Apote production.
For those of you who haven't listened to the Lady Vanishers, she might not know who I am, but my name is Sally and I am the daughter of long term missing person Marion Barta. I'm currently fifty one and to put some perspective into my situation, my mum was fifty one when she disappeared from my life. So my mom is Marion Bartera. She was a award winning school teacher. She was teaching at a school on the Gold Coast called TSS or the Southport School and in the November
of nineteen ninety six she was awarded by AITA. Butcher's actually was the presenter at the awards for the Netta Awards, which was awarding teachers for excellence and one was voted the best teacher in Queensland and she actually came to nationally.
The National Excellence and Teaching Awards allows us to recognize and praise teachers who show excellence.
In their work.
It's a marvelous way to let.
The community know just how good our teachers are and it also raises confidence in the profession. Yes, I do consider teachers to be heroes and I mean it, and I'm not just flattering you because I happen to be the MC and speak of this evening how teachers have thrived beats me. Teachers deserve our nations heartfelt thanks.
I had moved out and built a house with my partner who is now my husband, Chris. And yeah, mum was a busy single lady who was a dedicated school teacher. She was always there early morning setting up for the day. She'd always be the last one to leave the school grounds because she was setting up for the next day. And just a very passionate, loving, caring teacher and a mother of two myself and my brother Owen. My mum was someone who was very fashionable. She was ahead of
her time in a different way. She didn't dress like everybody else. She used to do some modeling for some of the boutiques that she bought clothes from. She loved her garden and she was a really great cook. So one of my fondest memories is her making bread cups that had asparagus in the very seventies vibe, you know, and we'd go to top wear parties and everyone always asked her to take that and she made a fantastic
Pavlova which I continued to make today. She loved gardening, and yeah, she loved classical music, going to the ballet, going to the opera.
So nineteen ninety seven was a busy year for us.
Chris and I got engaged in that April, and we were living in our new house. And then around that time, Mum was seemingly getting.
Quite upset at school. I went to her house.
I would frequently go to her house and I would go and see her ask as well. Because my job, I worked weekends, so I actually had a couple of days off during the week, and on those days off, I'd quite often just go and hang out with her at school and help her on excursions and things like that. She taught reception. Just to let everyone know, so four
and five year old boys. I had a great location down there on the Gold Coast where the school situated really close to the water, so you know, if she was reading a book about the beach, she'd actually take the boys down and they'd take their shoes off and put their feet in the sand, and lots of sensory kind of style teaching and creative teaching.
But one night I was actually.
At her house and we'd had dinner, and I just sat with her because she was quite upset. She'd been telling me that she was upset with a couple of the teachers at the school over time, like I feel like it.
Was over a period of time.
And she told me that someone had accused her of touching a boy and she was quite mortified, as was I by that claim. And I can only put it into my understanding in my feelings, but I feel like there was a lot of tall poppy syndrome going on. She sat on the couch next to me and she fell asleep, and I remember she had her hands facing upwards, so you know when you sort of sit back in the chair and you just relax and your hands sort of flopped to the side.
That's what she looked like.
And she fell asleep, and she'd been in tears that night, and I just was worried at that point that something was wrong. So when she told me that she was going to quit her job and go overseas on a holiday, I was actually okay with it. I was quite open to that idea. Owen and I were quite settled in our early twenties.
Owen had a partner.
He'd been with her for ten years and was engaged to be married, and Chris and I had built our house and we just preshly got engaged ourselves.
So you know, we.
Were like, yeah, sure, go and live your best life. Go and have a great time. You're single, you don't have any ties here. We want what's best for you. And then everything sort of started to roll really quickly. So she put the house on the mine and she sold it within three weeks, and she sold it for fifteen thousand dollars less than she bought it for and
it sells really quickly. And she asked me if I would come and help her pack up the house, and I said to her, I can't tonight because I'm going to Tathe, but I'll ask Chris and he'll pick me up on the way home. Because that was in Southport. Mum lived in Ashmore, which was the next suburb. So Chris was at mum's house helping her pack up when Mum came out and said to him, what's the time. He said, like, no, seven thirty. I can't remember it.
He doesn't remember exactly what time it was. And she said, okay, well I need you to go, so just drop what you're doing. And you can, you can go. And he said, I'll just finish packing this box, Marian, and she said, no, no, just leave it. I need you to go. And so he left and he came and picked me up from Taithe and he said, got your mum's rude. I said, what do you mean, Like she's never rude to you. What are you talking about? And he said, she just
kicked me out. I said, how bizarre, Like that's so weird. Why would she do that? So it was an odd behavior for her and definitely out of character. And Chris and I on the way home, It's around nine o'clock at night by this point when I finished Tafe typically and there was a McDonald's connected to a service station on Ferry Road there in Southport, and Chris and I stopped there to get something to eat on the way home.
And as we're sitting in the restaurant, I got up to go and get Chris some dessert of some description, and that gave him a window because I was sitting with my back to the bowsers, And when I.
Stood up, he gave him a window.
Out to the Bowsers and he said, oh, look, your mom's just pulled up. So I've turned around and I'm standing at the glass and I'm waving at her. She's got out of the car. She's standing at the door with the door open, like she's about to start putting fuel in the car, and she's staring at me like
a deer in headlights. And I noticed there's a man in the car, and all I can see is that he's really tall, and it just looked dark to me because I always said dark features, but rethinking it, and we've actually gone back to that service station and looked at the lighting and everything. It was probably because of the light reflecting off the windscreen, and it was late at night, so it.
Was dark outside.
But he was tall, and his head was almost touching the roof of her Honda Civic, so with small hatchback car so not a big car, that his head was almost touching the roof. And instead of getting fuel, she got back in the car and she drove off, and she instead of driving past us where we would have seen whoever that man was in the car, quite clearly, she went around the back and got stuck going through the drive through. So I ran over to the glass and I went busted. I've seen you you've got a man,
like what's happening with him? As a bit of a joke, thinking it was funny. I'm like, oh my god, she's got a boyfriend. She just doesn't want to tell us about it. It's a very tongue in cheek kind of thing. But she acted weirdly. The next day, I said to her, who was the guy in the car? And she said, Oh, it's just a friend that I've met from the art center. He was taking her out for a drink, I think, is what she said, which my mind was weird because she didn't drink alcohol. But that was it.
That was end of story.
And I didn't push her, and I just felt, you know, as a twenty four year old, I didn't have the right to ask my mum what she's doing. It's none of my business what she was doing. And I really was very firm in our relationship on that sort of level. So that was a very interesting point. And I told the police that, and they could never find the man who was in the car. We've never had anyone come forward and say, oh, that was me. I was with Marian on that night, So that's another part of the story.
Who was the man in the car with her at that time in her timeline when she was packing up her house getting ready to go overseas, and she's left the country within a month and changed her name all in that one month time period.
But anyway, she did it.
She packed up all her things and she put all her treasures into a shipping container, is what she told me. And she gave Chris and I some big pieces of furniture and said to me, when I come back, I'm going to buy a unit at Maine Beach, which is on the Gold Coast, and I'll be downsizing because I've got a three bedroom house with a swimming pool and I don't use the pool. The house is too big for me. I just want to downsize again. I went, fine, no problem.
So that all started to happen.
The REMOVALSS truck arrived at our house and dropped off the things that were coming to us. Then she had asked Chris's grandparents, who had a pool room up the back of their house, if they could store some of her school things. And I think there was a mattress and there was boxes of sheets and towels and things like that which was stored up at Nana and pars and the rest of it went.
