Theresa wants to signal that she was moving toward the end of her speech. she needs to insert a:

Macklin loads the dogs into the back of his brand-new, $60,000 Toyota RAV4 (“lovely car, great car”), into which he’s sunk his entire recent divorce payout. He cruises past the Metung shops, past the yacht club, and – in a decision that still haunts him – past the Rosherville Road turnoff, his regular shortcut home to Swan Reach, 10 minutes away. The music’s on, but not too loud. And he’s driving just under the 70-kilometre speed limit because, as a local, he knows this is wombat territory.

He follows Metung Road up a hill, leaving behind the town lights. He passes the dog kennels that care for Jasper and Kiro and is now deep into farmland that gently undulates between Metung and the Tambo River. Then, rounding a soft bend 4.5 kilometres from Metung, a woman appears out of the pitch-black, running across the opposite lane towards his car.

“A girl has just popped out of the middle of nowhere,” he tells me. “But not just popped out, she ran in.”

He hits the brakes. Everything slingshots towards the windscreen: the dogs slam against their cage, Macklin’s collarbone snaps, his teeth chip against the steering wheel. He’ll be unaware of these injuries until a day later: right now he’s desperate to find his phone to call triple zero. He finds it and steps out into the inky black. “Are you okay?” he calls out, the thin white phone light revealing bits of his car everywhere. Then he falls over the woman’s body, cutting his knees on the bitumen. “I tried to help,” he says. “But it was too late.”

Click to reload

In the 15 minutes before the ambulance arrives, Daniel Macklin sits with the young woman in the middle of the night, in the middle of a road, in what feels like the middle of nowhere. When the ambulance arrives, throwing more light onto the scene, he realises with a lurching panic that this might be the woman he is currently dating. She’s wearing similar clothing. He spots her handbag, sitting upright in the opposite lane, and searches for a phone, desperate to call an emergency contact. The screen comes alive with an image of the woman and an older man. This is not his lover’s father, he thinks. This is not my lover. On the phone he sees no missed calls or messages.

Eventually Macklin is taken to Bairnsdale, where he clears an alcohol and drugs test. “The detective said: ‘Mate, Michael Schumacher couldn’t have stopped. You’ve done nothing wrong.’ Then he said: ‘I don’t want you watching the news. This girl’s well known.’ ”

Nineteen days earlier, the woman Macklin hit – 23-year-old Ashleigh Petrie – had gone from an unknown court clerk to the focus of a media storm and legal controversy. On October 9, 2019, in a front-page story, Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper had revealed her relationship with then 68-year-old magistrate Rodney Higgins, 45 years her senior. The story went viral, and sparked serious questions about power and workplace culture in Victoria’s court system. The relationship was raised in the Victorian parliament and a complaint – later dismissed – was fired off about Higgins to the Judicial Commission, the oversight body for judges in the state.

“In all honesty, I don’t think it was just the media that tipped Ashleigh over the edge. I think there’s more to it.”

Ashleigh Petrie’s brother

Then, the day after Ashleigh died, there was silence. The media noted “no suspicious circumstances” and moved on. The coroner found Ashleigh Petrie took her own life “by deliberately running in front of a car”. His report, which Good Weekend has seen, has not been made public. Higgins returned to the bench and – a few months later – to his long-term partner, Lurline Le Neuf.

Ashleigh’s mother Theresa and brother John (both pseudonyms) were left not only with unrelenting grief, but with many unanswered questions about that night – about what Ashleigh was doing alone on that road, and what they see as Higgins’s odd behaviour that night and his hurtful actions since. “In all honesty, I don’t think it was just the media that tipped Ashleigh over the edge,” says John. “I think there’s more to it.”

Theresa Petrie lives alone in a regional town an hour’s drive west of Melbourne. Hers is the back flat in a row of four small, 1980s-style brick units. On a Saturday in early March, Theresa – straight blonde hair, striped top, jeans – welcomes me into her spotless unit, where the floorboards are shiny and Ashleigh is everywhere. Framed on the wall, in a soft apricot dress, she’s with Theresa and John on Mother’s Day. In a corner, in a shrine-like setting, she’s pictured with a gold garland crowning her long brown hair. She looks almost like a forest nymph; a beauty from another world.

