by Justine Ford
And neither can the police. ‘We spoke to Bung’s friends, her father in Thailand, we’ve looked at sex offenders in the area, we’ve questioned her teachers, the maintenance people at the school, a couple of workmen in the area, we set up a couple of information caravans and extensively doorknocked, but there was still nothing to go on,’ Justin says.
‘We talked to everyone off the phone list, basically,’ adds David.
The Pattisons also did everything in their power to find Bung: Fred took four weeks off work, spending countless hours walking the streets of Boronia, asking neighbours if they’d seen anything, and putting up ‘missing’ flyers at the local shops and at train stations.
Then came a lead, on Wednesday 29 June, nearly a month after Bung went missing, that raised everyone’s hopes. ‘A girl from a local primary school reported that a male had tried to abduct her, two streets away from where Bung was,’ Justin reveals. ‘She was twelve years old – so a similar age – and she was Asian too.’
Astounded by the lead, police wasted no time in asking the girl to provide them with a FACE (Facial Automated Composition and Editing) image so they could circulate a likeness of the culprit. Without delay, that image, of a middle-aged Caucasian man wearing a surgical mask, was published in the Herald Sun with a hard-to-ignore caption: ‘Face of Fear’.
Investigators received a plethora of calls from members of the public who ‘recognised’ the man. But the trouble was, he wasn’t real, and looked like any other Tom, Dick or Harry in the street (except for the surgical mask).
‘It turned out she made it up because she was running late for school,’ Justin says.
The girl, who went to school with Bung, apologised to police and said it wouldn’t happen again. ‘The good thing, though, was that it kept Bung’s disappearance in people’s minds.’
Next came suggestions in the media that Bung had been leading a ‘double life’ (or indeed a triple life) on Facebook, and that her online activities might have led to her disappearance. But as Justin explains, that was just a beat-up. ‘She had three Facebook accounts – one was old and there was nothing in that; one was in Thai for her Thai friends; and one was in English. She was active on social media but so is any thirteen year old these days.
‘There was nothing sinister and nothing on those sites that indicated anything to do with Bung’s disappearance.’
The investigators want to make it clear that whatever happened to Bung, it was not of her own doing. ‘There’s still this perception that she’s a runaway, but we believe she’s been abducted,’ Justin says. ‘When you think about child abduction – and possibly murder – in a Victorian context, there aren’t many. They’re quite rare and that’s why we want to keep the public thinking about this,’ he adds.
It’s one of the most frightening kinds of missing persons cases there is – a child snatched off the street by an unknown person in broad daylight.
‘The media have mentioned Bung’s disappearance in the context of Karmein Chan and Mr Cruel,’ Justin says.
‘But they’re completely different circumstances,’ David continues. ‘Karmein was abducted from her home and her younger sisters tied up while their parents were at work. Bung has been taken straight off the street.’
He continues, ‘A lot of people think, “How can a thirteen-year-old just disappear if no-one saw it?” But it can happen. And if it was a person with a weapon who forced her to jump into a car, then what could she do?’
Fred Pattison believes, however, that if his stepdaughter had been under duress, the whole neighbourhood would have known about it. ‘We’ve always told her not to get into strange cars and that if anything happened to her, to make noise. We think if someone grabbed her she would have made a lot of noise.
‘It was a weekday so there were lots of kids from the local area catching buses to get to school, so there were people going both ways. There were enough people around that someone would have seen something, if something had happened that was out of the ordinary.’
The fact that no-one reported a girl in distress must therefore raise the question: did Bung get into a car with someone she knew?
Vanidda thinks it’s possible, but under very particular circumstances. ‘If anyone had a problem, she’d help. If they spoke Thai, or said they knew me, then maybe [she’d go with them]. She’d believe them.’ Of course the odds of Bung being abducted by someone with a Thai background are slim, given there isn’t a huge Thai population in the area, but it’s not impossible.