In the truck on the shipping container.
In my mind, and Mum just said to me, oh, if I decide to stay over there and teach, I'll just get you toscend it over to me. And I never, as a twenty three twenty four year old, never thought to go, hey, where are you storing the shipping container? I just met Yet, no problem, Like that's a normal conversation. And my mum was a little bit you know, probably left of Senna when it came to things like that.
And if she wanted to go and teach. She liked Montessori and Steiner school varieties, and she was really open to perhaps getting a job over in England and living the jane Ere and the world of Wuthering Heights kind of vibe. Where to begin. She lost her mother Alie for a little man. This was a very different house, a far different places. That was my mum, you know, So it didn't seem weird or odd to me. Auto. Oh,
and I don't think that she would do that. Some of her friends had sort of commented later down the track that they thought it was a bit odd that she'd sell her house to go overseas, But it made sense to me that she said she was going to downsize and it freed her up from having a house sitting there for a year, and she wouldn't have put tenants in it because she had antique furniture and she didn't like anybody touching her things, so she was quite particular.
And then my birthday is the twelfth of May. Every few years it falls on Mother's Day, and I was pretty sad to find out a long time later that my mum actually changed her name only a few days after my birthday, and she changed it via Deepole to Flora Bella Natalia Marian Ramkeel. I didn't learn about that until twenty and eleven, so I think that's thirteen years, fourteen years later that I actually found out that mum had changed her name, and that was kind of shocking
to me. I didn't really understand the concept about that. But that timeline is the fifteenth of May nineteen ninety seven.
She had finished school.
The term finished on the twentieth of June nineteen ninety seven, and she had resigned. And I've got a letter that she gave me that says that she was asking for a reference so that she could potentially get a job. That she was renewing her teacher's registration for the following year in advance, so that meant that she had paid for her teacher's registration for nineteen ninety eight and by the Sunday, the twenty second, so she came to dinner.
We've had to go back and do these really fine timelines and things that you don't really document, right if someone's not missing, you're not writing down when you speak to your mum or when she comes over for dinner. But she requested to come and have dinner at our house and requested that I cook her a roast. So she brought her friend, Leslie Loveday, who was the lady she was staying with at the time she'd sold the house.
She packed up and there was a window where she wasn't quite ready to go yet, so instead of coming to our house, we offered to let her come and stay with us, of course, and we lived out the back of Madhra barr in Talli and Leslie lived around the corner from school at TSS, so it made sense that she would stay with Leslie, and they used to be neighbors and they were quite good friends, so Leslie kind let.
Her stay with her for a few weeks.
During that time, Mum had, in that moment, changed a couple of her accounts to come to Leslie's address care of Leslie Loveday.
So she didn't do that to my place.
She did it to Leslie's which I grabbed a bundle of mail from Leslie's house a little bit down the track in nineteen ninety seven, which I still kept and which has become quite important as the journey continued. But they came and had a roast dinner, and we lived in a cul de sac and we were on a battle ax block at the back. So we walked them up after dinner and she gave me a big hug.
She ac she gave me a painting of hers and it's got pine trees, and she said to me that night when we were walking down the corridor and I'd had it on the wall, and she said, I want you to think of me every time you used to look at this painting. And something that's really bugged me for life is that the police. I told the police that and they wrote down that. Marian said, you can think of me. This is where I'll be I said, no, that's not what she said. She just said, you can
think of me. And at the time I was like, you know, someone gives you a teddy bear, you.
Can think of me. That kind of notion was how I took it.
But anyway, so that was on the Saturday night and she flew out the next day. On Sunday, the twenty second of June. Leslie drove her to Railway Parade and Scarborough Street in Southport, where she caught a bus. They were early, Leslie says, and they were laughing because mom had so much luggage.
Leslie sort of said to us that, you know, she remembered.
I was sort of laughing so hard and they were crying as she waved off and off she went. So she went on the bus up to Brisbane International Airport where she caught a Korean Air flight to South Korea. And what I have learned through this journey is that int Pole, when you're traveling in and out of Australia or anywhere, they only record where you exit and when you first stop. So regardless of where where you say you're going, they only record you to your first destination.
So as far as they're concerns she went to South Korea, and that's when it all goes a bit pair shaped. She sent up postcards, she sent letters to everybody. I got an eight page letter and it was written on notepaper from a hotel in Japan called Hotel Niko Na Rita. It's stamped from tom Bridge in the UK. So she's picked up the paper and she's written on it and posted it in tom Bridge.
Is my belief.
Dear Salan, Chris, Greetings from beautiful but very wet UK. I finally arrived in England after a most interesting visit to the East. Cloud is somewhat by far too much luggage.
Left.
But tell them both again thanks for me, love your heaps, and don't worry about me, mum.
And it was quite a few weeks and she rang me. Chris and I had just been down skiing at Threadbow and we were on our way home when the thread Boat has asked.
Happened just before midnight.
A freak landslide picked up a chalet, sweeping it onto a lodge where senior Threadboat staff was sleeping. Witnesses it screams for help from beneath the debris. In the hours since then, silence.
It's quite a cold and forlorn scene here at the moment, So I mean.
It was a long drive.
We broke it up and stayed at my Auntie's house, my dad's sister who lived in Sydney, and we also stayed with them on the way back, and stayed with some friends as well. And on the way home we went to Auntie Rob's place and I had a bridal magazine was obviously I just got engaged, so I was kind of excited about getting married and what we were going to do, start planning those things. And the wedding dress that I wanted was available at a shop in Parramatta.
So anyway, while we were in Sydney, I rang the store and I said, do you have the dress? It was called Diana, and that's kind of ironic because Lady Diana died shortly after this.
Anyway, it was a beautiful dress and.
I went in there and Chris and I were pretty poor at that point. We had just built a house and we had no money, and the lady said to me, and this kind of makes me sad when I think about it, because I didn't have anyone with me to try on my wedding dress. Chris was sitting in the car downstairs and the our boot was packed to the rafters and we left Dunnie Rob's house as we were making our way home and we diverted past the shop at Paramatta so I could go and try on the dress.
So other than the women who were in the shop helping me get it on and looking at me, that was it. And she said, if you come back tomorrow, it's going to be on the sale and I said, well, we're actually leaving to go back to the Gold Coast right now, and so she asked her manager and they said, we'll give it to you at the sale price. So I think I got it fifty percent off the price, which was amazing for me. I was jumping through hoops and very excited. So I walked back downstairs with my
dress in a massive bag. It was a big dress too, so tried to lay that in the back of the car and Chris and I drove home. When we got in the door, we had an answering machine and the light was flashing, so I went and pressed the button and it was Mum and she's like, HI, just heard about the threadbir disaster. I was just ringing to check at you and Chris were okay. She knew that we were going away because we'd obviously booked it before she'd left.
