by Justine Ford
Despite their efforts, the police had little to go on until a man called Crime Stoppers after seeing a report about the missing twenty-four-year-old, whose car had also vanished. ‘On 18 January, a bloke called Crime Stoppers to say that he thought her car was at Kanangra Court in Reid near the city,’ Richard explains. ‘Kanangra Court are public housing units, but not the ones she usually frequented.’
When police arrived at the complex they found Laura’s car. Some personal effects were missing, but some of her other belongings were inside. ‘She’d gone to the laundromat so all her linen and towels were neatly folded in the car,’ Beth says. ‘There was a lot of paperwork inside too, including her Centrelink statements and her bills.’
Laura had some other belongings in the old Mazda that Beth found quite confronting. ‘Her tools of the trade were in the car – some long black boots that went up thigh-high, and other things that I didn’t want to think about.’
Even though Laura’s car had been located, she was nowhere to be found so the detectives continued to check her phone records, contact all her friends, investigate who’d seen her last, and issue media releases every two weeks. Between March and May, however, any leads they’d had seemed to dry up.
‘Before that there had been a lot of rumours,’ Richard says. ‘Drug users were providing false leads as to where she was. Then we’d show them a photo of Laura and they’d say, “No, that’s not her!”’
In May 2005, there was a breakthrough. Or so it had seemed.
‘A person at Kanangra Court said they knew that she’d been murdered,’ Richard says. ‘I was part of the on-call crime team that day so as soon as I heard that I asked the bosses if we could put together a team to work solely on this case for three months.
‘The information report turned out to be rubbish,’ he adds. ‘Two old ladies admitted they’d just been gossiping.’
Despite the false lead, Richard was charged with heading up a team to work on the suspicious disappearance of Laura Haworth. ‘We got to review the job and start at the very beginning again,’ Richard says. ‘We took more than seventy statements, and leading into Missing Persons Week we put up a kiosk at the housing commission units where her car was found in the hope that someone would give us some new information.’
Richard and his team received a few more reports, but nothing substantial. ‘We then received information that Laura had gone to a place called “The Cotter”, which is a river area with a camping ground about 30 kilometres west of Canberra. As a result we sent the Search and Rescue teams and the divers through there, but she wasn’t there.’
The investigators had collected DNA samples from items left inside her car, in case they did find anything. ‘We tested the DNA on her toothbrush against her mum’s DNA and they were the same strain, so we knew we had Laura’s DNA if we needed it,’ Richard explains.
There were times when they thought they might have.
‘Twice, unidentified remains were found that we thought might have been Laura,’ Richard says, ‘once in the Belanglo State Forest and once in Kosciuszko National Park. But they weren’t her.
‘At the time Laura disappeared the Summernats car festival had come to Canberra,’ Richard continues, ‘and the brothel where Laura was working was ringing the girls to get as many working as they could. She got a phone call early on the Saturday asking if she could go into work and she said she could.
‘She told David, however, that she was going to work out of a motel room instead for the night and she borrowed $100 from him, presumably to pay for the room.’
Despite her employment at the brothel, Laura sometimes plied her trade in cheap motels, so her request for cash didn’t seem strange. ‘She left at eight o’clock that night and it was the last time she’s been seen,’ Richard says. ‘She never went to the brothel.’
The day she disappeared Laura also stopped using her mobile phone, and it hasn’t been used since.
Richard and his team considered a number of scenarios.
‘It’s possible that during Summernats when we had a lot of people coming to Canberra, Laura met with foul play,’ Richard says. ‘And if she did check into a motel, she probably didn’t give her real name because we canvassed most of the ACT and Queanbeyan hotels and motels.’
There’s another possibility though.
‘She might have had a drug overdose and someone might have panicked and tried to get rid of her body,’ he says. ‘The fact that her car was found sometimes makes me think it was an overdose because if she had been murdered, her car probably would have ended up burnt out in the bush. And the car only turned up on the 18th of January – a week after she was reported missing – so someone who might have been involved dropped that car off there.
