How a sister's love unraveled the tragic death of Olympic hopeful Ian Walker and unmasked the teacher who abused him

Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse which may disturb some readers.

Winter 1983, 14 years to live.

Like a cyclone on legs, the stooped midfielder skittles his way through one, two, three, four, five Galen College opponents, tapping the ball along in front of him, making the waterlogged surface of VFL Park look like a bowling green.

Peter McKenna, the Collingwood legend, watches the cyclone on legs crashing through and almost purrs.

"Awww," he says. "That was good, strong, determined play by the Haileybury player Ian Walker."

It leads to a goal for Haileybury College, a Melbourne private school. Walker, a wiry, lean, slightly hunched ball of energy, trots back to the wing on the member's side of the ground. Later, McKenna's co-commentator Stephen Phillips says Walker is "one of the best players on the ground in my book".

The Seven network broadcast makes it look exactly like a VFL game of the 80s: the floodlights, the bog, the scrappy, physical, end-to-end play. And try telling the players it is only a schoolboy game. It is the Herald Shield; 210 schools across the state are slugging it out across months of sudden-death games.

This year, Haileybury will vanquish Billy Brownless's Assumption College on the way to the final and also win its historic first premiership in Melbourne's fiercely contested Associated Public Schools football competition, a tournament steeped in tradition and a breeding ground for future AFL stars.

The Haileybury boys are the pride of their school. A few will end up on VFL and AFL playing lists and a couple will have half-decade professional careers. Ian Walker, despite his abundant gifts, will not be one of them.

The final is an off night for Haileybury and they lose to Parade College. That night, Walker is not his usual self either. He dives under packs, ducks and weaves out of tackles, but every time he breaks free, his passes hit opponents' chests. For long spells, he languishes on the bench.

When you watch Ian in these long-ago moments of his youth, you get glimpses of the reasons why people still think about him, still talk about him, still want to know exactly what happened. It is impossible to miss his warp speed, his hair-raising courage, his willingness to take the game on.

But it is equally impossible, once you know how his life panned out, to miss the other story being told by Walker's body language: scattered, jittery, unsettled. That he is playing hurt. He is all bandages and frayed nerves.

At this precise moment, Ian's sporting magic is deserting him, to be replaced by something nobody will want to remember.

'Do you know what happened to Ian Walker?'

April 2021, 24 years after death.

Five years ago, on a grey afternoon, I found Karen Walker — or her name, at least — at the Cheltenham cemetery, on the rusty, flaking steel headstone of her brother's unpretentious grave.

"In Loving Memory of Ian David Walker," it read. "Born 4.10.1966 — Died as result of accident 22.8.1997."

And a few lines below: "Loved brother of Michele and Karen."

The word "accident" jarred. For weeks, old friends of Ian Walker had been telling me in no uncertain terms that his death was by suicide, that the brightest, most brilliant boy they'd grown up with had gone off the rails, become hooked on heroin and taken his own life. He was only 20 when he died, they said, maybe 21. Yet here I was at his grave, and it said he'd lived to 30.

They'd also said Ian's sisters once doted on him so smotheringly, it was like he had three mothers. They didn't tell me Michele had also died young, of cancer, a year after Ian, leaving behind a husband and two toddlers. I'd unknowingly walked past her grave on the way to Ian's.

The road to Cheltenham cemetery began weeks earlier when I published a story about Rod Owen, the former AFL star whose spiral into drug abuse and violence turned out to have a heartbreaking explanation. Rod's childhood footy coaches had sexually abused him, igniting a human bonfire that raged for decades.

Rod and Ian had been close friends, both brilliant sportsmen. They were 1970s classmates at Beaumaris Primary in Melbourne's bayside south, now better known, via the damning findings of a government inquiry, as the scene of wholesale child sexual abuse by four paedophile teachers.

One day, leafing through his childhood photo albums, Owen pointed to all his former school friends and footy teammates who were unravelling, addicted or dead. Ian? Dead.

"Ray got him too," was Rod's pained assessment.

In 1976 and 1977, Owen and Walker were two obvious targets of Darrell Ray, Beaumaris Primary's librarian and the coach of its football and cricket teams. The boys were not just stars at school, but key players in the Ray-coached Little League team at the St Kilda Football Club. Ray was no ordinary child abuser. Judged by the sheer scale of criminal prosecution and civil litigation, he was the most prolific of the Beaumaris offenders, with hundreds of victims.

We know all this only now, five years after Rod's brave disclosure — after waves of his peers stepped forward and revealed their own childhood horrors. Beaumaris, as well as being the picture postcard of a 1970s beachside idyll, was once a dangerous place to be a child.

Which is why, five years ago, I was inundated with emails asking the same question: "Do you know what happened to Ian Walker?"

What I knew, it turned out, was not half the story.

So, consider what follows less a companion piece to the tales of Rod and other famous victims of child sexual abuse, but the story of their ignored cousins of the 1970s and 80s. Of the hundreds more golden-hued men in the making, united in an irony: that the society which lauded them had unknowingly built them a pedestal from which it was difficult to notice their vulnerability and suffering.

Like most of those men, Ian was not a public figure. His death occasioned no media coverage. He was what journalism once dismissively referred to as one of "the little people".

There is another spin on that: "There are no little people," the American journalist Joseph Mitchell once wrote.

"They are as big as you are, whoever you are."

'I'm going to get a bit upset about that'

"Karen" and "Walker" being such common names, it was weeks before I located Ian's sister and got straight to the point: had she read Rod Owen's story?

"Yeah, I'm going to get a bit upset about that," Karen replied.

"I was devastated when I read it. Rod was Ian's best mate when they were younger. I was devastated because it's the same as my brother's story, except my brother lost his life."

Guilt struck me. I'd ruined her day. Her own plate, I learned, was full enough. She was dealing with a workplace injury whose legacy, then and now, affects every aspect of her life. And here I was, adding to those difficulties by raking up her grief.

Karen wouldn't have it. She was "actually a bit overwhelmed with happiness" to be talking about her brother with an interested stranger. She said it filled her with hope, not dread, that someone might pursue the unanswered questions plaguing her.

"Don't worry about me getting upset," she said. "Just keep going."

I filled her tearful silence with all the positive things I'd heard from Ian's old friends.

That he had been an Olympic-calibre track athlete, faster than Herb Elliott, with Hollywood good looks that had sponsors chasing him.

That he'd turned down an athletic scholarship at a top US college.

That he was the brightest spark in his year at Haileybury College.

That his fearlessness and athleticism on football fields had prompted St Kilda to try to recruit him to its junior development squad, but that he'd declined this offer too.

Karen knew all this already, but she was now reassessing why her brother had rebuffed the Saints. What gladdened her was the depth of feeling behind the stories, of the 50-something-year-old man who'd told me Ian could have been a Rhodes scholar, then dissolved into heaving tears that spoke of unresolved grief.

I told her Ian had inspired in his friends a depth of love and devotion that middle-aged men rarely verbalise. There was a tender, profound sense of longing in their anecdotes, about Ian's graceful stride around athletics tracks, his effortless command of a room, his wide-ranging intelligence and cheeky humour, and how his friends, in those highly impressionable and deeply felt early years of getting to know themselves and the world, based a portion of their self-worth on what Ian Walker thought of them.

Five decades later, women still swooned, too. A former girlfriend described Ian as the love of her life, claiming her devastation was so deep, she would not even discuss it on the phone. Another shared a class photo, on which she'd used a biro to gouge a deep, possessive circle around Ian, explaining: "I thought he was just gorgeous."

For Karen, these stories momentarily brought Ian back to life.

Time and again, people had billed themselves as Ian's "best friend", each more vehement that they'd known him most intimately, each so animated in their explanations of his extraordinariness, I suspected grief and nostalgia were enhancing the story beyond its true proportions.

