Mysterious disappearance of Marion Barter: Sally Leydon Pt.1

all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes in the contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Today I spoke to Sally Laden, the daughter of missing woman Marion Barter. Marion disappeared in bizarre circumstances twenty seven

years ago. Sally doesn't know what happened to her mum, but she's determined to find out, and today we spoke to her about the enduring pain a loved one's disappearance can cause. We also spoke about the shocking truth about the failings of the police investigation and a mysterious man called Rick Blum, who came into Marion's life around the time she disappeared. Rick Blum has denied any involvement in

the disappearance of Marion. Sally is determined to find out what happened to her mother and just maybe today's chat may prompt something. Sally Laden, welcome to I catch killers.

she went missing. And it is a rollercoaster, and there are times where I've had to tap out and just focus on being a mum or building houses or working in our business, and then when I have the energy to come back in, I jump back in and go a little bit further until you know, you get knocked down again, and you can kind of get knocked down so much, but I have this personality and ability, I guess to just pull myself out and keep going because

for me, my mum matters, and she shouldn't. Quite often A quoted of saying, you know, she's not a lost puppy, and it might be twenty seven years I'm actually fifty two now. She technically at the time the Currenter has deemed that when she passed she was fifty two as well. And my eldest daughter is twenty three about to turn twenty four. And I was twenty three turning twenty four when mum disappeared. So in our world we've actually come full circle in life again to where you know, Ella's

the same age as I was. I'm the same age as Mum was, and we still don't know what's happened to her, and so I'll I'll keep going. People joke that I'm a Tourian and I do have this stubbornness in me, so part of it.

I keep digging deeper, and you know, the more people that I sort of calls out for people to help me as well, and people have come to that table, and you know, it's with those little bits of information that it just keeps going and this story just keeps growing every day. So I'm here, I am keeping on, keeping on.

in Burley something's wrong. She missed my brother's birthday. That was very out of character for her and something that I've always wanted to get out for anybody who finds himself in this position, the language is actually important. But equally the police probably need to start looking at that as well. And because their argument to you know, in court was will Sally didn't walk in and say her mother was missing, And I'm like, well, you know, as a twenty three year old, twenty four year old, I

didn't know what was happening. I just knew that my mum was supposed to be overseas and money's coming out of her bank account and Brian Bay. The reaction from the lady on the phone when I rang Telly Banking, she nearly had a heart attack. She's like, what, I can't tell you this, but holy moly, there's money coming out of her bank account and Byron Bay. So you know,

it started at that very outset. They only marked my mum's on occurrence only at that stage within twenty four hours of me going to the police station.

about the circumstances of your mum's disappearance. Brief details, because we're going to break it down. So it's complex. But where was she the fact she went overseas and then so she was a school teacher.

of the best in Queensland. She wasn't very happy. There was times in the new year, around the March February time period where she just wasn't getting along with a few people at school, and I always sort of thought to myself, potentially there was a bit of tall poppy syndrome happening. She won this award and people didn't like that.

And I've even heard comments since then that people were saying, oh, well, it was the parents who were voting for her, and so even little comments like that, I'm like, what does it really matter who voted for her?

of the sort. So that was all happening. She decided to sell the house and told my husband and I he was my fiance back then. We just got engaged that she was going to come back in a year, and she was going to buy an apartment or a unit at Maine Beach, which is on the Gold Coast, not far from her house, and by doing so, she'd have to give us a couple of big pieces of her furniture because she wouldn't be able to house them

in the unit when she got back. The rest of her treasures were going into a shipping container, and foolishly I never asked her where the shipping container was going. She just said to me, if I decide to stay overseas and teach, I will get you to send it over to me. Okay, And I thought, okay, and like everything made sense to me. She did sell the house really quickly, so she sold it in three weeks for less than fifteen thousand dollars that she paid for it.

