Daughter

This is the case of Marion Barter, a mother, teacher, friend, missing for twenty six years.

You know, no sign that she was going to vanish.

That's for sure.

The bizarre circumstances surrounding her disappearance.

I'm not sure if it was intentional or there's something more foul afoot.

If you could imagine a teacher coming straight from say little house on the prairie to the eighties, that was Marian Barter.

What I say, whether.

You find Marian Barter dead or alive, I honestly believe somebody has that key piece of information.

And the relentless quest of a daughter to find her mum.

Something had happened, Something has happened to make her leave.

I am one hundred percent sure, one hundred percent sure that somebody knows something.

The Lady Vanishers episode fifty one, I'm Alison Sandy.

And I'm Brian Seymour.

On the eighteenth of January nineteen seventy a baby girl, a loner. Evelyn Jacqueline Wooters was born a King George the Fifth Hospital now known as Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. Her twenty three year old Hungarian born mother was a loner Wooters knie Kinsel. Her father was thirty years old and listed as a Belgian born photographer named Willie Wooters, just one of the dozens of names he'd

Amazed too.

I feel a bit shaky too, so I'm not quite sure what to say.

That's okay, that's okay.

We can just stay here and just yeah, We've got a lot, a lot to talk about.

I'm very sad about your mom. Like, yeah, I'm sorry, Yeah, I'm I've just been sad.

For your mom for a long time and I had to I knew something wasn't right, and I just needed to find you, and I just needed to That's what I felt like anyway, So I'm glad I found you, perfective.

It's amazing to me. Thank you so much for acknowledging that I've always been so I don't know, just felt a bit crazy for thinking that anything terrible had happened to my mum.

I'm sure it's I'm the same. Like, it's hard to sort of put it into a clear perspective.

So yeah, yeah, our moms. That's hard in itself, isn't it not.

Yeah, Yeah, it's been a hard journey not having a mother growing up.

Evelyn and Sally's meeting was filmed for a special episode Channel seven's Spotlight series with reporter Liam Bartlett, this.

Islamus to me.

It was nerve racking for both of them, but especially Evelyn, who has never been on television before or spoken publicly about her difficult and traumatic upbringing.

I'll be right, how am I? Yeah, there's a plaza than chess my starts running.

Evelyn and Sally share many similarities. Both have lost their mothers in suspicious circumstances. Both worry and wonder about the events surrounding their mother's deaths, assuming that Marian is indeed deceased, which is what both Sally and the News Arthwall's police have said they believe. In addition, both Sally and Evelyn know that their mothers were involved with the same man before they died, a man using different names.

Yeah.

I mean, I just always felt like something had happened to my mother, but there's just no way to get anywhere with it. Just the fact that I felt that something had happened to her, and I had an instinct that whatever it was was nefarious and dark. That that alone is what made all the people in my realm treat me like I was pretty crazy. So that was really my experience growing up with it.

But you still have those thoughts. You still think that.

I still have those thoughts now, but it's different because it caused so much pained me to be treated that way by everyone around me that eventually I had to go through a process where I had to let it go so that I could live my life, because otherwise I was probably going to die myself. There's no way to live with that amount of sort of trauma and the dysfunction of relating to people from a place of

Can I ask, I mean, this is a if I might say, I mean, it's a difficult mix, though, isn't it? Because he is still your biological father.

That's right.

It's worth noting here before Evelyn answers Limb's question that she has been estranged from Rick Bloom for most of her life and didn't even know of his existence until she was in her teens.

Although I don't see him as my father, he din't, no, I mean, I do understand, and in my thirties year, the last time that I met with him, and you know, I was left in a way that was very scarring to me, where again I thought something terrible was happening. I thought that maybe this person was trying to hurt me in a bad way.

And on the other hand, he's my biological father.

So the combination of those two things was just it left me scarred, and I have completely disassociated myself from him as a relative of.

Mine for a good reason.

Yeah.

Well, someone said to me once and it was kind of fitting at the time because we just had Ella and someone a friend of Chris has said, you know, anyone can be a father, but it takes a lot to be a dad, And I think that resonates with me with this as well, Like he can be your father, but he's not your dad.

No, he's not my dad.

That's very sad. But the reality, if I might say, Sally, it's fair, isn't it to say from your position that you think evilence biological father has had something to do with your mum's disappearance something.

Look, it's hard because I can't say that he definitely has.

But if I look at all the facts, and I'm a pretty.

Level headed human, I'm not someone who jumps through into craziness.

And if I look at all the statistics.

And all of the facts and all of the modus operandi that I've been presented, it's pretty fair to say that he's probably knows something that he's not telling me.

You haven't reached the definitive conclusion because you can't.

I can't yet, And it's hard for people to understand.

Like everyone looks at the facts and goes, oh, well, you know, we think he didn't like I can't say that yet, but.

You think on the balance of probability that he's had something to do with your mum. I have to disappearing.

I have to consider that my mum changed her name to his name. She went overseas the same time as him, she came back the same time as him, and all of her know and whereabouts and money coming out of her bank account and being in that location were where he was living.

And he's still living today.

