by Justine Ford
According to Daryl, Drake also used to befriend lonely single mums and take their sons on camping trips. When Dot Floyd heard that, she warned Terry to stay away from him and not accept any rides.
Daryl recalls how Terry had planned to defy his mum a couple of weeks before he disappeared. ‘After football, Terry went to one of those old red phone boxes to ring someone and said, “Come and pick me up, we’ll go to Avoca.” I think he was talking to “Unc” and I was shit scared so he said we wouldn’t go ’cos I was bawling my eyes out.
‘I think that’s why he got up early [the day he disappeared]; to go to Avoca without me, ’cos he knew I’d carry on again.’
Terry didn’t go straight to Avoca, however; he played his footy game first. Afterwards his mates asked him to watch another game but he knocked back their invitation, stating he was going to Avoca instead.
At about a quarter to two, Terry turned up at his mate Greg Jess’s place in Avoca. Greg lived with his family in the residence attached to the post office. When Mrs Jess asked Terry how he got to Avoca, he told her his uncle drove him there, and was going to pick him up again on the corner at half past four.
After playing Monopoly for a couple of hours, Greg walked Terry to the intersection of the Sunraysia and Pyrenees highways, where he left him leaning against a white pole to wait for ‘Unc’. Fifteen minutes later, concerned that Terry might still be waiting by the roadside, Mrs Jess sent Greg back to check that Terry had got his lift.
When Greg returned from his mission he told his mum that he’d seen Terry walking down the road about half a kilometre from where he’d left him. That was the last Greg saw of his childhood friend, although a couple of witnesses saw what happened next.
Patricia Mitchell, who lived in nearby Davy Street, was at home getting ready for work when she looked out the window and saw Terry walking along the highway towards Maryborough between a quarter to five and five. She also noticed a white panel van or ute with a canopy and saw it slow down. Mrs Mitchell assumed that the car had stopped and the boy had got in, because she lost sight of him after that.
John Drysdale said he was driving along the Pyrenees Highway when he saw a white Holden station wagon, which he described as similar to the one used on the Ararat Mail Service. He also saw Terry walking towards Maryborough.
It appears now that Terry was walking home but tragically, he never made it.
‘At five-thirty, Dad thought Terry was just running late,’ Daryl recalls. ‘“The bugger,” he’d thought, “he’d better hurry up.”’ But as time went by that evening, Ken and Dot’s anxious expressions told Daryl that Terry’s absence was something to be worried about. ‘It was horrendous,’ Daryl says. ‘Dad kept pulling the drapes back and looking out the window and saying, “He should be home by now.”
‘Then at seven-thirty he said, “I gotta go look for him.”’
Daryl went with his dad to talk to Terry’s friends but he wasn’t with any of them so at one in the morning Ken reported him missing. ‘I didn’t know what happened,’ Daryl says. ‘But I knew he hadn’t run away. He had no reason to run away.’
On the Tuesday following Terry’s disappearance, the eldest of the Floyd brothers, Ray, found Terry’s footy bag containing his socks and boots in the town’s main drain. It was a disturbing find but at least Terry wasn’t in the drain as well.
The newspapers quickly picked up on the unsettling story of the missing boy, and Ballarat Criminal Investigation Branch became involved, running an operation in which they dressed Daryl in clothes like Terry’s to see if passing motorists would stop and behave suspiciously.
Daryl recalls his part in the operation with a shudder. ‘Cars would stop and the drivers would say, “Do you want a ride, little boy?” The police would be parked a block away and would then come up and interview the drivers who’d stopped. They’d ask them, “Have you seen a young boy like this over the last two weeks?”’
Unfortunately the police didn’t get any results from using their live mannequin, and to this day, Daryl is deeply disturbed at being used as ‘bait’. ‘I was thinking, “Jesus, is the same thing gonna happen to me as happened to Terry? Is someone going to pick me up and steal me away?”
