August 27, 2025 • 62 mins
On October 19, 1997, Sally Leydon called her brother Owen to ask if their mum, Marion Barter—who was on a year-long trip overseas—had phoned for his birthday. When Owen said no, Sally felt uneasy. Marion never missed birthdays.
She’d last heard from her mum in August, calling from the UK. But it was the '90s—no constant contact, no photo trail. Marion had vanished.
Someone suggested checking her bank account. A bank employee paused when Sally mentioned Marion was overseas, saying that they were seeing large withdrawals from her account.
That moment sparked Sally’s decades-long search for answers. A missing mother, a hidden identity, and a trail of secrets would become the focus of one of Australia's most gripping podcasts: The Lady Vanishes.
Find out more about The Missing Matter podcast here.
If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.
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Guest: Sally Leydon
Host: Claire Murphy
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. On October nineteenth,
nineteen ninety seven, Sally Leyden called her brother Ohen down
in Sydney.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
He'd celebrated his birthday the day.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Before, and she wanted to know if their mum, Marian,
who was on a year long overseas trip, had gotten
in touch to wish him a happy birthday. When he
tells her that she didn't, Sally starts to worry. Now
that is not like her mum. She would never miss
her son's birthday. Now she knew that her mum had
been in the UK, she'd received a phone call from
(00:41):
her back in August. But it was the nineties, and
this is back before we were in constant contact via
mobile phone or the internet. There was no digital photo
trail of her mum's sipping tea in the quaint English
countryside for her to push back those worrying thoughts. Sallie
had no idea where her mum was or even how
(01:02):
to get in contact with her.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Someone suggested that she'd check.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Her mum, Marion's bank account to see if it was
still being used and to maybe find out where, while
the bank employee said to her, look, they can't just
hand over that kind of information due to privacy reasons. Obviously,
something Sally tells them makes them do a bit of
a double take. Where did you say your mum was
traveling overseas? Did you say that's not what I'm seeing?
(01:27):
The bank teller tells her, I can see money being
taken out quite large sums of it in fact, from
a branch they say in Byron Bay. From that moment on,
Sally search for her mum, Marian Barter would become the
subject of one of the country's most gripping podcasts. The
World following along while Sally learns that her mum was
(01:48):
hiding secrets, lots of them. I'm Claire Murphy and this
is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
most about them. Now you might know the name Marian
Barter from the highly successful podcast The Lady Vanishes. Through
(02:11):
bank records, witness reports, classified ads, false information, overseas trips,
and a less than thorough police investigation, a tangled web
of threads started to reveal the secrets of Marion Barter's
final known whereabouts. But while their investigation uncovered a lot,
it still wasn't able to hand Sally in her family
(02:32):
that last piece of the puzzle. Was her mum scammed
by someone who knew she was a romantic at heart?
Did she actually return to Australia or was it just
her passport that did And why did she change her
name before setting off on that fateful journey? Sally Laden,
Marian's daughter, has been searching for her mum all this time,
(02:54):
refusing to let her mum's story fade into a box
stash somewhere in the police archives. Sally's new podcast, The
Missing Matter, is hoping to not only uncover the truth
about Marian's final resting place, but to help others who
are also searching for their missing Sally joins us now, Salie,
(03:16):
thank you so much for joining us today. I just
wanted to know, and I kind of got a sense
of this from the ABC TV show You Can't Ask
that when they spoke to relatives of people who had
missing family members. It's been like, we're coming up on
thirty years since your mum went missing, and just wanted
to know, like, does the emotion around searching for a
(03:38):
lost loved one. Does that ever become any easier to bear?
I imagine it to be something like an open wound
that never really gets a chance to heal.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I personally think it gets harder as you get older.
I think that also has something to do with your age.
I was only twenty four when my mum went missing.
I'm now fifty two and I'm a mum myself, so
I think that has a part of it. But we
refer to the loss of a missing person in our
space as ambiguous loss, the ambiguity that comes with not
(04:09):
knowing the where, the why, the how, the what happened
to your loved one. It plays with your head and
it can cause mental health issues and all sorts of
crazy because you can dive in and you know, sometimes
not come back out for a while, and can be
quite challenging for.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Those listening who maybe aren't aware of your mum Marion's story,
although it has been covered quite extensively on the Lady
Vanisher's podcast, and you've picked that up again with the
Missing Matter in your own podcast now, which kind of
picks up from where the coronial inquests handed down their report.
Can you take us back to before your mum went missing.
What was life like for you guys as a family?
(04:52):
What was she like before all of this and what
you've subsequently learned about her has come to light?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, I mean, we had an unusual family mix, I
would say. My I moved to the Gold Coast after
getting a really good promotion at an exclusive boys' school
up there called the Southport School. So she packed up
and moved from New South Wales to Queensland on the
(05:20):
Gold Coast in late nineteen ninety three. I came up
and visited her in the June of nineteen ninety four
and decided that I would move up there with her
at that point, and I moved up in the December
of that year. My brother was living in Sydney. I
was twenty one. We were seventeen months apart. I was
(05:43):
the oldest. He was in a relationship that he'd been
in for many years, and soon after I moved up,
he got engaged. Soon after that, I met my husband,
who we've been together for thirty years now. His name's Chris,
And yeah, life was. Life was pretty boring, to be honest,
(06:04):
in comparison to what I am living today. I lived
with mum for a while. I met Chris, I moved
out because I got a dog and she wouldn't let
me have the dog. So and then Chris and I
ended up moving in together and we got engaged, and
their mum decided she was going on the trip of
a lifetime and we haven't seen her since.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well, let's talk about her circumstances.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So she was single at this point in life, like
she'd been married and divorced three times by that stage.
Did you get a feeling from her that she was
out looking for love when she was embarking on this
overseas adventure or was she happily single and was she
content with where her life had taken her.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
At that point.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Look, I don't think my mum was ever happy being single.
She was a woman who loved being in relationships. She
was a romantic. She was that person who dreamt of
Heathcliff coming over the rolling hills to whisker away, you know,
on the Orient Express, let's say, because that's the story.
(07:07):
So I feel like there was a few dramas happening
for her at her work. She had just won a
big award in teaching. She became the best teacher in
Queensland in the November of nineteen ninety six. I think
I just saw things start to shift. In that new
year of nineteen ninety seven, she changed a little bit.
(07:30):
She was sad, she was upset, she'd been crying to me.
Sounded to me like there was a bit of tall
Poppy syndrome happening at the school where some of the
other teachers didn't like the fact that she'd been nominated
for this award and won it, and it was a
pretty big award. I mean, Ida Butchero's actually was the
presenter at the Netta Awards who gave mum her award,
(07:51):
and my mum loved Diea Buttro's, so she would have
just completely loved that. But yeah, I think she was
just in a different headspace. So when she told me
that she had decided she was going to go on
this trip, she was going to go away for ee
year and she was going to come back in time
for my wedding, which was the following October, I was
(08:12):
okay with that. I just thought, you know, what's she's
not happy where she is. She's great at her job,
She's very passionate and loves what she does. As a teacher,
and I was okay with her going overseas. You know,
she was she was a strong person, she was capable,
very smart, So I didn't have any issues about her
(08:32):
doing that on her own or going solo. Yeah, but
I think she was a person that loved being in
a relationship. So you know, as it turns out, potentially
that's why she went overseas.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Well, let's talk about that moment because and as much
as you, as a twenty three year old is paying
attention to what their mum is doing, I mean, you've
got your own life, and you know, when you're in
your twenties, is still a little bit selfish. You do
not really like in depth in your mom's life at
that point. But there's lots of things that you've since
found out were actually going on at that time as
(09:06):
she's preparing herself to go on this overseas adventure. Can
you just talk us through some of the things that
were going on that you've now become aware of as
she was packing up and getting ready to go.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, look some of the things that we've come across.
She changed her name and didn't tell any of us
that she had done that, and that actually happened the
same week as my birthday and Mother's Day in nineteen
ninety seven. So I was quite sad to find that
out because my mum and I had a very good relationship,
(09:41):
and I was quite shocked, if anything, to know that
she hadn't told me that she had done that, and
she'd packed up all her things and put them into
a shipping container. And she did say to me, if
I decide to stay overseas and teach, I will get
you to send the shipping container over to me. And
(10:03):
I kicked myself every day that I didn't push her
to find out where she was storing the shipping container,
because we've never found that. So there's lots of little
things that have trickled in over the past twenty eight
years that have given me some insight as to potentially
how she was feeling. We knew at the time when
(10:24):
she'd sold her house, she sold it really quickly. She
sold it in three weeks and for fifteen thousand, less
than she bought it for only a few years before.
And I know fifteen thousand doesn't sound like much in
today's money, but back then the house was one hundred
and seventy five thousand, I think, and she sold it
for one hundred and sixty thousand very quickly in three weeks.
(10:46):
And we've sort of gone back and looked at that,
and I've had people like Laura Richards, who's a criminal
analyst who used to work for New Scotland Yard, and
she's looked at that and the speeding of the timeline
of things that have happened, Like she's changed her name,
she's got a new passport, she's got an international driver's license,
she's sold her house at a loss, and she quit
(11:07):
a job and then goes overseas, so that the speed
of that is quite worrying and troubling in from a
criminal perspective as to why she was doing that and
wasn't telling anybody what she was doing.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
What's interesting, too, is that when she applied for that
passport in her new name, she didn't ask anyone to
sign that application to be her witness. That would potentially
be someone that you would think she would because didn't
she ask a dentist to sign off on that for her.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
She did, Yeah, and he was on the stand at
the inquest actually and had no recollection of the matter.
He also was based in Brisbane. She lived on the
Gold Coast, So there was just a few of those
weird scenarios that we sort of looked at and went,
what why, why did she do that? And we still
don't know. Obviously she's not here to tell us, but
(11:58):
we can make assumptions based on activities and information that
we've garnered throughout their process of looking for her.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Well, she does go overseas, and it's not like she
disappeared into the ether. She's still in regular contact with you.
She's sending postcards, letters, and then she makes a final
phone call to you. It's August one, nineteen ninety seven.
This is the last time you speak to your mum.
What do you remember from that conversation? And is that
(12:28):
something that you replay to yourself. I imagine if I
was in your situation, that would be something that I
would replay in my head over and over and over
to see if I missed something perhaps.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
And this is where it becomes tricky, And this was
a topic of conversation throughout the inquest that when mum
spoke to me on the phone, she wasn't missing, So
I wasn't jotting down all the information or writing down
how long we spoke for or the information I had
to go off my memory of what we were talking about,
(13:01):
and I remember it as clear as day. Thankfully, I'm
blessed to be able to do that, I guess, but
the phone call was I remember because there's timelines, and
I think this is how my brain processes the things,
because obviously it's a very long time ago and a
lot has happened over that time. But I go back,
I go back through on my timestamp situation. So the
(13:23):
Threadbird disaster, for example, we have a time stamp on
that that happened and occurred. At eleven forty pm on
the thirtieth of July nineteen ninety seven, my husband and
I were driving back We've been skiing at Perisher, and
when we got home, there was an answering machine message
bleeping like the I don't know if you remember the answering.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I remember there'd be a light flashing. See knew someone.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Seeing the light flashing. I pressed it and it's Mum
and she's like, oh, I just heard word over here
about this redbird disaster. I just was checking in to
see if you and Chris were okay. And I remember
feeling really heartbroken. That I'd missed her, because that was
the first time she'd called since she'd been away. She
left on the twenty second of June, to give everyone
a bit of a timeline, or about six weeks in,
(14:09):
and I had just bought my wedding dress in Sydney
on the way back from skiing, and yeah, her passport
came back in on the second of August. So if
we look at the timeline there, we know for a
fact that she'd heard about the threadbir disaster, and she
being potentially in the UK's what we assume. She's a
(14:32):
day behind us as well, So we've got a very
narrow window here of her ringing checking in on Chris
and I. And I think that's important to mention because
she does fly back in the next day. And I
guess from my perspective, why would she take the time
to ring me and check in and make sure I'm okay.
