The Tipping Point

The Age

Saturday June 30, 2007

Jane Cadzow

She was intelligent, successful, sporty, likeable. But beneath her calm and smiling exterior, high-profile copper Audrey Fagan was close to cracking. Two months after the Canberra police chief was found hanged in a holiday hotel, Jane Cadzow tries to make sense of her shock suicide.

Mick keelty can still hear the words. it was the evening of Wednesday, April 18, and the commissioner of the Australian Federal Police was surrounded by cardboard cartons, in the throes of moving house, when he got a call from his close friend and protegee, Audrey Fagan. "I have had a moment of clarity," she said.

At 44, Fagan was the second most senior female police officer in the country. Thanks partly to Keelty's mentoring, she had climbed rapidly to the rank of assistant commissioner and was now chief of Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Policing, the division of the federal force charged with maintaining law and order in Canberra. She was the sort of woman held up as a role model to schoolgirls - not only smart and ambitious but exceptionally fit and adventurous. Her sports included rowing, skiing, cycling, scuba diving, horse riding and paragliding. Apart from all that, she was warm and engaging. People not only admired Fagan. They liked her.

But a week earlier, The Canberra Times had published an article highly critical of the city's police and Keelty knew Fagan had taken it personally. So shaken was she that he had arranged for her to see a staff doctor, who had referred her to a psychiatrist. The consultation had gone well, she said on the phone to her boss. "A moment of clarity..."

Keelty was relieved. "I actually said, 'Oh, that's good,'" he remembers. "Because I'm thinking she's on the road to recovery."

The next day, she was due to leave for Hayman Island, in Queensland's Whitsunday group, where her husband, IT specialist Chris Rowell, was attending a conference. Keelty urged her to forget about work and relax by the pool at the five-star resort. He even recommended a novel for her to take - Imperium by Robert Harris. "I said, 'It's a fantastic book. You'll love it. Do you want me to get it for you?' She said, 'No, no. I'll get it.'"

Like Keelty, Fagan had just bought a house. The two laughed wryly about the trials of changing address, and Keelty offered to lend her his boxes. He reminded her they'd arranged to get together when she returned from her break. "She said, 'Yeah, I'm in your diary, 11am Monday week.' I said, 'Great.'"

But Fagan would not keep the appointment. She wouldn't borrow the packing cases, either. Fewer than 48 hours after her conversation with Keelty, she was found hanged in her holiday suite.

Since then, rumours have eddied and swirled through the national capital. "Canberra is a small place, really," says Jon Stanhope, Chief Minister of the ACT Government, referring to the speculation and soul-searching that have followed Fagan's suicide. "She was such a bright and likeable person doing a very important job. As a result of her job, she was very visible."

Of all the women in Australian policing, only Victoria's chief commissioner, Christine Nixon, had risen further than Fagan, and it was clear to Stanhope that the ACT chief was still on the way up. "I would have been shocked if Audrey did not one day lead the Australian Federal Police," he says. "She was obviously a natural successor to Mick Keelty."

The Capital Territory's police minister, Simon Corbell, points out that Fagan mixed with Canberra's most powerful citizens. "She knew the city and she knew everyone in this Government," he says. "All the ministers, all the senior executives - she knew them, they knew her. It was a personal thing. I've never seen a death affect so many people." The first reaction was disbelief. "It was completely incomprehensible," says Corbell, who had considered Fagan the sort of person capable of dealing with any problem. "She presented herself as a very calm, composed, together individual."

Keelty was the only one of Fagan's colleagues to have had an inkling of her fragile state of mind - they had been confidants on and off since working together in the Juvenile Aid Bureau in the mid-1980s - yet he was as shocked as anyone else by what she had done. On the wintry afternoon I visit his office, the commissioner has the air of a man bereft. "She had every-thing to live for," he says, eyes glistening.

Criminologist David Biles sips tea in his home and confesses to being utterly baffled. "My first degree was as a psych-ologist," says Biles, who chairs the ACT Police Consultative Board. "I should have some insight into human behaviour. But I still can't get my head around the fact that someone as competent, as intelligent, as successful and as attractive could have taken her own life."

From the start, people assumed there was more to it than met the eye. After all, Fagan had a 15-year-old daughter from her previous marriage. To have abandoned her adored child, she must have been pushed beyond reason.

The most persistent gossip I hear while researching this story is that Keelty had told her she was to be sacked or sidelined. A retired federal policeman says a leading lawyer stood beside him at Fagan's funeral and murmured, "Where was Keelty in all this?" The same cop tells me that senior officers doubt she was driven to her death by The Canberra Times. "Nobody kills themselves over media," he says.

