“As soon as I arrive at the Darwin Airport my anxiety levels can sometimes be quite uncontrollable,” she says.

“It’s difficult for me to come here and see my friends and see my family.”

Gwynne lives in Melbourne, 4000km away from her youngest child Hayley, and from the place where she once walked tall, first as a tough-as-nails police officer and a legend of the Northern Territory Football League and then as a fearless Children’s Commissioner.

But her world came crashing down one July morning almost five years ago, when she arrived at work to find two detectives waiting to meet her.

“My life was to change forever,” she says.

“Pretty much arrested and put before the courts which would take over three years to prove my innocence.”

For the previous 18 months Gwynne had been the subject of a secret investigation run by the NT Police special references unit.

They had sent detectives to four different states to gather information, run surveillance on the Nightcliff home she shared with her wife and children, accessed her bank accounts and bugged her office in the Darwin CBD.

NT Police are more than adept at secret sting operations.

They have used them before to great effect, most notably to catch brutal killer Danny Deacon, who murdered his wife Carlie Sinclair and buried her body in a shallow grave at Berry Springs.

But Colleen Gwynne is no murderer.

Her alleged crime was that she had tried to hire her friend Laura Dewson as her assistant commissioner, a position Dewson had been acting in for several months and had been deemed suitable for by an independent panel which Gwynne recused herself from sitting on.

This week the NT Government announced an independent inquiry into senior appointments within the NT Police Force after an ICAC report found Commissioner Michael Murphy had helped his friend secure a job as assistant commissioner.

The government is in the process of terminating Mr Murphy’s appointment and the inquiry will look into all appointments from Superintendent and above made since August 2023. Many of the matters that will be examined have been known to authorities for almost 12 months.

But there has been no police investigation.

No-one’s office has been bugged or bank records searched.

The irony of the situation is not lost on Gwynne.

“It’s a disgrace, it’s not consistent. I’m just speechless. I’m not surprised, I’m speechless.”

The abuse of office charge laid against Gwynne is an allegation she has always denied, even if she was never given an opportunity to express that view to police before they arrived at her Mitchell St office and issued her a notice to appear in court.

“My first question to them at the time was, would you think maybe to offer me an interview so you understand exactly what happened?” Gwynne says.

“(There was) no natural justice, just ‘here you go, here’s your notice’ and then by the end of that day I was out; I was home wondering what had just happened. It just threw my life, my family’s life upside down and that was to start many years of a pretty dark time for us and I still ask myself every day, ‘why?’”

NT Police won’t speak publicly about Gwynne’s case.

Acting Commissioner Martin Dole declined to answer questions about the issue at a press conference on Monday.

He said he would be happy to discuss the matter at another time, but would only do so in private.

Unofficially, views among senior police about the case are divided.

One experienced officer describes it as a perfectly standard investigation into an alleged white-collar crime.

They believe police carried out a thorough investigation, just as they would into anybody else, and laid the charge of abuse of office only after receiving advice from the Office of the Director for Public Prosecutions.

“Nothing to see here.” Another officer with decades of experience disagrees.

They argue the type of investigation Gwynne was subjected to is usually reserved for “murderers and drug dealers”, and that her treatment is akin to something you might expect in a third-world, tin pot dictatorship.

“And all for what should have been a HR matter at best.”

Gwynne is in no doubt she was singled out for special treatment.

“Basically, I was being followed around Darwin and everything, every option, every avenue open to them was basically put on me, and I still don’t understand from a probative evidentiary point of view, one, how they would obtain the warrants to be able to do that, and two, what was the sense, what evidence were they trying to seek in utilising those evidence gathering methods, it just made no sense,” she says.

The police investigation was codenamed Operation Pollux.

In Greek mythology, Pollux is the brightest star in the constellation Gemini.

There was a time when Gwynne was the brightest star in the NT Police Force.

