Appoge Production. Well, welcome to episode two of The Missing Matter. Ar'm here with Joony. Hello everybody, Thank you for joining us again. Yeah, thanks for joining us. And in this episode, we're actually going to do a bit of a deep dive into the drama that was my life following the findings concluding in February last year. And if I think back to that time, I literally felt like I was standing on an island by myself and I know you were there, and I know Chris was there, and there
were beautiful people around me. That's nothing to do with you, guys. It was just my inner self. Felt like. I spoke to the lawyers, that was the last time I spoke to them. I spoke to the Crown Solicitor's office. They all gave me a big hug and wished me well, and that was it. Allison and Brian did their interview and left. It just doesn't stop just because we got an answer today from the coroner and I was like, oh my god, I'm standing here by myself. I don't
have any idea what to do moving forward. There is no guidebook here, so the coroner hands down her findings. Coroner's just told me officially my mum's deceased, says what she thinks should happen.
Recommending it now be referred to homicide detectives.
That's it. You sort of left to sort of fumble your way through and work out what's actually happened.
She'd been dating a man named Rick Bloom, who lied about his identity. She found Bloom preyed on vulnerable women and withheld crucial information about Marian from the inquest.
I haven't even had an apology, if I can put it, put it out there, you know, I still haven't from the police, had any apology for how I've been treated. In my case, I heard that my mum would deceased for the first time in twenty seven years of her
being missing, and that was massive for me. It was a huge moment in time, and by having that said by the coroner that allowed me to apply for a death certificate, which when you have a missing person, if you don't have a death certificate or they don't believe that your person is deceased, well you've got no chance of getting any information because their privacy matters. I kept getting told a comment that really rolled me a lot through. This whole thing is it's not a crime to go missing.
And I think about all the people who have gone missing and then found, and the time that the police spend trying to find and there's yellow alerts and there's police fluffing around. It takes time and energy and money
to do these things. So essentially having a death certificate was a really important part of this journey for you and me when we were discussing what still needed to be done, Because what people who are listening won't know is that you and I were sitting in the court and we were feeding the lawyers all the information that
we had. We'd spoken to people, we've interviewed people, We've got all the details, and we had to do that because the police weren't doing it and we were writing dossier's Like Johnny Gosh, by the time we'd finished, we probably had a law degree. Seriously, you know, I've learned so much in this time, in this space, But you get to that point, or I got to that point where I walked out of the coroner's court and went right, oh,
what do I do now? My first point of call was to call burst Essa Marriages and ask them to help me to get a death certificate. For my mum so we could start accessing her private information. So I called Queensland and they said, well, we're really sorry, we can't help you. You've got to do it online and I said, yeah, but your online document doesn't allow me
to put two names. And I have a problem where my mum changed her name, but she only changed her name legally on her passport and she had an international driver's license in the new name of Florabella Ramkel. Everything else remained in the name of Barta, her bank accounts, her superannuation, her medicare, anything that I wanted to try and gain access to to find out her tax return. In the taxi ba Ato, everyone knew her as Marian Barter,
so it was essential. And I kept saying this and barking about it at the inquest, and that's why the coroner kept saying Flora Bella Natalia Marian Ramkeel, formerly known as Marian Barter. So I was banging my head against the wall. I was in tears a lot of the time because none of these people showed any compassion or empathy or understanding about what it was that I was trying to ask. Goodness, I don't even know where to
start with this week. Seriously, you know, when you're dealing with a missing person, that is horrendous to sit there. I'm going, I don't know where my mum is, I don't have a funeral director, i don't know what day she died. I've got a date from the coroner who's saying she died on or around the fifteenth of October, so I'm assuming that's the date you want. And that
wasn't satisfactory. So nothing was working. So then I rang the coroner's court and for some weird instance of craziness, I find out that Coroner Teresa o Sullivan actually has her own dedicated team of people, and I'm like, wow. So I've just been through the coroner's process for three years and I never knew that I could contact Terresa O'Sullivan's team. I always had to go through it through
the right channels, is what I was told. So that meant I had to go through my lawyers, to go through their lawyers being Crown solicitors, to go through the police. If I had something for the police, the police would tell me, you have to go through the right channel.
