It’s time to find Rachel Antonio

RACHEL Antonio has been missing, believed murdered, for nearly 20 years and the pressure is on to search the one place the police never looked.

• Diaries could spark new search
• Earlier Hytch relationship ‘ended in violence’
• Pool manager’s knowledge a mystery
• Rachel’s family ‘know where body is’
• Searching For Rachel Antonio: The podcast

IT’S all about time. The time Rachel Antonio’s killer had to dispose of her body. The years her parents have waited to find her. The never-ending wait for justice.

Eighteen years after schoolgirl Rachel vanished from Bowen, in north Queensland, police this week confirmed they are considering a new search for her remains.

It has come about because ofThe Courier-Mail’s podcast series, Searching for Rachel Antonio, which highlighted the case and unearthed evidence even police had not seen.

For some, it might seem like digging up the Bowen tip in the hope of finding Rachel would be based on nothing more than a “hunch” or a “gut feeling”.

After all, there’s no direct evidence to support Ian and Cheryl Antonio’s fervent belief their 16-year-old daughter was put in a skip and taken to the tip and that all these years she has lain under a mound of rubbish.

But the couple’s theory about the location of their daughter’s remains is based firmly on logic and deduction, and a detailed understanding of the police case.

As the podcast revealed, police have long regarded Bowen’s dump as a place Rachel’s body may have ended up after she disappeared from the town on Anzac Day, 1998.

Months after Rachel disappeared, when it was becoming more and more apparent she had not run away, detectives had wanted to use cadaver dogs to search the tip.

They found the dogs would have been rendered useless, because they detect human and pig remains and the tip held a large volume of butcher’s waste.

Rachael with dog Phantom.

The longer it went on, the more futile a search of the tip seemed – it would have been a hunt for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Two big factors turned that view on its head. A new search has become a viable option for police, who have made a public and private commitment to Rachel’s parents to do everything possible to find her.

First, the long-dormant case was reawakened when Central Coroner David O’Connell found in July that lifeguard Robert Hytch killed Rachel and hid her body in a place it had never been found.

Hytch was accused of being Rachel’s secret lover and charged with her murder the year she went missing. A jury convicted him of manslaughter but, after an appeal, he was ultimately found not guilty.

The case went nowhere, with the Antonios and Hytch living side-by-side in Bowen, until Coroner O’Connell decided to look at it about two years ago.

Having always denied any involvement in Rachel’s disappearance, Hytch is appealing the Coroner’s findings.

Over the past five weeks,The Courier-Mail’s podcast series has gone into the events surrounding that night in more detail than ever before.

Witnesses were traced and interviewed and the Coroner formally granted access to the brief of evidence, containing more than 300 police statements, audio and video recordings and photographs.

According to the police case, now backed by the Coroner, Hytch had as little as half an hour to take Rachel’s life and dispose of her body.

At about the time of the last confirmed sighting of Rachel, 25-year-old Hytch left his brother’s birthday party to get ice and a video. When he returned he’d forgotten the ice and was not wearing his good, white Nike T-shirt. He said his car broke down twice and his shirt got dirty.

That T-shirt has never been found, but police retrieved the reef sandals he was wearing and allegedly found droplets of Rachel’s blood on their straps.

Ian and Cheryl Antonio with former tip manager Hugh Smith at the Bowen Rubbish Tip. Pic Peter Walis

Rachel had told people she was going to meet Robert, claiming she had faked a pregnancy, and that they were going to discuss it that night.

The fake pregnancy, Rachel claimed, was revenge for her belief Hytch had got another girl pregnant.

Hytch arrived at a video store bare-chested – having already removed his T-shirt – and rented the movie Toy Story at 7.39pm the night Rachel went missing.

After deducting time for Hytch to drive to the store and select the movie, he had no one to corroborate his whereabouts for about half an hour.

If Rachel’s body was dumped in that crucial half an hour – and not moved later – a skip or wheelie bin is an obvious place she could have been put. Only a search of the tip could eliminate it and that has never been done.

Extensive searches elsewhere, on land and from the air, failed to find any trace of her. And what about Hytch’s missing T-shirt – could a search of the tip find that too?

The diary of former tip manager Hugh Smith.

The second big factor is the discovery of the tip diaries from the period Rachel went missing.

Former tip manager Hugh Smith came across them by chance only last year while sorting through his belongings.

Smith says they map exactly where he put the town’s rubbish from the four days after Rachel vanished.

The area is now a green field and the stash of rubbish was in its own cocoon, separated from other waste with layers of dirt above and below.

Given free rein with an excavator, he’d reach the area in a few hours. Rubbish from a later period is in a different area and would require further investigation.

He worked at the tip for 20 years and has exposed rubbish from years earlier to find it perfectly preserved.

Rachel’s father Ian says there’s nothing to lose from searching the tip, beginning with an exploratory dig to check the state of what lies beneath.

“We know the killer had limited time. They have never eliminated the tip – they need to search it,” Ian says.

If it’s viable – and at this stage there’s no reason to see why it wouldn’t be – police should do it sooner rather than later.

It’s about time.

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Episodes of Searching for Rachel Antonio.

Follow the links to listen:

iPhone or iPad users search for “rachel antonio podcast” on iTunes — by clicking subscribe, each weekly episode will appear on your podcast app.

Android users can listen by following The Courier-Mail on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/couriermail.