Why one small detail in my story about a murdered woman still haunts me

This article is part of our Behind the Headlines series, where Age reporters reveal unforgettable moments in their careers.See all 7 stories.

Some things in journalism are heartbreaking. Like death knocks: landing on the doorstep of a grief-stricken relative to ask how they feel (spoiler alert: the answer is never “great!”). Some things are awkward, like confronting fraudsters; others feel a bit pervy, like asking near-strangers intimate questions you’d only expect from your therapist.

And some things seem almost impossible.

Some of the hardest things I’ve done as a reporter have involved conversations with mothers. Earlier this year, sitting at my kitchen table, I picked up the phone for one of the most emotionally fraught interviews of my career.

Bass MP Bridget Archer was abused by her stepfather when she was a child.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

I was working on a Good Weekend profile of Bridget Archer, the outspoken Liberal MP who was sexually abused by her late stepfather. Archer had spoken in general terms about this trauma, but gone much further in her interview with me, detailing, with incredible bravery, how the abuse unfolded in her childhood home in Launceston, Tasmania. I’ll never forget the interview we did sitting on street furniture in Launceston’s Civic Square, the awful betrayals spilling forth as people in suits strolled past.

As with all of these situations involving childhood trauma, or abuse of any kind, I mapped the boundaries with Archer: what she preferred was said and unsaid. As is normal in most families – but particularly abuse-afflicted families – emotional landmines are everywhere, hiding just below the surface. One careless step, one comment, one poorly worded sentence can cause permanent family ructions. Archer told me where those landmines lay.

But there was no escaping the fact that part of Archer’s story, her truth, was a deep feeling of betrayal when her mother Marian sent her away to boarding school, just 10 minutes from the family home. Marian’s husband, the abusive stepfather, had delivered an ultimatum: either she goes, or I do. Marian didn’t know about the abuse, but she chose her ex-husband. This, of course, hurt Archer deeply and sparked a downward spiral of misbehaviour and recklessness. She’d never really spoken to her mother about her feelings or indeed the abuse.

And yet all of this was about to be printed in a national magazine.

Archer didn’t want me to talk to her mother. She wasn’t estranged from her, it’s just that there were so many things unsaid between them. I didn’t really want to talk to Marian either. It seemed too fraught. But I had to, for two reasons: one was fairness – to give Marian the opportunity to respond to her daughter’s feelings of betrayal. And the second was that it was a normal part of our rigorous fact-checking process at Good Weekend. People’s memories often differ and we try to interview as many people as we can to get as close as possible to what happened. I talked it through with Archer, who agreed to give me Marian’s number.

Archer with her mum Marian Campbell after being re-elected in Bass in 2022.Credit: Courtesy of Bridget Archer

I’ve since relistened to the recording of this interview. You can almost hear the wobble of the tightrope I’m walking. At any moment, the whole thing could topple off into a pit of grief, guilt and pain. Marian had every right to tell me to piss off. But the whole time, she listens intently. “I’m all ears,” she says. At another point, when we talk about Marian’s adoption of Archer as a baby, she says: “Do you know I loved her straight away?” My heart melts.

The journalistic tools I’m using are not the wiles and cunning one might think of this profession. There is nothing hidden or obscured. What I am using is every scrap of emotional IQ I have, to be gentle, to deeply listen, to explain. I can hear Marian’s fear, but she keeps seeking to understand what I am doing and why. The conversation traverses dark places and light places. For an hour and a half, we go on a Cook’s tour of the past, down rabbit holes and back up again.

It is excruciating in parts. But somehow, slowly, we get through it. And at the end of the darkest parts, with grace and sadness, Marian says: “I’m sure she hasn’t told you one single lie. She’s not like that. But I’m having trouble getting her to talk to me about this.”

I try to carry everyone – particularly the mothers – through these stories. I remember driving through the night to read a story out loud to the mother of a young woman who had died. I finished reading and we sat there, looking at each other, in tears.

I remember another mother of a young woman who died in the Bali bombing. When I first talked to her, her 21-year-old daughter, full of life force, was missing. We kept in touch during the anguished days that followed when the reality dawned that her daughter was not coming home. I remember crying in the newsroom on one of the anniversaries of the Bali bombing, this young woman and her mother on my mind. I didn’t want us to bring it all up again. I’m still not sure how I feel about anniversary journalism.

But there was one mother that I failed to carry through. And it still haunts me.

The story was about the stabbing murder of a 43-year-old customs clerk by an ex-partner who had broken into her house. A watchful neighbour, concerned that the ex-partner might have an intervention order against him – turns out he did – called the police after seeing him lurking around her home and then walking towards the house. The young policeman who answered the neighbour’s call did not check the victim’s address, an act that would have brought up the intervention order and potentially saved her life. Instead, the policeman told the neighbour to call back “if you hear any yelling or screaming coming from that particular address”. Not long after, the victim was dead.

The night she died involved just one of a series of blunders police made in her case. There had been others in the previous weeks. It was a case that starkly revealed how police misunderstood the patterns around intimate-partner murder and how they sidelined the whole issue of domestic violence, despite evidence before the Royal Commission into Family Violence that police spent up to 60 per cent of their shift dealing with such matters. This seemed remarkable to me: it was like a person who sold mostly oranges in their fruit shop, but knew little about oranges and didn’t even think oranges were their core business.

One of the reasons I wanted to tell the story of this woman was because of the guilt I felt being part of the newsroom in the days when domestic violence was ignored. Like all other newsrooms at the time, reporters at The Age would hear the crackle of a report on the police radio and convey to the news desk that it was “just a domestic”. We were just as bad as the police: we didn’t see the true nature of the criminality rife in our society. Women were losing their lives frequently to intimate-partner violence and nobody thought it newsworthy. The harsh truth was that women’s lives weren’t valued as much.

So I was proud of the piece. Its conclusions about the police mishandling of the case were later reflected in the coroner’s report, which confirmed system gaps and flaws in the state’s response and multiple police failures. I had worked closely with the victim’s mother to honour her daughter and explain not just how she died, but how she lived – how she loved her whippet and competitive pool, how she was loyal and trusting.

I thought I had fact-checked everything with the mother, but I had included one detail from the coroner’s inquest that, unbeknown to me, had not been reported in the media before. It was a little detail about her taking a man home from the pub and her ex-partner listening at her window. To me, it was a chilling anecdote that revealed the stalkerish, one-eyed focus of a man about to commit murder. To the mother, it revealed her daughter in a bad light, someone who engaged in casual sex. This, of course, is a patriarchal norm at work: women carry a social stigma for sexual choices that men pay no penalty for.

The case revealed how police sidelined the whole issue of domestic violence.Credit: Gabriele Charotte

But this detail devastated the mother. And I immediately understood why: with her daughter gone, one of the few ways she could continue mothering her was by protecting her reputation. She felt she’d failed. And that I had failed her.

Within the ethics of journalism, there wasn’t anything I did wrong. I reported a publicly available detail. But journalism is also about judgment. I didn’t think that detail through, beyond its usefulness to the story, which is an important factor.

But it wasn’t an absolutely necessary detail and should have been part of my fact-check with the mother. I wish I could rewind the clock and take it out. If I could just save that mother that extra bit of pain, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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