True Crime Conversations Podcast

00:03 It's a Wednesday morning in May 1978 and it's pouring with rain as 23-year-old Barbara Brown makes her way to Beecroft Railway Station in Sydney's north. She's American and has been travelling the world for much of her 20s. She's no stranger to public transport or hitchhiking for that matter. 00:23 After arriving at Hornsby Station, Barbara stops for a milkshake and starts chatting to some road workers. 00:30 The road crew give her a lift to the highway, where her plan is to hitch her way north to Queensland. 00:36 But after that sighting, the girl with the golden hair and sunny disposition vanishes. 00:43 Police believe she was killed on or around that rainy Wednesday, but they don't have concrete proof. 00:51 For her family, they've spent their whole lives wondering, where is she? What happened? 00:58 Who killed her? 01:09 I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. 01:20 It's a uniquely painful experience to not know, to have someone vanish or disappear and not have any answers as to how or why, to not have a body to lay to rest. 01:33 Life for a missing person's family is a harrowing journey of ambiguous loss – Trauma is not just in the disappearance, it's in the response. 01:43 Because for many families, they're constantly having to fight to keep their loved one's name at the forefront of investigators' and media's lips. 01:52 Nicole Morris is the director of the Australian Missing Persons Register, a not-for-profit association that she set up in 2005 after realising there was nothing like it on the internet. She's never had a loved one go missing, but after more than 21 years of doing this work, voluntarily, I might add, she has a deep understanding of why people go missing, what happens when they do, and what the people left behind go through. 02:17 For many loved ones of missing people, Nicole does something life-changing for them. She listens. 02:23 She doesn't question or minimise their fears or make them feel like they're asking too much. 02:29 She sees their loved ones as the human beings they are. She validates their anger, exhaustion and persistence. Put simply, Nicole refuses to let families disappear along with the people they love. 02:42 She's already written two books filled with the stories of missing people. Now she's releasing a third. It's called Lost. 02:50 Today, she's going to tell us about the people within those pages. 02:59 Nicole, welcome back to True Crime Conversations. Thank you so much. Can you remind listeners, what is the current state of missing people in this country? How many go missing each year? And are most of those people found? 03:15 Absolutely. And we've just received new statistics, so I can give you very accurate information about that. And it's just under 50,000, it's about 49,000 something per year, which works out to 130 a day. 03:29 But the bad news is that long-term missing persons, the number of those has increased. So we're looking at 2,800. So 2,800 long-term missing persons. A long-term missing person is anyone missing longer than three months because then it becomes very difficult to find them. Out of the 49,000, there is a very good location rate. It's something like 98% of people are located within a couple of weeks. So, you know, things are improving there, but long-term missing persons, yeah, still a problem. 04:07 Doing this for two decades as you have, what stands out to you the most about the systems we currently have in place to find people? You did say that there are some improvements in that space. 04:19 I don't know why it's improved. 04:23 I guess there's a lot of pressure on police, but like every industry, they're under-resourced and I So it's very difficult to allocate officers to missing persons when you've got a lot of other crimes going on in Australia. Not that missing persons is a crime, but it's an area of policing. 04:44 So I'm not sure what the difference is. I don't know why that number has dropped, but it's fantastic that it has. 04:52 Unless there's less people being reported missing, unless we are getting a little bit better at preventative mental health care and that kind of thing, which is one of the major reasons that people go missing. So it's interesting. There are academics who do studies in this field. So it'll be interesting to see if they're seeing some sort of a change in the trend. 05:16 Because crime only makes up a small amount of those missing people, doesn't it? 05:21 Absolutely. Much to the surprise of the public, I think, because we see Netflix documentaries and I sit down and watch Netflix documentaries all the time as well. And you think... oh, well, you know, obviously when someone goes missing, something terrible has happened to them at the hands of another, but that's actually, it's not the case. And maybe it's an uncomfortable topic for people to think about that mental health crises are a leading cause of people going missing. 05:55 But unfortunately, that's the reality. And we really need to be trying to address that major issue in Australia. 06:03 I wanted to ask you briefly about rewards. Often when people are missing, we see a reward for information. 06:10 What is your opinion on how that's decided? Who gets what money? Because, you know, some cases you'll see 100,000, other cases you'll see a million. 06:18 It's such a controversial issue and a contentious issue and a distressing issue in the world of missing persons because people attach a value of a person's life to the monetary value of a reward. 06:31 And that is hurtful to the families of a missing person who might see a million dollars offered in another state. Some states are doing really well. 06:41 Some states are appalling. And I I will absolutely name and shame New South Wales as a state. And Queensland, I don't understand how they attach the particular figure to rewards. In Victoria, every child has a million dollar reward. 07:01 Western Australia has just stepped up to the plate offering half a million dollar rewards for every missing person. And not just, usually rewards are offered in the cases of homicides, but in Western Australia, they've said, okay, every missing person has a half a million dollar reward. And Northern Territory has also stepped up one of the cases that I featured in my first book, Vanished, Norman Lawson. 07:27 After I wrote the book, Northern Territory Police came out and said, okay, we're putting a half a million dollar reward onto his case and to other Northern Territory cases, which is fantastic. But again, you've got a family going, well, why is my... missing person only worth $100,000, worth $100,000. That's how they see it. So I think it may make sense in the fiscal departments of the government, but it doesn't make sense to a family who's dealing with a real person. 07:57 who are already grieving, emotional, you know, it just adds fuel to that fire, doesn't it? 08:03 Absolutely, absolutely. You know, you don't want to add to their distress and this often does. And there's missing persons cases that don't have a reward attached and I have personally gone to the commissioner and said, this is clearly a homicide. The coroner has urged a reward might help solve this case and the commissioner said, oh, okay, yeah, we'll think about it. 08:26 Very frustrating. 08:27 Because do we see rewards working? 