Chapter 25
The Runaway
A brother’s forty-year crusade to find his missing sister
‘It’s pretty clear to me that she planned her own disappearance. She saw an opportunity…and she took it.’
In the days before iPods – even before Walkmans – teenagers listened to their favourite tunes on transistor radios.
The sound was tinny but it was still just as exciting when the DJ played your favourite song.
Tamara Milograd, or Tammy, as she liked to be known then, was given a transistor radio by her mother, Luba.
It was great fun for a while because Tammy loved to dance, and the year she went missing – 1971 – was a pretty good time for music: Daddy Cool were doing the ‘Eagle Rock’; Rod Stewart was waking ‘Maggie May’; and The Doors were on their way to psychedelic heaven with ‘Riders on the Storm’.
But it wasn’t enough for Tammy to simply imagine the exciting new world that her rock idols sang about; she wanted to experience it too, and ran away from home when she was just sixteen.
That was more than forty years ago, yet despite the passage of time, her brother Eugene holds out hope that one day, he’ll see his little sister again.
•••
Alexander and Luba Milograd, and their extended family, fled Belarus as refugees. They arrived in Australia via Germany around 1950 and settled in suburban Melbourne – a world away from the troubles of post-war Europe.
The Milograds led a traditional life, consistent with the ways of the old country. They regularly went to church, mixed with families from similar cultures, and when their four children came along, they impressed upon them the importance of getting a good education.
Academic study didn’t figure quite so highly on Tammy’s agenda though, according to her brother Eugene. ‘She had rebellious tendencies,’ he recalls. ‘I believe she had to change her bedroom from the front [of the house] to the rear because she may have been sprung climbing out the window.’
Tammy’s freedom-loving ways came as a shock to her conservative family, who were doing what they could to quietly integrate into a society that was arguably much more racist than it is today. ‘It took a lot to establish themselves here,’ Eugene says. ‘I think Mum was sewing jeans or something in a factory and Dad might have been driving a coal truck at some stage. It was a slow process for our parents.’
But Tammy, who was born here, preferred life in the fast lane and embraced Australia’s progressive ways. ‘I think Mum probably laid down her expectations,’ Eugene says. ‘She had a different philosophy on life that Tammy mightn’t have accepted.’
Eugene also felt that Tammy had no interest in family activities outside the home. ‘It was disappointing if there was a family outing,’ he says. ‘She was like a self-appointed outcast.
‘She would branch off, so to speak. The reasons for that weren’t apparent. She was the daughter so she was a bit of a princess.’
Tricky teens have been around a long time but in Tammy’s case, her desire to do her own thing created real problems in the Milograd household. ‘Home life was tense actually,’ Eugene says. ‘With Tammy’s outlook being rebellious, it created all sorts of tensions, to the point that our parents couldn’t trust her fully.
‘For example, they bought her a transistor radio but what happened to it? She eventually confessed that it went to her boyfriend.’
Eugene describes Tammy’s then boyfriend as ‘a tall, blond lad from Perth’. He lived above a fish and chip shop in Newport – the same suburb as the Milograds.
Luba recalls her daughter dancing to the music on the transistor radio with the young man out on the front porch. Luba was especially worried because she’d heard that Tammy’s beau had been in jail. ‘And he was someone who probably wasn’t working or studying,’ Eugene adds.
Next thing Luba knew, Tammy’s transistor radio was missing. ‘Tammy’s response to that was that her boyfriend was bored and needed a radio to keep afoot,’ Eugene says. ‘So there was a radio handover.’
Tammy’s mum was hurt that her daughter was able to part so easily with her hard-earned gift, but disappointment soon gave way to relief when she learned that the young man was off the scene and Tammy had moved on.
But what – or who – did Tammy move on to? It’s been a long time without answers for the Milograds because on Saturday 18 September 1971, Tamara left home for a day of fun at the Royal Melbourne Show and never returned.
‘I’m not sure whether the friends Tammy was at the show with had told their parents or ours, but somehow the news that Tammy had gone missing was communicated to our parents,’ Eugene says. ‘Their initial response was shock, horror, disbelief. Like, what’s happened, you know what I mean?’
Eugene, who was studying law at university at the time, went to the police, desperate for help to find his sister. ‘They even wrote me a little note,’ he says. ‘It read, “Please assist Eugene in looking for his missing sister”. So I wandered around the show looking for her. It was sort of surreal …’
Eugene’s sister was nowhere to be found and as information filtered back from her friends and police, it appeared that was just the way she wanted it.
‘On the day Tamara disappeared we had planned to meet and go to the Royal Show and run away from there,’ Tamara’s friend, Anna, told police. She explained that she, Tammy and their friend Val had hatched their escape plans the week before. The three had arranged to meet at a bus stop out the front of the showground but as Anna stood on the corner of the street with Val, she burst into tears and said she couldn’t go through with it. Anna then told her mum what they’d planned and Val was later found at the Newport bus shelter, not far from where she lived.
Tammy, however, who’d broken away from Anna and Val at the showground, never even turned up at the girls’ designated meeting place. ‘I never heard from Tamara again,’ Anna added. ‘She just disappeared.’
