Chapter 12
A Mother’s Tears
The country town abduction of teenager Jessica Small
‘I often say to myself, “It’s out of my hands”, but then the mother side of me comes out and I think, “It should’ve been me”. ‘She was only fifteen…she deserved to live life.’
Jessica Small was just another teenage runaway.
That’s what Ricki Small kept hearing after her daughter disappeared.
But Ricki knew better and eventually, when the New South Wales Homicide Squad took over the case a decade later, she was proven right …
•••
‘Jess was an Alice in Wonderland type,’ her mother says of Jessica as a little girl. ‘She was always off with her imaginary friends.’
In textbook style, the shy little girl soon blossomed into a young woman, and by fifteen Jess was interested in fashion, wore makeup and loved to dance. ‘She was a very attractive young girl and beautiful in her nature as well,’ Ricki says. ‘She dreamed of studying marine biology but she probably would’ve become involved in acting or modelling or fashion.’
Jess had lots of friends at school and her mum let her go out at night, so long as she knew where she was going, who she was with, and when she’d be home.
Bathurst, an inland town surrounded by lightly rolling hills in the central west of New South Wales, was safe as houses as far as Ricki was concerned. She’d grown up there and like most locals, she’d always felt pretty safe once the sun went down.
‘But now I know that the same things can happen in a country town as can happen in Sydney or Melbourne …’
On Saturday 25 October 1997, Jessica and her best friend Vanessa Conlon, who lived in the same neighbourhood, had been looking forward to a barbecue at another friend’s house. ‘But a friend [of the host family] had died that morning, so Jess and her friends changed their plans for the evening,’ Ricki says. ‘The girls decided to meet up with half a dozen other friends in town and go to the local amusement arcade, Amuse Me, instead.’ The amusement parlour hadn’t been in town long but was already proving popular with local teens, who went there to play the latest arcade games.
‘Jess left the house between seven-thirty and eight that night,’ Ricki recalls. ‘She just said she wouldn’t be home late. I gave her money for a cab so I just presumed she would’ve got a cab home.’
But Jess didn’t come home early; in fact, she didn’t come home at all. It was highly out of character because Jess had always been a ‘Mummy’s girl’ and even though she sometimes roamed the streets of Bathurst with her girlfriends at night, she wasn’t the type of kid to take off.
By the early hours of the morning Jessica’s no-show had Ricki in a panic. ‘It was two or three o’clock the next morning when police came to the door to tell me something had happened to Jessica and Vanessa. “We think they’ve been attacked in Hereford Street,” the officer said, so I got the feeling that someone had jumped out of the bushes at them.’
It was the kind of doorknock every parent dreads, and within two hours the story had gone from bad to worse when Ricki heard ‘there was a car involved’.
‘Later that morning Vanessa came around,’ Ricki says. ‘She just threw her arms around my neck and sobbed.’
Then she told Ricki that Jess had been abducted, a story that would take years for some people to believe …
•••
As soon as Homicide’s Detective Sergeant Peter Smith took over the Jessica Small brief in 2007, he knew this was not a case of a teenage runaway. As far as he was concerned, Jess had been kidnapped and probably murdered.
‘First of all, Jessica had a great relationship with her mum and her sister, Rebecca. She had no reason to run away.
‘She had a close group of friends as well, and since she vanished she has contacted no-one. In addition to that, Vanessa was in the car with her and saw the bloke attack her.’
Before Peter took over the case, the investigation had turned up few clues, leaving Ricki Small frustrated and angry, questioning whether the investigation’s lack of momentum was because she was ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’.
Eventually, the coroner found that the original brief was ‘inadequate’, which is why Peter was called in to head up a taskforce to re-investigate the case from scratch, a challenging task given the passage of time.
When he re-interviewed Vanessa, Peter was left in no doubt that Jess probably didn’t survive the ordeal and that foul play was involved. ‘These girls hitchhiked everywhere,’ Peter says, ‘and that night they accepted a lift with a man who Vanessa described as being tall, with dark hair, Australian, and in his thirties.’