08:31 What's the hit rate? Are they actually helping? 08:35 It's really hard to say because it's not made public. So if someone comes forward and claims a reward, that's not going to make the front page of the paper for the safety reasons of the person who's made the report, because quite often they need to stay anonymous for their own safety. 08:53 So I'm not sure. I can't answer that question because it's just not talked about. Well, it can't hurt, can it? 09:00 Absolutely, absolutely. And it sort of, I think it shows to the family that police and the commissioner and the governments of each individual state are serious about finding missing persons. They're saying, yes, we actually do want to do something. So this is something we can do in addition to the investigation. 09:19 This is your third book. So in each of your books, you have selected a number of missing people to feature. 09:27 How do you decide that? Because once again, reading the names in your most current book, I didn't recognise any of them. 09:36 Is that on purpose? 09:39 It is partly, I think, because these are cases, I guess because they've been so familiar to me, I don't know how familiar they are to other people. It's more about whether a family wants me to do it because I don't write about a missing person without full family involvement. So that's really the criteria that I use if I go to a family and say, do you want to do this? Or they approach me sometimes and say, can you put my person in your book? 10:12 So it's not that I would just go, oh, this is... 10:16 you know, I realise also that I haven't got any Tasmanian cases and I haven't got any Queensland cases in the book. 10:24 But then again, that's just how it worked out, I think. And some of them, like Brad's case, I intended to put in the first book. And for reasons that I've explained in the book, it just didn't happen. So that's been held over to the third book and the same with Tanya Farrington's case. So It's really an individual set of circumstances as to if it just tends to come together at the time and it's the right time. There are cases where I've written a whole chapter and given that back to the family and they've said, oh, no, we've changed our minds. 10:57 We don't want to do it anymore. And that's fine because it's a really emotional thing to go through. 11:03 And so the 12 families that have spoken to me about this, it's such a brave thing to do because it's opening up all of those old wounds and I really applaud them for that. 11:14 And something like Barbara's story, who we're going to talk about first up, she got a lot of media attention back when it happened in the 70s. But I mean, I wasn't alive in the 70s. So I didn't hear about Barbara. I'm learning about her through your book, which a lot of people will. 11:31 Yeah. Yeah. Barbara, I became a bit obsessed with that case. And I think some of the people that I spoke to when I wrote it also became obsessed with that case because she, and I had unprecedented access to her life through her family's generosity in giving me her letters and her diaries and tapes that were made and I really feel that I really got to know her very well and she was just a delight. 12:05 She was just so lovely and I really hope that people reading her story will feel that and get to know her. She was just a young girl, free spirit, travelling the world, living her best life, backpacking all over the world because she felt like that was a safe thing to do and it should have been. 12:27 Well, let's tell her story a little bit more. She was 23, an American backpacker. She was in Australia, as you say, backpacking, using public transport, hitchhiking, doing a bit of it all, as you did back then. 12:40 She went missing in Sydney in 1978. Can you tell us a little bit about the last known sighting that we know about of Barbara? 12:51 Well, it's interesting because the last official sighting is of her catching the train at Beecroft and we think she was heading to Hornsby because that was the furthest that she could travel by train without sort of then going interstate. Her destination was Queensland, but we know that she liked to hitchhike because she had done it very successfully and she'd hitchhiked Throughout America, at the time of Ted Bundy, she was hitchhiking exactly when he was abducting people in exactly the same location. 13:25 So she was very lucky that nothing happened to her. She did travel through America with her boyfriend, Mike, who I spoke to for the book. 13:34 So she had that protection, I guess, there. 13:38 But she kind of felt that she was invincible. She kept saying to her mum in all her letters, you know, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. It's fine. Hitchhiking is very safe here. I've got lifts with truck drivers and they've been really nice to me. And she just had this innocent way of looking at the world and at people. And she trusted everybody and everyone loved her. 13:59 And so it wasn't until she's met the wrong person on the road that the worst has happened. So we think... 14:08 that she did make it to Hornsby and there was a very credible sighting of her at Hornsby chatting to some road workers at that time. And the term road workers will ring alarm bells for people because we know now that there was a very infamous road worker at the time who may have overheard that conversation and maybe followed her up the Pacific Highway. And I am, of course, talking about Ivan Milat. 14:34 Yeah. 14:35 We know that she made references to Texas, so a blonde Texan hitchhiker at that time would attract attention. So she was chatted to by these road workers and then she headed north, probably by hitchhiking. 14:50 I found a witness that I spoke to in the book who is sure that he saw her the following day in Taree. So that's not a confirmed sighting, but the information that he gave me was extraordinary, down to describing clothing that he couldn't have known that she had with her. But I found out that she did have these exact types of clothing with her. So the last official sight in Sydney, but I reckon she made it at least to Tari and probably to Kempsey. And we know from her letters and her mother's letters that there were people who think that they saw her and spoke to her in Kempsey as well. 15:29 And that's also the last known location of another couple also thought to have been abducted by Malat at almost within months of Barbara. So we think, I think that Kempsey was probably her final destination. 15:47 You mentioned Malat and it is a connection you look at in depth. Do you think he took her? 15:55 Yes, I do. And I don't say that lightly because it's my personal bugbear that every time I mention almost any missing person, even when I say a missing person who went who was last seen years after he was in prison, people would say, oh, that was Malat. He didn't abduct every missing person in Australia. He absolutely didn't. And there were other predators active at that time, which is horrifying to think. 16:25 But if we narrow it down to records that we have of where he was working at the time, where he liked to drive, and at that particular time, we don't have his exact work records, but it was as close as we can get, he was exactly... there at that time and I believe that it was him who took her. There's a mention in another book that has been written about Malat of him abducting a blonde Hitchhiker who was on her way to Queensland and I think that could have been Barbara and unfortunately everything points to him having been responsible for taking her. 17:12 Wasn't there also a conversation that we know about that happened between Malat and his wife where a blonde hitchhiker was mentioned? 