And if you wind back to nineteen ninety seven, we're talking around one hundred and seventy one hundred and sixty thousand dollars for a house. Just for some perspective, so that was a bit that was a bit odd. I did think that was a bit weird, but you know, I wasn't the kind of child, I guess young adult that asked my mum will probed into my mom's business too much. Anyway, there was a night that she'd asked me if I would come and help her start packing

up the house. And I was going to TAFE because ironically I was trying myself to get into the Queensland Police, so I was studying at TAFE while working from I do joke. I do joke about that. I should have I should have persisted. But any who, Chris went around my partner, yeah, and he helped mum pack up. And

so he was helping her. He was putting some records from the under the TV cabinet into some boxes, and she walked down and said, what's the time, and he gave her the time, and she said, oh, okay, we'll just drop what you're doing. I need you to go. And he goes, no, no, Marry and it's okay, I'll just keep packing this box and finish and he goes, no, no, you just need to leave it. I need you to go. So he left, quite bewildered as to why she was sort of kicking him out of the house in such

a hurry. Came and picked me up from Tafe. We stopped at a service station on the way home that had a McDonald's attached to it because it's late. We don't we didn't have time to cook dinner. McDonald's feel every time I say that now because I don't need McDonald's. But why did you have McDonald's Anyway? Life changes? But yeah, anyway, so we were sitting at McDonald's and my mum's car pulled up in the petrol bowser and Chris actually was

the one who saw her. I had my to the bowser and I stood up and I started waving at her. And she's standing at the car with the door open like she's about to put petrol in the car, and just stares at me like a deer in headlights, as if to say, oh my god, what are you doing sort of thing. Anyway, she got back in the car, didn't put petrol in the car, and drove off. But she went around to the left, which got meant that she went through the drive through and instead of driving

straight past us. And I think she did that because there was a man in the car, and I clearly could see that there was a guy. He was very tall, his head was nearly touching the roof. But the reflection from the lights, the bright lights at nighttime in the petrol station meant that I didn't get a very clear look at him, but he was big, and I guess always figured that if she'd driven past the window where we were standing, I would have got a full view

of who that was. I did ask her the next day and said, who was the man in the car? She said, just a friend I've met at the art center. He was just taking me out to say goodbye before I go over. And I went, okay, no problem, Ibe, you respect her privacy. I kind of joked and went, oh, maybe she's got a boyfriend. She doesn't want to tell me about it, but you know, I just left it at that essentially. So on the she came and had

dinner with us. She asked if i'd make her a lamb roast, and she came to our house with her friend Leslie. She'd moved in with Leslie because she'd sort of had to leave the house a couple of weeks before she was ready to move to go on the trip. I should say, Leslie lived close to school, so it sort of made sense that whereas we were like thirty minutes away, so it was probably better for her to stay with Leslie and so Leslie and drove Mum out to our house. I made her a lamb roast and yeah,

that was the last time I saw her. Gave her a hug and a kiss. She looked a bit sad that she was leaving.

and I had been skiing. We're driven down to go skiing, and we were there and we were driving back when we heard about the Threadbeat disaster. And when we got home there was an answering machine message. The light was flashing and I pressed it and it was Mum and she said, oh, I've just heard word over here about the Threadbat disaster. I was just checking to see if

you guys are okay. And I was really sad because I just bought my wedding dress here in Sydney on our way home in the car, and I really wanted to tell her because she was here when we got engaged, right, so she came to our engagement party on the ninth of June. She left on the twenty second of June, so she was aware of what we were doing. She knew that I was trying to get into the police. She's asking all those sorts of questions and being engaging

with us in those letters and postcards. And then she rang and said to me, look, you know I'm going to stop sending lots of postcards. I'm sending post ups to everyone, which she did from evidence, and she said, I just need to have a break, and I said, yes, go and have a break. You don't need to send us a hundred postcards. It's hard to get a stamp and find a postbox. Go and have a break. That's fine. We're all for all fine here. And that was the

last time I spoke to her. She was at a payphone and the money kept dropping out, and she'd ring back and she'd talk for a bit, and then the money would drop out again, And when we got to the last bit, she said, this is all the money I've got now, so I'll just let you talk until the phone drops out. So I'm literally just talking away in the phone cut off. And that was the last time I spoke to her.