"I adored Ian and he could have done so much with his life," one said.

That, of course, led to the first awkward question I had to ask Karen: how had her brother died? I'd heard many overlapping versions of the story, of how Ian's brilliance had unravelled quickly, fuelled by heroin and an inexplicable death wish.

"By the time he was 16, he'd decided he wanted to be Jim Morrison," said one friend. "He dressed like Jim Morrison and started this self-destructive rampage."

Another mournfully recalled: "Normal kid, normal family, but he just went off the rails."

"Ian's behaviour became extreme," said a woman who knew him in his teen years. "Good-looking kid. I really liked him. But like all the Beaumaris guys I hung around with, he was just nuts."

Suicide, they said. Without doubt. On some Melbourne train track or other. Tragic, but the inevitable conclusion of a human disaster that gradually drove all of Ian's friends away and then lingered iridescently in their memories.

Karen had much to fill me in on, she said, but she was now reassessing a lot of her own assumptions about her brother's life and death. She was sure Ian's death was an accident, not suicide, but now felt compelled to access his coronial inquest file to make sure.

"Just keep going," she kept saying, making me feel like I'd embarked on a new and noble quest. Reality, I can understand five years later, was far different: it was Karen's quest, a lonely and dispiriting one she'd already been on for decades.

'It's a privileged institution, and for Ian, it came with huge expectations'

Tallying everything, Karen conceded that Ian surely had been sexually abused by Darrell Ray. She was not surprised that another friend of Ian's had recalled, with dread, Ian's involvement in a disturbing re-enactment of Ray's abuse.

But I was confused: she knew Ian had been sexually abused, knew it had led to his addictions and death, but knew nothing about Darrell Ray and the abuse epidemic at Beaumaris Primary?

Karen explained. Rarely among his Beaumaris peers, mostly silent about their abuse, Ian disclosed his abuse to his bewildered parents relatively early, in 1988. He was 22 by then, staggering through an otherwise inexplicable life as a heroin addict and petty thief.

But, Karen said — and it was a big "but" — it was not Ray's abuse of him that Ian discussed with their parents. In 1979 and 1980, aged 13 and 14, Ian said he'd been sexually abused by a "swimming coach" in the showers at Castlefield, the Brighton campus of Haileybury College.

Perhaps, Karen now wondered, the abuse at Haileybury had been the final straw. It had blighted Ian's life so completely, she explained, that he'd never recovered. She'd always understood it as the single most decisive factor in her brother's death.

My next question was obvious: which teacher abused him?

This, it turned out, was one of the key unanswered questions haunting Karen. More than 30 years later, she didn't know the name of Ian's abuser, nor whether he was sacked or punished. Did he offend again? Were more lives ruined?

To the Walkers, in whose family lore Haileybury loomed large, the news of Ian's abuse had been particularly crushing. An uncle, Geoff Walker, was among Haileybury's most celebrated athletic prodigies of the 1950s, lending young Ian's feats the air of a dynasty. Haileybury was also central to the self-mythology of Ian's father, Ian Snr; his own parents ran out of money for his matriculation year.

Haileybury was the finishing school where Ian would evolve from child prodigy to man of destiny. He'd escaped Darrell Ray; now the rest of his life would begin.

There would be pressure, too.

"It's a privileged institution, and for Ian, it came with huge expectations," Karen said.

I now had an expectation of my own: in short order, I would identify the Haileybury abuser, put the pieces back together in Karen's mind and quickly publish a story about it.

It was, in hindsight, a hopelessly naive thought.

'Ian was a schizophrenic who was dealing with issues of sexual abuse that had occurred when he was at school'

November 1994, 33 months to live.

A social worker paces Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, one of Melbourne's livelier precincts — home to musicians and artists, but also the city's seedy hub of heroin and illegal sex work.

He is an experienced "outreach" officer, familiar with the most squalid scenes of drug addict despair. Yet for years afterwards, he will remember the sight, this day, of a young man crumpled on the footpath — not just under the influence of "heroin, pills and cannabis", but with "third-degree burns on his body as a result of being over exposed to sunlight due to his drug addiction".

Does he know this young man was once the pride of a swanky private school? It wouldn't matter. He helps Ian Walker to his feet, consoles him, takes him to the Alfred Hospital, arranges some counselling. In his kindness, the social worker becomes probably the second or third person Ian trusts enough to explain the state he's in.

"Ian was a schizophrenic who was dealing with issues of sexual abuse that had occurred when he was at school," the social worker later writes in a statement to police. "He was also addicted to heroin, amphetamines and prescription pills."

'Ian is the most promising middle distance prospect in Victoria'

If Ian Walker's sporting feats as a young boy convinced his peers that super stardom was fait accompli, the Walker family tree proves that nothing in life is foreordained.

In the hedonistic, bohemian Beaumaris of the 1970s, the Walkers stood out by their wholesomeness. Patriarch Ian Snr, a coal miner's son, was the first in his family with a university education, and dedicated himself to building a small empire of pharmacies. Ian's mother Judith, quirky and warm, provided the family's emotional nourishment. Ian was the cheeky one, spoiled by his older sisters, who both entered caring professions: Michele was a nurse and Karen pursued a career in workplace health and safety. They called him "Ian D."'

At nearby Beaumaris Primary School, Ian's intelligence, sporting brilliance and social magnetism ensured a lofty position in the pecking order. It also put a target on his back. To what extent and for how long Darrell Ray abused Ian is unclear, but a Saints Little League teammate who witnessed many sights he would prefer to forget forlornly described Ian as "one of Ray's absolute favourites".

In athletics, Ian's feats as a schoolboy were the stuff of local legend. In his first season at the Glenhuntly Athletics Club, he set records at every distance from 100 to 1,500 metres, establishing himself as its most outstanding young athlete. Former Olympian Leo Aarsman devised Ian's training regime with input from track legend Ron Clarke.

In 1981, as Ian was rebuffing St Kilda FC, a local newspaper article outlined his rising stocks in the world of athletics:

Sprinter-stayer Ian Walker of Deauville Ct, Beaumaris, is Victoria's most outstanding junior athlete.

Fourteen-year-old Walker picked up the top trophy at the Victorian Amateur Athletic Association presentations last week, for the second year in a row.

Walker's 800m times this season surpassed the great Herb Elliott's time (2 min. 3.4 sec.) at the same age.

The article hinted at the pressures and expectations buffeting Ian as he was reeling from sexual abuse. Said an almost reproachful Aarsman: "Ian is the most promising middle distance prospect in Victoria, and he's still only "playing" at athletics — after all, he's playing football for Haileybury, hardly proper winter preparation for running. We're bringing him along quietly, to peak around 21."

Did Haileybury notice Aarsman's broadside? Perhaps. From that moment forward, Karen told me, Haileybury's expectations of Ian only intensified, simultaneous to Ian's louder and louder cries for help.

By the time he reached Haileybury's main campus at Keysborough for his senior years, Ian would chug alcohol on the bus — before school, after school, whenever he could get his hands on it. Friends noticed him "goofing off all year and still getting As on his exams".

For a time, Ian seemed to have joined a gang. At home he would lie in the bath for what seemed like hours, listening to The End, The Doors's 12-minute dirge.

More obvious warning signs were apparently missed by Haileybury.

"At some point, Tek [Walker] became really agro at school," one of Ian's friends told me. "He was just rebellious and against everybody authoritarian. He used to have huge run-ins with the headmaster. He just became completely anti-social."

Yet historical notes of the Glenhuntly Athletics Club feature gushing references to the brighter side of Ian's double life: "Top class material — future champion … and there is plenty more to come in the years ahead, but equally important, you could not find a nicer bloke … apart from being a great athlete, he showed fine captaincy qualities … He was designated 'Mr. Popular' and for very good reason … As captain went out of his way to boost team morale; a true captain in every sense."

