Jan, a country girl who had started Irish dancing as a child, had been a dancer on Channel Nine in the network’s heyday as the home of variety and Bandstand. Now her showbusiness dreams were invested completely in her younger daughter.
But none of that mattered as the clock crawled past noon on Sunday 6 November 1994. All Jan Balmain knew was that Revelle had missed the train, that she wasn’t on the next train either and that she didn’t know why. It wasn’t just a casual day trip: Revelle had specifically arranged to visit her parents for a farewell lunch; next day she was going to Brisbane to rehearse dance routines for two weeks before heading on the Japan tour.
Jan went home and called anyone she could think of who might know Revelle’s movements, including her older daughter Suellen. No one knew anything. Then she called all the hospitals in Sydney. By late afternoon she could feel the panic rising. She went to the local police station at Nelson Bay around 6pm and insisted that a reluctant constable file a Missing Persons report.
Police are used to young people going ‘missing’ and turning up within hours or days, looking sheepish and ducking questions about a one-night stand, a party that got out of hand, a spontaneous trip to the beach or even just a forgotten appointment. The trouble is, of course, that a thousand happy endings for those who were never really missing hide the few who are.
This is the inbuilt advantage a random killer has: if nothing suspicious is witnessed, then the absence of a young adult is not taken seriously by the authorities for days. And, as any homicide detective can tell you, it means that in a handful of sinister cases, the 24-hour ‘golden’ period for an investigator is lost.
In those precious hours and days, the crime scene is destroyed or compromised, witnesses evaporate and their memories fade. Even relevant security footage can be lost. No one can tell which case is going to have a bad ending – but a mother’s instincts run high. In this case, Jan Balmain insisted that the Missing Persons report be forwarded to Sydney. She was right.
Next day, Monday, a policeman called Grahame Mulherin called her from Rose Bay police station in Sydney, his first day there after transferring from the South Coast. What the family did not know then – but has been haunted by since – is that some of Revelle’s personal property, apparently scattered from her handbag, had already been handed in to police on the previous day, Sunday.
A resident had found Revelle’s gear scattered in Ainslie Street, Kingsford on Sunday and had done the right thing, turning it in to Maroubra police. A Constable Alderman handed the gear – a cork-heeled platform shoe, cane makeup bag, diary and keys – to Mulherin, along with some interesting information.
For the police, the fact Revelle’s property had been scattered around Kingsford would soon take on some significance. But at first sight it might have seemed that the gear had been tossed away by a handbag thief. Not that any swifter action could have helped Revelle – but it might have led to her killer in time to make a case. Instead, the trail went cold.
What Constable Alderman had uncovered – and told Mulherin – was background about the missing girl that would shock her worried parents. Background that provided the best clue as to what had happened because it pinpointed the last person to see her alive.
Unbeknown to Jan and Revelle’s father, Ivor Balmain, Revelle had taken up working for two escort agencies. In a story as old as showbusiness, the girl waiting for her big break was cashing in on her best asset, her looks, to bankroll her tilt at the glittering life that hung just out of reach.
There are always people on the shady side of the showbiz street waiting to exploit the girls (or boys) who choose the fake and desperate ‘glamour’ of escort work instead of facing the grind of lowly-paid jobs that would reveal the failure of their dreams. It is a way to make fast money to subsidise fast lifestyles. But it’s a dangerous bargain, for all the justifications made for it.
What the efficient Constable Alderman had found out from Revelle’s flatmate Geoff Spears (and relayed to Mulherin) was that Revelle not only worked for a model agency run by a Kathryn Margaret Hazel-Dawson (known as Lilli) but she worked under an alias for an escort agency called Select Companions, owned by Zoran and Jane Stanojevic. She had also worked for another agency, VIP, under a different alias.
On Monday 7 November, the investigation went off course. It was nobody’s fault, really – more a case of misplaced confidence in an honest mistake. An acquaintance of Revelle’s, a model called Sonya Lynch, assured the police that Revelle had called Lilli’s apartment on Sunday morning and that she (Sonya) had answered the telephone and spoken to her.