(14:54):
She never wanted to see me ever again, which is
what I was told by police. So you know, the
phone call, she was at a payphone. The money kept
dropping out and the phone would hang up and she'd
ring me back again, and I was getting quite stressed
that because I guess I didn't have any control over
that conversation. She'd just chat and she'd written me this
(15:15):
long letter. It's written on notepaper from a hotel in Japan,
which is important to the stories, and thankfully I kept it.
But it's about nine pages of a little notepad that
you get next to your bed, so front and back
she's written, and that letter is kind of like a
bit of a checklist for me. Have you done this,
have you done that? Could you do this? Because she
(15:36):
was in such a rush when she was leaving, and
the phone call mimicked that, Okay, you got my letter,
Did you do this? Did you do that? So it
was a bit of a checklist. And then after about
the third or fourth time of the money dropping out,
she says to me, this is the last money I have,
so I'm just going to let you talk until the
money drops out. And so at that point I told
(15:57):
her what was going on in our lives and that
I just bought my wedding dress, and the phone cut
out and that was last time I ever spoke to her.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So, as you mentioned, you know that her part sport
arrives back in the country a day later, and we
presume that your mum marrying is the one who's using
that passport.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
But how long does.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
It take you to start to worry Because you don't
know at the time that she's her passport's returned to Australia.
You don't know, as you said, that your mum is
technically then missing. So how long does it take you
to really understand and when does it start to set in?
Like you know, when someone is missing, you think, okay,
maybe they're this, and you maybe think about all the
theories about potentially where they might be. Plus she's traveling,
it's the nineties, it's not like she had a mobile
(16:37):
phone with her. You know, she's using payphones. You're relying
on answering machines. So how long does it take you
to realize that something's amiss?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
So in the phone call, she said to me, look,
I'm going to stop writing postcards to everybody, and I
literally mean everybody got a postcard. Some people kept it, thankfully,
most didn't unfortunately, but they have been like little I
don't know, little droppings for us to be able to
actually timestamp where she was and where what she was
doing at the time, because she does talk about that
(17:05):
in these postcards and she said to me, look, I'm
going to stop writing postcards because I want to try
and have a holiday. And I said, absolutely, go and
have a holiday. Stop buying stamps and finding postboxes and
putting mail to us. We're all fine here. You just
go and have a break. Because I knew she needed
to do that, so in that there was an expectation
(17:26):
that I wasn't going to hear from her for a
little while, and so I wasn't worried. I was happy
that she was having a break. And then look, I
pulled myself back. It's hard to remember the timeline here
because it's a bit fuzzy, but there was a time
when it started to worry me that I realized I
actually have no way of contacting her. And in today's
(17:50):
world that's very hard to fathom because we're all so contactable,
but back then it was near impossible. We were relying
on dial up for the internet. As you said, we
didn't have mobile phones. Some people did, but you were
pretty well off if you had a mobile phone back then,
and it was so new. Technology was new. She didn't
have a laptop, so I was really relying on her
(18:12):
to either ring me or send me a letter in
the way of contacting as you did back in the nineties,
And it sort of just dawned on me that I
have no way of contacting her. I didn't know where
she was staying. I didn't know what hotel she was at.
I didn't know where she was going because she didn't
write any of that down. She didn't give me an
itinerary or anything for me to be informed or have
(18:34):
information of that. I don't even know if she knew
herself to be honest. And then it started getting long
in the tooth and I was like, I'm actually starting
to get concerned now, why is she not bringing me
what's happened? And then my brother's birthday was approaching in
the October, and I thought, for sure, she'll call Owen.
That'll definitely be the next point of contact if she
(18:55):
doesn't send us postcards or letters in the interim. And
I rang Ohen. His birthday was on a Saturday that year,
and the eighteenth of October, and I said, did you
hear from Mum? And he said no? And I was
worried at that point. And then I rang him back
the next day on the Sunday, and I said, have
you heard from her because giving her some grace that
(19:17):
they're a day behind over there and maybe she'd just
got her dates wrong. And he said, no, I didn't
hear from her, and I just knew something was wrong.
At that point. We had a friend come over for
dinner and we were talking about it at the dinner
table and she said to me, why don't you ring
the bank and see if she's using her account? And
so I jumped up straight away while we're eating dinner
(19:38):
and I rang The phone was on the wall next
to the dining room table, actually in the kitchen, so they,
my friend and Chris, my husband, were sitting there when
I rang Telly Banking and I said, look, my mum's
traveling overseas by herself. She's fifty one. She hasn't contacted
my brother forast birthday and that's very out of character.
Can you please check if she's using her bank account?
(19:59):
And she said, oh, I'm really sorry. I can't tell
you anything due to privacy. And she paused at that
point and said, hang on, did you say your mum's
overseas And I said yes, and she went, oh my god,
there's money coming out of her bank account in Byron
Bay and proceeded to tell me that five thousand dollars
had been withdrawn out of her bank account for multiple days,
somewhere in the mix of three and a half weeks.
(20:21):
She also tells me that she was back up in
Burley Heads on the Gold Coast, which is five minutes
from where I lived, so three days money was coming
out of her bank account there as well, and then
back down in Byron Bay. Now, Mum had left her
car with me. Before she left, she'd sold her house,
so she had nowhere to live and no transport. So
(20:42):
we know for a fact that she used her Medicare
card or her Medicare card was used in Grafton on
the thirteenth of August, So only what's that eleven days
twelve days after she's returned. So how did she get
to Grafton to use her Medicare card at an optometrist
and then back in Byron Bay taking out five thousand
(21:05):
dollars every day, then back up in to Burly Heads
and back down to Byron Back in nineteen ninety seven,
it took hours to get to Byron Bay because it
was a very hard road. It wasn't like the freeway
that it is today, So there's lots of questions about that,
like how did she maneuver herself, and why was she
taking out large lunts of money every day instead of
(21:26):
just taking out a lump sum. If I can add,
at this point, on the fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven,
we now know that eighty thousand dollars was electronically transferred
out of my mum's bank account to an unknown bank account.
So if you add all of that up, that's quite
a big chunk of money in today's money, probably close
(21:47):
to seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with Sally Leyden, the daughter of Marion Barter,
an Australian school teacher who vanished back in nineteen ninety
seven and has never been seen since.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Up next, Sally reveals.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
The explanation police gave her about her mother's disappearance, a
story that was not only misleading but completely incorrect. So
you have the feelings something's wrong. You're starting to find
evidence that something is definitely wrong. So you are taking
this to police at this stage, and this is a
(22:25):
thread that runs through this story quite significantly in whether
it's inaction from the New South Wales Police, whether it's
you being told that you can't access things due to
privacy reasons. But I'd like you to give me some
idea of and this is a complex one because it's
not just New South Wales Police, it's Queensland Police and
(22:45):
it's a lot of agencies working sort of sometimes side
by side, sometimes independently to try and find your mum.
But can you give us an idea of how the
police investigation into your mum's disappearance has been handled from
those very beginning stages through to the inquest. And this
is thirty years worth of information, so I understand it's
a lot. Do you feel police have handled this well?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Not very well? If I can just put it out
there straight off the cuff. The situation was after finding
out that money was coming out a mum's bank account,
Chris and I went straight down to Byron Bay and
took one of mum's photos and walked around the streets,
went to the bank and the guy at the bank
(23:30):
had a very unusual manner. He shook the photo and
asked me we actually shook the photo and said that
rings a bell and then walked into an office behind
him and came out, closed the door behind him, came out,
took a photo of a photocopy of it at the photocopier,
and walked over to me and said, what would you
like me to say to her if I see her?
And I just panicked. I was like, something is very
(23:52):
wrong here? What is going on? So well? Be lined
it around to Byron Bay Police station and this is
where it all gets a bit messy. They didn't take
a formal statement from me or me down. I stood
at the counter is my recollection and he just took
(24:12):
down notes in his notebook. And ten days ish later
I got a phone call from a man who I
believe was the same guy who I spoke to at
the police station, telling me that they'd located my mum
and that she didn't want anyone to know where she
is or what she's doing. I went back and told
(24:34):
my grandfather this information and he said, well, I'm not
satisfied with that, and he approached the Salvation Army Missing
persons unit here in Queensland and he started to work
with them, and that's where Queensland Police came into the mix.
Is my understanding and Queensland Police also have said, and
(24:58):
the Salvation Army told my grandfather in a letter which
I have that they had spoken to banks security and
bank security are like the police, and they confirmed that
it was your daughter Marion who came into the bank
and spoke to a bank teller that she wanted to
(25:18):
start a new life and withdrew the balance of her
bank account. So I have that in writing from Missing
Persons through the Salvation Army. It's come about at the
inquest that Queensland Police confirmed that and the Salvation Army.
The lady actually who was working with my grandfather who
(25:41):
is now very early came on to the stand, couldn't
remember it, but it's her name on the letter, so
she was like, well, obviously I wrote it because it's
my name, but said that sometimes it can be described
by somebody else and her just sign off on it.
At the time, and Queensland Police and New South Wales
Police through the inquest both confirmed that they'd never spoken
(26:01):
to or sited my mum.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That must have been heartbreaking to be told that at
the time, both you and your brother, because you've had
a very close relationship with your ma'ma up to that point,
and you're worried about her. What was that like to
hear that she potentially didn't want to have anything to
do with you. That must have killed you, guys.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Funny that you say that my brother ended up taking
his own life. He had a different experience with me.
The story gets a bit long in the tooth here,
but in short, my mum remarried my stepfather and he
didn't get along very well with Owen, my brother, and
it was a decision that Owen would go and live
(26:43):
with my dad, boys being boys. My dad was in
the Army Reserve, he played on motorbikes, and you know,
it probably had a better life for Owen really than
what we had living with my stepfather where he didn't
get along with And so for Owen, I feel like
he had abandonment issues from a young age with that happening.
(27:08):
In hindsight, and I do believe Mum thought she was
doing the right thing. She was trying to keep everybody
happy and balance the balls rather than having another divorced
marriage and a broken family. So I think she was
just trying to manage it the best way she knew.
I personally don't think that was a good decision, but
you know, you can't go back and change time. But
(27:29):
for oh and hearing that they'd found her and that
she didn't want anything to do with us again absolutely
crushed him, and a few years later he took his
own life, which absolutely devastated me. As I said before,
we were only seventeen months apart, so we were very
close growing up and completely ripped my heart out of
my chest when he died, very unnecessarily, and so to
(27:53):
hear that those words that were spoken to us and
if we just stopped for a second. I've been really
thinking about this a lot, as in my world that
I am in right now, the same age my mum
was when she we're missing, as opposed to my twenty three,
twenty four year old self. I'm actually devastated that the
(28:13):
delivery of those messages to us was so heartless and careless,
and I still haven't even had an apology from anybody
for that. You know, the woman who came on the
stand from Queensland Police, her comment at the inquest was, oh, yeah,
(28:33):
we liked to clean them up quick, referring to cleaning
up cases and getting them ticked off the box so
that they can file it Oh, yeah, we've done it.
We clean them up quick. And my mouth dropped on
the floor when she said that. I thought, how disgusting.