Sally can't tell us anything anymore. It's got to go through your lawyers to Crown solicitors to get to us, and I was just like, this is so convoluted and ridiculous and time wasting, like we do not have time for this, especially after waiting that long to actually even get to the point of having an inquest right. So I was speaking to the Coroner's court. I end up emailing him back and forth and he's like, I'm really sorry,
I can't help you. My question to him was I need the coroner to put in writing for me some sort of document so that I can go to Burst Desca Marriages and get a death certificate for my mum
because at this point no one's giving me one. And I didn't know whether to go to Queensland because that's where she was last living as we changed her name and she changed her name in Queensland, or did I have to go to New South Wales because it was with the New South Wales Coroner's Court she said that she's deceased and she was last known to be in Byron with drawing eighty thousand dollars out of a bank account, supposedly on the fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, and
her last digital footprints were in New South Wales, so very confusing. And again someone should have sat there and said to me, this is the process, now, this is what we need to do, will help you. But I didn't get any of that, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in these circumstances. After hitting brick walls with them again, I just had a bit of a
light bulb moment. And you know, there's that saying in life, it's not what you know, it's too you know, right, And this is definitely definitely the point in toe because while I was sitting into in the findings, so we've just walked in, We're sitting down therese people everywhere, media everywhere, and I'm flustered. I'm like, wow, I'm overwhelmed, super grateful for the support by everyone, but overwhelmed at the same time.
And a lady who i'll keep her name confidential, but she did come up to me and she said hello, Sally, and I went, oh, my gosh, how are you. And this lady had welcomed me to come to the coroner's court back in twenty nineteen, and I met with her and another lady from friends and family of missing persons so that was the first I'd ever heard that there was actually this little body of good humans who actually
were supporting people with missing persons. And she'd done a document and a booklet to help people get through the coronial process. And so I had met her back at that point, and she was a very kind lady. She gave me information, she answered my emails, which was a very rare thing for me. So I was like, oh my god, I finally found somebody who actually does listen and does actually respond positively, which was great. So I just had this moment in my head, maybe I should
ring her. I still had her number, and I did, and I explained the situation to her, and I said, I need some help. I need the coroner's court to be able to give birth, dess and marriage as a clear understanding of what is going on in this space. That I can have both mum's names put on her death certificate. It's essential for this. Why did you need to have that happen? Well, because I needed to have access to I mentioned before, like Medicare and ATO and
her bank accounts and her superannuation. They're all in marrying Barta. But essentially we were wanting to go overseas and we needed to get information about my mum and her passport was in the name of Florabella Ramckel, so I needed to be able to prove that I was next to kin and I had grant of access to Florabella Ramckel and also Marian Barter, so that's why it was really important. And then we are on the phone. I'm explaining this
to her. She's completely understanding what I'm saying, and she says, I can see that that is really important. I know someone I'm going to send them corners findings and that will be clear to them. And then I had a phone call from a gentleman who worked in New South Wales birth deaths and marriages, and I just felt like he was an angel for me, because again a rare moment where someone actually comes in and just sits down and takes time to actually help me do what I
need to do. And he sat on the phone with me for probably the best part of two hours, and he explained to me, I want you to fill it out your end, and I'm going to fill it out my end as well. And so we were word perfect going through the entire document and he said I want you to word it exactly like this, so it was worded such as surname ramakerl formally known as Bart. Given name Flora Bella, formerly known as Marian. Middle names you know,
Natalia Mary and formally known as Marian. So we had to make sure that his document and my document areligned. And thank god I had him because at the end of the day, there was questions in there about what date did and this was for all, like my mum was married three times and this caused a big drama and a big stir because the police would often say comments like, oh, well, she's a three times divorced woman who's in her fifties. She's capable of this behavior, not
her fault. You know, no one should make judgment on those sorts of things. But it has caused me quite the drama because she's had multiple names, and I had to know the day they all got married, So every single wedding, I had to know what each of the men's full names were. Yes, so I needed to know what Johnny Warren's middle name is, how old he was when they got married, what is his date of birth, what year did they get married, and where where was
the location? As they got married. I'm like, I don't know any of this. So he was able to pull up mum's file from their end and actually add it into the mix. And I was like, thank God, Like I would just be absolutely stuck if you had not been able to help me with that. So he was a godsend. And he's like, you just have to pay for it and you'll get the desert to figot like it's going to come as per this. And he was an age, so I was really grateful and that was awesome.
Because ultimately, if he hadn't have helped you, then you would have had to have requested all of those documents from birth, deaths and marriages to be able to then put the information into your form to then send it in. So that would have been a delay and lots of money, and whether you would have got them or not is another question altogether.
