by Megan Norris
2
THE SEARCH BEGINS
Day 1: Tuesday, 2 March
It is an incredible sensation to wake in the morning and realise that life may never be the same again. I wonder, now, why we even went to bed, but there was always the hope that Rachel would arrive at her dance school, apologetic and having made whatever money it was, with her new shoes in hand.
Now I face a dilemma. How honest should I be in telling this story? I say this in fear of upsetting people; in fear of upsetting police. But my account of events will not have its full impact unless I share the two struggles we first faced.
Our anger grew during Rachel’s disappearance to a point of total frustration. Not only did we and our family and friends struggle with the grief of Rachel’s disappearance but we also struggled with convincing the police that we felt Rachel was really in trouble. Into the second week, Lauren, an old school friend of Rachel’s, rang: ‘Elizabeth, you know she’s not capable of running away. Don’t stop looking for her.’
I look at Rachel’s compelling green eyes, staring at me from her photograph, and sense her spirit saying, ‘Come on, Mum, tell it all. I am with you.’
We took the girls to school on Tuesday morning, telling them not to worry. What else could we say?
At the Box Hill police station, the officer on duty at the desk did not know what we were talking about when, photographs in hand, we made our third contact with police. He explained that their shifts had recently changed but said he’d look for the report.
After failing to find it he went to a side room from where another police officer came out. Mike recognised him as the sergeant who had taken the report. The sergeant immediately went and lifted the report from a hook on the back wall. I couldn’t help thinking that they had taken the report last night and hung it up on the hook, without further action. But, they said, police cars in the area would have been told to look out for a girl answering Rachel’s description.
We left the photographs with the policeman. They were confident she would turn up of her own accord, that Rachel would be safe.
Rachel had not had breakfast at Kylee’s, nor had she arrived at her dance school this morning. But then we really didn’t think she would have because everything was feeling so horribly wrong.
We spent the rest of the morning discussing Rachel’s disappearance with dance students and teachers. Nobody had noticed anything odd about Rachel’s demeanour on Monday. She had been positive all day and her usual smiley self, although she’d had lunch on her own as her classmates were rehearsing for something connected to the Moomba festival or the Grand Prix.
Manni was alarmed that Rachel had not phoned as promised the night before. They had rung each other every night for the last ten months, much to the frustration of their parents. They saw each other every day and were so happy together and so deeply in love it did in all honesty concern me a little. I thought, if ever one of them left the other, there would be so many pieces to pick up.
Mike and I used to say that if she had to have a boyfriend at fifteen then she could not have made a better choice. My mother later said in her Victim Impact Statement, ‘… Rachel had visited me along with her parents and Emmanuel Carella a few days before she was so cruelly taken from us. He was her very first love, and Rachel adored him. As she was saying goodbye to me, she suddenly flung her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “Nan, don’t you think Manni is wonderful? Wouldn’t you love him in our family?” I can still feel the warmth of that hug and the delight in her, and as they drove away and I waved to her until they were out of sight, I thought, “Dear Rachel, may the magic last for a very long time.” ’
I went with Manni into the shoe shop in Swan Street to confirm what Rachel had said about buying some shoes, not for myself but because I knew the police would want confirmation. I went with notepad and pen in hand.
The shopkeeper remembered Rachel and thought she was a lovely girl. She was often in looking at shoes, and yes, she had asked the lady to put the shoes to one side. Rachel had been very excited. The shopkeeper repeated almost word for word what Manni had said. It was then that Manni recalled that Rachel had referred to an old female friend. ‘It was nothing immoral because she was going with an old female friend.’
Old female friend? A friend from primary or secondary school? A friend from the Baptist or Anglican church youth groups? Or from a previous dance school? Or was she referring to an older female friend, a woman? It was an expression we could not associate with Rachel. Old girlfriend, yes, but ‘female’? This sounded like the description of an older woman.
So then, our Rachel had never intended to catch the tram home on Monday night. She had planned to go somewhere with someone who was going to provide clothing and pay her a lot of money. Perhaps she’d thought we’d understand and praise her for her initiative. Or perhaps – and this thought wasn’t very appealing to us – perhaps she didn’t care that we would be worried. But I think not. Perhaps she’d been told by this someone, on meeting her later in the day, that her parents had been contacted during the day. Perhaps Rachel thought we knew where she was going and that it had been arranged for us to pick her up later.
A lot of money. To some, one would imagine thousands of dollars. To Rachel? She was planning to buy shoes, and it was also my fortieth birthday later that week. Mike remembered that he’d said to her not to forget it was Mum’s birthday and she had said she remembered.
We seemed to live from pay packet to pay packet and with dance fees there never seemed enough for luxuries. Rachel was on a strict budget and I was always going on about part-time work. I told her she could have money for tram fares and coffee and take a packed lunch each day. Any extras she would need to find the money for. This didn’t of course include clothing and everyday essentials. She had placed herself in an adult world and I believed we were doing the right thing by making her aware of where her own responsibilities were. I regret not paying her a weekly allowance. But the morning of the day she disappeared I had given her $10 – to buy two $5 tops.