Surely she'll contact Owen, my brother for his birthday, which was the eighteenth of October, And so I called him to see if she had called on the Saturday, which was his birthday, and he said no, and I said, okay, I sort of gave her a bit of grace to go. K's behind us. Maybe she's got her dates mixed up. She'll bring him tomorrow. So I rang him again and

he said, no, she hasn't called me. And it was just that a friend came over for dinner that night and we were talking about it, and I was saying, I'm worried, like now, I don't know, she would never miss his birthday, so what are we going to do? And she suggested that I ring the bank because I had her bank account details and see if she was using her bank account and here. I am thinking it would be overseas and that she'd say yes or no. I rang and she said, I can't tell you anything

due to privacy. And then she paused and she said, oh, my god, did you say your mum's overseas? And I said yes, and she said, oh, there's money coming out of her bank account and Barron Bay OK. So she goes, you can't tell anybody. I'm telling you this because I'll lose my job, you know. So there was all that rushing through my head as well, and I was just grateful that she told me, and so my husband and I we actually worked weekends in our jobs and it's

our We've gone back. I have gone back with a fine toothcomb to look at the timeline, and it's my opinion that we actually drove to Byron on the twentieth. The police report says it was the twenty second, But if you look at that really closely, they've done a lot of work, I guess, and ringing people and talking to people in a forty five minute period by when he said that he did it, and he's lodged it, so I'm not sure about that. That's all a bit gray,

and no one can really say, yeah, your name. But Chris and I think we went on the Monday and we went down there with a school photo of mums and we walked around everywhere to see if someone had seen her.

There was no one else and there was only one person serving. And I handed him the photo and I said, look, my mom's supposed to be overseas, but I've just been told by you're telebanking that money's been coming out of her bank account. Here can you help me? And he picked up the photo and he shook it and he said, m that rings a bell. So his body language to

me was really off. He took the photo and walked around the back of some tables, went into a room, closed the door behind him, came out, went over to the photocopy. He took a photo of it and came back to me and said, what would you like me to say to her if I see her? So I was like having a meltdown. And we drove straight around to Barron Bay Police and I walked in there and said, something's.

telling you now. You know that now, but for other people, because I think so many times people and I honestly believe it's because we're brought up to trust police, like you go and the police will saw that you've got the problem. You go to the police and you assume that the police are going to solve this problem. But I think that safeguard getting the name of the officer, you speak to making people accountable, and you know, wherever you work, if someone what's your name, you know, okay,

you're going to be accountable for this. I think that's a good practice, So let's put that out there. You've gone in and you explained when we first started the podcast. You've said you've got concerns about your mother. What were you told by the police at the time.

can't prove that because I didn't write anything down. But that phone call was a gentleman calling me to tell me that they'd found my mother and she didn't want anything to do with us. Exact words, where we found your mother. She doesn't want anyone knowing where she is or what she's doing. And that is burnt into my brain.

my grandfather's involvement. He lived up on the Sunshine Coast and he had contacted missing persons through the Salvation Army and they were working with Queensland Missing person and they actually wrote like I've got a letter from the Salvation Army just saying, oh, you know, bank security confirm that it was definitely your daughter Marion who went in and spoke of starting a new life and withdrew the balance of of her bank account and bank security are like

the police, so must be true. And that in her notebook she hasn't taken down the name of the bank teller who served mum who claims that it was definitely my mum who went in and telling my grandfather was definitely your daughter Marion is the word choice. And the kicker there too is that she didn't withdraw all the money out of heran account. There was still money sitting in her bank account up until.

spoken to your mother. But that's just an assumption and that sort of information shouldn't be passed on to members of the public if police have passed it on the information the way that you said, but in the circumstances to contact you and tell you that they've spoken to your mother, And it doesn't appear that that's correct that to me, And I could be wrong here. I'm only surmising understanding the workings and the organization of the police.

It's like someone that, oh, well, we can close that line of inquiry.

fifty one, she's been married and divorced three times. She's capable of this behavior without talking to my mum, never ever speaking to her. And I think for me when people ask me, why do I keep pushing and keep going.

