Journal Archive
Gwenda Barr never spoke to the media about the murder of her police officer husband, David. Now, after eight years, she tells Brett Williams how she survivedthe blackest day of her life and endured the agonizing years that followed.
Survived by a Woman of Courage
by Brett Williams
Gwenda Barr could never have known that death awaited her husband as he went off to work on a July morning in I990. But before that morning's end, David Barr, a police officer for almost 15 years, lay dead in hospital, murdered by a knife-wielding attacker.
It was just after 9:00 am when he and his partner responded to a disturbance at Salisbury interchange. An offender was reported to have threatened a woman whom he robbed of her bus ticket. During a struggle with the offender, Barr sustained a fatal stab wound.
Earlier, he had called in to his Salisbury Heights home to collect his lunch. He didn't leave straight away. He and Gwenda drank coffee and chatted. To both of them, the day seemed just like any other. Tragically, however, neither knew that these would be the last moments they would ever have together.
Gwenda remembers her parting, jocular remark as Barr, 3I, prepared to leave and continue his shift, protecting the community. "Get back to work and stop wasting the taxpayers' money," she quipped. He drove away, and that was the last time she ever saw him alive.
Only about an hour later, as her day was routinely unfolding, Gwenda answered a knock at her door. Standing on the porch was the then officer-in-charge of the Para Hills police division, Inspector AI Thomson.
Police spouses, of course, know the chilling implication of a commissioned officer on the doorstep while their loved ones are on duty.
And, like other police wives, Gwenda had sometimes lamented the injury risks her husband faced, even as a seasoned street cop. But his death in the line of duty was a possibility she'd always seen as "an extreme" - one which she "didn't like to dwell on".
So, totally unaware of what she was about to hear, Gwenda invited Thomson inside. She remembers that "alarm bells went off" in her head as soon as Thomson said he had something to tell her.
"His words," she says, "were along the lines of: 'There's been an accident - David's been injured.' I think even the word 'stabbed' was mentioned."
But she grasped desperately at the faint hope that his injury may just be superficial. "My immediate thought was: 'Okay, what's he got himself into now,"' she says. "I didn't think of how severe a stabbing could be - I suppose that was very naive."
Thomson assured Gwenda that everything possible was being done for her husband, whose life, at that very moment, doctors were trying to save at the Lyell McEwin hospital. He told her: "I want you to be there with him".
She wanted to shower and change, but knowing how critical Barr's condition was, Thomson insisted that there simply wasn't time.
"And then," Thomson says, "I think she realized how serious it was. You could see her suddenly changing - she went literally white (and) I thought she was going to faint."
On the drive of only a few minutes to the hospital, Thomson remembers Gwenda's conversation as simply "nervous talk". She has no recollection of even speaking, as much of that day draws a blank" in her mind. But Thomson says he spoke of her two young daughters, mother and parents-in-law.
As soon as they arrived at the hospital, Gwenda was escorted to a victim room where, consumed by fear, she sat and waited with two police officers. Her desperation for news of her husband's condition was intermittently eased by a hospital coordinator.
"She (the co-ordinator) kept popping in and out to let us know what was happening," Gwenda recalls. "By that stage, I realized how truly serious it was, especially when I learned that the retrieval team from the Royal Adelaide Hospital was on its way, and that David's heart had stopped and they were trying to restart it."
Barr's wound was extensive. The knife, which was plunged deep into his chest, had penetrated his heart and caused massive blood loss. He didn't survive.
The co-ordinator made a final visit to the victim room. She told Gwenda that her husband of nine years had just died.
Today, she suspects that, had she been standing at the time she was told, she would have collapsed. "I was shocked, stunned and numb," she says. "I couldn't believe it; I didn't want to believe it either. It was terrifying."
After having only minutes to absorb the crushing news of her loss, Gwenda was shown to the room where her husband's body lay. She was left alone to be with him.
But what could she possibly do or say as she stood in that room, faced with only the body of the man she'd known and loved?
"As silly as it sounds," she says humbly, "I spoke to him."
Her imperfect memories of that day, however, afford her no recollection of what she said.
Perhaps her sub-conscious mind purposefully blocked out some of that time's most horrific details. She says that, "to this day, there are still things that are being pieced together".
A man whom she says was a tower of strength to her, on that day and beyond, was senior police chaplain, David Marr. And Marr remembers seeing her in a "very distraught state" when he arrived at the hospital.
"I saw her struggling with it, and trying to grasp just what this was going to mean," he says. "She looked as if it was all too much to take in, and what I really saw was fear and uncertainty.
"(For Gwenda), the world had absolutely changed, and life was never going to be the same again."
And Gwenda's departure from the hospital a short time later was symbolic of her entry into that changed world. But it was one in which she would find life relentlessly unkind. In her shattered state, she had to begin immediately to face all of the issues which were about to flow from her husband's untimely death.
Weighing heaviest on her mind as she returned home was her now fatherless daughters, Nicola and Sarah, then eight and six.
"The hardest thing I had to tell them was that David had died - that he wasn't coming home and they'd never see him again," she says. "I told them by myself the same day."
But there was also a funeral to arrange, people to contact and a life-routine which Gwenda battled to maintain. Outside pressures such as the media, which hungered for her story, also played a part.
