The Story So Far...

Before you listen to the first episode of The Missing Matter, hear how the story has unfolded. In this bonus episode you can catch up on the story of missing person Marion Barter and her daughter Sally's decades-long journey to find out what happened to her mum, who disappeared in 1997. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Apote production.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
For those of you who haven't listened to the Lady Vanishers,
she might not know who I am, but my name
is Sally and I am the daughter of long term
missing person Marion Barta. I'm currently fifty one and to
put some perspective into my situation, my mum was fifty
one when she disappeared from my life. So my mom

(00:36):
is Marion Bartera. She was a award winning school teacher.
She was teaching at a school on the Gold Coast
called TSS or the Southport School and in the November
of nineteen ninety six she was awarded by AITA. Butcher's
actually was the presenter at the awards for the Netta Awards,

(00:57):
which was awarding teachers for excellence and one was voted
the best teacher in Queensland and she actually came to nationally.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
The National Excellence and Teaching Awards allows us to recognize
and praise teachers who show excellence.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
In their work.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
It's a marvelous way to let.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
The community know just how good our teachers are and
it also raises confidence in the profession. Yes, I do
consider teachers to be heroes and I mean it, and
I'm not just flattering you because I happen to be
the MC and speak of this evening how teachers have
thrived beats me. Teachers deserve our nations heartfelt thanks.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I had moved out and built a house with my
partner who is now my husband, Chris. And yeah, mum
was a busy single lady who was a dedicated school teacher.
She was always there early morning setting up for the day.
She'd always be the last one to leave the school
grounds because she was setting up for the next day.
And just a very passionate, loving, caring teacher and a

(01:58):
mother of two myself and my brother Owen. My mum
was someone who was very fashionable. She was ahead of
her time in a different way. She didn't dress like
everybody else. She used to do some modeling for some
of the boutiques that she bought clothes from. She loved
her garden and she was a really great cook. So

(02:18):
one of my fondest memories is her making bread cups
that had asparagus in the very seventies vibe, you know,
and we'd go to top wear parties and everyone always
asked her to take that and she made a fantastic
Pavlova which I continued to make today. She loved gardening,
and yeah, she loved classical music, going to the ballet,
going to the opera.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
So nineteen ninety seven was a busy year for us.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Chris and I got engaged in that April, and we
were living in our new house. And then around that time,
Mum was seemingly getting.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
Quite upset at school. I went to her house.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I would frequently go to her house and I would
go and see her ask as well. Because my job,
I worked weekends, so I actually had a couple of
days off during the week, and on those days off,
I'd quite often just go and hang out with her
at school and help her on excursions and things like that.
She taught reception. Just to let everyone know, so four
and five year old boys. I had a great location
down there on the Gold Coast where the school situated

(03:24):
really close to the water, so you know, if she
was reading a book about the beach, she'd actually take
the boys down and they'd take their shoes off and
put their feet in the sand, and lots of sensory
kind of style teaching and creative teaching.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
But one night I was actually.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
At her house and we'd had dinner, and I just
sat with her because she was quite upset. She'd been
telling me that she was upset with a couple of
the teachers at the school over time, like I feel
like it.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Was over a period of time.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
And she told me that someone had accused her of
touching a boy and she was quite mortified, as was
I by that claim. And I can only put it
into my understanding in my feelings, but I feel like
there was a lot of tall poppy syndrome going on.
She sat on the couch next to me and she

(04:13):
fell asleep, and I remember she had her hands facing upwards,
so you know when you sort of sit back in
the chair and you just relax and your hands sort
of flopped to the side.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
That's what she looked like.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
And she fell asleep, and she'd been in tears that night,
and I just was worried at that point that something
was wrong. So when she told me that she was
going to quit her job and go overseas on a holiday,
I was actually okay with it. I was quite open
to that idea. Owen and I were quite settled in
our early twenties.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Owen had a partner.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
He'd been with her for ten years and was engaged
to be married, and Chris and I had built our
house and we just preshly got engaged ourselves.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
So you know, we.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Were like, yeah, sure, go and live your best life.
Go and have a great time. You're single, you don't
have any ties here. We want what's best for you.
And then everything sort of started to roll really quickly.
So she put the house on the mine and she
sold it within three weeks, and she sold it for
fifteen thousand dollars less than she bought it for and
it sells really quickly. And she asked me if I

(05:14):
would come and help her pack up the house, and
I said to her, I can't tonight because I'm going
to Tathe, but I'll ask Chris and he'll pick me
up on the way home. Because that was in Southport.
Mum lived in Ashmore, which was the next suburb. So
Chris was at mum's house helping her pack up when
Mum came out and said to him, what's the time.
He said, like, no, seven thirty. I can't remember it.

(05:36):
He doesn't remember exactly what time it was. And she said, okay,
well I need you to go, so just drop what
you're doing. And you can, you can go. And he said,
I'll just finish packing this box, Marian, and she said, no, no,
just leave it. I need you to go. And so
he left and he came and picked me up from
Taithe and he said, got your mum's rude. I said,
what do you mean, Like she's never rude to you.

(05:57):
What are you talking about? And he said, she just
kicked me out. I said, how bizarre, Like that's so weird.
Why would she do that? So it was an odd
behavior for her and definitely out of character. And Chris
and I on the way home, It's around nine o'clock
at night by this point when I finished Tafe typically
and there was a McDonald's connected to a service station

(06:18):
on Ferry Road there in Southport, and Chris and I
stopped there to get something to eat on the way home.
And as we're sitting in the restaurant, I got up
to go and get Chris some dessert of some description,
and that gave him a window because I was sitting
with my back to the bowsers, And when I.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Stood up, he gave him a window.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Out to the Bowsers and he said, oh, look, your
mom's just pulled up. So I've turned around and I'm
standing at the glass and I'm waving at her. She's
got out of the car. She's standing at the door
with the door open, like she's about to start putting
fuel in the car, and she's staring at me like
a deer in headlights. And I noticed there's a man
in the car, and all I can see is that

(07:00):
he's really tall, and it just looked dark to me
because I always said dark features, but rethinking it, and
we've actually gone back to that service station and looked
at the lighting and everything. It was probably because of
the light reflecting off the windscreen, and it was late
at night, so it.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Was dark outside.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
But he was tall, and his head was almost touching
the roof of her Honda Civic, so with small hatchback
car so not a big car, that his head was
almost touching the roof. And instead of getting fuel, she
got back in the car and she drove off, and
she instead of driving past us where we would have
seen whoever that man was in the car, quite clearly,

(07:39):
she went around the back and got stuck going through
the drive through. So I ran over to the glass
and I went busted. I've seen you you've got a man,
like what's happening with him? As a bit of a joke,
thinking it was funny. I'm like, oh my god, she's
got a boyfriend. She just doesn't want to tell us
about it. It's a very tongue in cheek kind of thing.
But she acted weirdly. The next day, I said to her,

(08:01):
who was the guy in the car? And she said, Oh,
it's just a friend that I've met from the art center.
He was taking her out for a drink, I think,
is what she said, which my mind was weird because
she didn't drink alcohol. But that was it.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
That was end of story.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
And I didn't push her, and I just felt, you know,
as a twenty four year old, I didn't have the
right to ask my mum what she's doing. It's none
of my business what she was doing. And I really
was very firm in our relationship on that sort of level.
So that was a very interesting point. And I told
the police that, and they could never find the man
who was in the car. We've never had anyone come

(08:32):
forward and say, oh, that was me. I was with
Marian on that night, So that's another part of the story.
Who was the man in the car with her at
that time in her timeline when she was packing up
her house getting ready to go overseas, and she's left
the country within a month and changed her name all
in that one month time period.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
But anyway, she did it.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
She packed up all her things and she put all
her treasures into a shipping container, is what she told me.
And she gave Chris and I some big pieces of
furniture and said to me, when I come back, I'm
going to buy a unit at Maine Beach, which is
on the Gold Coast, and I'll be downsizing because I've
got a three bedroom house with a swimming pool and

(09:14):
I don't use the pool. The house is too big
for me. I just want to downsize again. I went, fine,
no problem.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
So that all started to happen.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
The REMOVALSS truck arrived at our house and dropped off
the things that were coming to us. Then she had
asked Chris's grandparents, who had a pool room up the
back of their house, if they could store some of
her school things. And I think there was a mattress
and there was boxes of sheets and towels and things
like that which was stored up at Nana and pars

(09:45):
and the rest of it went.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
In the truck on the shipping container.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
In my mind, and Mum just said to me, oh,
if I decide to stay over there and teach, I'll
just get you toscend it over to me. And I never,
as a twenty three twenty four year old, never thought
to go, hey, where are you storing the shipping container?
I just met Yet, no problem, Like that's a normal conversation.
And my mum was a little bit you know, probably
left of Senna when it came to things like that.

