Perfect Victim (16 page)

A car stopped outside. ‘You have a visitor,’ a detective said.

We both looked. ‘Oh Mike, he’s here.’

Mike went outside and spoke to the man we had felt necessary to report. He handed Mike some money to help with expenses. I was surprised that Mike accepted. After everything we had been through, and the story I had revealed, I thought Mike would have given it back. But the man insisted. Mike told him the news. Ironically he was the first to hear it outside our family. Much later he told us that he had parked his car at the side of the road on the way home, absolutely grief-stricken.

The police had taken the liberty of contacting our family doctor, who had been dining with friends. She was waiting in the car outside while the detectives spoke to us. What must
that
have felt like?

My mother rang my father’s house. Susan took the call. Her reaction? Immediate. She could not contain her grief. My father’s reaction? Anger. Ashleigh-Rose’s reaction? Shock. ‘How can my sister be dead?’ Dad and Susan drove a despairing eleven-year-old back to the same address but to a different home. Ashleigh-Rose said, ‘It was a long and painful drive. I was very scared.’

But perhaps driving home knowing her sister would not be waiting for her was kinder than the cruel guessing game we allowed Heather to experience. It wasn’t until I was speaking to Robbie about the matter nearly two years later that I realised how unreasonable our request to Drew and Robbie had been.

I cannot remember who rang Drew at his blue house on the cliff edge, overlooking the ocean at Harmers Haven. But Drew drove to Robbie at her home in Wonthaggi to tell her. We had requested they not tell Heather as we felt this was our responsibility, but now I think not telling Heather was inept. When Drew took Robbie out onto her veranda she let out a primeval scream. Drew told her we wanted to tell Heather ourselves. Robbie felt this was worse. Robbie wanted desperately to let out her grief, but because of Heather, could not.

Heather hardly said a word. Did she know? Did she weigh up in her nine-year-old mind, over the two-hour drive, what the most likely scenario would be? Robbie and Drew stopped and bought her, uncharacteristically, a can of soft drink, potato chips and lollies. What could they do for this little girl’s last two hours of thinking her sister was alive? Robbie said they talked about idiotic things.

When they arrived we whisked Heather into our bedroom and sat her on our bed.

‘Heather,’ I said.

We sat on either side of her holding her hands.

‘You’re going to tell me Rachel’s dead.’

Robbie was distraught, letting out her two-hour bound-up grief. ‘My poor little sister,’ she cried, holding me tight. ‘My poor little niece.’

‘Rachel’s with Nanny now, Robbie,’ I said. ‘Together, with your baby boy.’

Behind the scenes …

17

A S
TATISTIC

Every eighteen minutes, every single day in Australia, someone somewhere is reported missing to the police – almost 30 000 reports a year. And in March 1999 Rachel Barber became just one of them.

Among the 6461 missing persons reported in Victoria that year, 3490 were juveniles and 1847 were young women.

But these figures barely scratch the surface of what appears to be a growing problem, and since research is scant, it is also difficult to determine the impact of missing people on families and friends or on the community at large. In 1999 Rachel Barber had been missing less than two hours when her mother first contacted police. Once the official missing person report had been made, it became the responsibility of the officer on the desk at Box Hill police station, and he became the officer assigned to Rachel Barber’s case. Later he would have arranged for the family to fill out a standard missing person report: basic information including Rachel’s date of birth, sex, appearance, and a brief description of the clothes she would have been wearing – along with the time and place she was last sighted.

The report, along with around thirty other missing person reports made that day around the State, would have been phoned through to the Victoria Police Central Data Entry Bureau, because of Rachel’s age, within twenty-four hours.

Once the report was in the system, a regular 24-hour sweep would ensure that it was transmitted to the national network, allowing Rachel’s name to show up on police systems in stations throughout Australia.

Missing Persons has strict criteria governing the cases that fall under its jurisdiction. It does not involve itself in simple everyday cases of missing people, only those that suggest foul play, where the disappearance is suspicious – possible abduction, sexual exploitation, people missing for more than seventy-two hours. Such cases are generally potential homicide investigations. Missing Persons also looks into cases where the absence is a significant and inexplicable deviation from established patterns.

The police definition of a ‘missing person’ covers anyone reported missing to them whose whereabouts are unknown, and where there are fears for their safety. Does
this
definition describe Rachel Barber? Her parents certainly thought so.

But the brief report on Rachel that filtered into the police system a day or so after her disappearance contained no evidence suggesting foul play or suspicious circumstances. There was no undue concern from police in relation to her safety. So the report placed Rachel Barber outside the police criteria, and failed to attract any real attention.

At the time of Rachel’s disappearance there were ten police officers staffing the Missing Persons Unit, which operated under the auspices of the Homicide Squad at Victoria Police headquarters in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. One police officer, Senior Constable David dePyle, was an analyst who had the daily task of reviewing the list of missing person reports transmitted to him from police stations around the State. He read the short narrative on each person reported missing during the previous twenty-four hours and examined the brief carefully for evidence of concern that might warrant further investigation. He has no recollection of seeing Rachel Barber’s name on his daily list when he logged on the morning after she disappeared. But he would have expected her report to have filtered through the system very quickly.

‘In fairness to police members making out initial reports, they are required to fill in only very basic information, like a brief description and where the person was last seen,’ says Senior Constable dePyle. ‘But if a policeman taking the report gets a bit of a “gut” instinct about a particular case he will often contact his local CIB detectives first, asking for further investigations to be made. Or he might contact Missing Persons asking what we thought about it and what course of action should be taken.’

But only Mike and Elizabeth Barber, and their family and friends, had a gut feeling about Rachel’s disappearance.