So I cannot not think that there is some connection somehow to rip Blum. And he admits to having an affair with my mum and a relationship with her. And if you look at all the other ladies that have come forward for no reason of their own, they've just come forward and said, hey, this happened to me as well, and you can imagine how compacting that is. Like, I just felt like every time something happened, I would just be and throw me back ten meters and that I'd have to keep coming forward.

So, Evelyn, how do you process that connection with Sally? You've lost to your mum tragically very young age. There's that connection. You both lost your mother's but your father may or may not have been involved. How do you work that out in your mind now in front of Sally?

Well, I personally feel that my connection to Sally is based on the fact that both of us lost our mother.

Yeah, and I feel that way too, nothing to do with any connection to Rick Bloom the man, but rather what we both went through for losing our mums. And even though you know it seems to me that he is guilty of something, I also have to pinch myself to realize that he potentially did these terrible things. But what terrible things did he do? We none of us really know. We have to hopefully find out. Maybe he'll tell us.

Have you been thinking about this meeting for a while.

I didn't know it was ever going to get to meet Sally, and I didn't know if Sally would want to meet me.

I didn't know whether.

People would in some way try to put me in some context with him as a relative, which I was very frightened of. But I, after only recently becoming aware of Sally's story long story, I just wanted to give you're a hug.

That's it, he too.

As soon as I found out about you. I need to I need to find ever learn, and I just want to give her a big hug because I know what the feeling is like to lose your mum. I mean, you were obviously a lot younger than me, but I think even if you take all that away, you still have things in life that you have to try and cope with as a daughter of someone who's no longer there to help you and not knowing what's actually happened to your mum, Like that, you're the same position as me.

I mean, I know you were young. How are we seven seven and I.

Was twenty four, So there is that age difference between the two of us. And I feel lucky that I got to see my mom, you know, and grow up with her through my teenage years. But I just had this overwhelming want to meet Evelyn and just give her a hug and just tell her I'm here for her, and I am someone who understands and is grappling with the enormity of what this is and the craziness of what it is.

And you know, on the positive side, the long fight that Sally has been waging and all the study and the research in the background that she's been doing may in fact help you.

Yeah, amazing.

It's so encouraging after what I've been through that there's people out there, none of the people that were meant to support me through life, but people complete strangers out there believe that, yeah, something's gone on, and discovering what that something is is something important as well. So and hopefully if I can get a few answers, that would be amazing. But at the same time, my mother is dead and it'd be good to know what happened to sell his mum.

So, yeah, it's tragically sad your mum at thirty one of them, it's just sad thirty one years old. Well, what does the death certificate say?

I actually can't remember the medical word for it.

Her heart stopped. I did look it up in a medical book. It said that it was overload of toxins, but it's actually overload of toxins, overload of topic the heart's inability. I think, you know, to sort of like deal with toxins in the blood as it pumps it around. But it's a very common cause of death. It's up there with cardiac arrest. It's the environmental toxins. A lot of people their heart can't cope. So there's no way to really pin pointed as a as any.

Thirty one, she must have had a lot of toxin in her body.

Yeah.

Well, and when I grew up, I got told things like she had fever when she was a child and had a weak heart, or she died of a broken heart. There were some welfare papers where my stepfather had reported that she died from suicide on those documents. So I didn't really ever get a clear answer about it, and I think that maybe I would have accepted it if it wasn't for the fact that my grandmother died the same year.

Evelyn says her uncle Attila also died around this time.

My uncle being only somewhere in his twenties, so much younger than my mother, apparently of a stroke. I mean, it's unheard of the first time when I was in my twenties, and I thought, maybe this really happened. Maybe I'm just, you know, having invented all this stuff in my head because I can't deal with the trauma of losing my mother. So I took myself off to the doctor and I thought, if that's the case, I'd better go and get checked out.

Yeah, So I went to the doctor, told him.

The history, you know, of the young age of the you know, and the doctor was horrified. Round heaps of tests on me came back everything was normal, So, you know, I just it was just confusing growing up trying to get answers.

But I haven't had a chance to talk to Evelyn about what we found either, And I hope it's okay to tell you, but we actually have her autopsy report and her heart is normal.

Okay, times I worry telling that man normal.

Well, they ticked her heart was functioning normally and there was no damage to the heart. So on her death certificate it said she'd had a heart attack and that was at the hospital, and then the autopsy report came back that the heart was normal.

Why would a hospital put say one thing on a certificate and an autopsy say something different?

How would met.

Another question in the abyss that we're trying to grapple with.

That's amazing, But you didn't know this?

No, how could I know something like that?

Yeah, well no one.

You know, it's come through archives, That's how that information's come about.

So if the autopsy report four evidence, Muma's saying that her heart was normal, but what her body's full of toxin? But to still die in those circumstances at thirty one, and now, knowing all that we know about Rick Blum's background, have the police interviewed you, Evely?

They did call me, I had a phone call.

Surely they've taken a statement.

No, no, nothing, nothing at all.

They haven't asked you to to turn up as a witness to say something of the question.

Nothing.

Oh that's extraordinary. Do you think that's unusual?

I have goose bumps.

I mean, all this this is, you know, the and then these circumstances surrounding the death of Evelyn's mum surely are completely pertinent to the overall case the whole story. Would you agree?

Well, I think it's very important.