Lynch admitted she had been half asleep at the time but insisted that she knew Revelle’s voice well and that she was positive it was Revelle on the line. She was not the first witness to get a simple thing terribly wrong.
Faced with this ‘evidence’, Mulherin was understandably reluctant to assume the worst: that is, that Revelle had been murdered or was even a genuine missing person. The Balmains, and Revelle’s older sister Suellen Simpson, were sick with fear but willing to grasp at the hope the supposed Sunday morning telephone call offered. It didn’t last. The silence was too much. Every passing hour made it more sinister.
Later that Monday, Mulherin and a detective called Mick Gerondis spoke to local residents who had found Revelle’s belongings in Kingsford. Meanwhile, there were other developments in that suburb. The police soon established that Revelle’s last known movements were to meet an escort client at his house in McNair Avenue, Kingsford, on Saturday afternoon. The client’s name was Gavin Owen Samer, and the police asked the escort agency to tell him to get in touch with them, which he did.
Mulherin asked Samer to come to Maroubra Police Station, which he did at 5.20pm on Monday, accompanied by his then girlfriend Michelle Oswald-Sealy. Samer, then aged 25, wore a zip-necked shirt, partially open. Mulherin noticed scratch marks on his neck, under his jaw and below his ear, and was curious about how he had got them. Asked about these, Samer said he didn’t know, and his friend Michelle didn’t know either. This wasn’t surprising, as she had been away all weekend in Brisbane without Samer, who had celebrated his Saturday night home alone by pawning her clarinet for $250 to treat himself to some paid sex. He had called the Select escort agency and as bad luck had it, Revelle Balmain had taken the job.
The receptionist at Select, Lisa Mancini, knew Revelle had arrived at Samer’s house at 3.50pm because, as part of the agency routine, Revelle had called in to say so. Around 6pm Revelle rang in again to say she was leaving Samer’s house – but in fact she must have stayed until at least 7.15pm, when she called her friend Kate. The extra time she spent with Samer would suggest she had been offered extra money she didn’t want to share with the agency. The call to Kate was the last time anyone had heard from her.
All of this made the police interested in Samer’s demeanour, his alibi – and the scratches on his skin. Mulherin asked Samer to take off his shirt. There were more scratch marks on his ribs. He told the sceptical Mulherin he must have got them surfing. When Mulherin asked him about what appeared to be bite marks on his fingers, Samer said he’d hurt them surfing, too, or maybe cut them on string at work. Mulherin wasn’t convinced and arranged to have forensic photographs taken of the scratches.
Mulherin had a look at Samer’s car but did not find anything suspicious. It had been, of course, 48 hours since Revelle had been heard of, which was plenty of time for potential evidence to disappear. Mulherin took Samer back to his house to see the chequebook that Samer said he’d used to pay the girl. But when they got to the house Samer could not find the chequebook. He could not explain why it had disappeared. The garbage had already been emptied that Monday morning, which meant potential evidence might have been lost. It was becoming clear the investigation was a day behind – and a day is a long time in a suspected homicide. Which, by next day, it was.
Asked his version of events, Samer insisted that he had paid Revelle the agreed amount, plus a tip for staying
extra time. Then, he said, he had driven her to a local pub, the Red Tomato Inn. He said that after she had gone into the hotel, he had gone into the bottle shop and bought some Strongbow cider and cigarettes.
Mulherin went to the Red Tomato Inn and showed a photograph of the missing girl to the manager, a Michael Eivers, who said something like: ‘Have a look at the people that get in this place – if a girl like that walked in here, the whole joint would stop.’ She had not been there, he said. No member of staff or patron could recall seeing her. And no one could remember a man matching Samer’s description buying Strongbow cider and cigarettes – a point that would be proven in the Coroners Court four years later when the bottle shop attendant went through every transaction on the cash register roll for that Saturday night. No one had bought Strongbow cider and cigarettes that night, which meant Samer was lying or suffering delusions.