And this is how ridiculous it is. Right. So, and this is another drama because my mum went missing before I got married. So my name is Barta because I took on Ray Barta's name when I was only twelve. They thought that was a good idea because we'd relocated. I was starting a new school, so I was known as Sally Barter, and Mum had written her will and
I was known as Sally Barter in the will. So that meant that when I'm applying for these documents and I'm now Sally Layden, I then had to go and get an official marriage certificate, which we paid for to be able to show that I was Bart and now I'm Leyden. So it just never ended. It was just this big starter's web of crazy that I was getting stuck in, and I'm like, I don't know, I've got to pay for this. I've got to pay for that. I've got to jump through this hoop and jump through
that hoop. And this just continued for months. So I've gone to the post office and there's a registered male waiting for me at the post office and I get in it and I'm sitting in the car and I open it and I had to share it with everyone immediately and post about it and say, oh my god, I got it. And it's in both names. Massive, It's actually good. The spelling's correct, her date of birth is correct.
Like all the things that we've had challenges with throughout the whole journey, highlight it doesn't need to come out. Goodness me. I'll read you with the post, just to bring us all back to where I was and how I was feeling in that moment. So it was the tenth of April twenty twenty four. I just posted a photo of the death certificate that shows the family name. It says deceased. It says family name Ramichel formerly known
as Barta Flora Bella Natalia. Marian formerly known as Marian Sometime on or around the fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven is her date of death. Her place of death unable to determine sex and age female fifty two. Place of birth Marrickville, New South Wales. I write from my missing person Marian Barter Instagram and Facebook. I want to share with you all I finally received Mum's death certificate dot dot dot. As always, there's a story to tell.
I am sure you'll all feel so relieved to see both names have been included. This did not come without a fight. So I now have the death certificate in both names and the will another bittersweet day but very important. I found the solicitor you did. How that came about was I did a walk around on the Gold Coast, if you remember, that's right. And I just had it in me that I needed to find the a state agent.
So we had that lady actually up in cans who Yes, that's how we found this because she actually did the property search and she was able to tell us that the name of the person who bought Mum's house yes, And then from that the girls Le Sluthy Girls actually then found a whole bunch of people with that same name who still lived on the Gold Coast. And miraculously, the first person I called was the guy who bought
Mum's house. I then sort of went through the process of him trying to work out where the real estate agent was that he had the house from, because I had always said that maybe Mum had explained to the real estate agent what she was doing, and she had actually kept all the records in her garage. She just sold the business and the guys who when I worked out where it was, so he couldn't remember where it was.
I sort of just went and did a walk around and asked the question and they said, yes, we've just bought it from Partner Royalty, and they said, let me ring Louise because she said that she's got a whole bunch of all her documents from all the houses she's sold in the years. So she gave me those documents and I was able to see on there that there was a document that had the solicitor's name on it, and so I rang them and when I spoke to him, he said, oh, I've heard about your mom's story in
the news. I knew your mum. She taught my son at TSS. And so he said, when my secretary comes back, I'll get her to have a look and i'll get her to ring you if we have anything. I don't remember having anything, but if we do, And he literally rang me back in a minute and said, oh my god, I've just had a look and we have her will, which is weird because we don't even do wills. But he was unable to give me that well without a
de certificate. So even though my mum is missing, my brother is deceased, and he is the only other person on the will, he was still unable to He told me about it, but he didn't actually give me the original copy until such time as I had the destiny. So you know, you got to go through these processes, right, So and if you hadn't have done all of that and all the circles and looping looping, then we would have been looking at the will that she made down in New South Wales.
So this was a new will that you happened to discover with all of your So there's been so many instances of that kind of thing over the years.
And the will didn't even matter really because the house that she sold was in the will. I was executor of the will to what to nothing. Everything's missing or
stolen or gone sold. So there was literally nothing in the will except to show that she had nominated me as executor, and you know I was her next of kin, so that did give me somewhare power to be able to go and get these documents and you know that had nearly a thousand people like it and comment on it and just showing the power of actually pushing forward and still getting and garnering something that I really really needed.
So from there we did some live shows, right, and that was just my mind, like that is that is an amazing time in life. I just was shocked and blown away by those shows.
From Salad Jone where they are at and about their plans. Really bored now the inquest has concluded and the search continues.
Buying Marry now there do please welcome. Sal was a good energy from there. We did a raffle and I was a bit crazy on the raffle because I love doing things like that and I love people winning things and prizes, and it was just a good fundraiser for us as part of the live events. And there were two ladies who won gifts and I emailed them and then they came back to me with an email, and some of them I spoke to and one of the ladies said to me, you've actually emailed myself and one
of my friends. We both came to the show in Brisbane and we've both won a prize and I said, oh amazing. Would you like me to hand deliver it to you? And they agreed and said yeah, let's meet for coffee. So we met for coffee down at the gas works here in Brisbane and I'm in my very casual shorts and T shirt and they rocked up in suits and I went, holy, okay, this is very official. And then they said, oh, let us buy you a coffee and so we just sat there having a chat.