Evelyn is a very and a loner, very important part of this story, and hence.

Why when we found out what we did, I was like, you know, I need to find you.

I need to give you a hug, and I I was so sad to hear what happened to your mum and shocked at the same time. And just my gut feeling told me something wasn't right. And I have lived my whole life with my mum going something's not right, so I'm used to having a feeling of that, and then I just go on this tangent I need to find what's happened, and I need to look into it more. And sometimes it leads me down rabbit holes that are dead end, but sometimes I end up sitting next to

And even with other people.

Who have come forward, they've said to me, thank you for just letting me speak and letting me be heard, because like you said, you know, people thought they're crazy and don't be ridiculous, and that's why they haven't come forward. They've just sat back and gone, oh, people think I'm crazy if I say something. But it's important that we

It's my husband and.

My kids or my mum's sisters have thought that I'm crazy and that I should just leave it alone, and it's upsetting for them. It's upsetting for me too, but I feel like I have to do I have to do something.

Yeah, so it's the whole thing makes me shake. So I'm so sorry.

Oh it's fine, but I just yeah, I just want everyone needs to be looked after and cared for and treated with sensitivity and care.

Right.

Yeah, it's a bit of a process. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to take you away from what you just said. I'm just struggling to understand how professionals can deliver something on one report and then people in a similar profession like put a different cause of death onto a death certificate. To that there's a conflict in what they're saying there, how does something like that even even happen?

And if it's true, you're right, and it's happened to me as well, it's a great question. But on the same level, whereas they said to me that they'd spoken to my mum and she doesn't want anyone to know where she was or what she was doing, and that has proven to not be true. And then my brother

And if it's not right, then is there a known cause of death from my mother? If it's not her heart, you don't know.

It paints a very different picture potentially of what happened.

Potentially if we can find out what happened.

Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, great that you know finally that you have that information. But I completely concur I mean I can completely sympathize. I mean, well, you know, why would you have two different pieces of information and so far apart.

I mean, if we can't rely on documents that are coming out of the medical profession, then how how to uncover the truth? If the police are saying such terrible things to you, how does the truth get found?

Can I ask you both sort of individually, what is your hope for each other?

Well, I hope we can become friends and we can actually be there as a support for each other.

I think that's important for me.

And it's kind of weird because we've just met, but I feel like I know you and I feel like I have a really deep love for you as a person and go you know, you've been through a lot and I am very I have a lot of empathy for you for what's happened to you and what you've had to deal with, and I'd just like you to know that I'm here someone if you ever want to have a coffee or catch up or go out for lunch or something, because that's, at the end of the day, that's what life is about.

You know.

We're both in our fifties, and you've got to make the good out of the bad, you know, and these are good moments out of a bad situation.

I think we will find the answers. I must say.

When I heard about your grandma and Blona's brother again, and this is just me being someone who's been in an investigative mode now for half my life, I instantly just went something again not right there, Like what's happened to the grandmother and the brother and why did they all die in the same year? So I think that needs to be investigated a little bit more too.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing, amazing.

Were they all living together?

My understanding, which is it's not that I don't remember what I was told. It's just that I've lived a life where what I've been told hasn't been reliable.

But I do remember what I was told. So there was my grandmother was in.

Brussels, she lived with her second husband, and Attila, her son, was staying there.

He had a partner.

They'd had a child, I think a girl, but I don't have any of those details. And my mother had been two Brussels to visit. Then she came back to Australia passed away, and then my grandmother who was over there, passed away, and then Attila, who lived in the house with her, passed away.

And then so they all had been the three of them had been together together in the same house in Brussels, in Brussels, and they just happened to all die, and they all, yes, within how many months of each other.

I'm not one hundred percent sure. I remember when I was seven. It's very difficult to put the time around it. It was a condensed sort of a time frame.

Incredible coincidence. Is that a coincidence or is that a pattern?

You know? I just don't. I don't know. I just don't know.

It's amazing, as you say, I mean, because you know you were such a little girl when your mom died, that everything that you've been told essentially you know you've had to rely upon.

Well, I haven't been able to rely upon it.

You know what I mean. So you've had to rely upon it to be the truth when it may not be.

Yeah, well, I've had to.

Rely on my intuition, and then I've had to make a decision within myself that I'm not going to get answers, and therefore to try and let it go to some degree so that I can get on with living my life. And I don't think anywhere along my road, I don't think I've felt that I could rely very much for anything that's been said to me about my family, the history events and how they unfolded. So it's all been just a mystery to me, all of it. Who is this person, how did they interact with that person?

Who was who? I've got even my brother's birth certificate. He's my stepbrother.

He was born in Brussels, so it's in French, but I had someone read it out to me. It's is on there very clear that Willie Waters is his father, which is the current Bloom. However, when I confronted Bloom with that document, he denied that Chris was his son. And when I confronted Michael with that document. He said, no, Chris is absolutely my son. So both men agreed, but

So she committed I can't remember the word biggery.

Yeah, and so because Chris was then born in Brussels, they couldn't put the correct details on the birth certificate because they thought she.

Was still married.

