On January 2, 1989, NSW Homicide Squad detective Risto Baltoski and I were driving in separate police cars to Adelaide to continue an investigation into Italian organised crime when Risto was involved in a head-on collision on the Sturt Highway.

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It happened exactly halfway between Balranald and Hay, in the piercing heat of the Hay Plains.

Risto died in my lap. An off-duty nurse tried to ease his pain while bystanders held sheets over the three of us to shield us from the brutal January sun.

Eight days later, AFP Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester was murdered in the driveway of his Canberra home.

Two policemen. Two families. Eight days.

Nearly 18 years later, on September 29, 2006, their names were among those commemorated when the National Police Memorial opened in Canberra.

As we approach the 20th anniversary of that day, it is worth remembering what those names represent.

A memorial inevitably reduces a life to a name and a date. But behind every name is a story, and behind every story are the people who had to continue living after someone they loved did not come home.

After Risto's police funeral in Sydney, the investigation in Adelaide still had to be done. Other colleagues and I returned to work, leaving his young family to begin the much harder task of learning how to live without a father to his two young children, a husband to his young wife and son to his elderly parents.

I saw another version of that grief in Canberra.

For years after Colin Winchester's murder, his widow Gwen cut a lonely figure in the same pew, week after week, at St Peter Chanel's Catholic Church in Yarralumla.

The murder itself was terrible enough. Then came years of investigation, prosecution, appeals and inquiries.

David Eastman was convicted of Winchester's murder but that conviction was eventually quashed following an inquiry led by former Northern Territory Chief Justice Brian Martin.

I know Brian Martin well. He had prosecuted cases arising from our organised crime investigations in South Australia and I have no difficulty with his findings in the Eastman inquiry. Nor, from my experience of those investigations, do I give any credence to suggestions that Italian organised crime was responsible for Winchester's murder.

But legal proceedings have a clinical vocabulary: evidence, convictions, appeals, inquiries. There is nothing clinical about being the family caught in the middle of them.

That is what the National Police Memorial........

© Canberra Times