Warning: This story contains the names and images of Indigenous people who have died.
Lake Cargelligo: For seven weeks, Lake Cargelligo has been a town on edge. Its residents have looked over their shoulders, the fibres of the town taut with grief and fear; a collective breath held.
On Thursday, there was a sigh of relief as Lake Cargelligo paused to farewell Sophie Quinn, 25, and her aunt Nerida Quinn, 50, allegedly killed on January 22 by Sophie’s former partner, Julian Ingram, in a shooting that continues to reverberate through NSW’s Central West.
Hundreds gathered at the town’s cemetery, their guards lowered – if only briefly – breathing in the smoke of eucalyptus leaves burnt to cleanse the town of the hurt of the past two months.
“In life I loved you dearly. In death I love you still,” Sophie’s mother, Cathy Quinn, wrote in a tribute published in her daughter’s memorial pamphlet.
“It broke my heart to lose you, but you didn’t go alone.”
Buried with Sophie, a son due to be born this month and named Troy after her father, who died when she was a child.
“Baby Troy how I wish I had seen you, held you. I already loved you,” Sophie’s grandmother, Bev Quinn, wrote in a tribute.
Many mourners wore T-shirts with Nerida and Sophie’s faces printed on them; Nerida’s immediate family wore Cronulla Sharks guernseys bearing her name.
Beyond the tulips laid atop Sophie and Nerida Quinn’s coffins, dozens of police officers watching on served as a reminder of the fear still hanging over Lake Cargelligo and the ongoing search for Ingram.
The 37-year-old remains on the run and wanted for the murders of Sophie and Nerida Quinn, and 32-year-old John Harris. Harris, buried last month at a service in Cobar, was sitting beside Sophie when Ingram allegedly fired a shotgun through the windscreen of her Suzuki Swift as she pulled up outside a house on Bokhara Street.
Ingram, a gardener for the local council, then allegedly drove to Nerida Quinn’s Walker Street home and shot the 50-year-old dead in her driveway. Kaleb Macqueen, 19 at the time of the attack, was shot and was seriously injured but has recovered and since returned to Lake Cargelligo.
“When I think of her kind heart and all those loving years, my memories surround me and I can’t hold back the tears,” Nerida Quinn’s daughter, Mikaila Elms, said reading from the poem Farewell Dear Mother.
“She truly was my best friend, someone I could confide in, she always had a tender touch and a warm and gentle grin.”
In a tribute included in Nerida Quinn’s memorial pamphlet, Bev Quinn said her daughter was the “best part of my life”.
“I loved you with my whole heart every single day from the moment you were born,” she wrote.
Nerida Quinn’s sons, James and Gab, said their mother’s smile was “made of sunshine”. “We had a wonderful mother, one who never really grew old,” they wrote.
Ahead of Thursday’s service, which the Herald attended at the invitation of several members of the Quinn family, police renewed their efforts to find Ingram, offering a $250,000 reward for information that leads to his arrest.
“We do believe that there is a person or persons out there that do have information that could assist us and identify where Julian Ingram is,” NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Pisanos said on Tuesday.
“We’re after an arrest, and we want to bring some justice to these families.”
Ingram has not been seen since he fled Lake Cargelligo shortly after the shootings on January 22. Investigators now hope the reward will entice people they believe have been helping Ingram to help authorities locate and capture him, but have not ruled out the possibility that the 37-year-old may be dead.
A large police presence, including heavily armed tactical officers, this week returned to Lake Cargelligo and will remain in the town to temper community fears that Ingram could return.
At the graveside, though, the fear was briefly pushed aside to lay to rest two beloved daughters, sisters, nieces, aunts, and mothers whose legacies their families say will be more than the crime that snatched them away.
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