17:19 Yeah, that's what you're talking about. That's what I'm referring to, yeah, I think. It was dated earlier than when... 17:28 than when Barbara went missing, but I spoke to the authors of the book and they said they can't be sure when exactly that conversation happened. 17:35 And, I mean, there may have been, I think he was absolutely responsible for others as well. It might have been another blonde hitchhiker, but in everything that I've exhaustively looked at, I think he was the one. 17:50 As far as the police investigation into Barbara's disappearance, how far did they get into what you're talking about? Did they get as far as looking into Taree, into Kempsey, into the connections to Malat? 18:01 I think that they were limited in what they could do. So they did have people who saw her, who believed they spoke to her in a shop at Kempsey. They had probably something that sent them off on a different path. They did have a someone who worked at a train station in Taree who said that he sold her a train ticket to Queensland. I don't think it was possible. 18:26 And this sighting came weeks after she was last seen, so it doesn't make any sense to me. 18:33 That couldn't possibly have been Barbara, but I think maybe they said, oh, okay, well, she caught a train, but I don't think that was an accurate sighting. And I couldn't, I did track down that particular situation railway worker, but he wouldn't make a statement to me or to police. 18:52 So I think that they had a lot of sort of red herrings and is it her, is it not her? I think the fact that she was American and from Texas and made references to specifically Texan things when she was spoken to in Kempsey, such as NASA, because NASA was in Houston. And if she referenced Texas specifically, her family thought, well, that's got to be. I mean, how many blonde hitchhikers of that age from Texas would there have been in that exact area at that time? 19:26 So I think that those are pretty credible sightings. But Police was sort of, it's in the days well, well before the internet and well before mobile phones. And so they were sort of relying on sightings and chasing them up weeks later after she was long gone. So, and of course, at that time, we had never heard of Ivan Malat. So they didn't know who they were looking for. They didn't know what had happened to her. They could track her to the last sighting and that's where the trail went cold. 20:00 And none of these people that you mentioned saw her get into a vehicle? We don't have a description? 20:05 No, no, nothing at all. 20:08 We know that Barbara happily accepted lifts with truck drivers because she trusted them and she had had very good experiences. She went all the way from Sydney to Melbourne with a truck driver. 20:20 who was very kind to her. 20:22 And she had no problems whatsoever. So it wouldn't have surprised me if she had gotten into a truck. And at that time, Malat was driving trucks. 20:31 And I think the other couple that I mentioned, which was Alan Fox and Annika Adriansson, possibly also got into a truck around the Kempsey area. 20:42 It was sad reading her story to hear that her parents passed without ever getting answers. And I know that that is, you know, a cruel reality in a lot of these cases, isn't it? That's something that you would come across a lot where parents have fought for decades and then never find out. 21:01 Absolutely. It's completely tragic. And the legacy gets passed on, I think, to then other family members. So I spoke to Barbara's brother for the book, but I also spoke to her niece. So she has now been past the torch of trying to look for her aunt. 21:21 And if, you know, then she may pass that to her children. And it It just goes down the line and these families, when there's no one left to look for them, who's going to still remember that they're out there? 21:37 Well, I know that there is an inquiry in New South Wales right now into Ivan Milat. 21:41 I'm hoping that the powers that be will take a look at the book because I think there's two cases in the book that I think were Milat related. 21:52 But it's a difficult thing because he's not here for us to ask or charge or question. So it's going to be really, really difficult to get any answers, I think, unless we find where he actually disposed of Barbara and the others, which I think is somewhere up the north coast. There could be a couple of different locations somewhere. where other murder victims have already been found. I think that if something does come out of this inquiry, it would be that we need to search specific locations up the mid-north coast for the second area that Millat disposed of his victims. 22:34 Up next, what happened to 10-year-old Bradford Foley? 22:41 I was a Ornota in 2013 and made a vestuario for cyclists. For me, the best part of Shopify is the possibility of a business even not having technical knowledge. We managed to do everything, from back-end to front-end, and to make online vendas, without complications. If a Shopify was a cyclist equipment, I would say that it would be a bicycle. It's what allows us to get where we want. It's on Shopify that we manage our business. Start your evaluation at shopify.com 23:12 I want to move on now to 10-year-old Bradford Foley. 23:17 Can you tell us a bit about him? He had a really hard life for his 10 years, didn't he? He went missing in December 1982 on Boxing Day. 23:28 That's it, yeah. What happened? It's an absolutely tragic story. 23:34 The kids really had to kind of look after each other from a very young age. There was a lot of violence in his background. Their mum, Lorna, did the best that she could but was very ill-equipped, so the children were eventually taken into care. 23:49 she still absolutely fought to get them back and she did get them back. She met all the conditions that the government imposed on her as far as housing goes and she was able to get them back for visits. She visited them all the time when they were in state care. 24:07 So she had just sort of got them back to the house briefly and on that Boxing Day she got asked Brad to go and visit, I believe, a family friend. And the story, it's not clear if she wanted money, if she wanted some cigarettes. 24:26 but Brad was her golden child. That's how she referred to him all the time. He was the golden child. 24:32 He was very close to his mum that absolutely adored each other. 24:37 And so Brad took off running to the train station and his sister Anita said, oh, you know, don't let him go by himself, said to brother Bernie, go with him. 24:47 Bernie took off running and jumped fences, but Brad was too quick. And so Brad got to the train station and we assume got to the train station somewhere and completely disappeared. Bernie came home and said, couldn't catch him. 25:01 So they just thought that he would come home that day, but he never came home. Both kids and their mum went to the police and tried to report him as missing. And they said, no, you can't report him missing this soon. You know, he's just a little Koori kid. He'll come back. 25:20 He's 10. Yeah, went back the next day and said he still hasn't come home. Something has happened. 