Marion Barter was highly regarded as an elementary school teacher, but in 1997 the 51-year-old mother-of-two quit her job, sold her house, and flew from Australia’s beach-lined Gold Coast to start a new life in Europe.
Her family never saw her again.
Had Marion vanished without a trace, Australian police may have taken her case more seriously, but when her daughter, Sally Leydon, reported her missing, Marion wasn’t added to the missing persons list, and later police told her that Marion wanted no contact with her family.
For Sally, there were too many unanswered questions, and 25 years later she is still searching for answers. Did her mother leave of her own accord, did she truly want to vanish?
For more than three years, journalists working with Sally Leydon and a number of amateur sleuths have followed up leads, charting their progress in the podcast, The Lady Vanishes with 14 million downloads (according to the podcast’s executive producer).
After the podcast went live, New South Wales police launched a formal review of the case which gathered enough evidence to warrant a deeper investigation and eventually an inquest that ended last month. Rye News has been plotting this mysterious disappearance in a series of articles, the first, Missing person-can you help? was published in Rye News on July 18, 2019. You can follow the story which left us all in suspense when it was announced in May of this year that the court case had not reached a verdict and that there was to be a final hearing this November.
To date, nobody has been charged with wrong-doing related to her mysterious disappearance.
New South Wales State Coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, had been due to hand down her findings, last Wednesday, into a case that had tested evidence unearthed by the podcast and its listeners, and information gathered by police.
But, the hearing was postponed “following further investigations,” according to a court spokesperson who declined to elaborate.
The case continues.
Image Credits: Nick Forman , Channel 7News, Australia .