Chapter 18

Putting the Pieces Together

It was about 5.00 p.m. on Monday, 6 October when local Peter Taylor noticed the line search heading toward his property. Curious as to the reason for its presence, he walked down and asked some members of the line what they were doing. He was told that a couple of teenage girls were missing. Peter didn’t know the girls personally. Perhaps if his own children had been younger he would have, as they may have attended school together. He and his wife watched as the search proceeded from the bush, across the 28-acre property and on.

In the coming days, Peter would provide the police with information as to the whereabouts of a clue that he had come across earlier that day. But, as yet, he was unaware of the significance of what he had seen.

Owners of a hydroponics farm, the Taylors advertised their business at the T-intersection of Old Wallagoot Road and Sapphire Coast Drive. On the Sunday before, as Peter had driven out of his street to set up a stall at Candelo markets, he noticed that the sign was missing. Driving on, he made a mental note to search for it later. Occasionally, the sign would go missing for a period of time, or be vandalised, or even pinched completely. That afternoon, on the way home, he stopped to clear some broken glass off the road and saw the sign in the bush. Someone had ripped it out and thrown it there. He checked to see if it was okay. It was. Then, tired from a day at the markets, he went home.

At 7.45 a.m. the next day, Monday, he returned with his wife, Judith, to re-attach the sign. They were on the way to where the sign was resting when they spotted the clue. It was a pile of clothes. The clothes were a couple of metres away from the edge of the road and about 50 metres from the local garbage transfer station. Neither of them gave the clothes a second thought. It wasn’t uncommon for people to leave boxes of garbage on the roadside when the station was closed. That evening when the Taylors discovered that the girls were missing, they were still unaware of the significance of the clothing. It was the general consensus that the girls had run away. The couple wouldn’t realise what they had seen until days later.

As the line search moved on from the Taylors’ home, resident Allan Lane was standing in the caravan park office explaining to a police officer where he had found the clothes. It had been just after 4.00 p.m. when he had driven to the tip with rubbish he had collected while cleaning out a property for a customers. The clothes were in a neat pile on Old Wallagoot Road, just before the entry. They were the same clothes the Taylors had seen, but paid little attention, earlier that day. Having emptied the rubbish from his trailer, Allan had decided to stop the car by the clothes and investigate. There had been a blue-mauve jumper and a reddish flannelette shirt. The jumper had appeared to be new.

Allan had placed the clothes in his car, and then gone for a short walk into the bush to see if he could find the owner. Unsuccessful, he had turned the clothes in to the caravan park office, having decided a tourist must have lost them. He was wrong. The caravan park proprietor, Carol Marchanich, had recognised the clothes instantaneously.

‘Where did you get those?’ she had asked.

‘Up near the tip.’

They were Lauren Barry’s.

Initially, when Carol had heard that some girls were missing, she supposed they were from the caravan park itself. A number of residents had headed out to search, and the nearby paddock was alive with police and rescue groups. It had also become the heliport for the rescue choppers. Later, she had heard the missing girls were Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins. Both girls had frequented the park to visit friends. She had also heard what they were wearing. The clothes placed in front of her were Lauren’s – there had been no doubt in her mind.

Allan Lane had stood in shock as the caravan park’s proprietor had telephoned the police. Then, he had waited, unable to leave until the police officer had arrived from the search at Evans Hill. Now, as he stood before him, he was only too happy to help.

From the moment he saw the clothing, it was evident to Sergeant Shane Box whose it was as Lauren’s name was written on the tag of the sloppy joe. Regardless, the items had to be formally identified. When he finished questioning Allan Lane, the police officer drove to the Barrys’ home and placed the two items of clothing before them. The moment he did, Lauren’s mother began to cry. The clothes confirmed to Cheryl Barry that someone had taken her daughter. In Lauren’s bedroom, more of her clothes lay clean and neatly folded on her bed, ready to be placed in a suitcase for her trip to Sydney. Cheryl reached out and picked up the jumper and shirt.

The shirt had belonged to Nichole’s big sister, Liza, and when she hadn’t wanted it Nichole had taken ownership of it. Then, when she in turn had cleaned out her wardrobe, Lauren had been there to seize possession. So the cycle had continued. It had been too long for Lauren so the girls had cut it to fit. She had been wearing it the night she disappeared.