Haileybury was another story. The school, it seemed to Karen, cared only that Ian performed in athletics meets and in football games, where despite being an under-age player who kept injuring himself due to his reckless attack on the contest, Ian was a star of Haileybury's history-making first premiership team in the Associated Public Schools (APS) 1st XVIII competition.

"Haileybury putting Haileybury's brand as a sporting school ahead of Ian's education did not sit well with the family," Karen recalled.

"I remember the anger when Ian came home from an exam.

"He'd done something to his wrist and he was wearing a sling, and the principal [Michael Aikman] had burst into the exam room and interrupted Ian, asking if he'd be fit to play football the following Saturday."

That moment, I discovered, was surely a pivot point of Ian's life. Classmates remembered it vividly. It was early in 1984, Ian's final year at school. His face, no longer cheeky and boyish, became contorted. He stood up angrily, marched out of the exam room and never returned to Haileybury College.

In taking this stand, Ian had flunked out of high school and was made to take a job at Red Rooster, very far from a Rhodes scholarship. Many of the mates who'd once worshipped him would never see his face again.

'Appears to have a morbid fascination of death/dying'

August 8, 1986 — 11 years left.

Ian is 19 years old, two years out of school and already adrift in a sea of alcohol and drugs. The day after a drunken, violent altercation with his girlfriend, he arrives at the casualty ward of the Frankston hospital in a sorry state. On his notepad, an attending doctor bluntly records "a serious suicide attempt".

Earlier that day, home alone, Ian had written a farewell letter to his family and consumed a vast quantity of alcohol and prescription drugs. But when the phone rang at the Walker household and Ian answered to his father on the other end of the line, he admitted he was scared of dying. Sister Michele was dispatched to the house and spirited him to hospital.

For weeks afterwards, in painful therapy sessions with two local psychiatrists, Ian edges closer to explaining his misery. In one session, the psychiatrist registers a note of frustration about his "quite bright" patient: "Ian is usually guarded in what he says and how he answers," he writes.

But when you read the treatment notes with the benefit of hindsight, the hints are there.

"No problems academically but felt pressured to perform at Haileybury which he did not like and quite often was in the headmaster's office," the psychiatrist notes.

Then: "Appears to have a morbid fascination of death/dying — feels he wouldn't mind it. Today he told me since 3rd form he has talked about it and written about it."

Third form. Year nine. The year following Ian's two years of sexual abuse in the showers at Haileybury's Brighton campus.

'My brother is gone and won't come back'

July 2017, 20 years after death.

By the time Karen Walker appeared at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and made a submission on Ian's behalf, she'd struggled for decades with the painful aftershocks of his death.

She wanted to put on the record that Ian's abuse, as far as she was then aware, occurred at Haileybury College. She was seeking answers from the school to her burning questions. Which teacher abused Ian? What was done about it? Where was Ian's abuser now? Had other children suffered?

"In 1988, when my brother was 22 years old, my mother phoned to ask me if I remembered anything unusual about Ian's behaviour when he was 14," Karen told commissioner Bob Atkinson.

"I told my mother that I remembered that was the year Ian never slept. That he'd wake us all up because he couldn't sleep. That the doctor thought it was due to the stress of facing exams for the first time, and nothing seemed to help Ian sleep.

"My mother then told me that my brother had shared with my parents what he'd just discussed with a social worker. That he'd been sexually abused when he was 14, by a teacher at school. I believe my mother said it was the physical education teacher."

Pertinent to the aims of the royal commission, Karen then shared what she still believes to be an accurate account of Haileybury College's contemporaneous response to Ian's disclosure of abuse.

"My mother told me my father contacted Haileybury regarding my brother's sexual abuse. My mother told me that my father was informed by Haileybury that the teacher involved was no longer with the school, inferring he had been sacked. My mother told me my father then stopped making donations to support Haileybury … I believe my father communicated with the principal at Haileybury, who was Michael Aikman. I believe this would have been around 1988–1989 … from what my mother told me, Haileybury did not deny they knew of the teacher's abuse. Nor did they take any action other than sacking the teacher. I am not aware of the abuse ever being reported to the police."

'Ian would be in and out of institutions and psychiatric hospitals'

November 1996, one year to live.

For Ian, there had been many hard years by the time 1996 arrived.

In 1988, when Leo Aarsman thought Ian would be looping around the Olympic track at Seoul, he was commencing four years at The Woolshed, a therapeutic rehabilitation facility in Adelaide.

"I wish I could be with you," Ian wrote in a 1991 birthday card to Karen, "but there is always next year."

Two years later, missing home, he returned to Melbourne, bouncing between tenuous accommodations — other rehabs, halfway houses, crisis centres; each new location dutifully entered into Karen's address book.

In winter, there were Saturday afternoon reunions with family to watch his beloved Demons from the Melbourne Cricket Club members' reserve. They provided Ian with rare moments of normalcy.

But every other day was a struggle: to work out what was wrong with him, to find and take drugs, to get off drugs, to work his way back into the good graces of people whose trust he couldn't help but break.

"Ian would be in and out of institutions and psychiatric hospitals," Ian Snr later wrote, "however in the end nothing was able to solve his drug problems."

By late 1996, Ian was as desperate and as unhappy as he'd ever been. Evicted once more, he went on a drug-fuelled spiral that came to a literally crashing end.

Ian fell through a plate glass window, causing life-threatening gashes all over his body. Having staunched the bleeding, doctors noticed other problems: Ian's lung was punctured and he'd suffered a heart attack. They missed the alarming brain damage his drug use had done, but his survival was declared a miracle.

How long could the miracle last?

'The swimming coach was constantly trying to corner Ian in the showers'

With understatement, Karen once explained how depressing and lonely her quest for the truth had been in the years since the royal commission.

"I spoke to the specialist police in child sex abuse and they fobbed me off," she explained. "They initially said, 'We need a first-hand account', and I said, 'Well, how do you investigate murders?'

"I spoke to Haileybury, who tried to buy me off by offering to name a sports scholarship in Ian's name. I didn't respond to the email. This is the school that Ian would not want to have anything to do with.

"I told Haileybury it wasn't about me, either. My brother is gone and won't come back. I only contacted them because the head of the royal commission urged me to do so, because other children could still be at risk. My story is about ongoing risk to other children.

"But, of course, they didn't want to talk about that at all. They deflect. They ask what you want. 'How can we make you go away?'". (In response to questions from the ABC, Haileybury College said the scholarship offer was "made in good faith" and was "intended to honour Mr Walker's life, talent and memory in a lasting and meaningful way".)

Theoretically, if Ian's abuser had been sacked, as the school's then-principal Michael Aikman (who died in 2005) told Ian's parents in 1988, a paper trail must have survived. Not so, Karen was told in her communications with Haileybury.

If the school could not or would not identify Ian's abuser, I could at least offer Karen the thinnest shaft of light. Around the time of the Haileybury abuse, I discovered, Ian had entrusted at least one of his school friends with a disclosure. Now a middle-aged man, that friend had shared the information with me.

"The swimming coach was constantly trying to corner Ian in the showers," Ian's friend told me.

The mental image of Ian cowering in fear in the showers was awful to consider.

An obvious question at the outset was whether Karen's parents, then both still living (Ian Snr has since died), knew the name of the abuser. They didn't, multiple members of the extended family told me, and it was a topic neither of them was willing to discuss with a stranger.

Here, I learned that Karen's battle to obtain the truth was more complicated than I'd known, shrouded in desperately difficult family dynamics that stemmed from the deaths of her siblings.