So this was around the thirty first of July, first of August. And then I was sad because I wanted to tell her I'd just bought my wedding dress, Like I really wanted to tell her that. And I was really sad that she had rung and I'd missed her because back in those days, we didn't have mobile phones. Well, the very rare person had a mobile phone, right it was a very new thing concept, and there was no
internet other than the dial up variety. Anyway, she called me back and she said to me, I'm just having tea with some little old ladies. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. And that phone call was a bit of a checklist for me, Like when I think about it, she was like, did you take these back to the school? She in Amongst her things that she'd packed up and put up at Chris's grandparents place, she'd put in some Teddy bears and some Russian dolls and
a set of kitchen scales. Although she weighing scales with the little ways on them, and she used to use them in math lesson and she said in the letter, I bought a set, my own set into the class and the boys broke it. So I bought another one. And I can't remember if I use petty cash or my own money. So just to save Luke Glover, who was her boss, she says the word give him any ammunition, which I think is an interesting phrase, and she said, to avoid giving him any ammunition, can you just take
them back to the school. So this phone call was like, did you take them back? Did you give them to Jenny Hill, who was the teacher next door. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, And so this went on for a little bit. She was paying at a phone box and the money kept dropping out and the phone would disconnect, and I was like half midway sentence in trying to.
Talk to her.
Anyway, she'd ring back, and this happened a few times over and over, and I said to her, where are you and I will call you back, And that's when she said to me, oh, no, I'm just having some tea with some of the old ladies. And you know, it didn't really dawn on me. I didn't really think too hard about it. I was like, I was just excited to be talking to my mum. And anyway, she rings back the last time and says, Okay, I'm just
gonna let you talk. You just talk until the phone runs out, until I run out of my money, because this is the last money I've got. And so I was just telling her all about my wedding dress and our trip away, and the phone cut out and that was the last time I ever spoke to her. So interesting. I was sort of just left it at that. She'd told me that she'd postponed her trip on the Orient Express,
which is something she was really excited about doing. She'd told people at school she was doing that, her friends knew she was doing that, so that was a big ticket item for her. So it surprised me that we now know that never happened. And I wonder how that all came about, and what was the modus operandi around the whole Orient Express trip. I don't know if anyone's ever googled how much a trip on the our own Express is. It is super duper expensive, so it's a big ticket item.
The moment you step aboard, everything changes.
So she had told me that she was going to stop writing postcards to everybody because she was trying to have a holiday. And I said to her, you don't have to write postcards to everybody. You just go and have a break, Like it's exhausting writing postcards and then finding a stamp and then finding a postbox to put it in while you're trying to have a holiday. But she said, I'm going to have a break and so don't worry about me. I'll be fine. And I wait,
no problem, go and have a holiday. We'll talk soon. So that's around the first of August nineteen ninety seven, and then a few weeks go past, and I I'm starting to go, oh, it's sort of dawned on me. I have no way of contacting my mum. I don't know where she is, I don't know what hotel she's staying at. I don't know how to call her because there's no mobile phone, no text messages.
And I started to get a bit worried.
I was like, oh, I really want her to call me. Like I started getting quite anxious. And my brother's birthday was approaching in the October, and we're now talking, but I don't know how many weeks that is.
What is that ten weeks his birthday was.
Coming up, and I was like, she'll definitely ring him, like she never ever ever missed your birthday, and she was massive on birthdays, so I was quite confident that at that point she would contact Owen and we'd know where she is and we know she's fine, and we can talk to her and I can give her an update on what I'm doing with the wedding and all
that sort of stuff. And I rang Owen and his birthday that year was on a Saturday, so the eighteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, and I rang him and I said, did you hear from mum?
And he said no.
I said, okay, well that's a bit odd, don't you think, And then we sort of must have talked about it. I don't really remember the phone call that well, but I remember talking to him, and I sort of thought about it the next day and thought, well, there are a day behind us in the UK, so maybe she just got the date wrong and she'll bring him tomorrow. So on Sunday I rang, I went again, did you hear from mum? He said no? And I just spent some thing's not right, that's too long now she hasn't
spoken to us for weeks. I haven't heard from her. I haven't had a postcard. Something's wrong. And we had a friend come over for dinner on the Sunday night. Her name's Renee, and her husband played in a band. Sometimes we go and see the boys play because we're all friends, but sometimes if we didn't do that, Renee would quite often come over for dinner. So she frequented our house and we were talking about it at dinner and I said, something's not right, like I'm worried. I
don't know how to contact mum. And she was the one who suggested that I call the bank. She said, you got your UM's bank account details. And the reason I had those was because mum had left her car with me and we were going to sell my car and I was going to keep her car and I was going to put the money from the sale of my car into her bank account. That's why I had
the bank details. So I rang the bank. It was a nighttime, so I've rung Teley Banking and I just said, Hi, my mum's actually traveling overseas by herself, and she's missed my brother's birthday and I'm actually concerned. Can you check if she's using her account? And the woman said, I'm really sorry. Due to privacy, I can't tell you anything.
And then she paused and she said, did you say your mom's overseas and I said yes, and she said, oh my god, there's money coming out of her bank account and Barren Bay and I just I don't know what I felt in that moment. I think I was
just incomplete shock and a wave of stress. She proceeded to tell me that five thousand dollars was coming out of her bank account every day and she was sort of counting them as she was talking to me, and my memories it was like three and a half weeks of five thousand dollars every day.
And she said there's three days in.
The middle where the money came out in Burly Heads on the God Coast and then back down in Byron Bay again. And that threw me for six because we lived only five minutes from Burley and I was like, what do you mean there's money coming out? Why would she be back in Australia. I was so confused, and I was worried at that point that something had happened, because that's not normal.
Behavior for my mum.
And the next day Chris and I, which was a Monday, the twentieth of October, Chris and I drove to Byron Bay and I took one of mum's portraits from her school photos and we walked around the street. So we went to the chemist, and we went to Woolworth. We went to a naturopath and a health food shop, which is something my mum would venture into just to see if anybody recognized her. She's quite a recognizable person. She's got an interesting look about her with a big black
wavy hair, and she's quite memorable with most people. No one had seen her, and so we then went to the bank and I walked in and I said to the guy, my mum's supposed to be overseas and I've just found out through your telebanking that money is coming out of her bank account. Here, have you seen her? And he picked up the photo and he shook it and he said that rings a bell, and he walked
around the back. There was desks all behind him. He walked around the back and went into an office and it had manager on the door, and he came out and he walked over to the photocopier and he took a photocopy of the photo and he came over to the desk and he said, what would you like me to say to her if I see her?
And a WHOA, what's going on? Like, I don't know.
You can imagine being your twenty four year old trying to work out my daughter, my eldest dough was twenty four hour and she completely throws her for six. She's like, I don't know what I would have done or how I would have coped. Mum, Like, how did you even do that? So Chris and I got back in the car. We drove straight round to Buyron Bay. Police walked in. We stood at the desk at the front. This is all a bit hazy for me. My brain was probably going a million miles an hour as to be trying
to process everything. But anyway, I spoke to a guy and I told him everything that I knew and what I had just found out, and he took the details and we left and I in my mind, I was reporting her as a missing person. She was missing to me. I didn't know where she was. There was strange activity on her account, and she didn't contact my brother, and that was seriously out of character.
So we went home and then about a week.
Or ten days later, I received a phone call from a gentleman and he said, we've located your mother. She doesn't want anyone to know where she is or what she's doing. And exactly those words like they are burnt into my brain and I reflect back now as an older, wiser woman, and I'm like, what the hell, like, how did that happen? And how does someone speak to you like that without actually giving you anything more. He told me that she didn't want anyone to know what she
was doing. I was at Tafe actually during this period of time, I was working full time and I was going to Tafe at nighttime because I wanted to join the ironically, the Queensland Police. Shame I didn't continue through that because it might have helped me a little bit in my journey. But I was at Taife trying to get into the Queensland Police and one of my teachers was a police officer.
And in my class I had a.
