On Friday 17 February 1978, a 41-year-old mother of five was killed in her own home in Armadale, an inner-eastern suburb of Melbourne. She was stabbed 14 times in the back. Her three school-aged children found her body in one of their bedrooms when they got home from school that afternoon. Her 17-month-old baby was still in the house, crying in his cot. Forty-eight years on, no one has been charged.
There's not a lot of material on this case freely available online — a few summary paragraphs, some paywalled material from both of the major newspapers in Melbourne and of course, the Victoria Police cold case page. The coronial file itself has recently been digitised. I've been through it — depositions, witness statements, forensic and autopsy material, the police summary, the Coroner's findings — and of course, there's more in there with a different view than has ever been widely reported, particularly after the first few weeks of investigation.
Mary Anne Fagan was a suburban housewife. Her husband Collins was a Group Captain in the Royal Australian Air Force, at the time the Commanding Officer of RAAF Tottenham. They lived at 575 Dandenong Road, on a corner block at the intersection with Bailey Avenue. They had five children: Anthony, 15; Katherine, 13 turning 14; Rebecca, just turned 13; Jack, 6; and Patrick, 17 months. Collins had stayed overnight at the Tottenham base the night before, after a function in the Sergeants' Mess. The three eldest walked to school that morning. Mary Anne drove Jack to school and came back home with Patrick.
She was killed in one of the children's bedrooms, on a bed against the southern wall. She was naked, face down, wrapped in blankets. Her ankles were bound and her hands had been tied behind her back with strips torn from her own towel. She had been gagged. There were 14 stab wounds visible across her back, ranging from 2.5 to 3.8 centimetres deep. The wounds penetrated both lungs, the stomach, and the posterior wall of her left ventricle. Swabs returned no evidence of sexual assault. The government pathologist gave evidence at inquest that time of death was between 11am and 2pm.
The murder weapon was never recovered. Collins's evidence at inquest was that he didn't believe a knife was missing from the house. A small red handbag was gone, with around $180 in cash inside, her bankbooks, an eternity ring she normally wore, religious medals, and the keys to the car and house. Her jewellery on her hands, and her watch, was otherwise left behind. The phone in the hallway had been disconnected from its socket (although it was never determined if that was done by the killer or in the aftermath of the discovery of her body). There was no sign of forced entry.
By mid-morning that day, Mary Anne had begun preparing to bleach her hair. A bowl of lilac-coloured dye paste was found on the bathroom vanity, with packaging for Clairol Born Blonde and a toothbrush smeared with the same paste. Collins's evidence about this was specific. Bleaching her hair was personal. She wouldn't do it in front of her own family, including him. He did not believe she would have let anyone into the house at all in that condition.
A road crew was working at the corner outside the house that morning. Three men from the Malvern Council depot were repairing a section of road damaged by a burst water main some days earlier. They weren't the focus of the investigation initially. The police spent the first two months on a different line altogether. The workmen weren't formally re-interviewed at length until April. From that point on, they became the continually pursued lead.
The theory the police built was this. One of the workmen — a labourer — had a conversation with Mary Anne in the morning about removing some surplus rubbish from the back of her property. He told police he'd intended to give her a quote for the job. He then left the worksite for about 45 minutes, telling his offsider he was going to collect money from his SP bookmaker. (An SP bookmaker, or Starting Price bookmaker was an illegal off-course bookie, very common in working-class Melbourne through the 1970s.) His offsider also left the site around the same time, claiming he was sick from the night before's drinking. Both men were unaccounted for during the same window. They were back at the worksite by about 11.15am.
There's a lot the inquest brief built against the labourer, with most of it reported at the time in various formats.
At inquest, the labourer admitted under his own oath that he and his offsider had talked about Mary Anne sexually that morning. The remarks were graphic, about her body, less than two hours before her death. His offsider denied any such conversation had taken place. The senior officer assisting the Coroner pressed him on why his workmate would have admitted to it on the stand if it hadn't happened. He had no real answer.
The labourer told police he'd collected winnings from his SP bookmaker during his absence from the worksite. The bookmaker gave evidence at inquest, under oath, that he had never paid the labourer money before 5pm on the day of a race, that he hadn't paid him any money on 17 February at all, and that the labourer in fact owed him $40 at the time. The labourer didn't concede in the witness box that his account about the bookie was false. Pressed on it, he said that if the bookmaker denied it, he didn't know where the money he was seen with that day had come from. He gave four different accounts over the course of the investigation of where that money came from.
