The Dead Followed Me Home

She protected her family from what she saw. She could not protect herself from what she carried home.

On her second shift as a twenty-two-year-old police officer, Christine Odell watched a man with most of his face missing walk towards her.

It was the beginning of a career spent inside the places most people could not bear to enter.

Across twenty-seven years in the New South Wales and Queensland police services, Christine worked in frontline policing, child sexual abuse investigation, tactical operations and forensic crime scene examination. She investigated murders, suicides, sexual assaults, unexplained deaths and crimes against children, learning to read blood patterns, preserve evidence and remain composed in the presence of unimaginable violence.

At home, she said little about what she had seen.

Christine kept the darkest parts of her work from her family, believing silence would protect them. But the crime scenes did not remain behind the police tape. The bodies, smells and final moments of strangers entered her dreams, followed her home and began to fracture the resilience that had carried her for years.

Leaving the police did not end Christine’s work. It redirected it.

Following the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, she joined a humanitarian needs-assessment team and discovered a different use for the skills forged among the dead. She went on to work in Cambodia and Mozambique alongside governments, law enforcement agencies and international organisations responding to child sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

For years, Christine had arrived after the worst had happened. Now she was working for those who could still be reached.

The Dead Followed Me Home is the remarkable account of one woman’s journey through crime, trauma and survival, and the purpose she found in turning from the dead to the living.