Lot of people who were already working in the space of customs and in the jails and things like that, who were trying to get into the cops. At the time, and after I'd had that call, and they told me that my mum had been located and she didn't want anyone to know where she was or what she was doing, and that was kind of it. That's where I was left. I had a guy in my class who I knew worked for customs, and I asked him if he could
do a passport check on mum. Now I didn't know about the name change at this point, so I told him Marion Barter, and I told him her date of birth, and he came back to me and said her passport came back and was on shore on the second of August nineteen ninety seven. Now, if you remember, she called me on the first of August, so she rang me, telling me everything was fine and she was having a great time, and she postponed a trip on the Your
Own Express, but not to worry about her. And then her passport came back into the country the very next day. That probably led police to believe and fed into their narrative that she deliberately was trying to disappear herself because she didn't contact me and she didn't tell me on the phone that she was coming back into the country the next day. So we got married the October the following year. But then when she missed Iwin's birthday, that was when the alarm bells came flying in for me.
So I went to my grandfather. He had bone cancer and was not very well, but I went to him and said, this is what they've said, and he goes, well, I'm not satisfied with that. And he used to listen to the ABC radio and the Salvation Army used to come on there and do some talks for a missing persons unit. So he actually contacted a lady named Betty Brown from the Savos and they did an investigation in themselves.
And then we actually have the letters because my grandfather kept them thankfully around the February of the following year. So we're now into nineteen ninety eight, and the letter pretty much says that police confirm that it was your daughter Marion who went into the bank and withdrew eighty thousand dollars and said that she was starting a new life, and that it was confirmed by bank security. So my grandparents then believed that my mum had actually chosen to leave.
We didn't know about her name change at this point. The police had not looked into her movements coming in and out of the country. They hadn't verified her passport. None of that was done all the way back then.
And in my mind, if we'd actually found out that she changed her name, we could have looked into that a lot sooner and a lot deeper had we known that in nineteen ninety seven when I reported her to police as a missing person, that's kind of where my journey begins as to what happened to my mum, and then I had to Probably one of the hardest days was for me October of that year.
I then got married.
Probably the hardest part of that day was we were in a soft top car and I was with my dad and we were driving up to the church and we actually got married at TSS. And I had said to Mum it was probably one of the last things she did for me was I asked her if I could get married in the chapel, and she said, I
have to ask permission. And she asked the principal and she said to me, I said to him, I just had one more favor to ask, and he said, anything for you, Marian, And she said, Sally would like to get married in the chapel and he said, no problem, So Revstonia married Chris and I and I remember my dad saying to me, because it's kind of like a big windy path as you go up to the chapel inside the school grounds, the roofs off.
My brother in law's driving the car.
Scott, and my dad says to me, keep an eye out for your mother. I'm sure she'll be here, And it kind of broke me just before I was about to walk down the aisle, and that was kind of sad, sad day, and then the sad days continued from there. Chris and I had our first child after we got married, so Ella was born in two thousand and one, so she's the same age today as I was when my mom went missing.
And I'm the same age my mom was.
When she disappeared. So it's kind of done a full circle in our family, and we have no answers and we have no resolution yet, so hence my push and drive to keep on going. Well, the person who called me I interpreted as the police officer that I spoke to at the desk, so if anyone asked me, it was him. But you know, foolishly I didn't get a business card from him. I didn't take down his name. I didn't even feel in a statement. He didn't give me a copy of anything. He just wrote down some
notes in his notebook. So when I get that call like back later, that was a shocking thing to hear, because you just don't know what's happened.
You don't know how to feel about that.
I had mum's sister, one of them, she's got three sisters, she's the eldest, and one of them had a crack at me and said, what the hell do you think you're doing listing or as a missing person? And was angry at my grandfather for, you know, going along with what my thoughts were in this scenario. And she said, she's just having a holiday, why would you go on
list her as missing? And to me, they were older than me, they knew better, and I listened to what they said, so I sort of just went, Okay, I'll let Papa deal with it, because he's the person in charge of this in my opinion. But he was sick and he was the only person who would talk to me about it. My grandmother wouldn't talk to me, none of Them's just as we talk about it, it was like put your head in the sand, it'll all go away.
So that was quite challenging. And we had Ella in the July of two thousand and one and we took her down to Sydney in the December. She met my dad for the first time and his partner, and she met Owen and his partner as well. And my world shattered the following year on the seventh of March two thousand and two, when I got a call from my dad.
At about twenty past ten at nighttime.
I just finished breastfeeding Ella and put her down, and he said that Owen had killed himself and that the police were at the door and he had to go down and identify the body the morgue. And I was in Queensland, so I felt really helpless at that point. And I only had one sibling, so he was it. And he and I growing up were like twins. Everyone thought we were twins because we were only seventeen months
apart and looked quite similar. And I was a tomboy, so I was happy to get on my BMX bike and go riding with all the boys and hang out with the boys. So yeah, that broke my heart completely into a million pieces, and we had to.
Deal with that as well.
And you know, I remember going to the funeral and there was a lot of people.
At the funeral. He was a very well liked person.
People were sort of outside looking through the windows at this funeral. And I remember when I rocked up, my dad said here she is, My girl's here, and he said, your mother should be here. I shouldn't be doing this by myself. And so the language that was said to us in that phone call and then again by Betty Brown in her letter to grand and Papa just led us to believe that she had gone missing on her own account. And everyone believed it. Everyone thought that was
how it was. But me, I was like, something's wrong. She would not miss my wedding, she would not miss me having a baby. She loved kids, and there is just not a chance. So I just always knew something was wrong. But I felt like I was being sort of handballed to the side. You just sit here and park it here, sister, We're not interested, but let it be. And so it wasn't until two thousand and seven. It was January and I was pregnant with our third baby, so our son, and I was due.
To have him in June.
So I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy and my girlfriend Nina was over and I just said to her, do you reckon you could help me with the kids, just for like twenty minutes. I'm just going to make a phone call. And I rang the AFP, so I was getting nowhere. I had no contact at the New Southwest Police. I didn't know who was on the case. I didn't know what oh I see meant. I didn't have a number to call. I had no
compassion or empathy or care given to me. It was like, oh, well, she'll be right, mate, move on with your life.
Disappeared on her own account.
So I made the phone call and I the phone was answered by a lady named Rebecca cotts Beck, and I chatted for quite a while.
I think that phone call went.
For about two hours, and I was telling her everything that had happened. And she was the first person I reckon outside of my family and friends, who showed me empathy and care and understanding and just an ear and listening to me. And she offered to come up and visit me from Canberra, and so she came and met me, took me out for lunch. We went just down in Tenereefe, actually local to here, and she said to me, I've spoken to my bosses and we'd like to ask you
to be the face of missing Persons this year. We think it'd be a really good opportunity for you to get your mum's story out there in the media. It's a really great exposure, and we just think your detail and your attention to detail and what you've remembered and everything you have is really great and we'd really love to be able to help you with that, to which I was really excited about because up until then I'd had nothing. When I say nothing, I just had had
no support and I had no media. I think in two thousand and four, Women's Day did a short article about me and a couple of other mums who were missing, so this family stories about missing mums on Mother's Day.
I remember that was a two thousand and four because I was pregnant with Darcy, my second baby, when we had that photo shoot, and I remember, actually, I've got Ella sitting on my lap in the photo, and my husband was really worried about putting Ella in the magazine, and I remember saying to him, if mum sees it, she needs to see she has a granddaughter, like she'll come back. Like I was in such a spin, like I really didn't know what to think or what to believe.