Now I've been able to uncover since then. What a nightma. This is just one document, one example. I've been able to uncover since then. She was in fact divorced from Willy Waters at the time that Chris was born, and was in fact married to Michael Reid. So again, you know, there's this document and yet everyone you know, I mean, this has been my life has been like that.

And it's the same with me, Like I don't think my mum is alive, but it's something I have to endure to find a peace, you know, healing. So I'm still broken by what's happened. So I and I think he probably are too. So we need to heal that, and I think knowing knowledge is power, right, and information helps you. For me anyway, just to know is enough for me.

Well, you're both very much on the same bus, aren't you, which is really terrific because you know, ever, if Sally can solve her mystery of her mum, that will surely help you solve your mystery too.

I mean, I hope so. But the reason that I've come out is because I want to help you. And whether I find answers or not, I've got a story and my story might help get answers for what you're going through. That's what That's what I hope for. I feel really like.

A for want of better.

It's a care of duty to help in any way that I can. It's really important. I may not get the answers. I may get some, but I may not get them on this journey, but the things that I know and the things that I've been through might somehow help. I don't know how, but hopefully they'll they'll help uncover more.

Yeah, I'm very grateful.

I know it's tough to rehash it all again and bring it out, but I think there's a good purpose in that for both of us.

Yeah, to help each other.

It's lovely, right, it's nice.

That's good, so nice to meet.

Finally, it's a weird feeling.

It is weird.

Well done, ladies, girl power.

Girl power. Indeed, when the Lady Vanish's team launched our investigation into the disappearance of Marion Barter more than four years ago, nobody could have foreseen how many people, mostly brave, courageous and strong women, would join us, not only those who were directly affected and impacted by knowing Rick Bloom, also the many concerned listeners wanting to help in any

And I don't cry very easily, and that's because I will and truly run up the well.

To get from Brisbane to Brussels, we take four flights. The first to Sydney is only one hour, then a seven hour flight to Singapore, fourteen hours to London and finally one hour to Brussels in the afternoon. Upon arriving, we take a taxi to the hotel and marvel at the sights of Brussels on the way.

So pretty, it's what I remember, cobble Stone streets, the spell of the bakeries, the war falls in.

Particular, and just the old buildings, because we don't have this in Australia, like you know, really old like this, so it to us it's it's like a fairy tale city.

Evelyn reminisces about her brief time here when she was a child.

It's hard to.

Really explain, how co have youful the familiarity, how it feels even though I'm so different and far away from all these I can't even speak the language.

During our time in Brussels, we get a bit of a history lesson on Belgium, discussion of the divide between the Flemish who speak Dutch and the French speaking Belgians, how expensive the country's rural family is, and which places we needed to avoid accidentally wandering into at night. It's the rivalry between Belgians with Flemish and French origins, seems to have resulted in almost all of them being fluent in English.

Sue architect of that speaking. It was in the end of the nineteenth century.

With a population of more than two and a half million people. Brussels is the headquarters of the European Union and NATO. It's also famous for its waffles, chocolate and various types of beer. Needless to say, when we reach the hotel, we're exhausted and enjoy a good night's sleep before meeting again for breakfast the next morning. I greet Evelyn enthusiastically, who looks refreshed and ready for the day's challenges, including being interviewed by me.

It's good to see you too. I've been looking forward to catching up and going through this with you.

It's like just when we went and obviously went and into it a bit on the plane and it wasn't ready for it. Where the pictures of you as a child, knowing what you know with your mum and knowing what was ahead of you.

Yeah, it was.

Heartbreaking.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't look at those photos very often, but when I do, I see a little girl as well, and I always feeling does I feeling in my heart, like I want to talk to her. I just think that poor little thing, she had no idea what was coming down the road in front of her.

So you know, I just often I just want to grab her and give her a little hug.

For me too, Me too, As I said too, I wish I got to raise her. I wish that I was there for you at seven. It's kind of strange hearing Evelyn talking about herself as a child and the third person. But when you hear her story, you understand Evelyn is not that little girl. She's had to reinvent herself. While she's happy to be back in Brussels, her personal journey is like the road we drove in on, very bumpy. Not far from where we stay is the Grand Place,

Oh here we are in.

That square of Brussels. If I can do it justice. But it looks amazing.

What are you.

Thinking, Evelyn? Being here?

It's amazing.

There's gold came from everything.

And it's incredible and so I don't think there's anything more Brussels than this. We're actually gonna have to find out what all of this is.

But it is beautiful.

It is amagazine, and everyone has been so friendly. Who could have been here. We've had no trouble with people speaking English to us, have we.

Everyone's been so helpful.

It's lots of people, beautiful cafes, and it's just remarkable with everything that we're doing, and you know, it's all very serious what the purpose of being here is. We're still just blown away by the beauty and the coldness. Her day, it was so cold here.

Cold.

Yeah it is cold and it's gray, but it's beautiful. Back at the hotel, Evelyn shares with me her expectations of this trip and her hopes of finding answers to the mysteries surrounding her family. So, first of all, this whole thing before we left, right, you were kind of you know, you had a headache the night before and you got at four am to pack, right, So what

His involvement definitely.

Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of startling.

Kind of startling.

Yeah, it's a little bit diabolical to me. And I mean, it's just so clear to me that he lies, that he lies about all sorts of things.

