by Justine Ford
Quite unexpectedly, as Mark burrowed deeper into Frauenfelder’s past, he learned the extent of the local legend surrounding the returned soldier. He discovered a local newspaper article from March 1995, with the headline, ‘The Empty House of Mystery to Become a Home at Last’, which revealed that the house that had been built for ‘the Beechworth witch’ was finally going to have an occupant.
‘The Beechworth witch’ was what the local kids used to call Louis Frauenfelder’s eccentric wife, Annie, who – spooked after an escapee from the local prison broke into her home – used to take pot shots with her rifle at anyone who ventured too close to the property.
But her peculiarities didn’t end there.
‘Even after her husband disappeared, she still lived in the shed, even though Louis had built her a house,’ Mark explains. ‘She had no electricity, no tap water, kerosene heating, a battery-powered radio and a black and white TV.’
Why Annie continued living like an old hermit when she could have been enjoying the comfort of the house, no-one knew; then again, what happened to her husband was even more of a mystery. The word around town was that Annie had pushed Louis down a 40-foot well, but if that was true, it was a secret Annie took to her grave. She died in 1992, aged eighty-six, leaving everything to a woman who’d cared for her in her latter years.
Quirky to the end, Annie insisted her ashes be scattered under one of the pine trees on the property along with the ashes of her beloved cat. (It’s not known if her cat was already dead when its presence was required under the tree.)
As if the rumours about Frauenfelder’s wife weren’t outlandish enough, there were also rumours about Frauenfelder himself, the most enduring of which being that he was a German spy who disappeared to escape a dubious war history. ‘I think the German spy side of things was discounted by his military records,’ Mark Rippon says. ‘It would have been very hard to have been a spy during the early 1900s, during the war.’
There was another rumour that Frauenfelder took off because he couldn’t meet his gambling debts, but again, that story couldn’t be substantiated so Mark dismissed it as rumour and innuendo.
On something of a roll, Mark discovered that another man had disappeared from Beechworth, a few years before Frauenfelder. ‘The other possibility of a match to the Beechworth Skeleton was James Mooney, aged seventy-one at the time of his disappearance on 15 October 1968,’ he explains. ‘Mooney was a patient at the Mayday Mental Hospital on Albert Road, Beechworth, about 3.3 kilometres from where the remains were found.
‘Frauenfelder too had lived just three and a half kilometres from where the skeleton was found. So they had both been in extremely close proximity to where the remains were located,’ Mark says.
It was a sad story really. James Mooney had been mentally ill all his life, and in those days, the treatment was probably worse than the condition itself. Mooney had been a voluntary patient at Mayday, which meant he could come and go within reason. After twenty-four hours’ absence, voluntary patients were simply discharged, which is why no-one at the hospital had filed a missing persons report when they couldn’t find him.
A less official report was made to police in October 1968, however, which said that Mooney, who was unable to feed himself, had probably ‘wandered bush’. He was never seen again and left behind more than $3000 in government support payments – a lot of money in those days.
First Constable HT Crossman recorded that James Mooney was bald, had a sickly complexion and was missing some of his teeth. (There was a suggestion Frauenfelder was also missing teeth, a characteristic observed on the unidentified skull.) At the time of Mooney’s disappearance he was wearing khaki overalls, blue shorts, a green pullover and plastic shoes.
His illness – both mental and physical – meant that he wouldn’t have survived long on his own. ‘He was a chronic schizophrenic who’d recently had his kidney removed,’ Mark says. ‘I later discovered he’d spent most of his life from the age of twenty-one being institutionalised,’ Mark says. ‘That’s the best part of fifty years that he’d spent in various mental asylums …’
•••
The farmer who’d found the Beechworth Skeleton had died long ago, but Mark discovered, to his surprise, that he had a brother who was still alive and had also been present when the remains were found. Mark asked the local police to go have a natter. ‘He was able to show them where the bones were found,’ Mark says. ‘He also recalled that while the man’s bones had been collected, a small amount of them had probably been left behind.
‘So in July 2009, I attended Sloan’s Paddock with [Detective Senior Constable] Tony Combridge.’
When Mark and Tony examined the scene, it was with a view to conducting another full search of the area accompanied by a pathologist in the hope of uncovering more bone fragments. ‘But after we visited the paddock we believed it would be unlikely that any more remains would be found for several reasons: the area was top dressed every few years; stock goes over it; it had recently been ploughed; and it was swampy,’ Mark says.
With no material retained from the post-mortem, the skeleton would therefore need to be exhumed if Mark wanted to match it to a relevant DNA profile.
Mark consulted the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, which concurred that an exhumation was warranted. First though, Mark had to obtain DNA profiles against which the skeleton could be compared.
In the case of Louis Frauenfelder, Mark’s inquiries led him to two of Frauenfelder’s nieces who lived on the border of New South Wales. ‘They said they’d be happy to provide DNA,’ Mark says, ‘so in July 2009, I travelled to Albury and obtained the samples.’