(10:09):
And if she wanted to go and teach. She liked
Montessori and Steiner school varieties, and she was really open
to perhaps getting a job over in England and living
the jane Ere and the world of Wuthering Heights kind
of vibe. Where to begin. She lost her mother Alie

(10:29):
for a little man. This was a very different house,
a far different places. That was my mum, you know,
So it didn't seem weird or odd to me. Auto. Oh,
and I don't think that she would do that. Some
of her friends had sort of commented later down the
track that they thought it was a bit odd that
she'd sell her house to go overseas, But it made

(10:51):
sense to me that she said she was going to
downsize and it freed her up from having a house
sitting there for a year, and she wouldn't have put
tenants in it because she had antique furniture and she
didn't like anybody touching her things, so she was quite particular.
And then my birthday is the twelfth of May. Every
few years it falls on Mother's Day, and I was

(11:13):
pretty sad to find out a long time later that
my mum actually changed her name only a few days
after my birthday, and she changed it via Deepole to
Flora Bella Natalia Marian Ramkeel. I didn't learn about that
until twenty and eleven, so I think that's thirteen years,
fourteen years later that I actually found out that mum

(11:35):
had changed her name, and that was kind of shocking
to me. I didn't really understand the concept about that.
But that timeline is the fifteenth of May nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
She had finished school.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
The term finished on the twentieth of June nineteen ninety seven,
and she had resigned. And I've got a letter that
she gave me that says that she was asking for
a reference so that she could potentially get a job.
That she was renewing her teacher's registration for the following

(12:08):
year in advance, so that meant that she had paid
for her teacher's registration for nineteen ninety eight and by
the Sunday, the twenty second, so she came to dinner.
We've had to go back and do these really fine
timelines and things that you don't really document, right if
someone's not missing, you're not writing down when you speak
to your mum or when she comes over for dinner.

(12:30):
But she requested to come and have dinner at our
house and requested that I cook her a roast. So
she brought her friend, Leslie Loveday, who was the lady
she was staying with at the time she'd sold the house.
She packed up and there was a window where she
wasn't quite ready to go yet, so instead of coming
to our house, we offered to let her come and

(12:51):
stay with us, of course, and we lived out the
back of Madhra barr in Talli and Leslie lived around
the corner from school at TSS, so it made sense
that she would stay with Leslie, and they used to
be neighbors and they were quite good friends, so Leslie
kind let.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
Her stay with her for a few weeks.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
During that time, Mum had, in that moment, changed a
couple of her accounts to come to Leslie's address care
of Leslie Loveday.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
So she didn't do that to my place.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
She did it to Leslie's which I grabbed a bundle
of mail from Leslie's house a little bit down the
track in nineteen ninety seven, which I still kept and
which has become quite important as the journey continued. But
they came and had a roast dinner, and we lived
in a cul de sac and we were on a
battle ax block at the back. So we walked them

(13:38):
up after dinner and she gave me a big hug.
She ac she gave me a painting of hers and
it's got pine trees, and she said to me that
night when we were walking down the corridor and I'd
had it on the wall, and she said, I want
you to think of me every time you used to
look at this painting. And something that's really bugged me
for life is that the police. I told the police

(13:58):
that and they wrote down that. Marian said, you can
think of me. This is where I'll be I said, no,
that's not what she said. She just said, you can
think of me. And at the time I was like,
you know, someone gives you a teddy bear, you.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Can think of me. That kind of notion was how
I took it.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
But anyway, so that was on the Saturday night and
she flew out the next day. On Sunday, the twenty
second of June. Leslie drove her to Railway Parade and
Scarborough Street in Southport, where she caught a bus. They
were early, Leslie says, and they were laughing because mom
had so much luggage.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Leslie sort of said to us that, you know, she remembered.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
I was sort of laughing so hard and they were
crying as she waved off and off she went. So
she went on the bus up to Brisbane International Airport
where she caught a Korean Air flight to South Korea.
And what I have learned through this journey is that

(14:56):
int Pole, when you're traveling in and out of Australia
or anywhere, they only record where you exit and when
you first stop. So regardless of where where you say
you're going, they only record you to your first destination.
So as far as they're concerns she went to South Korea,
and that's when it all goes a bit pair shaped.
She sent up postcards, she sent letters to everybody. I

(15:20):
got an eight page letter and it was written on
notepaper from a hotel in Japan called Hotel Niko Na Rita.
It's stamped from tom Bridge in the UK. So she's
picked up the paper and she's written on it and
posted it in tom Bridge.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Is my belief.

Speaker 5 (15:38):
Dear Salan, Chris, Greetings from beautiful but very wet UK.
I finally arrived in England after a most interesting visit
to the East. Cloud is somewhat by far too much luggage.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
Left.

Speaker 5 (15:54):
But tell them both again thanks for me, love your heaps,
and don't worry about me, mum.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
And it was quite a few weeks and she rang me.
Chris and I had just been down skiing at Threadbow
and we were on our way home when the thread
Boat has asked.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Happened just before midnight.

Speaker 6 (16:16):
A freak landslide picked up a chalet, sweeping it onto
a lodge where senior Threadboat staff was sleeping. Witnesses it
screams for help from beneath the debris. In the hours
since then, silence.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
It's quite a cold and forlorn scene here at the moment,
So I mean.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
It was a long drive.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
We broke it up and stayed at my Auntie's house,
my dad's sister who lived in Sydney, and we also
stayed with them on the way back, and stayed with
some friends as well. And on the way home we
went to Auntie Rob's place and I had a bridal
magazine was obviously I just got engaged, so I was
kind of excited about getting married and what we were

(16:55):
going to do, start planning those things. And the wedding
dress that I wanted was available at a shop in Parramatta.
So anyway, while we were in Sydney, I rang the
store and I said, do you have the dress? It
was called Diana, and that's kind of ironic because Lady
Diana died shortly after this.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
Anyway, it was a beautiful dress and.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
I went in there and Chris and I were pretty
poor at that point. We had just built a house
and we had no money, and the lady said to me,
and this kind of makes me sad when I think
about it, because I didn't have anyone with me to
try on my wedding dress. Chris was sitting in the
car downstairs and the our boot was packed to the
rafters and we left Dunnie Rob's house as we were

(17:36):
making our way home and we diverted past the shop
at Paramatta so I could go and try on the dress.
So other than the women who were in the shop
helping me get it on and looking at me, that
was it. And she said, if you come back tomorrow,
it's going to be on the sale and I said, well,
we're actually leaving to go back to the Gold Coast
right now, and so she asked her manager and they said,

(17:56):
we'll give it to you at the sale price. So
I think I got it fifty percent off the price,
which was amazing for me. I was jumping through hoops
and very excited. So I walked back downstairs with my
dress in a massive bag. It was a big dress too,
so tried to lay that in the back of the
car and Chris and I drove home. When we got
in the door, we had an answering machine and the

(18:17):
light was flashing, so I went and pressed the button
and it was Mum and she's like, HI, just heard
about the threadbir disaster. I was just ringing to check
at you and Chris were okay. She knew that we
were going away because we'd obviously booked it before she'd left.
So this was around the thirty first of July, first
of August. And then I was sad because I wanted

(18:40):
to tell her I'd just bought my wedding dress, Like
I really wanted to tell her that. And I was
really sad that she had rung and I'd missed her
because back in those days, we didn't have mobile phones. Well,
the very rare person had a mobile phone, right it
was a very new thing concept, and there was no
internet other than the dial up variety. Anyway, she called
me back and she said to me, I'm just having

(19:02):
tea with some little old ladies. I just wanted to
make sure you're okay. And that phone call was a
bit of a checklist for me, Like when I think
about it, she was like, did you take these back
to the school? She in Amongst her things that she'd
packed up and put up at Chris's grandparents place, she'd
put in some Teddy bears and some Russian dolls and
a set of kitchen scales. Although she weighing scales with