What a disgraceful term to use when you're talking about
(28:55):
a missing person's case and that woman is still missing today.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
This is something you talk about quite a bit, especially
in your new podcast, is how much you and the
people around you have been retraumatized over and over through
this experience.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And I think the thing that I felt.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Myself so wound up as you were talking about how
difficult it was for you to get your mum's death
certificate after the inquest report decided that she was most
probably deceased at this stage, and just the red tape
and the difficulty you have dealing with government departments and
with businesses like banks and all of that is just
(29:38):
traumatizing you, guys, over and over and over again because
it's not.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
An easy thing.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
And I guess, as you say in these podcasts, there's
reasons why these things are in place, because no one
wants to have their identity stolen and things taken. But
for you, you essentially have to go in fighting every
single time you try and like access your mom's super
access the money that was left over in her bank accounts,
try and tie up all those loose ends to finish
at all? Is there an end to the retraumatization you
(30:07):
continue on this journey when you still don't have an answer.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
I refer to it as trauma on repeat. The doors
that have been shut in my face have just been astounding,
And I think being so open and honest about my
experience in the podcast allows people an opportunity to learn,
and I'm hoping that departments and government departments and people
(30:31):
who work in those areas listen to what I'm saying
and actually try and make a difference, even if it's
just the tone that they use when they're talking to
somebody who has a missing person. You know. I make
reference to one part of the journey where I ring
Archives National Archives here in Queensland and said, my mum's
a missing person. She changed her name in nineteen ninety seven.
(30:54):
I'm just wondering if you could tell me the correct spelling.
That was all I was after. It's an unusual name, Ramchel,
and I just wasn't sure if I was spelling it
the right way, and I didn't have any documentation at
that moment because everything was like lockdown from me. I
was getting blank, big black pages in brief of evidence
and freedom of information that they blocked out from me seeing.
(31:18):
So she said, no, can't tell you, And I said, okay,
well due to privacy. And I said, okay, Well, when
is the presumption of death come into play with a
missing person because she's obviously not going to be alive forever,
even if she thinks she's alive now, Still, when does
that come into play? Oh? It won't. It's got a
hundred year lock on it. I said, So you're telling
(31:41):
me that even after I passed away, my children won't
be able to access that information about how her name
was spelled when she changed her name, that's correct. I
then rang back some time later. I can't remember exactly
how many weeks months it was, and I just removed
the word missing. Hi, my mum changed her name in
(32:01):
nineteen ninety seven. I'm just wondering if you can give
me the spelling. And the woman told me everything, the date, where, how, why, etc.
We're not why let me she didn't tell me the why.
That was something we wanted to get.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That would have been incredible.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yes, And it's not on there, unfortunately, because there was
a lot of talk about this when we found this information,
and there was supposedly a witness that has you have
to give a reason why you're changing your name, and
that is actually not on the document. So yeah, it's
it's definitely been challenging and mum changing her name has
definitely put many forks in the road for me. It's
(32:41):
been very challenging.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Can tell us a little bit about the connection to
con man Rick Blum and how he came into the story.
As you're researching what's happened to your mum, because you've
been picking up every tiny trail, whether it's a bank statement,
whether it's a Medicare statement, whether it's a witness sighting,
like there's all these threads that you're trying to pull together.
(33:03):
How does Rick Blum come into this conversation?
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Well, when we started The Lady Vanishers, we launched the
podcast on the first of April in twenty nineteen and
around May, middle of May, tenth of May, so we're
around there. We were contacted by a lady called Johani
Condos and she herself had had a missing person in
(33:28):
her family and they had done a lot of research
and used a lot of things like trove and archives
to be able to find her husband's great grandmother, which
they did after fifteen years. And so she was listening
to the podcast. She tells me today that for the
(33:49):
first time, she's a true crime podcast. So she's been
listening for twenty odd years religiously to podcasts. And she said, interestingly,
it's the first time I'd ever heard someone ask for
help from the public. And she said, so, I just
thought to myself, what don't I said, She was sick.
She stayed up till midnight. She was just playing around
on her computer and she was running the name Ramkel,
(34:11):
which is the name that mum had changed her name to,
through all these search engines that she had come across,
and started to play within her own case, and she
stumbled across an ad in a newspaper called La Courier Australian.
It's a newspaper that ran out of Sydney and it's
a French speaking newspaper. In the newspaper there is an
(34:34):
advertisement that says a MF. Ramachel and gives how old
he is at that time. So this ad was placed
in around the late end of nineteen ninety four and
it talks about him being a polyglot, so speaking multiple languages,
good looking, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, looking for a relationship,
(34:57):
potential marriage. And there's a PO box connected to the
ad for people to connect with this person, and the
po boxes based in Lenox Heads, So for those of
you who aren't geographically in touch with that, Lenox is
the next suburb to Byron Bay. There was a phone
number as well, and our brain started to go a
(35:20):
million miles an hour. So the only two connectors we
had in the entire of Australia was with the name Ramickel.
Was my mum and this ad in the paper that
was it. So we went on this mad search trying
to find out who this MF. Ramickel is. Turns out
that M stands for Monsoux and the F stands for Fernande.
(35:42):
We find fernand Ramachel and we go and knock on
his door in Luxembourg. The irony and the connector there
is that mum had written on her outgoing passenger card
that she was moving to Luxembourg. So again heads are spinning,
We're like, what is going on? We approach Fernande after
a very crazy few days with Channel seven back in
(36:05):
May of twenty nineteen, and he gives us a very
cold reception. He accuses me of being a gypsy knocking
on his door asking if he knew who my mom was,
and it was very confronting for me. I was very
nervous and didn't know what to expect or who I
was talking to. And at that point I thought, you know,
this guy obviously has some connection to my mum potentially,
(36:28):
and turns out, fast forward we find the phone number
connector so the police hadn't been able to do that.
We'd given all the information to them, they'd come back
and said, tell STRA have no records. They couldn't go
back far enough to nineteen ninety four to see who
owned that phone number or what that phone number was
connected to. And we'd spoken about this on the podcast,
(36:51):
and I had a gentleman who lives down in that
neck of the woods who emailed me and said, look,
I'm just you know, retiree. I've gone down to the
local library. I've handscanned thousands of images of the phone
numbers to see if I can find a connect and
I think I found it. And so he had been
able to identify that the phone number was linked to
(37:13):
a business name called Balan A coin invest and the
owner of that company was a guy called Frederick de
Heavindery and his wife. So that that started the ball rolling.
We then did a huge amount of work. Joni in
particular dug very deep and started looking into coins and
(37:36):
you know, you can imagine what we had to do.
It wasn't an easy task, but in talking to people
in the coin world, we were able to identify that
Frederic de Heavindery and mister Rec Bloom are the same person.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
So who is Rick and how do you see his
story intercepting with Marian's.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Well, mister Blum or Bloom if you are, it's spelled
b l Um so plum blom, but over in Luxembourg
and Belgium it's actually pronounced as Bloom. Just for the record,
he currently is still living in northern New South Wales.
He just had his birthday last week. Actually I think
(38:22):
he's now eighty five eighty six years of age. He
was a person who was on the stand I think
thirteen days at my mum's inquest and in the initial
contact police made with mister Blom about my mum. He
(38:42):
denied knowing her, and then he went home and he
called them back the next day and said, actually, I
do know her and I had an affair with her,
but I didn't want to say anything in front of
my wife, and that's where it all started. He has
admitted to having an affair with my mum at the
(39:03):
same time that she was selling her house, so he
made reference to going to her home and seeing a
for sale sign out the front. His passport leaves the
country on the Tuesday before my mom flew out of
the country, so my mum waited until the term finished
on the Friday, which was the twentieth of June nineteen
(39:24):
ninety seven, and she flew out on the Sunday, the
twenty second. Mister Bloom flew on Japan Airlines to Japan,
and he was asked at the inquest where did you
stay when you went to Japan, and he said, I
always stay at Hotel Nico and Narrita, and very quick
(39:47):
off the mark, no question, no hesitation. The paper that
mum wrote to me on in that letter I talked
about before and the matching envelope came from Hotel Nico
and Narita, So you can imagine me, I was falling
off my chair many times with the connectors and be
then coincidences or what whatever people want to refer to them,
(40:10):
as it's quite quite daunting for me to sit there
and see these happening. When Mum came back into the
country on the second of August, mister Blom came in
flew in two days before, so their timeline overseas is
pretty much on part. And there's still investigation that Joanie
and I are working very hard on and pushing for
(40:33):
authorities to help us with with regards to getting more
information that we know exists that we've been previously told
doesn't exist, but going there ourselves, which is what we've
done and what we talk about in the missing about
of podcast and we go through our journey overseas in
finding this information. Is now you know where we're at
(40:53):
and what we're pushing for more information to be sourced
through that knowledge that we now have.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Can you tell us a little bit about some of
the discoveries you have made in making this new podcast,
because you've followed some pretty interesting trails for this one.
I mean, you talk openly about the fact that you've
taken advice from psyekicks and as well as witnesses, like,
there are so many threads that you are following down.
You've done searchers with cadaver dogs in places that crime
(41:26):
stoper phone calls originated from. Like what have you discovered
and if you've made any progress in finding.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Out any more about where Marion ended up.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Well you might have to listen to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, we can't give away everything obviously any spoilers.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
But look, we connected with some of the women who
gave evidence at the inquest, who tell the court that
they had relationships with Rick Blum and their stories behind that.
There's been some sadness happen. We've lost a couple of
them in this journey, which has been really devastating, and
(42:04):
you know, particularly those that I've become quite close to,
and you know, everyone's getting old, and quite frankly, I'm
getting really losing. I'm losing my patients. I guess with
why action is still not being taken with firm evidence
(42:25):
and firm information that we have and have presented to
New Southwest Police and to the AFP. You know, I
just don't see the action happening at a speed that
it should take. I mean I waited for twenty two
years before my mum was even recognized as a missing
person by New Southwest Police and put on the national database.
(42:46):
I only, you know, just had my DNA uploaded onto
the system because I found out that the DNA sample
I gave them back in twenty ten was a voluntary
sample and they can't actually upload a voluntary sample to
any database. And then I didn't sign anything. They just
(43:06):
tell me that they have done it. I have nothing
in writing. The only ever verbally tell me so's it's
all that sort of thing that, you know, really is
troubling for the person living with a missing person and
that person who's the next of kid who's trying desperately
to get the answers. I haven't made a lot of
friends in this space in pushing pushing envelopes and pushing buttons.
(43:27):
But you know, it gets to the point where, you know,
how much longer do I have to do this for
before people do start to pass away and we lose
more evidence after waiting that long. Already we're at this
juncture and you know, action needs to be yesterday next.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
What the inquest found about Marian's disappearance and what they
think happened.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
To her well.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
As I mentioned earlier, the inquest into your mum's disappearance
does finally conclude that she has likely passed away.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Does that change anything for you? I mean other than.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Physical getting a death stiviget, which is a nightmare in itself,
being able to do all of those things, Like, does
it change anything for you emotionally when that decision is
handed down.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
It's a very it's a very challenging time of life.
I'm going to be honest, because I have always felt
in my heart that my mum wasn't alive. I couldn't
fathom that she wouldn't come to my wedding, that she
wouldn't come to see her grandchildren, she wouldn't be at
Owen's funeral, like there was some massive things like both
her parents have passed away. I just don't believe, and
(44:37):
I haven't believed for quite a long time. I had
hope that she was alive and well like they told me.
But the more and more I kept digging, the more
and more I just was like, my gut feeling was
something is not right. So to hear the coroner say
what I thought was quite cathartic, like I feel like
I needed to hear it, it needed to happen, and
(45:00):
it allowed me to move on. But I'm in such
a world now where my emotions about my mum I
kind of have to put them to the side to
be able to do this. Otherwise I'd be a babbling mess,
I think. So I'm more about being a daughter who's
looking for her mum from an investigative point of view,
and someone who's emotionally invested in getting the information and
(45:23):
getting the truth and seeking justice and making sure my
mum's not forgotten more than I am about the emotional
side of my mum being deceased. In saying that allowing
me a death certificate has meant that I can go
through the process that people go through when someone passes away,
I'd like to mention at this point that when you
(45:45):
might remember I just said about this salvation, Army wrote
in a letter to my grandfather that my mum withdrew
the balance of her bank account. She still had money
sitting in her bank account, and the kicker was the
Commonwealth Bank were continuing to take the monthly fee from
her bank account for twenty seven years. Is the guy
(46:07):
who came on at the Inquest as a representative to
Commonwealth Bank. He recognized that and he had the charges reversed.