These twin tragedies, just 12 months apart, carried a payload of grief that obliterated the Walker family. When I first contacted her, Karen had not spoken to her parents in the 23 years since her sister's funeral. This, she graciously explained, was nobody's fault. But it left Karen without access to Ian's coronial inquest file, nor his police and medical records. Within them, she felt we might find answers to the questions that plagued her.

At that point, Karen's lack of a support network was a constant worry. Her cousin Phil was sometimes on hand to keep her spirits up, and there were friends she could call on in a crisis. But how could they understand the depth of problems Karen herself could not fully apprehend?

"I've given up at times, because it just gets too hard," she told me. "I haven't ever been able to go to my brother's grave myself. I've just been too …"

At that, Karen choked up. Then she ploughed straight on.

'His life had been set back on track'

February 1997, six months to live.

Against long odds, things are looking positive for Ian. He has moved into his best accommodation in years: a Salvation Army-administered apartment close to the Windsor railway station. He shares it with a compatible fellow addict-in-recovery, a once-famous guitarist with whom Ian shares a love of the Beatles.

Here, a police summary later notes, "[Ian's] life had been set back on track."

He joins the local library, cherishing his books. He takes a creative writing course and his teacher likes his work. He is constantly calling and writing to his sisters.

Most importantly, he reconciles with his parents, planning a trip to their new home in Queensland.

"He was really rapt at the thought of this," one of Ian's case workers later writes. "He felt this meant his family were beginning to trust him again."

As August dawns, not even a pending court date for a shoplifting charge brings Ian down as much as it would have in the past, and his housemate is able to reassure him that things will be fine.

"Yeah, I'm overreacting, aren't I?" Ian says.

It will be the last quote attributed to him.

'As a young boy, it was a bit of a minefield with these guys around'

As I sift through the material generated in the five years Karen and I spent trying to identify the Haileybury abuser, the predominant feeling is of frustration.

How could it be, that at a school so proud of its former students and staff and so diligent in its documentation of their achievements, that Ian's abuser didn't leap at us from the pages of Haileybury's annuals?

And even accounting for forgetfulness and inevitably fading memories, how could so many of Ian's friends not remember the name of this "swimming coach", even when presented with team photos and staff lists?

The Haileybury friend in whom Ian confided his shower room horror said that although he knew he could identify the offender's face if given clear enough photographs, the long lens pictures in the Haileybury annuals were not clear enough. Taking a legalistic approach, he also felt it would be unfair to and perhaps defamatory of a blameless teacher if he got it wrong.

Equally, the picture Ian's friend painted of the school's junior campus in those years was an unwholesome one.

"I don't want to get Haileybury in trouble," he said.

A lead that seemed important came from a former counsellor of Ian's, who remembered Ian admitting to travelling by train to a park near his abuser's house and sitting on a bench in the hope of catching the man coming or going. But my door-knock sessions at plausible addresses yielded nothing, ditto three trips up a precarious alpine road to find a former counsellor of Ian's, who'd apparently died between attempted visits two and three.

There was more success exploring Ian's friend's adamance that a broader culture of sexual abuse had existed at Haileybury.

Back in 2021, whereas the sexual abuse histories of numerous other Melbourne private schools had made constant media headlines, there was no hint of scandal about Haileybury. But a canvas of specialist law firms that handle historical sexual abuse cases revealed that numerous legal matters related to Haileybury were gathering steam. Serious allegations hovered over several former Haileybury teachers. But none of them were swimming coaches at the Brighton campus.

From the school, there were some conciliatory gestures. Haileybury sent Karen all of Ian's yearbooks. They allowed her to stage a Loud Fence memorial event, tying ribbons to the gates of the Brighton campus. But on the day, not a single representative of the school showed up, leaving Karen, myself and the criminology academic Dave McDonald as the only attendees.

And when the school produced a permanent memorial to Ian without Karen's collaboration, she was horrified to be emailed images of a sculpture featuring photos of her brother. (Haileybury College recently confirmed the removal of the photographs, saying that it realises such matters are "deeply sensitive, and that even well-intentioned gestures can be experienced differently by those most directly affected" and said the school is open to removing the display if Karen wishes.)

Some former Haileybury teachers were helpful from the outset. One sunny afternoon, a kindly former housemaster from the Brighton campus welcomed Karen and I into his front garden and shared warm memories of Ian.

Another explained that he'd been one of the few married teachers in those days, and that staff at the school's main campus in Keybsorough had referred to Brighton as "Queen's college" on account of its numerous gay and unmarried teachers. Leery of the common homophobic conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia in the 1970s and 80s, I pushed him further: was there a suggestion of boys being targeted and abused?

He couldn't think of any obvious candidates, explaining that any number of teachers could have been and were drafted into the duties of swimming coach. His final pertinent observation muddied the waters even further: he distinctly recalled the constant, gushing staffroom chatter, from all directions, about this brilliant boy named Ian Walker.

Were we looking for a needle in a … needle stack?

'It made me feel that Ian valued his own life, the way he felt about his friend's death'

August 20, 1997, two days to live.

Ian has a productive session with the outreach worker, the kindly man who'd peeled him off a Fitzroy street three years earlier and has since done everything in his power to turn Ian's life around.

"We had set a budget for him for the next three months and he was excited that he could pay his MCC membership," the outreach worker later writes. "He thanked me and made an appointment for the following Wednesday."

Ian has plenty to look forward to as he walks home, but the past is never far from his heels. Three weeks earlier, the last of his heroin addict mates from the bad old days in Flemington had died. The verdict was suicide.

"[Ian] expressed to me that [his friend's] death was a waste, causing anxiety to his parents and girlfriend," one of Ian's case workers later writes. "It made me feel that Ian valued his own life, the way he felt about his friend's death."

Is Ian's drug use really under control? Relatively speaking, yes. But the combination of methadone and prescription drugs is fraught, especially in periods when Ian falls back into "doctor shopping" to stockpile them.

The most plausible explanation for what follows is provided by the outreach worker. At some point on the night of Thursday, November 21, while walking the streets of Windsor and Prahran, Ian loses his treasured bag of personal belongings, including his prized library books.

"His level of responsibility would cause him to panic," the outreach worker concludes. "I believe he would not have returned home until he had searched the streets for his bag. The loss of the bag would have brought on an anxiety attack and it is this sort of situation that would have caused him to use those prescription drugs, which he had collated."

'I have always carried this guilt that I was responsible for Ian's death'

With his Paddington bear duffel coat, thick biker beard and gravel voice, Michael Stretton is difficult to size up at first glance, but his gnomic wisdom and diffidence hint at his vast first-hand experience of life's darker side.

Michael was Ian Walker's best friend, which I write meaning no disrespect to half a dozen other men who've laid claim to that mantle in the last few years. Michael still talks about Ian in the present tense. In Michael's dreams, Ian is as alive as you and me. This is not to say Michael is superstitious or strange. He's as earthy and practical a character as you'd ever meet.

Karen Walker's teenage diaries contain references to Michael's adventures with Ian.

"Ian went to Healesville with the Strettons for 3 days," reads one. Another, from New Year's Eve, 1980, when the boys were 14, hints at ill omens: "I had a disastrous New Year's Eve. Very disillusioned with Ian and Michael."

Like Ian, Michael came from a respected family with high expectations. Scattered among the Stretton family tree were judges, high-ranking army officers, lawyers and public intellectuals. Michael's own career has been a patchwork of jobs that don't entirely jibe with personality and a few that do, like the years he spent counselling sexual abuse survivors at the Mayamurri healing centre. Its logo is tattooed on his body.

He counselled, sadly, with a wealth of lived experience to draw upon, thanks to the childhood degradations inflicted upon him by 'Uncle Harold' Greenwood, a war veteran who befriended Michael's father when they were members of the same Freemasonry Lodge.

"A lot of my earliest memories are of Harold," Michael told me plainly when we sat down to discuss his life.