And turns out that their lawyers, and they said to me, we've spoken to our boss and we've asked can we help you to get your grant of probate? And I went, oh, my god, I feel so blessed that there are such nice people in this world, because when I've just gone through all of that, to have someone in power and who knows what they're doing and the knowledge that I just don't have, and even just to take a little bit of energy from my self and give it to somebody else to be able to go, you can take
that on a little bit for me. Amazing. So once again, good humans coming out in every form. So I worked with those beautiful humans for a couple of months and we sorted out getting the grant of probate done. And then the most shocking thing that I was so shocked about for me personally and quite devastated, was that the Supreme Court demands that you actually give them the death certificate for them to be able to process the grant
of probate. So I've physically just got this piece of paper that I have been eager to get so I can access information about my mum. And then they're like, we need to give them the original so then I had to run off and go and get them all certified and make sure I had copies of everything. Right, So I've got them all certified and I hand over that precious document, said, here you go, he's the de certificate that I just worked really hard to get. You
can have the original. I now don't have a copy of the destinicate, but I did get the grant of probate certificate from the Supreme Court. So on the second of August twenty twenty four is the day that I received the grant of probate. And for those of you who haven't connected that dot Mum actually flew back into Australia on the second of August nineteen ninety seven. But a granted probate is really important because it opens the doors.
So it actually makes me the next of kin with my missing mother who's been declared de ceased by the coroner. Gives me access to her information for things like I can go and act on her behalf with the ATO, I can go and act on her behalf for Medicare.
And the information that we wanted to get from those sources and from those entities is important because it could have led us down a path to having knowledge and information about what she did, where she was, what was happening, her location addresses and things like that, which is what we were hoping to get from those certificates. And also it does enable you to access a lot of the Commonwealth base information that even the New South Wales Police can't access. Yeah, that's right.
So it really did unlock a bit of a key, and that's why you really wanted it to happen.
And you think about things like when I found out about mum's name change. If you go back and listen to the last episode, you would have heard me say and I saw her name for a bleeping second. I saw it probably for two minutes. And I was spelling it phonetically for years. Even on my Facebook page, I'm spelling it as Ramckel, not Reemckel. I was spelling it with an A, not an E. So we got to a point we'd started the podcast The Lady Vanishes, and we were going along and I'd met you, and then
I learned about archives. I didn't know that that was a big thing and we could ring them and converse with them, and so I rang Queensland Archives and I said, Hi, there, my mum is a missing person and she changed her name to this name, Ramckeurl. I'm just wondering if you can help me with the correct spelling. I just want to make I've got the spelling right. And she said to me, I'm really sorry, we can't give you that
information due to privacy. And I said, okay, well, in the event that my mum is declared deceased, does that then void the privacy issue. She goes, no, it doesn't. There's one hundred year long on that and I'll never ever get it. I said, also, my kids won't even
be able to find out how this actual spelling. And just to clarify, this is before we were going to the coroner's court, so the coroner hadn't said that she was going to do a findings at this point, so I'm really just grappling at any bit of information I can get. And I rang back later on a different day, probably months later, and in instead of saying my mum was missing, I just said, Hi, my mum changed her name in nineteen ninety seven and I'm just trying to
get the correct spelling. Would you be able to help me? And the lady told me every big date she did it, what the spelling is, how she did it? I was like, well, okay, interesting. So if I say she's a missing person, there's a big block on that and no one wants to tell me anything. But if I just simply asked the question, hey, my mum changed her name, can you tell me what
the spelling is? Openslaver get told the whole sabang. So I found things like that to be quite unbelievable in the missing space, and why would you make it more difficult for somebody who's already going through such a difficult process, Like they just make it more difficult by doing those sorts of things. And I think people need to really listen to that and make changes and make that process easier and better. So this same problem came with the
deed Pole documents. So my mum changed her name to Florabella and Natalia Marry Ramckel on the fifteenth of May nineteen ninety seven. And for years I was trying to get the actual document because we had a lot of people, didn't we Journey, who were saying, you need to put on that document why you're changing your name, and there needs to be a witness on that document. So who was the witness and what reason did your mum give to changing her name? So that was important and we
needed to get those depot documents mainly for that. That was the reason I needed to get it. So I was in contact with the Supreme Court for years, and every time i'd put in a request for that document, I got told no, and then I'd have to give reasons as to why I wanted the document and they still said no. This went on and on and on. I finally found a lady who actually was quite lovely and helping me and emailing me and discussing with me, and she's like, look, send me the documents. I'll see
what I can do. I said, I've got to this point where we've gone to the findings the coroner is like, I knew what the coroner was going to say because I was privy to that information from what the Crowns listeners were telling my lawyers and legal team. So I'd given her that information and she said, I still can't give it to you until each such time as you've got a death certificate, and then it has to be assessed whether we'll still give it to you. So it
was just a big drama. I'm like, I just want to get the document of her changing her name. So anyway, I did get a document in the brief of evidence because the coroner had requested it from the Supreme Court in Brisbane and they handed it over. But the document
has information there, but not everything. I Actually what I was asking them for, which I thought I would require to go with the dea certificate and the grant of probate, was the physical name change certificate, so like a birth certificate or a marriage certificate showing that this person has legally changed her name to this, because I thought that would correlate and all fit together like the jigsaw puzzle.