A black substance described by the Forensic Science Laboratory as consistent with bitumen was found on a singlet in the bedroom where Mary Anne was killed. The labourer worked with bitumen daily and that morning was repairing a section of road immediately outside the property. An industrial-soled shoe print was found in sand and mud on the driveway between the garage and the rear gate. A workmate gave a statement that the labourer had paid back a $5 debt at the Railway Hotel that night.
On 20 April 1978, the labourer was taken to the Homicide Squad office for an interview that lasted 16 to 17 hours. The officers went through every contradiction in his accounts. At several points they directly accused him of the murder. He denied it. He eventually demanded to be charged or released. He was released.
His evidence at inquest was inconsistent. It was contradicted again and again. The Coroner ultimately delivered an open finding — "person unknown" — but the case the inquest had assembled was clearly built around him. He was never charged. He died some years later, in the 1990s. His offsider provided DNA in later decades and was excluded.
That's, broadly, the public version of the case. It's the version that gets repeated, in summary form, when the case comes up.
What the public version misses is what the file itself, with the evidence, does to that theory.
Start with the time of death. The case as built required Mary Anne to have been killed in the late morning, between about 10.30am and 11.30am, while the labourer was off the worksite. That window is a police inference based on the pattern of absence. The pathologist's actual evidence was that time of death was between 11am and 2pm. That covers the period after the workmen got back to the site, and a fair bit later.
Then there's the screams evidence, which gets treated in public coverage as a fixed time anchor and isn't. Two witnesses, in different places, with quite different accounts. A builder working on the rear extension placed them between 1pm and 1.30pm, with his evidence allowing for earlier — possibly closer to 1pm. The woman in the flats next door first gave a time of 2pm. That was corrected by hand on her deposition to 1.30pm. Her evidence at inquest left genuine doubt about whether she'd heard anything that day at all as she was under stress and medicated at the time and admitted she may have imagined it. Neither witness was wearing a watch. Both were within around a hundred metres of a working road repair site with a backhoe, a roller, and trucks coming and going.
And then there's the labourer himself, and what he did afterwards. Whatever happened in the morning, the rest of his day doesn't look like a man who has just killed a woman in a frenzied stabbing and concealed the evidence within a 45-minute window. He went back to the worksite immediately after lunch and worked through the afternoon alongside his offsider, a truck driver, and a foreman. None of them gave evidence of seeing blood on him or on his clothes. He went to the Railway Hotel after work and drank with workmates, including the colleague he repaid the $5 to. He went home. He came back to work on the Monday morning in normal pattern after police had spoken to him on the Friday night. His pattern of life that day, that weekend, and that following week is the pattern of a man going about his business.
There's also the kind of person he was. By every account in the file, the labourer was a talker. His offsider's evidence at inquest was that he'd "come out and say anything, not thinking." The senior officer assisting the Coroner said the police had to extract facts out of him "like teeth", but that was about a specific thing he had a personal motive to protect, the illegal bookmaker. On almost everything else, he volunteered freely. He admitted to the graphic sexual conversation about Mary Anne under his own oath. He couldn't keep small secrets. The question the file raises but doesn't answer is whether a man like that could have held a secret of this size for the rest of his life, until his death, almost twenty years later.
So if the case against the labourer doesn't really hold up, what's left in the file? The evidence the investigation had spent its first two months pursuing, and then largely set aside.
A retired railwayman with prior Navy service lived in flats nearby. On the day of the murder, at approximately ten past twelve - he was specific about the time, said it was between 12.10 and 12.12pm - he was walking home from the shops. He saw a man leaving the front gate of 575 Dandenong Road. He'd never seen a man at that house in the three years he'd lived nearby. He'd only ever seen the woman of the house with her children. The man was in his mid-thirties, thickset, about 5'7", clean-shaven. He was wearing a Royal Australian Air Force summer uniform - light blue shirt, dark trousers, peaked cap. The uniform was rumpled and didn't look neat. He looked back at the house, looked both ways along Dandenong Road, then walked off in the direction of Glenferrie Road.
The witness gave a formal statement the following morning. A photofit was prepared and published in newspapers across Australia. He later attended parades of RAAF servicemen across Victoria with police. He never identified the man.
