Chapter 9
The Long White Cloud to the Final Frontier
The disappearance of Kiwi traveller Jamie Herdman
‘The mystery never leaves us because it has never been answered. It’s always there. We try to get answers but the same questions keep coming up.’
Outside Darwin, a modern city rebuilt in the wake of Cyclone Tracy, the Northern Territory is ruggedly beautiful, boasting endless kilometres of paperbarks, yellow scrub and termite mounds as tall as people. Dotted with remote Aboriginal communities, occasional roadhouses selling beer and frozen croc meat, and friendly settlements where tourists are treated like old mates, the Territory is still Australia’s Final Frontier.
It’s also the site of some of our most notorious missing persons cases, including the 2001 disappearance and murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, and the most famous case of all, the disappearance in 1980 of nine-week-old baby Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru.
It’s not surprising that people go missing in the vast remoteness of the NT. It covers more than 1.3 million square kilometres, is stiflingly hot in summer, and full of native animals that bite and sting. Nor is it uncommon for travellers to set off unprepared, and with insufficient food and water, many are reported missing, while others perish in the heat.
But there are other cases – like that of missing New Zealander Jamie Herdman, that are not so easily explained …
•••
When eighteen-year-old Jamie Herdman found out his mum was dying of cancer, his world turned upside down. The mother and son were very close and Janine had always helped Jamie fulfil his dreams.
‘He loved cooking so his mum set him up in a chef’s course. He did a year and a half’s training but when Janine was diagnosed with cancer, he gave it away,’ Jamie’s dad, Steve says.
Eight months after the diagnosis, Janine passed away, which was a terrible blow to Jamie, his brother Carl and sister Kim, and of course, their dad, Steve. ‘It was a very painful time for all of us and it hit Jamie particularly hard because he was very close to his mother,’ Steve says.
The Herdmans, from the picture-perfect town of Whakatane in New Zealand, had always been a close-knit family who used to love going on trips to the snow together. ‘Jamie really loved snow skiing,’ Steve says. ‘We used to go as a family when the kids were growing up.
‘Later on, the whole family went to Colorado together. It was a real eye-opener as to what was out there and I think we all got the travel bug.’
It wasn’t too long after the Colorado trip that Janine was diagnosed with cancer, so travel was relegated to the backburner. After Janine passed away, the family had to put their lives back together, which was particularly difficult for Jamie, a quiet and easygoing young man who had thrived on family life. ‘He was totally devastated,’ Steve says. ‘We were all there the night she passed away. You know it’s coming so you’re sort of prepared for it but ultimately it was horrendous.
‘Her body was brought back after she passed and we had the service on the front lawn. The kids were all part of the service. Jamie wasn’t keen to say too much so he read a poem.’
It wasn’t easy for the Herdmans to get on with their lives but they did their best to cope and after a while, Steve found love again with long-time family friend Debbie Morton. ‘Debbie and my wife were best friends and she really supported Janine through her illness,’ Steve says, recalling how companionship later turned to love.
It was a surprise to Steve’s children, particularly Jamie, who felt it was too soon. It prompted him to move out of the family home and into a flat with a group of mates who, according to Steve, ‘were renowned for drug taking’.
Unfortunately, the outdoors-loving Jamie, still struggling with the death of his mum, turned to drugs himself. ‘It could have been because of his mum’s death or it could’ve just been because of the group of guys he was involved with,’ Steve says. ‘He probably needed an “out” and perhaps that was the only way he felt comfortable.
‘I knew that he smoked marijuana, and used harder drugs for a while there too.’ Those harder drugs included methamphetamine, or ‘ice’, a highly addictive psychostimulant that can lead to psychotic episodes. ‘It was a party house and from all accounts it was pretty full on,’ Steve says. ‘At one stage I was scared we’d lose him.’
Steve wrote heartfelt letters to his son begging him to keep in contact but it all seemed pointless, until one day, with his bag in his hand and a smile on his face, Steve’s loving son, Jamie, came home. ‘He’d given up the drugs and had begun leading a healthy lifestyle again. He’d put it all behind him and was looking forward to the future,’ Steve says. ‘My son was back.’
Jamie started working for his dad, who was a builder, and quickly became fit. It was a total turnaround and a great relief to Steve, who was thrilled that Jamie was back to his old happy self.