Yeah, and basically the file as well. Like I remember at the time, we were thinking if there was anything sitting behind that that hadn't been submitted to the currner's court, there could be little morsees of information there that might be helpful, such as the reason for the name change, which I didn't see within the brief of evidence itself.
So we were still chewing it. That mak showing Okay, let's go. So I go to this lay all in email and she's like, Okay, send me everything you've got now, so I need the death certificate, I need granted probate blah blah blah blah blah, and we'll process it and see, but I'll need originals. I went, okay, I'll bring them to you. Okay, So I'm out Supreme Court. Today is Wednesday, the thirteenth of November, and I've just gone and spoken to the lady who's been helping me trying to get
access for mum. So they've been declined multiple times, and I spoke to her. I rang her and spoke to her last week or actually might have even been was that was last week? I rang and said I was coming into the city. Lo and behold, they approve it. And they say, oh, we've good news. We've approved it. We can give you the documents and you just need to pay this fee and we'll send it to you. And I said, that's amazing. I'll pay the fee right now, so i'd send it back. I said, I have paid,
thank you very much. Can you email it to me because I would like it in email form, but i'd also like it in hard copy. So she goes, no problem at all, I'd email it to you. And guess what it was? Exactly what was in the ruth of evidence. So I just paid for a document and was put through the absolute ringer to get exactly what that was given to the coroner. So null and void didn't tell us anything. We were kind of hoping to have someone's
name on there. That would have been a really important part of the search, but no. And it's so exhausting, seriously to hear the yeses and the nose, and then the yeses and the nose, and then you think you get a win, and then you just get the door slammed in your face because it's actually not what you needed anyway, and it's cost you money and time of doing it. So it seems to be just be like a common denominator.
It's very much round peg in the square hole situation. Because of all the multiple and the complexities around it. I think some people just put it in the two hard basket because you know, from a process point of view, everything needs to tick, so you can't have a single cross on any of those elements or else it gets rejected.
So it's a bureaucratic thing, and I think that things need to change so that there's more ability, because as you hear there sales having to really, which is one thing that I greatly admire about you is that you are an absolute networker till the cows come home.
So you call on people that.
Show any kind of kindness or the ability to be flexible or stretch or move to be able to try to get.
Done what you need to get done. And it really shouldn't be that way. Yeah, I shouldn't have to call on people, I don't think. But people are generally happy to help to which has been amazing and I've said it a million times. I wouldn't have been able to do any of this without the help of the general public and the media too, you know, who have been helpful.
If we stepped to the next phase of this moment in time, for me, I am at a position where I know that there's money sitting in my mum's superannuation account.
There's not a lot of money sitting there. Just to clarify, because one of the things, if you remember from the Bonus episode about where We're at, I talked about how I was making suggestions to Gary Sheen of all these other things that we should be looking at, and one of them was had she touched her super and he had told me her super was untouched, so I had no idea, Like I've never had been privy to the information. I don't know how much money my mum had in
her superannuation. I managed to find going through my dad's things one time. I was going through a bunch of letters and stuff at his house and I found a letter that was actually written to mum from the Department of Education in New South Wales when she was pregnant with me. I was born in nineteen seventy three, and it talks about her going on maternity leave and her superannuation being so all I had to go on was like, well, she's been getting super since nineteen seventy two, so let's
look at that. I don't know what that means. And once we got the brief of evidence, it showed us because they actually had got that information and showed us that she actually withdrew all her SUPER when she moved from New South Wales to Queensland to go and work at TSS. And I'm still a bit baffled by that today as to how you could actually do that. Even when I spoke to the ATO, they're like, I don't know how she did that. How did she actually manage
to do it. So whether it was because she was single and she was trying to buy a house up in Queensland and we use the money to buy the house because we know for a file she was still holding the house in New South, that's all right, So she still had a house in Jerringong for a whole twelve months for sale. Yeah, so she had that house and bought the house at Marinda Court. So that also tells us how much money she sort of had in
the mix as well, doesn't it. Because I never asked my mom how much money she had, Like I knew we were okay, but I never really we didn't discuss it. So that was important in getting the information from the ATO as to what her superannuation was looking like. And I knew that there was an amount in there wasn't a big amount you can probably imagine. So I'm going to tell you all in nineteen ninety four, when she started at TSS, she put five hundred dollars fresh into
that account she's missing three years later. Yeah, okay, So that gives you an idea of how much super it was going to be.
