October 2002 Volume 83 Number 10 "serving the protectors"
No choice but to survive
By Brett Williams

Pam Whitford cannot forget the spring day she began as a happily married police wife, but ended as a shattered widow. Now, she and her adult children speak publicly about their years of heartache since the needless death of their husband and father.

Pam Whitford’s eyes still fill with tears when she tells of the moment she learned her missing police officer husband had shot himself dead. More than two decades have passed since then, but that moment plays out in her mind as if it were a carefully-directed film sequence.

The set is the Whitford’s newly built Mt Barker home. It is 2:30 on a Friday morning in October, 1981. Hordes of police, baffled by their colleague’s disappearance, are milling around the house.

Pam sees family friend and former assistant commissioner, Bruce Gamble, step into her living room. He walks toward her, as she sits in a beanbag by an open fire, desperately waiting for news. Her eldest daughter, Julie, then 18, lies nearby, asleep on a lounge.

Gamble, softly spoken, says: “I’m sorry. They’ve found him, and he’s dead.”

Amid the crush of police and close friends, Pam screams, as does Julie, who runs away to her bedroom. The tragic news instantly plunges her (Julie) into hysteria. Someone calls a doctor for her.

An agonizing gloom descends on the now fatherless home.

In Pam’s mind, this heartbreaking scene rolls into hundreds more. But about no other does she say, “I’ll never forget that”.

And, for her, a mother of three then young daughters, the pain of her tragedy was “indescribable”.

She had lost Geoff, the 38-year-old detective inspector to whom she had been happily married since both were the age of just 19. But, they had known and “liked” each other from as far back as their primary school days, when they were only seven.

Each would leave notes on the other’s bicycle at school and, by the age of 15, the two had begun a relationship. And, even at that age, both often spoke of “growing old together”.

They seemed destined to share a happy, loving family life; and for no reason would one ever leave the other voluntarily – or so it seemed.

Had Pam been looking for signs that Whitford harboured thoughts of killing himself, she might have spotted one the night before his death. For what seemed no reason, the inwardly troubled husband turned and embraced his wife as they lay in bed.

With unusual intensity, he asked her if she knew how much he loved her. But his actions were out of character. Neither had ever been the type to speak of the deep love he or she had felt for the other.

And, not long before his death, Whitford had told his wife that he did not “ever want a police funeral”.

Still, Pam never suspected he was about to take his own life. In her husband, she saw a man who loved life, his family and job, and was the ultimate people person.

On Thursday, October 22, 1981, came the last moments the couple would ever share. Whitford did a round of the kitchen table over breakfast to kiss all but Julie goodbye. She had begun a nursing career and was asleep after a late shift the night before.

Pam says he went into Julie’s room and kissed her goodbye as she slept. She (Julie) has no memory of his presence.

As Whitford was about to leave, Pam asked him what time he would be home for dinner that night. He said: “About 7:30, as usual.” But he would never return, and they were the last words the pair ever exchanged.

Whitford was, at the time, chief of the Crime Intelligence Support Unit. He had, for many months leading up to his death, worked on a highly publicized drugs case. But, that morning, he was to appear in court with former deputy commissioner, Neil McKenzie. The two were to give evidence against a police officer standing trial on a drugs charge.

Pam says that, to take part in a trial in which a fellow officer stood accused, made Whitford intensely uncomfortable. But other issues, she insists, were also deeply troubling him.

The early 1980s was a torrid time in SA policing. Bold claims of police corruption – which reporters seized upon – had emerged from within the criminal element. The Police Association responded with as many equally hard-hitting counter-claims. But, as always happens, politicians and interest groups were soon calling for a royal commission.

According to Pam, her husband – justified or not – feared the potential of a false allegation to blacken either his name, or that of one of his officers. Even worse, to him, would be a proved allegation against someone under his command. That, he feared, would discredit him as a leader.

But, in higher office, Whitford had, in any case, found little satisfaction. He had even tried to resign his commission.

Says Pam: “In the bedroom one morning in the last week before he died, I can remember saying to him: ‘You need help. You’re going to have a nervous breakdown’.

“He was so desperate. He just didn’t know where to turn for help to get out of the hole he thought he was in.”

On the morning of the court trial, he mysteriously failed to front. Word of his absence soon spread, and began to alarm his colleagues and superiors. Police Association president and then detective, Peter Alexander – who was that morning in the Angas St police headquarters – heard of the disappearance from a colleague.