Sergeant Box left the jumper and shirt with the Barrys and headed back to the search. As yet there was no need to keep them as evidence as the police still considered the girls to have run away. Later that night, Cheryl would fold the jumper and shirt, placing them with Lauren’s other clothing, unaware that they held a vital clue to her disappearance – the seminal fluid of one of her killers.

 

The girls’ last movements were slowly being mapped. It was clear, from the recollections of the teenagers at camp, that Nichole and Lauren had left around 9.30 p.m. on Sunday. It was then thought that they made their way down to the main road. A young local shop assistant had seen the girls on her way back from the Bega Festival fireworks display. She knew Nichole through work and guessed she had passed her and her friend just before 10.00 p.m. They had been about halfway down Evans Hill on the Snowy Mountains Highway. A local painter and his wife had seen two girls matching the descriptions of Lauren and Nichole walking along the road near Preo’s Fish Shop, a little further up the hill, at 9.55 p.m. Another family reported seeing a car on the dirt track leading toward White Rocks at about 10.00 p.m. It had been moving fairly fast as the headlights had been bouncing around quite a bit. Despite being on the Snowy Mountains Highway, this family hadn’t seen the girls, which meant that it was possible they had left the road before 10.00 p.m.

Local Susan Robinson would eventually provide the details as to how and when the girls left the road. On Tuesday, 7 October 1997, Susan returned to work unaware of the girls’ disappearance, but as she sat listening to the discussion at morning tea, it dawned on her that she may have witnessed their last movements before their departure from Evans Hill. That Sunday, Susan had been at her niece’s wedding in Merimbula. During the reception, her daughter had asked to go home and she had agreed to drive her back to Tathra and then return. The two had left Merimbula at about 9.30 p.m. and travelled along Sapphire Coast Drive. It was a fair distance, so by the time the car had reached the intersection and turned right into Tathra Road, or the Snowy Mountain Highway, it had been about 9.50 p.m. Half a kilometre up Susan had to stop. A car had halted on the road. The Evans Hill section of Tathra Road is a single-lane stretch fraught with bends. There are double lines, which prohibit overtaking. The bushy nature of the surrounding landscape adds to the lack of visibility. There are no streetlights. It would have been risky to overtake the parked vehicle.

In her car’s headlights Susan had seen what had appeared to be three hitchhikers. None of them had their thumbs out, nor had they been waving down traffic. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but perhaps the stopped car had given her the impression they were hitching a lift. There had been two girls and a man. Both girls had been rugged up. At least one of them had been wearing a beanie. She hadn’t taken much notice of them. They had been hidden by shadows. Her thoughts had, however, rested on the man for a moment. There was something about him that had made her worry about her trip back past him alone. He had dark skin, a goatee and a slim build. She had no doubt he was a thin man, not a boy. His hair had been cut short at the sides and was curly on top. He had been wearing baggy track pants. She assumed he was an Aboriginal.

The light-coloured sedan in front of Susan had slowly pulled into the alcove and she had overtaken it. As she passed, she had given the car a sideways glance. The interior had been dark and she was unable to determine who or how many people were inside. She had not noted the car’s registration number. Susan’s daughter mentioned that she recognised the man as being one of the local Aboriginal people in Bega. It had been his eyes she had identified. They had been really white.

Believing that what she had seen was important, Susan walked across town from her workplace to the police station and asked for a police officer she knew. She related her experience and was told to leave her name and telephone number. Someone would contact her later.

The two teenagers had been missing for more than 36 hours. Sergeant Shane Box approached his senior officers, telling them that it appeared there was more to the girls’ disappearance than a case of runaways. It was his gut feeling that something just wasn’t right. Neither of the girls had accessed their bank accounts, nor had they removed any personal items from their homes. The younger had a homelink phone card, which allowed her to ring home without money, from any telephone booth, at any time. Yet she hadn’t. That was in itself strange, as both girls until now had called home regularly. They appeared to be pretty reliable kids. Their disappearance was totally out of character. The police arranged for extra officers to be sent down and Operation DALOA commenced the next day. The dog squad and mounted police were to join their fellow officers and rescue groups already searching the Bega Shire area.

Later that evening, as daylight faded and the search was scaled down for the night, the Collins family returned home feeling empty. Inside the house Delma and Liza headed for the kitchen. Waiting on the bench was a box full of food and a huge bar of chocolate.