Harold Greenwood's sexual abuse of Michael Stretton started, he figures, before he was old enough to retain memories.

"I don't ever remember thinking, 'This is new,'" he said. "It was just like … this is what happens."

Michael's early school days at stuffy Brighton Grammar offered little respite, but home life in beachside Deauville Street, Beaumaris, became a little more bearable when the Walker family arrived. Michael and Ian were both five years old. Until then, by Michael's pained admission, an imaginary friend was his main companion. But from supervised playdates, he and Ian progressed by the age of seven or eight to an inseparable duo.

"I didn't have a lot of friends, and certainly not like Ian," Michael recalled.

When I first approached Michael, the pattern of information exchange was not dissimilar to when I first talked to Karen. I told him what I knew, Michael nodded, then said he'd had no idea about Ian's abuse at Beaumaris Primary and Haileybury.

Unfortunately, Michael added, Ian's childhood was even more difficult than Karen or I knew.

As boys, Michael and Ian had been wrapped up in a "big f***ing secret", as Michael put it: Harold Greenwood had also sexually abused Ian.

"The first time would have been one of our playdates," Michael explained. "Harold turned up for lunch. And unfortunately, he got both of us that day."

Unjustly, Michael had lived the rest of his life racked with the guilt that he was "responsible for Ian's death".

Like Karen, Michael later attended the royal commission and told his story.

"I had a friend, [Ian], down the road and he got involved as well," Michael said in his statement to the commission. "We used to do things together because [Greenwood] encouraged that. And [Ian] used to get abused by [Greenwood] as well."

With the benefit of hindsight, Michael can see how this abuse warped his and Ian's bond, propelling both boys through years of risk-taking, drug and alcohol abuse, and self-destruction. Michael was shocked when he attended a school reunion and discovered how many of his classmates had been scared of him.

"It is very upsetting to hear that you've terrified people," Michael said. "I guess I was showing my pain in ways that I didn't understand. Something very bad had been going on for a long time without me ever realising what it was."

When Michael realised, and physically outgrew Greenwood, he fought him off for good. But the life-altering damage was done.

"Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I disassociate," Michael told me. "You know you're there, but you're not there."

In hindsight, Michael understands why their friendship splintered, why Ian was sometimes angry and mean, why it was natural that Michael eventually felt the "very distressing" need to pull back. He was only 19 on his final trip to see Ian at the new Walker family home in Bonbeach. Michael brought marijuana. Ian, already into heavier drugs, had sneered.

In his 20s, Michael tried to invite Ian to his wedding, but Ian was in rehab. The "last time" he attempted to reconnect, he didn't know Ian was already dead.

"I was not doing well," Michael recalled. "I called Ian's mum and said I needed to talk to him, because I wanted to apologise. But, all of my guilt since came from that call. Ian's mum said, 'He's left us, and we don't know why'. It was very dramatic. But she didn't say he was no longer alive and I was a bit too overwhelmed to really push her with questions.

"The guilt that I had been feeling just got 10 times heavier."

Another 20 years would pass before Michael Stretton learned the whole truth about his best friend.

'I would never do anything to purposely end up somewhere like this'

1993, four years to live.

In 1993, Karen Walker took a creative writing course. Almost inevitably, her first essay subject was Ian. She titled it Missing Person.

It told the story, contemporaneously, of her brother's involuntary admission to a high security ward of Melbourne's Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital, hellish and, a few years later, closed for good.

In her essay, Karen documents the feelings of bewilderment she and Ian share on a visitation day. It is the most illuminative account of Ian's lost years: the 12 years between high school and his death, when none of Ian's childhood friends knew where he was.

Its power derives from its absence of the expected melodrama, or what Karen describes as "the worst images of psychiatric institutions and mental illness, gained from no real personal experience but from B-grade television movies and fiction, [overriding] my rational thoughts with horrifying images."

Instead, there is a fidelity to the smallest details: the slobbish tracksuits that make staff and patients indistinguishable, the confounding entrance signs. Karen locates Ian not climbing up the walls or screaming, but sitting quietly in a dark communal room, watching TV. She chides herself for an "inanely inadequate" opener: "Hello, how are you?"

"I wonder how it has happened," Karen writes. "Even after years of alcoholism, drug abuse, the associated unemployment and minor criminal convictions, it is still a shock, a tragedy, to think of my 26-year-old brother being here."

Ian is equally dismayed by his fate but retains his sense of humour.

"This is where they lock us up at night", he tells Karen with a grin, as they tour the facility.

Karen is surprised by his candour.

"Uncharacteristically, he talks about his drug problem, which he rarely acknowledges to me, and about being knocked down by a car, which apparently led to him being admitted here," Karen writes.

"I've been sectioned, you know … I can't leave even if I wanted to. I must have overdosed on the drugs I was taking … I can't remember coming here. I can't remember what happened last week. I would never do anything to purposely end up somewhere like this … I'm locked in here you know … the methadone is really stuffing me around, I've got to get off it."

"I don't know what is wrong with me. I'm just so unhappy. I hated the boarding house I was living in. I was so lonely. I was as unhappy there as I am here. I don't know what to do, where to go. I just don't know what to do."

Karen is struck by Ian's "frightened eyes in this round, boyish freckled face … I struggle with this tragic statement, from an attractive, youthful man. I don't know what to do to help him either. What can I say?"

Indeed, there are no grand plans to be hatched, no fists driven into tabletops, like in the Hollywood version, only the poorly timed appearance of a dishevelled woman in a dressing gown, who interrupts Ian's emotional outpouring and asks for change to use the phone.

"Sorry, I don't have any money," says Ian, sympathetic and kind. "Why don't you call reverse charges?"

The overwhelming impression Missing Person leaves is a wish that Karen might have even one more mundane encounter with her brother, "hugging him close then softly stroking his warm cheek".

"Thank you for coming, for visiting me," Ian says near the end. "I know it must be horrible to visit your brother in a place like this."

'I am blessed to have Michael's support and wisdom'

We skipped ahead a little before, with Ian's best friend Michael. Certainly, I located him and made contact as quickly as possible. And eventually we sat down for the long and difficult chat in which he laid out the complex and troubling life story I would later feel embarrassed to compress into such a brief summary.

But at first, it was Karen, not me, explaining to Michael that he needn't have subjected himself to decades of blame and self-recrimination. I had insisted on this break from journalistic convention because I was worrying about her more and more. She seemed isolated and in need of a supportive friend with whom she shared a meaningful connection.

Perhaps Michael would be that friend? They had plenty in common and had once known each other well, after all.

Michael duly became that friend.

The closeness and rapport they developed almost immediately was a huge relief. Like Michael, Karen had spent a decent portion of her career helping people who suffered from mental health crises. With their combined skills, they could offer one another much-needed emotional ballast.

Immediately, Karen became calmer and more confident. Despite the enormous emotional damage he'd sustained himself, Michael was sensitive and emotionally perceptive, anticipating and ameliorating many of Karen's most difficult moments.

In Karen's comments about Michael, I soon recognised the blossoming of a love that ran deep and defied the labels we usually place on romantic couples. But Karen and Michael did become a couple. They began referring to each other as "my partner". It was not a typical love story, but boy was it a relief that they had each other.

"I am blessed to have Michael's support and wisdom", Karen told me in one text message. "Michael reminds me to see the big picture."

On their one-year anniversary trip to Queensland, they walked along the sands of Broadbeach and for once relaxed. Six months later, Karen told me what comfort she felt in her long conversations with Michael, how "in the eloquent language Michael has a gift of using, he always says it better than me".

During one such long and meaningful conversation, Karen and Michael decided a belated memorial service for Ian was needed; a kind of second funeral, to cater for all of Ian's friends who'd missed out the first time around.