Or do they? "None of us knows what was going on in her mind," says Renee Leon, chief executive of the ACT Justice Department. "All of us who knew Audrey, and liked her and respected her - we will always wonder."

Perhaps clues to her death can be found in her life. I interview police, politicians, journalists and senior bureaucrats, all keen to talk about Fagan. Anecdotes, observations, casual remarks, small revelations...Together, they not only give an

insight into the woman herself but tell us much about the pressures she faced and the character of the town in which she operated.

The national capital has 330,000 residents and one daily paper. The best-known by-line in The Canberra Times is that of Jack Waterford, its passionate, prolific and physically imposing editor-at-large. In January, 55-year-old Waterford became a Member of the Order of Australia. In March, he was named Canberra citizen of the year. By any measure, he is a distinguished practitioner of his craft.

So people took notice when on April 11 he fired a broadside at the local constabulary, describing them in a 1500-word opinion piece as complacent, unaccountable and incompetent. In particular, his story targeted the police media unit, accusing Fagan's spin doctors of suppressing information about crime in the city. Most recently, he said, they had stymied journalists' inquiries about the indecent assault of a college student in Canberra's inner-south, with the result that the incident went unreported for a fortnight. "Perhaps this was something which the public, not least the women in the vicinity, might have wanted to know about," he wrote. "Perhaps someone, hearing the description or seeing the photo-fit, might have been able to assist police in their inquiries."

He also cited the media unit's failure to adequately publicise a series of sexual assaults the pre-vious year. When the investigating officers were finally allowed to talk to reporters in a bid to solicit help from the community, the alleged perpetrator had been caught within 18 hours, Waterford said.

"That hits pretty hard against a police chief," says David Biles. "What you're doing is absolutely contrary to what you're supposed to do to keep crime to an absolute minimum." But according to Keelty, Fagan was most upset by Waterford's reference to an internal federal police investigation into questionable conduct by senior officers. "One was said to have had her home painted by a man who had done $500,000 of work for the AFP over the past four years," he had written.

What few of Waterford's readers knew was that Fagan was the officer in question. Back in 2000, she and her husband had solicited three house-painting quotes and accepted the middle one, from a tradesman who had won a police contract. At the time, she was head of corporate services, the administrative division that awarded such contracts. But if she made an error, it has always seemed to Keelty to be so minor as to be inconsequential. "If you knew the person did a good job, why wouldn't you engage him?" the commissioner asks. "...If you were working for private enterprise, it would never, ever be an issue."

The police professional standards team found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the Common-wealth ombudsman conducted a second inquiry and recommended that Fagan be counselled. I ask Keelty what that means, exactly. "In the normal course, it would be a reminder of your professional standards and your obligations to the organisation," he says. In this instance, though, he sat Fagan down and told her not to worry. "It was basically a cup of coffee and a friendly chat."

That was in 2005, the year she became Canberra police chief. The ombudsman's finding against her was never made public, and Fagan must have hoped she had heard the last of it. Now here was Waterford digging up the incident and implying that it was part of a pattern of police corruption. Admittedly, he had not identified her - Fagan's name appeared nowhere in the story - but Keelty says she feared that would be the next step. "She could see this as being a way of trying to destroy her credibility," he says.

Waterford had been getting stuck into the local police for years, since long before Fagan became their leader. But according to Keelty, "she built up a belief in her own mind that the articles Water-ford was writing were directed at trying to de-stabilise her and remove her from her position".

In Canberra, the movers and shakers all know one another. Fagan and Waterford had often chatted over cocktails at the civic events to which both were invited. She and Chief Minister Stan-hope had been friends since they worked together at federal Parliament House in the mid-1990s - he for former Labor attorney-general Michael Lavarche and she as the Australian Federal Police adviser to the then justice minister, Duncan Kerr. "I was enormously fond of Audrey," Stanhope tells me. "She had a very open, inviting personality which was expressed through her smile."

But Fagan knew Stanhope liked Waterford, too. Hadn't he given him the citizen of the year award? She was aware that the Chief Minister's media adviser, Penelope Layland, had been a colleague of Waterford's at The Canberra Times, as had police minister Corbell's adviser, Monika Boogs. "In that sense, it's a very small city," says Keelty. "A lot of connections between people. So she was looking at everyone twice, I guess, thinking, 'What are they saying behind my back?'"