Their time working together reminded Steve of when Jamie was a boy. ‘On Saturday mornings, he’d play in the shed with the tools. He was always making things out of wood. It was always a really nice time for him.’
As time went by, Jamie began dreaming of a trip to Australia, where his brother Carl was already living. ‘Carl went to Australia in 2003 to work in the oil business,’ Steve explains. ‘He was based in Perth but worked off the coast.
‘Jamie wanted to go to Australia to expand his horizons. He told me he wanted to get some work over there, travel around and maybe meet some new people.’
Before he left Jamie had saved some money and was more positive than ever. ‘He saw his trip to Australia as a fresh start,’ Steve says.
So in 2004, twenty-four-year-old Jamie, who, by that time, had formed a strong bond with Steve’s partner Debbie, farewelled them and flew to Perth, where Carl was waiting for him.
As Jamie had expected, he fell in love with Australia straightaway, and after spending time with his brother and doing some sightseeing, he landed a job in Broome as a furniture removalist where his relaxed, ‘can-do’ attitude was considered a great asset. He lived in the basic accommodation out the back and was known for his friendly nature and his simple lifestyle.
Having a regular income and minimal expenses meant that Jamie could buy a car – an old Nissan Combi van to be exact – which he planned to fix up so he could eventually fulfil his dream of touring the outback. ‘He loved that car,’ his dad Steve says. So much so that he gave it a pet name, Edna. In exchange for a carton of cigarettes, an Aboriginal man he’d met in Broome painted a mural on it that was designed to protect Jamie while he was on the road.
If only it had worked.
On 22 November 2006, after eighteen months in the removal business, Jamie suddenly told his boss, Nigel Patmore, that he was quitting and that he had to leave Broome the very next day. Sergeant Kerry Harris from the Northern Territory Police (then a detective senior constable) remembers the haunting sequence of events like it was only yesterday. ‘He said he had to leave because his past had caught up with him,’ Kerry begins.
The next morning, still puzzled by Jamie’s mysterious confession, his boss, Nigel, spotted Jamie and Edna by chance at the Willare Roadhouse, about 50 kilometres out of Broome. He stopped for a chat, and Jamie agreed to delay his trip by a day so that Nigel could get him a much-needed spare tyre.
‘He was far less anxious the next time they met,’ Kerry reveals. ‘He seemed more relaxed.’
Jamie then travelled on to Kununurra, where he ran into a mate, Dusan Bobich, at the Shell service station, and the pair chatted happily for about half an hour. Jamie made no mention of his past catching up with him and seemed his usual, easygoing self.
But after leaving Kununurra and reaching Katherine, for a reason still unknown, Jamie turned and drove 200 kilometres north to a town just south of Darwin, where he bought petrol. He then drove back to Katherine, by which time he was so shaken that he pulled into the police station for help.
‘He told the police that he’d been followed from Borroloola by members of a New Zealand gang called Black Power,’ Kerry reveals. It was a bizarre claim that stunned the police officer taking Jamie’s report. ‘He’d never heard of such a gang being in Katherine before. He just thought it was quite unusual.’
Still, even unusual reports have to be investigated, so patrol officers from Katherine drove around town in search of Jamie’s alleged pursuers. Jamie had described the car tailing him as a red or maroon Ford Falcon, and by a stroke of luck, the police found it in the driveway of a house nearby.
‘They spoke to the owners of the car and conducted routine checks,’ Kerry Harris explains. ‘It was immediately clear that the men did not come from New Zealand, and were actually who they said they were. Katherine police were satisfied the men in the car were not following Jamie, did not know who he was, and had no interest in him whatsoever.’
So why on earth did Jamie think the men in the car were after him? And did it have something to do with a mysterious past?
‘Jamie told police in Katherine that he’d gotten the daughter of a Black Power leader pregnant,’ Kerry says. ‘And he believed they were coming to get him.’
While Katherine police quietly wondered if the twenty-six-year-old’s panicked state was drug related, the detectives who later investigated the case doubted it. ‘Jamie had not been taking drugs for a long time and had no history of psychosis or mental illness,’ Kerry says. ‘So how he got into such a state was anyone’s guess.’
