She Chose Him
The collected chapters of Sarah Jane Lahey—from orphaned child in Tasmania's highlands to tenacious detective in Hobart's Criminal Investigation Branch. These first-person accounts trace a life shaped by loss and driven by an unrelenting need for truth, spanning her grandmother's deathbed to storm-soaked pursuits through wilderness, from partnership with Karl Jenkins to the fatal meeting in Myrtle Forest. Witness a woman whose exceptional investigative instincts were matched only by her capacity for misguided devotion, whose pursuit of justice became entangled with impossible choices, and whose story ended at twenty-nine in circumstances that remain as complex as the cases she investigated.
This is Sarah Jane Lahey, and she could read anyone except herself.
From the moment a helicopter crash orphaned her at nine, Sarah understood loss. But understanding didn't equal healing. These chapters trace how a troubled girl who tested every boundary transformed into a detective who could see patterns invisible to others—witness interviews that broke open cases, instincts that connected dots across impossible distances, an intuitive brilliance that earned commendations and concern in equal measure.
Her grandmother Jane anchored everything. Weekend meals, medical appointments, the only relationship where Sarah could breathe. Until July 2018, when cancer claimed Jane just as the Greyson-Jeffries investigation began unraveling reality itself. Vehicles vanishing mid-chase. Whispers in empty houses. A suspect who turned out to be family.
And Karl Jenkins—her partner, her obsession, the man whose intensity mirrored her own until she couldn't distinguish dedication from destruction. Sarah's chapters don't shy from the truth: she loved someone incapable of reciprocation, covered his violence, destroyed evidence to protect him, crossed every line she'd sworn to defend.
The archive ends in Myrtle Forest on August 8, 2018. Two days after Jane's death, Sarah met Gladys Cramer in circumstances that remain as contested as they are tragic. She was twenty-nine years old, brilliant and broken, a detective who spent her life seeking truth whilst becoming trapped in lies she told herself.
Read Sarah's story to understand how someone so gifted at seeing through others remained blind to her own unravelling.