After arriving in the Territory in 1988 she forged a reputation as a fiercely determined operator. She would find something close to fame for her role leading the probe into the outback murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, taking over an investigation that was in disarray and eventually catching killer Bradley John Murdoch, who was jailed for life.

But Gwynne would not be immune from the internal politics of the NT Police.

She was one of a group of mostly-female officers who raised the ire of some of their senior colleagues by supporting a young female officer alleged to have been raped by a senior male colleague.

By 2013, four years into the tumultuous reign of commissioner John McRoberts, who would later be jailed for attempting to pervert the course of justice, Gwynne would call time on her 25-year career with the NT police.

But she wasn’t finished making waves.

In June 2015, the CLP Government appointed Gwynne as the Territory’s second Children’s Commissioner.

Within two months she would release an own-initiative investigation into the abuse of children in youth detention.

The report prompted the Four Corners program into the same issue and a subsequent Royal Commission.

Then in 2018, she released a damning report from another investigation, this one into the horrific rape of a two-year-old girl in Tennant Creek.

Her reports exposed shocking failures in NT Government departments including the NT Police.

A former colleague says Gwynne’s work angered people in police and the government, who wanted her to water down her criticism. “But in true Colleen style, she never pulls any punches,” they said.

Gwynne agrees she produced “some pretty scathing investigations”.

“My intent was never to try and embarrass or pull the government apart but at that time I thought we needed to go backwards to go forwards,” she says.

“But as a result of that I pretty much became target number one.”

Deciphering between co-incidence and conspiracy can be a difficult task in the Northern Territory.

But there are a series of unusual events that took place in the immediate lead-up to police launching an investigation into Colleen Gwynne.

One is that Gwynne attended an interview for the position of deputy police commissioner.

She would eventually be overlooked in favour of Michael Murphy, the man who now finds himself at the centre of the ‘jobs for mates’ scandal within the NT Police.

While the selection process for the deputy police commissioner was ongoing, Gwynne sought to appoint Dewson as assistant children’s commissioner. Claire Febey, an applicant from interstate, had been deemed the preferred candidate, but Gwynne says she wanted Dewson because she needed someone with the experience to conduct tough investigations, like the one she had just completed into the rape of the two-year-old girl.

Gwynne knew Dewson from their time working together in the NT Police, where Dewson had been the head of human resources. Her position had been terminated but she had later won a Fair Work case against her sacking.

Before appointing Dewson, Gwynne says she sought the advice of senior public servants including Ken Davies and Meredith Day Huntingford, who is now a Supreme Court judge.

“I never hid the fact that I knew Laura,” Gwynne says.

“I was so overt about it. It wasn’t a kind of clandestine process that I did behind closed doors. And not only did I declare it, during the process I also took advice from the director of the HR area, Brian Mappas, and also the government’s lawyer for employment matters, Simon Wiese at the time, who also said I’m quite within my rights to act the way I did.”

Police became aware of this advice early in their investigation.

On January 16, 2019, Detective Superintendent Mark Grieve, Detective Sergeant Wayne Newell and Detective Acting Sergeant Allan Welfair held a meeting where they were to agree on an investigation plan to be approved by Martin Dole (then the Commander in charge of the special references unit).

They highlighted Mappas’s advice as crucial to the case.

“Mappas to indicate if the advice he gave to Gwynne was pursuant to SFNT Legal,” Grieve’s contemporaneous notes say.

“If so whole job is gone.”

The detectives subsequently confirmed Mappas had provided the advice, but the job was anything but gone.

The investigation continued for another sixteen months.

Advice was sought from at least three interstate silks before police eventually received an opinion from the Office of the DPP that there was a prima facie case for a single charge of abuse of office.

Another unusual co-incidence is the haste with which a human resources complaint escalated into a full-blown police investigation.

Nicole Hucks, who had been the acting assistant children’s commissioner before taking maternity leave, had complained she had been overlooked for the position, even though the selection panel had found her unsuitable.

A complaint was lodged to the Commissioner for Public Employment Craig Allen, who days earlier had been sitting on the selection panel with Commissioner Reece Kershaw interviewing Gwynne for the police deputy commissioner position.