When the police told Jamie that his alleged pursuers were not from New Zealand, he appeared content to hit the road again, driving further along the Stuart Highway until, on 30 November, he reached Daly Waters, a settlement of about twenty people, 600 kilometres south of Darwin. There, he pulled into the car park at the Hi Way Inn – a friendly, no-frills roadside pub popular with tourists.
‘There was a sighting of him that afternoon, at about five o’clock, trying to hitch a ride on the Stuart Highway just outside the Daly Waters Inn,’ Kerry says. ‘A police officer from Elliott was driving by and saw him. He was pretty certain from the description that was later issued that it was Jamie.’
(A later check of Jamie’s bank transactions, however, showed that he was still an hour and a half’s drive away from Daly Waters at five o’clock, so either the police officer’s times were out or the dreadlocked hitcher on the side of the road was not Jamie.)
In any case, Jamie’s description was issued after the owner of the Daly Waters Inn phoned police to say that a strangely coloured Combi van called ‘Edna’ had been abandoned in the isolated car park around the back of the pub. When officers from Elliott arrived, they searched the van and were able to establish the identity of its owner, Jamie Herdman. Inside the unlocked van, they found Jamie’s passport, cigarettes, alcohol, and his clothes. His mobile phone and some cards and cash were also in the van, but no wallet.
‘The initial thought was that Jamie had broken down, but then an officer tested the car, and there was no problem with it.’
As far as police were concerned, Jamie Herdman was a missing person so Kerry Harris and Detective Sergeant Isobel Cummins from Major Crime were called in from Darwin to help lead what would soon become a long and frustrating investigation.
‘There is a lot of dense bushland surrounding the Daly Waters Inn,’ Kerry says. ‘It was a hot summer’s day and in that kind of environment, it doesn’t take long to get disoriented. It can get to over forty-six degrees on the ground.’
Despite the oppressive heat, police searched on foot and in the air, but there was no sign of the missing Kiwi. Other officers simultaneously conducted routine checks, canvassing the Hi Way Inn; accessing Jamie’s mobile phone records; contacting Immigration; and examining his bank accounts. They soon found out that Jamie had not used his phone, but he had withdrawn $100 at an ATM inside the pub, shortly before he was seen trying to hitch a ride. Yet despite Jamie’s distinctive golden dreadlocks, no-one at the pub recalled seeing him. ‘It seems he didn’t spend any money there, and didn’t talk to anyone. It soon started to look like he’d vanished into thin air,’ Kerry says.
But no-one vanishes into thin air. Most missing people turn up because there’s a rational explanation for their disappearance. But not in this case.
‘As soon as we told Jamie’s family that he had gone missing, they were very worried,’ Kerry says. ‘Their focus was immediately on finding him but they had no more idea than us what could have happened to him.’
‘It was absolutely devastating to hear that Jamie had gone missing,’ his dad Steve remembers. ‘It is every parent’s worst nightmare, hearing news like that.’ The nightmare continued because by the time Steve and Debbie flew to Australia to help with the search, there was still no word.
One thing was for sure: Steve and Debbie did not believe Jamie had taken off of his own free will. ‘The van was fully stocked,’ Steve reveals. ‘It had a gas fridge full of meat, a grocery box that was jam-packed and four or five jars of coffee.
‘If someone was on the run they wouldn’t be stocking up like this – like they were on a camping holiday.’
Steve and Debbie helped comb the bushland, drove relentlessly up and down the Stuart Highway, and asked everyone they met if they’d seen Jamie. ‘But the environment was so harsh and the landscape was so unforgiving,’ Steve laments. ‘We were just holding out hope that he was going to turn up somewhere.’
Meanwhile, the elderly gardener from the Daly Waters Inn reported that on the night Jamie disappeared, there had been a brawl outside that had woken him from his sleep. That night there were up to fifteen people, believed to have been from Aboriginal communities, camping across the road from the pub and enjoying a few drinks. It was a pretty regular occurrence.
When the gardener went outside he noticed three people standing near a white Ford Falcon. He thought it best not to get involved.
The following morning it was apparent that the car’s windscreen had been smashed and that there was blood on the car. And on this occasion, the campers had left earlier than usual. The worrying scene begged the question – had Jamie come to harm at the hands of the mystery campers?