But just those sorts of little things, there's just very
lack of and in the world of the missing and
people not really helping if you don't have if you
don't have a death certificate. I know of other cases
(46:30):
and people who I now would call my friends in
this space whereby let's say a husband goes missing and
they the police declare that he's actually just left. He
hasn't actually say same thing as my mum. They just said, oh, well,
she clearly doesn't want anything to do with you guys,
and so she's left on her own account and her
(46:51):
privacy matters, is what they kept telling me. And in
the instance of this scenario, the husband goes missing, they
don't list him as a missing person, they don't go
to Inquest for a decade, and therefore there's no death
certificate and his wife can't even sell their home because
(47:14):
there's no death certificate. So you know, in the in
the situation, like for a long term missing person, you
regarded long term missing if you're missing longer than three months,
And I think there needs to be more in place
There's a thing called a P seventy nine B form
(47:35):
which police are supposed to send to the coroner after
twelve months of a person going missing if they haven't
been seen nor cited. And I can see in police
records where the Coroners Court are requesting that information from
New South Wales police on repeat, and it's just getting denied.
They're not responding, they're not replying. That P seventy nine
(47:57):
B form did not get done until I went public
and did a podcast. So shouldn't be up to the family,
should it to be pushing the envelope to get these
things done when they're policy and procedures that need to
be followed.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
It's so hard to listen to the stone walling that's
happened to you and the brick walls you find yourself
up against and understand how you can keep going, like
to hit them so many times and then just keep going.
What motivates you this far down the track? Is it
just the thought of your mum in the back of
your head and just wanting to make sure that her
(48:33):
story doesn't just get forgotten?
Speaker 2 (48:35):
What is it that motivates you?
Speaker 3 (48:36):
Now? It's been hard for me to process that Actually,
I get asked that a lot when I'm talking to people,
and I don't really know why I keep driving myself,
because it does drive me crazy, But I think it's
just me as a person. I'm very driven. I don't
(48:56):
take no for an answer. I want to make sure
that the job is getting done properly and the answers
are found. But at the same time, the emotional side
of me, I'm worried that if I stop, my mum
will be forgotten again. My mom was a taboo subject
(49:16):
for a very long time. My grandmother didn't talk to
me about it, her sisters didn't want to talk about it.
I wouldn't have died my dad, you know. I don't
talk to my dad about my mom. They got divorced
when I was seven, so I really had no one
to talk to you about it other than my husband
and my kids, and you know, I didn't want to
(49:39):
burden them with the upset and the challenge that it
is to have a missing person. I didn't have connections
with anybody in the missing person world. I didn't have
friends and family of missing persons contact me and say, hey, Sally,
we'd like to offer you some support or some care
(49:59):
because my mom wasn't known to be a missing person.
So therefore I my mom's case the same actually fell
off the rich Dar scale and I was left to
sort of muddle along in my own world, having a
Facebook page with less than a thousand followers saying please
help me. Someone knows something. And it wasn't until we
(50:23):
launched the Lady Vanishers and you have a big media
network behind you that actually can put it on the
news at nighttime. We're going into the Australian newspaper on
the weekly. That's how we got to where I am today,
where people sat up and took notice and went actually
marrying is missing and the coroner deeming that yes there's
(50:44):
a problem here, we need to have an inquest and
go to inquest. And you know the inquest they told
me it was an unprecedented amount of days. And you
know they've had to put it back with the unsolved
homicide team. And you know, I asked Gary Jubilan when
I was talking to him on his podcast, I Catch
Killers recently, and I said, look, in Layman's terms, what
(51:05):
does that mean for me in your opinion? If they're
putting it with the unsolved homicide as opposed to going
back to Missing Persons unit. What does that tell you,
is it is she regarded as being murdered or foul
play And he said yes, that's where it would sit.
So it would be an indication that the coroner believes
(51:25):
there's more work to be done, so she places it
back with unsolved homicide to do the work on that
now unsolved homicide told me at the findings before we
walked in and hear her findings that they have eight
hundred cases and they need to prioritize that my mum's
case is open but inactive after everything we've found and
everything we've presented. That's what they told me, and it
(51:49):
just made me. That was probably one of the hardest
things I've had anyone tell me, because I just felt
like all the wind was taken out of my sales
after everything I've done and everything I've put myself through emotionally.
I'm on heart medication now because my resting heart rate
was getting up to one hundred he beats a minute
lying on a bed having an angiogram at the doctors
(52:11):
and they're likeing, and I think the machine's broken. No, no, no,
that's just my resting heart rate because I've just been
reading in quest findings and documents and what people are
saying about me, and you know, why am I doing this?
And what for? What for? And Mum's sisters sitting there
saying untrus about my relationship with my mum and absolutely heartbreaking,
(52:36):
you know. And at the end of the day, I'm
not trying to be antagonistic or trying to cause any
problems for anyone. I'm happy to work with anyone that
wants to work with me to help me find my mum.
And the flip side of that is by doing what
I'm doing, I have met some amazing people who also
find themselves in the same situation that I'm in. And
if I can help bring awareness to this space by
(52:59):
doing what I'm doing, in turn helping others that also
are experience and missing persons or god forbid, anybody who
find and some self in the same position as I did,
that they can learn from some of the things that
have happened, and hopefully, you know, I know, I've even
spoken to the top people in the police force in
(53:19):
missing persons who have actually said to me that there
has been change in those departments, particularly in the missing
Person's Department because of what I did and what I
said and what I shared with my experiences. You know,
I had Glenn Brown, who was a head of Missing
Persons Unit at the time, said it's because of you
that some of these changes have been brought about and
(53:42):
awareness has come about. So that's not to pat myself
on the back. I just want things to be better,
not just for me, but for everybody who finds themselves
in this situation.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
I guess I just wanted to end on.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
This in that this is such a weird conversation to
have because The Lady Vanishes and your story is such
a big part of Australia's true crime now and that
brings with it what that community of people brings with it,
which for you has been a whole bunch of people
who've also been super slutes for you, who have found
(54:16):
things for you. But it also means people are so
intrinsically invested in the outcome of this. And I know
when The Lady Vanishes podcast wrapped up without finding Marian,
there was a real sense of loss for everyone who
followed that journey. I just wanted to know from you
how you feel about the fact that you share that
(54:39):
sense of unfinished business with so many people now alongside
you and who desperately want you to get the answers
that we've all been following your journey through to hopefully
reach one day.
Speaker 3 (54:54):
It was difficult. It was a very difficult moment in
time for me when the lady vanishes wrapped up as well,
because I kind of felt like I was out on
an island by myself at that point. I just had
the coroner tell me my mum's officially deceased and that
she died on the fifteenth or on or around the
fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, and for me to
(55:14):
pull myself back to that moment and go I went
into the police station that week. So if you think
about Owen's birthdays, the eighteenth of October, that's three days later,
and I've gone to them and said something's wrong. So
within that week there was knowledge and they wrote it
in their files that eighty thousand dollars had been transferred
out of my mum's bank account. I get told she's deceased.
(55:38):
I get told that it's not going to the DPP,
that the homicide have eight hundred cases they need to
prioritize and that my mum's case essentially wasn't the priority
in that moment the Lady Vanisher's ends, and that for
me was very difficult because I feel like talking about
(55:59):
my story is my coping mechanism. At the same time,
my brother didn't talk about it and he took his
own life. I'm chalk and cheese with my brother. I
am the extrovert who needs to talk things through. So
for me, talking about it and keeping mum's story alive
is somewhat my mental health coping mechanism at the same time.
(56:23):
So we had decided Joanie and I had decided we
were going to go on this journey overseas to find
the answers that we knew were sitting there, but police
hadn't gone overseas to find that information, and some of
them were sitting behind closed doors and it was a
case of boots on the ground and have to be
(56:43):
there in person to actually explain the situation to find
the answers. And we ended up doing four live shows
as a fundraiser to try and raise some funds for
us to go over and do this journey. We had
to sell out shows in Brisbane. One in Sydney and
one on the Gold Coast, and very humbling experience for me,
(57:07):
all these beautiful people coming who'd been following my journey,
who wanted to come and meet me and give me
a hug and just wish me well in finding information.
And then fast forward to October, we go and do
the journey, and we come back and then all these
people are like, when are you going to tell us
what you found? What are you going to tell us
what you found? And so in my head, I was like,
I don't even know if I have the energy or
(57:29):
the drive to tell everyone. Like it was so exhausting,
and I just twenty twenty four was probably the worst
year of my life, to be honest. It was just
so many hurdles, so many roadblocks, people dying, the inquest.
It was just a lot for me doing cadavera dog
searches looking for my mum's body in creaks, like, you know,
(57:53):
no one should really have to do that, in my opinion.
But I decided that potentially we could put together a
podcast and share with everybody what we found, and that's
how essentially the miss matter was born. I've been using
the missing matter hashtag for a long time, because in
my world, it's not just about my mum anymore. It's
(58:13):
the missing. They all matter, so we shouldn't forget them,
and we need to talk about it and keep it
in there because someone knows something in every case. So
that's kind of how it was born. And you know,
I was very grateful for Jonie who's come along with
me on this ride. We do the podcast together, and
you know, moving forward, you know, October this year will
(58:37):
be my mum's eightieth birthday, or what would have been
her eightieth birthday, and I haven't had a chance to
mourn her, or have a memorial for her, or do
anything special to celebrate her over the years. I was
planning to do something for her seventy fifth actually, and
then we COVID hit and it all got messy, and
so I've just waited. I thought her eightieth birthday is
(58:58):
sort of seemingly quite fitting. I've done the podcast, we're
still working on it, and we've decided to have a
high tea for her her which is a paid or
a ticketed event which we're hosting here in Brisbane. There's
only one hundred tickets, so it's not a big event
and tickets will go on sale at the end of
July for that and the money raised. There won't be
(59:21):
a lot of money after everything that costs to host
one of these things, but I'm hoping that we can
raise a few funds from some raffles and some merchandise
and things like that. And my plan is to start
creating these bench seats in the color of green, green
was my mum's favorite color, and have a plaque on
them that says the missing Matter Marion Matters, and they
(59:44):
have a QR code on those, and put them in
prominent spots. I've noted when doing this research that councils
put memorial sites in cemeteries for the missing and it's beautiful,
it's got water features and all the rest of it,
but no one is actually going to a cemetery and
walking around looking at missing persons. We need to have
(01:00:07):
it in a prominent space, like the top of Kangaroo
Point Cliffs, for example, when people are sitting there looking
out to the river. In my head, I want to
be looking because I'm still looking for my mum, So
I don't want to be going to a cemetery and
sitting there with her memorial. The QR code. People will
be able to scan it and it will take them
to the website the Missing Matter, and they can read
(01:00:30):
stories about people who are missing in certain locations around
the world. So I always start really big and quite
off more than I can chew, and I chew like mad.
But I have had to pull it back a little
bit because we were doing a walk all over the
world and I had people in Scotland and New Zealand
and Seattle and three places in the UK who are
(01:00:51):
going to do these amazing walks, and we just I
just got I just yeah red taped again with you know,
having to pay indemnity, insurances and things like that, and
it all's got too difficult. So on Sunday, the fifth
of October, we're just asking that everyone just domins some green,
go for a walk, take a photo of yourself, throw
it over on our Facebook page with the hashtag Missing Matter,
(01:01:12):
and we'll just bring some awareness to the Missing space.
If people would like to try and get a ticket
to Mum's memorial, it that we're planning. It's going to
be held on Sunday, the twenty eighth of September this
year at Hamworth House here in Brisbane, and ticket information
will be available via the website as well.
Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Beautiful will pap a link to that in our show
notes too. Sally, thank you so much for sharing your
mom's story with us today and for taking us on
this journey with you for the past near decade now.
So we hope, for your sake and for everyone who's
been following this his sake, and for anyone who has
a missing person in their life, that people at least
get answers that go some way to healing that wound.
Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
With us today. Thank you, Claire for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Thank you to Sally for helping us tell her story.
You can find a link to her podcast, The Miss
Matter and her website in the show notes. If you
like this episode and want to hear more from guests
like Sally, send us an email at true Crime at
mammamea dot com dot au, and please, if you wouldn't mind,
also leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Just let us know what you think of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
True Crime Conversations is a Muma Mia podcast hosted by
me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio
designed by Jacob Brown.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
I'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. On October nineteenth,
nineteen ninety seven, Sally Leyden called her brother Ohen down
in Sydney.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
He'd celebrated his birthday the day.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Before, and she wanted to know if their mum, Marian,
who was on a year long overseas trip, had gotten
in touch to wish him a happy birthday. When he
tells her that she didn't, Sally starts to worry. Now
that is not like her mum. She would never miss
her son's birthday. Now she knew that her mum had
been in the UK, she'd received a phone call from
(00:41):
her back in August. But it was the nineties, and
this is back before we were in constant contact via
mobile phone or the internet. There was no digital photo
trail of her mum's sipping tea in the quaint English
countryside for her to push back those worrying thoughts. Sallie
had no idea where her mum was or even how
(01:02):
to get in contact with her.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Someone suggested that she'd check.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Her mum, Marion's bank account to see if it was
still being used and to maybe find out where, while
the bank employee said to her, look, they can't just
hand over that kind of information due to privacy reasons. Obviously,
something Sally tells them makes them do a bit of
a double take. Where did you say your mum was
traveling overseas? Did you say that's not what I'm seeing?
(01:27):
The bank teller tells her, I can see money being
taken out quite large sums of it in fact, from
a branch they say in Byron Bay. From that moment on,
Sally search for her mum, Marian Barter would become the
subject of one of the country's most gripping podcasts. The
World following along while Sally learns that her mum was
(01:48):
hiding secrets, lots of them. I'm Claire Murphy and this
is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
most about them. Now you might know the name Marian
Barter from the highly successful podcast The Lady Vanishes. Through
(02:11):
bank records, witness reports, classified ads, false information, overseas trips,
and a less than thorough police investigation, a tangled web
of threads started to reveal the secrets of Marion Barter's
final known whereabouts. But while their investigation uncovered a lot,
it still wasn't able to hand Sally in her family
(02:32):
that last piece of the puzzle. Was her mum scammed
by someone who knew she was a romantic at heart?
Did she actually return to Australia or was it just
her passport that did And why did she change her
name before setting off on that fateful journey? Sally Laden,
Marian's daughter, has been searching for her mum all this time,
(02:54):
refusing to let her mum's story fade into a box
stash somewhere in the police archives. Sally's new podcast, The
Missing Matter, is hoping to not only uncover the truth
about Marian's final resting place, but to help others who
are also searching for their missing Sally joins us now, Salie,
(03:16):
thank you so much for joining us today. I just
wanted to know, and I kind of got a sense
of this from the ABC TV show You Can't Ask
that when they spoke to relatives of people who had
missing family members. It's been like, we're coming up on
thirty years since your mum went missing, and just wanted
to know, like, does the emotion around searching for a
(03:38):
lost loved one. Does that ever become any easier to bear?
I imagine it to be something like an open wound
that never really gets a chance to heal.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I personally think it gets harder as you get older.
I think that also has something to do with your age.
I was only twenty four when my mum went missing.
I'm now fifty two and I'm a mum myself, so
I think that has a part of it. But we
refer to the loss of a missing person in our
space as ambiguous loss, the ambiguity that comes with not
(04:09):
knowing the where, the why, the how, the what happened
to your loved one. It plays with your head and
it can cause mental health issues and all sorts of
crazy because you can dive in and you know, sometimes
not come back out for a while, and can be
quite challenging for.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Those listening who maybe aren't aware of your mum Marion's story,
although it has been covered quite extensively on the Lady
Vanisher's podcast, and you've picked that up again with the
Missing Matter in your own podcast now, which kind of
picks up from where the coronial inquests handed down their report.
Can you take us back to before your mum went missing.
What was life like for you guys as a family?
(04:52):
What was she like before all of this and what
you've subsequently learned about her has come to light?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, I mean, we had an unusual family mix, I
would say. My I moved to the Gold Coast after
getting a really good promotion at an exclusive boys' school
up there called the Southport School. So she packed up
and moved from New South Wales to Queensland on the
(05:20):
Gold Coast in late nineteen ninety three. I came up
and visited her in the June of nineteen ninety four
and decided that I would move up there with her
at that point, and I moved up in the December
of that year. My brother was living in Sydney. I
was twenty one. We were seventeen months apart. I was
(05:43):
the oldest. He was in a relationship that he'd been
in for many years, and soon after I moved up,
he got engaged. Soon after that, I met my husband,
who we've been together for thirty years now. His name's Chris,
And yeah, life was. Life was pretty boring, to be honest,
(06:04):
in comparison to what I am living today. I lived
with mum for a while. I met Chris, I moved
out because I got a dog and she wouldn't let
me have the dog. So and then Chris and I
ended up moving in together and we got engaged, and
their mum decided she was going on the trip of
a lifetime and we haven't seen her since.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well, let's talk about her circumstances.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So she was single at this point in life, like
she'd been married and divorced three times by that stage.
Did you get a feeling from her that she was
out looking for love when she was embarking on this
overseas adventure or was she happily single and was she
content with where her life had taken her.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
At that point.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Look, I don't think my mum was ever happy being single.
She was a woman who loved being in relationships. She
was a romantic. She was that person who dreamt of
Heathcliff coming over the rolling hills to whisker away, you know,
on the Orient Express, let's say, because that's the story.
(07:07):
So I feel like there was a few dramas happening
for her at her work. She had just won a
big award in teaching. She became the best teacher in
Queensland in the November of nineteen ninety six. I think
I just saw things start to shift. In that new
year of nineteen ninety seven, she changed a little bit.
(07:30):
She was sad, she was upset, she'd been crying to me.
Sounded to me like there was a bit of tall
Poppy syndrome happening at the school where some of the
other teachers didn't like the fact that she'd been nominated
for this award and won it, and it was a
pretty big award. I mean, Ida Butchero's actually was the
presenter at the Netta Awards who gave mum her award,
(07:51):
and my mum loved Diea Buttro's, so she would have
just completely loved that. But yeah, I think she was
just in a different headspace. So when she told me
that she had decided she was going to go on
this trip, she was going to go away for ee
year and she was going to come back in time
for my wedding, which was the following October, I was
(08:12):
okay with that. I just thought, you know, what's she's
not happy where she is. She's great at her job,
She's very passionate and loves what she does. As a teacher,
and I was okay with her going overseas. You know,
she was she was a strong person, she was capable,
very smart, So I didn't have any issues about her
(08:32):
doing that on her own or going solo. Yeah, but
I think she was a person that loved being in
a relationship. So you know, as it turns out, potentially
that's why she went overseas.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Well, let's talk about that moment because and as much
as you, as a twenty three year old is paying
attention to what their mum is doing, I mean, you've
got your own life, and you know, when you're in
your twenties, is still a little bit selfish. You do
not really like in depth in your mom's life at
that point. But there's lots of things that you've since
found out were actually going on at that time as
(09:06):
she's preparing herself to go on this overseas adventure. Can
you just talk us through some of the things that
were going on that you've now become aware of as
she was packing up and getting ready to go.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, look some of the things that we've come across.
She changed her name and didn't tell any of us
that she had done that, and that actually happened the
same week as my birthday and Mother's Day in nineteen
ninety seven. So I was quite sad to find that
out because my mum and I had a very good relationship,
(09:41):
and I was quite shocked, if anything, to know that
she hadn't told me that she had done that, and
she'd packed up all her things and put them into
a shipping container. And she did say to me, if
I decide to stay overseas and teach, I will get
you to send the shipping container over to me. And
(10:03):
I kicked myself every day that I didn't push her
to find out where she was storing the shipping container,
because we've never found that. So there's lots of little
things that have trickled in over the past twenty eight
years that have given me some insight as to potentially
how she was feeling. We knew at the time when
(10:24):
she'd sold her house, she sold it really quickly. She
sold it in three weeks and for fifteen thousand, less
than she bought it for only a few years before.
And I know fifteen thousand doesn't sound like much in
today's money, but back then the house was one hundred
and seventy five thousand, I think, and she sold it
for one hundred and sixty thousand very quickly in three weeks.
(10:46):
And we've sort of gone back and looked at that,
and I've had people like Laura Richards, who's a criminal
analyst who used to work for New Scotland Yard, and
she's looked at that and the speeding of the timeline
of things that have happened, Like she's changed her name,
she's got a new passport, she's got an international driver's license,
she's sold her house at a loss, and she quit
(11:07):
a job and then goes overseas, so that the speed
of that is quite worrying and troubling in from a
criminal perspective as to why she was doing that and
wasn't telling anybody what she was doing.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
What's interesting, too, is that when she applied for that
passport in her new name, she didn't ask anyone to
sign that application to be her witness. That would potentially
be someone that you would think she would because didn't
she ask a dentist to sign off on that for her.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
She did, Yeah, and he was on the stand at
the inquest actually and had no recollection of the matter.
He also was based in Brisbane. She lived on the
Gold Coast, So there was just a few of those
weird scenarios that we sort of looked at and went,
what why, why did she do that? And we still
don't know. Obviously she's not here to tell us, but
(11:58):
we can make assumptions based on activities and information that
we've garnered throughout their process of looking for her.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Well, she does go overseas, and it's not like she
disappeared into the ether. She's still in regular contact with you.
She's sending postcards, letters, and then she makes a final
phone call to you. It's August one, nineteen ninety seven.
This is the last time you speak to your mum.
What do you remember from that conversation? And is that
(12:28):
something that you replay to yourself. I imagine if I
was in your situation, that would be something that I
would replay in my head over and over and over
to see if I missed something perhaps.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
And this is where it becomes tricky, And this was
a topic of conversation throughout the inquest that when mum
spoke to me on the phone, she wasn't missing, So
I wasn't jotting down all the information or writing down
how long we spoke for or the information I had
to go off my memory of what we were talking about,
(13:01):
and I remember it as clear as day. Thankfully, I'm
blessed to be able to do that, I guess, but
the phone call was I remember because there's timelines, and
I think this is how my brain processes the things,
because obviously it's a very long time ago and a
lot has happened over that time. But I go back,
I go back through on my timestamp situation. So the
(13:23):
Threadbird disaster, for example, we have a time stamp on
that that happened and occurred. At eleven forty pm on
the thirtieth of July nineteen ninety seven, my husband and
I were driving back We've been skiing at Perisher, and
when we got home, there was an answering machine message
bleeping like the I don't know if you remember the answering.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I remember there'd be a light flashing. See knew someone.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Seeing the light flashing. I pressed it and it's Mum
and she's like, oh, I just heard word over here
about this redbird disaster. I just was checking in to
see if you and Chris were okay. And I remember
feeling really heartbroken. That I'd missed her, because that was
the first time she'd called since she'd been away. She
left on the twenty second of June, to give everyone
a bit of a timeline, or about six weeks in,
(14:09):
and I had just bought my wedding dress in Sydney
on the way back from skiing, and yeah, her passport
came back in on the second of August. So if
we look at the timeline there, we know for a
fact that she'd heard about the threadbir disaster, and she
being potentially in the UK's what we assume. She's a
(14:32):
day behind us as well, So we've got a very
narrow window here of her ringing checking in on Chris
and I. And I think that's important to mention because
she does fly back in the next day. And I
guess from my perspective, why would she take the time
to ring me and check in and make sure I'm okay.
(14:54):
She never wanted to see me ever again, which is
what I was told by police. So you know, the
phone call, she was at a payphone. The money kept
dropping out and the phone would hang up and she'd
ring me back again, and I was getting quite stressed
that because I guess I didn't have any control over
that conversation. She'd just chat and she'd written me this
(15:15):
long letter. It's written on notepaper from a hotel in Japan,
which is important to the stories, and thankfully I kept it.
