Jeremy Marcus Harding

A Burnside Childhood

Jeremy Marcus Harding was born at 6:14am on 15 August 1975 at Adelaide's Queen Victoria Hospital, the first child of Michael Thomas Harding and Elizabeth Anne Harding née Patterson. Michael, then thirty-one, taught mathematics at Glenunga International High School and brought home the kind of analytical patience that filed every household problem under solvable in principle. Elizabeth, twenty-eight, was a surgical nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, a woman whose profession had taught her that compassion and clinical precision were the same skill applied to different surfaces. Their home on Greenhill Road in the leafy eastern suburb of Burnside was the kind of household where dinner conversations ranged from algebraic proofs to medical ethics and where the children were expected to follow either.

Daniel James Harding arrived on 22 March 1978, and the brothers settled into temperaments that would last them. Where Jeremy was the watchful eldest, the one who organised the games and refereed the disputes, Daniel was the introvert who preferred computers to cricket and who would, in adulthood, build the kind of life — software engineering, suburban Sydney, a wife and two children — that left him quietly puzzled by his older brother's choices. The role reversal would not become visible to either of them until much later: the protective older brother who arranged everyone else's safety eventually building no shelter of his own, and the introvert younger brother building one of the warmer households in the family.

Brighton and the University of South Australia

Jeremy enrolled at Brighton Secondary School in February 1988 and spent five years discovering that he was the kind of student who excelled at almost anything that yielded to attention. He captained the swimming team to three consecutive state championships, his powerful freestyle stroke earning him consideration for national trials, and chose academics over the trial when the choice was offered. He joined the debate team in his second year and became its strongest argument constructor — patient, courteous, surgical, the kind of speaker whose opponents found themselves dismantled before they noticed where the cuts had been made. His debating partner Sarah Chen would later describe him as the only person she had ever debated who never raised his voice and never lost a point.

In February 1995 he enrolled at the University of South Australia to read Criminal Justice with majors in Criminology and a minor in Law. The choice was less a vocation than a recognition: criminal investigation was the discipline in which the assumptions of his upbringing were taken as foundational. The world was solvable. Witnesses had truths. Evidence behaved. The job of the investigator was simply to be patient and rigorous enough to bring the answer to the surface. Jeremy enrolled the way another student might have enrolled in mathematics — not to discover something new, but to formalise something he had always already believed. He took Criminal Psychology under Professor Margaret Wells, Forensic Evidence Analysis with Dr James Morrison, and Advanced Criminal Investigation taught by former Detective Superintendent Robert Clarke. He captained the University Debate Team to the national championships in 1996 and 1997. He volunteered at the University Legal Aid Clinic, where he met domestic violence victims and disadvantaged defendants, and where he learned that the human stories beneath crime statistics were the part of the work that made the rigour worth doing. His honours thesis, Patterns of Recidivism in South Australian Property Crime: A Ten-Year Analysis, supervised by Dr Helen Matthews, earned him the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence in Criminal Justice and brought him to the attention of South Australia Police recruiters who had been looking, for some time, for exactly the kind of patient young man who would not need to be taught how to read a pattern.

The Academy and Elizabeth

Jeremy entered the South Australia Police Academy at Fort Largs in January 1999 as part of Squad 47. Training Sergeant Bruce "Bull" McKenzie, a Vietnam veteran with twenty years of police instruction behind him, recognised Jeremy quickly as the kind of cadet who never failed an assessment and never created a disciplinary problem. Academy psychological reports noted his exceptional emotional regulation under stress and intuitive understanding of criminal psychology. He scored 98% in his final firearms assessment and graduated with honours in November 1999.

His probationary placement at Elizabeth Police Station — a challenging suburban precinct in Adelaide's northern outskirts known for property crime and domestic violence — was where the academy's framework met an actual community. His training officer, Senior Constable Patrick "Pat" Murray, was a twenty-year veteran whose contribution to Jeremy's career was not technique but temperament. Pat Murray told Jeremy in his first week that the difference between a good detective and a bad one was that the good one believed every victim was owed his complete attention regardless of how the rest of the room ranked them, and that the day Jeremy started ranking victims was the day he should start looking for another job. Jeremy filed the instruction the way he filed every important thing, and never forgot it.

