Mary Anne Fagan - The Best Lead

What if the best witness in the case was eventually treated as if he had seen nothing at all?

At 12.10pm on the day Mary Anne Fagan was murdered, a retired Navy serviceman saw a man in RAAF uniform walk out of the front gate of 575 Dandenong Road.

He reported it to police less than 24 hours later.

Detectives called it their best lead. A statewide investigation followed. RAAF bases across Victoria were searched. Identity parades were conducted. A photofit was published nationally.

And then the investigation changed direction.

This instalment walks through the witness sightings, the timeline, and the institutional shift that moved detectives away from the man in uniform — despite two independent witnesses placing him on Dandenong Road that afternoon.

Content warning: This series discusses sexual violence and the murder of a mother of five. This episode includes references to post-mortem examination and children discovering their mother after her death. Listener discretion advised.

If you have information, contact Victoria Police Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000 or police.vic.gov.au/crime-stoppers. The reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction is $1,000,000.

Transcript

Content warning: this series discusses sexual violence and the murder of a mother of five. This episode includes references to violence, witness testimony, and the psychological impact of the crime. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know needs support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732, or your local crisis service.

At 12.10pm on Friday 17 February 1978, a retired man is crossing Dandenong Road.

He is 62 years old. A man who had previously served in the Navy. He has lived in the area for about three years, in a flat on Wattletree Road, a short walk from the corner of Bailey Avenue. He knows this stretch of road the way anyone knows their own neighbourhood --- by routine, by repetition, by the things that stay the same.

As he crosses the road and turns into Bailey Avenue, he glances toward 575 Dandenong Road.

A man is coming through the front gate.

The man is wearing a uniform. Not work clothes. Not civilian clothing. A service uniform --- dark trousers, a light blue shirt, and a cap. The retired man who had served in the Navy recognises it immediately. It is the new-style RAAF summer dress.

The man comes through the gate and stops. He looks back at the house. Then he looks both ways along Dandenong Road.

And then he walks away, heading west along Dandenong Road toward Glenferrie Road.

The retired man watches him go. In three years of living near the property, he has only ever seen a woman and young children there. An adult male in service uniform, walking out of the front gate at lunchtime, was strange enough to remember.

In less than six hours, when the news breaks, it will be strange enough to report.

In the days and weeks that followed, the lead was strongly pursued through multiple channels.

And then, for some reason, it seemed abandoned.

What if the best witness in the case was eventually treated as if he had seen nothing at all?

Part 3 -- Mary Anne Fagan 

The next morning, Saturday 18 February 1978, at 10.35am, "Hugh" walks into a Victoria Police station and gives a formal statement.

The murder of Mary Anne Fagan has been on the front pages overnight. He has heard the reports. He recognises that what he saw the previous day at around 12.10pm, on the corner of Bailey Avenue and Dandenong Road, may matter.

 Less than twenty-four hours have passed since the sighting.

He has not been pressed. He has not been contacted. He has come forward of his own accord.

He tells detectives what he saw: a man in Air Force uniform leaving the Fagan property through the front gate at approximately 12.10pm. He describes the man as thick-set, approximately five feet seven inches tall, around thirty-five years of age, clean-shaven, with mousey-coloured hair. The man was wearing a cap. He was not carrying anything.

"Hugh" is specific about the uniform. He tells detectives it was the new-style RAAF summer dress --- not the old version. He served in the Australian Navy. He knows what service dress looks like. He knows the Air Force changed its pattern in recent years. And he is confident in what he saw.

He tells police: "I thought that this was strange as over about the past three years I have seen only a woman at the premises."

He believes he could recognise the man if he saw him again.

Now go back to the moment itself, and look at it more closely.

"Hugh" did not just glimpse a man and walk on. The behaviour he described was deliberate enough to register and to be remembered.

The man came through the front gate. He stopped. He looked back at the house --- a backward glance, taken at the threshold, after passing through it. He looked both ways along Dandenong Road, scanning the street in each direction. And then he walked west, at an unhurried pace, in the direction of Glenferrie Road.