But it's about nine pages of a little notepad that
you get next to your bed, so front and back
she's written, and that letter is kind of like a
bit of a checklist for me. Have you done this,
have you done that? Could you do this? Because she
(15:36):
was in such a rush when she was leaving, and
the phone call mimicked that, Okay, you got my letter,
Did you do this? Did you do that? So it
was a bit of a checklist. And then after about
the third or fourth time of the money dropping out,
she says to me, this is the last money I have,
so I'm just going to let you talk until the
money drops out. And so at that point I told
(15:57):
her what was going on in our lives and that
I just bought my wedding dress, and the phone cut
out and that was last time I ever spoke to her.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So, as you mentioned, you know that her part sport
arrives back in the country a day later, and we
presume that your mum marrying is the one who's using
that passport.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
But how long does.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
It take you to start to worry Because you don't
know at the time that she's her passport's returned to Australia.
You don't know, as you said, that your mum is
technically then missing. So how long does it take you
to really understand and when does it start to set in?
Like you know, when someone is missing, you think, okay,
maybe they're this, and you maybe think about all the
theories about potentially where they might be. Plus she's traveling,
it's the nineties, it's not like she had a mobile
(16:37):
phone with her. You know, she's using payphones. You're relying
on answering machines. So how long does it take you
to realize that something's amiss?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
So in the phone call, she said to me, look,
I'm going to stop writing postcards to everybody, and I
literally mean everybody got a postcard. Some people kept it, thankfully,
most didn't unfortunately, but they have been like little I
don't know, little droppings for us to be able to
actually timestamp where she was and where what she was
doing at the time, because she does talk about that
(17:05):
in these postcards and she said to me, look, I'm
going to stop writing postcards because I want to try
and have a holiday. And I said, absolutely, go and
have a holiday. Stop buying stamps and finding postboxes and
putting mail to us. We're all fine here. You just
go and have a break. Because I knew she needed
to do that, so in that there was an expectation
(17:26):
that I wasn't going to hear from her for a
little while, and so I wasn't worried. I was happy
that she was having a break. And then look, I
pulled myself back. It's hard to remember the timeline here
because it's a bit fuzzy, but there was a time
when it started to worry me that I realized I
actually have no way of contacting her. And in today's
(17:50):
world that's very hard to fathom because we're all so contactable,
but back then it was near impossible. We were relying
on dial up for the internet. As you said, we
didn't have mobile phones. Some people did, but you were
pretty well off if you had a mobile phone back then,
and it was so new. Technology was new. She didn't
have a laptop, so I was really relying on her
(18:12):
to either ring me or send me a letter in
the way of contacting as you did back in the nineties,
And it sort of just dawned on me that I
have no way of contacting her. I didn't know where
she was staying. I didn't know what hotel she was at.
I didn't know where she was going because she didn't
write any of that down. She didn't give me an
itinerary or anything for me to be informed or have
(18:34):
information of that. I don't even know if she knew
herself to be honest. And then it started getting long
in the tooth and I was like, I'm actually starting
to get concerned now, why is she not bringing me
what's happened? And then my brother's birthday was approaching in
the October, and I thought, for sure, she'll call Owen.
That'll definitely be the next point of contact if she
(18:55):
doesn't send us postcards or letters in the interim. And
I rang Ohen. His birthday was on a Saturday that year,
and the eighteenth of October, and I said, did you
hear from Mum? And he said no? And I was
worried at that point. And then I rang him back
the next day on the Sunday, and I said, have
you heard from her because giving her some grace that
(19:17):
they're a day behind over there and maybe she'd just
got her dates wrong. And he said, no, I didn't
hear from her, and I just knew something was wrong.
At that point. We had a friend come over for
dinner and we were talking about it at the dinner
table and she said to me, why don't you ring
the bank and see if she's using her account? And
so I jumped up straight away while we're eating dinner
(19:38):
and I rang The phone was on the wall next
to the dining room table, actually in the kitchen, so they,
my friend and Chris, my husband, were sitting there when
I rang Telly Banking and I said, look, my mum's
traveling overseas by herself. She's fifty one. She hasn't contacted
my brother forast birthday and that's very out of character.
Can you please check if she's using her bank account?
(19:59):
And she said, oh, I'm really sorry. I can't tell
you anything due to privacy. And she paused at that
point and said, hang on, did you say your mum's
overseas And I said yes, and she went, oh my god,
there's money coming out of her bank account in Byron
Bay and proceeded to tell me that five thousand dollars
had been withdrawn out of her bank account for multiple days,
somewhere in the mix of three and a half weeks.
(20:21):
She also tells me that she was back up in
Burley Heads on the Gold Coast, which is five minutes
from where I lived, so three days money was coming
out of her bank account there as well, and then
back down in Byron Bay. Now, Mum had left her
car with me. Before she left, she'd sold her house,
so she had nowhere to live and no transport. So
(20:42):
we know for a fact that she used her Medicare
card or her Medicare card was used in Grafton on
the thirteenth of August, So only what's that eleven days
twelve days after she's returned. So how did she get
to Grafton to use her Medicare card at an optometrist
and then back in Byron Bay taking out five thousand
(21:05):
dollars every day, then back up in to Burly Heads
and back down to Byron Back in nineteen ninety seven,
it took hours to get to Byron Bay because it
was a very hard road. It wasn't like the freeway
that it is today, So there's lots of questions about that,
like how did she maneuver herself, and why was she
taking out large lunts of money every day instead of
(21:26):
just taking out a lump sum. If I can add,
at this point, on the fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven,
we now know that eighty thousand dollars was electronically transferred
out of my mum's bank account to an unknown bank account.
So if you add all of that up, that's quite
a big chunk of money in today's money, probably close
(21:47):
to seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with Sally Leyden, the daughter of Marion Barter,
an Australian school teacher who vanished back in nineteen ninety
seven and has never been seen since.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Up next, Sally reveals.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
The explanation police gave her about her mother's disappearance, a
story that was not only misleading but completely incorrect. So
you have the feelings something's wrong. You're starting to find
evidence that something is definitely wrong. So you are taking
this to police at this stage, and this is a
(22:25):
thread that runs through this story quite significantly in whether
it's inaction from the New South Wales Police, whether it's
you being told that you can't access things due to
privacy reasons. But I'd like you to give me some
idea of and this is a complex one because it's
not just New South Wales Police, it's Queensland Police and
(22:45):
it's a lot of agencies working sort of sometimes side
by side, sometimes independently to try and find your mum.
But can you give us an idea of how the
police investigation into your mum's disappearance has been handled from
those very beginning stages through to the inquest. And this
is thirty years worth of information, so I understand it's
a lot. Do you feel police have handled this well?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Not very well? If I can just put it out
there straight off the cuff. The situation was after finding
out that money was coming out a mum's bank account,
Chris and I went straight down to Byron Bay and
took one of mum's photos and walked around the streets,
went to the bank and the guy at the bank
(23:30):
had a very unusual manner. He shook the photo and
asked me we actually shook the photo and said that
rings a bell and then walked into an office behind
him and came out, closed the door behind him, came out,
took a photo of a photocopy of it at the photocopier,
and walked over to me and said, what would you
like me to say to her if I see her?
And I just panicked. I was like, something is very
(23:52):
wrong here? What is going on? So well? Be lined
it around to Byron Bay Police station and this is
where it all gets a bit messy. They didn't take
a formal statement from me or me down. I stood
at the counter is my recollection and he just took
(24:12):
down notes in his notebook. And ten days ish later
I got a phone call from a man who I
believe was the same guy who I spoke to at
the police station, telling me that they'd located my mum
and that she didn't want anyone to know where she
is or what she's doing. I went back and told
(24:34):
my grandfather this information and he said, well, I'm not
satisfied with that, and he approached the Salvation Army Missing
persons unit here in Queensland and he started to work
with them, and that's where Queensland Police came into the mix.
Is my understanding and Queensland Police also have said, and
(24:58):
the Salvation Army told my grandfather in a letter which
I have that they had spoken to banks security and
bank security are like the police, and they confirmed that
it was your daughter Marion who came into the bank
and spoke to a bank teller that she wanted to
(25:18):
start a new life and withdrew the balance of her
bank account. So I have that in writing from Missing
Persons through the Salvation Army. It's come about at the
inquest that Queensland Police confirmed that and the Salvation Army.
The lady actually who was working with my grandfather who
(25:41):
is now very early came on to the stand, couldn't
remember it, but it's her name on the letter, so
she was like, well, obviously I wrote it because it's
my name, but said that sometimes it can be described
by somebody else and her just sign off on it.
At the time, and Queensland Police and New South Wales
Police through the inquest both confirmed that they'd never spoken
(26:01):
to or sited my mum.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That must have been heartbreaking to be told that at
the time, both you and your brother, because you've had
a very close relationship with your ma'ma up to that point,
and you're worried about her. What was that like to
hear that she potentially didn't want to have anything to
do with you. That must have killed you, guys.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Funny that you say that my brother ended up taking
his own life. He had a different experience with me.
The story gets a bit long in the tooth here,
but in short, my mum remarried my stepfather and he
didn't get along very well with Owen, my brother, and
it was a decision that Owen would go and live
(26:43):
with my dad, boys being boys. My dad was in
the Army Reserve, he played on motorbikes, and you know,
it probably had a better life for Owen really than
what we had living with my stepfather where he didn't
get along with And so for Owen, I feel like
he had abandonment issues from a young age with that happening.
(27:08):
In hindsight, and I do believe Mum thought she was
doing the right thing. She was trying to keep everybody
happy and balance the balls rather than having another divorced
marriage and a broken family. So I think she was
just trying to manage it the best way she knew.
I personally don't think that was a good decision, but
you know, you can't go back and change time. But
(27:29):
for oh and hearing that they'd found her and that
she didn't want anything to do with us again absolutely
crushed him, and a few years later he took his
own life, which absolutely devastated me. As I said before,
we were only seventeen months apart, so we were very
close growing up and completely ripped my heart out of
my chest when he died, very unnecessarily, and so to
(27:53):
hear that those words that were spoken to us and
if we just stopped for a second. I've been really
thinking about this a lot, as in my world that
I am in right now, the same age my mum
was when she we're missing, as opposed to my twenty three,
twenty four year old self. I'm actually devastated that the
(28:13):
delivery of those messages to us was so heartless and careless,
and I still haven't even had an apology from anybody
for that. You know, the woman who came on the
stand from Queensland Police, her comment at the inquest was, oh, yeah,
(28:33):
we liked to clean them up quick, referring to cleaning
up cases and getting them ticked off the box so
that they can file it Oh, yeah, we've done it.
We clean them up quick. And my mouth dropped on
the floor when she said that. I thought, how disgusting.
What a disgraceful term to use when you're talking about
(28:55):
a missing person's case and that woman is still missing today.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
This is something you talk about quite a bit, especially
in your new podcast, is how much you and the
people around you have been retraumatized over and over through
this experience.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And I think the thing that I felt.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Myself so wound up as you were talking about how
difficult it was for you to get your mum's death
certificate after the inquest report decided that she was most
probably deceased at this stage, and just the red tape
and the difficulty you have dealing with government departments and
with businesses like banks and all of that is just
(29:38):
traumatizing you, guys, over and over and over again because
it's not.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
An easy thing.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
And I guess, as you say in these podcasts, there's
reasons why these things are in place, because no one
wants to have their identity stolen and things taken. But
for you, you essentially have to go in fighting every
single time you try and like access your mom's super
access the money that was left over in her bank accounts,
try and tie up all those loose ends to finish
at all? Is there an end to the retraumatization you
(30:07):
continue on this journey when you still don't have an answer.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
I refer to it as trauma on repeat. The doors
that have been shut in my face have just been astounding,
And I think being so open and honest about my
experience in the podcast allows people an opportunity to learn,
and I'm hoping that departments and government departments and people
(30:31):
who work in those areas listen to what I'm saying
and actually try and make a difference, even if it's
just the tone that they use when they're talking to
somebody who has a missing person. You know. I make
reference to one part of the journey where I ring
Archives National Archives here in Queensland and said, my mum's
a missing person. She changed her name in nineteen ninety seven.