Hoping to receive spiritual guidance from her homeland, Vanidda returned to Thailand for a few weeks in July 2011, to spend time at the temple and visit the monks. ‘Some monks asked, “Why is your face so sad?”…Thai people believe if your face [does] not look light…there is a problem in you.’
Vanidda says the monks told her that her problems stemmed from a previous incarnation. ‘They said my karma’s from the last life…but what I did, I don’t know…we have to accept the karma.’
Vanidda says she doesn’t blame herself for Bung’s disappearance because she can’t remember her past lives – but it doesn’t make it any easier. ‘Sometimes I’ve got to fight my mind…that’s why I have to meditate.
‘Another person [a journalist] asked, “What do you think happened to her?” I said “Stop!” That’s not [living in the] now.’
‘We hope she’s all right,’ Fred adds, trying to help his wife who’s still struggling with English. ‘We hope it’s like an adventure. We can’t believe it’s a nightmare for her because we don’t know.
‘We love her, we miss her…but we still think she’s out there.’
To find out where exactly, police even entertained the views of prominent and lesser-known psychics. ‘We had a lot of psychics ring up with information and we followed up because we would hate to leave it,’ Justin explains. ‘You wouldn’t be doing your due diligence if you didn’t follow it up.’
‘You can’t ignore it,’ David agrees.
One of the psychics told investigators that Bung’s remains were in a particular park, so police sent SES to search the area but they didn’t find the missing teen.
They might not have achieved a result that day, but police are satisfied that at least they tried. ‘Because if you’ve got nothing,’ Justin continues, ‘what have you got to lose? You’d hate to be the one who ignores information that could find a missing person.
‘And whether they [the psychics] were to fluke it, or whether it’s voices from the grave, who knows?’
Police won’t let go of Bung’s case until they have some answers, and still have many people yet to interview. Who is responsible, though, is such a mystery that they must limit the information they can release to the public. ‘Because we don’t have a crime scene and we don’t know what happened, it would be too dangerous to release a profile [of an offender],’ Justin explains.
But both Justin and David are confident they’ll find out who’s responsible. Eventually. ‘Things always tend to happen in investigations,’ Justin says. ‘You go to jobs and a week in you say, “How am I going to solve this?” but lines of inquiry open up.
‘We hope someone out there’s got a conscience. If the person responsible doesn’t come forward we hope to hear from someone who has their suspicions about someone else.’
Who took Bung, where they come from and whether they have abducted a child before are all unknowns, but it’s not hard to let your imagination run wild in Boronia once you know an innocent child has been kidnapped from one of its streets. You can start to overlook the handsome weatherboards and clusters of gum trees, noticing instead the dilapidated fibros with overgrown lawns, peeling paint, and piles of scrap metal out the front.
‘You do start to wonder why some people’s curtains are permanently drawn,’ an elderly Boronia resident comments. ‘Some of the houses around here do look a little creepy so you do think…is that little girl being held in one of them against her will? Or has something even worse happened?
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‘It’s no surprise that a lot of kids around here aren’t allowed to walk to school by themselves anymore …’
While fear-mongering can be counterproductive, police hope locals will come forward with anything – even the slightest piece of information – that could help them find Bung. They’re particularly interested, according to Justin Tippett, ‘in anyone who’s been behaving strangely around kids’.
In October 2011, Victoria Police set up Taskforce Puma, doubling the number of officers investigating Bung’s disappearance. While David and Justin hope the additional manpower will help them find the missing girl, her family continues to deal with the day-to-day reality of life – which at the moment is still without their beloved Bung.
Her sister, Siriporn, is trying to keep busy juggling study and work in a Thai restaurant, while Vanidda and Fred continue to rely on each other, and their spirituality, to help them cope with the nightmare of having a child who’s becoming a household name for all the wrong reasons.
‘She always said she wanted to be famous and be a superstar,’ Fred reflects.
