by Justine Ford
Believing by now that Antoine was out there somewhere, police classified him as a missing person, and, led by the now-retired Detective Inspector Michael Gerondis, they were determined to leave no stone untouched in their quest to find him.
They launched a full-scale air, land and sea search, but there was no sign of the missing French national. Overseas, Interpol weighed into the investigation, trying to uncover anything they could about Antoine’s personality and his plans. The Herrans, meanwhile, having conquered the tyranny of distance but still dealing with a language barrier, appealed to the Australian public for help to find Antoine, via the TV news and newspapers.
As a result, there were some unconfirmed sightings of Antoine but most of those leads went nowhere. ‘That sometimes happens,’ Mick Kyneur says of missing persons investigations like this. ‘There’s nothing malicious about that.’
One sighting, however, gave police a clear insight into the workings of Antoine’s mind. In late April 1998, a staff member from the French benevolent society Alliance Française, reported to police that she’d seen Antoine’s photo in the paper, and that he’d come into her office for advice. ‘He asked me how he could stay in Australia,’ the woman revealed. ‘I got the impression he wanted to stay in Australia permanently.’
The woman said they spoke in French for five to ten minutes and that she was 100 per cent convinced he was Antoine Herran. A most credible witness, her evidence propelled police to exhaust every line of inquiry to find Antoine, who, still in possession of his passport, did not appear to have left Australia. Yet despite his distinctive French accent, question mark scar and thick ‘Coke bottle’ glasses, the French national was proving elusive.
‘He had an unusual optical prescription,’ Mick Kyneur reveals. ‘His glasses were thick and unusual. Very strong.’ Police contacted the Optometrists Association Australia, hoping an industry professional would recall filling Antoine’s unique lens prescription, but that line of inquiry went nowhere.
The overseas investigation, meanwhile, had begun to yield some significant information. It turned out that Antoine had twice phoned France from the Cambridge Park Hotel on 10 April, the day before he was due to fly home. The first call cost seventy-five cents and was believed to be a wrong number; the second call, which cost $31, was to his close friends Christophe and Valerie Servez, who told investigators there was nothing unusual about the conversation.
‘I’m coming back tomorrow,’ Antoine had reportedly said.
‘In that case, you should come to our place on Sunday,’ his friends replied.
‘Okay,’ Antoine agreed.
Looking back, however, Antoine’s friends had noticed some curious behaviour before his disappearance.
Before leaving France, Antoine had pre-ordered flowers for Valerie: two bouquets that he paid for at a florist he’d used previously, and another that he paid for via Minitel, the French precursor to the internet. Two of the bunches were scheduled to arrive on Valerie’s name day, the Feast of Saint Valerie, and the third on 28 April, by which time Antoine was nowhere to be found.
Mick Kyneur believes the flowers were Antoine’s way of saying goodbye to his best friends before starting a new life. ‘This suggests that when Antoine left France, he knew he would not be returning,’ Mick says, reflecting the views of investigators at the time.
Around the same time, police also learned that Antoine gave away his much-loved computer games to another friend before leaving his homeland. ‘Whatever happens,’ Antoine had said, ‘these items will be better at your place than mine.’ Mick says that Antoine’s friends later interpreted that as ‘an anticipated will’, but police strongly believed Antoine had not farewelled life itself, just his old life. ‘I believe he staged his own disappearance,’ Mick Kyneur says.
Reinforcing that belief are other, vague remarks that Antoine made to friends back in France. ‘There were also some other ambiguous comments that he may disappear,’ Mick adds.
Mick believes it’s likely that Antoine got a driver’s licence under a different name in order to change his identity, a deception that was easier in the nineties. ‘Once you had that hundred points of ID, anything was possible. Maybe he had assistance here. It’s highly probable.’
But assistance from whom?
To find the answer to that question back in 1998, Michael Gerondis had to examine everything he knew about Antoine.
Antoine’s parents had told him their son was Catholic and celebrated holy days. Nothing unusual there. What was unusual, however, was that Antoine was said to be intensely fascinated by a philosophical esoteric society, the Rosicrucians. Michael instantly wondered if Antoine had joined the secret order, or was being sheltered by them. ‘There were exhaustive inquiries done with that and it took us nowhere,’ Mick Kyneur says.
But Antoine’s interest in the esoteric didn’t end there and shortly after the Frenchman disappeared, Michael Gerondis found himself investigating other secret societies he’d previously known little or nothing about. Apparently, Antoine was also interested in the Knights Templar, (very Dan Brown), but no new leads came from those inquiries either.
He also had an interest in a doomsday cult called the Order of the Solar Temple, otherwise known as the International Chivalric Organisation of the Solar Tradition, which had an arm in Australia. Not only were the teachings of its founder, Luc Jouret, said to be apocalyptic, but back in the nineties, there was a disturbing number of murder-suicides within the cult’s ranks in Switzerland, Quebec and France.
Yet again, police inquiries went nowhere, but as Mick Kyneur points out, in an investigation like this, ‘We have to chase every rabbit down every hole.’
A pretty scary hole if you believe everything you read about cults.
