by Justine Ford
The next phone call Kath received was from her boss, asking if she could work another shift the next day. Kath was very keen to help out.
At 7.16pm, Kath’s friend Mandy phoned and the women spoke until 7.26pm. Kath mentioned she was home alone and was watching a movie called Coyote Ugly. They also made plans to catch up on Tuesday.
‘That was the last known contact anyone had with Kath,’ Damian explains.
At 7.27pm, however, Kath’s mobile contacted John Bergamin’s, but was diverted to his messagebank.
Then at 8.44pm, John’s mobile received another call from a pay phone about 400 metres from Kath’s place, near his mum’s house.
‘There was no further phone activity for the rest of the evening or during the time she disappeared,’ Damian says.
•••
When Kath’s housemate Sandie returned home at about 11.15pm that night, she realised Kath wasn’t there. It wasn’t like Kath to go out late at night without telling her.
Sandie’s boyfriend, Pat, also arrived, and parked his car in the garage. He noticed that the porch light was on, as well as the lamp in the lounge room and the desk lamp in Kath’s bedroom.
‘Sandie observed that the back door was locked, and that there was half a bowl of vegetable soup in the sink and half a cup of tea on the mantelpiece,’ Damian reports. ‘She also noticed Kath’s Nike runners were at the foot of her bed and they both observed that Kath’s handbag was under Sandie’s doona.’
It was all rather strange but, figuring there must be a rational explanation, Sandie and Pat retired for the evening.
When they awoke the next morning, however, they realised Kath had not come home. Sandie had to go work but when she returned at about three o’clock, she saw that her friend had still not come back and that nothing in the house had been touched. By now, Sandie was getting suspicious and decided to have another poke around.
‘Sandie observed that there was no clothing of Kath’s missing except what she’d been wearing the previous afternoon,’ Damian says. ‘She also observed a red-coloured Nike anklet sports sock in the hallway. It was one of the same socks Kath had been wearing the day before.
‘She then noticed Kath’s electric blanket was on. That was strange too because Kath had a habit of pulling it out before she went to bed.’
Continuing her nervous search, Sandie then discovered Kath’s mobile in her desk drawer and noticed a number of missed calls.
Surely Kath would return home soon…wouldn’t she?
•••
The same day, Monday 19 August, there was a fire. It was in the shed at the Bergamins’ property and the heat was so searing it destroyed a car.
In a statement to police, John said he’d been using an oxyacetylene torch to cut up lengths of steel and had directed an employee to watch for sparks in order to prevent or extinguish spot fires.
After finishing the job, which he’d done near the shed, John and his employee drove about 500 metres to the bottom paddock where they started pruning vines.
Later, while they were still working, John said he noticed some smoke and thought it might be coming from his place. He then drove to the foot of the hill, where he heard Steven yelling out, so he drove up to the shed where he found a fire ablaze.
‘The alarm was raised and the CFA was called,’ Damian says.
The car, as it happened, was a Toyota Camry sedan, and while Steven had been driving it of late, it belonged to Kath.
•••
The same morning, just after ten, Sandie reported Kath missing. ‘The Homicide Squad and the Missing Persons Unit were called in four days after Kath went missing to assist in the control of the investigation,’ Damian explains.
They searched the property at Cheshunt and spoke to all of Kath’s family, friends and associates, including her employer, doctor and psychiatrist. They pieced together a picture of a woman who had begun to enjoy life – not someone who planned to end it or disappear.
Investigators examined every inch of Kath’s burnt-out car, and an arson chemist, Karen Ireland, assessed the temperature conditions in the area to determine whether a fire could self-ignite from oxy work. ‘Her initial view,’ according to the coroner’s report, ‘was that it was highly unlikely that sparks from the oxyacetylene work…started the fire.
‘At the conclusion of her evidence, however, Ms Ireland felt unable to say that the fire was deliberately lit or to exclude the possibility that the fire had been accidentally started because of sparks from the work referred to above.’