Mike and I started a shop-to-shop walk with Rachel’s photographs, starting with Bridge Road because this was the direction Manni had last seen Rachel walking in.
‘Excuse me, could you please help us for a moment? Our fifteen-year-old daughter went missing last night. She was last seen at 5.45 near the corner of Swan and Church Streets, walking in the direction of Bridge Road.’ We would show them Rachel’s photo. A number of shopkeepers remembered seeing Rachel from time to time but not the previous day. They all sounded very much concerned for her welfare.
It began to sound like a stuck record after a while. Mike walked down one side of the street and I down the other.
There were some shop assistants in two girls’ clothing shops who thought they may have seen her. One at Pretty Girls thought she had bought two $5 tops from their sales bin at the front entrance. She said Rachel had been by herself.
Mike met me on the street. ‘I think I have something. Come and listen to this lady.’
This lady, a middle-aged shop manager, told us in detail about a report in Monday’s Age concerning a man who had been released from jail. He had been in prison for coercing under-age girls into an illegal brothel he supposedly owned in Fitzroy. The lady raised enough suspicion to suggest it may have been possible for Rachel, particularly with the tale Rachel had shared, to have been grabbed for this market.
We thanked her, left hurriedly and managed to purchase a copy of yesterday’s Age. We returned to Rachel’s dance school, expressing concerns about the article.
It was the middle of the afternoon and Rachel had made no contact with Manni, home or the dance school. I remember thinking, this can’t be happening. Where was Rachel? Had she been grabbed like the lady thought? Was she scared? Somewhere in Melbourne our Rachel was in trouble.
3
MISSING PERSON
We climbed the few steps into the Richmond police station, an old and dusty-looking fortress, with the distu
rbing newspaper article in hand. We turned into the area in front of the dark wooden counter, a room I soon discovered was called the watchhouse. We sat and waited in the cramped space with just enough leg-room between a row of three or four chairs and the counter. There was a National Missing Persons poster plastered to the wall showing the faces of several missing people. I thought, our daughter is a missing person. Incredulous.
We explained our story again and our fears in connection to the article. Rachel’s dance school had contacted the Richmond police earlier to express their own fear but the police officer was unaware of this contact. The police officer asked us what we would like him to do. We were beginning to think we should have reported Rachel missing at the Richmond police station instead and shared this with him. He explained he couldn’t really do much as it needed to be investigated by the policeman it was first reported to, the sergeant at Box Hill. He also felt our fears relating to the newspaper article were unwarranted. Logically thinking, I believe his assumption was justified, but we were the parents of a newly missing person, with no leads.
The officer rang the Box Hill police to discover the sergeant’s name and said we must contact him. I thought how useful it would have been if we had been made aware that the police officer we made the initial report to was also the same officer responsible for the continuing investigation. It isn’t something one thinks of when, as distressed parents of a missing child, you go to the police. It seemed natural, now that we believed Rachel did not catch the tram to Wattle Park, that the investigation should be handled by the Richmond police.
We left the station feeling confused and at a loss to understand the apparent lack of co-operation on behalf of the police, and continued our shop-walking in Swan Street. Mike was told a disturbing story by a young woman who worked at the dress shop beneath the dance school. She recognised Rachel as one of the dance students who browsed in the store.
She told Mike a woman who had been in the shop on Monday had followed her onto the same carriage at Richmond railway station in the evening. She hadn’t thought too much of this until the woman followed her off at her home station, Elsternwick, a bustling and cosmopolitan suburb within easy distance of the city and the bay. After walking behind her for a short while the woman spoke to her. She told her she was a very pretty girl and offered her a chance to make a lot of money by working at the Daily Planet. The girl refused but thought there may be a possible connection because of the story Rachel had told Manni – about clothing being provided and making a lot of money. She gave Mike a description of the woman: about twenty-eight, large and with shoulder-length blonde hair. She was wearing a pink top.
Mike shared this story with me and concerned dance teachers. ‘Isn’t the Daily Planet a newspaper?’ I quizzed.
There was spontaneous laughter from the dance school teachers. ‘No,’ it was a legal brothel in Elsternwick.
Could Rachel have been approached by the same lady when she’d been having lunch by herself? Could Rachel have thought the Daily Planet was a newspaper too, or perhaps a magazine? Could Rachel have thought she was being offered a modelling job? After all, she had just modelled for the March edition of Women’s Fitness Australia, through the modelling agency where Rachel had completed a full-time course the previous year.
I was urged to ring the Daily Planet. The people I spoke to were appalled by the story, assuring me they did not operate this way. It wouldn’t be worth their while. They thanked me for bringing it to their attention and suggested I ring the Victorian Prostitutes Collective and gave me their phone number.
‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Rachel would have a fit if she knew we were even considering she was silly enough to get caught out with such a tall story.’
‘Why not?’ answered one of the teachers. ‘You thought the Daily Planet was a newspaper.’
I rang the Prostitutes Collective, not even sure what I was going to ask. I was regretting that Mike had spoken to the lady in Bridge Road who had pointed out the original Age newspaper article. Coupled with the story of the Daily Planet, everything was beginning to sound just a bit too serious.