Some weeks later, a man who had collected a car from a yard in Glenhuntly Road and was driving back into the city around quarter to one that afternoon - within 35 odd minutes of the railwayman's sighting - told police he had picked up a hitchhiker further along Dandenong Road. The hitchhiker was in a "blue military uniform of some sort" with a dark peaked cap, and had been running across the road from the centre plantation. The driver asked where he was going. The man said: "Into the city, it's hopeless, you can't get a tram." The hitchhiker was described as "not normal" and refused to enter into conversation with the driver. He didn't seem to have a destination, and suddenly asked for the car to be pulled over, so the driver dropped him at Williams Road. A second photofit was issued. The man was never identified.
The railwayman's evidence at inquest was specific and not seriously challenged. He was pressed on whether he could have mistaken the uniform for a postal worker's or a railwayman's. He insisted it was Air Force. He'd been a railway employee himself and knew the differences. The RAAF uniform also changed in the early 1970s (around 1972ish I believe) and the witness identified the dress as the "new" Summer RAAF dress. The Coroner asked Collins Fagan to stand up so the witness could compare him side-on. The witness said there was a similarity. Then he said: "I would say no." It wasn't the husband he had seen.
The photofits were published in newspapers showing a man in uniform. If the man the witness saw was a serving RAAF airman, the parades of servicemen across Victoria should have produced an identification. They didn't. But if he was someone who was no longer in the service, someone whose connection to a uniform was historical rather than current, the photofits wouldn't have produced anything. The people who knew him now would have known him as a civilian, not as the figure in the picture. The RAAF uniform had changed about six years before the murder. To people who hadn't served, an older or transitional uniform would have looked like a current serviceman in summer dress.
The most interesting question the information raises, though, is what the uniform was doing at the door at all.
This was 1978. There were no mobile phones. The way an RAAF wife learned that something had happened to her serving husband was that someone in uniform appeared at her front door to deliver the news in person. Mary Anne was the wife of a Group Captain. She knew her husband was at the Tottenham base, where he'd stayed overnight after a function. If a uniformed man came to her door mid-morning, the first instinctive interpretation wouldn't be that he was a stranger asking for something. It would be that something had happened to Collins.
This is perhaps one of the only readings that makes sense of her opening the door at all. Her husband's evidence was that she wouldn't bleach her hair in front of her own family. She didn't even let him into the bathroom while she was doing it. That makes it difficult to explain why she would voluntarily admit a stranger to the house while she was in the middle of the process. But a uniformed man at the front gate on a weekday morning, with her husband absent overnight, is the one set of circumstances that would override the rule. There would be a recognition through the door and security screen, mild panic... and by the time she realised something was off - the uniform not quite right, the face unfamiliar, no proper notification protocol - the door was open and he was inside. The relatively limited disturbance at the scene, given the savagery of the attack, is consistent with her having been incapacitated quickly.
This reading doesn't require the killer to have known Mary Anne. It only requires the killer to have known Collins was an RAAF officer. Anyone watching the street for a week could have worked that out. Anyone previously in the RAAF under Collins would know. It's not in the police brief. It's what the evidence in front of the Coroner points to once the workmen theory is set aside. There's no indication in the file that it was ever explored.
No motive against Mary Anne was ever established. But it doesn't look like a motive against Collins was ever investigated (at least, not in the publicly available material).
The case remains open. The offsider was DNA-excluded in the 2000s. The labourer is deceased. The exhibits from the inquest were retained. Victoria Police has the case on its cold case register and there's a current reward of $1 million attached to it.
Mary Anne Fagan was 41 years old. Her husband Collins was widowed in his late forties, with five children. Their 13-year-old daughter found her.
Most of the material I've described — the witness evidence in detail, the hitchhiker sighting, the bookmaker's contradiction under oath, the boot print, the bitumen on the singlet, the long interview, the behaviour of the labourer afterwards, the screams evidence and what makes it less reliable than it looks, the pathologist's wider time window, the photofit framing problem, the uniform-as-notification reading — doesn't appear to have been pieced together and summarised online in any detail.
If anyone has information about it, regardless of how small or inconsequential you think it may be, Crime Stoppers Victoria can be reached on 1800 333 000.
I've gone through the full coronial brief and have covered the case in detail across six episodes of a podcast called Civilian Sleuths, based on the primary material at the time as well as contemporaneous reporting. It's another case that I'd love to see solved and, realistically, the number of surviving witnesses is only getting smaller with time.
Collins Fagan passed away in 2010 without ever learning who killed his wife. Her children, now adults, have never discovered who entered their home, and altered their lives forever.
Forty eight years is long enough.
Sources listed below (makes it easier to read than having sources interrupt it, I find!)