THE twin Telecom phone boxes took coins and Sharron didn’t have any. It had been a long night and she was still stranded. She’d walked up the road looking for a phone. Walked back to her car. Stood, alone, in the dark, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive.
A couple of people had called out to her. Did she need help? Was she OK? Someone had offered her a lift but Sharron wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t getting into a stranger’s car late at night.
She’d called Martin, her new man, about 45 minutes earlier but he’d been half asleep when he’d answered. She’d tried to describe the service station. It was small, a Shell. On Ipswich Rd.
“Wait there,” he’d told her. “I’ll find you.” But he hadn’t found her. And as the clock hit midnight, and May 8 became May 9,
Sharron was back at the phone box.
She spoke to the operator and asked to reverse the charges.
Gave them her boyfriend’s number again. The flatmate answered.
Martin had left already. Should have been there by now. She hung up the phone.
.......
By the time the police cadets started their careful line search of the roadside,
it had been raining for two days. Sharron’s family had been through her flat, through her car, touching things, desperately searching for clues as to her whereabouts.
Police, who’d questioned Martin Balazs, went looking for proof that she’d called him from the big roadhouse at Gailes – a decent walk from where her car had stalled. Nobody had seen her. They’d seen Martin, though.
........
Then, on May 13, after days of searching, Courier-Mail
reporter Ken Blanch revealed he’d been doing his own investigating. Police had been looking in the wrong place.
Sharron had never been at the Gailes roadhouse.
Blanch had walked the road, trying to get a handle on Sharron’s last movements.
Her car had broken down near the Wacol Migrant Centre. There was no phone there at that time of night.
There would have been one at the army barracks, but
a group of soldiers who had been celebrating their graduation that night
denied having seen her.
A few hundred metres from her car was a small Shell garage. Next to it, just in from the corner, on Wacol Station Rd, was the snack bar and convenience store. And next to that were the two Telecom phone boxes. It made no sense, Blanch thought, for Sharron to have walked past these phones to the Gailes roadhouse 2km on.
He went into the
snack bar and spoke to the man behind the counter, Albert Baumgartner. Did he know anything about the missing girl? Had anybody seen her that Thursday night?
Sharron’s face had been on the front page of the paper the day before. One of the regulars had told the store owner
he’d seen her while picking up his son from the train station. His son had even spoken to her. Sharron had mentioned running out of petrol. She was waiting for a friend to collect her.
Other mistakes had been made too.
Bob had driven his daughter’s car home. He’d later claim police told him to get it off the side of the road. As the investigation moved from a missing persons case to something worse, police told him to bring it back. A peg had been left in its place and at some point,
detectives realised the marker was 60m out.
Once again, they’d been searching in the wrong place.
.......
Bob continued to clash with police. He’d get a call from someone with information and he’d be off searching the bush with a shovel and one of the boys. On Thursday nights, they’d head back to Ipswich Rd where they’d wave photographs of Sharron at motorists, hoping to catch someone who regularly drove by who’d seen her walking the street. Police ordered them off the road more than once, worried they’d be hit by a car.
But the practice of returning to a scene at the same time on the same weekday to look for witnesses is now a common investigation technique.
....
LIFE WENT ON. THE ENDLESS SEARCH FOR SHARRON HAD depleted the Phillips’s finances.
Bob sold his truck to pay the debts. He found an ally in Detective Bob Dallow, the head of homicide. Dallow was a tough-talking, old-school cop. He was equally determined to find Sharron. Dawn had her good days and her bad, but the bad were becoming the norm. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and doctors struggled to find medication that worked.
“She was up and down like a yoyo,” Merlesa says. “She’d turn into this horrible person we didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault. It was the effect of the meds.”
Police explored new leads. Prisoners would tell of fellow inmates bragging about killing Sharron and burying her in the bush.
Police would tell Bob and Bob would head out to look for her.
......
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/...r/news-story/63582480e02de26593edb023d1a35097
This ends with the revelation made to police by a man claiming his father, a taxi driver, had killed Sharron and disposed of her body in the drains. Unfortunately, it led nowhere, nothing was found.
The article gives an insight into the family dynamics, Bob's character and Dawn's frail mental health, probably exasperated by Sharron's tragic disappearance. The three younger children lived through those years filled with the parents despair and desperation to find Sharron. Merlesa, younger sister of Sharron, seems well adjusted and understanding of what her family endured.
It's no wonder conflict arose with the elder children who lived out of home. It's an extremely sad situation and it can take a toll on mental health and blaming is easier than living with no answers. JMO