25:28 And then horrifically suspicion then fell on Lorna. 25:33 And she was for years believed to have killed her child. 25:38 And Anita... 25:40 loudly protested this and said, absolutely no way in the world. They were there for a start. They were all there in the house with her. She saw Brad leave the house and her brother saw Brad leave the house and they knew how much Lorna adored her kids. So it was up to Anita and Bernie to really fight to clear their mother's name because she died only a couple of years after Brad went missing. 26:04 So it was up to Anita and Bernie to say, no, something else has happened to our little brother. 26:11 Why would they accuse Lorna in the first place? Did they have any evidence? 26:15 I don't think so. 26:17 There were some neighbours who had some strange stories. 26:22 One of them was about a fire and Anita, I spoke to Anita about this directly and said, well, you know, tell me about the fire. 26:31 One of the neighbours reported that Lorna had burned Brad's body on a mattress in the bedroom and Anita said absolute rubbish. Anita still lived in the same house. She lived in the same house her entire life. 26:46 And so she said, if anyone wants to come here, we did have a little fire in the house. It was here in the lounge room. I'm looking at it as I speak to you. There's still a scorch mark on the floor. It was a tiny little fire. It was absolutely not Bradford on a mattress in the bedroom. That didn't happen. So it was perhaps vindictive neighbours and Anita had a very troubled life and was in trouble with the law quite a lot. 27:16 I think because of what happened to her throughout her whole life, she had quite a mistrust of the law. And then to have her brother go missing and police not be able to find him, that deepened her mistrust of the law. So there was a lot of animosity between her and police. So on one hand, they were trying to help her, but she did get in trouble a lot. So maybe that was sort of a retaliation by people who felt that they needed to accuse the family. They accused Anita as well. She said that she had a shipping container in the backyard and there were constant rumours that Brad was under the shipping container and that made her very angry as well. 27:54 Someone told police that Brad was buried under the house, so police came and dug up under the house and found nothing. They had to endure that their whole lives, that suspicion, when in fact it had nothing to do with the family. 28:08 Do you think you know what happened to him? 28:10 I do, I do, because I did speak to other people connected to the family who told me horrific stories about a person connected to the family. I'm not a big fan of coincidences. I think if you've got a person who has these particular behaviours and that person has a direct link to the family and then you have a missing child, you have to put all of those pieces together. And police are aware of that, but again, It comes down to evidence. 28:41 They don't have a body. They don't have any evidence. They've got nothing to prove that that's what happened. But I think there's a definite strong suspect in that case. 28:54 And once again, Anita died in 2020 without answers. And the death of Brad really kind of followed her throughout her whole life, didn't it? 29:02 Yeah, yeah. She didn't, I think she was always Brad's sister. 29:08 She struggled to be Anita and she was such a, she could tell you to the minute all of the birthdays of her family, the dates of the deaths of her family, she was a very proud woman. foley woman and loved her family deeply. They were everything to her, adored her brother Bernie. When we spoke, she was just desperate for him to come and live with her so that they could be together because all they had left was each other. 29:41 And she was a tortured woman who was in a lot of pain. 29:50 I do need to ask in terms of that case, it was the 80s. Do you think racism played a part in the lack of investigation in that story? 30:01 I did speak to a man who grew up with the Follies and was in care with the Follies. So he sort of was looking at it from the outside and that's what he believes. He believes that police did say... 30:16 Just an Aboriginal kid, they run away all the time. Look at his upbringing. He lived on the streets half the time. You know, he's just run off to King's Cross. He's just run off here. So I think that wasn't exclusive to Aboriginal children. 30:33 I saw that attitude in the 70s and 80s with other missing kids. 30:38 Missing teenagers, unfortunately, they just had this attitude of, you know, they're just a troubled kid, they'll come back, instead of taking it seriously from the start. So it's a difficult question to answer because I don't know, but that's what people close to the family believe. 30:57 Attila Bogar. Now this case is quite baffling, really. Would you agree with that? 31:03 Yes. It's one of those cases where I, when I was writing it, I was thinking, I bet he's going to be watching the interviews that I do and talking about him. So Attila, if you are out there, hello, please give your sister a call. 31:19 Yeah. 31:20 Yes, it's very strange. 31:22 Well, he was once called the most promising upcoming developer of the time by then Prime Minister John Howard. Yes. He was from Melbourne, went missing aged 35 in 2014. Was Mr Howard onto something? Was he developing the next big thing? 31:38 He could well have been. He was one of those computer geniuses that was so clever. He could well have been snapped up by the government. That's what his sister believes, snapped up by the government to work on... 31:55 technical ASIO surveillance. It's all well beyond my comprehension. But he was a very, very intelligent man who had his own computer company at a very young age and was working on complicated systems. He was developing a system that went into schools that other people failed to develop. And he went in and did what he did and made it perfect and And he was extremely clever. 32:26 So who knows? It just seems a bit strange that someone that clever would just disappear. 32:33 Well, I found it interesting that back in 2014, he was talking about wanting to get into AI. I mean, fast forward to 2026, look where we are. 32:41 Exactly. Yeah, exactly. 32:44 I think he was well beyond his time. I think if anyone could orchestrate a disappearance, it may be someone like Attila. 32:51 Let's talk about it because he was quite paranoid before his disappearance, wasn't he? Tell me about those weeks and days because there was an early morning phone call... 33:01 some weird stuff with asking his mum to give him cash. What happened? 33:04 Yeah. 33:06 His behaviour did sort of decline over a period of time, but he was still running his company. He was still a very capable man. He had set up meetings. 33:17 He was waiting for bank investment to expand the business. So it wasn't like he was in in a complete disarray in his life, but he did have some paranoia whether or not that was justified. 