ust as the ink on her skin told the story of Emma Bates’ life, the bruises on her body told the story of her death. For Bates’ older sister, Cassandra Searle, her abiding memory of when she lost Emma was seeing her laid out on a gurney in the mortuary. Emma had been covered in a white sheet, which had been carefully folded back around her head to reveal a small patch of skin on the side of her face.
She looked peaceful and almost angelic. Searle and two of her sisters were standing in the Victorian coronial services building in Southbank after being called to formally identify their beloved sibling. “It was quite beautiful the way they did it,” she says.
“They wanted to protect us and preserve our memories of her, so they protected us from the worst of her injuries.” Emma, who was a type 1 diabetic, was found dead in her bedroom inside her home in Cobram – 220 kilometres north of Melbourne, near the NSW-Victoria border – on April 23. She was discovered by police who broke in through a back window to do a welfare check.
She had head and upper body injuries consistent with being violently assaulted. Her family believe the 49-year-old may have been lying there for days, after last being seen in the main street of Cobram, with bruises on her face, the weekend before she died. The image of the white sheet will be forever etched in Searle’s mind.
It covered a sea of treasured tattoos her sister had collected, piece by piece, over a lifetime. They included a dinosa.