‘Still, if it had been an overdose I would have expected her body to turn up earlier.
‘We’ve certainly looked at people who we think are dodgy but we can’t charge anyone with a crime because we don’t have enough evidence.’
The third possibility – the one that Laura’s mum Beth still clings to – is that Laura is still alive and leading a new life outside Canberra.
‘I find it difficult to believe she’s leading a new life,’ Richard says. ‘She’d been coming to the attention of police and mental health workers for three to five years before she disappeared but the authorities haven’t heard from her at all since she’s been missing. In order to get a new identity, you’d think she’d need to straighten out.’
A difficult task, given how sick Laura had been.
‘It is unusual for missing persons to still be missing after so long, so there is a strong possibility that she’s accidentally died or she’s been murdered,’ Richard says. ‘If this is the case, somebody would have been responsible for disposing of her body.
‘I’d love to prove this theory wrong and for her to turn up one day,’ he adds. ‘So even though the team is no longer investigating the case twenty-four-seven, we keep looking and investigating, and every three months our intel people still do checks to see if she has come to notice with any other jurisdictions.’
Laura’s mum, Beth, also keeps an ear to the ground. ‘There was a sighting of Laura in Melbourne,’ Beth reveals. ‘A family friend was dining on Lygon Street and saw her get into a taxi outside a pub with an older man, so that gave me a lot of hope.
‘Our friend has known Laura since she was a baby and her husband was a police officer. When she showed him a photo of Laura he said, “Oh yeah,” because it looked like her. So I thought, “If she’s leading a parallel life, that’s fine.”’ But it wasn’t entirely fine because Beth needed to know if it was Laura for sure. ‘I went down to Melbourne to get an idea of how far away she was when they saw her but now I don’t really know if it was her or not …’
The problem is that families of missing people see people all the time who resemble their loved ones. It’s just so hard to be sure. ‘I do see Laura a lot but it’s not her. I follow people …’
Beth thought there was another possible explanation for her disappearance too. Laura had a male friend called Ashley, whom she regarded as very special. ‘He was quite calm, a guitar teacher. He could deal with her outbursts and was always there for her. Once she said to me, “If there’s anyone I could marry it would be Ashley.”’
The last Beth knew, Ashley had gone to live in the country with his parents. But what if somehow they were together, living happily ever after? The fact is that Beth doesn’t even know whether Laura and Ashley had that kind of relationship, just that he was one of the few men who were kind to her.
Constantly confused as to her daughter’s fate, Beth sought counsel from clairvoyants. ‘And they’ve all said exactly the same thing. That Laura is okay but she’s living somewhere else and isn’t coming back for a long time.’ One of the clairvoyants also told Beth that Laura left because she was pregnant and hadn’t wanted the authorities to take another child from her. ‘She couldn’t see why she couldn’t have her kids with her because s
he had no insight into her disease,’ Beth says.
Sometimes Beth feels so convinced that Laura left town, pregnant, that she puts it down to ‘a mother’s instinct’. Other times she’s not so sure which of her theories is most likely. ‘There’s my logical brain, my creative brain and my doomsday brain,’ she says. ‘And they all compete for the answers.
‘The thing is, it just wouldn’t be like Laura to willingly miss birthdays, and Easter and Christmas, because those events were very strong and well celebrated in our family …’
Whatever the reason behind Laura’s sudden disappearance, it continues to weigh heavily on Beth and the family, including Laura’s stepdad Danny, her little sisters and her father, Phil. ‘I try to hide it a bit because my kids are thirteen and eleven so I keep buoyant for them. So having kids is my strength and my husband is my support.
‘But I do feel very alone …’
The time when Beth feels most alone is in the evening when she ventures outside to peer at the moon in the night sky, hoping, willing Laura to do the same.
