Nov 2000 Volume 81 Number 11 "serving the protectors"
Search for the Cop Samaritan
By Brett Williams

Constable Colleen Hilditch (née Fisher) survived the same Gillman car crash that left her 20-year-old mother dead on May 10, 1973. Only six months old, she had been a back-seat passenger in her parents’ car.

Driven by her father, the car had suddenly collided with another on Eastern Parade. The impact killed Christine Fisher. Police laid charges against the juvenile driver of the other car.

Naturally, Hilditch has no memory of the tragedy. But she knows a young SA motorcycle policeman attended the crash scene. He broke the news of Christine Fisher’s death to her parents-in-law at their Birkenhead home, where Hilditch lived with her parents.

Hilditch is now in search of that officer, whom she calls her “missing link”.

The plight of the motherless baby clearly moved him, and he continued to visit the Fisher home for weeks after the accident. He would ask to see, feed and nurse baby Colleen. Her still-grieving grandmother, Joy Fisher, acceded to the young man’s requests each time he called.

After those initial weeks, however, his visits stopped. The Fisher family never saw him again, and had known neither the station from which he came nor his reason for caring. And, with the passage of time, his name was lost to Grandmother Fisher’s memory.

So Hilditch, 27, has never known the compassionate cop’s identity, but is now desperate to find him. To her, he is the only one with comfort-giving answers to her many lingering questions.

Her father, Ray, never speaks of the accident - to anyone. So Hilditch knows only the story she has, since the age of six, many times heard her grandmother recount.

Even today, the story continues to resurface. “We’ll be sitting around,” says Hilditch, “and she (my grandmother) will say: 'What about that copper?’ She thought this bloke was just wonderful.

“If he didn’t have a big impact on my family, there wouldn’t be talk about him 27 years down the track.”

If her dream of a reunion with the unknown policeman came true, Hilditch would ask him some of her “million questions”. Her first would be about how the accident “really happened”.

“For some reason that’s important to me,” she says. “None of my family really knows.

“I’ve heard that I was sitting in my car seat on the road when they found me. I want to know if that’s true. And, being so young, why didn’t I die? Why did it happen to my mother?

“Maybe he can’t answer that sort of thing, but he’s probably the best person who can.”

And, just as important to Hilditch, is the answer to why he cared. Even as a police officer herself, she strains to understand his seemingly willing personal involvement.

“Something must have touched him in some way,” she says, “because he wouldn’t have done it (otherwise). Most of us, as coppers, do our job and then leave; you try to put it out of your mind. He did exactly the opposite, and I don’t know why.”

Hilditch and her then 19-year-old father stayed together after the accident. They remained living with Grandmother Fisher, who essentially took charge of her grand-daughter’s upbringing.

Hilditch grew to know Fisher as her mother, and today still calls her “mum”. But Fisher took an entirely open approach to revealing the past. She told Hilditch when she was just six that her “mummy was killed in a car accident”.

The confused child responded with: “No, you’re my mum.”

“Mum talked about it a fair bit,” says Hilditch, “because she wanted me to know exactly what happened, and why and how it affected everyone.”

Hilditch left her grandparents’ home with her remarried father when she was eight. They later moved to Queensland where Hilditch lived her teen years, some of which she describes as “rocky”.

She attributes a brief rebellious period to separation from her role-model grandmother.

“I never got into deep trouble,” she says, “I just went 'off the way’.”

And, through those years, Hilditch thought often and deeply of her mother. She wondered how, with her mother’s influence, her own life might have taken a completely different path.

It was also as a teenager that she first learned of the kindly cop who once voluntarily cared for her. Her grandmother revealed his selfless deeds, but Hilditch at the time saw little significance in them. As a police officer and mother in later years, however, her view would change completely.

Meanwhile, Hilditch scored a job as an administration officer with the Queensland police department. She worked in that role for three-and-a-half years at Gladstone police station.

She became interested in a police career and, from Queensland, applied to join SAPOL. “It was just at that stage of my life,” she says, “when I wanted to go back to where my family was.”

SAPOL accepted her application, and she headed back to Adelaide to join the thin blue line in 1994.

But did her knowledge of the good Samaritan policeman influence her career choice? Her grandmother insists it did. Says Hilditch of the possibility: “Maybe sub-conscientiously, but I honestly don’t know.”

Now, it is not only herself for whom she seeks her one-time carer. Her now cancer-stricken grandmother has, in recent times, spoken much of the man she describes as then being “a good-looking bloke in his mid-30s”.

Hilditch suspects that, while her grandmother is able, she would love to see him one more time.

But Hilditch has, at the same time, wrestled with mixed feelings. “One part of me knows why I am doing this (searching): because I want to know,” she explains. “But deep down it hurts, and I sometimes don’t want to go there.”

She also wonders how the policeman - whom she sees as a “pretty special person” - must have felt. “It blows me away,” she says, “because death on the road must be terrible for anyone to go to, let alone when there’s a baby involved. He must have had so many mixed feelings.”

Hilditch wrote to the Police Journal requesting its help two months ago. She knows her story may well result in a highly emotional reunion with the man in whose arms she lay 27 years ago. So now, she nervously awaits information.

Until now, however, she has never considered how a reunion might unfold. “I think I’d cry,” she says, “but I’d definitely be grateful, and there’d be a big 'thank you’.

“I’m worried that he’ll think I’m an idiot, and wonder: 'Why does this girl want to know this?’

“I’d like to know about his family, and whether he was a copper for the rest of his working life.”

Hilditch believes that, in her two children’s eyes, he might see the baby for whom he once so deeply cared. But she understands the endless possibilities: that he may have died; he may have emigrated; or he may simply not want any contact with her.

“I think it would be more disappointing if he’d died than if he said: 'I don’t want anything to do with it’,” she says. “If he was dead, I’d never know.”

Anyone with information about the identity of the police officer for whom Colleen Hilditch is searching should contact Brett Williams at the Police Journal

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