‘Goodness,’ Delma exclaimed. ‘I wonder where this came from. Well, I guess we’d better unpack it.’ She turned to the fridge and opened the door. It was stuffed to the brim. The freezer was also as full as possible, the little pantry overflowing. Two of her work colleagues had needed to do something. They had decided that Graeme and Delma wouldn’t be able to shop if they were searching and that they would do it for them. When they had reached the local supermarket, Murrays, one of the owners had teased the girls, ‘That’s a lot of groceries for you, isn’t it?’

They had explained what they were doing and he had asked them to wait while he added his own contribution to the spoils.

The local community was seeing to it that they needed for nothing. Earlier, Delma had returned home to find a friend from tennis downstairs.

‘What are you doing sneaking in my backdoor?’ she had joked.

‘I just wanted to leave this lasagne in your laundry sink. I didn’t want to intrude.’

‘You’re not intruding,’ Delma had assured her friend.

Another friend had brought a casserole and wine. Another would come every morning to see whether they needed milk or bread. Delma wondered how she would ever begin to thank everybody.

As Delma looked for somewhere to put the extra groceries, Graeme sat outside on the back steps. He had spent the day searching and answering questions. Before him was the familiar sight of the bush, its gum trees and banksias alive with the movement and noise of the animals and the wind. From where she came, he didn’t know. Suddenly she was there, her blonde hair pulled back, her blue eyes looking directly at him.

‘It’s okay, Dad,’ Nichole smiled. ‘I’m all right now.’

Then she was gone.

Graeme slowly rose to tell Delma and Liza what he had seen. His search would no longer be for the return of his daughter alive, but for her remains.

 

When he was assigned to the investigation on Wednesday, 8 October, Detective Sergeant Joe Mura’s job was to set up the task force. He had to look at what the local police knew to have transpired and all the additional information that had been gathered, then delegate tasks. It wasn’t a small chore. There were hundreds of snippets of information, including sightings of the girls all over the country, and Bega, like most small towns, suffered from a lack of specialised human resources and technical equipment, which meant there was no formal investigation system in place. The first thing the detective did was to call upon an analyst from Wollongong to set up a computer database called the TIMS system. Once all the gathered information had been keyed in to the TIMS system, it spat out jobs to do, lines of inquiry, follow-ups and helpful pieces of information.

That day investigators arrived from Lake Illawarra, Shoalhaven, Batemans Bay and Queanbeyan. These men, along with the detectives based in Bega, made up the inner circle of investigators that were Operation DALOA.

That day, Delma Collins had the sorrowful task of ringing her ex-husband, Nichole’s biological father. It was the third day the girls had been missing. It was time to tell him. The phone call had been Graeme’s suggestion. Graeme maintained regular contact with his own children, unlike Nichole’s natural father, who hadn’t seen her in over ten years. But he still felt a father had rights. He wouldn’t have liked to have found out his child was missing on the television news. He indicated to Delma that it might be an idea for her to call him, both letting him know about his daughter’s disappearance and inviting him to come down to participate in the search.

Ironically, Nichole’s natural father had tried to contact her and her sister, Liza, just before Nichole disappeared. In the beginning, neither of the girls had been keen on resuming contact. Graeme had sat down and asked them to give him a chance.

‘Just have a yarn with him and see what happens,’ he had encouraged. Nichole had refused. When the phone had rung, she had signalled she was out.

‘I’m not here. I’m not here,’ she had mimed, shaking her head and panning her hands. Delma had been left to make excuses.

As she spoke to her ex-husband, Delma tried to explain what his daughter was like. Despite having sent photos, the girls he knew were still little, as they had been the last time he had seen them. Delma invited him down to Kalaru so that she could take him out to the campsite and show him a little of what Nichole’s life was like before she disappeared. He accepted, and would eventually spend some time searching. After that visit he would regularly call for the latest news on his daughter. At first there wouldn’t be much to tell.

As Operation DALOA commenced, countless police hours were being spent draining dams and abseiling down crevasses. Lauren’s father, who knew the local area well due to his job with the council’s town-planning department, helped by pinpointing areas of concern. Among them were the disused mine shafts up in the hills, which were now hidden by vegetation but still posed a serious risk. It would have been easy enough for one, or both, of the girls to have fallen metres below the surface. Divers were also checking all the streams, rivers, lakes and ocean. Others were climbing down the cliffs along the coast and searching the rocky ledges below. Mounted police were scaling the bushland and a sniffer dog was searching for trails. Every resource available was being utilised, but nothing was found.