His first significant case came six months into his service. A series of burglaries across Elizabeth and Salisbury had appeared, to the patrol officers handling them, to be unrelated. Jeremy noticed that the targeted houses had all been empty during particular cultural celebrations and that the gaps between the burglaries corresponded to the calendar of a community he had only recently become familiar with. The pattern led to the arrest of Marcus Thompson and the closure of a two-year crime spree, and the commendation Jeremy received noted his exceptional analytical skills and attention to detail. He was twenty-four years old, and he had just been confirmed in the worldview that would govern the next quarter-century of his life: patterns surfaced, if you watched them long enough.

The Climb Through Adelaide

His promotion to Constable in March 2001 brought him to Adelaide City Station and to the night shift in Hindley Street, the city's entertainment district. He learned to read the early signs of a fight and the late signs of a man who had decided he was about to commit one. He learned the precise tone of voice that calmed a drunk woman without patronising her. He learned that an arrest made cleanly, with respect, was an arrest a magistrate would believe. In September 2002 he arrested nightclub owner Tony Kostas for drug distribution after months of patient observation, an operation Detective Inspector Graham Foster would later describe as the slowest landing of a good punch he had ever watched.

Senior Constable stripes arrived in July 2005, and with them mentoring responsibilities. He took on Probationary Constable Eric Richardson in 2006 and spent eighteen months teaching him, almost entirely by example, that the paperwork was not a formality and the witness statement was not a transcript. Richardson would later credit Jeremy with the line that became the spine of his own career: every victim deserved their best effort regardless of background.

The armed robbery series that plagued Adelaide from 2008 to 2009 became Jeremy's breakthrough. Working under a taskforce led by Foster, Jeremy noticed a connection between the robberies and a series of stolen vehicles, traced the link to a mechanic's shop in Port Adelaide, and watched the operation he had quietly built return five arrests and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in recovered cash. The South Australia Police Service Medal followed. Foster told him, in private, that he was the most patient detective the unit had produced in a decade and that he should expect the major crime division to come calling within the year. Foster was right by six months.

Major Crime

Jeremy's promotion to Detective Senior Constable in January 2010 brought him into the Criminal Investigation Branch's Major Crime Investigation Section, and into homicide for the first time. The work was the work he had been preparing for his whole adult life. Bodies were puzzles. Methods left signatures. Lies, given enough time and the right room, came apart in his hands.

In 2011 he was assigned to the murder of university student Rebecca Andrewartha, found strangled in her North Adelaide apartment. Rebecca shared her given name and a startling physical resemblance with the woman his brother Daniel had been quietly serious about for nearly two years — a Rebecca who would in time become Jeremy's sister-in-law. The first photograph from the scene arrived on Jeremy's desk and stopped him for longer than he afterwards admitted. He worked the case to its conclusion, reconstructed the victim's final hours from mobile phone data and CCTV footage, and brought her ex-boyfriend Frederick "Fred" Webb to a confession that put him away for life. The conviction was clean. The Andrewartha family thanked him at the sentencing. And Jeremy understood, for the first time in his career, that the thing he had been taught to compartmentalise was a thing that did not always agree to be compartmentalised. He never told Daniel about the resemblance. He never quite stopped seeing it.

His most significant Adelaide investigation began in March 2015 when pensioner Dorothy Mills vanished from her Glenelg home. Over the following months, four more elderly residents disappeared without trace, and Jeremy noticed that all five had attended the same community centre and had each, in the weeks before vanishing, withdrawn substantial sums from their accounts. The pattern led him to care worker Simon Bradshaw, a man who had befriended each victim, killed them in their own kitchens, and buried them in shallow graves in the Adelaide Hills. The case brought Jeremy the National Police Service Medal and a quiet conviction, building inside him for years and now finally articulated, that he had reached the part of his career where the work had stopped surprising him. He decided to leave the city six weeks later.