(19:24):
the little ways on them, and she used to use
them in math lesson and she said in the letter,
I bought a set, my own set into the class
and the boys broke it. So I bought another one.
And I can't remember if I use petty cash or
my own money. So just to save Luke Glover, who
was her boss, she says the word give him any ammunition,

(19:44):
which I think is an interesting phrase, and she said,
to avoid giving him any ammunition, can you just take
them back to the school. So this phone call was like,
did you take them back? Did you give them to
Jenny Hill, who was the teacher next door. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
And so this went on for a little bit. She
was paying at a phone box and the money kept
dropping out and the phone would disconnect, and I was

(20:06):
like half midway sentence in trying to.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Talk to her.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Anyway, she'd ring back, and this happened a few times
over and over, and I said to her, where are
you and I will call you back, And that's when
she said to me, oh, no, I'm just having some
tea with some of the old ladies. And you know,
it didn't really dawn on me. I didn't really think
too hard about it. I was like, I was just
excited to be talking to my mum. And anyway, she
rings back the last time and says, Okay, I'm just
gonna let you talk. You just talk until the phone

(20:31):
runs out, until I run out of my money, because
this is the last money I've got. And so I
was just telling her all about my wedding dress and
our trip away, and the phone cut out and that
was the last time I ever spoke to her. So interesting.
I was sort of just left it at that. She'd
told me that she'd postponed her trip on the Orient Express,

(20:51):
which is something she was really excited about doing. She'd
told people at school she was doing that, her friends
knew she was doing that, so that was a big
ticket item for her. So it surprised me that we
now know that never happened. And I wonder how that
all came about, and what was the modus operandi around
the whole Orient Express trip. I don't know if anyone's

(21:14):
ever googled how much a trip on the our own
Express is. It is super duper expensive, so it's a
big ticket item.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
The moment you step aboard, everything changes.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
So she had told me that she was going to
stop writing postcards to everybody because she was trying to
have a holiday. And I said to her, you don't
have to write postcards to everybody. You just go and
have a break, Like it's exhausting writing postcards and then
finding a stamp and then finding a postbox to put
it in while you're trying to have a holiday. But
she said, I'm going to have a break and so

(21:53):
don't worry about me. I'll be fine. And I wait,
no problem, go and have a holiday. We'll talk soon.
So that's around the first of August nineteen ninety seven,
and then a few weeks go past, and I I'm
starting to go, oh, it's sort of dawned on me.
I have no way of contacting my mum. I don't
know where she is, I don't know what hotel she's
staying at. I don't know how to call her because

(22:15):
there's no mobile phone, no text messages.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
And I started to get a bit worried.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
I was like, oh, I really want her to call me.
Like I started getting quite anxious. And my brother's birthday
was approaching in the October, and we're now talking, but
I don't know how many weeks that is.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
What is that ten weeks his birthday was.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Coming up, and I was like, she'll definitely ring him,
like she never ever ever missed your birthday, and she
was massive on birthdays, so I was quite confident that
at that point she would contact Owen and we'd know
where she is and we know she's fine, and we
can talk to her and I can give her an
update on what I'm doing with the wedding and all
that sort of stuff. And I rang Owen and his
birthday that year was on a Saturday, so the eighteenth

(22:56):
of October nineteen ninety seven, and I rang him and
I said, did you hear from mum?

Speaker 1 (23:00):
And he said no.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
I said, okay, well that's a bit odd, don't you think,
And then we sort of must have talked about it.
I don't really remember the phone call that well, but
I remember talking to him, and I sort of thought
about it the next day and thought, well, there are
a day behind us in the UK, so maybe she
just got the date wrong and she'll bring him tomorrow.
So on Sunday I rang, I went again, did you
hear from mum? He said no? And I just spent

(23:24):
some thing's not right, that's too long now she hasn't
spoken to us for weeks. I haven't heard from her.
I haven't had a postcard. Something's wrong. And we had
a friend come over for dinner on the Sunday night.
Her name's Renee, and her husband played in a band.
Sometimes we go and see the boys play because we're
all friends, but sometimes if we didn't do that, Renee
would quite often come over for dinner. So she frequented

(23:46):
our house and we were talking about it at dinner
and I said, something's not right, like I'm worried. I
don't know how to contact mum. And she was the
one who suggested that I call the bank. She said,
you got your UM's bank account details. And the reason
I had those was because mum had left her car
with me and we were going to sell my car
and I was going to keep her car and I
was going to put the money from the sale of

(24:08):
my car into her bank account. That's why I had
the bank details. So I rang the bank. It was
a nighttime, so I've rung Teley Banking and I just said, Hi,
my mum's actually traveling overseas by herself, and she's missed
my brother's birthday and I'm actually concerned. Can you check
if she's using her account? And the woman said, I'm
really sorry. Due to privacy, I can't tell you anything.

(24:29):
And then she paused and she said, did you say
your mom's overseas and I said yes, and she said,
oh my god, there's money coming out of her bank
account and Barren Bay and I just I don't know
what I felt in that moment. I think I was
just incomplete shock and a wave of stress. She proceeded
to tell me that five thousand dollars was coming out

(24:50):
of her bank account every day and she was sort
of counting them as she was talking to me, and
my memories it was like three and a half weeks
of five thousand dollars every day.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
And she said there's three days in.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
The middle where the money came out in Burly Heads
on the God Coast and then back down in Byron
Bay again. And that threw me for six because we
lived only five minutes from Burley and I was like,
what do you mean there's money coming out? Why would
she be back in Australia. I was so confused, and
I was worried at that point that something had happened,
because that's not normal.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Behavior for my mum.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
And the next day Chris and I, which was a Monday,
the twentieth of October, Chris and I drove to Byron
Bay and I took one of mum's portraits from her
school photos and we walked around the street. So we
went to the chemist, and we went to Woolworth. We
went to a naturopath and a health food shop, which

(25:44):
is something my mum would venture into just to see
if anybody recognized her. She's quite a recognizable person. She's
got an interesting look about her with a big black
wavy hair, and she's quite memorable with most people. No
one had seen her, and so we then went to
the bank and I walked in and I said to
the guy, my mum's supposed to be overseas and I've

(26:07):
just found out through your telebanking that money is coming
out of her bank account. Here, have you seen her?
And he picked up the photo and he shook it
and he said that rings a bell, and he walked
around the back. There was desks all behind him. He
walked around the back and went into an office and
it had manager on the door, and he came out

(26:29):
and he walked over to the photocopier and he took
a photocopy of the photo and he came over to
the desk and he said, what would you like me
to say to her if I see her?

Speaker 1 (26:38):
And a WHOA, what's going on? Like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
You can imagine being your twenty four year old trying
to work out my daughter, my eldest dough was twenty
four hour and she completely throws her for six. She's like,
I don't know what I would have done or how
I would have coped. Mum, Like, how did you even
do that? So Chris and I got back in the car.
We drove straight round to Buyron Bay. Police walked in.
We stood at the desk at the front. This is

(27:02):
all a bit hazy for me. My brain was probably
going a million miles an hour as to be trying
to process everything. But anyway, I spoke to a guy
and I told him everything that I knew and what
I had just found out, and he took the details
and we left and I in my mind, I was
reporting her as a missing person. She was missing to me.
I didn't know where she was. There was strange activity

(27:24):
on her account, and she didn't contact my brother, and
that was seriously out of character.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
So we went home and then about a week.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Or ten days later, I received a phone call from
a gentleman and he said, we've located your mother. She
doesn't want anyone to know where she is or what
she's doing. And exactly those words like they are burnt
into my brain and I reflect back now as an older,
wiser woman, and I'm like, what the hell, like, how

(27:53):
did that happen? And how does someone speak to you
like that without actually giving you anything more. He told
me that she didn't want anyone to know what she
was doing. I was at Tafe actually during this period
of time, I was working full time and I was
going to Tafe at nighttime because I wanted to join
the ironically, the Queensland Police. Shame I didn't continue through