It was quite possible, however, that Antoine’s interest in secret orders and sects may have been inspired by another, less ominous source. ‘It might all relate around those video games,’ Mick suspects. ‘A lot of them were dark video games.’
Detectives, like the original investigator, Michael Gerondis, are trained to deal in facts, not fiction, but he had no choice but to continue delving into the world of make-believe in his search. He found out that Antoine – not so surprisingly – was a role-playing enthusiast. Mick Kyneur refers to the police brief to describe the games Antoine enjoyed. ‘These are popular games and books which provide storylines for a group of people to get together and act out characters and stories over a period of time: anywhere between one hour and more than one year. Some role plays provide just the rules for the players to write their own story, and the other types of role plays are already set out.’
It was a line of inquiry that police had to take seriously because they discovered that on rare occasions, role-playing games can go on forever, prompting them to wonder if Antoine’s disappearance was part of a role in which he was still immersed. Police visited role-playing bookstores and spoke to groups of people involved in such games, but no-one claimed to have met Antoine. ‘That also came to a dead end at the time,’ Mick says.
Another possibility was that Antoine was helped by members of Sydney’s gay community. ‘Antoine’s family thought he might have been a homosexual,’ Mick says. ‘So we had to investigate whether he’d made friends in that community.’ In order to find out, police placed a notice in the gay newspaper the Sydney Star Observer, but no-one responded.
As the years passed, there was neither sight nor sound from the missing Frenchman, and in 2006 Coroner John Abernethy returned an open finding at the inquest into Antoine’s disappearance. Today, almost a decade and a half after Antoine vanished, his disappearance remains as much a mystery as it was then.
In itself, it’s not a crime to go missing, so police still hold out hope that Antoine will resurface one day, if not for his own sake, for the sake of the family and friends back home who continue to miss Antoine’s cheerful, friendly nature.
And while it would be easy to criticise Antoine for causing mischief and wasting police
resources, no-one knows what led him to disappear in the first place. There may be more to this peculiar story than police know.
So whether Antoine has found a religious order to shelter him, whether he’s found solace in the gay community, or even if this is all part of an elaborate game, police remain certain that Antoine is out there somewhere.
‘My view is still that he’s changed his identity and is living large in Australia for reasons that may never be known,’ Mick Kyneur says. ‘But,’ he adds, with the experience of an officer who’s had eighteen years in the job, ‘people do unusual things.’
Chapter 4
Smile, Have a Nice Life
The dead man’s calling card
‘I just thought he was having a little laugh really. Like he was telling anyone who tried to identify him: “Do your best”.’
Senior Constable Claire Gillespie, Queensland Police
He’d prepared meticulously for suicide, but the man whose body was found beside a dam in the Queensland town of Nambour had also gone to great lengths to conceal his identity.
He left behind no note, no identification, and no family photos…little more than a wallet-sized card that read, ‘Smile, have a nice life’.
•••
When maintenance workers at the secluded Poona Dam first stumbled upon a man in his mid-fifties lying on the dam’s eastern spillway, they assumed he was just resting. ‘They thought he was having a sleep at first,’ says Senior Constable Claire Gillespie from the Queensland Missing Persons Unit.
On closer inspection, however, it was apparent that the man was dead, and given the numerous empty blister packs of prescription drugs surrounding his body, it looked like he’d taken his own life. ‘The packs had contained sleeping pills, and medication for depression and anxiety,’ Claire explains. ‘The prescription boxes were not there, however, so there was no indication of whom they were prescribed to – to the man who was found at Poona Dam or someone else.’
Poona Dam – a small, out-of-the way water supply best known to locals – was a curious choice of suicide spot, lacking the drama of an imposing cliff, the dinginess of a cheap hotel room, or the desperate airlessness of a fume-filled garage. ‘It is very isolated in the sense that no-one would run across it by accident,’ Claire says. ‘And it’s a rather pretty place surrounded by trees.
‘There are some hills at Nambour – you could look down and see the dam from there – but it’s not somewhere you’d just walk past.
‘The conclusion that may be drawn is that he went there wilfully and he intended to end his life there; that it was something pre-planned.’
The way in which he’d prepared his resting place adds weight to the officer’s conclusion that it was suicide and not foul play. ‘There was no trauma on him for a start, no suggestion of that whatsoever,’ Claire says. ‘He’d laid some towels out and was lying very neatly on them when he was found and had covered his face with a facecloth.
‘He looked very peaceful. He’d brought some comforts and snacks, and it looks as though he quietly laid everything out and then went to sleep.’
The man’s last supper had been a simple affair – crackers and cheese similar to that found in hotel rooms. ‘We checked hotels and accommodation around Nambour – even shelters – but that didn’t help us.
‘A Winfield cigarette box was found next to the deceased,’ Claire continues. ‘The assumption was that he was a smoker – but was that a red herring?’
It was possible that the man had intentionally left behind misleading clues because there wasn’t much else to help police identify him. A black Jag men’s wallet was found near his body, but it had been emptied of everything, bar two quite bizarre items. ‘One was a membership card for a video store called the Plains Video Store in Kingaroy that had long not existed,’ Claire explains. ‘Unfortunately the card didn’t give us a name or a membership number or anything so I didn’t know if the card was another possible red herring or a clue.’