‘And she is that now …’
Chapter 3
French Resistance
The bizarre vanishing act of Frenchman Antoine Herran
‘I think he’s still in Australia having the time of his life. We just don’t know where.’
Detective Sergeant Mick Kyneur, New South Wales Police
Wondering how the other half lives? Then take a drive down winding New South Head Road in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs, and you get the picture.
This is where the cashed-up shop till they drop, Louis Vuitton purses at the ready. Million-dollar apartments overlook luxury yachts, bobbing idly on the bay. The dining is fine, the schools are elite and the cosmetic surgeries are as full as a socialite’s lips.
Rose Bay police station sits in the middle of all this wealth, so to an outsider, a post as an officer here might seem like the cushiest job on the force. But think again, because this prestigious neighbourhood has a most worrying underbelly.
Rose Bay station is a just a stone’s throw from Watsons Bay, and its notorious suicide spot, The Gap, where attractive Perth newsreader Charmaine Dragun took her own life in 2007.
But it’s not just the beautiful people who end their lives here. Every year about fifty people from all over Australia, desperate and depressed, leap to their death from the cliff. And almost every day, officers from Rose Bay are called to The Gap after receiving the distress call: Someone’s going to jump. It can be highly traumatic, not just for the person who wants to end it all, but also for the police officers trying to talk them out of it.
So in the early hours of 12 April 1998, when police received a call to say that someone was about to jump, they rushed to The Gap in the hope they could prevent another tragic death.
Sadly, a man did take his life at The Gap that night, but police weren’t there when he jumped.
Presented with a strange set of clues, police deduced early on that the body was that of a French tourist named Antoine Herran. But when investigators dug deeper they realised they had a case of mistaken identity on their hands, and that they were dealing with a mysterious Frenchman who’d planned a most bizarre vanishing act …
•••
When twenty-seven-year-old French national Antoine Herran told his family in Normandy he was planning a holiday in Australia, it came as no surprise. He’d been to Australia twice before as part of an exchange program, once in 1991 and again the following year.
The two families who’d billeted him during those early stays lived on Sydney’s North Shore and northern beaches, where they showed Antoine the sights and taught him English. By all accounts, he loved the sunshine and relaxed atmosphere.
‘The families described him as having a quirky sense of humour, an outgoing and friendly person,’ Detective Sergeant Mick Kyneur from Rose Bay police reveals. ‘He was well mannered and intelligent, and he loved Australia.’
Looking back at the brief he prepared for the coroner when he took over the case in 2006, Mick Kyneur adds: ‘He often expressed a desire to return to Australia, and in 1998, he informed his father, “I’m going to Australia from the 17th of March to the 11th of April, 1998.” He further stated that he wanted to see the transformation of Sydney prior to the Olympics, so that was his reason for being here.’ When Antoine’s dad, Jean, farewelled him at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, he had no reason to believe it might be their last goodbye.
Antoine, an unemployed storeman who’d saved some money, decided to stay by himself and didn’t make plans to visit his host families. Arriving in Australia, Antoine kickstarted his travels by spending two and a half weeks up north, taking in the wild beauty of Cape Tribulation, Fitzroy Island, Darwin, Kakadu and Alice Springs. He went on day trips, four-wheel driving and catamaranning. It was the trip of a lifetime.
By 5 April, Antoine was back in Sydney for the last six days of his trip, staying at the Cambridge Park Hotel in Surry Hills. No-one has been able to tell police what Antoine did during his stay, until he checked out of the hotel on 11 April and made his way to Sydney International Airport, seemingly for the flight home.
Antoine’s ticket was processed, and he was allocated his seat and boarding pass for Malaysian Airlines flight MH 122, due to depart at one o’clock that afternoon. The customer service attendant remembered Antoine well because he made a highly unusual request. ‘He requested a seat with people around him,’ Mick Kyneur explains. Anyone who’s caught a long-haul flight will tell you they want as much room to themselves as possible, so the curious exchange stuck in the attendant’s mind. ‘In twenty-five years of service, he had never heard such a request,’ Mick says. ‘At first they thought flying made him nervous.’
