tipple, who was representing Chantelle, intervened, saying he didn’t think his client could answer that question.

His Honour demurred, saying that he had thought about that, but felt she might have some information about a discussion she’d had with her husband as to why she should sign it.

Chantelle told His Honour that she couldn’t answer the question. She’d been really sick.

On resuming, Mr Barker asked Chantelle, ‘Just to be clear about it, when the letter records at page three that which I have read out to you earlier, that’s all stuff that Adrian has attributed to you, not things that you knew about yourself in any detail? So when it says “given the information that I have about all the circumstances on that day I am of the opinion that the drowning was accidental in nature” — that’s not something you knew, that’s something that your husband has attributed to you?’

Chantelle replied, ‘Well, that’s what he said.’

(Bingo! Exactly what I had thought when I read it.)

But Mr Barker wasn’t finished with Chantelle. He reminded her that during an earlier break, he’d shown her a ring binder entitled ‘Inquest — Higgins, Elizabeth Ann — Documents received from C Lacroix’. He asked, ‘Would I be right that each of those letters that you saw in the ring binder were in fact authored by your husband?’

She said that was correct.

Mr Barker: So is it the case that all the letters in that ring binder, or any other letters for that matter that have gone to the Coroner’s office attributed to you, that is, carrying your signature, have in fact been drafted by your husband and you were asked to sign them?

Chantelle: Yes, because they’ve been emailed.

Mr Barker: What is it about the emails that troubles you?

Chantelle: Well, as you can see the emails say that I will come in my lunchtime — like I — I don’t write emails from work when I’m at work. And the times that the emails are sent are when I’d be at work.

Mr Barker: Right. I’m going to ask this in two stages. The first is: before you separated from your husband, did you have occasion to email the Coroner’s office about anything yourself?

Chantelle: There were emails to the Coroner’s office but I didn’t type them, no.

Mr Barker: So if there are any emails to the Coroner’s office prior to your separation from your husband that appear to have been on the face of them emails from you, you say they were in fact emails from your husband?

Chantelle: Yes.

The Coroner wrote in his finding:

This evidence was not challenged by counsel for Mrs Lacroix. In my view it establishes that the criticisms of other witnesses or diversionary allegations apparently made by Mrs Lacroix were in fact authored by Mr Lacroix. This leads to the further conclusion that he was the real agitator not only for the inquest, but for the issues which might otherwise have been thought to be a reflection of the concerns independently held by Mrs Lacroix as senior next of kin. Further, it also supports the manipulative and controlling personality and behaviour of Mr Lacroix touched upon elsewhere in the findings.

He said it was important that the early assertions made to the Coroner’s office apparently by Chantelle and now withdrawn ‘be put to rest as best I am able.’

It was nevertheless incumbent on the Coroner to investigate assertions and allegations about Ann’s state of mental and physical health. Could she have committed suicide? (Drowning is said to be an easy and painless method.) Had her extreme living conditions during her marriage to Harry contributed to an ongoing state of despair and depression?

Dr Julie Madden, a friend of Ann’s who was also an elder of their church, told the court she had taken part in cleaning up the Roches Beach house after Ann and Harry separated.

She said, ‘I have never been in a house that’s been in such a mess, so unhygienic, so full of rubbish, and just so neglected. There was a horrible smell in the house. There were bags of rubbish all over the place. It was obvious that things hadn’t been cleaned for a long time.’

The room where Ann and Rebecca had slept was disgusting. ‘There were mattresses with holes in them that looked like rats had eaten them, and rat faeces. And the shed outside had numerous stacks of newspapers that were sort of stained with urine and smelt of urine. The garden was overgrown. It was just like a tip, really.’

Julie went there with other members of the church to see what the situation was and work out what practical help they could give. ‘Probably three or four [of us] went at different times over the following weeks,’ she said. Her husband, who was a builder, arranged for rubbish skips to be delivered. Julie recalled that they had filled ten skips with rubbish from inside the house. ‘It was just unusable or so smelly that you couldn’t live with it, really. You’d have to go out of the house every now and again just to get some fresh air.’