The man had agreed to take the girls to another friend’s place at Kelso, a satellite suburb just east of Bathurst. ‘Jeez, they need to fix that bridge,’ the man had commented as he drove them towards the old Hereford Street bridge on the outskirts of town.
It was an innocuous enough comment but Vanessa’s account of what happened next was nothing short of a living nightmare. Two hundred metres before they reached their friend’s house, the driver switched off the car’s headlights and turned around to face Jessica, who was sitting in the back.
‘You come here,’ he demanded.
‘I don’t think so,’ Vanessa replied on her friend’s behalf, at which point he grabbed her by the throat.
Vanessa says she then heard Jessica’s door open and yelled to her, ‘Let’s go!’ As Vanessa ran screaming through the night she thought Jess was right behind her.
She wasn’t.
•••
Hysterical, Vanessa ran to a neighbour’s house for help, soon realising her best friend was not in pursuit as she’d first thought. Worse still, when Vanessa came out of the house there was no sign of Jess and the man’s car had gone, but where?
It was a terrible burden for a young girl to carry – the fact that she’d believed her friend to be running behind her, when in fact she was in the clutches of an unknown man with fearsome intentions.
Relaying the terrifying events of that night to Jess’s mum Ricki, it soon looked like Jess would not return home unharmed, if she returned at all. Chillingly, Kelso residents also reported hearing screaming just after 12.40am on Sunday 26 October, around the same time Jessica was last seen.
‘As you can imagine, by Sunday night I was going into shock,’ Ricki tells. ‘It was so surreal.’ She says the police were of the opinion that Jess might have run away but figured at that early stage, ‘they were probably dumbfounded too.’
Ricki wondered how she could help find her daughter but having never been in such a bewildering position, she didn’t know where to start. ‘As a parent of a missing child you feel so damn helpless. Where do you look? I couldn’t do that to myself…why torture yourself?’
Ricki didn’t need to torture herself because straightaway others were content to do so for her, telling her that Jess was just another runaway. ‘There was a lot of bitchiness and gossip but those people have all had to swallow their words because it’s been fifteen years now since Jess disappeared, so now they realise that something must have happened to her. All this time later they give me half-baked apologies or smile at me in the street.
‘You wonder about people sometimes.’
It was tough for Vanessa too, who was too young to know how to deal with all the malice. ‘A lot of the teenagers at the time were telling her that she was lying and said she knew where Jess was. They made it hard for her.’
There were also rumours that Jessica had had a drug overdose. Peter says that’s pure fantasy too. ‘We’ve got an independent witness seeing Vanessa and Jessica in the main street of Bathurst. Thirty-five minutes later Vanessa was on someone’s doorstep bawling her eyes out. It doesn’t make sense that Jessica had an overdose and that her body was disposed of and Vanessa, who was just a young girl, was suddenly on the other side of town within thirty-five minutes.’
Preferring to examine facts rather than rumours, Peter quickly turned his attention to who else was at the amusement parlour at the same time as Jessica. ‘We spoke to every single solitary person who was there that night,’ Peter says. ‘We asked them, “Who were you there with?”, and got a statement from everyone.’
As a result of Peter’s thoroughness, he dug up a vital clue that should have been unearthed years earlier. ‘Two people came forward and said they saw an adult male at the amusement centre,’ he reveals. ‘Amuse Me was a place where kids would hang out,’ he adds. ‘It would be rare for anyone over eighteen to be there.’
Significantly, the witnesses told Peter they had seen the man watching Jessica and recalled how he was asking questions about her. It might have been understandable if he were a teenage boy, but he was at least thirty, the same age as the man who offered Jessica and Vanessa a lift that fateful night.
It was almost inconceivable that the information about the man who’d had his eye on Jess had not surfaced during the original investigation. ‘It’s certainly problematic doing things after the fact,’ Peter acknowledges.