“I had a horrible feeling at that very moment,” he says. “As soon as he (the colleague) said it, I knew he had committed suicide. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew – just like that.”

By late morning, police had arrived at the inspector’s home, where they broke the news to Pam that her husband was missing. Her first shocking thought was that criminals from the drug world had kidnapped or killed him.

The police asked her where he might be, but she knew of nowhere they could begin to search for him. She did know, however, that she and the police were facing “something very serious”.

As the day unfolded, Julie arrived home from a city shopping trip, and more police gathered at the house. Officers set up a command post at the home of then Whitford neighbour, Bruce Gamble.

The police also spoke to Whitford’s parents and in-laws, and informed them that they intended to make appeals for public help that evening through media broadcasts.

After the appeals went to air, information emerged that led police to begin a search in the Myponga area, south of Adelaide.

Meanwhile, Pam sent her two younger daughters, Kerry and Amanda, then 13 and nine, to stay with friends. Now, with her eldest daughter, she could do nothing but wait, along with the many equally concerned police in and around her home.

To cope with the dragging hours, and her excruciating fears for Whitford’s safety, Pam chain-smoked and drank coffee, cup after cup. For distraction, she played a Neil Diamond record, Hot August Night, over and over.

“We chatted about nothing,” she says, “as though nothing had happened. It was like, if you didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t really happening.”

But Pam’s desperate hope that, maybe, nothing had happened, was about to be shattered. Police at the search scene had found Whitford’s unmarked CIB car parked between two shacks at Myponga Beach.

At around midnight, family friend and then Mt Barker detective, Norm Colquist, told Pam of the discovery of the car. When he added that, inside the car was Whitford’s necktie, she “feared the worst”. She knew well his strict practice of never removing it until he arrived home at the end of a work day.

Sadly, she was right to be fearful. Before long, police searchers found Whitford’s body on Pebble Beach with a single gunshot wound to the head. The next and most devastating blow for Pam and Julie would come with the soul-deadening words that Gamble would utter at 2:30am.

“There weren’t many words to be used,” says Gamble. “She (Pam) saw the look on my face, anyway, and, being a pretty bright lady, she put two and two together.

“It knocked the hell out of me, but that was nothing compared with what it did to them.”

Says Julie of her response to Gamble’s message: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It immediately hit me that I was never going to see him again, and that ‘killed’ me. He was my world, and it was as if somebody had put their hand through my chest and ripped my heart out.

“I remember being quite hysterical for quite some time. Mum was sitting in front of the fire, where she put her face in her hands and just cried.”

So intense was the women’s emotional outpouring that, out of concern for their wellbeing, someone called a doctor. He arrived equipped to sedate them but, in the end, administered nothing. Instead, he sat and spoke with the grieving women, and insisted they “let it out”.

Through what remained of the night, the pain and tears continued, and no one slept. All of the police and Whitford friends remained right through to daybreak.

On her first morning as a widow, Pam would have to tell her two younger daughters of their father’s death. “I picked Kerry up and told her first,” she says. “She didn’t say a word, and I didn’t see her cry once. A week after that, I found her in the foetal position in her bedroom.”

Amanda remembers hearing the news as “pretty awful”. She walked into the still crowded lounge room, where some people stood weeping. “In front of them,” says Amanda, “Mum looked up, and said: ‘They’ve found your dad. He’s committed suicide’.

“That was a very big word for a nine-year-old, and I had no understanding that it meant death.

“That’s one of the memories that I wish I didn’t have, but it really sticks in my head.”

In the weeks that followed, the Whitford home became fortress-like. To Pam, the police department had “taken over my life”. Officers answered the telephone, checked cars that approached the house and organized the non-police funeral Whitford had requested.

But this regime never eased Pam’s anguish. Through that weeks-long period, she scarcely ate, lost 20kg and felt “like a zombie”. “I only slept with a sleeping tablet that lasted four hours,” she says, “so that’s how much sleep I got every night.

“I didn’t want to live; and I realized then that you could die of a broken heart.”

Nonetheless, Pam realized her “three beautiful daughters” needed her, and so strived to survive. But she now faced a life in which still more pain would overwhelm her.

Pam Whitford makes an emotional plea through the press a week after her husband’s death.