Two hundred and fifty dollars and then she upped it to five hundreds, so she doubled the amount yeap to go into her super with TARSS.
So she had the two houses she had Marinda Court, and then she also had Croft Place in Durangong and then she sold Croft Place, so she would have had an injection of money there, but that didn't go into her super. So I had to jump through huge hoops to access the small portion of money from mum Super. And oh my god, I thought I was going to have a complete melt down at this point, because this started in August, the Taxation Department didn't actually pay it
out until December. And I don't know if you want to think about that for a second, but that's just an ongoing trauma of me sitting on the phone for sometimes up to two and a half hours for them to put me through to the next person. For them to put me through to the next person, I've got to explain the whole rigmarole about her having one name
and the other name. And I can tell you that while we were in Luxembourg, Chris actually got the letter in the mail and he said that they have completely ignored the whole fact that her name was Marian barter and said, we've done all these checks under Florabella Ramckel, and it just listed off, like I think there's ten or so things that they've listed off that Florabella and Italia Marian Ramickel has not done a tax return in the last three years. I'm like, no shit, she's actually
a missing person. She's been missing for twenty seven years and you're not reading. Like every time I do this, I have to do a full on document which actually shows everybody exactly what's happening in this space. Because it is hard, it's convoluted, it's confusing, and I try to make it as clear as I possibly can for these people so that they have an understanding and there's no question.
But just remember too, that whole counterbalance between us seeing basically half of one of the volumes of the brief was all of these letters coming from the superannuation which had care of Leslie Loveday in it. So basically they had sent her things the same with the bank every six months.
There was all these letters that were produced.
Remember, and then you're in Luxembourg and we get the correspondence saying no superannuation located for this person, and it's just crazy because you actually see that there is superannuation there. If they had have talked to each other, then it would have been sorted and done. Quickers that we're.
Back and forth with then paid the accountant and they started looking into it and they're like, oh, no, they have found the money. Confirmed that they found the money, but then they couldn't access it. I had to go back and do it myself and sit on the phone again, and I was in tears in some of those phone calls and absolutely losing my mind that they were not listening to me. And it's like their robots. They just don't show any compassion or understanding of what I'm trying
to explain to them. And I was like, I could care less about the money. I want to finalize her life. She has been declared deceased. This is important part from my family that we just go through the process when someone passes away. You close their bank accounts, you sell their car, you do the things that you need to do to finalize them as a person. And I felt like it was a rite of passage for me to go, Okay, we've got through this stage and now I can actually
go Okay, we're going to do all these things. She had money sitting in her bank account as well, right, so I had to jumps through a million hoops with the Commonwealth Bank. They were probably the best out of all of them, but I had to fill in forms and documents and show them the death certificate, show them the grand a probate. So this is why they were all important documents. But they don't even give you the courtesy of giving you a letter to say, hey, we're
paying it out. Money just showed up in my bank account and it was a couple of grand and so the next hoop for me to jump through was I speak to the ATO and I got onto a guy and he says, I'm going to have to call you back. And I said, you are going to have to swear on my children's lives that you are going to call me back, because I've just sat on this call for another two hours and I've been bumped from one person to the next. He said, there's just something on here
that doesn't look right. I'm going to have to call you back, and I promise you I will ring you back, and thank goodness he did. He rang me back and he said, I'm going to apologize to you because there has been an error our end. I went, well, surprise sally laden as an error or there's a problem, But thank you for acknowledging that. And I said, I really hope that you explained to the person who made the error how diabolic all this has been for me, and
that I've been fighting for this since August. It's now December. This is already hard and it's already trauma. I should not have to sit here and just be put through more pain and more stress and more time and anxiousness to go through to get something that is rightfully made available to me like it did to everybody else, Like I've had multiple people who have passed away in the same time as my mum was granted as deceased. They're will gone through all the processes of closing up everything
and finishing without any hassle. But because my mum's missing, I have to jump through a million hoops to get a decertificate to get granted probate to then have access to her files. And the kicker here was that I said, how will you pay out the superinnuation? And he said, I will send you a check. So I said, well, my bank doesn't actually accept check. So is there any other way we can do it? No, that's the only way we can do it. So that afternoon I decide to go to the A and Z. Okay, folks, this
is just getting wildly ridiculous. I am seriously about to lose my mind. I've just had a phone call from the A and Z bank who informed me that when they would when the girl was doing up the application for an account to be a beneficiary for my mum's state so that when the ATO finally send me a check for mum's superannuation, I can bank it into that account. When she did it, I said to her, you do need to put both names. She goes, well, I'm going to put Marion Barter because that's the name of the
checks going to be. And I said, well, that's correct, but you'll probably need to put both names because she's officially Florabella Ramichel, formerly known as Marion Barta, which is on her de certificate, which is on the grant of probate. She only put Marrion bar We just thought we'd see how we go. She's come back to me saying, oh, well they've declined it, and saying, well, she's a formerly known as Flora Bella, Natalia Marian Ramckel, not Marian Barter.
