By GREG ANSLEY
SYDNEY - Top crime-busting detective Steve Leach reported for work at the busy Parramatta police headquarters in Sydney, checked out his handgun ... and shot himself.
Detective Senior Sergeant Leach, who cracked some of New South Wales' most notorious crimes, gave friends and colleagues no indication of the demons
that led to his suicide in the locked armoury on Tuesday.
He had reportedly applied for early retirement and a pension after being injured in a car crash, and colleagues told the Sydney Morning Herald he had been cheerful and looking forward to life after the police he had served for 35 years.
One of his two sons recently became the third generation of the Leach family to join the force. The other son is in the Army.
But at about noon on Tuesday, another officer entered the armoury and found Leach dead.
Police provided counselling for colleagues and Leach's family, who NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said were "understandably very distraught".
"Detective Sergeant Leach was a highly respected officer with 35 years experience and had been involved in some of the state's most high-profile homicide investigations," he said.
"His death is a terrible tragedy."
In the mid-1980s Leach was a member of a federal-state police task force which investigated a series of attacks on Family Court judges.
Between 1992 and 1994 he was a member of Taskforce Air, investigating the murders of seven backpackers whose bodies were eventually found in the Belanglo State Forest, west of Sydney.
In May 1994 he arrested 49-year-old Ivan Milat, one of Australia's worst serial killers - yet supported Milat's devastated sister Shirley during the international media glare of her infamous brother's trial.
Leach later helped track down serial rapist David Johnson in Sydney's western suburbs, and led the investigation into the disappearance 15 years earlier of nine-year-old Samantha Knight.
Samantha vanished after leaving her Bondi apartment in August 1986 to go shopping nearby, a mystery unsolved until Leach's team arrested convicted serial paedophile Michael Guider for her murder in 2002.
After this, Leach was seconded to the European War Crime Tribunal in the Hague, working on the case against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and tracking gruesome evidence of crimes including massacres, ethnic cleansing, executions and rape.
Leach's final major case was the hunt for the killer of Zoe Zou, whose one-year-old baby was left abandoned in a stroller outside Manly Hospital last year when the Sydney mother was abducted and murdered.
In March, police charged former federal police officer Michael Wallace with her death.
By GREG ANSLEY
SYDNEY - Top crime-busting detective Steve Leach reported for work at the busy Parramatta police headquarters in Sydney, checked out his handgun ... and shot himself.
Detective Senior Sergeant Leach, who cracked some of New South Wales' most notorious crimes, gave friends and colleagues no indication of the demons
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