These are not the movements of someone leaving a place they expect to return to. They are the movements of someone checking. Checking that no one is at the door behind him. Checking that no one is approaching from the road. Checking, in those few seconds at the gate, the conditions of his departure.

"Hugh" stopped long enough to register all of that. He had no reason at the time to know what he was looking at. He simply found it strange. A man in service uniform, walking out of a property where he had only ever seen a woman and her children, pausing at the gate to look around before walking away.

He held the picture in his head until the news broke. Then he took it to the police.

The investigators who took his statement that Saturday morning were dealing with a witness whose recall was fresh, whose attention had been arrested, and whose background gave him a baseline for recognising service dress that most members of the public would not have had.

They would describe him, throughout the investigation, as their best witness.

A man in military-style uniform did not blend into suburban Melbourne in 1978 the way high-visibility workwear might today. Uniforms attracted attention. Especially in a residential street. Especially at lunchtime. Especially outside a house where, according to neighbours, only a woman and children were normally seen.

That visibility is part of what makes the witness account, and the silence that has followed, so striking.

The timing of the sighting places it within a narrow window.

Between 10.30am and 11.00am on the morning of the murder, Mary Anne had spoken to her husband on the telephone. Collins had rung her from the base. He would later tell police she sounded quite normal. She mentioned nothing unusual. She was not expecting anyone.

That call places her alive at some point between 10.30am and 11.00am. The hair-dye process she was in the middle of takes between 30 and 45 minutes from application to wash-out. By 12.10pm, when "Hugh" sees a man walking out of her front gate, that process has been running for some time.

The window between her husband's phone call and "Hugh's" sighting is approximately 70 minutes.

Whatever happened inside 575 Dandenong Road, happened in that 70 minutes.

While that 70 minutes passed in Armadale, Collins Fagan was at Tottenham.

He was the Commanding Officer of the Number 1 Stores Depot. He had been at the base since the previous evening, having stayed over after a mess function. His morning was administrative --- the routine command duties of a Group Captain running a logistics facility. 

There was no reason for him to feel anything was wrong.

He would later tell investigators he rang his wife twice a day, every day, when he was at the base. The morning of 17 February was no different. By his own account she sounded normal --- she always sounded normal --- and the call ended without incident.

He returned to his office. He continued his work.

The next call he would take about his wife would come four hours later. From his 15-year-old son. From a phone box on Dandenong Road. The boy would be ringing because the children couldn't get in the house and the baby was crying inside.

By that point, the man "Hugh" had seen at the gate would have been gone for nearly four hours.

Two weeks later, on 2 March 1978, a second witness comes forward.

"Doug" is a 27-year-old computer programmer. He has just bought a car --- a transaction with a dated receipt and registration paperwork --- and he is reading newspaper coverage of the Fagan case when he realises something. On the day of the murder, while driving home from collecting the new car, he had picked up a hitchhiker on Dandenong Road. The hitchhiker had been wearing a uniform.

He gives his statement to police that day. He has the date pinned to a vehicle purchase that left a paper trail.

His account is this.

At approximately 12.45pm on Friday 17 February, he was driving west along Dandenong Road. As he approached the intersection with Hawthorn Road --- approximately one and a half to two kilometres west of Bailey Avenue --- he saw a man running across the road from the central plantation to the southern side.

The man was signalling for a lift.

"Doug" stopped. The man got in.

"Doug" asked where he was going.

The man said "into the city."

"Doug" told him he wasn't going that far.

The man said "anywhere."

Anywhere.

Not a destination. Not a suburb, not a street, not a building. Anywhere. A man who needed transportation more than he needed direction.

"Doug" tried to make conversation. The man wouldn't speak. He looked away when "Doug" turned toward him. He wouldn't meet his eye. He gave nothing.

"Doug" would later describe the man as appearing not normal. Not threatening. Not aggressive. Just --- not right. Withdrawn. Disconnected.

The man was wearing a blue military uniform. A dark peaked cap. A woven belt.

He was fairly neat. "Doug" did not see any blood stains. There was nothing that would immediately suggest violence.