But he's definitely has.

Lied about whether he knows me or not, and his involvement with my family. So I'm pretty keen to get to the bottom of that.

Evelyn and I are joined by the Spotlight producer, Dwayne Heavily, and I show him some of the photos that Evelyn brought with her, including remarkable images of her parents' wedding and candid shots of them when they were courting. Some of these other photos are the happiness, the love that seems to be shown and he he's got such a bored grin on his space. There is laughing with your mum, and he looks so happy.

They look incredibly happy.

They do.

And there the way they're looking at each other, it's just true love by the looks of it, you know, like it's just Yeah.

You can imagine when I was quite young and I got my hands on these photos, and it wasn't long after I found out that my stepfather wasn't my father.

I didn't know I had another.

Father out there, and I got my hands on these photos, and I I thought that, you know, I would find this.

Man out there that would be a father to me. They would love me.

And look after me and care for me, because they do look so incredibly in love. I never imagined for a second after seeing these photos there'd be someone out there who was more like a monster that I don't want to have anything to do with.

Wells looks like such a loving person. Yeah, so happy. She looks happy. And I've got these photos. I don't have the originals.

Mm.

The Gelgium Consulate actually had the originals of these and pave me photocopies of things. And these were their arrivals. Came to Australia. Her nine yeah, so they must be was eleventh of September sixty nine and hers eighteenth sixty nine September. The same month, and they've both referred to each other as each other's spouses.

Yeah, I'm there.

So sixty nine they were definitely married. But if we're talking so, she would have only been in her early twenties and then you know, maybe she met him about nineteen or yeah, something like that. But yeah, she's very young. Like that picture is just wow, and they really are of the era. Oh yeah, this one as well, So that's their wedding day. She looks beautiful. She's got this it's almost like a daisy dress. Yeah, a daisy dress.

How picky looks wedding day to her.

Yeah, it looks like a genuine marriage.

So she would have been pregnant with me when she traveled out here in September sixty nine if I was born January seventeenth.

Yeah, and then this one is of.

Yeah, that's my grandmother.

That's her second husband, Joseph Bireau okay, and that's my mother.

Okay. Joseph Birerou allegedly sexually assaulted Aloner as a teenager. When Evelyn's grandmother died, he married his stepdaughter's best friend. As mentioned earlier, not long after Alner's brother, Evelyn's uncle, Attila, also died.

I'm not one hundred percent certain because I haven't been able to find any relative that can really share any information with me about Attila.

But he somehow suspiciously.

I say suspiciously because it's suspicious to me that a healthy twenty four to twenty five year old young man just suddenly drops stead in the street from stroke. I thought, and had always been there to believe that it was nineteen seventy seven that they all died. But I'm not one hundred percent certain anymore that Attila didn't die maybe a couple of years after my grandmother and my mother.

Alexander Evelyn is referring to Alexandra Piriboom, who we planned to meet up with later in the day. Alexandra is the daughter in law of Guilaine danois another victim of Rick Blum, who alleges he stole seventy thousand euros from her in two thousand and six, after she answered a personal app in particularly, she also claims that Blum had a morbid fascination with poisons.

Said that she had found it may be him with a deceased state of nineteen eighty one. Okay, so, which would be making about twenty four to twenty five.

Akay, I think.

So we've got that situation we're not quite sure of. But then we've also got the situation that we want to resolve to try to find out what happened to your grandmother's estate because he was involved. Rick Blum was involved.

Yeah, somehow he was somehow involved.

Were you in communication with him at this time, you wouldn't have been with you. You didn't know about him, is that right.

We've got documents saying that he's made a private arrangement with a lawyer around nineteen seventy eight. I didn't find out that my stepfather wasn't my own natural father until I was around the age of fifteen or sixteen, So no, I had no idea to hear about him at all.

He just did this on his behalf, saying that you and Chris and Chris your brother were his, and he just made he just made applications.

Yeah, it is on that basis.

It appears as though he's done something I'm not clear what, but made some sort of a private arrangement in relation to what the documents say.

Are both his children.

Myself and my brother Chris in nineteen seventy eight, and it would be great to find out what those private arrangements were.

Well, that's what we partially while we're here, So we're going to do that and hopefully that Alexandra's help. Can you tell me about when you got in contact with him?

You reached out to him, right, I reached out to him. It was I think around in nineteen ninety four.

Ninety five, and they.

Belgium Consulate in Melbourne helped me to locate him under the name Frederick Uh.

They were familiar with who he.

Was because he was regularly getting his international on Belgium houseport updated with them for trouble, so they contacted him formed They just called him.

They just went straight into their files, called.

Him and asked him if he was agreeable to meeting me, and he said yes, and so they gave me a phone number and said that he was happy to hear from me.

So that's how it was set up. I called him. He said he was.

Going to be in Melbourne sometime soon, he'd let me know when, and then he came. I met him at the hotel and we went out for a for dinner. And that was my first meeting with him.

So what happened there, like what happened at the dinner? Do you remember anything or when you when you started to discuss ditch Eurasia Mom.

But yeah, we didn't. The first dinner, we didn't really talk too much about anything.