‘I think I’m quite normal but they [psychologists] believe at some stage I’ll resort back to being that ten-year-old boy who was left on the side of the road.’
The investigation wreaked havoc with mum Dot’s mental health as well because Terry was never far from her mind.
Early on she became convinced that Drake was responsible, and two weeks after Terry disappeared she turned up at the police station to confront the detectives. Daryl recalls his mum’s desperation. ‘Where did he take my son?’ she’d demanded. ‘What did he do with him?’
‘He’s the mayor’s son,’ Daryl says the police replied. ‘We can’t go and convict him of that.’
But the police certainly questioned Drake, who said that after the football he visited friends in Maryborough until two-thirty. Then he said he dropped in on his sister, whose place he stayed at until after five. After that he claimed he returned home, before going to a country and western show two hours later.
Police noted that Drake’s ‘times were slightly out’ but that ‘his alibi checked out’. Between four-thirty and five o’clock – the crucial time when Terry disappeared – Drake was with his sister.
So if ‘Unc’ hadn’t picked up Terry Floyd, who had?
Police looked into the whereabouts of child abductors and sex offenders to find out what they had been up to at the time of Terry’s disappearance and soon turned their attention to a man named Raymond Kenneth Jones, who was on bail for indecently assaulting a boy in a Ballarat toilet block. Jones – who drove a fawn-coloured panel van – admitted to being in Avoca on the day Terry disappeared. But police didn’t have any evidence to prove that Jones was responsible for Terry’s disappearance, so the family struggled on, hoping someone would eventually come forward to say who was.
Not even a $5000 reward, offered in 1976, turned up any useful information.
Naturally, Terry’s mum Dot was hardest hit by his disappearance. ‘One thing I can always remember was Mum’s sad eyes,’ Daryl says. ‘Those puppy eyes that used to droop…you could just see the pain.’
The pain became too much for Dot in 1987, when she became gravely ill. ‘They thought it was a nervous breakdown at first,’ Daryl recalls. ‘Now we know it as depression.’ But after the depression came something even worse. Dot was diagnosed with a brain tumour that grew so aggressively, doctors gave her just twenty-four hours to live. She died, aged fifty-eight, twelve years to the day after her beloved Terry disappeared, and Daryl believes it was a broken heart, not the brain tumour, that took her life. ‘She said in her last interview, “It’s the not knowing that’s the killer.”’
Six years later, Dot’s husband Ken died too. It was from heart disease, and he was sixty-eight.
Daryl hated what his brother’s disappearance had done to his family and strongly believed Terry had been snatched from the side of the road by an evil opportunist. ‘It’s not just about the people who took Terry,’ he explains, ‘they took my parents too. Our lives stopped because of this mongrel.’
But who the ‘mongrel’ was remained a mystery. It wasn’t until 2000 when Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles from the Homicide Squad re-opened the Terry Floyd files that the case gained momentum. Ron Iddles is arguably Australia’s best homicide investigator, having been involved in 260 murder investigations over the course of twenty-three years, more than 160 of which he’s seen through to trial in the Supreme Court. With such an exemplary record, Ron Iddles is Daryl Floyd’s best hope of finding out what happened to his big brother.
‘I think back in 1975 local police thought he was just a runaway,’ Ron says. ‘But looking back, there was nothing much to base that on.
‘So I gave an undertaking to Daryl that I’d get it to inquest stage, and as a result of the re-investigation we spoke to
people from 1975.’ Ron would have jumped at the chance to re-interview ‘Unc’ but Drake had died in 1991, leaving many unanswered questions in his wake.
Ron did, however, uncover a new witness, Frank Impey, who shed new light on where Terry went from the highway. Frank Impey believed that between four o’clock and five o’clock on the afternoon Terry disappeared, he saw him standing at the intersection of the Sunraysia and Pyrenees highways. Frank, who was a butcher, had thought nothing of it, and continued to drive up Avoca’s Bung Bong Hill into the forest. Then about half an hour after first noticing the boy, Frank saw him again, on the side of the road. Across the road from the boy, he also noticed a white panel van.
