Forty-one-year-old Mary Anne Fagan lived a fulfilling life as a homemaker, dedicated to her husband, Collins Fagan, a Royal Australian Air Force officer, and their five children. The family had settled in Armadale, Melbourne, after years of moving between Australia and the UK.
The morning of February 17th, 1978, began like any other. At around eight thirty a.m., Mary Anne drove four of her children to school in the family’s Holden station wagon, returning home with her seventeen-month-old son, Patrick, by nine fifteen a.m. Her husband was away at work and not expected back until later that afternoon, though she spoke with him briefly on the phone at approximately ten a.m.
Around ten thirty a.m., a neighbor saw Mary Anne speaking with council workers repairing the road outside their home, and a passerby reported seeing her in the front yard. These would be the last known sightings of her.
Shortly after four p.m., the Fagan children returned home from school and sensed something was terribly wrong. The side gate was open, an unusual detail, and they could hear their baby brother crying inside the house. Mary Anne’s car was still in the driveway, but the doors to the house were locked. Unable to enter, the children called their father from a nearby phone box. Returning to the house, one of them broke a window to gain entry. Inside, they made a devastating discovery: their mother’s body in the front bedroom.
Mary Anne had been bound, gagged, and fatally stabbed multiple times. An autopsy later revealed that the stab wounds pierced her lungs, heart, and stomach, causing death by hemorrhage. According to reports, she was found naked, face down on a bed, with bleaching cream still in her hair, lying on a plastic sheet. Several personal items, including a handbag and two sums of money, were missing from the home and have never been recovered.
Victoria Police launched an extensive investigation, interviewing dozens of individuals, including the council workers seen near the home that morning. One worker, James Robert Scanlan, was questioned for more than sixteen hours and reportedly told he would be charged, though no charges were ever filed. The coroner, Mr. K. Mason, noted in 1979 that the evidence from the council workers was “not very satisfactory” and that Scanlan had been “far from honest” in his statements, particularly regarding a “sexual” conversation about Mary Anne with another worker that morning. Despite these leads, no suspect was identified, and the murder weapon was never found.
The coroner’s inquest in June 1979 concluded that Mary Anne died from stab wounds inflicted by an unknown person in a “vicious and frenzied attack.” No motive was established, and the case gradually went cold. The brutality of the crime, committed in broad daylight on a busy street and with a toddler nearby, baffled investigators. Detective Inspector Dean Thomas later noted that Dandenong Road’s high traffic made it likely that someone witnessed something significant, yet no breakthrough emerged.
In April 1978, a $20,000 reward was offered for information leading to the killer’s conviction, increased to $50,000 in June of that year. On February 15th, 2024, Victoria Police announced a $1 million reward, hoping to prompt new leads in the forty-six-year-old case. As of this writing in June 2025, however, the rewards remain unclaimed, and the identity of the person or persons who murdered Mary Anne Fagan is still a mystery.
Crime Immemorial 