I was just so excited. I couldn't believe it. I'd found my father. So I was just giddy with excitement about that. We had dinner, had a briefcase with him, and he told me over dinner that it was full of cash because he just got back from overseas where he had sold coins. He told me he was a coin collect a dealer. I guess I was sort of excited about that too. Being a single mother at the time, I thought, oh, that's great, m he might.

Help me pay the electricity bill. But uh, that was that wash.

We just had a a nice dinner, smiling at each other a lot. I'd never had the experience before of looking at somebody else's face and being able to see some of the characteristics of my own face in their face. Obviously I didn't grow up with that cause I didn't have my mum there, and so that was like a first time experience for me when I met him.

Is that when he gave you this picture of your half brother and sister.

Not that day, no that, I think that might have been the next time that he came. So after that meeting, the memories are a bit clouded because it's so long ago, and I do want to have to say anything that's not accurate. But as I as I sort of as my recall is, I think he was going overseas again. He sounded like a big troubler and we had that dinner like it was just constantly back and forth and

So that's sort of what happened.

The next time he came to the house where I was renting in the Fountain Gate, and that's when he gave me the picture of his children born here in Australia and said to me, he's also got more family, got another brother.

And sister, and here they are beautiful picture. He was very proud of them.

He spoke very highly of them swimming in Commonwealth Games.

Were they were in the nationals. I don't know, has no idea they might have got for the Wealth Games, but they were definitely in the nationals. They were really good swimmers. Mite and David.

He was very proud. He talked about them a lot. He spent all of his spare time at the swimming pool. He personally coached his daughter into swimming. He was side by side with his kids all the way through this. He was very proud.

I was a little bit jealous.

He said that he and he said, I haven't told them about you. Yeah, I can't remember. Maybe his wife wasn't comfortable or something like that.

I'm sure you were a struggling single mom at this time, right. Did he say anything about your mom?

Well, yes, he told me he said terrible things about my mother. First of all, My main question for him was, you know, why didn't you come and find me.

Yeah, I mean I was sort of out here in the world on my own. He told me that.

He didn't know I existed, and that he didn't even know that my mother had died, and only when the consulate contacted him that that was the first time he had ever heard of me.

And ever knew that my mother had passed away.

Well that's a lie. We already know that right away, yes, straight away.

Yeah, Well, but I didn't know that straight away when he said that to me. I mean, I was obviously perplexed by the answer, but I was really young, and I was I was a victim of a lot of trauma, and I hadn't unpacked all that trauma when I was at that stage, so I didn't really have the the common sense or the ability to unpack the things that he said that made me feel uncomfortable, or to even necessarily question them further. Because I was so fearful of rejection.

But he said, s that's what he said to me.

I remember feeling perplexed by his answer, But then he went on to t to tell me that my mother was a slut. What justification did he have for saying that she wasn't she wasn't that good? She would go out to nightclubs, she enjoyed partying too often.

Really, she was just a slut. It just came. I don't, I don't.

I mean, it's not like we were having any conversation that I recall that would lead a person to say something like that. I was just a young woman wanting to know about his relationship with my mother, which I thought was a person that he loved, So it wasn't something I expected to hear. I didn't answer to him when he said that, but I remember thinking to myself, you know, how can you speak like that about somebody, my m my mother, your ex wife. How can you say those things about someone and.

She's not even alive to defend herself.

Like I remember thinking, I'm a pretty mixed up person, but even I wouldn't speak about somebody that's not there to defend themselves.

In that way. I thought it was really inappropriate.

You're being stopped deprecating. I've been through a lot, So tell me you did reach out to him for help, right, And what he said when you did that because she told him that you were struggling and that he couldn't you know you needed help financially?

Yeah, I actually I don't remember the question directly or his direct.

Response to it, but the conversation.

Went to I, I think you know he's he couldn't help me, was the answer that I got, but I don't remember how that got said to me at all. And then I moved on and asked him whether or not he knew anything about what had happened to my grandmother's estate, and he said that he was going to be going to Belgium against sometime soon.

He had a trip planned.

And that while he was there he he may know a relative or a friend of a relative of my mother's that he can get in contact with, and that he should be able to find something out for me, and then when he comes back he would let me know. And then when he returned he gave me the news. That's when I decided that I never wanted to expect

That's what he came back and said to me. So, yeah, he left, he left.

My house, and my boyfriend at the time came home and sort of found me sitting on the floor trying to trying to I couldn't. I couldn't actually repeat what had been said to me, like my brain was unable to accept that I had heard what I had just heard.

Just to clarify here, the Michael Evelyn is referring to is Michael read alone as widower and her stepfather.

After that incident, I never wanted to speak to him again. And then, you know, fast forward a decade or so later, and another boyfriend and who thought it'd been really good for you, you know, to get in contact with your dad.

This is your lawyer one.

The lawyer one, Yeah, it'd be really good for you. And I said, you know, without telling him all of the sort of the gory details of it. I did tell him, you know, I didn't want to have anything to do with him because he had said these terrible things to me and that he'd called my mother a slut. And my boyfriend at the time was just convinced that.

I was.

Maybe overdramatizing it, maybe even embellishing it a little bit, and that if I wanted to heal from my past, then I should go back there, reconnect with this man and try and form a relationship with him and give him a chance.