33:34 Perhaps he was working on something that made him concerned for his safety or the safety of his friends, we don't know. The bits that really confuse me are that he hated driving. He Wouldn't even drive 10 minutes from his home to his office. He would ask his sister to give him a lift or his mum to give him a lift. Absolutely hated driving. Sometimes he would pull over to the side of the road and say, ring someone and say, look, I've pulled the car over, come and get me. He wouldn't drive over a bridge. Absolutely hated driving, which I can relate to. 34:05 I hate driving as well. So I get that. But he, for then some reason, jumped in the car and drove from Melbourne to Sydney, And we think, according to his car GPS, as far as Noosa, turned around and came back down, went driving in inner city Sydney, which the thought of that petrifies me. So I can't, I don't, how did Attila do that? 34:29 And then started to drive back to Melbourne. Why did he do all that driving? What was he doing? Was he going to meet someone? 34:36 So it's very confusing. And then for someone who, who was almost surgically attached to his phone, left certain things in his car but took certain things with him. So left things that could be tracked but took things that couldn't be tracked and he's the sort of person who would be able just to know if someone was able to track him with that information. And then more recently I've discovered that he was possibly meeting someone in Wollongong And then that also turned into a huge mystery because the person that gave me that information then died a couple of days later after our phone call. 35:17 Wow. 35:23 If it is a case that Attila did abandon his car at Picton and take his own life, then where is his body? Yeah. 35:33 And there's too many questions really and police are still looking into this case. 35:38 He made a triple zero call. What did he say in that? 35:42 He claimed that he had... He was confessing to a crime that he hadn't committed. 35:48 So he claimed that he had taken a bribe from someone, a particular large payment of several... 35:56 thousand dollars for he wasn't really clear with police about what that was for he said that he had taken a bribe but his sister then went through every account because she was she worked for his business and so she was in charge of all his financials she was his EPOA so after he went missing she was able to access absolutely everything there was no payment so it Presumably that wasn't in cash because, as you said, he asked his mum for some cash, he said, for accommodation. 36:32 So if he had taken this massive bribe in cash, then he wouldn't have needed to ask his mum for anything and worry her. 36:40 and there was absolutely no evidence that he had taken a bribe for anything and what would someone need to bribe him about? So he kind of made a false confession to police and they then were not able to locate him. He sort of, he was on the phone for quite a while to the police during that 000 call, but they don't know exactly where he was at that time and again then just vanished. 37:08 What is your theory here? Because you said hello, Attila, at the start. Do you think he could be alive? 37:13 Well, I tend to go by the people who knew them. 37:18 And he was very close to his sister. It was just the two of them. They were extremely close. They lived together at one point. They worked together. She worked for his business. So they were together constantly. 37:30 And that's what she thinks. So she thinks it's highly possible that Attila orchestrated his own disappearance or the government orchestrated his disappearance and said, we need you, we need your brain for this secret project. It's all sounding a little bit sci-fi, isn't it? 37:48 Or conspiracy theory-esque, yeah. 37:51 Yeah, yeah, but I'm just going by the person that knew him the best and that's his sister and she thinks that that is entirely possible. Strange things have happened as well. She's had twins since then and she's specifically made that announcement public because she wanted Attila to be able to see that he was an uncle. So little things like that, she thinks that maybe he is still out there. Yeah. 38:19 It is certainly one of the stranger stories I've heard in the missing persons world. 38:24 Definitely. Definitely. It's one of those ones. Normally you can sort of say, okay, this is the likely scenario. Yeah. With Attila. I don't know. I think if he was still somewhere by the side of the road at Picton, they would have found him. 38:38 Moving on to Brian Maxted, he was 25, disappeared in 2009 after taking a flight from his home in Darwin to Sydney. This is also another quite strange one. He checked into a hotel, a very expensive hotel. Mm-hmm. 38:54 And they found his belongings there, so we know he was at the hotel. But this was all quite out of character for him. It was a bit weird. 39:00 Very much. And I think that's the point. I think he wanted to change his life. I think he wanted to do something exciting with his life. He had been in Darwin... 39:12 You know, working at the local electronics store, he was briefly engaged, but that didn't work out. 39:19 He was living in a caravan on the property owned by his stepfather who he didn't get on with. 39:26 I think he just thought, my life is going nowhere. I need to do something. I need to shake it up. 39:33 And he thought, right, I'm going to get on a plane. So he went to Sydney and thought, I'm going to just do something exciting. What do you do when you're a 25-year-old man landing in Sydney for the first time? You go to King's Cross. And so that's what he did. And he also spoke to an escort agency, but just wanted to talk to them. And they found him really sweet and really nice. And they were concerned because he was quite a naive young guy who wanted to go and experience a quite dangerous part of Sydney if you don't have your wits about you because there's a very big difference between Darwin and King's Cross. 40:13 And at that time, I sort of delved into what was going on in King's Cross at that time. There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of street violence. There was a lot of robbery. It was not... 40:25 a great place for someone who really didn't know what they were doing. And so I think Brian just wanted to have some fun, wanted to experience the nightlife, but something's happened. Something has definitely happened. We know he saw a doctor in Sydney at that time who gave him antidepressants. Now I can't figure that out either because this doctor was a locum doctor And you don't go to a locum doctor on holidays and get antidepressants. 40:55 It doesn't work like that. You need to be assessed and diagnosed and antidepressants take a long time to work. And so I don't know if this was a refill of a prescription he already had. So we know he filled the prescription because the medication was found in the hotel room. So we know he was feeling depressed, but if that may have been a long-term condition. It may not have been something he was feeling at the time. He may have been quite happy in Sydney. But I think, again, it's one of those cases where police have said, he was on antidepressants, therefore he's taken his own life. 41:30 And that's a message his mother, makes his mother very angry. She said, no, that was not him at all. He absolutely adored his mum. They were very close. It was just the two of them for most of their life. 41:43 In every conversation I have with Janine, she said, I love Brian so much and he loved me. Every conversation. 