The man got out of the car just short of the Williams Road intersection, approximately three to four kilometres west of where "Doug" had picked him up. Not at a house. Not at a shop. Not at any identifiable destination.

He simply got out and was gone.

Place the two sightings side by side.

At approximately 12.10pm, "Hugh" sees a man in RAAF-style uniform leaving the Fagan property through the front gate, walking west along Dandenong Road.

At approximately 12.45pm --- thirty-five minutes later --- "Doug" encounters a man in blue military uniform running across Dandenong Road, roughly one and a half to two kilometres further along, in the same direction.

The two witnesses do not know each other. They have no connection to the council workers, and no connection to the Fagan family. Their statements are taken at different times, by different officers, on different days. Nothing in the available material suggests any contact between them.

The direction of travel is consistent. The uniform identification is consistent. The timing --- thirty-five minutes to cover one and a half to two kilometres --- works out to roughly normal walking pace.

For two unrelated witnesses to converge on this kind of alignment by accident would require a significant coincidence. The simpler explanation is that they saw the same man.

And consider the corner itself.

The intersection of Bailey Avenue and Dandenong Road on a Friday morning in February 1978 was not a quiet corner. Three council workers were on or near the worksite for most of the morning. Cars passed in both directions on Dandenong Road, one of the main arteries through the south-eastern suburbs. Neighbours came and went.

In the middle of all that activity, two people --- and only two --- saw the man in uniform.

One at the gate. One on the road thirty-five minutes later.

He moved through a watched street and was seen by exactly the people who happened to be looking in his direction at the right moment. And by no one else.

Two weeks after the murder, on March 3, 1978, the head of the Homicide Squad goes public with the sighting.

A photofit of the man is published in newspapers. It shows a thick-set face, clean-shaven, mousey hair, a peaked cap pulled low over the brow. The face is set, expressionless, somewhere between watchful and blank.

Chief Inspector Noel Jubb is unequivocal. He tells the press the man is now the prime suspect. He says: "There are some other uniforms similar to RAAF airmen's issue, but the witness who gave us a detailed description is a most reliable person." And then: "We are 95 per cent certain it was a RAAF uniform. It's clearly the best lead we have so far --- it's a very good description, with a distinctive face."

The detail is precise. The man is described as approximately thirty-five years old, around five feet seven, thick-set, clean-shaven, with mousey-coloured hair. The uniform is described as rumpled but with no apparent bloodstains.

A separate appeal goes out for the driver of a small green panel van --- possibly a Ford Escort --- that was seen parked outside the Fagan home for at least an hour after 11.30 on the morning of her murder.

The investigation pursues the sighting through every channel available. 

A formal liaison is established between Victoria Police and the Royal Australian Air Force. RAAF police --- the service's own police --- assist the homicide squad. The cooperation is unusual. It signals how seriously the lead is being taken.

Other organisations with similar-looking blue uniforms are approached. The Postmaster-General's Department. Victorian Railways. Airline operators. Ambulance services. Each is asked whether the photofit might match any of their personnel, current or recent.

Air Force supply stores are checked, in case the man had recently bought his uniform through official channels. The records of recent issue and sale are reviewed.

"Hugh" is taken to identity parades at every RAAF base in Victoria --- Laverton, Point Cook, East Sale, Williams, Tottenham --- to inspect lines of serving airmen one base at a time. He is asked to walk past each line. To look. To consider. To say if any of the men in front of him was the man at the gate.

He never identifies anyone.

The photofit campaign runs in newspapers across Victoria. Tips come in. None of them resolves to a name.

The investigation continues to treat the sighting as the prime line of enquiry.

For about two months.

By April 1978 --- two months after the murder --- the institutional view of the witness sighting has begun to shift.

A different kind of consideration starts to weigh on the case. It is one that no senior detective would have articulated publicly in those terms in 1978, but that has shaped police thinking about witness identification for decades.

Witness memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Each time a witness is asked to recall what they saw, the recollection is reassembled from fragments --- and each reassembly is shaped by what the witness has seen, heard, and been shown since the original event.