(28:15):
that because it might have helped me a little bit
in my journey. But I was at Taife trying to
get into the Queensland Police and one of my teachers
was a police officer.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
And in my class I had a.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
Lot of people who were already working in the space
of customs and in the jails and things like that,
who were trying to get into the cops. At the time,
and after I'd had that call, and they told me
that my mum had been located and she didn't want
anyone to know where she was or what she was doing,
and that was kind of it. That's where I was left.
I had a guy in my class who I knew

(28:47):
worked for customs, and I asked him if he could
do a passport check on mum. Now I didn't know
about the name change at this point, so I told
him Marion Barter, and I told him her date of birth,
and he came back to me and said her passport
came back and was on shore on the second of
August nineteen ninety seven. Now, if you remember, she called

(29:10):
me on the first of August, so she rang me,
telling me everything was fine and she was having a
great time, and she postponed a trip on the Your
Own Express, but not to worry about her. And then
her passport came back into the country the very next day.
That probably led police to believe and fed into their
narrative that she deliberately was trying to disappear herself because

(29:32):
she didn't contact me and she didn't tell me on
the phone that she was coming back into the country
the next day. So we got married the October the
following year. But then when she missed Iwin's birthday, that
was when the alarm bells came flying in for me.
So I went to my grandfather. He had bone cancer
and was not very well, but I went to him

(29:52):
and said, this is what they've said, and he goes, well,
I'm not satisfied with that. And he used to listen
to the ABC radio and the Salvation Army used to
come on there and do some talks for a missing
persons unit. So he actually contacted a lady named Betty
Brown from the Savos and they did an investigation in themselves.

(30:13):
And then we actually have the letters because my grandfather
kept them thankfully around the February of the following year.
So we're now into nineteen ninety eight, and the letter
pretty much says that police confirm that it was your
daughter Marion who went into the bank and withdrew eighty
thousand dollars and said that she was starting a new life,

(30:37):
and that it was confirmed by bank security. So my
grandparents then believed that my mum had actually chosen to leave.
We didn't know about her name change at this point.
The police had not looked into her movements coming in
and out of the country. They hadn't verified her passport.

(30:59):
None of that was done all the way back then.
And in my mind, if we'd actually found out that
she changed her name, we could have looked into that
a lot sooner and a lot deeper had we known
that in nineteen ninety seven when I reported her to
police as a missing person, that's kind of where my
journey begins as to what happened to my mum, and

(31:19):
then I had to Probably one of the hardest days
was for me October of that year.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
I then got married.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Probably the hardest part of that day was we were
in a soft top car and I was with my
dad and we were driving up to the church and
we actually got married at TSS. And I had said
to Mum it was probably one of the last things
she did for me was I asked her if I
could get married in the chapel, and she said, I
have to ask permission. And she asked the principal and

(31:50):
she said to me, I said to him, I just
had one more favor to ask, and he said, anything
for you, Marian, And she said, Sally would like to
get married in the chapel and he said, no problem,
So Revstonia married Chris and I and I remember my
dad saying to me, because it's kind of like a
big windy path as you go up to the chapel
inside the school grounds, the roofs off.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
My brother in law's driving the car.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Scott, and my dad says to me, keep an eye
out for your mother. I'm sure she'll be here, And
it kind of broke me just before I was about
to walk down the aisle, and that was kind of sad,
sad day, and then the sad days continued from there.
Chris and I had our first child after we got married,
so Ella was born in two thousand and one, so

(32:34):
she's the same age today as I was when my
mom went missing.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
And I'm the same age my mom was.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
When she disappeared. So it's kind of done a full
circle in our family, and we have no answers and
we have no resolution yet, so hence my push and
drive to keep on going. Well, the person who called
me I interpreted as the police officer that I spoke

(33:02):
to at the desk, so if anyone asked me, it
was him. But you know, foolishly I didn't get a
business card from him. I didn't take down his name.
I didn't even feel in a statement. He didn't give
me a copy of anything. He just wrote down some
notes in his notebook. So when I get that call
like back later, that was a shocking thing to hear,
because you just don't know what's happened.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
You don't know how to feel about that.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
I had mum's sister, one of them, she's got three sisters,
she's the eldest, and one of them had a crack
at me and said, what the hell do you think
you're doing listing or as a missing person? And was
angry at my grandfather for, you know, going along with
what my thoughts were in this scenario. And she said,
she's just having a holiday, why would you go on
list her as missing? And to me, they were older

(33:49):
than me, they knew better, and I listened to what
they said, so I sort of just went, Okay, I'll
let Papa deal with it, because he's the person in
charge of this in my opinion. But he was sick
and he was the only person who would talk to
me about it. My grandmother wouldn't talk to me, none
of Them's just as we talk about it, it was
like put your head in the sand, it'll all go away.

(34:09):
So that was quite challenging. And we had Ella in
the July of two thousand and one and we took
her down to Sydney in the December. She met my
dad for the first time and his partner, and she
met Owen and his partner as well. And my world

(34:30):
shattered the following year on the seventh of March two
thousand and two, when I got a call from my dad.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
At about twenty past ten at nighttime.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
I just finished breastfeeding Ella and put her down, and
he said that Owen had killed himself and that the
police were at the door and he had to go
down and identify the body the morgue. And I was
in Queensland, so I felt really helpless at that point.
And I only had one sibling, so he was it.

(35:00):
And he and I growing up were like twins. Everyone
thought we were twins because we were only seventeen months
apart and looked quite similar. And I was a tomboy,
so I was happy to get on my BMX bike
and go riding with all the boys and hang out
with the boys. So yeah, that broke my heart completely
into a million pieces, and we had to.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
Deal with that as well.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
And you know, I remember going to the funeral and
there was a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
At the funeral. He was a very well liked person.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
People were sort of outside looking through the windows at
this funeral. And I remember when I rocked up, my
dad said here she is, My girl's here, and he said,
your mother should be here. I shouldn't be doing this
by myself. And so the language that was said to
us in that phone call and then again by Betty
Brown in her letter to grand and Papa just led

(35:53):
us to believe that she had gone missing on her
own account. And everyone believed it. Everyone thought that was
how it was. But me, I was like, something's wrong.
She would not miss my wedding, she would not miss
me having a baby. She loved kids, and there is
just not a chance. So I just always knew something
was wrong. But I felt like I was being sort

(36:14):
of handballed to the side. You just sit here and
park it here, sister, We're not interested, but let it be.
And so it wasn't until two thousand and seven. It
was January and I was pregnant with our third baby,
so our son, and I was due.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
To have him in June.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
So I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy
and my girlfriend Nina was over and I just said
to her, do you reckon you could help me with
the kids, just for like twenty minutes. I'm just going
to make a phone call. And I rang the AFP,
so I was getting nowhere. I had no contact at
the New Southwest Police. I didn't know who was on
the case. I didn't know what oh I see meant.

(36:54):
I didn't have a number to call. I had no
compassion or empathy or care given to me. It was like, oh, well,
she'll be right, mate, move on with your life.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
Disappeared on her own account.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
So I made the phone call and I the phone
was answered by a lady named Rebecca cotts Beck, and
I chatted for quite a while.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
I think that phone call went.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
For about two hours, and I was telling her everything
that had happened. And she was the first person I
reckon outside of my family and friends, who showed me
empathy and care and understanding and just an ear and
listening to me. And she offered to come up and
visit me from Canberra, and so she came and met me,

(37:38):
took me out for lunch. We went just down in Tenereefe,
actually local to here, and she said to me, I've
spoken to my bosses and we'd like to ask you
to be the face of missing Persons this year. We
think it'd be a really good opportunity for you to
get your mum's story out there in the media. It's
a really great exposure, and we just think your detail
and your attention to detail and what you've remembered and

(38:00):
everything you have is really great and we'd really love
to be able to help you with that, to which
I was really excited about because up until then I'd
had nothing. When I say nothing, I just had had
no support and I had no media. I think in
two thousand and four, Women's Day did a short article
about me and a couple of other mums who were missing,

(38:21):
so this family stories about missing mums on Mother's Day.
I remember that was a two thousand and four because
I was pregnant with Darcy, my second baby, when we
had that photo shoot, and I remember, actually, I've got
Ella sitting on my lap in the photo, and my
husband was really worried about putting Ella in the magazine,
and I remember saying to him, if mum sees it,