The tragedy is that if Laura has come to harm, Beth, who has done nothing but love her troubled daughter, blames herself. ‘You can lose a purse, or a phone, but losing a person? I feel like I’ve been very careless to lose a person …’
Chapter 19
Two Alight, One Extinguished
The disappearance and death of Daniel Morcombe
‘This is how stupid we were. We thought if we had boys they would be safe …’
Denise Morcombe, Daniel Morcombe’s mother
Daniel Morcombe had long been to Australia what Madeleine McCann is to England – the most recognisable missing child in the country.
Tragically, Daniel’s remains were located in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in 2011; Madeleine, who was apparently snatched from her bed in Portugal in 2007, has never been found.
While Madeleine’s parents are still searching for their missing daughter, Daniel’s parents, Bruce and Denise Morcombe, continue a heartfelt crusade to teach children about their personal safety.
It has been a gut-wrenching journey for the Morcombes, who have made sure not only that we never forget the smiling face of their blue-eyed boy, but that we work together as a nation to make Australia a safer place for our children.
•••
It was an overcast December day when Daniel decided at the last minute to go shopping for Christmas presents for his family.
‘Daniel and his twin Brad and their older brother Dean used to pick passionfruit for the man next door,’ Daniel’s mum, Denise, recounts. ‘It had been a busy season, and Daniel had been saving money for Christmas.’ Usually the boys started fruit picking around breakfast time, but it had been raining so the man next door asked them to come by when the showers had eased. The slightly later start meant they wouldn’t make it in time to attend a work Christmas party with their parents, Bruce and Denise, who were successful regional managers for the well-known ‘Jim’s’ franchise.
After finishing work, Daniel, dressed in a red Billabong T-shirt, dark shorts and Globe brand runners, asked his twin brother, Brad, if he wanted to go shopping. Initially Brad said no, but changed his mind while taking a shower.
When Brad had finished in the bathroom, he noticed that Daniel had already left and was heading up the long driveway of the family property at Palmwoods in the lush hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. He figured it was too late to catch up.
It wasn’t unusual for Daniel to catch the bus to the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre alone; less than a fortnight shy of his fourteenth birthday, he was surely old enough to go by himself, and if he was ever going to be late home, he’d use his phone card to call his mum or dad.
Late, in Daniel’s case, was not eleven or twelve at night as it is for some teenagers; it was four in the afternoon. Daniel was no rebellious youth; he was a quiet, well-adjusted boy who loved riding ponies and motocross bikes with his brothers. ‘We thought it was a beautiful place to live…a small, rural community,’ Daniel’s dad, Bruce, reflects. ‘It was a good life.’
But that good life turned into a horror story when Daniel failed to return home that afternoon.
‘We got home at about four on that Sunday,’ Denise begins, her soft voice recounting the dreadful story yet again. ‘Dean wasn’t home and Brad was at a friend’s place. We spoke to Brad and he said that Daniel had gone down to the plaza.’
Denise drove to the bus stop to see if Daniel had caught the four o’clock bus but he hadn’t. Bruce went to the bus stop an hour later but Daniel hadn’t caught that bus either. ‘By then we knew something wasn’t right,’ Denise says. ‘It wasn’t like him at all. He would have phoned. He’d even shown me that he had a new phone card.’
Back home, Denise checked the bus timetable on the internet, and saw that the last bus to Palmwoods was the one that left at five o’clock, so she and Bruce drove back to the plaza in the hope that Daniel had simply missed the bus and was still there. ‘By this time I was panicking a little bit,’ Denise remembers haltingly.
When he wasn’t at the bus stop Denise phoned the bus company and asked the drivers if they’d seen her son. Again, she had no luck.
‘We didn’t know if he’d got hit by a car…we just didn’t know,’ she says.
Beside themselves, Denise and Bruce went to Maroochydore District Police Headquarters to report Daniel missing, but the officer in charge told them to come back the next day to file an official report. ‘We came home after the police told us to hang tight,’ Denise says, mystified as to why the police didn’t start looking for Daniel straightaway. They did alert other police stations via radio, but it was Bruce and Denise who began the search that night.