(30:54):
I'm just wondering if you could tell me the correct spelling.
That was all I was after. It's an unusual name, Ramchel,
and I just wasn't sure if I was spelling it
the right way, and I didn't have any documentation at
that moment because everything was like lockdown from me. I
was getting blank, big black pages in brief of evidence
and freedom of information that they blocked out from me seeing.
(31:18):
So she said, no, can't tell you, And I said, okay,
well due to privacy. And I said, okay, Well, when
is the presumption of death come into play with a
missing person because she's obviously not going to be alive forever,
even if she thinks she's alive now, Still, when does
that come into play? Oh? It won't. It's got a
hundred year lock on it. I said, So you're telling
(31:41):
me that even after I passed away, my children won't
be able to access that information about how her name
was spelled when she changed her name, that's correct. I
then rang back some time later. I can't remember exactly
how many weeks months it was, and I just removed
the word missing. Hi, my mum changed her name in
(32:01):
nineteen ninety seven. I'm just wondering if you can give
me the spelling. And the woman told me everything, the date, where, how, why, etc.
We're not why let me she didn't tell me the why.
That was something we wanted to get.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That would have been incredible.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yes, And it's not on there, unfortunately, because there was
a lot of talk about this when we found this information,
and there was supposedly a witness that has you have
to give a reason why you're changing your name, and
that is actually not on the document. So yeah, it's
it's definitely been challenging and mum changing her name has
definitely put many forks in the road for me. It's
(32:41):
been very challenging.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Can tell us a little bit about the connection to
con man Rick Blum and how he came into the story.
As you're researching what's happened to your mum, because you've
been picking up every tiny trail, whether it's a bank statement,
whether it's a Medicare statement, whether it's a witness sighting,
like there's all these threads that you're trying to pull together.
(33:03):
How does Rick Blum come into this conversation?
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Well, when we started The Lady Vanishers, we launched the
podcast on the first of April in twenty nineteen and
around May, middle of May, tenth of May, so we're
around there. We were contacted by a lady called Johani
Condos and she herself had had a missing person in
(33:28):
her family and they had done a lot of research
and used a lot of things like trove and archives
to be able to find her husband's great grandmother, which
they did after fifteen years. And so she was listening
to the podcast. She tells me today that for the
(33:49):
first time, she's a true crime podcast. So she's been
listening for twenty odd years religiously to podcasts. And she said, interestingly,
it's the first time I'd ever heard someone ask for
help from the public. And she said, so, I just
thought to myself, what don't I said, She was sick.
She stayed up till midnight. She was just playing around
on her computer and she was running the name Ramkel,
(34:11):
which is the name that mum had changed her name to,
through all these search engines that she had come across,
and started to play within her own case, and she
stumbled across an ad in a newspaper called La Courier Australian.
It's a newspaper that ran out of Sydney and it's
a French speaking newspaper. In the newspaper there is an
(34:34):
advertisement that says a MF. Ramachel and gives how old
he is at that time. So this ad was placed
in around the late end of nineteen ninety four and
it talks about him being a polyglot, so speaking multiple languages,
good looking, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, looking for a relationship,
(34:57):
potential marriage. And there's a PO box connected to the
ad for people to connect with this person, and the
po boxes based in Lenox Heads, So for those of
you who aren't geographically in touch with that, Lenox is
the next suburb to Byron Bay. There was a phone
number as well, and our brain started to go a
(35:20):
million miles an hour. So the only two connectors we
had in the entire of Australia was with the name Ramickel.
Was my mum and this ad in the paper that
was it. So we went on this mad search trying
to find out who this MF. Ramickel is. Turns out
that M stands for Monsoux and the F stands for Fernande.
(35:42):
We find fernand Ramachel and we go and knock on
his door in Luxembourg. The irony and the connector there
is that mum had written on her outgoing passenger card
that she was moving to Luxembourg. So again heads are spinning,
We're like, what is going on? We approach Fernande after
a very crazy few days with Channel seven back in
(36:05):
May of twenty nineteen, and he gives us a very
cold reception. He accuses me of being a gypsy knocking
on his door asking if he knew who my mom was,
and it was very confronting for me. I was very
nervous and didn't know what to expect or who I
was talking to. And at that point I thought, you know,
this guy obviously has some connection to my mum potentially,
(36:28):
and turns out, fast forward we find the phone number
connector so the police hadn't been able to do that.
We'd given all the information to them, they'd come back
and said, tell STRA have no records. They couldn't go
back far enough to nineteen ninety four to see who
owned that phone number or what that phone number was
connected to. And we'd spoken about this on the podcast,
(36:51):
and I had a gentleman who lives down in that
neck of the woods who emailed me and said, look,
I'm just you know, retiree. I've gone down to the
local library. I've handscanned thousands of images of the phone
numbers to see if I can find a connect and
I think I found it. And so he had been
able to identify that the phone number was linked to
(37:13):
a business name called Balan A coin invest and the
owner of that company was a guy called Frederick de
Heavindery and his wife. So that that started the ball rolling.
We then did a huge amount of work. Joni in
particular dug very deep and started looking into coins and
(37:36):
you know, you can imagine what we had to do.
It wasn't an easy task, but in talking to people
in the coin world, we were able to identify that
Frederic de Heavindery and mister Rec Bloom are the same person.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
So who is Rick and how do you see his
story intercepting with Marian's.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Well, mister Blum or Bloom if you are, it's spelled
b l Um so plum blom, but over in Luxembourg
and Belgium it's actually pronounced as Bloom. Just for the record,
he currently is still living in northern New South Wales.
He just had his birthday last week. Actually I think
(38:22):
he's now eighty five eighty six years of age. He
was a person who was on the stand I think
thirteen days at my mum's inquest and in the initial
contact police made with mister Blom about my mum. He
(38:42):
denied knowing her, and then he went home and he
called them back the next day and said, actually, I
do know her and I had an affair with her,
but I didn't want to say anything in front of
my wife, and that's where it all started. He has
admitted to having an affair with my mum at the
(39:03):
same time that she was selling her house, so he
made reference to going to her home and seeing a
for sale sign out the front. His passport leaves the
country on the Tuesday before my mom flew out of
the country, so my mum waited until the term finished
on the Friday, which was the twentieth of June nineteen
(39:24):
ninety seven, and she flew out on the Sunday, the
twenty second. Mister Bloom flew on Japan Airlines to Japan,
and he was asked at the inquest where did you
stay when you went to Japan, and he said, I
always stay at Hotel Nico and Narrita, and very quick
(39:47):
off the mark, no question, no hesitation. The paper that
mum wrote to me on in that letter I talked
about before and the matching envelope came from Hotel Nico
and Narita, So you can imagine me, I was falling
off my chair many times with the connectors and be
then coincidences or what whatever people want to refer to them,
(40:10):
as it's quite quite daunting for me to sit there
and see these happening. When Mum came back into the
country on the second of August, mister Blom came in
flew in two days before, so their timeline overseas is
pretty much on part. And there's still investigation that Joanie
and I are working very hard on and pushing for
(40:33):
authorities to help us with with regards to getting more
information that we know exists that we've been previously told
doesn't exist, but going there ourselves, which is what we've
done and what we talk about in the missing about
of podcast and we go through our journey overseas in
finding this information. Is now you know where we're at
(40:53):
and what we're pushing for more information to be sourced
through that knowledge that we now have.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Can you tell us a little bit about some of
the discoveries you have made in making this new podcast,
because you've followed some pretty interesting trails for this one.
I mean, you talk openly about the fact that you've
taken advice from psyekicks and as well as witnesses, like,
there are so many threads that you are following down.
You've done searchers with cadaver dogs in places that crime
(41:26):
stoper phone calls originated from. Like what have you discovered
and if you've made any progress in finding.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Out any more about where Marion ended up.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Well you might have to listen to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, we can't give away everything obviously any spoilers.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
But look, we connected with some of the women who
gave evidence at the inquest, who tell the court that
they had relationships with Rick Blum and their stories behind that.
There's been some sadness happen. We've lost a couple of
them in this journey, which has been really devastating, and
(42:04):
you know, particularly those that I've become quite close to,
and you know, everyone's getting old, and quite frankly, I'm
getting really losing. I'm losing my patients. I guess with
why action is still not being taken with firm evidence
(42:25):
and firm information that we have and have presented to
New Southwest Police and to the AFP. You know, I
just don't see the action happening at a speed that
it should take. I mean I waited for twenty two
years before my mum was even recognized as a missing
person by New Southwest Police and put on the national database.
(42:46):
I only, you know, just had my DNA uploaded onto
the system because I found out that the DNA sample
I gave them back in twenty ten was a voluntary
sample and they can't actually upload a voluntary sample to
any database. And then I didn't sign anything. They just
(43:06):
tell me that they have done it. I have nothing
in writing. The only ever verbally tell me so's it's
all that sort of thing that, you know, really is
troubling for the person living with a missing person and
that person who's the next of kid who's trying desperately
to get the answers. I haven't made a lot of
friends in this space in pushing pushing envelopes and pushing buttons.
(43:27):
But you know, it gets to the point where, you know,
how much longer do I have to do this for
before people do start to pass away and we lose
more evidence after waiting that long. Already we're at this
juncture and you know, action needs to be yesterday next.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
What the inquest found about Marian's disappearance and what they
think happened.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
To her well.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
As I mentioned earlier, the inquest into your mum's disappearance
does finally conclude that she has likely passed away.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Does that change anything for you? I mean other than.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Physical getting a death stiviget, which is a nightmare in itself,
being able to do all of those things, Like, does
it change anything for you emotionally when that decision is
handed down.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
It's a very it's a very challenging time of life.
I'm going to be honest, because I have always felt
in my heart that my mum wasn't alive. I couldn't
fathom that she wouldn't come to my wedding, that she
wouldn't come to see her grandchildren, she wouldn't be at
Owen's funeral, like there was some massive things like both
her parents have passed away. I just don't believe, and
(44:37):
I haven't believed for quite a long time. I had
hope that she was alive and well like they told me.
But the more and more I kept digging, the more
and more I just was like, my gut feeling was
something is not right. So to hear the coroner say
what I thought was quite cathartic, like I feel like
I needed to hear it, it needed to happen, and
(45:00):
it allowed me to move on. But I'm in such
a world now where my emotions about my mum I
kind of have to put them to the side to
be able to do this. Otherwise I'd be a babbling mess,
I think. So I'm more about being a daughter who's
looking for her mum from an investigative point of view,
and someone who's emotionally invested in getting the information and
(45:23):
getting the truth and seeking justice and making sure my
mum's not forgotten more than I am about the emotional
side of my mum being deceased. In saying that allowing
me a death certificate has meant that I can go
through the process that people go through when someone passes away,
I'd like to mention at this point that when you
(45:45):
might remember I just said about this salvation, Army wrote
in a letter to my grandfather that my mum withdrew
the balance of her bank account. She still had money
sitting in her bank account, and the kicker was the
Commonwealth Bank were continuing to take the monthly fee from
her bank account for twenty seven years. Is the guy
(46:07):
who came on at the Inquest as a representative to
Commonwealth Bank. He recognized that and he had the charges reversed.