"On that night," says AI Thomson, "the media wanted to do a follow-up story, and the 'vultures' had literally taken over the street where she was living. There were cars right out the front with cameras - it was appalling.
"Talk about revictimized - that's what she was. She contacted me direct and said: 'Can't we be left alone?' So, we arranged to have those people moved."
The emotion Gwenda released that day took an exhausting toll on her. She wept almost continuously. "I didn't think I had another tear in my body," she says. "I was absolutely emotionally drained."
One among those who had rallied to support Gwenda called a doctor who prescribed sedatives for her. Whether she took them is something else of that day which she can't recall.
But something which she knew would help her was a first-hand account of the circumstances of her husband's death - and it was an account she wanted from his partner.
"All I wanted to do was speak to him," she says. "I needed to hear it from him, and also find out how he was doing."
He not only explained exactly how Barr died, but also offered to take her to the scene of his murder.
"To this day, I still haven't been," she says. "I don't want to. I don't need to know - I know enough details now. "
Unable to leave their home without reporters following them in cars, Gwenda went with her daughters to stay with relatives in the country for a few days. They returned the day before Barr's funeral.
The grandeur of the police funeral overwhelmed Gwenda, but in a positive way. "I think David deserved it," she insists.
But also overwhelming in those initial days and weeks was her grief. Amid the anguish and heartbreak of losing her husband, she now had to find some way to begin a process of recovery.
"The wheels fell off in a big way at the start," she says. "(Recovery) was damn hard and very slow. I couldn't get back into a routine of normality.
"I was a danger to myself on the roads, and everybody else - my mind was elsewhere. It took me a long time to get out of that.
"It was just a case of taking one day at a time - as it came. But in the early days, it was like one minute at a time, and one hour at a time. Then, it gradually went day to day."
But the healing process which Gwenda politely describes as "damn hard", others saw as excruciating.
"I remember when we were with the funeral directors trying to make arrangements," says David Marr.
"Gwenda said: 'This doesn't get any better it doesn't get any easier.' "
And Gwenda endured many gutwrenching reminders which weren't seen by outsiders. Every night her loss was brought into sharp focus by simply lying in bed without her husband beside her.
To ease that pain, she tried to think of it as: "David's only at work - I've done this one hundred times before. I can do it again".
Sometimes, she'd set a place for him at the dinner table. "I'd realize what I'd done and the tears would start again," she says.
"It was really pretty tough ' " Even something as simple as seeing a police car cruising the streets was a painful experience. She would look and think: "David should still be driving around in one".
But her own daughters were often her most poignant reminder. "Sarah," she says, "will still come up to me and give me a cuddle and say: 'I miss dad.' I say: 'Yes, I know. If I could change things, I would, but we've got to make the best of the situation we have now.-
In the two years which followed her personal tragedy, Gwenda fought on with the support of her family, and the man whom she calls "my good friend", David Marr. But in November, I992, another unthinkable, life-threatening crisis struck: Gwenda was diagnosed with leukaemia.
She underwent chemotherapy and the disease went into remission. "When I was in hospital," she says, "it was painful emotionally, because I didn't want to cheat the kids out of a second parent."
But in July '93, she suffered a relapse and had to undergo a bone marrow transplant.
She thought that, if all her misery of the previous three years had been one of life's character-building exercises, she'd "had enough for the State". When, she wondered, "does life get better?"
Although her sheer survival was a desperate struggle for much of the time, Gwenda became philosophical. Her once strongly-held hatred for her husband's killer ceased. And suicide, as a means of escaping her torment, was a course she never considered.
"I look towards the future," she says. "The girls have been cheated of one parent, and I'm not going to let them down - if it's within my power."
But her philosophical outlook doesn't preclude her from harbouring a healthy measure of anger. The relationship between her daughters and their father, which can never be and which she calls "the missed years", infuriates her.
And in terms of her own loss, she speaks of divorcees whose parting from their spouses is by choice. She never forgets that being parted from her spouse was a matter in which choice played no part.
Now, five years since her transplant, Gwenda speaks confidently of her future. Her doctor, however, can offer no assurances.
"My doctor's not going to jinx me," she says. "She (the doctor) won't say one way or another at the moment. I just continue going for check-ups every three months."
As a woman afflicted with intense suffering and great personal loss, Gwenda has sought reasons and answers. Often, as she gazes at the portrait of her late husband which hangs in her study, she thinks: "Yeah, why?"
She insists, however, that "why" remains a question to which there is no answer. No one, she believes, can ever explain why life burdened her with so much misery.
Despite all of the trauma she's endured over the past eight years, Gwenda, 38, now regards herself as "on an even keel" and "cruising along slowly". But deeply saddening moments, with which she must cope, still arise at different times.
She feels the strain of celebrating birthdays, Christmas and her wedding anniversary without her husband. But the toughest day of all to bear is 26 July, the date of Barr's killing.
And she remembers their unfulfilled plans of working on their house together and "building a happy home life for the children".
But does she wonder if things might all have been different had her husband not been a cop?
"I do," she says. "Maybe we'd still be happy together, but life isn't happily-ever-afters, is it?"[End]