A high-profile case creates particular conditions for that reassembly. The Mary Anne Fagan murder is on the front pages of every Melbourne newspaper. The photofit has been published. "Hugh" has attended identity parades at multiple RAAF bases. Each parade is an opportunity for his memory to absorb new context: the faces he has been asked to compare, the men he has been asked to look at, the framing of the questions detectives have asked him.

None of this means the witness was wrong. It means a senior reviewer in 1978 --- working in a homicide squad under pressure, with a queue of unsolved cases including the disappearance of Denise McGregor less than five weeks after Mary Anne's murder --- might have institutional reasons to be cautious about a witness sighting that had not produced a match through any of the channels the investigation pursued.

In April 1978, the Homicide Squad changed hands. A new head of homicide took over the case.

He appears not to have been persuaded by the uniform sighting.

Within weeks of his arrival, the focus of the investigation shifted. The RAAF parades wound down. The photofit campaign quieted. Resources moved elsewhere. The man at the gate --- the prime suspect Chief Inspector Jubb had once called the best lead they had --- was, in the institutional view that began to take hold, almost certainly nobody.

The reasoning that sat behind that view was articulated publicly twenty-three years later.

In December 2001, when the case was reopened in the hope that DNA technology might finally produce a result, it was reported by people connected to the investigation that the original investigation, in their view, “sidetracked from day one”.

Asked to explain, the response was that the investigation “came to the conclusion very quickly that the supposed sighting was almost certainly the husband on a different day. All the evidence was that Mrs Fagan was a very moral woman and there was no reason it would be anybody else at the house."

Almost certainly the husband on a different day.

That is the institutional view that came to dominate this case. Not that the witness was wrong about what he saw. But that the sighting itself was a phantom --- a misremembered glimpse of Collins Fagan, on some other day, transposed in the witness's reassembled memory into the morning of his wife's murder.

That position remained the institutional position when the case was reopened in 2001. It remained that position when the cold case unit took over. It is the view that explains why, by April 1978, the homicide squad had stopped looking at RAAF servicemen and started looking somewhere else.

The Chief Inspector who first ran the case had called the man in uniform “the best lead we have so far”.

Two months later, that view was dismissed as “almost certainly the husband on a different day.”

Between those two views, the investigation moved on.

The man "Hugh" saw at the gate --- whoever he was --- was never identified. He has never come forward. The photofit produced nothing. The Victorian RAAF parades produced nothing. The supply store checks produced nothing.

And by April 1978, the Homicide Squad had moved toward what police then treated as a better lead.

Behind these investigative arguments was still the central fact.

Mary Anne Fagan had been killed in her own home, on a Friday morning in February, while her infant son slept in the next room. The room she died in had a rocking horse, toys and crayon drawings. She had made school lunches that morning. She had been preparing for a social function she was to attend with her husband.

Her older children would come home from school that afternoon to find her.

Every lead mattered because one of them should have explained how that was possible.

For forty-eight years, Mary Anne's murder has remained unsolved, despite significant investigation.

Join us next time as we turn to the men the investigation turned to.

Three council workers, repairing a road outside 575 Dandenong Road on the day Mary Anne was murdered. Their statements would be taken weeks apart. Their accounts would not agree.

A retired senior officer would later tell media that the original investigation's failure to adequately question two of those workers had been a serious flaw. The men, he said, were "either suspects or potentially vital witnesses". They had been interviewed for ten minutes on the night of the murder, by a uniformed constable in a hotel. They were not properly interviewed by homicide squad detectives until nearly two months later.

Two months later was April 1978.

The same April that the squad changed hands. The same April that the man in uniform was set aside.

And the same April that the investigation shifted toward a council labourer who had spoken to Mary Anne that morning, who had left the worksite alone, who had returned with money he could not account for --- and who, when finally questioned in detail, would lie about almost everything.

If you have information that could assist police in relation to the murder of Mary Anne Fagan, please contact Victoria Police Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000, or submit a confidential report online at police.vic.gov.au/crime-stoppers.

Some names and non-essential identifying details have been changed for privacy. All core events and timings are drawn from publicly available records, inquest materials, and contemporaneous reporting.

Unsolved. Unforgotten. Unfinished.