(38:41):
she needs to see she has a granddaughter, like she'll
come back. Like I was in such a spin, like
I really didn't know what to think or what to believe.
You know, my grandfather died shortly after that, actually, so
I lost my only solid person who was helping me
and believed that maybe something was not quite right. He'd
gone as well. So anyway, so it's a couple of

(39:03):
years later that I've met Beck. It's mom's tenth anniversary.
So that year it was like she's been gone ten years,
and who's doing something about this because there's nothing. Everyone's
just sort of forgotten about her, and I can't even
talk about her. I can't even mention her name in
her own mother's house. It's like a taboo subject. So
Beck was just amazing. She was a great person and
we actually ended up becoming very good friends. She sadly

(39:25):
died of cancer a couple of years ago after a
really tough battle. So after our first encounter in the January,
I then worked for pretty much the next six months
planning on going down and being the face of missing person.
She told me that they'll fly me to Melbourne and
flying me to Sydney and will bounce around the country
for that week, doing all these interviews and plugging Missing

(39:47):
Person's Week. And I said, well, Caleb's going to be born,
which he was on the nineteenth of June, and Missing
Person's Week is like around the first of August.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
So I'm madly storing my breast milk and.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
I'm getting prepared, and Chris is organizing to take time
off work and we get a call for her I
don't know. A couple of days before we were do
you to fly down? And she said to me, I'm
so sorry, but they've pulled you. They're not going to
let you do it. And I said, who's not going
to let me do it? And she said New South
We was police, and they've told us that because this

(40:22):
year is about mental health and people missing with mental health,
that we can't use your story. We can't use Marian's
story because she didn't have mental health issues. I'm really sorry.
And I was crushed. I was like, oh my god,
I've just had a baby. I've had my third cesarean.
I'm storing my breast milk so I can come and

(40:43):
do these interviews for Missing Person's Week and make awareness
and help. Someone knows something about my mum. She's someone's neighbor,
she's buying milk from somewhere. If she's alive and well,
like they all kept telling me she was, someone had
to know where she was and they had to be
some digital footprint of her, which there just was not.
So I was eager to get out there and do something.

(41:04):
But you know, you're in that realm, right like you
think about my life. My mum's just gone missing. I
get married the following year. I then have three babies,
We build a house, we move from the Gold Coast
to Brisbane.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
I have to reset up my business.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Very very busy time of life for us, and very stressful.
You know, my brother died, my grandfather died. They were
my two key people in my camp. And you know,
awful circumstances, really awful circumstances. So Rebecca says to me,
we've already booked your flight, so you most will still come.
Just come and you can sit in the audience. So
I remember sitting in the audience and the lady who

(41:41):
was talking, who was then chosen to be the Missing
Person feature for that year, her brother had been missing
for a week, and I remember going, I know what
that feels like, like missing for an hour is absolutely
gut wrenching. But I was sitting in the audience, going, oh,
I don't know how I feel about this. I shouldn't

(42:03):
feel sad that I'm not on the stage, and that
her brother needs to be found as well, and he
did have mental health problems. But after the whole conference
was finished, I went outside with Rebecca and the police
commissioner was there and she introduced me, and he said
to me, oh, well, Sally, I don't know where my
brother is. He's missing as well. And you know, some

(42:25):
people just choose to go missing, and you know that's okay.
The people are allowed to go missing. And I went, right, okay,
and he goes, well, my mum knows where he is,
but none of us know. He won't tell any of
us where we are. And I went, so, he's not
really missing in this true sense of the word, then
is he if your mother knows where he is. And
it was just such a degrading conversation. I was like,

(42:46):
you've really just ignoring every element of what I'm actually
dealing with right this second from someone who's living with
the ambiguity of not knowing what's happened to my mum.
So no, no one knows where my mum is. No
one has spoken to her that we know. She's in
the true sense of the word, a missing person. So
that was at the tenth anniversary, and that took all

(43:10):
my energy and a lot of wind out of my sales,
as you can probably appreciate going through what I had
to go through. And then from that moment, and this
is interesting, from that moment onwards, the police started to
dabble back in it again. So we now had Mum's
case sitting with the New South Wales Missing Person's Unit,

(43:30):
and Steve McAllister was the guy.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
That I was talking to.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
He rang me while I was at my grandparents' house
and he asked me lots of questions in that phone call,
and one of them was what's her date of birth?
What's her hair color? Tell me a little bit about her.
And I was like, surely you would have all of
this information, right, like, surely you know she has black

(43:55):
hair and green hazel eyes. Nope, had nothing. And I
said to him at that point, and this is actually
all been recorded because I wrote an email back to
him telling him about my questions, I'm concerned that you've
asked this, I'm concerned that you've said this, And then

(44:16):
I actually say in it, I would like to see
the original file from when I came to the police
back in October nineteen ninety seven and reported my mum missing.
And I said, I want to know who the person
was who took that report because I didn't get his card,
I don't know his name, I can't remember his name,
and they couldn't answer those questions.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
And he's like, they've lost the file, and.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
I was like, what do you mean, they've lost the file?
So my frustrations started to grow quite heavily at.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
That point with the police.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
As part of our investigation, I came across a piece
of paper. On it I saw her passport photo the
front and the back, and it had this is a
true photo of Flora Bella Ramicel. It had her outcome
going passenger card. I just remember like seeing lots of things.
I remember looking Luxembourg three days, which actually turned out

(45:14):
to be eight days. But in the flash of trying
to see something in a short space of time, it
was quite confronting for me.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
And at the very top of the page there.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Was lots of asterisks and arrows and things like that,
but it had mums' names, so it had all her
names from when she first was like Maryan Wilson, which
was her maiden name.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
She married John Warren who was a big SoC star.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
I was the captain of the Strain Soccaroos in the
sixties and seventies and that was her first husband, so
she was Marying Warren.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
She doesn't have a middle name, so that.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Made things quite difficult as well when we're doing searches
and things like that.

Speaker 4 (45:53):
Born in nineteen forty three, the boy from the inner
city Sydney suburb of Botany knew his passion for the
world game always rose above those petty disputes, making a
mark both at home and abroad, and a bad.

Speaker 6 (46:06):
Clearance and a challenge by John Warren.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
But then it sort of went to my dad, Marion Brown,
which is what she was known for most of my
childhood when she was a school teacher in the Blue
Mountains in Springwood. Then she met Ray Barter and married
Ray Barter and they got married in nineteen eighty five.
In the Blue Mountains, Mom ended up getting a promotion,
moved down to Sussex, Inlet on the south coast and

(46:31):
taught down in that southern area before she got the
promotion and went to the Southport School up here in Queensland.
So we were looking at that document and we noticed
that there was a new name on there, Florabella Natalia
Marion Ramachel. And it wasn't until twenty sixteen. I had
a Facebook page which I set up in twenty thirteen

(46:53):
to try and see if we could garner some interest
and see if anyone could help me find the answers,
because I was literally doing it on my own and
I had no idea. I'm not a sleuth. I don't
know how to go and search things. I didn't know
about going into archives and pulling out files. I have
learned a lot over this past two decades, nearly three
decades of searching for my mum, but winding back to then,

(47:16):
I was really just putting my hands into the police
and hoping for the best.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
And at that point I don't really remember.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
What he said to me, but he says that, well, clearly,
she deliberately has tried to change her name, and she's
tried to disappear herself, and I was not sure that
that was my thoughts on the situation. I felt like
something was wrong, and I kept saying, that's a weird name.
Why would you change your name to Flora Bella Ramkel
if you wanted to disappear, I'd be Jane Smith. And

(47:46):
you know what the other part of that is, if
I've left the country and I've gone to live in Luxembourg,
why would I come back? So there was all these
questions going and just rolling through my gut and thinking
something's not right. So I had a lady contact me
who was following my Facebook page and she said, Sally,

(48:07):
I just wanted to let you know, I've just been
onto the National Missing Person's Register and I've noticed your
mom's not on there. And I was like, what do
you mean she's not on there? So I rang Rebecca
Cotts because I had a friend in her now right,
So our friendship was now nine years old and she'd
been my person if I needed anything I could call
on her.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
And just to clarify too, Rebecca.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Was working in friends and families of Missing persons for AFP,
so she wasn't actually with the Australian Federal Police. She
was a civilian working for them in this space supporting
people with missing persons, and I rang her and I said,
I've just had this lady tell me that Mom's name
is not on the register. Can you please have a
look and try and work out what's happened. And she