Broken Hill

His decision to transfer to Broken Hill in August 2015, with the promotion to Detective Inspector that came with it, surprised the colleagues who had assumed he would stay in Adelaide and work toward a Superintendency. He told Daniel, over a long Sunday lunch in Burnside the week before the move, that the cases in Adelaide had begun to repeat and that he needed a jurisdiction where the work would not let him coast. Daniel, who was himself preparing to move his life to Sydney to be closer to Rebecca's family, told Jeremy that he understood the impulse and did not entirely believe it. Jeremy did not entirely believe it either, and could not have said what the rest of the impulse was, only that the city had begun to feel like a room he had already finished arranging.

Broken Hill Police Station, a solid brick building on Argent Street, served a jurisdiction larger than several European countries with a population of barely twenty thousand. Station Commander Superintendent Margaret Walsh, who had read Jeremy's record before he arrived, gave him considerable autonomy in establishing the detective division's procedures. The first months were an adjustment. The forensic laboratory was five hundred kilometres away. Witnesses were reluctant to involve outsiders. Disputes ran on generational fuel that the file would not show him. He learned to spend longer in pubs and community centres than he had ever done in Adelaide, earning trust through patience and consistency rather than asserting authority. His first significant Broken Hill case, in 2017, was a syndicate stealing mining equipment for overseas resale — a two-million-dollar operation he closed not through forensics but through a mechanic in a Silverton pub who mentioned, after several beers, the unusual late-night truck movements he had been quietly noticing for months. The arrest was clean. The methodology was not the Adelaide methodology. Jeremy filed the difference and adapted.

He rented a small cottage on Bromide Street, walking distance from the station, and over the following years it became the place where his life happened, although he would not have used that phrase for it. He joined the Broken Hill Symphony Orchestra in 2016 and was given the second flute desk, a position he held for years more out of routine than enjoyment. He joined the Broken Hill Chess Club, where his regular opponent was retired magistrate Harold Chen, who told him on their third game that he played like a detective, patient and methodical, always thinking five moves ahead. Jeremy took the description as a compliment. He restored a 1968 Ford Falcon GT in the garage behind the cottage, the methodical process of stripping and cleaning and rebuilding standing in for whatever weekend he was supposed to have been having instead. He missed his mother's seventieth birthday in 2017 and his nephew's first school play in 2022, both because of cases. He drove all night through a domestic violence call to make Daniel's wedding in Sydney in August 2018 and arrived at the church an hour after the ceremony had begun. The accumulation of these absences was not a sacrifice. He never made one. He simply said yes to the next case and no, by default, to everything else, for years on end, until the cottage on Bromide Street was the only place in his life he had a key to and the case files spread across the kitchen table were the closest things in it to company. He would have rejected the framing if anyone had offered it. No one did, until one of his colleagues, eventually, would.

The Smith Disappearance and the First Crack

In late July 2018, Claire Louise Smith reported her husband Paul missing following an argument. Jeremy knew Paul slightly from the orchestra — a quiet pianist whose Sunday rehearsal presence was reliable — and he knew Claire by reputation as a woman who ran her own dance school in Broken Hill and who had previously reported fictional break-ins and made false harassment claims. The case began as a probable repeat performance and refused to stay one. Over beers at the Palace Hotel on the evening of 29 July, Jeremy revealed the orchestra connection to Senior Constable Brock Polden and Constable Felicity Massey while maintaining investigative distance, and suggested they check Adelaide airport. Flight records confirmed Paul had travelled interstate.

On 1 August 2018 Jeremy contacted Tasmanian police about Paul's last known whereabouts. The detective who returned his call, Karl Jenkins of Hobart, told him that Paul's brother Luke was the prime suspect in five Tasmanian disappearances that had all the hallmarks of being something other than disappearances. Jeremy thanked him, ended the call, and sat at his desk for several minutes before doing anything else. The Smith case did not resolve. Paul did not return. The Smith family receded from active investigation into the back of Jeremy's filing cabinet, where they joined a small but growing collection of cases that had come to him whole and remained whole. He did not yet think of them as a category. That came later.