‘On 28 August, the crime scene investigators did a further investigation of Kath’s house and silver-coloured duct tape was located on the ground and there were quantities of red fibre on it. Kath had had small red socks on the night she disappeared,’ Damian reveals. ‘A small piece of tape was also found on a cushion in the lounge room and we found it was the same type of tape.
‘DNA testing was done on the sock and the tape but it was inconclusive. We are of the belief, however, that the tape was used to tie Kath up.’
Police also learned that between 6.30pm and 7.30pm on the night she disappeared, a neighbour saw an unknown man speaking to Kath through her screen door. The neighbour also saw a car out the front, similar to the one Kath owned. The neighbour noticed that the passenger-side door was open and that there were two people inside the car, whom she assumed were young because there was a P-plate on the rear windscreen and loud music coming from the car.
Unfortunately, neither the man at the door nor the occupants of the car have ever been identified and no-one knows what Kath’s mystery visitor said to her that night because she hasn’t been seen since.
With no firm evidence of Kath’s whereabouts by November 2002, police mounted a massive land and air search of the rugged bushland around Cheshunt and Docker, about 40 kilometres away. Homicide Squad detectives, the Air Wing, mounted police, the dog squad, Search and Rescue police and the SES were all involved. Sections of the Bergamins’ farm were even dug up, but to no avail.
With no sign of Kath locally, investigators conducted extensive national checks yet they were still unable to find her – dead or alive.
The investigation continued and on 24 March 2006, police drove to the Cheshunt farm where they arrested John Bergamin over Kath’s murder. The charge was dropped, however, due to lack of evidence.
Police were convinced that someone had murdered Kath, though, and a reward of up to $100,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer.
The investigators hoped they would get some of the answers they craved when approximately sixty witnesses were called to the coronial inquest, which began in 2007. The coroner excused both John Bergamin and his son Steven from giving evidence, though, ‘on the grounds that each should not be compelled to answer questions which may tend to incriminate himself’.
The decision disappointed Roger Russell, who was deeply upset by the way his sister was portrayed during the court proceedings. ‘The lawyers tried to slander my sister terribly,’ he says. ‘They just made her out to be a flaky person who wanted to commit suicide.’
After a stop-start proceeding, Coroner Peter White found, in January 2008, that Kath Bergamin had been taken from her home between 7.26pm and 11.15pm on 18 August 2002. There was insufficient evidence for him to be able to name her abductor.
‘Thereafter,’ the coroner continued, ‘at an unknown time and at an unknown place, she was unlawfully killed following which a person or persons who were seeking by their acts to avoid detection, secretly deposited her remains in a still unknown location.’
While acknowledging the problems in John and Kath Bergamin’s relationship, as well as John’s ‘spying’ and ‘campaign to put further pressure upon her’, the coroner was unable to say at whose hands Kath met her untimely end, only that she had had ‘no wish either to leave Wangaratta or intention to end her own life’.
Interestingly, Coroner White found, on the evidence before him, that
the fire in the shed had been ‘deliberately lit and aided by the use of an accelerant’. He was similarly satisfied ‘that John Bergamin was a party to the starting of that fire and that he left the scene to return to the lower paddock intending to distance himself from that action.’ The coroner also drew the inference that the Bergamins’ son, Steven, ‘was aware that a person or persons including his father, intended to destroy this vehicle and that he condoned that act.’
As for why the car ended up in flames, the coroner couldn’t say. ‘There is insufficient evidence before this inquest to establish, to a reasonable satisfaction, the motive for the deliberate demolition of the Toyota Camry in question.’ He went on to praise the investigators for their assistance, and encouraged them to keep trying to solve the mystery of Kath’s disappearance.
Phillip Dunn QC represented John Bergamin at the inquest and told assembled reporters that John was still hopeful of a result himself. ‘John Bergamin believes that there are people in Wangaratta who know a lot more about the disappearance of Kath than they’ve told the police and he wishes they’d come forward.
