Searching for Rachel Antonio: Friend remembers her each Anzac Day

A FRIEND has revealed what a 16-year-old girl planned to tell her alleged secret boyfriend to “get back at him” just days before she mysteriously disappeared.

EVERY Anzac Day Rebecca Lock thinks of the friend who never got to live out her dreams.

Ms Lock, 34, was a school friend of Rachel Antonio, who vanished without trace after being dropped off at a cinema by her mum in Bowen, north Queensland, in 1998.

“On Anzac days I think of her because that’s the last time any of us saw her, and the day she disappeared,” she told The Sunday Mail. “So Anzac Day has taken on a different significance for me.”

Ms Lock’s story is part of a new instalment of an investigative podcast, Searching for Rachel Antonio, to be launched tomorrow.

The podcast is re-examining Rachel’s disappearance, one of the state’s most enduring mysteries.

“We were 16 at the time. I guess it was disbelief, denial,” Ms Lock says. “We thought, `she’ll turn up’, that it was just some misunderstanding.

“In the beginning, we didn’t really believe it.”

The belief that Rachel would be found was one reason friends did not immediately tell police all they knew, Ms Lock confirmed.

Rachel Antonio feeding a wallaby in 1997.

Rachel had told her friends she was secretly dating an older surf lifesaver, Robert Hytch, and that he had made another girl pregnant. And Rachel said she wanted revenge, so she was going to pretend she was pregnant, too.

“From that naive 16-year-old point of view, we didn’t want to get Rachel in trouble,” Ms Lock says.

‘‘Being 16, I had no idea. That’s been a hard thing to deal with as I’ve grown up — if only I’d told my mum, if only I’d told someone with some authority … maybe things could have been different.”

Mr Hytch, who lives side-by-side with the Antonios in Bowen, has always denied any involvement in Rachel’s disappearance and says they did not have an intimate relationship.

He was convicted of her manslaughter in 1999, but the conviction was overturned and at a 2001 retrial he was found not guilty.

Rachel Antonio's school friend Rebecca Lock.

More than 300 police witness statements were obtained from a coroner as part of the podcast.

They show Rachel’s friends gradually told police more of what they knew.

Just over a month after the disappearance, friend Hope Wallis told police Rachel had told her she intended to fake a pregnancy to “get back at Robert”. “I have not told the police this information before because I did not want to get Rachel into trouble,” Ms Wallis said.

School friend Kristy Otto told police she had a birthday party about a week before the disappearance and heard Rachel whispering to Ms Lock. “I do remember Rebecca say to Rachel, `That’s mean, that’s mean … you’ll crush him’.’’

Ms Lock said that I’ve never for an instant thought she would have run off.”

Searching for Rachel Antonio, Episode 2: Dear Diary, will reveal Rachel in her own words.

The new podcast, by The Courier-Mail’s investigative reporter David Murray and digital producer Sean Callinan, was No. 1 on the Australian podcast charts last week.

Episode 2 is available Monday, November 28, for free on iTunes, Whooshkaa, SoundCloud and through couriermail.com.au.

Follow the bold links to listen to Episode 1:

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.