And it's not that I wanted to, It was just that I sort.

Of the irony is is that I ended up thinking, you know, he'll get off my back and it'll probably help my boyfriend if I just contact him, and then he can see what sort of a guy this person is, and then you know, we'll be done with this sort of ongoing.

Input. And so that's what I did.

Yeah, I don't remember whether I still had his phone number, whether I contacted the consulate and got an updated number. I don't remember how it all went down, but I found him, called him and he was really cold on the phone. And the thing is I decided never to speak to him again. But it's not like in that decade I overheard from him again either after he had

Yeah.

So he was cold on the telephone, and I said, I asked him. I said, oh, you know, like I haven't heard from you and it's been a long time. And he responded saying something like, why would I speak to you. I put ten thousand dollars in your bank account to help you, and you never even called me to say thank you.

Excuse me.

Then I'll be so you said, well, I didn't receive ten thousand dollars.

Yeah, and he said, well, I'm going to go to the bank and check what happened to that and find out from my end, because I definitely paid you ten thousand dollars. And then he called back and he said, oh, somehow there was a mistake and that the transaction had been lost, and now he was sort of a bit friendly towards me.

So straightway, it was a mistake.

It was just that I had the pressure of a partner at that time that really wanted me to just sort of, I guess, try to connect with him and to give him the benefit of the doubt, and so I was trying to do that, even though the very opening conversation was just a lie and an act and an untrue accusation. It was a lot of things. So we organized to meet. We definitely met three times. There may have been four, maybe even five times over the next few months.

I think it was after that phone call.

The last three times I met with him were the three times that I remember the most. He was at my home, my children were there. He met my children, and he and I were sitting on the couch chatting. He wanted to know the contact details of my stepfather and said that I should provide them to him so that he can rightfully seek revenge as my fathers.

As it's what a father should do. And I think I just exc I don't quite remember how.

I just excused myself to the bathroom or toilet or something the kitchen. I just said, oh, I don't really, I don't really, I don't really do that, something like that. And then he said, well, the least I can do for you, then is teach you how you can poison people so you can protect yourself if anyone tries to hurt you. And so then he went through a I guess a procedure for poisoning people. I'm not comfortable repeating it, but I remember it the.

The details of it vividly.

It's etched in like in Hindi when they say a sam scar, it's like a scar on your psyche. I can remember every single word of that procedure. And what he said was that if I was ever in need of doing that, that the person would develop flu like symptoms, maybe a cold, and then within a week or two they would be dead, and that they would be a trace of what had been done to them.

Pause for just a moment. Here in the paper trayal of documents that we have access to that are connected to Ilona Kinzil's death, there is a note that Elona had attended a doctor Zigo just six days before her death because of her tonsils. Whether that's referring to tonsilitis or a sore throat, we're not sure. Anyway, back to Evelyn and what she was told about poisons by Rick Bloom.

It was obviously through food, a mechanism for turning food into poison.

He seemed quite proud, boastful even that he used to bury.

People alive when he was growing up. That one of the things that he liked to do in the village. Him and some of his friends. Someone had harmed one of the girls in the village, so they got the guy and they buried him alone with hungry cats. And that this is, you know, how they used to take care of the people.

Just to clarify, Evelyn is not saying any of this actually happened, just that Bloom told her these stories and that she felt he was trying to scare her.

Yeah, I was pretty scared.

I'd had a pretty colorful life myself and had managed to always surround myself with some pretty dubos characters, and I was very conscious of never hearing anything that I thought would put me in danger or seeing anything that I thought would put me in danger. I always had that self protective sort of street wise. I grew up on the streets. I was thirteen on the streets, so

But I was unsure whether they were real or whether he was.

Just trying to brag and that was his way of impressing me or impressing people.

I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell whether he was real or not real with what he was saying. But yeah, I was scared.

Is that when when he told you, you know, when you were talking about you know, basically, are you going to help me or not?

Right?

Is that sort of around that time?

Or no, are you gonna help me?

That was the first the first time I met him. I never went back to that conversation the second time I met him, after that meeting.

At my house. I mean, he told me so many things.

It's hard to recall all of them because it's just a it's a matter of when I hear things about him, then sometimes I think back and I think, oh, that's irrelevant to this thing that he said. Like I heard that he's told one woman that he he was sort of buried in some pit and torture it, and I thought that's interesting. I I heard something similar, only he used to do that to people.

In the version he gave.

Me, he told me that he he was a survivor at five years old, that he lost his mother and father and brothers and sisters all in Oswitch that he was Jewish but didn't believe in God anymore, cause you know, how could God do that to his family. I raised my children with his story, and you know, the whole identity is wrapped up in this idea that we are sort of generationally from victims of a Holocaust, and it's probably not even true. In fact, it's I don't think

Life on life.

How do you ever get to the bottom of any of it to find out if there's truth there? But the second time around when we met, there was that third visit that was that was the po the poisoning ones. And then the next visit was he contacted me and said he was going to be in town and asked me to meet him in the city, and so I I did that.

I went to meet him. He said that he had a proposition for me. He pre warned me that he had a a proposition.

So.

I was pretty scared. I didn't know because I'd had this one meeting.