'He had not overdosed and was not a danger to himself'

12:24am, August 22, 1997, 5 hours to live.

Two constables from the Prahran police station pull up to the scene of a suspected drug overdose. It is Ian. But attending ambulance officers confirm Ian has "not overdosed", is "not a danger to himself" and does "not require medical attention".

The constables drive Ian home. Ian is not on a bender. Neither is he fuelled by the Jim Morrison-inspired death wish his childhood friends observed 15 years ago. He is just confused and upset.

What happens in the intervening five hours is not entirely clear, but it is likely the combination of Ian's multiple sources of anxiety — his friend's recent death, his contact with police, his impending court date, his frantic search for the bag containing the few possessions he values — sends him into a panic he can't control.

In this panic, Ian reaches for his stockpile of prescription drugs.

'I believe an incident in his school years was possibly a trigger to this'

In the last five years, Karen has blossomed into a relentless and formidable advocate, not just for Ian but many other survivors and victims of sexual abuse. One particular focus has been to dismantle the institutional roadblocks faced by secondary victims in families like hers.

Her advocacy, Karen often tells me, gives her back the energy that is robbed by her ongoing battle to settle a legal case related to her workplace injuries.

She was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Victorian government's 2024 board of inquiry into historical child sexual abuse in Beaumaris Primary School and certain other government schools, at which she gave heartbreaking testimony.

That inquiry in turn prompted a $48 million "truth telling" process for survivors of abuse in other Victorian government schools; at great personal cost, Karen shared her expertise and lived experiences during its community consultation phase.

She created a support group for survivors of sexual abuse in the bayside region. She staged Loud Fence protests at Beaumaris Primary, Haileybury College, St Kilda Football Club and numerous other institutions where abuse has occurred. She has been in the inboxes of more federal and state MPs and made more Freedom of Information (FOI) requests than most journalists.

Most gamely, in seeking Ian's criminal history to help us piece together a timeline of his desperate final decade, Karen took the FOI department of Victoria Police to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). Karen self-represented, significantly increasing a heavy workload that began with a 9,000-word written statement.

The case hinged on the fact that Karen was not Ian's "senior next of kin". At length, she explained that in her parents' stead, and by then with her mother's approval (they had spoken, cordially, for the first time in decades) she was seeking important information that would help piece together her brother's life. It was a story she was certain that Ian would want told. It nagged at Karen that Ian might have confronted the Haileybury abuser in such a way that it had prompted interactions with police, and that details of such a confrontation might remain on file.

It was a marathon VCAT hearing. Karen ploughed on through panic attacks and rebuttals she felt were an assault on Ian's memory. Strangers who'd never met Ian, nor knew a thing about the unbreakable bond between the Walker siblings, told Karen that Ian would not have wanted his sister to access his file.

In what she came to view as a pointless administrative cruelty, Karen lost. When her appeal failed too, the police minister and attorney-general were unwilling to intervene.

For Karen, such drawn-out fiascos have been far too common. Just one painful example: when Ian's South Australian rehab facility sheepishly admitted to destroying his patient records only 12 months before Karen's request to access them.

If there have been more defeats than victories along the way, none of Karen's triumphs brought Ian's story more in focus than her effort to convince the Victorian coroner that she deserved access to Ian's inquest file. Upon its arrival in Karen's inbox, we immediately homed in on her father's statement, hoping to see the Haileybury abuser's name; perhaps he'd once known it, then forgotten.

Unfortunately, Ian Snr's explanation of Ian's "difficulties in life" was succinct: "I believe an incident in his school years was possibly a trigger to this," he wrote. "When he was about 14 he was sexually assaulted by a swimming coach at school."

That, we already knew.

But the file did something else very useful, explaining beyond any shred of doubt the final moments of Ian's life, which will at least correct the misconceptions of many people who knew and loved him.

It was his way home

5:26am, August 22, 1997, seconds from death.

Surveillance cameras capture Ian Walker entering the Sandringham-bound platform of the Windsor railway station. In Ian's youth, it was his way home.

A woman on the platform notices that Ian is unsteady on his feet; a few months earlier, he'd fallen on the tracks in similar circumstances and felt immense hurt when nobody helped him to safety.

As he has done dozens of times before, Ian takes a shortcut to his nearby apartment. He walks to the end of the station platform, jumps down onto the tracks and sets off home.

As in Karen's story Missing Person, it is the unadorned details of the train driver's four-paragraph statement that haunt.

Approaching Windsor station, the driver begins to slow down, passing through the bridge at Chapel Street. To his horror, he notices Ian stumbling around a mere 15 metres or so ahead.

The driver is close enough to see that Ian is startled by the sight of the oncoming train and anxious to avoid it. In the blink of an eye, the driver slams down the brakes, screams and motions for Ian to scramble onto the platform.

"[Ian] then moved in hard against the platform but he didn't make it up," the driver later recalls.

"I didn't see him after that."

Accident? Yes. But the fact that Ian Walker did not take his own life hardly masks the scale of tragedy his family woke to that awful day.

The two-word entry in the "cause of death" column of Ian's death certificate remains a loaded statement: "multiple injuries".

'I miss him as much now as I did 20 years ago'

August 20, 2022, 25 years after death.

The Melbourne Cricket Club's stuffy Long Room seemed an odd fit for the belated celebration of Ian's life for which a small contingent of his family and friends gathered on a perfectly chilly Saturday four years ago.

But the Melbourne Football Club had been one of Ian's great loves, and the member's reserve represented normality, warmth and an escape from the bitter realities of his later life. There was no better gathering place for those who'd missed his funeral in 1997.

The preceding September, as Karen, Michael and myself were in the thick of our combined research, something improbable occurred: the Dees won their first AFL premiership in 57 years.

A week beforehand, Karen had a dream in which Ian, Michael and Rod Owen were playing kick-to-kick on the football ground at Beaumaris. To her and Michael, Melbourne's triumph felt like Ian finding a way to impose his will on the universe, to send us a message that we could defy the odds, too.

Two months later, Karen decided it was also finally time to visit her siblings' graves for the first time in 25 years. It was a bittersweet moment for which we were joined by Bruce, widower of Karen's sister Michele, and a group of Michele's closest friends.

Beside Ian's freshly restored headstone, Michael placed a wreath of red roses encircled with blue bows, in recognition of the Dees's premiership. Sadness hung heavily in the air. Then Karen spontaneously belted out the opening lines of It's a Grand Old Flag, Melbourne's club song. With gusto, the rest of us joined in.

A year later, entering the Long Room, faces and names were being reconnected after decades apart. Any sense of awkwardness disappeared with the arrival of Ian's last housemate, the once-famous guitarist. His effervescence, the sheer unlikelihood of his survival and his warm-hearted anecdotes immediately transformed the mood.

Whatever Karen's anger towards Haileybury College, Ian's belated send-off was studded with deeply moving speeches by half a dozen of his Haileybury friends — precisely the sort of accomplished, thoughtful men that private school prospectuses always claim they are producing.

Then there was the towering figure of Darren Seccull, ruckman for Ian's APS premiership-winning Haileybury football team and an exemplar of the school's values statements. Unlike the other speakers, he hadn't been particularly close to Ian. And he could have been anywhere else that Saturday morning. But he put on a suit, paid his respects, and almost 40 years on from his days palming the ball down to Ian, moved to the lectern and paid thoughtful tribute to Ian's courage and talent.

Seccull had also arrived with a present that remains precious to Karen; DVDs of Haileybury's televised Herald Shield games at Waverley Park. Momentarily, they brought Ian alive, sprinting down the wing, splitting packs, driving Haileybury forward. A montage of freeze-frames now adorns Karen's Facebook page.