You know, my grandfather died shortly after that, actually, so I lost my only solid person who was helping me and believed that maybe something was not quite right. He'd gone as well. So anyway, so it's a couple of years later that I've met Beck. It's mom's tenth anniversary. So that year it was like she's been gone ten years, and who's doing something about this because there's nothing. Everyone's just sort of forgotten about her, and I can't even
talk about her. I can't even mention her name in her own mother's house. It's like a taboo subject. So Beck was just amazing. She was a great person and we actually ended up becoming very good friends. She sadly died of cancer a couple of years ago after a really tough battle. So after our first encounter in the January, I then worked for pretty much the next six months planning on going down and being the face of missing person.
She told me that they'll fly me to Melbourne and flying me to Sydney and will bounce around the country for that week, doing all these interviews and plugging Missing Person's Week. And I said, well, Caleb's going to be born, which he was on the nineteenth of June, and Missing Person's Week is like around the first of August.
So I'm madly storing my breast milk and.
I'm getting prepared, and Chris is organizing to take time off work and we get a call for her I don't know. A couple of days before we were do you to fly down? And she said to me, I'm so sorry, but they've pulled you. They're not going to let you do it. And I said, who's not going to let me do it? And she said New South We was police, and they've told us that because this year is about mental health and people missing with mental health, that we can't use your story. We can't use Marian's
story because she didn't have mental health issues. I'm really sorry. And I was crushed. I was like, oh my god, I've just had a baby. I've had my third cesarean. I'm storing my breast milk so I can come and do these interviews for Missing Person's Week and make awareness and help. Someone knows something about my mum. She's someone's neighbor,
she's buying milk from somewhere. If she's alive and well, like they all kept telling me she was, someone had to know where she was and they had to be some digital footprint of her, which there just was not. So I was eager to get out there and do something. But you know, you're in that realm, right like you think about my life. My mum's just gone missing. I get married the following year. I then have three babies, We build a house, we move from the Gold Coast to Brisbane.
I have to reset up my business.
Very very busy time of life for us, and very stressful. You know, my brother died, my grandfather died. They were my two key people in my camp. And you know, awful circumstances, really awful circumstances. So Rebecca says to me, we've already booked your flight, so you most will still come.
Just come and you can sit in the audience. So I remember sitting in the audience and the lady who was talking, who was then chosen to be the Missing Person feature for that year, her brother had been missing for a week, and I remember going, I know what that feels like, like missing for an hour is absolutely gut wrenching. But I was sitting in the audience, going, oh,
I don't know how I feel about this. I shouldn't feel sad that I'm not on the stage, and that her brother needs to be found as well, and he did have mental health problems. But after the whole conference was finished, I went outside with Rebecca and the police commissioner was there and she introduced me, and he said to me, oh, well, Sally, I don't know where my brother is. He's missing as well. And you know, some people just choose to go missing, and you know that's okay.
The people are allowed to go missing. And I went, right, okay, and he goes, well, my mum knows where he is, but none of us know. He won't tell any of us where we are. And I went, so, he's not really missing in this true sense of the word, then is he if your mother knows where he is. And
it was just such a degrading conversation. I was like, you've really just ignoring every element of what I'm actually dealing with right this second from someone who's living with the ambiguity of not knowing what's happened to my mum. So no, no one knows where my mum is. No one has spoken to her that we know. She's in
the true sense of the word, a missing person. So that was at the tenth anniversary, and that took all my energy and a lot of wind out of my sales, as you can probably appreciate going through what I had to go through. And then from that moment, and this is interesting, from that moment onwards, the police started to dabble back in it again. So we now had Mum's case sitting with the New South Wales Missing Person's Unit, and Steve McAllister was the guy.
That I was talking to.
He rang me while I was at my grandparents' house and he asked me lots of questions in that phone call, and one of them was what's her date of birth? What's her hair color? Tell me a little bit about her. And I was like, surely you would have all of this information, right, like, surely you know she has black
hair and green hazel eyes. Nope, had nothing. And I said to him at that point, and this is actually all been recorded because I wrote an email back to him telling him about my questions, I'm concerned that you've asked this, I'm concerned that you've said this, And then I actually say in it, I would like to see the original file from when I came to the police back in October nineteen ninety seven and reported my mum missing.
And I said, I want to know who the person was who took that report because I didn't get his card, I don't know his name, I can't remember his name, and they couldn't answer those questions.
And he's like, they've lost the file, and.
I was like, what do you mean, they've lost the file? So my frustrations started to grow quite heavily at.
That point with the police.
As part of our investigation, I came across a piece of paper. On it I saw her passport photo the front and the back, and it had this is a true photo of Flora Bella Ramicel. It had her outcome going passenger card. I just remember like seeing lots of things. I remember looking Luxembourg three days, which actually turned out to be eight days. But in the flash of trying to see something in a short space of time, it was quite confronting for me.
And at the very top of the page there.
Was lots of asterisks and arrows and things like that, but it had mums' names, so it had all her names from when she first was like Maryan Wilson, which was her maiden name.
She married John Warren who was a big SoC star.
I was the captain of the Strain Soccaroos in the sixties and seventies and that was her first husband, so she was Marying Warren.
She doesn't have a middle name, so that.
Made things quite difficult as well when we're doing searches and things like that.
Born in nineteen forty three, the boy from the inner city Sydney suburb of Botany knew his passion for the world game always rose above those petty disputes, making a mark both at home and abroad, and a bad.
Clearance and a challenge by John Warren.
But then it sort of went to my dad, Marion Brown, which is what she was known for most of my childhood when she was a school teacher in the Blue Mountains in Springwood. Then she met Ray Barter and married Ray Barter and they got married in nineteen eighty five. In the Blue Mountains, Mom ended up getting a promotion, moved down to Sussex, Inlet on the south coast and taught down in that southern area before she got the promotion and went to the Southport School up here in Queensland.
So we were looking at that document and we noticed that there was a new name on there, Florabella Natalia Marion Ramachel. And it wasn't until twenty sixteen. I had a Facebook page which I set up in twenty thirteen to try and see if we could garner some interest and see if anyone could help me find the answers, because I was literally doing it on my own and I had no idea. I'm not a sleuth. I don't know how to go and search things. I didn't know
about going into archives and pulling out files. I have learned a lot over this past two decades, nearly three decades of searching for my mum, but winding back to then, I was really just putting my hands into the police and hoping for the best.
And at that point I don't really remember.
What he said to me, but he says that, well, clearly, she deliberately has tried to change her name, and she's tried to disappear herself, and I was not sure that that was my thoughts on the situation. I felt like something was wrong, and I kept saying, that's a weird name. Why would you change your name to Flora Bella Ramkel if you wanted to disappear, I'd be Jane Smith. And you know what the other part of that is, if I've left the country and I've gone to live in Luxembourg,
why would I come back? So there was all these questions going and just rolling through my gut and thinking something's not right. So I had a lady contact me who was following my Facebook page and she said, Sally, I just wanted to let you know, I've just been onto the National Missing Person's Register and I've noticed your mom's not on there. And I was like, what do
you mean she's not on there? So I rang Rebecca Cotts because I had a friend in her now right, So our friendship was now nine years old and she'd been my person if I needed anything I could call on her.
And just to clarify too, Rebecca.