It was a good thing Mark was an avid reader because yet again, he chanced upon information that would propel his investigation. ‘I was reading in the local paper about a lady who was doing some work for a family whose daughter was buried in Beechworth Cemetery,’ Mark explains. ‘I got in touch with the newspaper, who told me that she was a genealogist who worked for the State Trustees Office, so I arranged a meeting with her and gave her all the information I had on Mooney and Frauenfelder.’
The genealogist must have been extremely good at her job because within no time she had located Mooney’s grandniece. It was great news because even though Mark had found some of Mooney’s male relatives living in another country town, it was a female relative he really needed in order to extract mitochondrial DNA.
‘I spoke to her on the phone and she was quite excited because she had always wondered what had happened to her uncle,’ Mark says. ‘She knew he’d gone missing and even though she had never met him, she’d always wondered what had become of him.
‘So I went and met with her and she gave me a DNA sample.
‘She knew that James had been institutionalised almost all his life but wasn’t really able to shed any light on anything that could help me identify him as she had never met him. She’d just heard her parents and grandparents talk about him.’
Next, Mark successfully applied to have the skeleton exhumed and it was raised from the ground one cold, miserable day in July 2011.
When the DNA of Frauenfelder and Mooney’s relatives was compared against the skeleton, however, Mark didn’t receive the news he’d been banking on. ‘The DNA didn’t match either Frauenfelder or Mooney,’ he says. It was disappointing but as Mark explains, ‘It’s a process of elimination. It’s not them…but it’s got to be somebody else.’
Just before the skeleton was laid to rest a second time, Mark phoned the families to tell them the news. ‘That’s when James Mooney’s grandniece said, “There’s something I should have told you.”’ They’re not the words an investigator wants to hear when they’ve spent three years working on a case but nevertheless, Mark was all ears.
‘She told me she might have been adopted.’
Mooney’s grandniece was sheepish in her admission because she’d realised that if she and James were not blood relatives, their DNA couldn’t possibly match.
Unravelling her family history, Mark worked out that Mooney’s grandniece had not been adopted, so at least the scientists had tested the right DNA.
So after all that, if the Beechworth Skeleton was not that of Mooney or Frauenfelder, who was it?
And what had happened to the missing men in the first place?
Perhaps local legend will reveal all …
Chapter 18
Laura, Look at the Moon
Where is Laura Haworth?
‘I used to say to Laura on the phone, “I’m going outside to look at the full moon. You go outside and look too. We mightn’t be in the same place but in a way we are because we’re both looking at the moon together.”’
Beth Cassilles, Laura Haworth’s mother
Sometimes bad things happen to sweet little girls.
‘Sweet’ is the word Beth Cassilles most often uses to describe what her daughter Laura Haworth was like as a child. By her teen years, however, Laura’s nature changed dramatically and her mum knew it wasn’t just growing pains; Laura was suffering from a debilitating mental illness and was no longer in control of her behaviour.
Her childhood dreams of becoming a vet were shattered and she ended up working as a prostitute to pay the bills. It was a career choice made in the shadow of an illness that Laura couldn’t accept…and one that may ultimately have led to her disappearance.
•••
‘Laura and I had a lot of connection spiritually,’ Beth Cassilles says of the daughter she gave birth to when she was just eighteen. ‘We knew what each other was thinking. I could will her to phone me.
‘Mind you, I’ve done a lot of willing lately but there’s been no phone call …’
Growing up, Laura Haworth was ‘a lovely little girl’, according to Beth. ‘She loved animals and was really sweet.
‘Her father and I separated when she was quite young and so my mum and sister also became very important to her.’
Laura liked the company of all her family and when she was about twelve she went to live with her dad in the country, but stayed with her mum in the city on weekends.
‘Then when she was in Year 9 I brought her to live with me full time,’ Beth says. ‘We put her into a Steiner school and she said it was the best school she’d ever been to.’
Had everything gone as planned, Laura would one day have studied to become a vet, but she started getting restless and asked if she could go back and live with her dad. ‘So we took her back there. It was a very sad day.’
At first, it wasn’t so sad for Laura, though, who enjoyed the rural lifestyle. ‘She loved the country and living on a small property. She also had lots of animals there that she loved – a horse, sheep, kittens, puppies, you name it,’ Beth says.
But Laura’s restlessness soon translated into problems at school. ‘She had a lot of trouble socially,’ Beth recalls. ‘She was at that rebellious teenager stage and ran into conflict. She didn’t finish school and became streetwise. She even got herself onto Centrelink benefits.’
As if dropping out of school in Year 9 wasn’t worrying enough for Laura’s parents, Beth started noticing a dramatic change in Laura’s behaviour whenever she’d visit. ‘At first we wondered if it was diet related,’ says Beth, who is a naturopath. ‘Then we wondered if she was taking drugs but we couldn’t seem to pinpoint what the problem was so we didn’t know how to deal with it.
‘She started having rages and engaging in anti-social behaviour in public,’ Beth continues. ‘She had always been such a sweet, lovely girl but it got to the point where we’d be walking through a department store and she’d notice someone looking at her. She’d get paranoid and would yell, “What the fuck are you looking at?” It was so out of character.’