But just those sorts of little things, there's just very
lack of and in the world of the missing and
people not really helping if you don't have if you
don't have a death certificate. I know of other cases
(46:30):
and people who I now would call my friends in
this space whereby let's say a husband goes missing and
they the police declare that he's actually just left. He
hasn't actually say same thing as my mum. They just said, oh, well,
she clearly doesn't want anything to do with you guys,
and so she's left on her own account and her
(46:51):
privacy matters, is what they kept telling me. And in
the instance of this scenario, the husband goes missing, they
don't list him as a missing person, they don't go
to Inquest for a decade, and therefore there's no death
certificate and his wife can't even sell their home because
(47:14):
there's no death certificate. So you know, in the in
the situation, like for a long term missing person, you
regarded long term missing if you're missing longer than three months,
And I think there needs to be more in place
There's a thing called a P seventy nine B form
(47:35):
which police are supposed to send to the coroner after
twelve months of a person going missing if they haven't
been seen nor cited. And I can see in police
records where the Coroners Court are requesting that information from
New South Wales police on repeat, and it's just getting denied.
They're not responding, they're not replying. That P seventy nine
(47:57):
B form did not get done until I went public
and did a podcast. So shouldn't be up to the family,
should it to be pushing the envelope to get these
things done when they're policy and procedures that need to
be followed.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
It's so hard to listen to the stone walling that's
happened to you and the brick walls you find yourself
up against and understand how you can keep going, like
to hit them so many times and then just keep going.
What motivates you this far down the track? Is it
just the thought of your mum in the back of
your head and just wanting to make sure that her
(48:33):
story doesn't just get forgotten?
Speaker 2 (48:35):
What is it that motivates you?
Speaker 3 (48:36):
Now? It's been hard for me to process that Actually,
I get asked that a lot when I'm talking to people,
and I don't really know why I keep driving myself,
because it does drive me crazy, But I think it's
just me as a person. I'm very driven. I don't
(48:56):
take no for an answer. I want to make sure
that the job is getting done properly and the answers
are found. But at the same time, the emotional side
of me, I'm worried that if I stop, my mum
will be forgotten again. My mom was a taboo subject
(49:16):
for a very long time. My grandmother didn't talk to
me about it, her sisters didn't want to talk about it.
I wouldn't have died my dad, you know. I don't
talk to my dad about my mom. They got divorced
when I was seven, so I really had no one
to talk to you about it other than my husband
and my kids, and you know, I didn't want to
(49:39):
burden them with the upset and the challenge that it
is to have a missing person. I didn't have connections
with anybody in the missing person world. I didn't have
friends and family of missing persons contact me and say, hey, Sally,
we'd like to offer you some support or some care
(49:59):
because my mom wasn't known to be a missing person.
So therefore I my mom's case the same actually fell
off the rich Dar scale and I was left to
sort of muddle along in my own world, having a
Facebook page with less than a thousand followers saying please
help me. Someone knows something. And it wasn't until we
(50:23):
launched the Lady Vanishers and you have a big media
network behind you that actually can put it on the
news at nighttime. We're going into the Australian newspaper on
the weekly. That's how we got to where I am today,
where people sat up and took notice and went actually
marrying is missing and the coroner deeming that yes there's
(50:44):
a problem here, we need to have an inquest and
go to inquest. And you know the inquest they told
me it was an unprecedented amount of days. And you
know they've had to put it back with the unsolved
homicide team. And you know, I asked Gary Jubilan when
I was talking to him on his podcast, I Catch
Killers recently, and I said, look, in Layman's terms, what
(51:05):
does that mean for me in your opinion? If they're
putting it with the unsolved homicide as opposed to going
back to Missing Persons unit. What does that tell you,
is it is she regarded as being murdered or foul
play And he said yes, that's where it would sit.
So it would be an indication that the coroner believes
(51:25):
there's more work to be done, so she places it
back with unsolved homicide to do the work on that
now unsolved homicide told me at the findings before we
walked in and hear her findings that they have eight
hundred cases and they need to prioritize that my mum's
case is open but inactive after everything we've found and
everything we've presented. That's what they told me, and it
(51:49):
just made me. That was probably one of the hardest
things I've had anyone tell me, because I just felt
like all the wind was taken out of my sales
after everything I've done and everything I've put myself through emotionally.
I'm on heart medication now because my resting heart rate
was getting up to one hundred he beats a minute
lying on a bed having an angiogram at the doctors
(52:11):
and they're likeing, and I think the machine's broken. No, no, no,
that's just my resting heart rate because I've just been
reading in quest findings and documents and what people are
saying about me, and you know, why am I doing this?
And what for? What for? And Mum's sisters sitting there
saying untrus about my relationship with my mum and absolutely heartbreaking,
(52:36):
you know. And at the end of the day, I'm
not trying to be antagonistic or trying to cause any
problems for anyone. I'm happy to work with anyone that
wants to work with me to help me find my mum.
And the flip side of that is by doing what
I'm doing, I have met some amazing people who also
find themselves in the same situation that I'm in. And
if I can help bring awareness to this space by
(52:59):
doing what I'm doing, in turn helping others that also
are experience and missing persons or god forbid, anybody who
find and some self in the same position as I did,
that they can learn from some of the things that
have happened, and hopefully, you know, I know, I've even
spoken to the top people in the police force in
(53:19):
missing persons who have actually said to me that there
has been change in those departments, particularly in the missing
Person's Department because of what I did and what I
said and what I shared with my experiences. You know,
I had Glenn Brown, who was a head of Missing
Persons Unit at the time, said it's because of you
that some of these changes have been brought about and
(53:42):
awareness has come about. So that's not to pat myself
on the back. I just want things to be better,
not just for me, but for everybody who finds themselves
in this situation.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
I guess I just wanted to end on.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
This in that this is such a weird conversation to
have because The Lady Vanishes and your story is such
a big part of Australia's true crime now and that
brings with it what that community of people brings with it,
which for you has been a whole bunch of people
who've also been super slutes for you, who have found
(54:16):
things for you. But it also means people are so
intrinsically invested in the outcome of this. And I know
when The Lady Vanishes podcast wrapped up without finding Marian,
there was a real sense of loss for everyone who
followed that journey. I just wanted to know from you
how you feel about the fact that you share that
(54:39):
sense of unfinished business with so many people now alongside
you and who desperately want you to get the answers
that we've all been following your journey through to hopefully
reach one day.
Speaker 3 (54:54):
It was difficult. It was a very difficult moment in
time for me when the lady vanishes wrapped up as well,
because I kind of felt like I was out on
an island by myself at that point. I just had
the coroner tell me my mum's officially deceased and that
she died on the fifteenth or on or around the
fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, and for me to
(55:14):
pull myself back to that moment and go I went
into the police station that week. So if you think
about Owen's birthdays, the eighteenth of October, that's three days later,
and I've gone to them and said something's wrong. So
within that week there was knowledge and they wrote it
in their files that eighty thousand dollars had been transferred
out of my mum's bank account. I get told she's deceased.
(55:38):
I get told that it's not going to the DPP,
that the homicide have eight hundred cases they need to
prioritize and that my mum's case essentially wasn't the priority
in that moment the Lady Vanisher's ends, and that for
me was very difficult because I feel like talking about
(55:59):
my story is my coping mechanism. At the same time,
my brother didn't talk about it and he took his
own life. I'm chalk and cheese with my brother. I
am the extrovert who needs to talk things through. So
for me, talking about it and keeping mum's story alive
is somewhat my mental health coping mechanism at the same time.
(56:23):
So we had decided Joanie and I had decided we
were going to go on this journey overseas to find
the answers that we knew were sitting there, but police
hadn't gone overseas to find that information, and some of
them were sitting behind closed doors and it was a
case of boots on the ground and have to be
(56:43):
there in person to actually explain the situation to find
the answers. And we ended up doing four live shows
as a fundraiser to try and raise some funds for
us to go over and do this journey. We had
to sell out shows in Brisbane. One in Sydney and
one on the Gold Coast, and very humbling experience for me,
(57:07):
all these beautiful people coming who'd been following my journey,
who wanted to come and meet me and give me
a hug and just wish me well in finding information.
And then fast forward to October, we go and do
the journey, and we come back and then all these
people are like, when are you going to tell us
what you found? What are you going to tell us
what you found? And so in my head, I was like,
I don't even know if I have the energy or
(57:29):
the drive to tell everyone. Like it was so exhausting,
and I just twenty twenty four was probably the worst
year of my life, to be honest. It was just
so many hurdles, so many roadblocks, people dying, the inquest.
It was just a lot for me doing cadavera dog
searches looking for my mum's body in creaks, like, you know,
(57:53):
no one should really have to do that, in my opinion.
But I decided that potentially we could put together a
podcast and share with everybody what we found, and that's
how essentially the miss matter was born. I've been using
the missing matter hashtag for a long time, because in
my world, it's not just about my mum anymore. It's
(58:13):
the missing. They all matter, so we shouldn't forget them,
and we need to talk about it and keep it
in there because someone knows something in every case. So
that's kind of how it was born. And you know,
I was very grateful for Jonie who's come along with
me on this ride. We do the podcast together, and
you know, moving forward, you know, October this year will
(58:37):
be my mum's eightieth birthday, or what would have been
her eightieth birthday, and I haven't had a chance to
mourn her, or have a memorial for her, or do
anything special to celebrate her over the years. I was
planning to do something for her seventy fifth actually, and
then we COVID hit and it all got messy, and
so I've just waited. I thought her eightieth birthday is
(58:58):
sort of seemingly quite fitting. I've done the podcast, we're
still working on it, and we've decided to have a
high tea for her her which is a paid or
a ticketed event which we're hosting here in Brisbane. There's
only one hundred tickets, so it's not a big event
and tickets will go on sale at the end of
July for that and the money raised. There won't be
(59:21):
a lot of money after everything that costs to host
one of these things, but I'm hoping that we can
raise a few funds from some raffles and some merchandise
and things like that. And my plan is to start
creating these bench seats in the color of green, green
was my mum's favorite color, and have a plaque on
them that says the missing Matter Marion Matters, and they
(59:44):
have a QR code on those, and put them in
prominent spots. I've noted when doing this research that councils
put memorial sites in cemeteries for the missing and it's beautiful,
it's got water features and all the rest of it,
but no one is actually going to a cemetery and
walking around looking at missing persons. We need to have
(01:00:07):
it in a prominent space, like the top of Kangaroo
Point Cliffs, for example, when people are sitting there looking
out to the river. In my head, I want to
be looking because I'm still looking for my mum, So
I don't want to be going to a cemetery and
sitting there with her memorial. The QR code. People will
be able to scan it and it will take them
to the website the Missing Matter, and they can read
(01:00:30):
stories about people who are missing in certain locations around
the world. So I always start really big and quite
off more than I can chew, and I chew like mad.
But I have had to pull it back a little
bit because we were doing a walk all over the
world and I had people in Scotland and New Zealand
and Seattle and three places in the UK who are
(01:00:51):
going to do these amazing walks, and we just I
just got I just yeah red taped again with you know,
having to pay indemnity, insurances and things like that, and
it all's got too difficult. So on Sunday, the fifth
of October, we're just asking that everyone just domins some green,
go for a walk, take a photo of yourself, throw
it over on our Facebook page with the hashtag Missing Matter,
(01:01:12):
and we'll just bring some awareness to the Missing space.
If people would like to try and get a ticket
to Mum's memorial, it that we're planning. It's going to
be held on Sunday, the twenty eighth of September this
year at Hamworth House here in Brisbane, and ticket information
will be available via the website as well.
Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Beautiful will pap a link to that in our show
notes too. Sally, thank you so much for sharing your
mom's story with us today and for taking us on
this journey with you for the past near decade now.
So we hope, for your sake and for everyone who's
been following this his sake, and for anyone who has
a missing person in their life, that people at least
get answers that go some way to healing that wound.
Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
With us today. Thank you, Claire for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Thank you to Sally for helping us tell her story.
You can find a link to her podcast, The Miss
Matter and her website in the show notes. If you
like this episode and want to hear more from guests
like Sally, send us an email at true Crime at
mammamea dot com dot au, and please, if you wouldn't mind,
also leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Just let us know what you think of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
True Crime Conversations is a Muma Mia podcast hosted by
me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio
designed by Jacob Brown.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
I'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.
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