Was working in friends and families of Missing persons for AFP, so she wasn't actually with the Australian Federal Police. She was a civilian working for them in this space supporting people with missing persons, and I rang her and I said, I've just had this lady tell me that Mom's name is not on the register. Can you please have a
look and try and work out what's happened. And she had a look at the file while I'm on the phone to her, and she said, hmm, there's something on the file, but I need to get approval to be able to tell you what it is. Bear with me, let me see if I can get approval and I'll come back to you. So it's a long time ago, and it was a very frustrating period of time. So
I'm going to say maybe a day. The same day, the next day, the day after, Rebecca comes back to me with approval and she brings me and says, I've been given approval to send.
You what we have.
So she sent me a document and the document was outlining the situation of my mom and they new South Wales Police had marked my mum as located and a date. So upon looking at this document, it's actually got a notation that my mom was located on the seventh of December twenty eleven, and that on the eighth of November, so month before that, Gary shean suspends the case of my mum. So I ran Gary and I said, I've just received a document from the AFP that says that
in twenty and eleven you located my mum. Now, I won't go into the nitty gritty because there's a little bit of back and forth about some information about her living in Queensland that came into that mix, and I'm not really clear, so I don't want to sort of talk too much about that. But he said to me, can you read me the document? So I read it to him and he said, can you read it again? So I read it again, and he said, I'm just going to make a call. I'll call you back. So
he called me back a short while later. I was at work and he said, I've spoken to them and they said it's a typo.
I said, what do you mean, it's a typo.
There's a document, a legal document says that my mum was located on the seventh of December twenty eleven and it's now twenty sixteen and I know nothing of this, what's going on? And he said, I'm just going to ring them back and get a bit more information. So then he rings me back again.
Later.
It might have even been the next day, and it was quite a lengthy phone call. And I did write all this down in a notebook because I got to the point in this exercise of I write down everything. I write down the date, how long the call was, what time it was, because what I quickly realized fast forward another ten years, no one ever puts anything in writing to me. They always ring it through to me.
So I've got no proof of what's been said, what's happened, what's so it's very important that you start documenting everything. So I've become a bit paranoid in that realm of life, let's say, for valid reasons. He rings me back and he said, I've spoken to them again and they've explained to me that on a document within the police force,
there's two boxes. You're either located or you're missing. And we believe on the basis that your mum sold her house, she quit her job, and she changed her name, didn't tell that she was coming back into the country, that she's deliberately gone missing, so we have no choice but to tick that she's been located. And I was like, what do you mean. You can't mark someone located if you haven't located them. She's in La La Land. You
guys obviously need a third box. If that's the scenario, we don't know box, rather than let's make an assumption and put her over here. Because that language continued. Then I was fighting every force of nature. I've got documents where police are saying, oh, I believe Marian was located as recently as last month. Who says that stuff without
proof and without actual facts. So that was really damaging to the case for me and for mum, you know, at that time, and that was twenty sixteen, and Gary had sort of said to me, that's as good as I can get. It's documented that I think it was the eighth of November, so like just a month before that located was noted on that document. He suspended the case and no action was to be taken, and then she gets marked as located.
That was it.
So in discussions with Gary, he was pretty much telling me on repeat his hands were tied and he couldn't help me any further.
And I can't remember for sure.
He might have suggested to me that I maybe go and talk to Queensland Police and see if they can help me, being that she was living in Queensland and it typically should be a Queensland case. Is kind of the vibe he was always pushing onto me. So in the December, I took myself down with my folder and rocked into Morningside Police station here in Brisbane and talk to the person at the desk. Again.
I was having like deja vu.
No one brings you in and sits down and says, I'm so sorry you're dealing with this. What can we do? They just sat at the table at the front desk with big perspects in front of it, took my name and number and said we'll get someone to call you. So I remember I was working and i'd driven to the post office and I was going to collect the mail and I was sitting in my car when this lady rang me and in a nutshell she said to me, we can't help you, Sally, just because you're dissatisfied with
New South Wales Police. They own carriage of the case. We can't just pick up and start helping you because they own the carriage of the case. And I remember that very clearly because that was the first time i'd heard that language, that there was a carriage of the case. So then I went back and forth. Then there's lots of emails and lots of transcripts of me asking for
the carriage to be released by New South Wales. If they've suspended it and you're not working on it, why can't you give it to Queensland Police to have a look at and see if we can get some traction on looking for my mum because no one else is doing anything and they refuse to No, we have carriage of it, we're not giving it to Queensland. So I was really left at that juncture, going what do I do? What are we now? We're twenty twenty five so next year.
That's ten years ago, and the fight has just been huge ever since to get people to help me, to get people to listen to what I'm saying and help me find the answers as to what's happened.
People just don't disappear.
I mean, yes they do, but there's usually a reason why. So they either have disappeared on their own account or something has happened to them. And I wasn't about to sit back and let that go down that slide because I just my gut told me something was not right and I had to do more so in twenty eighteen, so a couple of years after that all happened and everything kind of just paused like there was nothing happening. And Gary had told me, this is as good as
you're going to get. So they were the kind of languages that I was getting. My hands are tied, nothing I can do. I can try and help you, but I'll be doing it in my spare time because I've got other jobs to do. So that was sort of like the language that I was copying most of the time. And I was trying to think of all these different things, like can you check her superannuation?
Did she do a tax return in ninety ninety seven?
Can you look at the passenger lists on the flights that she came in and out of, so we can see if the same name's on the same flight, maybe we have a person of interest. I was throwing all these suggestions at them, and I'm just sitting here as the daughter of a missing person, a mum of three, working full time, trying to think of how I could find information that might help me find out what's happened to my mum, full well knowing that her bank accounts
were drained and I knew something was wrong. She hadn't bought a house, she hadn't touched her super, she hadn't gone to Center Link. And this is based on what I was being told by police. So I was really reliant on them giving me that information, because when someone's missing but they're not deceased, you don't have a death certificate and you are powerless to their information. And I kept getting.
Told by Gary that Florabella.
He always referred to her as Florabella, which just grinded my gears to the whole because no one knew her as Florabella and there was a reason why this name had come into the mix. And he kept saying to me, Flora Bella's privacy matters. Selling her privacy is important, and I was like, but when does that stop? When does it actually be a case that I can actually help her and work on helping find out what's happened to her.
And in twenty eighteen, a lady that I know from my children's primary school, who had a link into the media world, had wrung me and she said, Hey, Sally, just wondering if you're interested if I could try and get you onto sixty Minutes or the Sunday Night program. Would you be interested? And I said one hundred percent. My grandmother had recently passed at this point, and that's my mom's mum.
She was living by herself and she was ninety four.
I didn't want to upset her, like it got to the point where she didn't want to talk about it. I was very careful with anything that I was thinking or saying or doing, but I knew that it had more to tell and someone knows something, so I had to do something.
But I just really felt it in my heart.
I had to wait for her to pass before I didn't because I really didn't want to upset her. And I said, yeah, I'm really keen. I'm ready now, like this is the right time to do something.
My kids are a little bit older.
I can spend time now doing this because I know how consuming it is from the times that I had dived back in. She said, okay, well I'll see what I can do. And so about a week later, I hadn't heard from anybody. I rang her back and I said, Hey, just checking, has anybody sort of reached out? Have you had any interest? And she said, look, I haven't. I've put it out there if they contact you, they will.
I went, okay, all right, no problem. And it was only a couple of days after that that I got a call from Alison Sandy and Allison actually used to work for this lady's husband, so that's how they were connected. And she said, would you like to meet for a coffee? And I said, sure, love to meet for a coffee.