(48:51):
had a look at the file while I'm on the
phone to her, and she said, hmm, there's something on
the file, but I need to get approval to be
able to tell you what it is. Bear with me,
let me see if I can get approval and I'll
come back to you. So it's a long time ago,
and it was a very frustrating period of time. So
I'm going to say maybe a day. The same day,

(49:12):
the next day, the day after, Rebecca comes back to
me with approval and she brings me and says, I've
been given approval to send.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
You what we have.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
So she sent me a document and the document was
outlining the situation of my mom and they new South
Wales Police had marked my mum as located and a date.
So upon looking at this document, it's actually got a
notation that my mom was located on the seventh of

(49:43):
December twenty eleven, and that on the eighth of November,
so month before that, Gary shean suspends the case of
my mum. So I ran Gary and I said, I've
just received a document from the AFP that says that

(50:06):
in twenty and eleven you located my mum. Now, I
won't go into the nitty gritty because there's a little
bit of back and forth about some information about her
living in Queensland that came into that mix, and I'm
not really clear, so I don't want to sort of
talk too much about that. But he said to me,
can you read me the document? So I read it

(50:27):
to him and he said, can you read it again?
So I read it again, and he said, I'm just
going to make a call. I'll call you back. So
he called me back a short while later. I was
at work and he said, I've spoken to them and
they said it's a typo.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
I said, what do you mean, it's a typo.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
There's a document, a legal document says that my mum
was located on the seventh of December twenty eleven and
it's now twenty sixteen and I know nothing of this,
what's going on? And he said, I'm just going to
ring them back and get a bit more information. So
then he rings me back again.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Later.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
It might have even been the next day, and it
was quite a lengthy phone call. And I did write
all this down in a notebook because I got to
the point in this exercise of I write down everything.
I write down the date, how long the call was,
what time it was, because what I quickly realized fast
forward another ten years, no one ever puts anything in
writing to me. They always ring it through to me.

(51:30):
So I've got no proof of what's been said, what's happened,
what's so it's very important that you start documenting everything.
So I've become a bit paranoid in that realm of life,
let's say, for valid reasons. He rings me back and
he said, I've spoken to them again and they've explained
to me that on a document within the police force,

(51:53):
there's two boxes. You're either located or you're missing. And
we believe on the basis that your mum sold her house,
she quit her job, and she changed her name, didn't
tell that she was coming back into the country, that
she's deliberately gone missing, so we have no choice but
to tick that she's been located. And I was like,

(52:14):
what do you mean. You can't mark someone located if
you haven't located them. She's in La La Land. You
guys obviously need a third box. If that's the scenario,
we don't know box, rather than let's make an assumption
and put her over here. Because that language continued. Then
I was fighting every force of nature. I've got documents
where police are saying, oh, I believe Marian was located

(52:37):
as recently as last month. Who says that stuff without
proof and without actual facts. So that was really damaging
to the case for me and for mum, you know,
at that time, and that was twenty sixteen, and Gary
had sort of said to me, that's as good as
I can get. It's documented that I think it was

(52:57):
the eighth of November, so like just a month before
that located was noted on that document. He suspended the
case and no action was to be taken, and then
she gets marked as located.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
So in discussions with Gary, he was pretty much telling
me on repeat his hands were tied and he couldn't
help me any further.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
And I can't remember for sure.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
He might have suggested to me that I maybe go
and talk to Queensland Police and see if they can
help me, being that she was living in Queensland and
it typically should be a Queensland case. Is kind of
the vibe he was always pushing onto me. So in
the December, I took myself down with my folder and
rocked into Morningside Police station here in Brisbane and talk

(53:44):
to the person at the desk. Again.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
I was having like deja vu.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
No one brings you in and sits down and says,
I'm so sorry you're dealing with this. What can we do?
They just sat at the table at the front desk
with big perspects in front of it, took my name
and number and said we'll get someone to call you.
So I remember I was working and i'd driven to
the post office and I was going to collect the
mail and I was sitting in my car when this
lady rang me and in a nutshell she said to me,

(54:11):
we can't help you, Sally, just because you're dissatisfied with
New South Wales Police. They own carriage of the case.
We can't just pick up and start helping you because
they own the carriage of the case. And I remember
that very clearly because that was the first time i'd
heard that language, that there was a carriage of the case.
So then I went back and forth. Then there's lots

(54:34):
of emails and lots of transcripts of me asking for
the carriage to be released by New South Wales. If
they've suspended it and you're not working on it, why
can't you give it to Queensland Police to have a
look at and see if we can get some traction
on looking for my mum because no one else is
doing anything and they refuse to No, we have carriage

(54:54):
of it, we're not giving it to Queensland. So I
was really left at that juncture, going what do I do?
What are we now? We're twenty twenty five so next year.
That's ten years ago, and the fight has just been
huge ever since to get people to help me, to
get people to listen to what I'm saying and help
me find the answers as to what's happened.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
People just don't disappear.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
I mean, yes they do, but there's usually a reason why.
So they either have disappeared on their own account or
something has happened to them. And I wasn't about to
sit back and let that go down that slide because
I just my gut told me something was not right
and I had to do more so in twenty eighteen,
so a couple of years after that all happened and

(55:39):
everything kind of just paused like there was nothing happening.
And Gary had told me, this is as good as
you're going to get. So they were the kind of
languages that I was getting. My hands are tied, nothing
I can do. I can try and help you, but
I'll be doing it in my spare time because I've
got other jobs to do. So that was sort of
like the language that I was copying most of the time.
And I was trying to think of all these different things,

(56:00):
like can you check her superannuation?

Speaker 1 (56:03):
Did she do a tax return in ninety ninety seven?

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Can you look at the passenger lists on the flights
that she came in and out of, so we can
see if the same name's on the same flight, maybe
we have a person of interest. I was throwing all
these suggestions at them, and I'm just sitting here as
the daughter of a missing person, a mum of three,
working full time, trying to think of how I could
find information that might help me find out what's happened

(56:26):
to my mum, full well knowing that her bank accounts
were drained and I knew something was wrong. She hadn't
bought a house, she hadn't touched her super, she hadn't
gone to Center Link. And this is based on what
I was being told by police. So I was really
reliant on them giving me that information, because when someone's
missing but they're not deceased, you don't have a death

(56:46):
certificate and you are powerless to their information. And I
kept getting.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Told by Gary that Florabella.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
He always referred to her as Florabella, which just grinded
my gears to the whole because no one knew her
as Florabella and there was a reason why this name
had come into the mix. And he kept saying to me,
Flora Bella's privacy matters. Selling her privacy is important, and
I was like, but when does that stop? When does
it actually be a case that I can actually help

(57:14):
her and work on helping find out what's happened to her.
And in twenty eighteen, a lady that I know from
my children's primary school, who had a link into the
media world, had wrung me and she said, Hey, Sally,
just wondering if you're interested if I could try and
get you onto sixty Minutes or the Sunday Night program.

(57:36):
Would you be interested? And I said one hundred percent.
My grandmother had recently passed at this point, and that's
my mom's mum.

Speaker 1 (57:44):
She was living by herself and she was ninety four.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
I didn't want to upset her, like it got to
the point where she didn't want to talk about it.
I was very careful with anything that I was thinking
or saying or doing, but I knew that it had
more to tell and someone knows something, so I had
to do something.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
But I just really felt it in my heart.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
I had to wait for her to pass before I
didn't because I really didn't want to upset her. And
I said, yeah, I'm really keen. I'm ready now, like
this is the right time to do something.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
My kids are a little bit older.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
I can spend time now doing this because I know
how consuming it is from the times that I had
dived back in. She said, okay, well I'll see what
I can do. And so about a week later, I
hadn't heard from anybody. I rang her back and I said, Hey,
just checking, has anybody sort of reached out? Have you
had any interest? And she said, look, I haven't. I've

(58:34):
put it out there if they contact you, they will.
I went, okay, all right, no problem. And it was
only a couple of days after that that I got
a call from Alison Sandy and Allison actually used to
work for this lady's husband, so that's how they were connected.
And she said, would you like to meet for a coffee?
And I said, sure, love to meet for a coffee.
So we arranged that and I rocked up with my

(58:56):
big blue folder with all my documents in it, and
we sat down for a coffee and we pretty quickly
decided that it wasn't going to be enough for a
one hour TV program on Sunday night, but maybe we
should look at doing a podcast. I had just heard
The Teacher's Pet. That was the first podcast I'd ever
listened to, and I sort of saw similarities in my

(59:19):
mum's story about a woman who the police just sort
of wrote off as well, she just wants to be
left alone, she doesn't want to be found. And we
came up with the concept of doing The Lady Vanishers,
and I think today still it's the longest running single
story episode podcast in Australia. When we were up to

(59:40):
fifty seven episodes. It finished last year in February when
we got to the end of the findings for the
Inquest bar.