Waterford is in reality a fiercely independent journalist, but the more Fagan mulled over his latest article, the more significance she gave to his links with Stanhope and Corbell, the two men in the ACT Government to whom she reported. "She saw that as a very solid connection," says Keelty, "and thought that if Waterford was criticising her, she was about to lose her job."

When Corbell cancelled a meeting with her after the article appeared, she was certain she was out of favour. "I said, 'Look, no, that wouldn't be the case,'" remembers Keelty, who nevertheless undertook to talk to both Corbell and Stanhope on her behalf. "'I'm going to reassure you,'? " he says he told Fagan. "'While you're having your holiday with Chris, I'll firm this all up.'"

Fagan came to this country as a nine-year-old with a lilting Irish brogue. Her immigrant parents settled in South Aust-ralia, where, as she told the crowd at an Inter-national Women's Day breakfast in Canberra in March, she quickly learned to defend herself. "I was picked on by an Italian girl who I suspect had arrived only shortly before me," she said. "Two strategies came into play there. One, working at my accent. And my parents sent me off to judo and karate lessons, which I excelled in."

She explained to her audience that when she joined the Australian Federal Police at the age of 18, female officers wore high heels and carried their guns and handcuffs in handbags. She used to wonder how they were expected to catch crooks - throw their handbags at them?

Julie Biles, the organiser of the breakfast (and wife of criminologist David), was struck by Fagan's poise and good humour. The police chief had the aura of one whose life was going exactly to plan. "She was right up there on the crest of a wave," Biles says. This was less than eight weeks before she died. Listening to a tape of her speech, I replay a comment about the importance of developing self-awareness. "I really work hard on that," she said, "because, guess what? It's sometimes not that easy and you want to go into the corner and have a good cry."

Criminologist Jenny Fleming, a sometime colleague, says Fagan never tried to hide the fact she had insecurities like everyone else. "She was very frank and upfront. I think that's what endeared her to people," says Fleming, who remembers her talking about having hired a life coach to help

her meet the challenges of being police chief. When she got the promotion, "she was quite public about her trepidation and anticipation and excitement", says Fleming. "She was incredibly excited to be doing this job."

Like most modern managers, Fagan was aware of the risk of burnout and knew what she should do to avoid it. She exercised, kept up with friends and made every effort to leave the office in time to help her daughter with her homework. She and Rowell often retreated to their holiday house in the Snowy Mountains, spending weekends skiing and unwinding. As the ACT justice department's Renee Leon says, "she did all the textbook things one should do to ensure that life doesn't get you down".

Fagan had been delighted when the Australian Federal Police won top honours in the National Work and Family Awards in 2004. "She always talked about work-life balance," says ACT Policing deputy chief Leanne Close, who remembers her discouraging staffers from staying back late. "She would say, 'No, go home to your kids.'"

In a sense, though, fagan was never off-duty. Police, like criminals, work around the clock - "and she wanted to be called constantly if things were happening", says Close. "Her mind was always really alert and really active." At night, she ploughed through piles of reports, determined to be informed about every aspect of

police operations. Close, who looked up to Fagan, remembers saying to her, "'Audrey, you don't need to know the actual detail of it. It's too much. You can't possibly take all that in.'"

But Fagan was the sort of person who loved up-to-the-minute facts and figures and felt edgy unless she had them at her fingertips. Close drops her voice. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but sometimes we'd come in in the mornings and we were like, 'I wonder what mood Audrey is in today? Is she going to be happy or is she stressed?...There were two sides, but I think to the outside world she always came across as calm and in control."

For all Fagan's understanding of the benefits of moderation, she drove herself extremely hard. Her days began before dawn, when she got up to go rowing on Lake Burley Griffin, and frequently ended with public-speaking engagements in the evening.

A relentless self-improver, she seemed always to be studying - striving for one more certificate in applied management or another diploma in executive leadership. Close remembers her lamenting that she had done a rushed job on a particular assignment and expected to get a terrible mark: "I said, 'Oh, don't worry about it. They'll probably give you a pass.' Then the week before she died, she came in and said, 'Guess what? I got a high distinction.'"

It seemed that everything Fagan did, she did well. Her clothes were immaculate, her fingernails perfectly polished. Even her parties were meticulously organised. "Details," sighs Close, who went to Christmas drinks at her place last year. "Everything was beautiful. I remember thinking, 'God, I couldn't do this.'"