Next day, Tuesday, detectives spoke to Revelle’s close friend Kate Brentnall and took a statement from her about the fact Revelle had called her from Samer’s at 7.15 on the Saturday night to arrange to meet Kate around 8pm … but had never turned up. It was looking ominously likely that she had been killed soon after making the call – 22 hours before her mother raised the alarm with the police.
By now Revelle had been missing more than 60 hours and everyone was taking it seriously. When crime-scene police took photographs of Samer’s scratches at the Sydney Police Centre, he knew he was a suspect. He took a lawyer with him.
Two homicide detectives joined the inquiry. They checked that Revelle’s pre-booked air ticket from Sydney to Brisbane had not been collected. Any faint chance that she was ‘hiding’ was gone. The detectives’ inquiries that week began the painstaking process of ruling out suspects to isolate the most likely candidate. Samer’s girlfriend, Michelle, voted with her feet – moving out of his house with police present in case of any unpleasant scenes. It is not known whether she ever got back her pawned clarinet.
Detectives spoke to Revelle’s boyfriend Piers Fisher-Pollard and another friend, Zoe Brock, and were satisfied they were hiding nothing. The same with her flatmate at Bellevue Hill, and so on through a list of friends and acquaintances.
By Friday 11 November, six days after the disappearance, four more homicide detectives were put on the case and the police force went public. They made a televised appeal for information and more people came forward with more of Revelle’s belongings found in the streets near Samer’s house, as if thrown from a car. A search and doorknock of two Kingsford streets that weekend produced more items – and some information.
One woman told police that she had been in her front garden a week earlier – on the Saturday night when Revelle had gone missing – and had noticed something odd. She had heard something metallic clink as it hit the bitumen near a dark-coloured station wagon which left the scene shortly afterwards. Curious, she had taken a look and found a set of keys, which she’d handed in. It turned out that they were Revelle’s.
Why would someone in a car deliberately throw keys away? The detectives thought they knew the answer to that question.
They also knew what the family feared but could not yet admit: they were looking for a body. But they didn’t know where to start. Fifteen years later, they still didn’t.
ON DAY nine, Monday 14 November, it seemed that someone started running interference. Agnes Situe of 3D World Publishing answered a call from a woman who identified herself as ‘Revelle Balmain’ and asked to speak to Alex Smart – editor of Oyster magazine. Smart was unavailable and the so-called ‘Revelle’ said she would call back, but never did.
It was never established who the caller really was but police were sure it wasn’t Revelle. If it wasn’t a stray crank call made by a lunatic it was conceivably someone conniving with a killer or abductor. Oddly, it had to be someone who knew about the Oyster magazine shoot, as few would have. Someone still out there may be wondering if their information can be turned into $250,000 reward.
Meanwhile, another mystery was laid to rest – the real identity of the caller who’d sounded like Revelle when she had spoken to Sonya Lynch the first Sunday morning after the disappearance. It turned out to be Sarah Pussell, another model who worked for Revelle’s boss and friend, Lilli, at the Satellite Modelling Agency. By accident, Sonya Lynch had skewed the investigation at the most vital stage, persuading the police that Revelle was not really missing and giving the killer an extra day to fudge his tracks.
As police and the Balmain family pieced together information from Revelle’s circle of acquaintances, they found out more about her secret life. One model told them Revelle had spoken of meeting a fabulously wealthy Arab sheik, a prominent racehorse owner who had taken her out several times – once to an Arabian horse show – and had wanted her to visit the Middle East with him.
At first the family grasped at this: was it possible the sheik might have whisked Revelle overseas? But the police established the sheik had not been in Australia for months before the disappearance and ruled him out.
Another client was a wealthy Asian businessman called ‘Michael’ who had wanted Revelle to go to Thailand with him. But he and several other clients were all ruled out.
