Ian Walker's death haunted his friends. His sister's love solved the mystery

Karen Walker (left) has searched alone for answers about the crimes that ruined her brother's life and hastened his death. (Supplied) Link copiedShareShare articleWarning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse which may disturb some readers. 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". Grainy freeze-frames from a 1983 Herald Shield game at Waverley Park capture Ian Walker driving Haileybury College into attack. (Supplied) 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. Ian Walker (top row, third from right) was a star player on the wing in Haileybury College's history-making first premiership team in Melbourne's prestigious Associated Public Schools football competition of 1983. (Supplied) 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. 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." In 2021, Ian Walker's headstone suggested there had been few visitors to his grave in Melbourne's Cheltenham cemetery since his death in 1997. (ABC Sport: Russell Jackson) 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

Ian Walker's death haunted his friends. His sister's love solved the mystery

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