Mysterious clue from the girl with a halo

Did beautiful, brilliant vet Alexandra Tapp mean to end her life in a lonely motel room? Her sister Virginia is searching for the answer – and there’s a mysterious clue in one of Alex’s last actions. NEW EPISODE of My Sister’s Secrets is live now.

The night before Alexandra Tapp died, she updated her Snapchat profile picture to show a girl with a halo, it’s revealed in Episode 5 of My Sister’s Secrets.

I wanted my sister’s fatal drug overdose to be accidental.

I didn’t want to believe that she was in such severe pain in the lead up to her death that she saw no way out.

I felt that if it was an accidental overdose, it was somehow less scary.

But in investigating the life and death of my sister, Alexandra Tapp for our podcast My Sister’s Secrets, I’ve had to separate what I want to believe from the facts in front of us.

I wanted to believe that opioids had just become her way of relaxing after a stressful day’s work, and she accidentally overdid it. Unlucky.

It’s also purely selfish on my behalf, but I wanted to believe it was accidental because I couldn’t deal with the idea that she sat down on the bed that night and made a decision to leave us forever.

I still can’t imagine a pain that your family isn’t worth living through, but I realise that just means I haven’t been in enough pain yet.

Considering the alternative to accident – suicide – is harder.

The clouds seem to roll in and it becomes something darker.

When I add the reality of Alex’s suffering — that she was sexually abused by our step-grandfather for several years from the age of three, and then raped by another family member as a young woman — it becomes something uglier still.

But it also becomes understandable — that she had good reason to be in this amount of pain.

People she should have been able to trust treated her as worthless and betrayed her in such a horrendous way that she was robbed of the ability to like herself or trust people.

She was left unable to find the feeling of safety or joy in healthy relationships.

Ultimately, it’s understandable how such a deep trauma at formative times in her life would drastically affect her ability to function normally in day to day life.

It’s a massive psychological injury to live with.

Who am I to ask her to stay another 60 years, and live with it, purely for my benefit?

Over the course of the production of My Sister’s Secrets, I’ve arrived at a truth that is much more complicated than one or the other.

Initially my hopes had rested on the report from the coroner which came through several weeks after her death.

I believed the coronial investigation would find something we didn’t already know, something conclusive.

In the end it was astonishingly brief and summed up the cause of death in about four words – methadone toxicity, accidental overdose.

The report came with a disclaimer though – the coroner’s office called Mum to tell her that the coroner always makes an ‘accidental’ finding in the absence of any conclusive evidence of intent.

Essentially, they told us, we don’t know for sure and we never will.

The levels of drugs in her system were inconclusive; they can be fatal for some people and not for others.

Methadone, along with traces of benzodiazepines, cannabis and prescription antidepressant sertraline – that’s a risky combination but wasn’t enough for the coroner to call it a sure thing.

There were no significant underlying health issues that would markedly increase her susceptibility to the methadone.

We have to accept that there is no way of knowing exactly what she was thinking when she lay down in bed that night.

Whether it was: ‘I’m about to go to sleep for the last time, this is an amount I will definitely not survive and I’m okay with that.’

Or whether it was more like: ‘This is an amount that will bring such amazing relief from this never ending pain, but it won’t kill me. I know what I’m doing and I have tolerated this amount before. I won’t sleep through my alarm in the morning and I’ll get to work on time.’

And still, it nags at me in the way any unsolved mystery does.

It’s itchy and uncomfortable to not know.

I’d rather speculate and at least trick myself into thinking I can find the answer.

I search for people who have a more reliable ‘gut feel’. A better educated guess.

In the making of this podcast I’ve spoken to people who spent time with Alex in the last few years of her life, and the last few days, and uncovered details that are at odds with the coronial ‘accidental’ finding.

There’s Emma*, a colleague and friend, who has little doubt about Alex’s intent that night. “My initial feeling was, even before we confirmed that it was a drug overdose, that she did take her own life,” Emma recalls.

“And when we learnt the type of drugs that were used, they’re not for relaxing, you don’t get your little fix from them, they’re quite serious drugs. You couldn’t even really measure it for humans, so it’s very much like she knew what she was playing with.”

And then Emma tells me something quite unexpected, that I cannot explain away. It might seem a bit superfluous at first glance, but it really stumps me if I think about it.

“The other thing we noticed was her Snapchat profile picture changed to a picture of a girl with a halo and the eyes closed on the night she died,” she explains.

“We had seen her usual profile picture the day before, and then some time that night it changed to the angel, which we noticed the following morning.”

Then there is her employer in her last days, Newcastle equine veterinarian Kristen Todhunter.

“The only reason I would think it’s intentional is that she had a history of it, apparently, which I found out later,” she says.

Alex Tapp's Snapchat picture was changed the night before she overdosed to depict a girl with eyes closed and a halo.

“The other perspective you could have, though, is that if she had an opioid addiction and she used methadone, maybe she was trying to use it in a way to get over the opioid addiction. She could have taken other opioids here, but she didn’t.

“She took methadone, which is to me, that’s what you take when you’re trying to get past it.”

Of course, we’re not the first family to never quite know for sure. Countless findings of ‘accidental overdose’ have been applied to celebrities over the years.

This kind of drug use seems to be a desperate attempt to escape pain that seems insurmountable in that moment.

Alex’s profile picture from Snapchat had earlier showed a girl with eyes open, smiling.

It seems that as long as the relief comes, where the green exit sign leads them to doesn’t really matter.

It toys with a concept that is foreign to me – that death isn’t the worst possible thing that could happen.

I have to remind myself that either way, Alex knew that she was using drugs in a risky and life threatening manner.

She was a medical professional who studied these drugs for years at university and then actively administered them for years as a vet.

Anyone knows that intravenous use of pain medication designed for half-tonne animals is probably not best practice.

She had weighed up the odds and kept making calculated decisions that dulled the pain but brought her closer to the end.

Knowing Alex, there is something about the accidental finding that just doesn’t gel.

She was so incredibly secretive with her pain and her addiction for so many years.

She had a brilliant intellect, she was too smart for her own good.

And she was always intent on shielding Mum and I, and everyone, from the reality of what she was going through.

I think I’ve settled on the possibility of one final grand deception – that she curated an overdose that would be fatal but inconclusive.

This was the only way she could justify the pain she knew would be inevitable for us.

Did she or didn’t she? Well, either way, she did.

LIFELINE 13 11 14

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• My Sister’s Secrets is the new investigative podcast from The Australian. Episode 5 is live now in the podcasts section of our app or at mysisterssecrets.com.au
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