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People in Lake Cargelligo don’t typically lock their doors. Most of the town’s 1200 residents know one another – some better than others – but at the very least, they all know of one another. If someone isn’t where they say they will be, someone will know where to find them. Though the town isn’t without crime, it has been a place where locals are not accustomed to violence in the extreme.
But Lake Cargelligo has changed. Now, people lock their doors not once, but twice; they check the windows before going to bed and chock them shut. Many people have installed CCTV at their homes; others are taking extra measures like keeping baseball bats by their front doors. Lake Cargelligo is not a town living on the edge of fear – it has fallen over the precipice.
“We’re not resting,” Margaret Harris says. She is not alone, but for her, the nights since January 22 have been especially long and sleepless. Each of them has been spent longing for her grandson, John Harris, to walk laughing through her front gate and, like the rest of Lake Cargelligo, reliving a day that turned the town inside out.
Warning
This story contains the names and images of Indigenous people who have died
The fatal shootings of Harris, his friend Sophie Quinn, and her aunt, Nerida Quinn, almost two months ago have not just shaken Lake Cargelligo to its core. They have peeled back the layers of its residents’ complex histories and revealed a community gripped by long-standing feuds, drugs, and a paralysing fear that an accused killer could soon return.
‘All I heard was the shotgun’
Walking towards his ute with his adult son Wendall, Dwayne Kirby hardly took notice when he spied Sophie Quinn driving her black Suzuki Swift towards his house just after 4pm on January 22. Far from an unexpected visit, the 25-year-old stopping by was about as certain as the sun rising. Just as normal was seeing John Harris in the passenger seat. John was seven years older than Sophie, but the pair had grown up together; they were just about joined at the hip, their families say.
Sophie drove north along Bokhara Street and past Lake Cargelligo’s pool opposite Kirby’s house. She waved to Dwayne and Wendall as she got closer and made a U-turn. She pulled her car in behind Dwayne’s, as the father and son got into their car. As she did, Dwayne saw Julian Ingram, the local council’s gardener, tearing up the street behind her. Ingram cut across the street, swerving sharply towards the roadside, stopped beside Dwayne’s car and pointed something out his driver’s side window back towards Sophie. “All I heard was the shotgun,” Dwayne says. “He just cocked it.”
The next thing he heard was the first shot shattering Sophie’s windscreen. As Dwayne started his car and headed for the police station to raise the alarm, the second shot echoed through the street. Before they reached the end of the street, two more shots were fired. Dwayne called the local officers whose phone numbers he had saved, but couldn’t get hold of anyone.
After pounding on the front door of the station with no answer, Dwayne drove back towards home and pulled in beside Sophie’s car, now at a standstill. It had veered over the kerb and rolled into the back of a nearby trailer. When police arrived, there was no hope of saving Sophie or her unborn son. Dwayne could see Sophie slumped in the driver’s seat, motionless. She had been shot in the head.
John, though, still had a pulse and a chance. They dragged him, suffering from several gunshot wounds and barely alive, from the car and onto Dwayne’s lawn. John’s uncle, Dean Harris, begged the paramedics who took over from police to keep treating his nephew. “Keep going, keep going,” he screamed. “Keep working on him.” The crowd grew, neighbours screamed, family howled, children seeking refuge in the pool from the blistering heat watched on, and paramedics laid a blanket over John’s body. “He’s gone,” they told Dean.
Nearby, shotgun shells and shattered glass lay on the bitumen, but Ingram had gone. The bad blood between Nerida and Ingram was no secret, and the gardener, still armed and driving like a man possessed, was headed for the other side of town. Word and panic spread. “He’s gone to Nerida’s,” relatives gathering at the crime scene screamed at police.
By the time officers had driven the 1.2 kilometres and seven streets west to Nerida’s Walker Street house, it was too late. She lay dead in the front yard, shot in the head, and her son’s teenage friend, Kaleb Macqueen, was seriously injured. Already the killing of three people was too much for the six police officers permanently stationed in Lake Cargelligo to handle; controlling the crowds of traumatised and grieving relatives alone would sap precious resources. Forensics officers who needed to examine the crime scenes would be hours away. But they had a bigger problem: Julian Ingram had fled town and no one knew where he was headed. Worse still, he had a head start and he was armed with a shotgun.
A town torn between allegiances
Matt Cruickshank worked with Julian Ingram at the Lachlan Shire Council for most of the past decade. For some of that time, he lived two doors down from him. Often, the pair would drink together, either at Cruickshank’s house or Ingram’s, and always they’d have a good time; between work and home, he’s probably seen more of Ingram than most in recent years. The two were close. More than once in the weeks after the shootings, police turned up at his house to ask if he knew anything about Ingram’s whereabouts. Cruickshank sees Ingram as not just a friend, but someone who did a lot for Lake Cargelligo, both in his work and beyond it. “I f---en loved him,” he says.
The day of the shootings, Ingram seemed normal, Cruickshank says; a few hours earlier, he’d taken a kilogram of cooked sausages from the council work fridge. It was odd, but it was the sort of thing Ingram would do for a laugh. About 10 minutes before the first shooting, Cruickshank’s housemate, Josh McCarten, was at work when he saw Ingram driving through town. As he drove past Wood’s Tyre Service, Ingram waved to McCarten, lifting a single finger from his steering wheel. Neither believes the rumour that Ingram kept a gun in his work ute. Where Ingram, who has never held a gun licence, got the weapon remains a mystery to them and police.
There are a number of others who, like Cruickshank, speak highly of the “Hoolio” they knew before January 22. Marty Riley, who watched Ingram grow up at Euabalong, a town of 80 or so people about 25 kilometres north of Lake Cargelligo, says Ingram was probably the hardest worker he’s ever seen. In the months they worked together as brush cutters, and the years they drank together at Euabalong, where Ingram lived until about a decade ago, Riley says he never saw him start a fight or cause trouble.