Of course, fighting crime is a messy business and, no matter how many post-graduate qualifications the chief has collected, there is no such thing as a fault-free police force. Less than a month after Audrey Fagan took the top job, a car being pursued by police ran down and fatally injured a 21-year-old university student. Last November, another police chase ended in the death of an 82-year-old woman. And in March this year, a Canberra policewoman became the second officer in four months to be charged with using capsicum spray to assault a prisoner in the city watch-house.

Keelty says incidents such as these weighed heavily on Fagan: "She took so much personal responsibility for anything that went wrong." He tried telling her that ups and downs were inevitable in a job like hers: "We talked about Christine Nixon and [NSW police commissioner] Ken Moroney: how everybody in these leadership roles is on a roller-coaster ride. You're top of the heap one day and bottom of the heap the next. You just have to look at it from a longer perspective."

As he had promised Fagan two days before her death, Keelty made appointments to see three people: Stanhope, Corbell and Waterford. But the first thing he did after her departure for Queensland was to have a close look at the illustration that had accompanied Waterford's story.

He saw that it depicted a senior police officer - a male figure - whose face had been replaced by a key in a keyhole. To Keelty, it was an obvious reference to the police media unit's lack of openness, but he knew Fagan had read it differently. On the phone, she had spoken of a dawning realisation that the cartoon was a warning to her that Waterford intended to unlock her secret - the house painting transgression.

Was this what she had meant by a moment of clarity? The commissioner felt a frisson of concern. Just as she had misinterpreted the cartoon, he might have misconstrued her words. More than ever, he was glad that she would soon be lying in the tropical sun reading Imperium. A rest would do her the world of good.

When keelty went to see simon Corbell on Friday morning, the police minister had nothing but praise for Fagan. Her meeting with him had not been cancelled but rescheduled, it transpired. As far as Corbell and Stanhope were concerned, she was doing a great job.

Unfortunately, the vote of confidence never reached her at Hayman. It would later be reported that Fagan's husband had joined some of his colleagues on a trip to nearby Whitehaven Beach that day, while she had opted to stay at the resort. Her body was found in the afternoon by cleaning staff who knocked on the door of her room and, getting no answer, let themselves in. She had left two notes: one each for her husband and daughter.

Leanne Close's first thought was that it was typically considerate of Fagan to have done this in Queensland: she would not have wanted her own police to have to conduct the inquiry. Mandy Newton, the only woman besides Fagan on the federal police executive, recalled that when her friend visited Vietnam in January, she had paid a tailor to run up nine copies of her favourite Laura Ashley sundress. Newton tells me with a rueful laugh that as she struggled to absorb the news of Fagan's death, an absurd question popped into her head. "I thought, 'How can you do that after you've just got nine dresses made?'"

Jack Waterford had only been home a short time when The Canberra Times's editor, Mark Baker, phoned to tell him Fagan was dead. He returned to work immediately and started writing a story for the next morning's paper.

"As you might imagine, I was fairly mortified," he says when we meet a few weeks after the event. He tells me he bore no malice towards Fagan. In the many articles in which he had criticised the police over the years, he had never attacked her personally. "Sure, I was irritated," he says with a wan smile, "but it was just business, you know what I mean?"

Across the newsroom, Mark Baker describes Fagan as a decent and honourable person who ran "the most secretive, uncommunicative police force in the country".

ttempting to unravel the web of misun-derstanding and misinformation surrounding Fagan's death, I keep coming back to the ACT police media unit and what Simon Corbell calls its "culture of unhelpfulness".

The police minister says he completely understood journalists' exasperation at the foiling of their attempts to extract information about crime and policing. "I found it frustrating, too," says Corbell, who believes the stand-off between the hacks and the media unit flacks put great pressure on Fagan. "She ended up being in terrible situations where she had to defend the police against allegations of secrecy and failure to communicate."

Sandi Logan, who headed the media unit until late 2005, maintains that information flowed freely to the public in his time. "You can't pretend that crime isn't occurring," says Logan, now an Immigration Department spokesman. "People want to hear about crime and they want to hear that the police are doing something about it."

Canberra radio 2CC breakfast announcer Mike Jeffreys remembers Logan's reign differently. "Sandi thought a good day was when he managed to forestall any kind of inquiries," Jeffreys says. "I've had a lot of experience with other police forces and I've never encountered anything like the stonewalling on what seemed to be fairly straightforward stories."

In any case, delays and obfuscation are said by some to have increased under Logan's successor, Darryl Webb, a police officer with a law degree but limited media experience. According to Waterford, who had acrimonious exchanges with Webb, "the overwhelming impression developed in the police force that you could never get into trouble for withholding information whereas you were always at risk of trouble for giving it out".