And I said, well, yes, that's why I explained to you that you'd have to put both names on the application, because I thought that would be the case. And she goes, oh, well, we can't put both names. We can only put one name. And I said, well, I've had to go through a million hoops and fight tooth and nail to have mums both mums' names put on My god, I can't believe this is happening. I just seriously cannot believe that this
is still happening. The whole name changed thing is the biggest, absolute, biggest debarkle of my entire life. Anyway, you can hear the frustration in my voice. I'm just so tired of this. I am absolutely exhausted. So then she tells me that at the next problem is that the granted probate that I just paid for through the lawyers to do this granted probate has since expired because they're only valid for ninety days. I said, how can it be expired? Only
just got it in August. She goes, oh, they only have a ninety day period. I said, I only applied to the ATO after I got granted broke probate, which was on the sixth of August, and it's taken them till December to pay me the damn checks. Like I have to fight every way, every single pathway I go, and she goes, well, I'm really sorry, but that's what they're telling me. Also, your passport and everything that you've
sent through has expired. I'm like, that is just not true, Like I have I have the documents anyway, So that's the next thing. And then she said to me, I need to ask you who Owen Clifford Brown is. I said, oh, Clifford Brown's my deceased brother I told you about. She goes, okay, well, we need his death certificate. I said, well, I don't have his death certificate and I don't have access to it.
I would have to apply through birth, death and marriages, and even then it would have to be my eighty one year old father to apply for a death certificate because I'm not his next of kin. So I don't have his death certificate. I said. It states on my mum's death certificate that Owen Clifford Brown is deceased because he's named in the will, right, he gets three pieces of furniture whatever he wanted in mum's will. So this is why they want to get a desertificate for Owen.
I just told her to can it. I said, forget it. Just don't even bother going through it. I'll have to find an alternative way to try and get this check cashed. I said to her, she's a really beautiful girl, Like, I really like this girl. She took a really big interest in the case, and she's going to listen to the podcast and everything. This is not her fault. This is just how our these departments and businesses are in
not dealing with missing persons cases. People. You need to wake up and listen far out like this should not be this hard. I just said to who this is trauma on repeat Today's sixth and December twenty twenty four just does not get any easier. So at that point I felt like all my options had literally run out. I actually met up with the Lovely Ladies who actually offered to help me get the grant of probate, and she offered to receive the ATO check and put it
in their account in a trust account for Mum. But thankfully they actually helped me manage all of that, which was a massive saving for me as well, and just because I just had no way around any of those. So again it came down to just good people helping me. Otherwise I would still be stuck, and I don't think we would have overseas we wouldn't have been able to
do half of what we had done. So while I'm trying to deal with ATO and multiple other entities trying to get this information deepole document, Supreme Courts, you name it, I am in this world of hurt. And the last other thing that I really wanted to get, and I know you were keen for this journey as well, was to get the Medicare reports about Mum, where she went, what she was doing, and who she was with. Yes, do you remember what was the key part of that
for us to get that Medicare report? So look at this.
In regards to the Medicare stuff, we didn't really know exactly what we were going to receive with that information. We were hoping for a lot more detail, so names addresses how she paid as well.