That's one of the main things I want people to learn that language is actually and what you spay and what your words woulds do actually can cause a lot of problems for somebody, especially if you're living in this ambiguous bubble over here where you don't know what's happened and you're always guessing and you and your mind just goes million miles an hour.

right thing. You've gone to the police with genuine, legitimate concerns and there's been a failing in the system, not a failing from your point of view, like at you accept what police tell you on face value, and I told you not the jump ahead on the jump ahead a little bit in that during the coronial inquest that wasn't held for years and years after the Detective Chief Inspector Brea, who I know and I rate him as a good detective, and he was heading up the missing

person's unit at the time that he gave this evidence. He said in a statement that forms part of the evidence of the Crannial brief, and this is from Detective Chief Inspector Brown, it is my view that Marion Barter should not have been classified as located, as her whereabouts were still unknown and there was still justification to hold concerns for her safety or well being. So that's someone that's reviewed it years later. So it's not just give

you some credit here. It's not just you saying things could be done better or me trying to beat up on the police on the matter. That's someone that's still serving police officer that reviewed the situation and came up with that opinion and gave that evidence the cranial inquest in his statement. So that must add to the frustration.

she's just having a break. Why would you go on list her as missing. And so they sort of had a crack at me, and they don't talk to me anymore, like ever since I've done the podcast. The lady vanishes and I understand it's traumatic, and I understand it's upsetting, and I understand that not everybody is like me who can just keep plugging along and going with it, and it is upsetting for them. It's their sister. She was

the eldest. But you know, at the same time, it's important that you know, we do look for her and we make out that what's happened to her, make sure she's safe and well. And so for years and years and years, I just wanted to find her to make sure she was like, Hey, I'd even say, you know, I don't need to see you. I don't need to talk to you if you don't want to talk to me. As sad as that is, just let me know you're okay,

and I can rest my heart because I can't. I can't rest until I know, and you know, I'm on heart medication now. Like it's been really hard for me to do what I'm doing. This is not easy, but I just feel I have to do it for her. I have to. I have to do it for her, and I have to do it for every other missing person as well, because they need a voice. My mum's not here to tell her story.

in that field. And we had a guy and I wasn't really friends with him, but I just knew he worked in customs and I said to him, can you do a passport check for me? This is after I've been told that she's they found her, okay. So that phone call came in, as I said, about a week to ten days after I'd been to the police. And he then came back to me and he said, your mum's passport came back into the country on the second of August. So that's when I found out about it. Now.

The interesting thing there, and I didn't know this at that time, but my mum had changed her name, and so when I told him, I gave him Marion Barta and her date of birth is the third of the tenth forty five, So that's all I gave him to go on, and he's come back and told me that he didn't tell me anything else. And it wasn't until twenty eleven that we found out that she'd actually changed her.

I said to her, I need to do something. It's month tenth anniversary this year and no one's doing anything.

So I contacted I had done just for clarity I had in two thousand and four, I actually reached back out to the Salvation Army after my grandfather was passed, like well, he was very sick with cancer, so it was either just before he passed or after he passed, and I reached out to them asking for the information about what they told my grandfather, and they came back and said, we've got no records of anything, and we've tried to find your mother and there's nothing we can find.

So we're really sorry. God Bless was probably it. And then a short time after that, the lady I was working with in that circumstance, she contacted me and said, look, Woman's Day magazine would like to do an article about missing mums on Mother's Day. Would you like to be involved?

So I did do that article. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Darcy, and I remember I had Ella on my lap in the photo and I remember saying to my husband, well, he had sort of indicated he didn't want her in the magazine, and I said, I really want her in the magazine because if Mum reads it and she sees that she's a grandmother, I just wanted her to see And so that was quite stressful. So I had done that little bit of media, that was it, and nothing came of it. I didn't hear anything.