Mark Baker doesn't want to point at individuals in the media unit. "I think they were operating under instructions from their superiors," he says. Whatever the source of the unit's problems, Keelty and Fagan decided in February to hire a consultant to iron them out. Tenders were called, but no one had been appointed by the time of the police chief's death.

Among the hate-mail that arrived at the paper after Fagan's suicide was an email from Sandi Logan. "So Canberra Times and Jack Waterford: Are you satisfied now?" he began.

But the way Baker sees it, journalists have a duty to question and criticise powerful institutions and figures of authority. "There's a presumption that the people who head those institutions have the experience and the personal fortitude to roll with that," he says.

For a person in the grip of anxiety or depression, the Australian Federal Police could scarcely be a better employer. "We're an organisation that has spent a lot of time focusing on wellbeing - on physical as well as mental fitness," says Keelty. Eight staff psychologists, five counsellors, four family-liaison officers...The trouble is, Fagan didn't approach any of them. According to former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, who chairs the national depression initiative Beyondblue, senior executives are notoriously reluctant to admit even to themselves that they need help. "People will go to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact they are suffering because they think their position, their role, demands it," says Kennett.

After Fagan's death, Chris Rowell said in an email to a friend that he had not seen her truly happy since their trip to Vietnam in the summer. But as far as most of her friends and colleagues were concerned, she had been her usual chipper self right up to the end. No one, including Rowell - who did not wish to talk to Good Weekend - had any idea that she was thinking of taking her life. So as soon as the first wave of shock subsided, the search began for an explanation. As Waterford puts it, "There were people who immediately said, 'Hang on. Do people commit suicide just because somebody's written something nasty about them? There must have been something else going on.' "

Police consultative board chairman David Biles has argued that Fagan had the near-impossible task of serving two masters - the ACT police minister and the federal police commissioner. Could juggling their competing demands have brought her to the edge?

It seems unlikely. Corbell and Keelty do not always see eye-to-eye but they insist they were united in their high regard for Fagan. Both dismiss conjecture that Keelty had canvassed the possibility of moving her aside. "Absolutely not. He was rock solid," says Corbell.

In turn, Keelty scotches the notion that anything was awry in Fagan's personal life. Her daughter was the apple of her eye, says the commissioner, who knows the contents of the notes Fagan left. And Rowell - with whom Keelty went to the rugby occasionally - was her loving ally. "She had a great marriage. She was a great mum. She even had a good relationship with her first husband," Keelty says.

A female police chief might in theory have come up against resentment or jealousy from her male subordinates but it seems that, despite occasional grumbling in the ranks, Fagan was popular and well respected. "I never felt that she was at any disadvantage or particularly under pressure by virtue of being a woman," says the Justice Department's Renee Leon.

Leanne Close tells me Fagan picked up a stomach bug on a trip to Jamaica last year. "She was really unwell but she pushed herself and came back to work pretty much straight after she flew back," says the deputy chief. "It took her months and months to get over it." Close now wonders if her health ever fully recovered - she certainly didn't regain the weight she had lost. Yet she was rowing every morning, studying, buying a house, running a police force. Perhaps she was stretched so thin that the prospect of her reputation being besmirched by the house-painting affair was enough to tip her into despair.

"It affected her much more badly than people who weren't under all those other pressures could have realised," Close says. "I think she felt that she had let herself, or the organisation, down."

If so, why not just quit the job? Former colleague Mandy Newton has wondered about that a lot. "I suppose you get to a point where you think you're letting people down if you walk away from it," Newton shrugs.

Waterford does not pretend to have any answers. "I don't know why people commit suicide," he says. "The desire to attribute blame for something like this is, at the end of the day, fairly stupid. But I can't deny I played some role in it. Precipitated it."

He is not the only one struggling with guilt. "I didn't know Audrey was under any stress, even," says Jon Stanhope. "But in retrospect, I've asked the question of myself: 'Should I have known? Should I have been more sensitive to the potential impact of the attacks on her?...Should I have stood up for her?"

Darryl Webb has left the media unit and taken a new job in the force. "He felt a sense of responsibility for Audrey's death," says Keelty, who sympathises with him because he has berated himself in the same way. "Was there more I should have done, or could have done?" the commissioner asks as he rises to show me out of his office. "Were there signs I should have seen?"

Near the door, Keelty pauses. "I guess it's not going to bring her back," he says.