Allen passed the complaint directly to Alan Borg, the Public Interest Disclosure (PID) Commissioner.

In another co-incidence, Gwynne had received an apology two months earlier after a statement she gave to the PID about the conduct of a senior police officer had been leaked back to the police.

After receiving Allen’s complaint, Borg, without conducting any of his own inquiries, emailed Kershaw claiming similar incidents interstate had resulted in prosecutions and convictions and sought a meeting to “gauge your interest in me referring this matter to you”.

The brief was given to the police special references unit the day before the Northern Territory’s Independent Commission Against Corruption came into operation.

Had the case been referred to ICAC there might have been a different outcome.

Gwynne believes her treatment was “entirely malicious”.

“You don’t undertake a criminal investigation unless you think there is a reasonable prospect of conviction, and the matter is serious and you’ve got to balance it with the public interest,” she says.

“Would the public want you to be spending resources on a matter such as this? And I think we know from the response that the public would have said ‘no, this is a waste of time’.”

Three years and close to a million dollars were spent on the failed prosecution of Colleen Gwynne.

But she never really had her day in court.

Prosecutors withdrew their case just days into her trial after telling the court there was “insufficient evidence” for the matter to proceed.

Had it continued we might have more answers about a case that has baffled many Territorians. How would the evidence of the police have stood up under cross-examination?

Might we have found our way to the bottom of exactly what Gwynne was told by senior public servants, who struggled to recall key conversations at her committal?

Instead, the only revelation from the Supreme Court trial was the audio of a racist remark Gwynne had made about Hucks - describing her as a “fat g*n”.

It was found by police after trawling through three months’ of secret recordings and played to the court in the prosecution’s opening address, before the case was withdrawn.

Gwynne apologised on the steps of the Supreme Court and remains remorseful about the comment.

But she also questions the process by which it made its way into the public arena.

“It wasn’t my finest moment, but I don’t think that changes who I am as a person,” she says. “My actions speak louder than my words and I think I’ve been a servant to the Northern Territory, particularly to Indigenous people for many years, and I thought that was a pretty dirty game to play, to be honest.”

Gwynne had a been a pioneer of women’s football in the Northern Territory, leading Darwin club Waratah through a decorated playing and coaching career before taking on roles at the Tiwi Bombers and Adelaide Crows AFLW side.

In 2016 the NTFL named its senior league best and fairest award in her honour.

But following the airing of her secretly recorded remarks, Gurindji man and ABC broadcaster Charlie King called for the AFLNT to act.

Gwynne’s name was stripped from the medal.

“It had a huge impact on me,” she says.

“For people to think that I’m racist, it tore me apart. At a time when I was pretty low, it was the knockout punch.”

She says the strain of the investigation has broken her.

“It certainly impacted on the relationship I had with my kids and my partner at the time,” she says.

“My wellbeing was probably at its lowest, there were times where I thought perhaps not being here would be an easier option than having to try and go through what I went through.”

Gwynne has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and says her mind is not as sharp as is used to be.

But it’s the impact on her family that hurts the most.

“Why anyone would want to do that, particularly when my kids were so young and they took me away from them,” she says.

“For some really important years I just wasn’t capable of being the mother to my children that I should have been, and that will live with me forever.”

Five years ago you could have guaranteed Colleen Gwynne would be at the footy on any given weekend in early March.

But she wasn’t at TIO Stadium last Saturday.

Nor was she at the NTFL awards night on Sunday where a medal was presented that was once named in her honour.

For the first time in a long time though, she did summon the courage to venture out into a public place.

At the Nightcliff markets she was embraced by former colleagues, friends, teammates and even politicians.

People who, in private at least, believe she’s been the victim of great injustice.

Perhaps, one day, she will return to the place she called home for more than 30 years.

But for now, the pain is still too raw.

“I never thought I’d leave the Territory,” she says.

“I thought I’d die here.”