41:51 That was the, he was her whole world and he still is. You know, she has just been completely shattered by his disappearance. 42:02 So I think it's dangerous for police to make these assumptions and they made the same assumption about Sandrine Jordan in my second book, Missing. 42:13 She had had a previous suicide attempt. She was on antidepressants. She must have taken her own life. And so that's what they've assumed here. 42:21 But I would say, well, how would you do that in King's Cross and not be found? 42:27 And why didn't anyone see anything? 42:31 And so I think it's my concern is that he's gone to King's Cross and has said the wrong thing to the wrong person. And I think someone may have harmed him. And that's the conclusion that I've come to with Brian's case, for him to suddenly just abandon everything. He was planning to go back to the hotel. Everything was there, caught a taxi to King's Cross and has gone missing. So what happened to him that night? 42:57 I was shocked to read that the Northern Territory and the New South Wales Police basically played hot potato with this case. I mean, it was 2009 and the cross kind of police communication just wasn't there. 43:11 Exactly, exactly. They were saying, oh, it's a Darwin case. Well, it's not because he went missing in King's Cross and his poor mother was caught in the middle of that and she was unaware that no one was investigating her son's disappearance because they were saying, well, he went missing in Darwin. It's the Northern Territory case. Oh, yeah, but he was last seen in Sydney. 43:30 It is ridiculous to me that that sort of red tape exists and prevented what could have been you know they could have been interviewing taxi drivers they could have been getting CCTV from nightclubs and from streets and and no one was doing anything and by the time they sort of got themselves together and said oh yeah it is really actually a Sydney case because he went missing in Sydney all of that that information and evidence was was gone because it was too long, that they had just taken too long to get around to investigating it properly. 44:01 And no one's investigated whether Brian was murdered. 44:05 It feels like a lot of these missing people end up just falling through cracks. Am I right in that assumption? 44:11 I think so, because as you said at the start, you haven't heard of these names. So why aren't there there's a lot of names that are very familiar to the public. But yeah, a lot of, I think it depends on investigating officers. It depends on preconceived notions about bad behaviours, but they didn't know these missing persons and what they need to do is listen to their families. And if they had listened to his mother saying he would not have done this, he would not have taken his own life, he had no reason to He had his whole life ahead of him. 44:48 He was not clinically depressed. He was not suicidal. 44:52 And why would he go to Sydney? You know, it's nothing, none of that makes sense. 44:57 So I think they need to really listen to the families and take on board what they say about their missing person rather than a police officer who never met them standing up in the coroner's court saying, it is my belief that they took their own life because that's offensive and upsetting to a family. 45:15 Let's go back to the 70s. Rhonda State, she went missing in 1979. She was 20. She was a young mum. She had a four-year-old daughter. 45:25 And it was Camden that she went missing, another New South Wales. What can you tell me about her? Because she went to a dance and then vanished, didn't she? 45:35 She did. 45:37 Again, it's alarming because it's that whole Camden, Campbelltown area. And we once again know that that was Malat's stomping ground. 45:47 Yeah. 45:47 And again, Rhonda had a little bit of a troubled past. She was a very young mum. She became a mum as a teenager, but absolutely adored her daughter, Sarah. 45:57 I spoke to Sarah for the book, who... you know, only has limited memories of her mum because she was such a little girl when she went missing, but has grown up knowing that something terrible happened to her mother and it's really just been so distressing for her. It affected her deeply throughout her whole life. And so Rhonda did have a little bit of a troubled history and I think that could have coloured the police investigation again. 46:25 They thought, oh, you know, she's just a little bit of a tearaway. She's taken off. She'll come back. But once again, not really properly investigated because when I wrote the book, I spoke to someone who saw her getting into a car in the car park after the dance. And I said, so when you reported this to police? And she said, no. No. 46:48 She's never spoken to police. What? I spoke to a direct eyewitness who has never spoken to police. I said, why? And she said, they never asked me. Oh, my gosh. Wouldn't you have thought that police would have tracked down every single person at that dance and said, did you see anything? But they didn't. 47:05 I don't know why. I don't know how you could not do that. So they certainly made public appeals. Rhonda's case was in the media, was in the newspapers, but they didn't do the basics of tracking down and asking people, what did you see? And so now me asking that question of this eyewitness all of these years later, she can't remember anything She thinks there was a man at the wheel of the car. 47:39 Rhonda got in willingly, so perhaps he had offered her a lift somewhere. There was a suggestion she wanted to go and visit a man at Campbelltown. So maybe this guy said, I'll give you a lift there. Maybe this guy was Ivan Millat. 47:52 She can't remember the details of the car. She thinks it was a station wagon. And then I had another eyewitness who was has seen photos of what Malat looked like at the time in the late 70s and has a memory, whether it's an accurate memory or not, who knows, but she has a memory of a man who looked like that, who would hang around the dance. 48:15 And would hang around inside. There was a dance area inside the Masonic Hall and a bar area. And there were a group of men who sat in this bar area drinking and sort of watching the dancing. And she has a memory of him being there. And then another eyewitness who came forward who said her husband worked with Malat at the I think it's a mine down there at that time and knows that he frequented that particular dance. She knows that once again, the police don't have any of that information because they've not canvassed any of the people that were there at that time. 48:53 So in Rhonda's case, again, You know, again, I would never just say, oh, yeah, 1978, obviously it was Malat. I would never do that. There were so many other predators. But in this case, there is multiple people that can put him at that location at that time. And we know that he didn't just start abducting and killing people in the 90s. This was going on in the late 70s. 49:20 It's pretty scary, isn't it? You know, You've only covered a few cases in this book and two of them potentially were taken by Malat. 49:27 How many people did this serial killer take? 49:31 Exactly, exactly. 