‘He believes strongly that he’s innocent and believes there are other people who know exactly what happened and they haven’t come forward for very good reason and he hopes the police keep digging.’
That’s just what Damian Jackson, a talented investigator who reached the rank of Detective Sergeant in his mid-thirties, intends on doing. ‘I still encourage people to contact us with information,’ he says. ‘It’s important we find out where Kath is for her family.
‘At the moment it is still a circumstantial case but we’ll keep trying to progress it from the inquest findings.’
Where Kath’s body lies might still be a mystery, but there is one thing about which Damian remains certain. ‘She’s met with foul play,’ he says. ‘There’s no doubt about it.’
Roger Russell knows that Damian is right and that he’ll never get his sister back. Not alive, anyway. ‘It’s made me a bit bitter but I try not to think about it because it makes me angry,’ he says.
Nevertheless, he’s full of praise for the detective who won’t let go, and believes that one day, whoever abducted and killed his little sister will have their day in court. ‘There’s a lot of lessons to be learnt from what happened to Kath,’ Roger says. ‘When you’re surrounded by people who aren’t too flash, bad things happen.’
Chapter 2
The Girl Who Would Be Famous
The street abduction of teenager Siriyakorn ‘Bung’ Siriboon
‘They said my karma’s from the last life…but what I did, I don’t know.’
Vanidda Pattison, Bung’s Mum
Teenagers run away every day. They always have and always will.
Some feel unhappy or unsafe at home, some are hiding from schoolyard bullies, some have mental health issues, while others are just plain rebellious.
Worryingly, teenage runaways make up an inordinately high proportion of missing persons cases across Australia, with more than half of the 35,000 people who are reported missing each year being teenage girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.
While most return or are found a short while later, a small percentage never come back and join the ranks of Australia’s long-term missing persons, and many of those, like Siriyakorn ‘Bung’ Siriboon, are most likely the victims of foul play.
Police maintain that Bung, who never made it to school one winter’s day in 2011, was no errant teenager…her life revolved around her family and she was not the kind of girl to run away.
And that, they say, is why she’s been so hard to find …
•••
Veer off the main road in the Melbourne suburb of Boronia, and you might as well have arrived in a country town.
At the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, Boronia is home to scores of grand old weatherboards, winding, native tree-lined streets, and more magpies than a Collingwood grand final.
In 2011, Boronia hit the headlines when a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, Siriyakorn Siriboon, known by her Thai nickname of ‘Bung’, disappeared from one of its semi-rural streets.
It came as a shock to her family and friends, who all say that Bung was a contented, stable teenager, who loved singing and dancing, and making her family laugh. ‘Every time she came back from school she’d say, “Where’s Dad? Where’s Dad?”’ Bung’s mother, Vanidda, recalls. ‘Then when she found him she’d say, “Dad! I want to be a superstar!”’
The man Bung called Dad was her stepfather, Fred Pattison, whom her mother married in 2004, when Bung was six. ‘Everyone who knows her loves her,’ Fred says. ‘She’s polite, she’s happy, she’s always joking around.
‘She’s always trying to help. At school, she always picks the outsider [to befriend]. She never really complains. She’s a good teenage girl.’
Fred Pattison speaks of his stepdaughter in the present tense as though she’ll walk in the door any moment, a dream that he and Vanidda hope will come true. But it’s been a while now, and every day that passes makes the chance of her returning home safe a little bit slimmer …
Bung’s family recalls how the day she disappeared, Thursday 2 June 2011, began like any other. As usual, Fred had arrived home from his nightshift job as an electrical fitter and Vanidda was cooking breakfast for Bung and her older sister, twenty-year-old Siriporn.
‘I’d started doing some banking or something on the computer when Bung said goodbye,’ Fred recalls. ‘Then she stopped and said, “See you Mum.”’