Salvation Amy came back to me about a month later and said, look, we haven't heard anything. We're really sorry. And then it was two thousand and seven, as I said, I've got my girlfriend Nina looking after the kids while I jump on the phone to the AFP Missing Person's Unit because I thought, I'm going to go to them. They're the top dogs. Let me go to them and see what they can do to help me, because I

really just had nothing. And anyway, I spoke to a really beautiful lady named Rebecca cotts Beck since passed, but we became really good friends and she we spoke for probably two hours in that initial conversation, and then she rang me back and asked me if I would be the face of Missing Persons Week.

you're pregnant. But we got to the end. I had my third cesarean, and she told me that I need to prepare myself because they're going to bounce me around from state to state to do all these interviews in that week. And so I there storing my breast milk. Sorry Gary with.

mental health, so they said they can't use you. He said, look, we've already got your tickets for the plane and everything's

still come down. I remember it really well, actually, because Kevin Rudd was sitting in front of us on the plane, and we got to Camber on a little buzzy plane and sat in the audience, and you know, I walked out of there and the police commissioner was outside, and Rebecca actually introduced me to him, and he came up to me and he said, oh, well, Sally, my brother's missing. I don't know where he is. And sometimes that's just how people are, you know, people will have the right

to be missing. And then he I don't know. The conversation she kept going. He goes, well, my mum knows where he is, but we don't know where he is. He's missing to us. So anyway, that was a really rough time of life, right, that was not fun. And I guess for me, every time I go through those things, it takes so much energy and so much effort, and then I just come flat splat on the ground and I have to really suck myself back up and to keep going again and go, Okay, what avenue can I

do next? So at that point it's interesting actually because in the inquest, when you do actually get information from the brief of evidence, we can actually see that after Rebecca Cott's rings Missing Persons New South Wales and asks for Mom's file so that they can put her on as the head of the face of missing persons. That year, there's a very quick change on the cops event from occurrence only to missing.

depth of conversation with any of them. Gary Sheen became the oh I see on the case, and I did have a lot to do with him. We spoke a lot on the phone. He was interested, He sat down. He wanted to know everything about the case, everything we were up to. He did some digging. He found that there'd been an Armadale crime stoppers call come into Armidale saying that my mum's body was buried in Armidale. So he organized and got approval to go out with some

Cadava dogs. But it was like so many years before, so those sorts of things started to come in about. He then told me that he'd found a I don't know what you call it now, my brain's not working, but there'd been a ping on her Medicare card to

get used in Grafton. So but the problem there, which was a pretty big problem, they were looking for a doctor and so all this flurry about trying to find the doctor surgery and trying to find doctors who were working back in nineteen ointy seven to see who it was. And in actual fact we had the name.

after her pass what's come back into Australia. So we really desperately wanted to find that card crucial because it could have told us where she was or who she was with at least. And yeah, they didn't find it because they were looking for a doctor instead.

back then. And yeah, it's a lot easier now, or it's harder now to disappear, but there was still a lot of lines of inquiry that could have been covered to find out where she was and if someone's writing the report off that they've found her, if the report's done properly, it should be where she's living, what her circumstances are to write the report off. But there was none of that, was it.

just honester goodness. I just thought by walking in there and telling them I had concerns and walking away that even though they said to me, oh, we've located her, for some weird reason, in my head, I just thought she'd still be, you know, in this system, and she just wasn't.

out about the crime Stoppers call. And then in twenty eleven he spoke to Immigration in Brisbane and he got a file that showed him that my mum's name had been changed to Florabella Ramchel.

we find out about the name change. And I'm going to fast forward here from this moment to twenty sixteen. So twenty sixteen, I've got a lady who's following my Facebook page. I set the Facebook page up in twenty thirteen. I had less than a thousand followers on it. And if you go back and read all the very beginning of that, I was close to giving up, and then i'd come back again. I'd close to giving up, and it was just such a roller coaster ride of crazy.