49:33 There's a list at the end of the book as well of all of the people missing in the 70s, particularly young women, not just women though. Sometimes there were couples, sometimes there were... 49:47 I don't, they definitely weren't all taken by Malat, but we need to, and I'm glad that the inquiry is looking at it again. I'm not sure how we can prove that it happened, but I think if we really put together a strong timeline of where he was and his general MO, it's what he did. He said, hey, do you want to lift somewhere? That's how he got people into his car. And I think that It's alarming how many there are. 50:19 And the thing that upsets me is that you've got families who can never lay those people to rest. So they're in a shallow grave somewhere and that's what haunts Barbara's brother and that's what haunts Sarah, that where are they? Why can't they be laid to rest in a decent, respectful way? 50:36 Well, Rhonda's case was recently announced as part of a parliamentary inquiry, but it does mean that, I mean, her case is getting looked at again. I mean, that's good news. 50:47 Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, all missing persons who are suspected unsolved homicides are looked at every five years anyway, whether that it's not, I don't I think it's a particularly intensive reinvestigation. They just kind of check things to see if there's been any new information, if they've got anything that might need to be looked at, any evidence that has popped up. So that is happening every five years anyway, according to New South Wales Unsolved Homicide. 51:18 But anything that will take another look at cold cases, I'm very passionate about cold cases because these people have been tortured for their whole lives. So that needs to stop. But the other thing that I really am so passionate about that I've spoken about in the book is that we have a lot of unidentified remains, particularly in New South Wales, thousands of them. thousands across the country, that we just don't have the funding to identify. 51:49 Really? And it is difficult when you've got, yeah... particularly very degraded remains, it's very difficult to identify them and more expensive and needing further specific testing, DNA testing. But we're not funding that. So I could be making appeals for people who were found years ago that we just haven't been able to identify. So some of these people may have been found, but they're just lying in Glebe Morgue unidentified without a name. 52:18 That's devastating. 52:20 Yeah, it horrifies me that we're spending money on things that, you know, statues and stadiums when we could be giving people back their daughters. 52:32 Because if there's anything from reading these stories, it's learning about how this grief destroys people or like just... 52:43 is a shadow over them for their whole lives. In the case of Sarah, the young girl who lost Rhonda, you know, she was looked after by loving grandparents who just stopped talking about Rhonda. 52:54 And she kind of faded into the background. But for Sarah, that's her mum. And it just was, it's so sad to see how it shapes these people. 53:04 Exactly, exactly. And the letter that Barbara Brown's mother wrote to the police, just saying, I'm just one of many, but please don't forget my daughter. 53:18 And so it's a privilege to be able to now in 2026 still talk about these people and and say I haven't forgotten them I'm going to keep talking about these people because that's all we can do it's um and sometimes the families aren't strong enough I think I've gone to a few of them actually and said do you want to speak to the media when the book comes out and um many of them have said I just can't can you talk for me Because it was hard enough doing the interviews and we all cried during the interviews and it's hard enough for them to relive it rather than to keep talking about it. 53:59 You've got people like Sally Layden who is amazing at talking about her mum, Marian Bada. She has this amazing strength and is able to do that all the time. Not all families have that and so they need others to speak on their behalf. 54:17 After the break, Nicole tells me about a case that's close to her heart. 54:24 The last missing person I want to talk about is Tanya Farrington, another 1970s missing person, late 1970s. She was 14 and she went missing from Crow's Nest, Sydney. Tell me why this case is so personal to you. 54:43 It was not long after I started the register. So I've been doing this 21 years. So it was not long after I started, I got an email from Tanya's sister-in-law. So she was married to Tanya's brother, Tony, and said, oh, I've just spotted Tanya's entry on your website. Who are you? 55:03 Yeah. 55:05 And that sparked a friendship that has lasted so almost 20 years. So Leanne is my best friend. We have become so close. And when Tanya's case went before the coroner, which was a very long time ago now, we bonded together and said, okay, we're going to present the absolute strongest conversation submission to the coroner that we can. We are going to find every scrap of information about Tanya. 55:34 The police literally lost her file. I think they said Tony was told that it was just sitting dusty on a shelf at North Sydney Police Station somewhere and it was pretty much empty. So Leanne and I said, we're going to fill that file up and we're going to give the And so we tracked down everything. We went through every person she went to school with. We know that she had a boyfriend at that time, but the police couldn't figure out who he was. So Leanne and I figured out who he was and we sent the police to go and talk to him. 56:08 We, we uncovered absolutely everything we possibly could because we wanted to just do the best that we could for Tanya and, and, and honour her and honour Tanya's parents who also died with never knowing what happened. 56:23 So we gave all that information to the coroner and said, you know, still no one has ever been charged. She is a case where I don't believe it was Ivan Malat, even though he was around at that time. I don't think it was Malat. There was another gang operating around the Northern Beaches at that time who were thought to be responsible for the abduction and murder of Trudy Adams at around the same time. 56:52 I think that those men are likely to have taken Tanya, but there's also some other kind of red herrings that we that we found and other potential suspects. 57:05 You know, we sort of discounted the boyfriend, but Tanya was someone who was really desperate for someone to love her. She wanted a boyfriend. She wanted that love. She wanted... to feel happy in her life. She was sort of struggling to fit in with her school and her friends in Sydney. She had come from Port Macquarie where she was very beloved by her friends and had loved her life there, moved to Sydney and sort of struggled to fit in where she was. 57:36 So she was really looking for that connection with someone. And when we spoke to all of the people in her life, there were some concerns that we had that popped up. 57:49 that we've passed on to police as well. And police are already very well aware of them as well. People that were interviewed at the time that sort of gave conflicting accounts of things. So it's far from over. 58:02 To step back a bit, what were the circumstances of her disappearance? She went missing basically from her bedroom, right? 58:10 Pretty much, yeah. Tanya was a bit of a rebel. She liked to sort of sneak out of the house on occasion. They had found her on Manly Beach one day with a boy. We know from speaking to her friends that she would sneak out and go to nightclubs, mostly at Manly. 