The Coroner also examined whether changes in Ann’s medications could have contributed to her drowning. Some of the letters to the Coroner had been particularly critical of Ann’s treatment by Dr Stonefield and Dr Redhill. These complaints, however, were dismissed. All the medical practitioners considered that the gradual and supervised withdrawal of the many medications Ann had been taking wasn’t a contributing factor. The medicos all said that Ann’s physical health had improved dramatically since her separation from Harry. She’d lost weight, become fitter, and seemed much happier, although Dr Redhill qualified her opinion by saying, ‘She was — still a troubled soul, let’s put it like that.’ The Coroner found that Ann’s medical care was appropriate and adequate.

Mr Barker asked Chantelle in the closing days of the inquest about whether she was now certain there was no longer a reason to consider that blame should attach to any of Ann’s medical practitioners, or to any of the other medial experts who had contributed to the inquest. Chantelle said she could see that they were not to blame.

In the light of Chantelle’s revelations about the authorship of the letters, the Coroner recalled that Dr Stonefield had remarked that Ann had been ‘told to say all this stuff’, and he raised the possibility that she was not the author of the screeds of hand-written material she’d brought to her medical appointments. He said that the doctor’s statement about ‘the possibility of her being coached as to what she was saying and her being easily led, is very perceptive in the light of the admissions by Mrs Lacroix about the vast majority of her letters or sworn documents being authored by Mr Lacroix.’

The Coroner reminded himself of the evidence given by Ann’s psychologist, who said Ms Higgins ‘was particularly vulnerable to being psychologically controlled and manipulated’.

The Coroner summed up the medical reports by saying he didn’t consider there were any medical issues involved in the drowning, nor did he think there were any ‘dissociative episodes’ or panic attacks that could have contributed. The possibility of either was merely speculative.

He then put forward a speculation of his own: ‘Could it be that when Ms Higgins got into difficulty at the beach, Mr Lacroix lost control of her and her situation and simply did not know what to do about it?’

He handed down his findings, which attributed the death to:

drowning March 2011 whilst swimming at Little Howrah Beach in Tasmania. There is no evidence of any other physical or medical cause of death. She was aged 61 years at the time of her death and she was at that time usually resident at 2/17 Holland Court, Howrah in Tasmania, and was unemployed and in receipt of a disability support pension.

I find that her death occurred somewhere between about the time Mr Moore located her body under the water, approximately just before 7 p.m. on the 14th March 2011 and the time she was pronounced dead at the Royal Hobart Hospital at 8.07 p.m. on that date. Between those times Mr Moore alone, then Mr Moore and Mr Lacroix and others, and then Tasmania Ambulance Service officers continued CPR but were not successful, with no vital signs detected between those times.

I find that the terminal event of drowning occurred due to asphyxia due to salt water instead of air occupying the air spaces in the lungs. I am unable to make any finding as to what may have caused Ms Higgins to ingest the salt water which led to asphyxiation and death.

Other than in the sense that had Mr Lacroix acted sooner to retrieve Ms Higgins from the water to enhance the prospects of her resuscitation, I make no finding that her death occurred by or was contributed to by any acts or omissions which were directly responsible for her death, through the agency, intervention or involvement of any other person.

There are no other relevant findings I need to make.

He concluded by saying:

Finally, I take this opportunity to express my belated condolences to the family and friends of Ms Higgins. It has been a lengthy and difficult inquest and it has taken its toll on many persons who have been in close contact with it … Finally, I commend and thank those who attended to assist Ms Higgins on that tragic March day in 2011. I especially commend Mr Moore, Mrs Nikitaras, and Ms Noble for their efforts in recovering Ms Higgins from the water and attempting her resuscitation. Unfortunately, it was to no avail.

Glenn Alan Hay, Coroner
4 May 2017

On 5 May 2017 at 7.15 a.m., I received a surprise message from Adrian, who hadn’t been in touch since I’d complained about his group letter. The night before, I’d seen on the news that he’d left the court with the finding, telling the waiting media that he was planning to appeal. He must have thought better of it, as no appeal was lodged. Adrian’s text message said, ‘Hi Robin, the Coroner has found that I did not contribute to the death of Elizabeth Ann Higgins.’

I replied at 10.50 a.m: ‘You must be pleased with the outcome? [I] read the finding yesterday afternoon.’

He texted immediately, ‘Generally, yes.’