Families across the region woke to a sight not seen for three decades or more as snow lay several centimetres deep across the city.

It was a magical morning of snowmen and snowball fights and Bathurst was in a party mood.

It wasn’t to last.

By lunchtime, word was getting out that police had found a terrible scene inside a home in Kelso.

At first there were no names, but the city was slowly learning there were two dead bodies – probably a murder-suicide.

Domestic violence had been in the news all year across Australia with the appalling statistic that women were dying at the hands of their partners at a rate of more than one a week.

It was a national shame being played out in our own backyard.

But there were still more shocks to come.

By mid-afternoon, the story was going around town that the dead pair were Bathurst “glamour couple” Elie Issa and Nadia Cameron.

One had been a well-known cafe owner in the centre of town, accustomed to hosting the city’s movers and shakers along with high-profile visitors to town.

The other was a bright, popular real estate saleswoman who had made Bathurst her home and was forging a new career.

Both were regulars on the Bathurst social scene and both seemed to be living the dream.

We now know that was not the case and an inquest in Bathurst next week could finally make public the full horror of this nightmare.

Our city is no stranger to inquests in recent years – the cases of Janine Vaughan, Jessica Small and Andrew Russell, in particular – but this one is different.

In each of those cases, years of police investigations had come to a dead end with not even a body found to shed light on the mystery of their disappearances.

Before this inquest even gets under way, though, we largely know the answers to who, where, when and hows of the case.

Much of what we don’t know, and what we wait to see if the inquest can tell us, is why.

These are the answers that Ms Cameron’s family and friends deserve and the memory of Ms Cameron demand.