Speaker 7 (59:49):
And Barter, the Gonks teacher who disappeared twenty four years ago.
Did she meet with foul play or start a new
live first the Blogbuster Lady Vanishes podcast now The Inquest
to Solve the Mystery. Full coverage on seven News Monday.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
So Allison and I met, I think it was in
October of twenty eighteen, and it was an interesting time actually,
because I'd spoken to Gary Shean in the December and
I told him, I said, I've got a media interest.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
We're going to do a podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
And he had told me prior to that, in that
same conversation that his hands were tied, there's really nothing
more to do. He'll only work on it any spare time,
same sort of language again. I said, Okay, well, I
have got a media interest and we're looking at doing
a podcast. So I'll keep you informed as to what's
going on with that. Because I've always worked actively with

(01:00:43):
the police. Anything they want, I've given it to them,
and I've been very kind and of giving of my time.
I've driven back and forth whenever they want to take
DNA and blah, blah blah, blah blah. I've done a
lot because at the end of the day, I just
want to find my mum. I don't want to be
an antagonistic human and upset anybody. I'm just here to
find the answers, you know. I just want people with
passion and drive to have the same for me. Anyway,

(01:01:06):
we went away for Christmas, and then when we got back,
I went away again with my daughters because Ella had
finished school and we decided we were going to go
on a bit of a girl's trip. So when I
got back from that, Gary rang me, which was quite
out of the out of the ordinary, and said to me, oh,
I just wanted to let you know I've done multiple
proof of life checks runs all over Australia for your mum.

(01:01:28):
And I went, you just told me your hands were
tired and you weren't doing anything and there's nothing more
you could do, and now you're doing proof of life checks. Okay,
well that's good. I'm glad you're doing proof of life checks.
That's really what I wanted you to do. And he said,
I've only heard back from two so far and there's nothing.
And then the first of April we launched The Lady
Vanishers and we went live with Channel seven and I

(01:01:51):
went down to Sydney. We were on Sunrise promoting it
to get it going and look to be honest, we
at that point we thought it would be a seven
part podcast series, just talking about my story in the
hope that someone might know something.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
Marion Barter is an extraordinary one that once married to
a Soakaru legend. She disappeared in nineteen ninety seven and
has never been seen again.

Speaker 5 (01:02:15):
Her daughter Sally, has never given up hope and her
search for the truth is the subject of a brand
new podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
That was my hope and my goal at the end
of it was to get to an inquest because my
mum had never been to an inquest or had an inquest,
and she wasn't even recognized as missing for a lot
of that time, and at that point in twenty nineteen,
she was not on the National Missing Person's Register, My
DNA was not on any register, and we were really

(01:02:44):
going nowhere. It was circling the drain and no one
was interested and they all thought that her privacy added
more than finding her.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
So the podcast started.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
It gained very fast momentum and I was shocked and overwhelmed,
and you know, trying to keep up with everything. And
after many many years of not having anybody really show
much interest, and I had like less than a thousand
followers on my Facebook page, I'm now up to twenty
thousand people following my Facebook page. The Lady Vanishers had
like millions of downloads and people recognizing me in the street,

(01:03:16):
and I was like, oh goodness me, like, this is
really huge now. And I wanted it to be big
because I know someone knows more than we've found out yet.
So that was why I was happy to project myself
into that space for the pure fact of finding more
knowledge and more information. And that has been the case.
We've had so many people come forward and tell us things,

(01:03:37):
and it's been imperative. We've got Jonie who so if
I give you the timeline right we launch on the
first of April, I put a call out on the
podcast and say we would really like some help if
you can help us, if you know something, can you
please let us know? And we got a call from
Joanie Condos and she said that she had done some

(01:03:59):
research into the name Ramachel and she was sick this
night and she was staying up late. She'd had the
flu and she was just playing around on the computer
and she had had a missing person story in her
family on her husband's side, and so she had some
skills in that space that she thought she could lend
to my mum's case to see what she could find.

(01:04:20):
And lo and behold, she found an ad in a newspaper,
which was a French speaking newspaper called Lo Courier Australian.
It was published out of Sydney and the date in
the newspaper article was nineteen ninety four and it was
a gentleman by the name of m f Ramckel who

(01:04:41):
was looking for love, potential marriage. He's a polyglot, non smoker,
you know, bon chique boncha, which is like good taste,
good style in French. And the po box was Lennox
Heads in New South Wales. And for those who are
listening along and don't really know the geographical side of Australia,

(01:05:04):
Byron Bay is the next suburb to Lennox Heads. My
mum's money was being withdrawn out of Barron Bay. And
we've got a po box with a guy looking for
love with the same surname spelled exactly the same way
as my mum was spelling her name, her new name
that she changed her name to, who also happened to

(01:05:24):
have the same initials Flora Bella Natalia Marion Ramackel.

Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
My mind was blowing. We were freaking out, going what
is going on?

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
What is going on? So investigations start into who is
this FM Ramikel. We knew how old he was because
he put his age in the paper and we knew
it was the paper date was nineteen ninety four, so
we were able to work out how old he was.
And we did a search on an MF. Ramichel and
we found a guy who was the same age who

(01:05:58):
lived in Luxembourg. Mum's passenger card said that she was
going to live in life Luxembourg, and we were just
mind blowing by this whole thing. I was beside myself, actually,
I just didn't know what to think. So anyway, May
twenty second, I remember it well because it was one
of Ella's best friend's birthdays and I was sitting on

(01:06:21):
the plane wishing her a happy birthday as we're taking off,
and yeah, we flew to Luxembourg and we actually knocked
on the door of mister f M.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
Ramchel, who lives in Luxembourg.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
That was mind boggling, Like I reached my hand out
to shake his hand, he rejected my hand. I was
holding my mum's photo in my hand and I was
shaking like a leaf. And I'm with an interpreter. So
I said to the boys, the cameraman and Brian Seymour,
who came with me, who's one of the producers of
the podcast, and I said, let me go by myself.

(01:06:56):
I don't want cameras in their faces and stuff like that.
These people might be very innocent people. I don't know
who they are, but we need to tread very carefully.
But were received with a very hostile situation. His wife
came out of the garage and started filming the boys
in the car, which was parked down the street, while
Sarah and I are at the front door, and I've

(01:07:17):
got this man who was very aggressive to me, and
he's saying he wouldn't speak English. I said, you speak
English and nah, and he's speaking to Sarah, but we
do know that he speaks fluent English. So that was
frustrating and it was nerve racking, and it was questionable,
why are you acting this way. He later said to
me that I was acting like a gypsy, which is

(01:07:38):
a very derogative term over there, that I should have
come up to the door and excused myself for the disturbance.
And I was like, well, I felt like I was
very pleasant, you know, I put my hand out, I
was pretty kind. Actually, I was just being an Australian
girl going I feel really nervous, like my heart was
racing a million miles an hour. And I kept saying
to Brian, my husband's going to shoot me if he

(01:08:00):
knew that I was doing this right now, He's going
to be very mad at me. And I've got three kids.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
And I'm like, oh my god, Like what's going on.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Why I'm in the middle of the fields and in
the middle of nowhere and no one really knows where
I am. Anyway, we meet him. He then calls the police,
and we'd actually been to the police station the morning
that morning before because they weren't home, and so we'd
spoken to the police, and the police knew why we
were there, and they had actually done a search for me,

(01:08:28):
because when you live in Luxembourg, you have to register
to live in the country, and so they looked up
her date of birth, and they looked up under Florabella
Ramichel and under Marion Barter and there was no register.
So that told us that she's never been registered as
living in Luxembourg. And by the time we went back
to their house, we'd actually driven all the way back
into Luxembourg, and we'd been there three times this day,