And she contacted me and she said, look, Sally, I've just gone on to the National Missing Person's Register and your Mum's not on there. And so I thought that's so weird. So I had a look, wasn't on there? So I rang my friend Rebecca Cotts again. I said, hey, Beck, I've just had a lady contact me. And she said that mum's name's not on the missing person's register. I

can't see it either. Can you have a look. And she said she has a look, and she says, oh, well, this actually something on the file that I haven't seen before. I have to get approval to give it to you. Let me go and do that and see what they say, and I'll come back to you. So anyway, she comes back to me and she said, I've got approval. I'm

going to send it to you. And it was a document, so it's on AFP letterhead, but that document actually has that on the seventh of December twenty eleven, my mum was located, and on the eighth of November that year,

so a month before ish. The case had been suspended on those dates again, eighth of November nineteen twenty and eleven, and then she was located on the seventh of December twenty eleven, and that I had been it says underneath it, there's a notation that says that I had been notified of that decision.

back to you. So he rang me back. I don't remember if it was straight away all the day after, but he did ring me back pretty quickly, and he said, I've spoken to them and it seems it's a typo.

mind blowing. And he did ring me back and he said, I've spoken to them, And how it works is we've got two boxes, so you're either missing or you're found. And because we deem that your mother is missing because she sold her house, she quit her job, and she changed her name, we have no choice but to marko is located.

unluckiest person in the world or these things. So, Okay, you found out now that your mum's not missing, that she's Yeah, so you go through life thinking, oh, well, she's not missing. My mother just doesn't want to talk to me. And my mother that I was close with my whole life just doesn't want to talk to me. Where does it ramp up again to become a missing person's well, because when you receive that, do you just go, well, am I just banging my head against the brick wall? What am I meant to do?

before the end, before end of financial year. Maybe if she's come back, and if money is such a drive, thinking that she's going to the bank every day for three and a half weeks to take out five thousand dollars every day, Clearly she wants money if it's her, so she might have been entitled to a tax returns, so therefore she might have done that. Can we check if she's touched her superannuation? Can we get the passenger list?

I was thinking of all the things I couldn't do because I was bound by privacy, right, so her privacy madded my hopes to find my mother. Clearly didn't it. So I was giving him and feeding him all these ideas, and he wouldn't tell me much about what he'd found, or he's like, what I've heard was that he couldn't access ATO. The only people that can access ATO, sorry, the police can only access ato information if the person's

in jail or in prison. He couldn't access it. So that was one part of it, and we had to wait to see if the coroner could access that information. Then he told me he'd looked at the passenger list, but there was nothing that stood out, and he told me that she hadn't touched a super and that was probably about it. And then so that's twenty sixteen. We just sort of plodding along again and I'm sort of tapping away on Facebook and I'm trying to get some people,

you know, do you know anything? And can you share

my story please? Someone knows something. Again, very stressful time of life, busy with three children who are now teenagers and going into high school, and you know, trying to manage life as well and not rocking myself in the corner because I think for me at the very beginning, I remember watching a story on missing persons very early on, and there was two women and one of their sons and the little boy just kept crying the entire time on the show, and I just, for me, I just

didn't want my kids to have to live that, and I didn't want I just wanted to be strong, and I just wanted to be a person to go, you know what, my mum matters. She's your grandmother. I know you've never met her before, but it's really important that we do the right thing for everybody. I want everyone to know what's happened to her. And I was still probably by that point, I was starting to believe that maybe she wasn't alive because I didn't just didn't believe.

I didn't believe she wouldn't turn up for Owen's funeral. I didn't believe she wouldn't turn up for my wedding when I had kids, like all these big key moments in life that she wasn't there for. So we sort of plotted along from twenty sixteen up until twenty nineteen. Well, actually that's the end of twenty eighteen, and that's when Alison, Sandy and I were put in touch with each other.