Silverton, Felicity Massey, and the Binary

The call from Senior Constable Polden came in at 7:50 on the morning of 14 January 2023. The body of twenty-seven-year-old Naomi Simmons had been discovered at Silverton's John Dynon Gallery, strangled and arranged among the sculpture installations, her purse undisturbed and a Teppo Jalaskain piece called Mirage missing from its display. The case, when Jeremy assembled his team — Detective Sergeant Patricia Wong on forensic coordination, Detective Constable James Mitchell on interviews, Senior Constable Felicity Massey on evidence documentation — was the third murder in six months that suggested a serial pattern operating in country he had spent eight years getting to know.

The investigation was the most thorough Jeremy had ever run. He interviewed Naomi's boyfriend Ethan Cummins, whose shoe print inside Silverton Hall contradicted his stated alibi and whose text messages suggested a relationship under strain. He interviewed her ex-husband Liam O'Connor, whose grief seemed authentic but who Jeremy knew well enough not to discount. He interviewed Julia Novak, an art enthusiast whose obsession with Jalaskain's work placed her at the gallery on the night of the killing. Dr Patricia Mulligan's autopsy via video conference on 15 January confirmed death between 11:30pm and 1am, defensive wounds consistent with a struggle, ligature marks consistent with a silk scarf or similar material. Each detail fed Jeremy's developing profile of a killer who combined calculation with violence. By the time he held a press conference on 6 February 2023 — a press conference at which he said the words we need the public's help for the first time in his career — he had three plausible suspects, none of whom he could prove, and a growing private suspicion that the answer was none of them. The suspicion was the first crack. The crack was small enough that he did not look at it directly.

The case ran through 2023 and into 2024 and remained open. The community's initial confidence in the detective from Adelaide eroded into questions about his competence. Naomi Simmons' photograph stayed on his kitchen table. He stopped attending the orchestra. The chess games with Harold Chen became sporadic, then occasional, then stopped. The Ford Falcon gathered dust in the garage. Each of these losses was small enough that he could rationalise it as temporary, and each of them, having been rationalised, became permanent.

By the middle of the decade, Felicity Massey had become the colleague Jeremy worked with most closely and the only person in Broken Hill who saw him clearly. She was a competent investigator with an unconventional streak that he had at first treated as a junior officer's enthusiasm and then, slowly, as something his own methods could not entirely dismiss. She was willing to entertain witness statements he was not. She was willing to ask questions about the unsolved cases that he had stopped letting himself ask. And — the part that mattered most and unsettled him most — she was willing to ask questions about him. In a town the size of Broken Hill, the line between professional and personal dissolved within a year of being drawn. Felicity knew the cottage on Bromide Street was full of files. She knew about the orchestra he no longer attended and the brother in Sydney he had not visited in eighteen months. She knew about Naomi Simmons because everyone in the station did, but she also knew, in a way the others did not, that the case had hooked into Jeremy in a place he was no longer protecting. She did not press him. She simply, calmly, every few weeks, asked questions he would have answered in a heartbeat if a witness had asked them, and which he had no idea how to answer when they were asked of him. He deflected, politely. He thanked her, professionally. He went home and opened the file again.

The cases that would not yield had, by then, become a category in his head and a row in his filing cabinet. He no longer dismissed the impossible elements in the witness statements. He had stopped trying to make them fit. The choice in front of him was simple and unbearable: either his judgement had begun to fail him, slowly and embarrassingly, in the middle of his career — or it was sound, and the world he had spent his entire adult life learning to read had never been the kind of place his methods were built to read. He told no one. He told Felicity least of all, because she was the one person who would have understood. Each morning he woke at half past five, made coffee, opened the file, and worked the cases the way he had been taught. Each morning the work did not work back. He was the most respected detective in Broken Hill and the most quietly frightened, and he had not yet decided which of his two answers he was hoping to be true. He no longer knew which would frighten him more. He kept opening the file.