But as time went by, that behaviour became ‘in character’, according to Beth, who sought medical help for her daughter. ‘We found out that behaviour was the beginning of bipolar disorder,’ Beth says, remembering how, as Laura grew into an adult, some days were good, while others were excruciating.
‘She had to be hospitalised for months,’ Beth says. ‘It would deplete and disempower her. She’d start a job and everything would be fine, then she’d get sick and have to be treated again so she couldn’t keep her job.’
It was a vicious cycle that Laura couldn’t beat.
‘She didn’t accept that she had this disease,’ her mum says. ‘So she’d have long stretches where she wasn’t suffering from bipolar and she’d be her usual self, playing computer games with her little sister and brother, and next, a stranger would be dropping her off naked at my place and she’d be saying things like, “There are gunmen in the walls.” And she’d believe it.’
During all the turmoil, Laura gave birth to two children by different fathers but was not considered well enough to care for them full time. ‘She was so sick that there was a mental health order for her to take her medicine. She was very obedient and took it until the day after the court order ended. And that’s when she went missing.’
It’s not too surprising that someone as unwell as Laura could go missing. That scenario is even more likely when you add to it the fact that she’d started turning tricks in Canberra’s notorious red-light district of Fyshwick, which made Beth extremely nervous. ‘The family had helped her get a really good flat in Mawson, here in the ACT,’ Beth says, ‘and we’d help her with the rent and with food parcels and things like that, so she didn’t need any extra money. But she liked shopping so she got into prostitution. I think she met one of the drivers who might have gotten her into it.
‘She told me she was safe and that the lady at reception [at the brothel where she worked] looked after her very well. But it worried me enormously of course.’
Beth had every right to worry. She knew her daughter was a pot smoker, but once she started working in the sex industry, she tried heavier drugs. ‘One of the brothel owners would give her speed to keep her awake so she could do the job,’ Beth says. ‘She didn’t like taking it but she liked the money.’
She must have liked it a lot because she mixed with some very unsavoury characters to get it. ‘She used to know a lot of bad people, dickheads,’ Beth says, ‘and because she was very pretty and tall and outgoing and funny and witty, she used to have men from the wrong side of the tracks chasing after her.’
So did one of them catch up to her?
•••
Just before Laura went missing, she got kicked out of her flat in Mawson because she’d stopped paying the rent. ‘It was a shame because it was such a good flat,’ says Beth. ‘She could come and go as she pleased and just shut the door to the world.
‘The neighbours were very tolerant too, because when she was sick she’d get very loud and the police would have to come and take her to hospital.’
While Beth had always been there for her daughter, by the end of 2007 she was emotionally drained. ‘I told her, “I just need a break,”’ Beth admits, ‘because she’d ring and abuse me twenty-seven times a day. Of course that was at the time she became homeless so there’s my guilt kicking in …’
After losing her flat, Laura stayed in a caravan park for a while before moving in with a friend she’d met through the sex industry, who lived in Queanbeyan, just across the border in New South Wales. Her friend’s name was David and he wanted to help her get back on her feet.
‘He had a job, he was very much older than her and seemed to care for her so he took her under his wing,’ Beth says. He also allowed her to keep her beloved cat, Foxy, at his place, and bought her a car, a Mazda 121, so she could get around town.
As far as Beth knew, they weren’t in a relationship, just good friends.
Eventually, Beth and Laura got things back on track as they always did. It was hard though because Laura’s mental health wasn’t getting any better. ‘On Christmas Day she got drunk and abusive,’ Beth recalls. ‘We had to tread on eggshells. Still, I was glad she came
…’
Beth invited her daughter on a family holiday after Christmas but Laura turned down the offer, and in January she stopped calling her dad, Phil. It was most unusual as the father and daughter spoke on the phone several times a day.
‘By day three, when he hadn’t heard from her, he knew something was drastically wrong,’ Beth says. ‘He said, “She’s missing, she’s gone.”
‘And we all knew straightaway…she’s gone.’
In the meantime, Laura’s friend David had also alerted the family to tell them she hadn’t returned home. They all started looking but there was no sign of her anywhere, so Beth reported her missing at the front counter of Woden police station. The situation just didn’t seem real. ‘It felt like, “Is that all?”’ Beth remembers. ‘They said they’d send a patrol car and someone to see us.’
‘ACT Police became aware that Laura was missing on 11 January 2008,’ says Detective Sergeant Richard Gough.
‘I think at that stage I was hopeful that maybe she was hiding or something like that,’ Beth says.
But if Laura was playing hide and seek, she was very good at it because as the days went by, there was still no sign of her.
‘It had a huge impact on our lives at home,’ Beth says. ‘I’d just started a new job and they must have thought I was an idiot because I couldn’t take anything in. And people would ask me questions like, “Have you checked with all her friends?” Of course I’d checked!’
When the family had done all they could to find Laura, they put all their faith in the police. ‘At the beginning, general duties officers and detectives started doing background checks on Laura, contacting all interstate transport including the trains and the buses, and putting out media releases to see if the public knew where she was,’ Richard Gough says. ‘They found out that there was a housing commission block she used to hang around where she bought cannabis, so they did a doorknock there.’