She travelled to her husband’s funeral in the back seat of police car with Norm Colquist on October 26. On the way, Colquist handed her a copy of a suicide note that Whitford had addressed to her. He had written of Pam as a wonderful mother, and of his love for his daughters. He had also written of his “miserable” life, and used the letter to ask for forgiveness and simply apologize. Pam wept as she read his words. “I thought he might have said why he did what he did,” she laments, “but he didn’t. I just felt as though we didn’t have any answer.” Whitford’s suicide helped fuel the debate over the police corruption allegations. Some saw his death as shrouded in suspicion and so pushed all the harder for a royal commission.

Pam believed the effect of this intensified push was to vilify Whitford. It all became a heavy added strain on her. So the still-grieving widow came out in the press with a forthright call to “clear my husband”. This bold move, only a week after his death, proved to be “very tough” for her.

“I wasn’t a public person,” she says, “but they were kicking him when he was down. Someone had to speak up for him.”

As time passed, Pam’s daughters continued to be her motivation to endure. For them, she tried desperately to project an image of strength, and so retreated to the shower whenever she wanted to cry. That happened up to five times a day.

But, at other times, she made mental plans to take her own life – in line with certain timeframes. One of her plans was to kill herself after her youngest daughter, Amanda, turned 21. A later strategy was to commit suicide after all three daughters had married.

The plans continued, and included one in which she would wait to see the birth of her first grandchild and then kill herself. “That’s how I lived my life,” she says, “by putting timeframes on milestones.”

She would also think constantly of her husband and, in memory of him, buy a red rose every Thursday. She lamented the loss of their life together, and that he would never see his daughters marry and have their own children.

And combined with her mental anguish was a heavy financial strain. The Whitford clan had lost its sole breadwinner and, six years after his death, Pam lost the family home.

Each daughter, too, had her dilemmas coping with the loss of her father. Says Julie: “I was having a lot of trouble emotionally, dreaming that he was still around. I just couldn’t accept the fact that he’d gone.

“And your mind does silly things. You think: ‘Maybe he’s working undercover somewhere and he’ll come back in a couple of years’.”

Julie found some relief in one of two visits the family made to the office of the State Coroner a few years after the suicide.

“We saw photos of him at the site,” she says. “He was laying on his side with his arm out and the weapon a couple of feet away from his hand. I had to see (that he was dead). It was a relief, really, because it stopped the nightmares.”

Julie, now 39, concedes that she pursued many relationships only to find a “father figure”. “I went out with a guy who was 16 years older than I was,” she says, “but he couldn’t fulfil that role. Maybe one day I woke up, and just thought: ‘It’s not going to happen’.”

Amanda found comfort through immersing herself in sport, and being a strong support to her mother. But for involvement in a normal family structure, she looked to two of her friends – who were sisters – and their parents.

“At times,” she says, “I was very envious of the life they had, compared with mine. I did push my way into their little world to experience what it would be like to have a mum and dad, and be financially comfortable.”

In 1991, Amanda followed her father’s footsteps into the police force. Her mother, she remembers, was “pretty horrified”. “But, at the same time,” says Amanda, “she was very proud when I graduated.”

Today, as an undisputed survivor, Pam rejects the views of others who say she has shown great bravery. “It’s bullshit,” she says, “because I didn’t have a choice. I had to pull up my bootstraps and get on with the girls’ dad not being here.”

But the tragedy, she insists, has made her stronger, more caring and her “own person”. To her relief, she no longer thinks of her husband every day of her life, as she did for many years. And, rarely does she visit his grave at the Enfield Memorial Park cemetery. “He’s not down there,” she says, “he’s in my heart.”

Pam and her daughters, however, still express a healthy measure of anger toward Whitford for leaving them. But that anger does not exclude the great love that remains for him in their hearts.

Kerry, now 34, harbours strong views on how to improve the lot of those affected by suicide. “I think there should be more education on the whole thing,” she says, “and counselling shouldn’t be such a dirty word.

“For police, there should just be more talk about it, right from their training at the academy. And there should be more services.”

Peter Alexander, too, advocates a greater support network. “I believe we have learnt that we must enable people to come forward when they have problems,” he says. “That was missing in the era of Geoff Whitford.

“And we have to help the surviving families, not just in the period after a death, but also in the longer term.”

Pam’s heart “sinks” whenever she hears of a suicide today. Her advice to those who suffer as she and her daughters once did is to “live one day at a time”. “There’s nothing you can say to take away that pain,” she says solemnly, “nothing at all.”

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