58:30 And she just wanted to have a good time. She wanted to be older than she was. 58:35 and just wanted to enjoy her life. And she had this big, bright city now around her and she wanted to explore it. So we know that she did sneak out quite often and that's probably what she did on that night. But where she went after that, we just don't know whether she hitchhiked down to Manly. But again, I did a lot of research about what was on that night in Manly at that time. And there's probably not a lot that she could have gone to see that, you know, she could have snuck into a pub, but there weren't any major events on that night. 59:07 So I don't know that she would have snuck down to Manly on a Thursday night. 59:11 So whether she was instead going to visit a friend locally, whether she was going to walk to that friend or whether she was going to hitchhike somewhere and she's been picked up by the wrong person, we're not sure. 59:25 you think that she could have been the victim of this potential gang that you mentioned. Is there just not enough evidence there or are the police not looking into it? Like, where are we at with her case? 59:36 Again, all those suspects are dead, so we can't go and say, hey. I did speak to an amazing police officer named Jason McLeod who has done so much work. 59:49 It's a very complicated situation involving a corrupt police officer who kind of protected one of the main suspects and he did a lot of work in trying to find out what happened to Tanya way back sort of around the time of the coronal inquiry. And he did, I think the closest we came to was one of the suspects who in prison talked about taking a girl from Crow's Nest. And we think that was Tanya. And we know that he was part of this particular gang of usually two or three that would roam around abducting these girls. 60:26 There were a series of rapes, abductions and rapes on the northern beaches at that time that we are sure that these people were responsible for. But again... 60:36 They're all dead. We can't ask them. We can't charge them. 60:39 So where Tanya's body may be, we have absolutely no idea. The same with Trudy Adams. No one was able to find her body either. 60:49 Was it a really different experience for you being so close to the family in this case and kind of investigating it alongside them? Because these people have become like family to you. I can imagine that's a very different kind of experience. 61:05 It was. I think I never want to favour one missing person over another and I have always said that, you know, because I don't have a missing person in my own life, I can be impartial. So I didn't want to sort of say, oh, you know, Tanya is more special than the others, but it was I think my friendship with Leanne was was absolutely the reason that I jumped in and said, okay, let's really deep dive into this because I'm not able to do that for all missing persons. 61:39 So it was, it just felt like I was honouring Tanya to do that. And the same with putting her in the book. I felt, I said to Leanne, do you think we've done her justice? And she said, yes, we've done everything we can. So that was a new experience. It certainly helped. 61:58 And I feel like I wanted to do that for Tanya's mum as well. 62:02 Reading about Tony's experience as the brother, you know, you could see a lot of survivor's guilt through him. That's another kind of thing that you see with a lot of these families, isn't it? 62:16 Oh, it's just horrendous. He is just a broken man. He really is. It's really affected him throughout his whole life. And he just kept saying, I should have been able to protect her. He was her big brother. 62:28 There was quite a few years between them. He said, I should have been there. I should have looked out. I should have known what she was doing. I should have stopped her from sneaking out. He feels guilty that it just annoyed him at the time. He was annoyed with her when his mum told him the next morning, oh, Tanya didn't come home. He was like, oh. 62:47 you know oh geez typical tanya you know he didn't he wasn't worried it wasn't until sort of the next day that it's like oh she still hasn't come home um and and he feels tremendous guilt that he couldn't do anything to stop it from happening but the reality is there's nothing anyone could have done i think she was gone before anyone knew that she was missing 63:11 Does living in these stories and in the unknown of the missing persons world, has it taken a toll on you, 21 years of it? 63:21 I think it's... 63:24 I'm very... 63:27 Conscious of my own mental health because, you know, I think that I'm sort of a mental health ambassador and I've got some qualifications in mental health. The work I do is with dementia, so I'm very interested in the brain and how it works. So I'm conscious of my own mental health and I know that when I start getting really stressed, I can take a step back. 63:50 And I do things to kind of manage my own stress levels. 63:55 You know, I meditate and I watch silly Facebook videos and you've got to do things in your life that you enjoy to counteract the hard stuff. But I can also compartmentalise what I do with my own life because these things are not happening to me. So I don't take on that that terrible feeling of distress because I don't have the right to because this isn't happening to my life, thankfully. 64:29 I mean, it could. Having a missing person could happen to anyone. But I'm just able to say, okay, I need to be this type of person to be able to help these people so they don't need someone to cry with them. They need to say, right, let's do something. 64:49 The register is something you do in your own time for free. You've done it for 21 years. 64:56 What's the future of it look like? Do you have another 20 years in you? 65:00 Oh, absolutely. Yeah. As long as people still go missing, I can't imagine not doing it. I can't imagine... 65:08 living a life where you're not contributing something to the community around you, because I think we're all here to help one another. And that's what society is. That's what community is. And if you have the ability to help someone and you don't, then what's the point? I can't imagine being, I can't imagine not helping someone because that's just kind of what I do. 65:36 So if I have the ability to do it, then I'll absolutely keep doing it. And I've loved writing the books. That has been so incredible for me because I've always wanted to write and now I've written three books and that's so exciting to me. So I want to keep doing that, whether that's missing persons books or different kind of books. But I'll absolutely still be there. 65:57 There's no reason why I wouldn't be able to, I think, just to help people because it's become automatic now. 66:08 You're incredible, Nicole. Thank you for everything you do and thank you for joining us again. Thank you so much. It was lovely. 66:16 Thank you to Nicole for helping us to tell these stories. If you have any information about a missing person, you can contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or go to www.crimestoppers.com.au. You can find a link to her book Lost in our show notes. You can also find a link to the Australian Missing Persons Register. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.