Frank went about his business – the illegal dumping of offal down a mineshaft at the top of the hill – and on his way back out of the forest, he noticed the panel van was still parked there, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. (Asked later why he didn’t come forward during the original investigation, Frank said he was worried he’d get into trouble for dumping waste illegally.)
The sighting of a young boy and a panel van in the forest, however, raised more questions about Raymond Jones’ movements that afternoon.
While not saying that Jones was responsible for Terry’s disappearance, Ron Iddles’ interest was certainly peaked by Jones’ activities on that day. ‘He worked in Avoca on the day that Terry went missing and his Holden panel van was very similar to the one seen by witnesses.
‘There’s a strong possibility he saw Terry on the road that day,’ Ron maintains.
So on 10 May 2001, Ron Iddles re-interviewed Jones but he denied being involved and refused a lie detector test. If Ron knew everything Raymond Jones did that evening, he could exclude him from the investigation, but at this stage, he is still on the detective’s radar. ‘He actually left Avoca around 5 pm to drive back to the caravan park in Maryborough [where he was staying] to have a shower. He returned to Avoca but did not get there until about 7:30 pm.
‘His account cannot be verified.’
After speaking to Jones, the next step was to take the case to the coroner, which Ron did in November that year. Coroner Francis Hender found that Terry had likely died but how, where and why could not be determined.
Ron had his own theory. ‘What it appears,’ Ron says, ‘is that he didn’t get his ride. He told Mrs Jess, “I’m going,” he walked out and he’s been picked up in a vehicle.’
And while no-one can say for sure who that vehicle belonged to or who was inside, Terry’s brother Daryl is convinced that person would have abused his brother then taken his life. ‘Terry was picked up by five-thirty and he’s dead because of this mongrel. It’s put a family through thirty-six years of torture for half an hour.’
One hot spring day in 2009, Daryl decided to check out the disused goldmine close to where Terry was last seen. Along the way, he stopped at a farmhouse to ask locals for directions. ‘There were two lovely ladies round the back. I said I was just in the area and looking for the mine they pumped the sewage down.
‘One of the ladies grabbed me by the arm and said, “See up there at the top of that hill? That’s where they put Terry Floyd down.”’ Daryl was floored. What made this old lady think his brother was down the mine? And what a coincidence!
Ron Iddles investigated the woman’s claim but found out that despite her good intentions, the elderly lady had just been repeating town gossip. Daryl, however, believed the chance encounter was the lead he was looking for and will never forget the first time he laid eyes on the mine. ‘I went up there and saw a hole with rubbish in it,’ he begins. ‘Now I’m not a bloke who believes in the hereafter or nothing but it was the coldest, most gut-wrenching feeling I’ve ever had.’
In May 2010, still digging for clues himself, Ron Iddles submitted a request to excavate the mine just in case Terry was buried beneath the earth, but police decided there was not enough evidence to initiate a search.
Determined to literally get to the bottom of it, Daryl decided to fund the excavation himself, and coughed up $30,000 – his life savings – to begin excavating. With the help of Ron Iddles, it took Daryl almost a year to get authorities to approve the excavation. Once it was given the green light, however, several local companies jumped on board to provide free manpower, equipment, security fencing and skip hire. ‘The locals were unbelievable,’ Daryl says. ‘They wanted to find Terry too and said they’d do whatever they could to help.’
But it would be a daunting process because not only did Daryl and the team have to deal with the possibility they might find human remains, but they also had to sort through all the waste that had been dumped down there over the years. ‘There were traces of sump oil and bundles of sticks like someone had tried to burn something, and one of the local butchers had used it to dump cow bodies. We’ve found tools and car engines down there as well.’
Then one day the excavators found a silver chain on a ledge inside the shaft. ‘It was just like one Terry used to wear,’ Daryl says. ‘That made me think he was down there for sure.’