Others spoke of Ian's limitless potential, his devilish grin, their sorrow at not realising the source of his teenage angst. Ian's younger cousin, Tina, remembered her early childhood obsession with Ian, and how a family member pulled her aside and explained that she was probably not going to be able to marry her cousin.

"Yes, he was very good at everything," Michael Stretton said, responding to all the tales of Ian's talents. "But he always enjoyed other people getting a little bit of glory as well."

Unexpectedly, the most heart-wrenching speech was the shortest by far and delivered by the friend of Ian's who'd presented as the self-deprecating comedian of the bunch.

"The reason I didn't want to get up here is because I thought I'd cry," he said, struggling to talk.

"I'll never forget him. He was exceptional at everything he did, and that included being a friend.

"And I'll miss him forever."

'Other children could still be at risk, and that is why I'm talking to you.'

You might be wondering how it could take five years to complete a story like this. The answer is straightforward and not.

It is more common than one might imagine that the name of a sexual abuser is not known to those within his sphere of secondhand harm. And it is not uncommon that victim-survivors never utter their abuser's name out loud, even to those they trust.

I cannot bring myself to blame Karen that her longstanding mistrust of Haileybury College has, over the last five years, festered into a seething contempt. But occasionally, I played devil's advocate and asked: is it possible they genuinely don't know who did this to Ian?

Karen's response never changed: if Haileybury didn't keep notes of her parents' 1988 meeting with principal Michael Aikman, it was just as bad as covering it up, because the school could no longer rule out the possibility that Ian's abuser had caused further harm.

Karen, Michael and I had all arrived at the mystery of Ian's death with misconceptions: me that Ian's was simply another tragic tale of the crimes inflicted on boys of Beaumaris Primary and the St Kilda Little League, Michael that he alone was to blame for Ian's death after putting him in the orbit of "Uncle Harold", Karen that Ian's abuse at Haileybury was the sole source of his trauma.

Each of us sought answers in our own way, with mixed results but certain personal outcomes in common. This quest for the truth did nothing less than wreak emotional havoc in Karen and Michael's lives. Almost inevitably, the precarious combination of grief and love that brought them together eventually drove them back apart.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a love forged in such circumstances would flame out. But it leaves both short on support, and their respective legal matters — Karen's against her former employer, Michael's against the Freemasons — are unresolved.

For me, having taken on dozens of similar stories in the meantime, there have been entailments predictable to anyone with knowledge of historical child sexual abuse and its investigation: depression, anxiety, a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown.

At the school gate, at every morning drop-off, I gripped my own child's hand tighter than ever. Thoughts of Ian were never far from my mind when I set off all over Victoria, sitting in living rooms, car parks, demountable construction site lunch rooms, pubs and cafes, hearing the horror stories of decent people whose lives had been up-ended by the things that were done to them as children.

I respected their courage and did my best to honour it by probing institutions, seeking out witnesses, collating documents and writing stories. Sometimes it helped. Often it fell on deaf ears. Occasionally it felt like I'd merely raked up miseries best left in the past.

Of the latter, one of the more devastating low points was the death by suicide of one of Ian's St Kilda Little League teammates, a fellow victim of Darrell Ray. Around the time of Ian's Haileybury ordeal, this boy had allowed police to use him as human bait to finally arrest and prosecute Ray. His friends assured me his death came after decades of mental ill health, and was both complicated and grimly inevitable, but it remains difficult to reconcile with a view of a fair and just society.

It helps even less that he was such a gem of a man. When I was struggling with my failure on Ian's story, I found comfort in his distinctive all-caps text messages of support ("KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK RUSSELL"), and his requests for me to pass on messages to his and Ian's other teammates ("TELL HIM I AM THINKING OF HIM & THAT HE IS NOT ALONE DEALING WITH WHAT WE'VE ALL BEEN THOUGH").

Ian's story always presented a serious professional challenge. I cared a lot about Karen and Michael. As much as it was possible, I felt like I knew Ian. I liked his friends. I'd not wanted to let any of them down. But I'd simply failed — not abjectly, and not for lack of commitment, but in a way that felt vast and insurmountable, like a moral failure.

Then something miraculous happened. In February, Karen messaged me with news I could barely believe: the only one of Ian's close friends from his Haileybury years whom I'd been unable to interview was now willing and able to talk to me. Would I meet up with him? Immediate arrangements were made.

At a cafe not far from the bayside sports fields where Ian had entranced his friends, we sat down.

Like all of Ian's other friends, the man had never known the precise circumstances of Ian's death and was tentatively eager to hear them. When my summary was over, he was so overcome with sadness and delayed grief, he pushed his chair back and strode away from the cafe and out of sight.

A nervy few minutes later, Ian's friend reared back into view with a determined look on his face and sat back down, immediately relaying the information Karen had been craving.

"Ian told me who did this," he said. "He talked about it to me all the time."

"It was Mr Walkley."

'He wasn't even pretending to hide the fact he was pursuing boys'

Karen and I already knew a thing or two about Rhys Walkley when his name came tumbling out of the mouth of Ian's friend.

In a 2022 email, former Haileybury College Brighton campus principal Paul Aldred had given me the names of the classroom teachers associated with the school's swimming program of 1979–80, saying Walkley and one other teacher had been timekeepers.

Although I'd taken the information at face value and started investigating both men, there was a somewhat convenient overlap in their stories, as far as Haileybury was concerned: both had been openly gay men and both had died of AIDS. The first teacher was quite easy to exonerate: no criminal record, no civil lawsuits naming him, not a single bad word from colleagues, and as far as Ian's mates were concerned, he'd been above reproach.

Less so Rhys Walkley, who died in 2014. From his teaching peers I heard endless gripes bordering on character assassination, although nothing concrete to say he was a child abuser.

"I find it harder to rule out Walkley," I wrote in a 2022 email to Karen, updating her on what I was finding.

Following the recent revelation of Ian's old Haileybury friend, Walkley was more thoroughly ruled in when I obtained larger, higher quality photographs of him to send to the other Haileybury friend of Ian's who'd told me years earlier that he'd be able to identify the abuser from a close-up picture.

He replied immediately and emphatically: "That's him."

A flood of memories returned to this friend of Ian's — not just of Walkley stalking around the Haileybury pool, following Ian as he swam, but of Walkley being among the Haileybury teachers he'd previously referred to as "actively pursuing" boys.

"He wasn't even pretending to hide the fact he was pursuing boys," Ian's friend remembered when we recently spoke again on the phone.

Although he had nothing to be sorry for, Ian's friend regretted that he couldn't remember Walkley's name the first time we spoke. He knew it had been a surname starting with W, he explained, but hadn't wanted to tell me so, lest he implicate the wrong teacher.

He also hadn't wanted to tell me of his own experiences, lest they muddy the waters.

"I remember him putting his hands on me," he said. "He was the bus monitor. He would be actively stalking kids in the line. I was unbelievably uncomfortable about it."

In 1980, he recalled, he'd told his mother of Walkley's groping. "She was going to do something about it, but I told her not to," he said. "I didn't want anyone saying anything about me."

Ian's friend's mother, still alive, recently recalled that another parent had done something about it at the time: "At some point, someone's mother went in and made a fuss about it", Ian's friend said, and Walkley was sacked.

This possibly explained why, having appeared in school annual photographs during Ian's two years at Haileybury's Brighton campus, in 1979 and 1980, Walkley was missing from the Brighton campus staff list by the end of 1981.

'That he had to be told what was inappropriate I felt was a black mark for him'

I recently put all this new information to the Haileybury College Brighton campus principal of the time, Paul Aldred, and was pleasantly surprised at the candour of his emailed reply, which contained further alarming details about Walkley's employment at Haileybury.

"Rhys Walkley was not my best appointment," Aldred wrote.