‘The property is 5 acres so we searched around it with torches…looking in the dam. We also went back to the underpass where Daniel would have waited for the bus, but we didn’t find him there either,’ Bruce recalls.
When Daniel had been gone the entire night, the grim reality started to set in. ‘Early in the morning, Bruce was just bawling in the bedroom,’ Denise says. ‘We just knew there was something wrong. You just had that feeling in your stomach…it just wasn’t like him not to phone.’
Thirteen hours after their first visit to the police station, Bruce and Denise reported Daniel missing a second time, at which time police undertook a massive search, combing the scrub around the underpass, canvassing motorists, and interviewing known child abductors and paedophiles in the area. But as the days rolled on, the gentle teenager was nowhere to be found.
Twelve days after he disappeared, Daniel missed out on his and Brad’s fourteenth birthday so it became a day of commemoration, not celebration. ‘To recognise his birthday we had a priest, some family friends…maybe ten people on the front lawn. It was a calm, still day,’ Bruce recalls. ‘A couple of prayers were read. The three boys’ baptism candles were lit in the middle of the table, then halfway through the reading of a prayer, one puffed out and the other two continued to burn. We wondered – what’s that all about? It was just a visual image that can’t be explained. We found it a bit haunting …’
Time continued to pass with no sign of Daniel, even though the Morcombes and Queensland Police saturated the media with images of the missing boy.
Early in the investigation, police believed they had a rough idea of what happened to Daniel but didn’t know where to find him. ‘Daniel’s case was a suspected abduction and murder,’ Denise says. ‘We knew early on that we’d probably never see him again.’
Patching together witness accounts from passers-by and the bus company, police learned that the bus Daniel hailed on the Kiel Road underpass, about 2 kilometres north of the Big Pineapple, drove past him without stopping. It was a replacement bus for another one that had broken down around the bend, and the driver had been instructed not to pick up any more passengers as another bus was on its way.
It was just a three-minute wait between the buses, but in that short time, Daniel vanished. ‘De
nise and I have spent seven and a half years trying to fill in that three minutes,’ Bruce says.
The first possible clue as to what happened in those crucial few minutes came from motorists who noticed a man lurking in the shadows of the underpass, just behind Daniel.
Several witnesses also observed a square-shaped mid-eighties blue sedan nearby, while others also reported a whitish van in the area at the same time. ‘Many dozens of road-users saw Daniel,’ Bruce reveals. ‘Some said they felt something was wrong because he was dressed neatly but the shadows-man was not dressed in the same manner. They thought, “He doesn’t look like the lad’s father.”’
Some of the motorists noticed that Daniel had a stick in his hand, which he was using to draw pictures in the dirt while he was waiting for the bus. Then, as the first bus approached, he tried to hail it by raising the stick in the air. ‘Did Daniel suspect he was in danger?’ his dad wonders. ‘Was this a signal to say, “Please help me”?’
The Morcombes were convinced that someone knew the truth about Daniel’s disappearance, and with the help of the public, they hoped to find answers.
‘Right from the word go, we received letters, cards, food hampers, printing for flyers, and offers to help find him,’ Denise says. ‘Volunteers came forward to do things, people held fundraisers…one little girl even had a barbecue out the front of her home and raised $5. People have always wanted to help.’
The Morcombes seized upon the community goodwill and in May 2005 set up the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation designed not only to fund the search for Daniel, but also to help child victims of crime and promote child safety. The Foundation’s motto is ‘Protection, Safety and Opportunity for Children’, and it operates on donations from individuals and businesses around the country.
The Foundation quickly gained momentum, garnering support from high-profile names like Australia Zoo’s Terri Irwin, teenage sailor Jessica Watson and then Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. Under the Morcombes’ guidance, the Foundation established several fundraising and child safety awareness events, including the now famous ‘Day for Daniel’, the ‘Dance for Daniel’ and the ‘Ride for Daniel’, all of which continue to attract support from all sectors of the community.