Vanidda and Fred are certain there was nothing troubling Bung before she left for school that morning. She was not a moody or secretive girl and left the house at about half past eight in her usual, cheerful spirits.
But somewhere on the 700 metre walk between their Elsie Street home and Boronia Heights College, Bung, dressed in her blue and white school uniform, disappeared.
‘When she didn’t show up to school that day a friend rang to remind her about a football thing on at school,’ Fred remembers. It surprised Fred and Vanidda to hear that Bung had missed school, not only because they’d seen her leave that morning, but also because she enjoyed her classes and never wagged.
By four-thirty, when Bung had still not arrived home, they felt for sure that something was wrong and reported her missing to local police.
Two nights later the media picked up on the teenager’s disappearance and ran stories about it on the evening news. Detective Senior Sergeant David Snare from the Victoria Police Homicide Squad was watching the bulletin on his couch when he saw one of the reports. The alarm bells sounded instantly. ‘I just looked at it and thought we’d better get involved,’ David says. ‘I just got a gut feeling.’
A good investigator knows never to underestimate the power of a gut feeling, so David Snare contacted Knox Criminal Investigation Unit to find out more about the case. He learned that Bung, who spoke conversational English, enjoyed a happy home life, was popular at school, and had a kind and friendly nature. While starting to notice boys, she didn’t have a boyfriend, so there was nothing to suggest she’d have taken off with a boy either.
Even at that early stage, what he’d learned about Bung was enough to tell David that his ‘gut feeling’ was on the money. ‘We were pretty satisfied she wasn’t just a runaway,’ he says.
But unfortunately, little is known about what happened to Bung after she walked out the front door. ‘She had her uniform on with her school backpack,’ says David. ‘And she was sighted by a neighbour on her way to school.’ When the neighbour saw Bung, she was walking in the direction of Boronia Heights College, and there was no sign that anything was wrong or untoward. But something must have gone wrong soon after because that was the last known sighting of Bung Siriboon.
Detective Senior Constable Justin Tippett, one of the crew trying to solve the mystery of Bung’s disappearance, explains how they tried to find her. ‘You start off by trying to exclude things: did she run away, did she meet up with someone, did she go off
of her own volition? All these avenues were excluded so the last possibility was that she’d been abducted.’
But abducted by whom?
It goes without saying that in major crime investigations, police must work from the inside out. ‘It’s no secret we’ve investigated the family,’ Justin says. ‘With any case of missing persons you start with the family and work your way out.’
As you can imagine, some families become defensive when an investigation is focused on them, but not Fred and Vanidda. ‘In 80 per cent of these cases it’s a family member who did it and for a while I was number-one suspect,’ Fred says with no hint of a grudge. ‘But I had to go through that.’
The media were curious about Fred and Vanidda too, probably because they didn’t come across as your average, middle-aged suburban couple. Fred’s hair is buzz-cut short, except for a long thin ponytail that runs down his back; he has a tattoo ‘sleeve’, and is proficient in martial arts. He has visited Thailand many times over the years, lived there once, and even considered becoming a tattoo artist there.
He met Thai-born Vanidda in Australia and after friendship blossomed into romance, they married in November 2004 – an instant family.
The other thing that has drawn attention to Fred and Vanidda is their reaction to Bung’s disappearance. ‘We believe in Buddhism,’ Fred explains. ‘Vanidda’s been praying every day and making merit.’
‘Making merit’ refers to the Buddhist belief that if a person does good deeds, they will be rewarded. Basically, what goes around comes around. To that end, the Pattisons hope if they do kindnesses to others, they will be rewarded, and that Bung will come home. It may sound naive, even a little strange, but it is only when you spend time with Fred and Vanidda that you see how strongly they rely on their beliefs to give them strength, and remain as ‘zen’ as possible under the worst of circumstances.
‘I believe we don’t have much say in a lot of things we do,’ Fred explains. ‘We believe in karma: if you do good things, good things happen to you. But we can’t really explain why something like this happens …’