And Allison works for Channel seven and a friend of hers had sort of wrung me, who knew from a parent of school, saying, you know, if I could get you onto sixty minutes or Sunday night program, would you be interested? And I said, absolutely I would. My grandmother, So my mom's mum was living by herself in her beachfront property up and the Sunshine Coast, and she never spoke about it, like we did not talk about my mum,

and I didn't want to upset her. When I did that Woman's Day article way back, I got into trouble. You know, you didn't tell us you were doing it, and I was like, well, no one ever asked me what I'm doing. I don't want to. I don't know how to bring it up with you guys, because you don't want to talk about it. So I wasn't prepared

to do anything. And the irony of that is, as soon as she passed away, I said to my kids and my husband, I'm going to approach sixty minutes and see if they would like to do a story on it, because someone knows something. And so I wrote to them probably five or six times, and they didn't respond to me at all, and I just thought, I'm just another missing person story that no one's really interested in. And

I met Alison. We went out for a coffee and we pretty quickly decided then that the amount of information I had and the details that we were working with and there was more investigation that we could have done on the name, we decided to do a podcast. Okay, So the podcast launched on the first of.

I don't believe it when anywhere. So I'm a bit still gray in what actually was going on with that. But at that point we launched the podcast first of April, we sort of put a call out. I guess Joni who you'll hear about soon enough, Johnie Cokondos. She's researcher who has been helping me for in our six years and she was listening to the Lady Vanisher's. She's an avid listener of true crime. She's been listening for twenty years.

And she said, the difference between you, Sal and other podcasts I've heard before was you actually asking for people to help. And so when I heard that, I just thought I might just sit down and have a bit of a play. And I was playing with the name Ramckurl because when she looked into it, there was no Ramackeurls in Australia except for my mum. And we were like, oh, this is a pretty rare name. Turns out there's only

one hundred and one Ramic Curls in the world. Put into perspective, so no Jane does or you know Jane Smith or anything. It's a very rare name. And she herself her husband's grandmother went missing or great grandmother went missing, and she and the family had worked for fifteen years to try and find her, and they actually did find her, and what had happened to her. She'd been deceased, but

they did find her. And she just thought to herself, I've got these tools here that potentially I can help Sally. I'll just have a bit of a play around and see what I find. She was sick, she had the flu, and she was up at midnight and she punched it in and this ad binged up on her screen. She's so excited she jumped ran and jumped in on her husband. She said in Oh my god, I found something. I found something. And so that ad was in the La

Courier Australian. It's a French speaking newspaper that runs out of Sydney, and it was a gentleman with the initial M and then f ramachel and it sort of just goes along, you know, single forty seven I think he

I think it was he was forty seven. The ad was written in nineteen ninety four and it Stilla talks about his single, good looking, non smoker, non drinker, a polygue loot speaking multiple languages and bon chik boncha, which is like a term that he put in there, which we've found out means good taste, good style, and looking for a relationship, potential marriage. And it had a po box in Ballina, New South Wales with a phone.

is a local. He'd listened to the lady Vanishes as well, and he just took himself down to the local library and hand scanned all the phone books at the time and then ran it through micro fish and he found the phone number and it was linked to a business called Baalana Coin Investments had the address of where the property was in Ballina as well, so link. Yeah. So I've found some amazing people through this who have just helped me or helped us, like everybody in the mix

be able to get to where we are today. And anyway that the owners of that business were called Frederic Heavedariry and Dianda Heavedariry. Frederic to Heavidairy turns out to be Rick Blum.

to read something out. I'm being careful here that before we start talking about Rick Blom, I want to put on record he's not been charged with anything relating to your mother's disappearance. So we put that on record. The state coroner, in her findings regarding mister Blom stated, and he gave evidence at the inquest into your mother's disappearance thirteen days and this is what the coroner said in

her findings. I do not accept as accurate anything mister Blom has said in evidence, in the absence of independent corroborating evidence, that's fairly powerful, powerful comments to make about the witness.

changed his name. He admitted before the court to using a number of different aliases over the years, including the following. And I'll try and pronounce it these properly, but they're a wide range of names. So Bernard DuPont, Fernando, Nicholas, Remarkale, Frederick, David Dexavier, Rick Blum, rich Richard's, Richard, Lloyd west Richard Lloyd Westbury, Rick Richard, Rick west Wiley, Copperyle Wiley, David Copperiley, Wiley, Wooters, Shane, Frederick,

David Dexavier and Zabdel Zilling. They're fourteen names. Yeah, so let's let's just conclude, just.

to just get your thoughts on it. So let's take a break and we'll be back for part too shortly