Peter discovered another critical lead too: the man at the amusement parlour had said he worked at the Oberon timber mill, about three-quarters of an hour’s drive from Bathurst. At the time, about 800 people were employed there. ‘So what we did was a canvass of all men between eighteen and forty-five who worked at the timber mill in October 1997.
‘Many of them had moved on – some were in Queensland, Western Australia even.’
It would not surprise Peter if Jessica’s abductor had worked at the mill and had local knowledge; from his conversations with Vanessa, Jessica’s attacker seemed to know the way to Kelso. ‘When the girls told him where they wanted to go, he went straight there. He seemed to know the area well and may have been from the area.’ The fact that he commented on the Hereford Street Bridge also gives Peter the impression the man was familiar with it.
Ricki Small has long had a gut feeling that Jess’s abductor had local knowledge and suspects her body isn’t far away. ‘I’ve had this inkling she may be around the Bathurst area,’ Ricki says. ‘I think that’s why I’ve never left here…although I’ve sometimes wanted to …’
While Peter continues the immense job of tracking down past mill employees, he’s hoping to uncover a ‘person of interest’ – someone who owned a car like the one driven by Jessica’s abductor. ‘It was a white VK model Holden sedan. It had a lot of holes in the floor of the front passenger’s seat – not big enough to put your foot through but big enough to see the road going by underneath.’
Peter’s team conducted extensive research into the VK Commodore and learned that rust in the foot well was not a problem common to that make, so he hopes members of the public will help him identify who drove the damaged car back in the late nineties.
There was also an item in the car that Peter thinks might prompt someone’s memory. ‘There was an orange blanket covering the rear parcel shelf,’ he reveals.
Besides the material clues, Peter believes members of the public might have long held suspicions about the identity of Jessica’s abductor, and wants them to come forward too. ‘While the passage of time might have dimmed certain parts of evidence, it can also make people more willing to share information,’ he explains. ‘Loyalties people might have had fifteen years ago, they mightn’t necessarily have anymore. So if anyone has any information, as small as they might think it is, it might be the piece of the puzzle that we need.’
Thankfully, Peter has put together more pieces of the puzzle than ever before, but the investigation is far from over. ‘We’ve interviewed twenty persons nominated as having knowledge of the incident and we’ve eliminated all of them. We’ve conducted searches of possible locations where Jessica’s body might be found; we’ve even got some cadaver dogs down to where a woman saw a similar car parked that night. And we’re still going.’
Grateful to Peter for his tenacity, Ricki Small now believes it’s more likely than ever that one day she’ll find out who kidnapped her daughter. ‘I wish he’d been there in the first place,’ she says of Peter, who was the first person to offer her and Vanessa some much-needed counselling to help ease the emotional trauma. ‘For the first few years I hit the bottle,’ Ricki admits. ‘These days I’m okay…although I have a lot of depression and detachment from other people. I just prefer to be on my own at this stage of my life until I am relieved of some of the pressure.’
It’s been an uphill battle for Jessica’s older sister Rebecca too, who still grieves for her sister every day. ‘She’s just been devastated,’ Ricki says. ‘She doesn’t cope at all really. She has children of her own now and as a result of what happened to Jess, she’s overprotective. She’s a very sad, lost girl who loved her sister deeply.
‘To people like us, who have a missing family member, one day is a long time. It just goes on forever and you just hope for a bit of an ending to it.
‘It probably won’t be a nice ending,’ Ricki admits reluctantly. ‘It is very cruel, always wondering and never knowing for sure …’
Peter Smith may never be able to bring Jessica back but he is determined to find out what happened to her and bring her abductor to justice. After all these years he wants to give Ricki the answers she deserves.
‘It might sound like a cliché but I really want closure for Jessica’s family and Vanessa.
‘If we don’t solve this, I’ll carry it for the rest of my career.’