He was telling me about burying people alive and how to poison people, and then I had the this next meeting with a proposition. So I went to this meeting.

This is where we.

Were in a cafe and he was started to explain to me that in a very philosophical sort of a a framework that in in life we don't have a lot of options and nu if you n if you don't have creativity, which he said.

Clearly I don't.

Therefore I can't produce anything from my mind to be self supporting as a single mum. That then the only other way was to sell my body.

Pausing again, Rick Bloom is telling his daughter her only option here is to prostitute herself. Then he suggests another option.

He had an idea for me that might help, and it involved drawing up contracts regarding life insurance policies that would be effective on people in another country, and that I didn't need to worry about what was going to happen to the people. That was going to be something that he was going to take care of. He needed the contact details of my partner at the time because he was a barrister and he wanted help to draw

But you put him into I was I d I did not put him in contact with my partner.

No, m This was just a more terrifying experience, and the one than the last meeting when he was explaining to me how to poison people. This was to me it had just gone, you know, dialed up a notch. And I was scared cause I I didn't know what that meant, what he was saying to me. It could have it could be stitched together to be something absolutely diabolical, which I'm starting to think it.

Might have been, probably not starting pick me.

But I've always wondered whether it is as bad as the worst possible way he could imagine something like that, or whether or not I was just hearing things, whether he was trying to say something to me that was normal but that I couldn't understand it, and I was turning into something in my own imagination that it wasn't. I just it's so unbelievable to think that someone could save something like that, and that it was as bad as it sounded. So I was so unable to process that.

I barely made it to the car. I got a.

Really sharp pain in my head and I started vomiting, and I don't know how I drove home. I had the worst migraine. I couldn't get out of bed for a day or so. I was unable to mentally unpack what had been said to me. I didn't know whether I was just had lost my mind, whether I.

Was just loose completely. So that was that was the problem.

And then there was the last meeting, and that's where he rang and said that he was coming to visit and he'd come for dinner again. He had a present for me, which I didn't like the sound off, and he asked me to pick him up from the airport drop him he had some business to attend.

To drop him.

Somewhere nearby, and then he'd catch a taxi back to my house for dinner. So then I went to the airport picked him up. He opened the boot of the car, pulled out a bottle of Bolinger.

And said to me to take up I said, oh no, no, that's okay.

I just I'll wait for you to come back, and he said, no, I know, take it, take it, take it home, put it on ice, and just wait for me. Do you drop me off and then I'll be back for dinner and we'll drink it together.

And so.

I drove him to I wish I remember where it was. It was around q Hawthorne that area. He got out of the car. He he was bragging, he was someone was giving him forty or fifty thousand dollars and all they had was a telephone number that he could just change. They'll never be able to find him. He jumped out of the car. I went home, put the champagne in the fridge, s set the table, sat there, waited, waited, and I never heard from him again.

That was the last time.

So and I did try and call a few days later, not because I uh, because I wanted to speak to him, but just because I was just I thought that I was losing my mind. That's what I thought this was happening at the time. I s I thought, I am literally I am losing my mind, like I think that, you know, l My intuition is that there's been a an a you know, an attempt on my life.

Mate. That's my intuition because of the shampagne. That's because of the champagne.

It was, there were little holes in the foil. But it was the combination of everything. Him telling me how to poison people, him bragging about how he had killed people, buried them alive, him trying to involve me in some scam that sounded like.

It involved deceiving people.

More than it sounded, you know.

It was it was a scam that involved life insurance policies, and he said he was going to take care of the people.

So I didn't know what that meant.

Yeah, ba see Yeah, So it was a combination of all those things. I thought I was losing my mind, I thought, And I thought that's what the bottle of champagne was.

I thought it was poison. So I tried to.

Call him a few days later because I was trying to really just ascertain for myself how crazy I was, and he his mobile had been cut off.

And is that when you rang his home and got Diane or was that another time?

Oh?

No, Diana.

That was the first round of meetings the decades before, when I was sitting in Nari Warren.

Mm.

Yeah, because he he had said that he was gonna come back to visit after he got back from overseas, and months and months went past.

I hadn't heard, and he had.

He'd I don't know why he'd given me the home number, and so I called the home number and she answered, and I said, I asked for him. She said he wasn't there, and I said, oh, he you know, he said he was gonna help me with some things. And you know it's Evelyn, his daughter, because he had told me that she he had told her just they decided not to tell the children.

I think it was. Yeah.

So anyway, she just said, oh sure you are or oh sure he did something like that and hung up on me. It was very, very cold, so that was pretty much. That's pretty much it.

Evelyn later took the bottle of champagne to her local police station, explaining her suspicions. We'll come back to this in a later episode. There is so much here to unpack. To start with, Evelyn claims her father outlined a very specific method of fatally poisoning people. She rightly doesn't want to outline in detail what he said, as she nor

So there is a debt of four million francs of debt to the to the States, access to the four millions.

If you knew Marion or have any information about her or her whereabouts, we'd love to hear from you. Our website is sevennews dot com dot au slash news slash the Lady Vanishers, and you can also message us here. You can also send us an anonymous tip at the Lady Vanishes dot org. If you like what you're hearing, don't forget to subscribe. Please rate and review our series.