So we arranged that and I rocked up with my big blue folder with all my documents in it, and we sat down for a coffee and we pretty quickly decided that it wasn't going to be enough for a one hour TV program on Sunday night, but maybe we should look at doing a podcast. I had just heard The Teacher's Pet. That was the first podcast I'd ever listened to, and I sort of saw similarities in my mum's story about a woman who the police just sort of wrote off as well, she just wants to be
left alone, she doesn't want to be found. And we came up with the concept of doing The Lady Vanishers, and I think today still it's the longest running single story episode podcast in Australia. When we were up to fifty seven episodes. It finished last year in February when we got to the end of the findings for the Inquest bar.
And Barter, the Gonks teacher who disappeared twenty four years ago. Did she meet with foul play or start a new live first the Blogbuster Lady Vanishes podcast now The Inquest to Solve the Mystery. Full coverage on seven News Monday.
So Allison and I met, I think it was in October of twenty eighteen, and it was an interesting time actually, because I'd spoken to Gary Shean in the December and I told him, I said, I've got a media interest.
We're going to do a podcast.
And he had told me prior to that, in that same conversation that his hands were tied, there's really nothing more to do. He'll only work on it any spare time, same sort of language again. I said, Okay, well, I have got a media interest and we're looking at doing a podcast. So I'll keep you informed as to what's going on with that. Because I've always worked actively with the police. Anything they want, I've given it to them, and I've been very kind and of giving of my time.
I've driven back and forth whenever they want to take DNA and blah, blah blah, blah blah. I've done a lot because at the end of the day, I just want to find my mum. I don't want to be an antagonistic human and upset anybody. I'm just here to find the answers, you know. I just want people with
passion and drive to have the same for me. Anyway, we went away for Christmas, and then when we got back, I went away again with my daughters because Ella had finished school and we decided we were going to go on a bit of a girl's trip. So when I got back from that, Gary rang me, which was quite out of the out of the ordinary, and said to me, oh, I just wanted to let you know I've done multiple proof of life checks runs all over Australia for your mum.
And I went, you just told me your hands were tired and you weren't doing anything and there's nothing more you could do, and now you're doing proof of life checks. Okay, well that's good. I'm glad you're doing proof of life checks. That's really what I wanted you to do. And he said, I've only heard back from two so far and there's nothing. And then the first of April we launched The Lady Vanishers and we went live with Channel seven and I
went down to Sydney. We were on Sunrise promoting it to get it going and look to be honest, we at that point we thought it would be a seven part podcast series, just talking about my story in the hope that someone might know something.
Marion Barter is an extraordinary one that once married to a Soakaru legend. She disappeared in nineteen ninety seven and has never been seen again.
Her daughter Sally, has never given up hope and her search for the truth is the subject of a brand new podcast.
That was my hope and my goal at the end of it was to get to an inquest because my mum had never been to an inquest or had an inquest, and she wasn't even recognized as missing for a lot of that time, and at that point in twenty nineteen, she was not on the National Missing Person's Register, My DNA was not on any register, and we were really going nowhere. It was circling the drain and no one was interested and they all thought that her privacy added more than finding her.
So the podcast started.
It gained very fast momentum and I was shocked and overwhelmed, and you know, trying to keep up with everything. And after many many years of not having anybody really show much interest, and I had like less than a thousand followers on my Facebook page, I'm now up to twenty thousand people following my Facebook page. The Lady Vanishers had like millions of downloads and people recognizing me in the street, and I was like, oh goodness me, like, this is
really huge now. And I wanted it to be big because I know someone knows more than we've found out yet. So that was why I was happy to project myself into that space for the pure fact of finding more knowledge and more information. And that has been the case. We've had so many people come forward and tell us things,
and it's been imperative. We've got Jonie who so if I give you the timeline right we launch on the first of April, I put a call out on the podcast and say we would really like some help if you can help us, if you know something, can you please let us know? And we got a call from Joanie Condos and she said that she had done some research into the name Ramachel and she was sick this
night and she was staying up late. She'd had the flu and she was just playing around on the computer and she had had a missing person story in her family on her husband's side, and so she had some skills in that space that she thought she could lend to my mum's case to see what she could find. And lo and behold, she found an ad in a newspaper, which was a French speaking newspaper called Lo Courier Australian.
It was published out of Sydney and the date in the newspaper article was nineteen ninety four and it was a gentleman by the name of m f Ramckel who was looking for love, potential marriage. He's a polyglot, non smoker, you know, bon chique boncha, which is like good taste, good style in French. And the po box was Lennox Heads in New South Wales. And for those who are listening along and don't really know the geographical side of Australia, Byron Bay is the next suburb to Lennox Heads. My
mum's money was being withdrawn out of Barron Bay. And we've got a po box with a guy looking for love with the same surname spelled exactly the same way as my mum was spelling her name, her new name that she changed her name to, who also happened to have the same initials Flora Bella Natalia Marion Ramackel.
My mind was blowing. We were freaking out, going what is going on?
What is going on? So investigations start into who is this FM Ramikel. We knew how old he was because he put his age in the paper and we knew it was the paper date was nineteen ninety four, so we were able to work out how old he was. And we did a search on an MF. Ramichel and we found a guy who was the same age who lived in Luxembourg. Mum's passenger card said that she was going to live in life Luxembourg, and we were just mind blowing by this whole thing. I was beside myself, actually,
I just didn't know what to think. So anyway, May twenty second, I remember it well because it was one of Ella's best friend's birthdays and I was sitting on the plane wishing her a happy birthday as we're taking off, and yeah, we flew to Luxembourg and we actually knocked on the door of mister f M.
Ramchel, who lives in Luxembourg.
That was mind boggling, Like I reached my hand out to shake his hand, he rejected my hand. I was holding my mum's photo in my hand and I was shaking like a leaf. And I'm with an interpreter. So I said to the boys, the cameraman and Brian Seymour, who came with me, who's one of the producers of the podcast, and I said, let me go by myself. I don't want cameras in their faces and stuff like that.
These people might be very innocent people. I don't know who they are, but we need to tread very carefully. But were received with a very hostile situation. His wife came out of the garage and started filming the boys in the car, which was parked down the street, while Sarah and I are at the front door, and I've got this man who was very aggressive to me, and he's saying he wouldn't speak English. I said, you speak English and nah, and he's speaking to Sarah, but we
do know that he speaks fluent English. So that was frustrating and it was nerve racking, and it was questionable, why are you acting this way. He later said to me that I was acting like a gypsy, which is a very derogative term over there, that I should have come up to the door and excused myself for the disturbance. And I was like, well, I felt like I was very pleasant, you know, I put my hand out, I
was pretty kind. Actually, I was just being an Australian girl going I feel really nervous, like my heart was racing a million miles an hour. And I kept saying to Brian, my husband's going to shoot me if he knew that I was doing this right now, He's going to be very mad at me. And I've got three kids.
And I'm like, oh my god, Like what's going on.
Why I'm in the middle of the fields and in the middle of nowhere and no one really knows where
I am. Anyway, we meet him. He then calls the police, and we'd actually been to the police station the morning that morning before because they weren't home, and so we'd spoken to the police, and the police knew why we were there, and they had actually done a search for me, because when you live in Luxembourg, you have to register to live in the country, and so they looked up her date of birth, and they looked up under Florabella Ramichel and under Marion Barter and there was no register.
