‘Know I will never leave you’: Constables farewelled in moving service

It has been the tradition at some Brisbane high schools for parents of the graduating class to write their children a letter, a message for them to hold through life, something more than transient dinner table encouragement and congratulations.

About eight years ago, Sue and Terry Arnold’s letter to their son Matthew, a triplet, told him to do what made his “heart sing”. His natural height would command people to look up to him, they wrote, but the important thing was to be the kind of man that made them want to.

Senior Sergeant Laura Harriss, a long-time friend of the Arnold family who read Matthew’s eulogy, told a crowd of mourning police colleagues and strangers at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Wednesday that the 26-year-old had lived his parents’ hopes.

He was a leader and an inspiration, she said from the stage overlooking two draped coffins. He was brave and kind. And in policing, he had found his purpose.

Matthew and Rachel McCrow, 29, were shot dead on the afternoon of December 12 by the occupants of an isolated Western Downs property to which the constables had been sent with two others to check about a missing person. Good Samaritan neighbour Alan Dare, 58, was also killed when he arrived to investigate smoke and gunshots.

It was the worst loss of Queensland police lives in living memory.

The memorial procession for Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold.Credit: Jono Searle/AAP

The surviving two constables, Chinchilla’s Keely Brough and Randall Kirk, were in the nearly 8000-strong audience. So was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

The immediate families of both constables, including Rachel’s mum, Judy, and sister Samantha, sat in the front row, metres from the coffins, bouquets, wreaths laid by dignitaries, and freshly awarded medals of honour.

Later, the two hearses passed through a guard of honour more than a kilometre long to a chorus of bagpipes.

Rachel’s family chose a picture slideshow over the song Horses by Daryl Braithwaite. They showed her to the audience smiling with school friends, family and on her adventures. When the famous chorus rose through the vast auditorium, strangers wept.

Constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold.

They heard she graduated from the Townsville police academy in June last year – a little more than a year after Matthew finished in Brisbane – after study, travel and work, including at the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission, an experience she jokingly used to stir “a bit of mystery” among her fellow recruits.

Rachel exceeded every benchmark at the academy, according to Freddy Hartigan, a member of intake 44. To help others, she would organise study sessions and dawn runs. She was a goof, loving, intelligent and “fierce in a wrestle”.

While most of that class stayed north, Rachel began her career in the southern Queensland town of Dalby before moving to Tara. “I know a lot of [intake] 44 regret losing contact with Rachel as they started their own policing careers, but 44 is here with you today,” an emotional Hartigan said.

“The team from Townsville has come down. The girls from Mackay are here. The lads from Coen had to drive down … Bamaga, Mount Isa, Aurukun – Rachel, you are truly the only person that could have brought us all together.”

Constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold are given a guard of honour in Brisbane.Credit: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images

Like Matthew, who represented Australia in a youth volleyball team and once scored an A-Grade cricket century off just 50-odd balls while still at high school, Rachel was an exceptional sportsperson, the mourners heard. Such was her dedication to swimming, she once insisted on a waterproof cast for her broken arm so she could continue her 5am sessions.

Senior Constable Melissa Gibson, reading the first half of the eulogy, said despite the circumstances in which she lost her life, Rachel would be the first to remind fellow police how much good was out there and in need of their protection.

Played over the country song Refrigerator Door by Luke Combs, Matthew’s photos put him on the volleyball court, in the mountains, and at the bar flashing the cheeky and disarming smile that Harriss said got him out of so much trouble as a child.

Queensland Police Service commissioner Katarina Carroll said it was Grade 9 when he first raised the idea with his parents of becoming a police officer. She joked that when Terry mentioned this to the police fathers at St Laurence’s College, which Matthew attended, they offered to take him down to the local watchhouse on a Friday night to persuade him otherwise.

Thousands gathered at the memorial service for fallen Queensland police officers Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold.Credit: Nine

But while he first pursued study and a stint in security through his late teens and early twenties, it was always the police, beginning in Dalby and then, like Rachel, in Tara.

“As a triplet, Matt was the older brother by just a few minutes,” Harriss said. “But this made him no less than a big brother to his siblings. He was also a protector, a leader and a big brother to all those who knew him.

“At school, Matt was a role model for everyone. Whether it was captaining a sports team, acting as a peer mentor for younger students, coaching, or leading school camps, he inspired greatness in those around him.”

She said Matthew, preparing to strike out on his own after school, replied to his parents’ graduation letter.

“Matt wrote: ‘Thank you for everything. I may be gone someday. Soon, perhaps. But just know that I will never leave you. I will cherish every moment we’ve had together in my heart forever’.”