Nervous enough not to board his flight? It looked that way at the start, because when the flight was called, Antoine was nowhere to be seen. His two bags made the flight but he didn’t, and the reason why he asked to be surrounded by other passengers remained a mystery.
So where had Antoine gone? On face value, what happened next seemed to provide the answer.
At 2.08am, thirteen hours after Antoine’s flight took off without him, a man placed a call to emergency number triple zero from Watsons Bay shops, across the road from The Gap. The caller had a French accent. ‘There has just been a man jump from the left butt of the Gap,’ he said. (Police believed he was referring to the bluff, the highest point of the cliff.)
When police began searching The Gap that night, it wasn’t a body they found, but a backpack belonging to Antoine Herran, along with his identification and aeroplane boarding pass, all illuminated by a powerful Maglite torch and prominently positioned near the fence at the bluff so they couldn’t be missed.
‘Written in pen on the boarding pass was a phone number for Lifeline and Customs Coastwatch, which was a number displayed on a plaque at The Gap at the time,’ Mick says.
It appeared that Antoine had called police himself, leaving his belongings at the top of The Gap so police were aware he had jumped. As for the phone numbers on the boarding pass – they certainly made it look like he’d been troubled …
It wasn’t until after the sun had risen, however, that a park ranger did find a man’s body near Hornby Lighthouse at the base of The Gap, about three or four hundred metres from where police had found Antoine’s belongings. It was a sad but all too common discovery, and police had enough circumstantial evidence to believe the dead man was Antoine.
Police promptly contacted Antoine’s family, who were on holiday in Italy at the time, to tell them the devastating news.
From the outset the Herrans didn’t believe the body belonged to Antoine and they had good reason. ‘He had no previous history of mental illness,’ Mick Kyneur says. ‘So the news came as a great surprise to his family.’
Mick believes that if anything, Antoine’s spirits were probably quite high before he disappeared. ‘He’d gone on holidays in Australia and he
was living large and thinking, “This is fantastic!” He was on an overseas holiday so why would he commit suicide? No!’
The Herrans asked police to check the dead man’s abdomen for a large, distinctive scar in the shape of a question mark, which he’d had since an operation years before. But the police needed more to go on than that because the body had sustained considerable trauma. ‘We simply couldn’t rely on the scar for an identification,’ Mick explains.
So on 25 April, Antoine’s family – his father Jean, his mother Francoise and his sister Sophie – flew to Australia to find out if the body was indeed Antoine’s. When they arrived, police met the Herrans at the airport. While most visitors to Sydney get to take in the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, the Herrans’ first port of call was the frigid viewing room at Glebe Morgue.
As soon as they saw the body on the slab before them, they knew it wasn’t Antoine. Police were baffled, because the man at the morgue looked similar to the photo they had of Antoine Herran…but after death, the changes to a body can be deceiving.
Later, back at the police station, police played the tape recording of the triple zero call to the Herran family. ‘Each family member identified the voice on the tape,’ Mick says. ‘They said, “That’s him.”’
Police now faced more questions than answers. Had Antoine actually witnessed a stranger’s death dive? Or was it a coincidence that a man had jumped to his death and become caught up in Antoine’s plot to stage his own disappearance? And just who was the man lying dead at the morgue?
Fortunately that piece of the puzzle was quickly solved the second time around. ‘They identified that person as being a patient from a Sydney psychiatric hospital,’ Mick reveals. ‘The cases were totally unrelated.’
Weirdly, on the day the patient’s body was found, the water police located yet another body at the base of The Gap. It was a woman, and while not related to Antoine’s disappearance or the other man’s suicide, it was another tragic reminder that there are people among us in dire need of help.