‘We tested the blood from the car but it couldn’t be linked to Jamie,’ Kerry says. ‘We can’t say for sure that the campers weren’t involved but we certainly have no evidence to that effect.’
As Kerry and the team continued to investigate, they decided to enlist the help of police in New Zealand, to find out for sure whether or not Jamie had any links to Black Power. ‘The police there helped us investigate Jamie’s claim that a senior gang member had a vendetta against him because he’d gotten his daughter pregnant and was coming to get him. There was no evidence that Jamie had links to any gangs – no affiliations or ties with gangs at all. And he certainly hadn’t fathered a child. We still have no idea why he said or thought what he did because nothing was substantiated at all.’
As time went on, the Herdman clan, led by Steve, made return trips to the Northern Territory, retracing Jamie’s steps, putting up flyers and talking to locals, desperately hoping for clues. But it was like looking for a needle in a haystack so Jamie’s brother Carl called a press conference to implore anyone who frequented the highway for help.
‘It’s really hard for us to believe that no-one has seen him there and we are just appealing to the truck drivers, any tourists going past, just to have a think about it,’ Carl said. As for how he was coping, Carl summed it up like this: ‘We are just keeping busy and living on hope. Playing it day by day, hour by hour.’
‘We are really struggling now,’ Steve added before making a heart-wrenching appeal directly to his missing son. ‘Just ring us, mate.’
With no sign of Jamie in the vast Northern Territory, police called on media right around the country. As soon as Jamie’s photo was released, the sightings came in thick and fast. ‘There were lots and lots of sightings Australia wide,’ Kerry Harris tells. ‘North Queensland through to Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT, South Australia, Western Australia…there were countless sightings.’
But were any of them Jamie?
‘Some of the sightings got our hopes up, especially in Sydney and at Yass in New South Wales, and in the ACT. There was also CCTV footage of someone at Queanbeyan who looked like Jamie, and we were also told he had a job as a road worker in northern Queensland, repairing the highway between Palmerston and Bachelor.’
All the leads were investigated but as quickly as the reports came in, they were discounted. ‘I think everyone who had dreadlocks in Australia was spoken to,’ Kerry says.
With all leads exhausted, the Herdmans sought the advice of a well-known Australian psychic to see what information she might turn up. ‘We were open-minded about it,’ Steve says, ‘because we had nothing else to lose.’ The psychic insisted on doing a ‘cold’ reading for the Herdmans: that meant she didn’t want to know anything about Jamie before she started. All she wanted were some of Jamie’s personal effects to help her ‘connect’ with him.
Holding Jamie’s watch, the psychic told the Herdmans that she believed Jamie had been involved in an altercation at a pub in Broome, and that his assailants had caught up with him again in Daly Waters, fourteen hours’ drive away.
She said that she believed Jamie had been murdered and that his remains were in the boot of a smashed-up white car that kids jump all over on an Aboriginal community. She believed the community to be near the border of two remote locations and to have a cross on a sign out the front. She believed it was not a dry community and that while not involved, a young girl named Lily might know something about Jamie’s whereabouts.
Kerry’s theory on what happened to Jamie is markedly different. ‘I believe he wandered off and perished in the bush out there.’
Steve Herdman, however, believes it was foul play. ‘I believe that Jamie was murdered that night in Daly Waters,’ he says. ‘By whom, I don’t know. But I believe there was a person or persons there who know what happened that night.’
The impact of having a missing family member cannot be overestimated: those who have had the misfortune talk of endless tears, sleepless nights and in some cases, sickness.
Steve has recently been fighting a serious illness himself, and you can’t help but wonder what impact the trauma of losing his wife then his son has had on his health. ‘I think once you’ve been through watching the person you love more than anything else die before you, it changes you. There’s only one way forward and that is to deal with it – or try to – otherwise you’re no use to anyone.
‘It was bloody hard when Jamie went missing. And it still is…the not knowing.
‘But sometimes I sense he’s with me, particularly at night. I stop and wonder if it’s just my brain [playing tricks] but I feel like, “Yeah, Jamie was right there.”’
‘They’ll never give up,’ Kerry Harris says of the Herdmans. ‘They’re such good people and I’d do anything to find an answer for them. But I see cases like this time and time again…and I fear that this is one that won’t get any ending.’