She had helped reform mental health care across Australia. Then, one afternoon in 2002, Margaret Tobin stepped out of an elevator at her office in Adelaide and was shot four times. Her killer was not a stranger. Years earlier, he had been a fellow psychiatrist. After concerns about his fitness to practise helped end his medical career, he blamed Tobin—and never let it go. Five years later, the grudge followed her across the country.
A Woman Trying to Change a System
By the time she arrived in South Australia, Margaret Tobin had built a reputation as one of Australia’s most important figures in mental health reform.
She had worked in Victoria and New South Wales before becoming director of South Australia’s mental health services in 2000. Her task was difficult: reshape a system under pressure and push mental health care toward broader community-based services.
Tobin was known for confronting entrenched interests and pushing for change. South Australian politicians later described her as relentless in her efforts to improve services for people living with mental illness and disability.
But years before Adelaide, she had worked with another psychiatrist in Sydney.
His name was Jean Eric Gassy.
And their professional relationship would eventually turn deadly.
The Colleague Who Never Let It Go
In the 1990s, Tobin became Gassy’s superior at St George Hospital in Sydney.
Concerns were later raised about whether Gassy was fit to continue practising. Tobin sought an assessment of his psychiatric condition, and he was eventually deregistered as a medical practitioner in 1997 after refusing to comply with conditions attached to his registration.
For most people, that would have ended a difficult professional chapter.
For Gassy, it did not.
Authorities later discovered that he had held a grudge against doctors involved in his deregistration. The connection between him and Tobin would become central to the murder investigation.
He spent five years blaming Margaret Tobin for the end of his medical career. Then he followed her into an elevator—and waited until the moment she stepped out. What happened next became one of Australia’s most shocking revenge murders. Watch the full video to see how investigators traced the killer and uncovered the phone call that brought his carefully planned escape undone.
Four Shots Outside an Elevator
On the afternoon of October 14, 2002, Tobin returned from lunch to her office in Adelaide’s Citi Centre building.
She rode the elevator with three other people. Two left at the seventh floor. Tobin and a man continued to the eighth.
Soon after Tobin stepped out, she was shot four times with a Glock 9mm handgun.
She later died from her injuries.
The killing sent shockwaves through South Australia.
Tobin was not simply a psychiatrist. She was the public face of an ambitious reform effort involving one of the most difficult areas of public health.
And now she had been killed at work.
The Search for the Man From Her Past
Investigators faced an unusually difficult case.
Hundreds of people were inside the office building, but no one had witnessed the shooting itself. Police had to reconstruct what happened from the moments before and after the attack.
Eventually, the investigation led back to Jean Eric Gassy.
The former psychiatrist was convicted of Tobin’s murder in 2004 and sentenced to life imprisonment. That conviction was later overturned on appeal because of the trial judge’s directions to a deadlocked jury, requiring a retrial.
In 2009, Gassy was convicted again. He remains imprisoned. A later attempt to reduce his sentence was rejected in 2023.
Her Lasting Legacy
Margaret Tobin was 50 when she was killed. But the reforms she had spent her career pursuing did not disappear with her.
South Australia later established the Margaret Tobin Awards to recognize contributions to mental health. A 40-bed mental health inpatient centre at Flinders Medical Centre was named the Margaret Tobin Centre, while scholarships and professional awards were also created in her name.
That is perhaps the most striking part of the story.
The man who killed Margaret Tobin appears to have spent years unable to move beyond what he believed she had done to him.
Tobin, meanwhile, was trying to change a system whose impact would extend far beyond either of them.
One professional dispute became a grudge.
The grudge lasted years.
And on an ordinary afternoon in Adelaide, it ended with four shots outside an elevator.
Margaret Tobin’s life ended there. Her work did not.
Margaret Tobin’s murder began with a professional dispute that, for one man, never truly ended. But the story is also about everything that remained after her death. The psychiatrist who spent years trying to improve mental health care was gone at 50, yet her work continued to influence the system she helped reshape. Her killer preserved a grievance for years. Tobin left behind something far more enduring: a legacy that outlived the violence meant to silence her.
