THE NEWSPAPER WRITEUP:
Conman dad terrified daughter with ‘lessons on poisons’
A convicted conman questioned over the disappearance of a Queensland teacher spoke in horrifying detail about how to kill people with homemade poison, his daughter says.
Ric Blum gave evidence under oath at the inquest into the presumed death of Marion Barter that he met his daughter, Evelyn Reid, only once, as a baby, and had never seen or spoken to her since.
Yet Ms Reid has told The Australian of her as an adult making contact with Mr Blum, only to be terrified by his dark tales of torture and murder.
“I always thought I had a father out there and that if he knew how hellish my life was, he would come and rescue me from it,” Ms Reid said.
“So later on in life, I sought him out. He was a nightmare.
“He spoke in a manner about my dead mother that was utterly disgusting, said things that left me in a state of shock.
“I just really didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”
Years went by without further contact until a boyfriend insisted that engaging with her father could heal some of her trauma.
“So I sought him out again,” she said. “This time, I did get to see evidence of why I was so disturbed by him the first time around.
“ He wanted to teach me how to poison people. I ended up being terrified.”
Police have contacted her only once, during the ongoing inquest into Barter’s disappearance, and had not taken a formal statement, she said.
Mr Blum last week strenuously denied separate allegations he may have wanted to poison a Belgian widow he is accused of defrauding, one of a growing number of women he allegedly deceived and exploited over decades.
Describing those claims as “completely untrue”, Mr Blum said the only poisons he knew were those in general home use.
He also denied to police and at the inquest that he murdered Barter, though he has admitted they had an affair just before she vanished in 1997.
Ms Reid, 53, says when it comes to the relationship between her mother, Ilona Reid, and Mr Blum, she knows only what she has been told by family members.
Those stories are as astonishing as almost everything else that has been revealed about her father.
Ms Reid’s mother was from Hungary and migrated with her family to Belgium, where she formed a relationship with Mr Blum.
According to an aunt, her mother was wildly in love with Mr Blum, but a private investigator hired by her suspicious family “found out that he had other wives and other children”.
Ms Reid’s mother ignored her family’s warnings about Mr Blum, only to later discover for herself “how horrible he was”, the aunt said.
“The story … is that she fled Belgium to get away from him,” Ms Reid said.
“The story (the aunt) told me was of this crazy man in a Porsche on the Euro freeway where you can drive a million miles an hour, with a gun, trying to get to the boat before it sails off – and that that was him.
“I have no way to sort out what is fact and what is fiction of any of these things.
Not long after her mother arrived in Australia, so did Mr Blum. Her mother had met someone else on the ship, and Mr Blum played no role in Ms Reid’s early life.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 13, 1977, Ms Reid’s mother was found dead, slumped over the steering wheel of her Holden Torana sedan on Chapel St in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Ms Reid was seven years old and her mother, a hairdresser, was only 31.
Official coronial file documents state that she died of heart failure. No alcohol, common drugs or poisons were detected, the file states.
“My grandma only had two kids, my mum and my uncle. All three of them died in 1977,” Ms Reid said, adding that the deaths had left her with lifelong questions.
When she later reconnected with her biological father, Mr Blum, she told him of other distressing events in her childhood.
He responded by detailing a way to kill someone with homemade poison without leaving a trace, she said.
“He disclosed a method to me and it’s like a tattoo – I’m scarred with it for all my life,” she said.
“What he said is that as his daughter, I should learn the things that he knows how to do.
“He was sharing with me all sorts of stories – when he was growing up, what they used to do to people in the village when they did wrong things to a girl, they’d bury the guy alive with hungry cats.
“He was just constantly talking about sort of killing people.”
She became so scared of her biological father that when he gave her a bottle of Bollinger, she took it to Prahran police station.
“I said ‘I think someone’s trying to poison me’. I got the whole sort of ‘You poor crazy girl’,” she said.
Mr Blum, 83, who was jailed in France for fraud, is known to have used 50 aliases.
His testimony that he and his daughter had never spoken was “just not true”, Ms Reid said.
“I tracked him down through the Belgium consulate under the name Frederick De Hedervary. He’s on my birth certificate as Willy Wouters.”