From day two, investigators had one prime suspect – and nothing would happen to change that. The family did not know what to think. It would take years, says Revelle’s sister Suellen Simpson, to accept that she was not only gone – but dead. To accept her death was to give up hope, and in the absence of a body, or conclusive proof, they did not want to do that. Suellen and her parents were tortured by the possibility that people associated with escort agencies might have been involved.
‘She had a lot of nasty people around her,’ Suellen told the authors. She was unimpressed with Zoran Stanojevic, proprietor of Select Escorts. And she found out that Revelle had fallen out with the proprietor of VIP Escorts – the one who had introduced her to at least one super-rich Middle Eastern client – because he had demanded a bigger share of the fees she charged clients.
Early in the New Year, police spoke to Gavin Samer’s relatives, who told them Gavin was argumentative and was known to have been involved in domestic violence. Around the same time, on 25 January 1995, listening devices were put into Samer’s house until warrants expired on 10 February. There were no warrants to monitor anyone else.
IT took four years to get the Balmain case to the Coroners’ Court, by which time the police, media and the family had exhausted every angle. Photographs and stories had been run on the anniversaries, and the family had distributed posters.
Gavin Samer’s family, prosperous and respectable Jewish people in the ‘rag trade’ in Surry Hills, had done their best to look after their prodigal son’s legal interests. The surf-chasing, hard-drinking and marijuana-smoking Gavin was a black sheep compared with his hard-working brother and sister, and the parents had employed him in the family business transporting fabric around in the Holden Commodore station wagon that doubled as his surf wagon.
The family invested in the best lawyers they could afford to represent Gavin. And, according to Sydney police sources, they got what they paid for: a skilled advocate who – four years after the event – was able to suggest enough alternative scenarios to win the main suspect the benefit of the doubt.
The lawyer was able to point to the proprietors of both escort agencies, hint at the possible guilt of other escort clients, and throw a little mud at a circle of friends that Revelle’s own mother described in the witness box as ‘evil’ people who had led her daughter astray.
The main alternative scenario put to the inquiry was that Revelle might have fallen foul of the owner of Select Companions. The agency owner, Zoran Stanojevic, provided contradictory evidence about his whereabouts on the day Revelle disappeared, but consistently denied he had anything to do with it.
He would technically remain as the second suspect. But, to be fair, given that police did not seek evidence of his alibi until years after the event, it was little wonder he wa
s unsure of his movements on a given day. The fact that detectives had not checked the alibis of Stanojevic or another escort agency proprietor in 1994 was not so much due to laziness as their belief that they already had a better suspect.
The coroner heard a claim that a former client of Revelle Balmain, a wealthy commodities trader called Mark Coulton, had told a friend she had been murdered by the agency for ‘moonlighting’ – doing extra sex work for cash on the side.
‘She’s ten-foot under and no-one will find her body,’ Coulton was alleged to have told a friend but he strongly denied under oath ever making the statement. It was all grist to the mill for the lawyer that Gavin Samer’s parents reputedly spent their life savings to hire. A little bit of mud clouds a lot of water.
Jan Balmain’s evidence was the outpouring of a twice-broken heart. She told how her daughter, born at Manly in 1972, had been cherished. She had gone to Locket Valley, an Anglican primary school at Bayview, then to St Lukes at Dee Why before taking up the ballet scholarship in England at sixteen.
And she revealed another family tragedy – a far more private one – that could have had a bearing on the behaviour of her doomed and beautiful daughter. When Revelle was four, she had found her fifteen-month old brother Matthew drowned in the family swimming pool.
‘And I don’t think she ever really fully recovered from that,’ Jan Balmain said to a hushed court room. ‘It was a very big impact on her life and I know it took us many years to deal with it and we never really knew with Revelle how she dealt with that.’
In court, says Revelle’s sister Suellen, Gavin Samer cut a strange figure ‘frozen in his seat, glaring at a fixed spot at the back of the room’ as if he didn’t trust himself to make eye contact with the Balmain family. Or had been instructed not to.
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