Missing Australia podcast: New recorded interviews shed light on Katie O’Shea’s disappearance
The disappearance of Melbourne woman Katie O’Shea in Queensland has remained unsolved for almost 20 years. Now, new evidence has emerged. Listen to the podcast.
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Recorded interviews with two men questioned over the disappearance of a mother-of-five – including her own son – have been released by police.
The disappearance of the 44-year-old Melbourne woman Katie O’Shea has remained unsolved for almost 20 years and is one of Australia’s most troubling missing persons cases.
Originally from Melbourne, Ms O’Shea was last seen in December 2005 after travelling to Ravenshoe in the Atherton Tablelands in north Queensland for the birth of her first grandchild. She was reported missing to police by her son Alan two weeks later.
The latest episode of true crime podcast The Missing Australia includes a recording of the interview Mr O’Shea did with police on 18 January 2006.
“Youse obviously don’t have any information because you’re asking me for information,” he told detectives during the interview.
Mr O’Shea said his mother had been staying with him, that she had a history of illegal drug use but that the two of them were “thick as thieves”.
He last saw his mother on December 29, 2005, Mr O’Shea said, when he dropped her off in the nearby town of Atherton to go to the local hotel.
She never returned, meaning she missed the birth of Mr O’Shea’s daughter, her first grandchild.
Mr O’Shea told police his mother had friends in nearby Cairns, “but they probably wouldn’t appreciate me telling you guys about it”, declining to give detectives their names.
He left Ravenshoe the next month and subsequently declined to give police a formal statement.
No one has been arrested or charged in relation to his mother’s disappearance.
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A 2014 inquest found “it is most likely that an unknown person or persons with whom she came into contact” after arriving in Atherton ”caused her death and disposed of her body”.
The following year, in March 2014, Queensland police interviewed a second man, Francis Wark, who has since been convicted of rape and manslaughter, unrelated to Ms O’Shea’s disappearance.
Around the time Ms O’Shea went missing in December 2005, Wark was living roughly a half-hour drive from where she was staying.
He was subsequently jailed for a brutal sexual attack on a local hitchhiker.
While in prison, Wark was asked by police if he knew a Kathleen Mary O’Shea and said “I think so”, and that they met while “riding motorcycles” in Western Australia.
After being told Ms O’Shea was a missing person, he said “That might be a different person”.
Then asked “You’ve got no information in relation to her disappearance?”, Wark said “No”.
He was uncertain about his movements around the time Ms O’Shea went missing, telling police he didn’t travel much.
In 2021, Wark was convicted of the manslaughter of 17-year-old Hayley Dodd, who he abducted on a remote road near the rural town of Badgingarra in WA in 1999.
Dodd’s body has not been recovered.
Ms O’Shea’s daughter Brigid, who was 11 and staying with her mother when she disappeared, said it was “heartbreaking” not knowing what happened to her, or where her body might be if she was murdered.
“It does become close to impossible, some days, absolutely,’ Brigid told The Missing Australia podcast.
“You go through it in your head. Deep down inside, you know they most likely won’t show up, you know, not alive anyway.
“But you just keep hoping and wishing, no matter what [that] she will walk in the door one day.”
EX-COP’S THEORY ON WHAT HAPPENED TO KATIE O’SHEA
Like Brigid, Ms O’Shea’s other daughter Lily Parmenter just wants to know what happened to her mother. “You’ll say, ‘yeah my mum’s deceased’, and they’ll go ‘oh was it cancer, you know was it sudden’, then some people will push and you go, ‘OK, no, no she was murdered, or murdered missing person’,” Ms Parmenter tells the Missing Podcast.
She said she has never stopped searching for her mother, and even has a stubbie of her mother’s favourite beer Cooper’s stout and a glass ready, waiting for her for when she comes home.
“I just put it out in the window for kind of so they know what’s in the windows above the sink, and I always like to sort of have it around the window. So just in case, she’s hanging around windows that you know, she sees it and I would like to make sure that it’s on display. Just remind you.”
But unless someone comes forward with what happened to her mother, Ms Parmenter fears her mother is never coming home.
Wark and Mr O’Shea could not be contacted.
Do you know more? Call Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000.
Share your crime stories at themissing@news.com.au
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Originally published as Missing Australia podcast: New recorded interviews shed light on Katie O’Shea’s disappearance
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