The lady I spoke to at the Prostitutes Collective could understand our concerns. She suggested that if Rachel had not been found by the end of the week then we should call back with a full description of her. They had ‘staff’ who went around the streets looking after the welfare of their sex workers. They’d be happy to keep an eye out for Rachel. I thanked her for her concern and said goodbye.
We spoke to tram travellers and pedestrians from about 5.30 p.m. in the vicinity of the dance school, showing them Rachel’s photograph in the hope someone remembered something. We stayed hovering at the intersection of Church and Swan Streets, assuming that if Rachel had caught the tram it would have been from this corner.
No one saw anything. The ‘nothing’ people saw confirmed Rachel never caught the tram as expected. A young girl who happened to be a student at the dance school remembered how odd it seemed that Rachel was not on the tram. They had recently begun to sit together until Camberwell.
I went into the Café Montague beneath the dance school and the owner asked me to wait a moment. He said he knew Rachel and Manni as they often came in with a group of students to drink coffee or occasionally, when they were out of cash, jugs of ice-cold water. He was really concerned for Rachel because, like everybody else who knew her, this disappearance felt terribly wrong. He gave me the mobile number of a mate of his, Neil Paterson, who happened to be a detective in the Missing Persons Unit.
I went out onto the street holding this number in my hand. Missing person, missing person. Yes, ‘missing person’ because she was missing. I couldn’t reach Neil Paterson so I left a message on his answering service.
Another shop-owner remembered seeing Rachel on occasion and offered to make a poster. She scanned Rachel’s photograph onto her computer and made the first poster for us. We photocopied these at the dance school and then Mike and I, Manni’s family and dance students started putting them up in Richmond and the city.
We continued to search the back streets of Richmond in a systematic order.
On the way home we called into the Camberwell tram depot because two tram inspectors we’d spoken to earlier had suggested we drop a poster off. Perhaps a driver had noticed her. We did this, but the person in charge was not so co-operative, saying that drivers were too busy to notice who gets on and off their trams. After gentle persuasion he did take a few posters and said he’d put them up in the canteen. We left, feeling like scolded children.
When we arrived home I rang my father Ivan Southall and my stepmother Susan, and told them Rachel was missing. They could come up with no answers either. But we discovered that while we had begun our first day’s search, they had been hanging an exhibition of Susan’s at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Collingwood, close to the centre of Melbourne.
I had forgotten all about this. Rachel was at the heart of the whole exhibition. Susan, a contemporary artist, assembles photographic images within a collage to create her works, and Rachel was her muse. Susan paid her a modelling fee for each sitting. Rachel had, for years, been portrayed in Susan’s artwork as Viking slave girls, sea captains’ wives, dancing maidens, heroines and sacrificial ‘lambs’, the Madonna and a host of angels from ancient, medieval and Renaissance literature.
This exhibition was on show throughout March. Susan was worried someone in the Richmond area may have recognised Rachel from the thousands of pamphlets distributed beforehand across Melbourne, possibly attracting unwanted attention. I didn’t think this was likely but was prepared, as the week advanced, to accept all possibilities. So Dad and Susan hung a sign telling the public that the girl featured in the artwork had since disappeared and that if anyone had seen her they should inform the assistant at the desk.
Later that evening, at home, we rang the numbers given in several ‘dancing girls required’ ads in the local papers, on the off-chance that Rachel had naively rung
them for part-time work. But applicants needed to be eighteen plus, as we had already assumed. And they had to provide proof of age, so it was highly unlikely she would have even been interviewed. Nevertheless, they did inquire for us, to see if there were any new girls with the name of Rachel. No Rachel.
We went through Rachel’s address books and school diaries looking for names of old friends. When she was thirteen I sheepishly read some extracts of her diary. This was the age she discovered she was a teenager with developing boobs. It was the age when she and her girlfriends would sit in huddles giggling about boys. I didn’t find anything I wouldn’t have expected, apart from a few swear words, and I’d felt so bad that I never did it again. My own mother said she once read my elder sister’s diary when my sister had been sixteen and vowed she’d never do it again.
Well, now I was doing it again. I still felt as though we were invading her privacy. We began to make a search of Rachel’s room, finally going to bed about 4 a.m.
For the second night in a row Rachel had failed to contact Manni.
Since her birth we had known where she slept every one of those nights, for fifteen and a half years. This night our daughter was sleeping elsewhere.
4
MAKING SOMEONE NOTICE
Day 2: Wednesday, 3 March
We didn’t sleep on Tuesday night. It seemed disrespectful to sleep. It would be dishonouring our daughter to sleep. I was already feeling guilty for sleeping some of Monday night.
How could we sleep when Rachel might have been huddled somewhere so scared she perhaps feared for her life? Was she crying? Had she been raped? Had she been grabbed off Church Street and housed in an illegal brothel? Had some sleaze been watching her on the corner of Church and Swan Streets, while she cuddled Manni on the bench? Sometimes I would drive round the corner to see Rachel and Manni kissing their farewells and think, don’t they realise someone could be watching? Had this sleaze dragged her off the streets, fondled his way through our daughter’s clothing, stripped and raped her? Had he beaten and killed her, dumping her body somewhere in the bush? Was she dead?