"His CV, I recall, included a reference to involvement with the Victorian Swimming Association [or similar], which was in his favour as we had a new pool and the Sportsmaster could do with help with coaching.

"Only after his appointment did I discover he was not a swimming coach, but an official [timekeeper/judge]. Black mark for me for not asking the right questions. However, he was willing to assist the Sportsmaster with team management and proved efficient at that."

Aldred's email went on to state that he had "no complaints about [Walkley] from parents or boys".

"Over time, though, some question marks did form in my mind," Aldred wrote.

"First, there was a photograph of Ian Walker. I found it on one of the proof sheets of the school photographer, employed by the school for public relations promotions. When I asked [the photographer] about that particular photo, he said Rhys had asked him to take it. It was not a revealing photo — Ian was in the corner of the pool up to his waist in water looking up at the camera. I remember feeling it was a strange request on Rhys's part, but did not follow up the matter any further."

Here was Walkley, for what can only have been his own personal gratification, seeking topless photos of a pubescent student, and not just any pubescent student, but Ian.

"The second," Aldred went on, "was when I passed Rhys's Class 4 classroom just before the end of one school day. I caught a glimpse of Rhys sitting at his desk tucking in a boy's shirt down the front. I spoke to Rhys afterwards about how inappropriate that was.

"That he had to be told what was inappropriate I felt was a black mark for him."

So, why and when was Rhys Walkley moved on?

"The third incident, which led to him leaving the staff, happened late in 1981," Aldred wrote.

By 1981, Ian Walker and his friends had already graduated to Haileybury's senior campus in Keysborough, 16 kilometres away, out of sight and out of mind. But Walkley had not even seen out the 1981 school year. I found a newspaper advertisement for his job during the mid-year school holidays, in July, 1981; Aldred confirmed it meant Walkley had departed mid-year, with unusual abruptness.

"They were the only indications I had of Rhys's tendencies," Aldred concluded. "However I think I was probably relieved he left, especially as his replacement proved such an outstanding teacher."

Presented with the details of Ian's abuse and its aftermath, Aldred lamented the "catastrophic chain of events" and expressed his sorrow that Ian was not able to share his burden.

"I walked in the grounds every lunch time catching up with boys and talking to them," Aldred wrote. "But clearly my availability was insufficient."

In response to my queries, the Victorian Department of Education has since confirmed Karen's fears: after Rhys Walkley moved on from Haileybury College, he continued his teaching career.

Walkey's movements between 1981 and 1988 are difficult to establish — it is likely he taught at other private schools in those years — but in 1989 he gained employment in the public school system, working as an emergency teacher at Aspendale Technical School and Aspendale Primary School in 1989, and as a classroom teacher at the storied Melbourne High School between 1990 and 1994.

A few weeks ago, I located someone who attended Walkley's memorial service in 2014 and asked him what he remembered of it. Walkley had been a nature lover, he said, and each funeral attendee was given a small banksia plant to grow in Walkley's memory.

I asked what became of the man's tree.

"I planted it," he replied, "but the damned thing shrivelled up and died."

'Overwhelmed with waves of jubilation and gratitude that made sleep impossible'

A few years ago, after many trips around the Beaumaris neighbourhood of Ian Walker's youth, I thought the perfect ending to his story had come to me in what has turned out to be a recurring dream.

In the dream, it is Christmas day. I am standing by the window of the Walker family home in Deauville Street, Beaumaris. Karen and Michele and Ian are all there, all older, but not unrecognisable, attending to children and grandchildren. Michael Stretton is there too. It is as though no misfortune has visited this happy and normal family.

In the dream, the Walkers can't see me, but I want them to. I want to ask Ian a question. But before he walks towards me, before I even know what I need to ask him, I wake up with a jolt, panicked and frustrated.

This, of course, is the B-grade movie version of life that Karen resisted when she wrote her essay, "Missing Person".

In recent weeks, I have sought accounts of Rhys Walkley's personality and behaviours from people who knew him. He was, by various reports, pompous, brilliant, eccentric, difficult, the possessor of a memorable handlebar moustache, wearer of distinctive broad-brimmed hats, a collector of stamps and fossils, a lover of drama and genealogy, and in his later years in beachside Seaford, an environmentalist intent on saving an endangered bayside bandicoot.

Does knowing these things humanise Walkley? Of course, which is one point we should always remember when tackling child sexual abuse like that inflicted upon Ian Walker: it is committed not by monsters, but by normal-looking men who collect stamps and wear funny hats and lie a little bit on their resumes.

For Karen, Walkley's name and face now prompt a clearer mental image: he is cornering and sexually assaulting Ian in the showers at Haileybury, ruining everything in that instant, tilting Ian's trajectory directly towards the train tracks at Windsor station.

Since our overdue discovery of the final piece in the jigsaw of Ian's life, I asked Karen to put down in writing how she feels to know the full truth — about Darrell Ray, Harold Greenwood, and this new and discomfiting figure in her life, Rhys Walkley.

Characteristically, Karen took this task very seriously, drafting four versions, each detailing the pain of the 37 years she has spent knowing that it was Ian's abuse at Haileybury College that ended his life, and the feelings she grapples with every day after watching her brother fade away.

The "pursuit of the truth", Karen wrote, "is one of the ways I have been continuing to be Ian's sister, honouring how much Ian meant to me and honouring the memory of our wonderful big sister Michele, who would have done the same for Ian."

The day Karen finally heard Walkley's name, she was "overwhelmed with waves of jubilation and gratitude that made sleep impossible that night, because this is a form of justice for Ian, and for the many people who have continued to remember him, stand by him, and do their best for him."

She could reflect now on the miraculous way her advocacy for Ian and other victim-survivors had given her "a much-needed sense of purpose, at the time a workplace injury ended my career".

Whereas "multiple dimensions of my wellbeing have been seriously diminished by my injury, advocacy helps me remember who I am."

I gave Haileybury College the opportunity to respond to the news that we'd identified Rhys Walkley as Ian's abuser, and that its former Brighton campus principal had confirmed Walkley's removal from staff.

A school spokesperson confirmed that Haileybury College has not located any records of Ian's parents' meeting with former principal Michael Aikman, and that in the years following Karen's first approach, it had not been able to identify Ian's abuser. Haileybury said that "to ensure compliance with privacy obligations", it would not comment on Rhys Walkey's tenure or dismissal from the school.

Haileybury College's CEO and Principal Derek Scott offered a statement on behalf of the school.

"Sexual abuse is abhorrent and Haileybury has zero-tolerance for child abuse and inappropriate behaviour of any kind involving children as this is a devastating violation of trust and safety and its impact is lifelong," Mr Scott said in the statement.

"We condemn sexual abuse without reservation and stand with all victims and survivors.

"Our thoughts are with the Walker family, their friends and all victims and survivors. We acknowledge the courage it takes for survivors and families to speak about these experiences, and we support every person's right to be heard, believed and treated with care and compassion."

Is this privileged institution inherently bad? No, but perhaps the exemplary men who passed through its halls with Ian are a greater credit to themselves and their families. At a school so proud of its history, there is certainly room for greater thoroughness in investigating historical wrongs and thoughtfulness in acknowledging those it has harmed along the way.

Equally, this was never the abusers' story and neither is it Haileybury's. The reason for its resolution is the same as the reason for its existence: Karen Walker's courage, persistence and dignity in the face of her grief.

So, if my recurring dream ever reaches its conclusion, and Ian finally gets to the window to hear my question, I hope my question will not be about those who abused him and failed him and ended his precious life, but about the person standing right beside him, then and now.

I hope my question will be: do you really understand how much your sister loves you?

Contacts:

• If you have more information about this story or others like it, contact reporter Russell Jackson (jackson.russell@abc.net.au) or digital editor Kyle Pollard (pollard.kyle@abc.net.au).