So that told us that she's never been registered as living in Luxembourg. And by the time we went back to their house, we'd actually driven all the way back into Luxembourg, and we'd been there three times this day, and it's an hour out and an hour back, so that's six hours of driving there and back and there and back, and in the car, my brain's just going a million miles an hour as to what's going on, Like it was crazy. We were up at three am
in the morning and like, yeah, just absolutely mental. And we got back to his house and we did all of that, and then Brian and the cameraman came up to the door, so we saw Sarah and I left. He closed the door on our face and we left, and the cameraman and Brian come up to the door and they start knocking and say, we just would like to talk to you. We've just got a few questions
to ask. And he's up the top sipping his tea videoing us as we're leaving, and then we just waited in the car, and then the police came, and so he walks out and comes and addresses the police. Brian and the cameraman and Sarah went up to the police and I sat in the car because I was just like, Oh my god, I don't know what's going on.
I'm just really quite scared now. I just don't know what's happening.
Anyway, it was all sort of Joe Bull and they were like, we've got nothing to do with her. I don't know who she is. I should also mention that this guy, mister Ramichel in Luxembourg was also a professional football player, so we were sort of putting the dots together, going did he meet Johnny Warren when Johnny Warren was just playing professional football because they're the same age, and so there was all all these weird coincidences that were
just very linked. So we've got Luxembourg mum saying she's moving to Luxembourg permanently on her outgoing passenger card, yet she comes back into the country six weeks later. We've got her changing her name to this random name of Ramackurl, which there were no ramckeurls in Australia at all except for this ad in the paper and my mum changing her name. So we were just having a chat with them out the front, and we actually spoke to his
ex wife. We found her details and gave her a phone call just to ask her some questions, and her name is Monique Cornelius.
Turns out that a.
Gentleman by the name of Reck Blum, who has admitted to having an affair with my mum in nineteen ninety seven prior to her disappearance, also was in a relationship with Monique Cornelius, who is Fernand Ramachel's ex wife, the real Fernand Ramachel. Mister Blum also admits to using Fernand Ramicel's identity and placing the ad in the paper in the La Courier Australian. He also had an international driver's license that he obtained in Queensland of the name Fernande Ramckel.
In court, he actually accused my.
Mum of stealing the driver's license so she could change her name to that name. So it's all very interesting. The journey itself has been quite wine boggling, And you know I said earlier that my goal was really to get to an inquest so we could do a full investigation. We did a petition. So on my way home on that flight, I came up with the idea, maybe if we do a petition, we can get some leverage. We had no reward or for information, and so everything just
started to ballroll from this moment. So the ad in the paper that Jonie found super super important and that opened the case right up. How we found Rick Blum was another gentleman who was listening to the Lady Vanishers and he's always wanted to stay anonymous, but he's a local, and he took himself down to the Ballina library and because we had a phone number in the ad, and the police, like I remember Gary saying to me, oh, we've tried to find the phone number.
Who owns the phone number?
And it's this guy and he's retired and it definitely wouldn't have been him, and Telstra didn't have records that go back further than seven years. However, this gentleman just went down to the local library. He did hand scan thousands of entries and ran it through microfish. But then he found the phone number was connected to a business called Ballana Coin Investments that ran out of Ballana and the name of the owners of that company was Frederick
de Heavidery and Diana Heavidaeriry. Frederic de Heavidery is also Reckblum, one of his fifty two aliases that he has used in Australia during his time here. He's a Belgium national who moved to Australia in the sixties and has been here ever since. So you know, at that point we
had a really successful petition. So we had a lot of Australia and around the world behind me by this point, and we had over twenty seven thousand signatures on there, which then saw us get a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars reward by New South Wales Police noted for my mum, which was a breakthrough for me.
I was like, wow, you guys haven't even recognized she's been missing.
Now she's a missing person and you've got a reward out for her. And at that same point I had written to the New South Wales coroner It's Court and asked if they would consider having an inquest or holding an inquest, and they did so. After months of waiting, I finally got the okay and all this while I've got Gary Sheen telling me, well it's really not a New South Wales case. It should be a Queensland case, because you know your mum was living in Queensland. But
our argument was her last know and movement. So we know that her Medicare card was used in Grafton after she came back. We know that about the withdrawals of her money in Byron Bay and in burly Heads, and then on the fifteenth of October there was eighty thousand dollars electronically transferred out of her bank account to another
bank account. Mister Blum opened a bank security envelope with the Commonwealth Bank, the same bank the day before the eighty thousand dollars were withdrawn from my mum's bank account, and he.
Closed it thirteen days later.
No proof that he has the money or that it went there, but as a lot of coincidences or circumstances that you might go that was quite interesting, and the coroner did make mention of that in her findings spoiler alert. We ended up getting an inquest and that was extremely difficult process. I ended up on heart medication. My resting heart rate was up to one ninety beats per minute and you know it tore my family apart. Not myself,
increased my been and my kids. But you know, my mum's family don't talk to me anymore since the podcast was launched, and you know, we've had to be open and honest about what's happened and how things have been handled and what's transpired. And it really puts a bomb in your world and it explodes pretty hard, and at the end of the day, you're the one left to
pick up the pieces. And I'm really grateful because I've had quite a lot of people who have stood by my side very firmly for a long time, helping me, and they were there to support me and care for me and check in on me. But you know, the person who's stuck by me the longest and the hardest is Jooning. She came in and she said, I'm here until you tell me to stop. I'm going to keep going and I'm going to keep helping you. And she's
been instrumental in helping me. So we had the findings in February last year, and that was the first time I've actually heard the words that my mum is officially deceased. And at that point, you know, the finding things was held at Lincoln Court in Sydney, and I put a call out on Facebook and I said, if anyone would like to come and support you know, I've got no family, so if you can come and help support me, that would be amazing, and just wear a splash of green.
And we arrived at the court to an absolute sea of green. The concrete was covered with human bodies who were there to support me and give me a hug. And it was the nicest feeling I've had. Because none of Mum's sisters came. We only had one of her friends come, Catherine Greenwood, who's one of Mum's really good friends from her Sussex similar days, and Mum taught her daughter Sally. Her name is Sally as well, so her and her daughter came. But outside of that, it was
just people. The people came and the people helped me. And at the end of the day, this podcast has
actually been built on support of care of people. And I've always said people power was the power of the people who actually get us through and get the information, because people know stuff and it might be just the smallest little inkling of information, but it actually can follow through to huge things and that's what's really projected us onto this journey, and the inquest ended, but it didn't end for Joanie and I, but I said to her there's still more to do, and she agreed to help
me continue where we are today. So what I wanted to share with everybody was the journey after the findings, because for me, being told my mum was deceased was not a surprise to me, but it meant that I could do things and propel the story and the investigation further. I then had a death certificate, something I haven't had for twenty six years. And there's more to do, There's
more to look at. There's lots of things that weren't done at the inquest, Like we were asking questions and wanting more information and we were getting told the inquest is about two things, Sally. The inquest is is your mum dead or alive? And did the police do their job? They were the two points about the inquest. It had nothing to do with anybody else, any other person. It was just about those two elements, So anything else really was null and void as far as the coroner was concerned.
Her job was to determine those two things, and she determined that my mum had died. On or around the fifteenth of October nineteen ninety seven, when the eighty thousand
dollars was withdrawn on the second count. She determined that the failure by New South Wales Police to do their job properly between nineteen ninety seven and twenty nineteen was the main reason that my mum is still missing today, and had they followed procedure properly and had followed the Commissioner's handbook as to how you deal with and handle a missing person's case, my mum would potentially have been found