Inquiries revealed that the Plains Video Store had been taken over by Civic Video, and that the membership card had been issued prior to 1998. Not surprisingly, none of the old files had been retained. ‘We contacted the old owners who were also very helpful, but there were no more records and no-one knew the man based on his description.’
The second item of interest from the man’s wallet was a card printed with an ironic message. ‘Smile,’ it said. ‘Have a Nice Life.’
‘I just thought he was having a little laugh, really,’ Claire says.
But at whose expense?
Surely the man’s loved ones had the right to know about his final curtain call?
‘It’s very sad, isn’t it?’ Claire says. ‘He did things the way he did, I suspect, in an attempt to obscure his identity for all time, but why, we just don’t know.’
Even sadder were the two used tissues near his body that indicated his last laugh had been fleeting. ‘The tissues had been moistened,’ Claire says, ‘so it looks like he’d been sitting on the dam wall, crying.
‘It’s a heartbreaking way for someone’s life to end.’
The investigators felt they owed it to the dead man to learn who he was and find his family.
When Claire took over the case at the Missing Persons Unit, she examined photos of the scene for even the smallest clue.
‘Unfortunately his clothing was quite nondescript. He was wearing a dark jumper with tracksuit pants and Cougar white, navy, silver and orange sandshoes, which were pretty standard-looking. He was also wearing Fila ankle socks, and on his head he had a red cap with the name of the clothing brand “Bauhaus” written on it.’
Underneath the cap, Claire says, ‘he had greying, short, buzz-cut hair but his eyebrows looked gingery’. He was about 185 centimetres tall and of solid build with all his own teeth and four distinctive tattoos on his upper arms. One, primarily in green ink, was of a shark; another was of a Native American woman in a headdress; and the other two were too faded to be fully identifiable, but they may have been images of a buzzard and a warrior.
‘We went to multiple tattoo artists and spoke to pathologists who all agreed that they were old tattoos from twenty-five to thirty years ago – the late seventies or something. No-one could nominate a particular artist who’d done them and the style was actually fairly common for that era.
‘There were no names on the tattoos either,’ Claire adds, acknowledging an old trend to put a woman’s name on one’s arms.
Along with the body, Claire also observed a couple of cigarette lighters, some nail clippers and an empty brown satchel with the word ‘Fox’ written on it. ‘It was very well used. We tried to find out where it was made and found it originally came from Fox Studios but it didn’t bring to light anything to help with the investigation.’
It was the last of the meagre set of clues left behind at the scene, so Claire had to hope someone would recognise the man and tell police who he was. ‘We had the photo that was taken of him at the time reconfigured using a program to create a new image using his features.’ Police distributed the photo widely throughout the media but no-one came forward to say they knew him for sure.
Claire continued to investigate the dead man’s link to Kingaroy, hitting the area hard in the hope of finding out something about him. ‘We went up there repeatedly. We saturated Kingaroy with media and all sorts of things.’
The Missing Persons investigator hadn’t given up on the theory that the man might have come from the Nambour area either, given that he’d chosen such an out-of-the-way spot, best known to locals, to end it all. ‘There was a huge doorknock in Nambour. We spoke to a lot of locals who may have seen someone like that but they hadn’t.
‘One of the local farmers said his father had had orphans working on the farm twenty years ago so they would know the area well. People like that would have no family to miss them so it was possible he might have been among them. But that lead didn’t pan out either.’
Claire continues, ‘We als
o checked hospitals and pharmacies to find out if anyone had been treated with the drugs he left behind, but we got no leads from that.’
Claire contacted Missing Persons Units around the country but that didn’t get her far either. ‘We’ve had a few suggestions as to who he is,’ Claire says, ‘including a couple of missing persons from interstate and locally, but nothing that’s given us any more information than from day one.’
The Missing Persons Unit also arranged for the man’s fingerprints to be taken in the hope they were on file but that too drew a blank, indicating he had neither been in trouble with the law in Australia, nor had he been in the armed forces. They also contacted authorities in New Zealand but there was no indication he’d come from there either.
So how could it be that no-one was missing the man from Poona Dam?
‘It could be that someone does know him and is not surprised he’s missing,’ Claire speculates. ‘And given he’s tried to conceal his identity it’s possible he may have said to people, “I’m going interstate,” and he’s just gone. And if he’s their neighbour they won’t be expecting him back.’
Claire doesn’t rule out another possibility that’s even more tragic. ‘He could be estranged from his family,’ she posits. ‘He could have said he was moving on.
‘It’s just very sad where he’s moved on to …’
Several years since the discovery of the body at Poona Dam, Claire Gillespie remains hopeful that a member of the public will come forward and identify him. ‘That’s all we can hope for now because there are simply no other leads,’ she says.
Today, the Poona Dam man’s body lies refrigerated at the morgue, waiting to be buried.
But before he is laid to rest for good, he needs to be identified because no matter what he thought of himself, what he had done with his life, or how desperate his situation had become, he was at one time someone’s friend or or someone’s neighbour.
He was certainly someone’s son and he deserved to have a name.