Like many of the locals, Susan Robinson and her husband wanted to help and joined a line search. At first they had been positive, but now they had a terrible sinking feeling. Ten minutes earlier, the line they were in had come to what had looked like a couple of shallow graves. The police immediately taped off the area and asked the searchers to leave, checking their shoes for evidence on the way. Susan looked up as a police officer approached. Yes, they could continue, the graves had been full of shells. Abalone shells.

Also searching, 17-year-old Nathan Barry had decided that it was more likely the girls would be found along the coast than inland, especially if they were on foot. He was methodically covering the area from Narooma to Merimbula. Since pulling out his topographical maps within hours of their disappearance, his father had spent every waking moment searching on a motorbike. Nathan had opted for a mixture of horseback, motorbikes and the canary yellow Kingswood he had recently acquired, along with his provisional licence. Nathan was aware that Loddy knew the bush well. Their first house had been in Black Range Road in Bega. At the time, having few local friends, they had spent hours traipsing through the bush, recording birds and exploring. Then, when they had moved to Kalaru and built up a social network, they had joined the other teenagers camping in the bush that surrounded their town.

The two siblings and their friends had paddled on Blackfellows Lake in canoes, finding idyllic havens to set up their tents. The waterway stretched from the ocean in Tathra to the Bega Cheese Factory. Today, shallow enough that you could almost walk the entire distance, it was once the pathway for steamships. Years of farming and land degradation had washed dirt onto its banks, reducing its depth. The lake and the bush had been their playground. It would have been impossible for either of them to get lost there.

As the searching continued, Detective Sergeant Joe Mura and his partner travelled to Kalaru and started to go through Nichole Collins’s room looking for clues.

 

Delma watched as one of the police officers read her daughter’s diary. When he had first opened it, a letter from one of Nichole’s friends had fallen out. It talked of ‘losing Mr V’.

‘Do you know who he is?’ the police officer had asked.

Delma had had no idea and had investigated. Rebecca Kemble had known the answer.

‘Mr uh, uh. You are thinking about having sex so you’re not going to be a virgin anymore,’ she had shyly explained. The girl who had written Nichole the letter had obviously been thinking about having sex with her boyfriend.

‘Virginity,’ Delma announced to the police officer later. ‘Mr V is virginity.’

Delma returned to stand vigil at the door as the search of Nichole’s room continued. The police officers flipped through clothes, books and magazines – there were plenty of them. Every month Nichole would buy Dolly magazine. To her and her friends it was important. They were forever laughing over questionnaires and sending away for freebies. Little brown packages with pads and other necessities would arrive in the mail.

Detective Sergeant Mura pulled a small cotton bag out of Nichole’s drawer. His eyes rose briefly to meet the other police officer’s.

‘You’ll find rocks in there,’ Delma stated. The two policemen glanced at each other again before Joe tipped out the bag’s contents. They were rocks. Nichole had hated cleaning her room. She preferred to be out socialising. Delma smiled. When she was in, you would hear her banging on the wall between her and her brother’s room shouting, ‘Turn that bloody music down.’ Ben played his music loud. The next day she would be at his door asking to borrow the same CD. Ben saved and spent his money on music. Nichole never had any. She was always a couple of months in advance on her pocket money. She drove Graeme insane.

Earlier they had questioned Graeme about another entry in Nichole’s diary. In it she had claimed that her parents had a huge row and her father had moved out. The incident had been in January. As they often did, Delma and Graeme had fought over Nichole’s lack of savings. Nichole had a job at Coles and got pocket money, and had nothing to show for it. The argument had culminated in Graeme throwing a glass at Delma’s car before going to Liza’s place for a few days to cool down.

Detective Sergeant Mura reached further into Nichole’s drawer. Wednesday was coming to an end and there was still no sign of either of the girls.

Later that evening, Lauren and Nichole’s friends camped at Sarah Darcy’s house on her bedroom floor. Everyone was tired. They had been searching all day, but sleep wasn’t on the cards as wind and rain lashed the outside walls. The girls wondered out loud how their friends were doing. How would Lauren be coping with her period without pads? How would Nichole make it through without a cigarette? Somewhere in the darkness, their two friends’ bodies lay in the rain, undisturbed since before they were discovered missing. The two men responsible for their deaths had already returned to New South Wales and begun to cover up the evidence of their crime. It would be at least another month before one of them would break down and confess. From the opposite side of Sarah’s room, Rebecca Kemble looked at Lauren’s big brother, Nathan. As the chatter continued around them, she noticed his shoulders hunch. During the terrible weeks that followed, it would be the only time she would see him cry.