Few of Ingram’s friends will put their names to their views. Many are torn between their years-long friendships with Ingram, and their connections to the Quinn and Harris families – biological or otherwise. They admit, though, that Ingram is no saint, and that rarely did he find himself on the right side of the law. Local police granted Ingram bail last November after he allegedly assaulted Sophie as they were breaking up. Police have subsequently pointed to the passage of time since Ingram had last been accused of a violent crime as the main reason he was not kept behind bars – one decision of many police made in the lead-up to the shootings that are now under the scrutiny of the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission. In court, three days after he was granted bail, police successfully applied for an apprehended domestic violence order to protect Sophie from him. It was the third restraining order taken out against Ingram.
Ingram, in turn, has been on the receiving end of Lake Cargelligo’s violent side. Twice, in 2019 and 2022, police sought restraining orders to keep Ingram safe. One of those was against John Harris. Ingram and Harris had long had their issues and came to blows more than once. Who was to blame depends on family allegiances.
Harris’ family say the assault was retaliation after Ingram set Harris’ car alight; Harris confronted Ingram and “flattened” him.
Those on the other side of the fence remember it differently. Cruickshank says the “rumour” that Ingram had torched the car wasn’t true, but Harris tore through Ingram’s house and flogged him regardless. Ingram wasn’t charged over the fire. Harris pleaded guilty to assaulting and attempting to stalk or intimidate Ingram. He was spared jail to serve his sentence in the community and complete an anger management course, but the pair’s already strained relationship was cactus after that. “They haven’t been right since,” Dean Harris says. “Really, they shouldn’t have been near each other.”
As mad as those close to Ingram say he could be, no one expected this. He could fly off the handle and didn’t shy away from a fight, but even for him killing three people was a bridge too far. “I never thought he had that in him,” a friend of Ingram’s late mother said. Like many others, the friend talked on the proviso their name not be used.
Many people in Lake Cargelligo knew Ingram well, but none know why he would do what the police have accused him of. Everyone has a theory. Most believe Ingram found out he wasn’t the father of Sophie Quinn’s unborn son and saw red. When he was told he wouldn’t be involved in raising the child, they say, he set out to make sure no one else would. Sophie’s family say Ingram was not the father of her unborn son and that he knew as much from the moment she fell pregnant, but in the months before and after the pair separated in November, Ingram told several people otherwise. “I finally got me boy,” Ingram, who has fathered three daughters to three different women, told one friend last year.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, police initially suspected Ingram had shot Sophie Quinn and Harris in a fit of jealous rage, believing the pair had taken up together. The Quinn family say Sophie and Harris were not romantically involved, but best friends. Whether Harris was a target or collateral damage is unclear. “You never know what people are capable of,” another local close to Ingram says.
When it comes to Nerida Quinn, several people say the pair had long-running issues with each other and had often butted heads.
Some of those who knew Ingram best say the 37-year-old had started on a downward spiral long before January 22. Ingram had been using methamphetamine in increasing amounts for several months before the shootings, according to several of his friends and acquaintances. Use of the drug has become rampant in regional towns across Australia, and Lake Cargelligo locals say their town is no different. They say along with MDMA, methamphetamine is now more readily available in the town than ever before, reflecting Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission wastewater results that show methamphetamine usage in regional areas has surpassed that of capital cities.
‘It will never ever leave us’
As the search for Ingram reaches the middle of its eighth week, the fallout of January 22 is eating away at Lake Cargelligo. The past two months have raised uncomfortable questions about where people’s loyalties in the town lie, festering into resentment. Chief among them, the suspicion that someone has been – or is – helping Ingram not only stay alive, but one step ahead of authorities. This week, police dangled a $250,000 carrot to see who would bite as information from the public slows to a trickle. So far, the 20-plus tips that have come in since the reward was announced have amounted to nothing.
The hunt for Ingram has been largely scaled back since hundreds of police officers searched bush and farmland around Lake Cargelligo after the shootings. Investigators working under Strike Force Doberta – the operation searching for Ingram and investigating the killings – hope the reward will lead to his arrest and bring closure to the town. Police believe Ingram is still alive, but they say there is a possibility he may be dead; neither his mobile phone nor his bank accounts have been touched since the shootings.
All reported sightings of Ingram since January 22 have been investigated and ruled out. The last time he was seen for sure was at Euabalong West, near where he grew up, shortly after the shootings. If he is alive, his friends say, Ingram – a “mallee rat” – won’t be found until he wants to be. “Julian will stay holed up in that bush forever,” one says. “He’s a planner and a survivor.”
While Ingram remains on the run, locals’ doors remain locked. Almost everyone in town has heard of Ingram’s “hit list” – the names of those who have supposedly wronged him – and many believe he will return to Lake Cargelligo. “He’s not finished yet,” one friend says. No one can say exactly who is on the list, but some fear their own names could be there. So deep-seated is the fear that many locals stayed away from Sophie and Nerida Quinn’s funerals on Thursday. “He could come in here and lift me, couldn’t he?” Dean Harris says.
Divided as the town is, even those who don’t fear for their own safety fear for the safety of others, and remain deeply affected. “People lost their lives, and I don’t think the town will ever forget,” one friend of both Ingram and the Quinn family says.
At the Harris home where John visited his grandmother every day, there is only one way forward. “I want justice for my nephew,” Dean Harris says. “You can’t move on when he’s still on the loose.” Arrest or not, Margaret Harris knows nothing will ever be the same. “It will never ever leave us,” she says. “Not in a lifetime.”
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service (1800RESPECT) on 1800 737 732.
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