(01:08:50):
and it's an hour out and an hour back, so
that's six hours of driving there and back and there
and back, and in the car, my brain's just going
a million miles an hour as to what's going on,
Like it was crazy. We were up at three am
in the morning and like, yeah, just absolutely mental. And
we got back to his house and we did all
of that, and then Brian and the cameraman came up

(01:09:11):
to the door, so we saw Sarah and I left.
He closed the door on our face and we left,
and the cameraman and Brian come up to the door
and they start knocking and say, we just would like
to talk to you. We've just got a few questions
to ask. And he's up the top sipping his tea
videoing us as we're leaving, and then we just waited
in the car, and then the police came, and so

(01:09:32):
he walks out and comes and addresses the police. Brian
and the cameraman and Sarah went up to the police
and I sat in the car because I was just like,
Oh my god, I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
I'm just really quite scared now. I just don't know
what's happening.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Anyway, it was all sort of Joe Bull and they
were like, we've got nothing to do with her. I
don't know who she is. I should also mention that
this guy, mister Ramichel in Luxembourg was also a professional
football player, so we were sort of putting the dots together,
going did he meet Johnny Warren when Johnny Warren was
just playing professional football because they're the same age, and
so there was all all these weird coincidences that were

(01:10:07):
just very linked. So we've got Luxembourg mum saying she's
moving to Luxembourg permanently on her outgoing passenger card, yet
she comes back into the country six weeks later. We've
got her changing her name to this random name of Ramackurl,
which there were no ramckeurls in Australia at all except
for this ad in the paper and my mum changing
her name. So we were just having a chat with

(01:10:29):
them out the front, and we actually spoke to his
ex wife. We found her details and gave her a
phone call just to ask her some questions, and her
name is Monique Cornelius.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Turns out that a.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Gentleman by the name of Reck Blum, who has admitted
to having an affair with my mum in nineteen ninety
seven prior to her disappearance, also was in a relationship
with Monique Cornelius, who is Fernand Ramachel's ex wife, the
real Fernand Ramachel. Mister Blum also admits to using Fernand

(01:11:07):
Ramicel's identity and placing the ad in the paper in
the La Courier Australian. He also had an international driver's
license that he obtained in Queensland of the name Fernande Ramckel.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
In court, he actually accused my.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
Mum of stealing the driver's license so she could change
her name to that name. So it's all very interesting.
The journey itself has been quite wine boggling, And you
know I said earlier that my goal was really to
get to an inquest so we could do a full investigation.
We did a petition. So on my way home on
that flight, I came up with the idea, maybe if

(01:11:44):
we do a petition, we can get some leverage. We
had no reward or for information, and so everything just
started to ballroll from this moment. So the ad in
the paper that Jonie found super super important and that
opened the case right up. How we found Rick Blum
was another gentleman who was listening to the Lady Vanishers

(01:12:05):
and he's always wanted to stay anonymous, but he's a local,
and he took himself down to the Ballina library and
because we had a phone number in the ad, and
the police, like I remember Gary saying to me, oh,
we've tried to find the phone number.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
Who owns the phone number?

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
And it's this guy and he's retired and it definitely
wouldn't have been him, and Telstra didn't have records that
go back further than seven years. However, this gentleman just
went down to the local library. He did hand scan
thousands of entries and ran it through microfish. But then
he found the phone number was connected to a business
called Ballana Coin Investments that ran out of Ballana and

(01:12:43):
the name of the owners of that company was Frederick
de Heavidery and Diana Heavidaeriry. Frederic de Heavidery is also Reckblum,
one of his fifty two aliases that he has used
in Australia during his time here. He's a Belgium national
who moved to Australia in the sixties and has been

(01:13:05):
here ever since. So you know, at that point we
had a really successful petition. So we had a lot
of Australia and around the world behind me by this point,
and we had over twenty seven thousand signatures on there,
which then saw us get a two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars reward by New South Wales Police noted for

(01:13:25):
my mum, which was a breakthrough for me.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
I was like, wow, you guys haven't even recognized she's
been missing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Now she's a missing person and you've got a reward
out for her. And at that same point I had
written to the New South Wales coroner It's Court and
asked if they would consider having an inquest or holding
an inquest, and they did so. After months of waiting,
I finally got the okay and all this while I've
got Gary Sheen telling me, well it's really not a

(01:13:54):
New South Wales case. It should be a Queensland case,
because you know your mum was living in Queensland. But
our argument was her last know and movement. So we
know that her Medicare card was used in Grafton after
she came back. We know that about the withdrawals of
her money in Byron Bay and in burly Heads, and
then on the fifteenth of October there was eighty thousand

(01:14:14):
dollars electronically transferred out of her bank account to another
bank account. Mister Blum opened a bank security envelope with
the Commonwealth Bank, the same bank the day before the
eighty thousand dollars were withdrawn from my mum's bank account,
and he.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Closed it thirteen days later.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
No proof that he has the money or that it
went there, but as a lot of coincidences or circumstances
that you might go that was quite interesting, and the
coroner did make mention of that in her findings spoiler alert.
We ended up getting an inquest and that was extremely
difficult process. I ended up on heart medication. My resting

(01:14:55):
heart rate was up to one ninety beats per minute
and you know it tore my family apart. Not myself,
increased my been and my kids. But you know, my
mum's family don't talk to me anymore since the podcast
was launched, and you know, we've had to be open
and honest about what's happened and how things have been

(01:15:15):
handled and what's transpired. And it really puts a bomb
in your world and it explodes pretty hard, and at
the end of the day, you're the one left to
pick up the pieces. And I'm really grateful because I've
had quite a lot of people who have stood by
my side very firmly for a long time, helping me,
and they were there to support me and care for

(01:15:35):
me and check in on me. But you know, the
person who's stuck by me the longest and the hardest
is Jooning. She came in and she said, I'm here
until you tell me to stop. I'm going to keep
going and I'm going to keep helping you. And she's
been instrumental in helping me. So we had the findings
in February last year, and that was the first time

(01:15:57):
I've actually heard the words that my mum is officially deceased.
And at that point, you know, the finding things was
held at Lincoln Court in Sydney, and I put a
call out on Facebook and I said, if anyone would
like to come and support you know, I've got no family,
so if you can come and help support me, that
would be amazing, and just wear a splash of green.
And we arrived at the court to an absolute sea

(01:16:20):
of green. The concrete was covered with human bodies who
were there to support me and give me a hug.
And it was the nicest feeling I've had. Because none
of Mum's sisters came. We only had one of her
friends come, Catherine Greenwood, who's one of Mum's really good
friends from her Sussex similar days, and Mum taught her
daughter Sally. Her name is Sally as well, so her
and her daughter came. But outside of that, it was

(01:16:42):
just people. The people came and the people helped me.
And at the end of the day, this podcast has
actually been built on support of care of people. And
I've always said people power was the power of the
people who actually get us through and get the information,
because people know stuff and it might be just the
smallest little inkling of information, but it actually can follow

(01:17:02):
through to huge things and that's what's really projected us
onto this journey, and the inquest ended, but it didn't
end for Joanie and I, but I said to her
there's still more to do, and she agreed to help
me continue where we are today. So what I wanted
to share with everybody was the journey after the findings,

(01:17:24):
because for me, being told my mum was deceased was
not a surprise to me, but it meant that I
could do things and propel the story and the investigation further.
I then had a death certificate, something I haven't had
for twenty six years. And there's more to do, There's
more to look at. There's lots of things that weren't

(01:17:47):
done at the inquest, Like we were asking questions and
wanting more information and we were getting told the inquest
is about two things, Sally. The inquest is is your
mum dead or alive? And did the police do their job?
They were the two points about the inquest. It had
nothing to do with anybody else, any other person. It
was just about those two elements, So anything else really

(01:18:10):
was null and void as far as the coroner was concerned.
Her job was to determine those two things, and she
determined that my mum had died. On or around the
fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, when the eighty thousand
dollars was withdrawn on the second count. She determined that
the failure by New South Wales Police to do their

(01:18:31):
job properly between nineteen ninety seven and twenty nineteen was
the main reason that my mum is still missing today,
and had they followed procedure properly and had followed the
Commissioner's handbook as to how you deal with and handle
a missing person's case, my mum would potentially have been
found