All week I've spent on the phone, you will know that I've been chasing information from Medicare for some months now after sending them an email, because last time I went in there they said, oh, look we don't have it. You'll have to send them an email. And without any conversation or communication from Medicare, I just received an envelope
in the mail two days ago. Just the front page says sensitive personal Dear Miss Leyden read Sally Laden slash Marion Barter, thank you for your request for release information. Please find Medicare reports attached. A lot of this stuff we already had out of the brief of evidence, but there's some things in her here we didn't have, so
I classify that as a win service. History they've given me is from the first of January nineteen ninety four to the first of January twenty fifteen, and it lists all of the doctors that mum saw between nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety seven before she left. Then we have a number and item number and description for every category that she's had against her Medicare card, which is great because we can go through that and have a look and she do a bit more deep digging into
what some of those mean. Then I asked for the bill, type and description of her payment, and particularly we were looking for the transaction at the optometrists that she went to on the thirteenth of August nineteen ninety seven in Grafton, because that was the last digital footprint of her physically
doing something. We don't know if she was taking the money out of her bank account or if that was being done by somebody else, So that date is quite important, and I wanted to know did she pay cash, did she pay by card? How did she get her rebate sent to her? What? Did they have an address potentially
of where that would be sent to. And unfortunately, because they've just done a generic print off, they haven't actually read the detail of the information that I'm requesting asking for those finer details, so I don't know if they had an address for her. They haven't told me that. What it does tell me is that that optometrist appointment with Dean Evans at the OPSM was the payment method was bog bill, so that means that she didn't have
to pay for anything. That means that she didn't get a refund from Medicare, which is really devastating because I was thinking if she'd did get a refund and it was sent to her in a check, which is how they used to do it back in nineteen ninety seven. They'd post you out a check we would have an
address for her. So you know, it's quite devastating because you know, if we could find out an address for her after she returned to Australia, that would have been massive, massive, massive find And those forms are trauma on repeat, so you're looking at the form online and it's asking you who is the funeral director, where is the body, what date did they die, how did they die, among other.
Things, so whether it was check, whether it was by cash, and that sort of thing, just to see if we could actually work out a her health history over that whole time, because there was a little bit of interesting stuff around the liver function test that was done in nineteen ninety seven, considering that there was another woman in Belgium who had a similar kind of liver test done, So that was one.
Thing we wanted to look at.
And the second thing was that little ping that happened on the thirteenth of August nineteen ninety seven, where after arriving back into Australia, her Medicare card was put through as Dean Evans, the optometrist said on the stand at one of those old click clack credit card type machines
at the optometrist in Grafton. So we wanted just to see if there was more information there, because fortunately on the stand Dean Evans did state that there would have been a new client card done for that service and so therefore that could have had or it would have had an address and a contact phone number. Now, because that card wasn't able to be located it was too long ago, we were hoping that possibly Medicare might have changed their address or their phone number based on the client card.
None of that really came.
About with the documents that we got. But one thing that we were able to concretely cement, which is something that people have been wanting to sort of know for a long time, is that this was actually the sixth time in her post moving to Queensland where she had gone to an optometrist with a single visit not in her local area, and this was actually the sixth time that she had done that, So that to me shows
a pattern of behavior. So this wasn't just some ping of going to see an optometrist that came out of the middle of nowhere. This was actually in line with what she'd been doing for the past couple of years since she arrived in Queensland.
And the other thing that was a big standout for us was that she was billed for that service and that was a real bummer because if she'd got a check back, they would have posted the check to an address and it would have been listed as to where the check went, and that would have been a massive,
massive find for us. So you know, and there's a lot of undercarriage with that as well, because the police initially back in twenty eleven found this information about her going and using her Medicare card or her Medicare card being used in Grafton and they were looking for a doctor and they were not looking for an optometrist, and so that information back in twenty eleven, they would have had the records and we could have actually pulled like
even OPSM said that because we found them. The lady didn't we She's now living in Coffs Harbor and we were like, did you keep records? Do you still have records? She's like no, we destroyed them. And I was like, that's so disapposed because some missed opportunity and they weren't looking properly. They just made an assumption that he was a doctor and not an optometrist. Doesn't even say doctor
on there, it just sees Stevens. So, you know, another missed opportunity from the police to maybe garner some information, and that was really vital. But the flip side is Medicare sent me every single detail. They sent all of my information as well, which is a lot more than my mum's, and we were able to look at certain things.
And you know, for those of you who are questioning about the liver test before, there is a little bit of information in there which we might talk about on Facebook and answer some questions on there, because we did go into deep on that. In the Lady vanishes as well, and there's a storyline behind my mum and Girlaine, who is another lady who had dealings with mister Rick Blum, who both ladies had. My Mum and Laine both had liver function tests whilst they were allegedly engaged with Rick Blum.
In the next episode of The Missing Matter, the lady warned me in the letter not to try and look for her and said it would be detrimental to my children. That's when the nightmare started. A reoccurring dream I had on repeat for years, where Chris and I drove to Maurie. We found a house just outside of town where there was a dip in the road and had a big, long concrete footpath that went up to the front door.
And in the dream, i have Darcy on my hip as a baby, and I'm holding Ella's hand, who is three. Chris is waiting in the car. He's got the window down. As I'm walking up to the door, I knock on the door and my mum opens the door and she closes the door in my face, doesn't say anything, and I turn around and I walk back up to Chris and she opens the door and she shoots me in the back.