‘The talk was that she’d left the group to change some money. She had $5, which she needed to change for another denomination,’ Eugene says. ‘But whether that was a cover story we’re not sure.’
Further digging revealed that at some stage Tamara had gone off with another group of friends at the show…friends who weren’t known to Tammy’s family. ‘The girlfriends who she went to the show with were from family connections,’ Eugene says. ‘But we believe there was another connection…whether there was a boyfriend involved, we don’t know.’
Whoever Tammy was with – because no-one seemed able to name them – Eugene believes they probably helped her to disappear and start a new life. ‘I think she eloped. There was even a suggestion she was pregnant, which hastened her disappearance. But with no hard facts it’s all supposition,’ Eugene says.
Hearteningly, in the early days of the investigation, there were sightings of Tammy. ‘It was thought that she spent two nights sleeping in the horse stables at the showground after she disappeared,’ Eugene says. ‘We later heard that she had taken a milk bar job in the St Kilda area and lived in a flat there for a time.
‘We heard that she then moved to the Oakleigh/Springvale area.’
Family friends who knew Tammy well were also convinced they saw her at a dance, three years after she took off. ‘In 1974 she was seen by friends at the Tarmac Hotel in Laverton,’ Eugene recalls. ‘They said she was wearing high white boots. They were pretty spot on about it being her.’
But where is she now? And how has she managed to elude police and her family all this time?
‘Back then you could just walk into a bank and open up an account under a different name,’ says Detective Sergeant David Butler, whose team reviewed the case as part of the cold case missing persons unit Taskforce Belier. ‘It was an innocent age where there was limited checking of ID.
‘Police would have done the available checks, but back then they weren’t able to access things like banking and telephone records because they weren’t available, so it would have been simple for a girl like this to slip off into the abyss and start a new life, which is what I think happened.’
Of course David – like the investigators before him – had to consider all angles. ‘Did she go off with some guy? Did he kill her? That’s a possibility but it’s unlikely because the pre-planning put into her own disappearance is a strong argument against that scenario.’
While Tammy’s brothers (aged eight, twelve and nineteen at the time) saw her as a rebellious teen, there might have been more to the story than met their innocent eyes. ‘We have been told that Tamara was pretty scared of her dad,’ David says. ‘Leading to her disappearance there was an incident in which she was caught smoking at school and she was suspended for it. She was very concerned about what would happen at home and [as a consequence] had spoken to a friend about running away.’
It seemed certain that the idea of leaving home prematurely had crossed the teenager’s mind more than once. One of her friends also told police, ‘Tamara never spoke to me about her family much but she never seemed happy.’ She cited an incident in which Tamara claimed that her father had angrily grabbed her by the hair while she was brushing it.
Eugene recalls their dad’s relationship with Tammy quite differently, saying that ‘he adored her because he was her only daughter’.
Unfortunately, Alexander Milograd is unable to tell his side of things because he passed away in 1989, aged sixty-nine. ‘He suffered two major strokes,’ Eugene says. ‘One wasn’t fatal but he was left very restricted; he had to walk with a frame.
‘Some time later he had a massive stroke for which he was hospitalised but never recovered.’
Regardless of the reason for Tammy’s disappearance and the fact that it’s been so long, her family remains desperate to hear from her. It’s especially important to mum, Luba, who’s now in her mid-eighties. ‘It’s on her mind constantly,’ Eugene says. ‘We talked about it recently and she said, “If only I knew what happened to her because without her there’s just this vacuum.”’
Coincidentally, Taskforce Belier discovered that around the same time, there were a number of girls who had taken off to start new lives without ever telling their families where they’d gone. ‘We had a few cases on our books involving girls in the late sixties and early seventies who had gone interstate and sometimes had children, only to be tracked down years later by investigators on my team.’
The detectives were often met with a frosty reception and the women demanded to know, ‘Why are you tracking me down?’
‘Tamara is probably one of those women,’ David says, stressing that it is not a crime to go missing. ‘We are obliged, however, to investigate if someone is a missing person, but at the other end we are not permitted to give information about the missing person to the reporting person. That is, we’re not in a position to tell the family. Privacy is absolutely paramount.’
What David would like to do, though, is let Eugene and his family know that Tamara is still alive. ‘We either need someone who knows her to let us know where she is or we need her to come forward herself and say, “I’ve had enough – I don’t want anyone to know where I am but can you tell Mum and my brothers to stop worrying.”’
Eugene was barely an adult when his sister went missing; today, he is sixty, and is South Australia’s Assistant Liquor and Gambling Commissioner. In his own words, he’s ‘like Judge Judy without the robe’, entrusted with the role of making important judgements about people’s conduct.
But no-one is going to judge Tamara – just greet her with open arms if she decides to come home. ‘I wouldn’t be angry at her. I’d be delighted to see her. I don’t see that there’s any point in anger because the past is the past.
‘We shared our childhood together. The fact is, she is my sister, my only sister, and will always be that. She means the world to me and I just want to know that she is safe and happy.’
Since Tamara disappeared, Eugene and his brothers have asked the public for their help time and time again. Some people would give up after forty years without a word, but not Eugene Milograd.
‘I’ve talked about it for a long time, yes,’ he says.
‘But I’ll talk about it forever if I have to …’