Daryl’s search of local mine records had indicated that the shaft was 20 metres deep so he was banking on learning his brother’s fate within a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, though, the mine proved deeper than he thought, and the money was fast running out.
Going above and beyond the call of duty, Ron Iddles travelled to Albury to speak at a fundraising event for the dig. ‘He’s just been amazing. To think that the detective in charge of the case would give up his time like that just leaves you speechless,’ Daryl says. The event, which was attended by about 300 people, raised another $6000, which kept alive Daryl’s hopes of finding his brother’s remains.
The following month Victoria Police decided to pitch in some cash after all – $50,000 – which meant Daryl could excavate another 30 metres below.
Ron Iddles also applied to the State Government for an increase in the reward to $100,000, and his request was granted. ‘Which I was very, very thankful for,’ Daryl adds.
But it still wasn’t enough to get to the base of the shaft, and in May 2011, at a depth of 53 metres, Daryl’s grim journey to the bottom of the earth again ground to a halt.
Ever hopeful, Daryl says he won’t give up until the Bung Bong Mine reveals its secrets. ‘I’ll never stop doing this,’ he says. ‘And if I can help anyone else in this situation – anyone who’s got a missing loved one – then I’ll do this for the rest of my life.
‘I’d like to send a message to never give up hope. It doesn’t matter if it takes three years or thirty-six years, just never give up hope.’
Ron Iddles won’t give up hope either. Even if Terry isn’t down the mineshaft, he believes someone out there knows something, and that’s the key to solving the decades-old mystery of his disappearance. ‘I always say that most people involved in these types of crimes will tell somebody and we want that person that has been told to come forward.
‘I don’t think in twenty-three years in Homicide I’ve known a case where they don’t tell …’
Chapter 15
Find My Family
The quest to find out who loved Perth’s Mystery Man
‘The seventh of March doesn’t go by without me thinking of him. It’s like Remembrance Day for me.’
Senior Constable Jen Robinson, Western Australia Police
Senior Constable Jen Robinson had just got back from maternity leave when a file landed on her desk.
A man had gone under a train near Perth’s Burswood Casino and it was her job to find out who he was.
Jen thought that identifying the body would be easy. She also thought – after years of identifying bodies in the worst of circumstances – that she could remain detached.
She was wrong on both counts.
•••
Jen Robinson has seen it all but you’d never guess to look at her. The attractive mum has been on duty for twenty-two years – but not at the tuckshop.
Her toughest gigs have been in the Forensics Divis
ion, where she spent six years, and the Coronial Investigation Unit, where she spent seven. ‘So I’ve dealt with lots of suicide,’ she says.
Jen was also part of the Disaster Victim Identification team that helped give names to the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand in 2004. It’s the kind of work you need a strong stomach for because by the time Jen and her colleagues examined the bodies, they’d been in the water for long enough to make the job extremely arduous and unpleasant.
Prior to that, however, it had been Jen’s job to identify ‘Perth’s Mystery Man’, and from day one she felt like he was pleading with her from beyond the grave.
•••
The man had died at 11.20pm on the night of Saturday 7 March 1998, struck at 90 kilometres an hour by a city-bound train between Burswood and Victoria Park railway stations, where he’d been walking along the tracks.
He hadn’t stood a chance.
When forensic investigators answered the call, they examined every inch of the scene, photographed the body and the blood-spattered train, then bagged and tagged the man’s battered remains.
The fact that he’d left nothing behind to say who he was – and that no-one had reported him missing – meant this investigation was going to be harder than Jen first thought. ‘It was definitely a challenge,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have any identification on him at all.’
She thought the people of Perth might recognise the man by the clothes he was wearing, so she made that her starting point. ‘He was wearing olive green Bogart brand trousers,’ Jen says. ‘They were popular in the late seventies and early eighties but stayed current. They were a brand you’d get from Kmart.
‘We also determined by his trouser length that he was between 168 and 175 centimetres tall.’