Rachel Antonio: Mayor backs tip search for clues

A LOCAL mayor says police will have any support requested for a new search for missing schoolgirl Rachel Antonio as a former tip manager warns it will become more difficult if delayed.

A LOCAL mayor says police will have any support requested for a new search for missing schoolgirl Rachel Antonio as a former tip manager warns it will become more difficult if delayed.

Whitsunday Regional Council mayor Andrew Willcox said council would offer its full co-operation if police wanted to search the Bowen tip for the first time.

“It’s a police matter. They’re the ones that are running it. but we’d support anything we could to try to bring this thing to a finality,” Mr Willcox told The Courier-Mail.

Mr Willcox, a lifelong Bowen resident, said the community wanted the mystery of Rachel’s 1998 disappearance from the small north Queensland town resolved.

“It’s a local family. We feel for the family and we’ll do whatever we can to try to bring this to an end,” he said.

It comes after the lead detective on the case, Detective Sergeant Mark Inmon, this week spent four hours with former Bowen tip manager Hugh Smith.

Mr Smith says he can help police pinpoint where he put the rubbish in the days after Rachel vanished, using tip diaries he found last year while sorting through his belongings.

He yesterday said the search should be done soon because new rubbish was encroaching on a key area.

“The thing against us is that the dump is moving in that direction fairly quickly and we’ve got a wet season coming up,” he said.

“Probably by three months there will be another four metres of rubbish over that area.”

Mr Smith said rubbish from four days after Rachel went missing could be expected to be in an area about 6m wide, 60m long and 4m high.

From maps in his tip diaries, it would be under about 4m of separate rubbish.

During his police interview this week, Mr Smith was asked about the chances of finding remains of a missing T-shirt if it ended up at the tip.

A coroner this year found lifeguard Robert Hytch killed Rachel.

Mr Hytch is appealing the decision. On the night Rachel went missing, he had left his brother’s 18th birthday party and returned home bare-chested, saying his car broke down and that he removed his white Nike T-shirt because it got grease on it.

The shirt has not been found.

Episodes of Searching for Rachel Antonio.

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