This is my second interview with Theresa, both conducted with a lawyer present. Her wariness is understandable: she partly blames the media’s scorching spotlight for her daughter’s death and guards her own privacy strenuously. This is why Good Weekend has changed her and her family’s names.

Ashleigh Louise Petrie was born in 1995, in Melbourne. John followed two years later. Theresa and then-husband Peter (they separated in 2015), lived in the city’s outer-western suburbs and the kids grew up under her protective watch. “I never took my eyes off my kids,” she says. Ashleigh was Daddy’s little girl, but mother and daughter were also close, only 16 years apart. “I was like her big sister,” Theresa laughs through tears. “Actually, she hated that comparison!” Ashleigh loved watching Keeping up with the Kardashians. She was chubby – then, after a health kick, skinny.

In years 11 and 12, at her high school in Hoppers Crossing, Ashleigh hit the books. Post-it notes bloomed around the house as she committed her studies to memory. She was uninterested in partying or boys. “I’d take her to a party and say, ‘Don’t ring me for a few hours,’ ” says Theresa. “But within an hour she’d be home, saying she had to study.” It paid off: Ashleigh’s marks got her into a psychology degree at RMIT University (she switched to criminology after six months).

Ashleigh was a lover of inside jokes; bubbly, happy, generous. About seven months before she died, Ashleigh dragged her mother and brother around the city streets until 10pm, handing out hot cross buns to the homeless. “We weren’t allowed to eat before we gave out all the buns,” remembers Theresa. But with this generous heart came a trusting soul. “She was young and naive, very naive, I probably sheltered her a bit too much in life,” says Theresa. “She trusted everybody.”

And when your trusting, big-hearted daughter becomes an adult, there’s only so much you can do.

“I wish I could have protected her,” says Theresa. “She was 23 and you can’t go kidnap her. I would have loved to have kidnapped her and spoken sense into her.”

At about 8.30am on Monday October 28, seven-and-a-half hours after Ashleigh died, Stuart Gowty found his neighbour Lurline Le Neuf madly knocking on his back door. She’d heard rumours on the court grapevine that something bad had happened to Ashleigh. Gowty rang Theresa and suggested she call Ashleigh. Theresa’s calls went to voicemail. Theresa then called Higgins, but it rang out. About 20 minutes later, Gowty called Higgins, who picked up first ring. Gowty urged him to call Theresa immediately. “He goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will. I’ve got to go.’ And then he hung up and proceeded to turn his phone off.”

Theresa tried Higgins about 10 times. Around 9.30am, she says, he finally returned her call. “He says: ‘Oh, she’s dead.’ I mean, who says, ‘Oh, she’s dead’? ” says Theresa, crying in gulping, big breaths.

Within three days of her death, Good Weekend has confirmed, Higgins had called Rest Super about Ashleigh’s $180,000 death benefit. The magistrate, who earns $324,000 a year, then made a successful claim, despite Ashleigh having bequeathed the money to Theresa, who earns a modest income in an accounts job. (An appeal process against Rest’s decision, now in its 16th month, is still afoot and Theresa is raising funds for her legal fees via a GoFundMe page.) Higgins refused to let Theresa and John see and listen to Ashleigh’s last messages.

Putting his garbage out a few months after Ashleigh’s funeral, Gowty needed more space and opened the Higgins/Le Neuf bin. He spotted some of Ashleigh’s mementos, including her Western Bulldogs hat. When Gowty tells me this, I notice his usual joviality has leached away. “I still love her and I still miss her,” he says. He regrets his restraining order every day – that he wasn’t there for Ashleigh when she needed him. I suggest that living here, next to Higgins, might not be good for his mental health. He’s already decided to move, he says, and does so a few months later.