One of the more unusual unsolved cases that remained part of an ongoing investigation by the Missing Persons Unit at the time Rachel Barber disappeared was that of a woman called Elisabeth Membrey. Elisabeth had also been a student at the dance school Rachel attended in Richmond. She was twenty-two when she disappeared in 1994 from her East Ringwood home, ten minutes away from the Barbers’ in neighbouring Heathmont.

Blood specks found on Elisabeth Membrey’s carpet and in her car suggested foul play, and police concur that she most certainly disappeared in suspicious circumstances. But extensive inquiries over the past few years have not yet led to a conviction, and her distraught parents live in an endless painful limbo as they wait for new leads. Ironically, Elisabeth Membrey’s parents had dedicated a trophy to honour their daughter at the Dance Factory and Rachel Barber had been the third student to receive the award for Most Improved Student. That was three months earlier and now Rachel was missing.

While there was initial speculation among the media that there might be some link between Rachel’s disappearance and Elisabeth’s, the police say that no connections were ever established.

David dePyle’s first recollection of Rachel Barber’s case is of hearing his colleague Detective Senior Constable Neil Paterson telling the team ‘in passing’, of a telephone conversation he had just had with a woman called Elizabeth Barber whose daughter had disappeared on the previous day.

The officer also remembered Paterson saying that he had already received a call earlier that day from a friend who ran a café underneath the dance school from which Rachel had vanished. The friend had rung to say he had given the Barbers Paterson’s mobile telephone number in the hope that he might be able to give them some advice on their missing daughter.

Paterson had told the Barbers not to panic because most missing teenagers turn up within twenty-four hours. He also suggested that they compile a list of names since some of Rachel’s fellow dance students remembered her mentioning an intended meeting with an ‘old female friend’ on the evening she vanished. The Unit head, Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Waddell, was informed about the matter.

The following morning, Wednesday 3 March, Neil Paterson, on the advice of his boss, contacted Senior Sergeant Laurie Wilks at Box Hill police station in relation to Rachel Barber, requesting an investigation of the girl’s disappearance. Paterson was told that Box Hill police would be contacting Richmond Criminal Investigation Bureau immediately because Box Hill believed Richmond were in a better position to investigate the situation. The missing girl was, after all, last seen in Richmond.

At this stage there was nothing in the Rachel Barber report to suggest that it was a potential case for Missing Persons.

The odds, it seems, are stacked heavily against teenage girls who go missing. They quickly become statistics. Of all the people reported missing in Australia each year, the biggest proportion consists of young women. Most of them are teenage girls. And the police are all too aware, both from personal experience and from supporting studies, that the most typical of these
is
a fifteen-year-old girl.

She often disappears of her own volition, generally with a girlfriend though sometimes with a boyfriend. She goes missing after a family argument or some other parental conflict, more often than not over authority or discipline.

She will choose to disappear on a Friday, in time for the weekend, rather than on any other weekday. And mostly she will disappear from her home, or while travelling to or from school.

Australian research by the National Missing Persons Unit also shows that almost two-thirds of all missing people will be located on the same day, or the day after being reported missing. And half of all teenage girls who go missing in Victoria will turn up, within forty-eight hours, of their own accord. Some are apologetic. Some are not, and will repeat the adventure. And the most effective means of tracing a missing person appears to be ‘putting out the word’ among friends and social groups.

According to Victoria Police figures, only 10 per cent of missing person cases remain unsolved after one month, 5 per cent after six months and 1 per cent unsolved after twelve. And in rare long-term missing person cases, the subject remains untraced because of a suspected suicide, or because no body has ever been recovered.

Sometimes cases remain unsolved because the person has engineered the disappearance, even though this may be totally out of character. Had Rachel Barber’s body not been found, she might well have been deemed to have fallen into this category.

Also highlighted in research conducted by the National Missing Persons Unit is the fact that one-third of all the people who were reported as missing had a history of disappearing.

Rachel Barber had no such history, but her age and sex, and the lack of any evidence of foul play, made it most likely that she would be considered a runaway rather than a missing person. On the other hand, she had not been involved in any family discord. She was happy pursuing her dream of becoming a dancer. She never missed a lesson, even when she was injured.

The day before she disappeared she had been told she could have the kitten she wanted. She had a boyfriend she couldn’t bear to be separated from, and even
he
had not heard from her. And she couldn’t have run away with a friend because all her known friends had been contacted and were worried about her.

Her mother’s fortieth birthday was coming up and she had discussed gifts with her father. And it was her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary the following week.

On top of all that, Rachel was afraid of the dark, uneasy about using public transport – indeed of doing anything alone. She had even persuaded her boyfriend to travel home with her from a recent modelling shoot because she couldn’t handle the trip by herself.

So, to the Barbers, Rachel’s disappearance
was
highly suspicious. They felt that there was considerable cause for concern about her safety. And they were as bewildered by the response from the local police as they were by their daughter’s failure to catch her tram.

It was the Barbers’ steadfast refusal to consider Rachel a runaway and the intensity of their ensuing poster campaign and search that brought Rachel’s case, one week later, to the attention of the Missing Persons Unit.

18

A V
ITAL
S
IGHTING

Senior Constable dePyle had been waiting for his morning train on Tuesday, 9 March – eight days after Rachel’s mysterious disappearance – when he first noticed the poster appealing for information on the missing teenager.

It was one of the two thousand posters her family and friends had been busy displaying over the previous holiday weekend as they tramped around bus and train stations, tram depots and a multitude of public venues.

David dePyle remembered the girl from the earlier discussion with Neil Paterson and had a vague recollection of his colleague saying that the family was conducting its own search and putting up posters. But this was the first time he had seen one of the posters bearing Rachel’s face.