Abducted: The pregnant murder victim Victorians forgot
THE unsolved disappearance of Krystal Fraser eight years ago, three days before she gave birth, should haunt Victorians. It doesn’t — and her mum wants to know why.
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KRYSTAL Fraser fell through the cracks in death as she did in life.
The 23-year-old intellectually disabled woman was three days from giving birth to a little boy she planned to name Ryan when she vanished from her home in northern Victoria on a chilly Saturday night in June 2009.
Victoria Police has offered rewards of $1 million in a bid to solve some of the state’s worst crimes.
But for Krystal — highly vulnerable, heavily pregnant and perhaps unaware she was in danger — the reward is $100,000 with no plans yet to increase it.
Pyramid Hill, where she lived, is a sun-bleached town of about 400 people that straddles the Bendigo-Swan Hill railway line.
It’s an hour’s drive north of Bendigo but out there in the northern plains, it seems so much further away, with little to break up the big sky except the bizarrely triangular granite outcrop that gave the town its name, and the huge grain silos by the railway line.
Karen Fraser and husband Neil moved to Pyramid Hill 25 years ago and ran the local bakery for eight years.
Everyone knew them and their kids Krystal, Chantel and Arron — were fixtures at the shop. Everyone knew them.
Krystal, though, was a little different. Karen says her eldest daughter’s intellectual impairment was never properly diagnosed.
“She was a very kind-hearted girl. She wasn’t stupid, but she lived in her own little world. I took her to so many doctors trying to get her diagnosed, but you’re talking 30-odd years ago,” Karen says.
“She had lots of little bits of different spectrums, and she got put in the ‘too hard’ box. That’s where Krystal lived her whole life.”
Karen says Krystal was brilliant with numbers. She could recite phone numbers, never forgot a loved one’s birthday and had an incredible recall of the birth dates and family details of celebrities.
But her short-term memory wasn’t good. She struggled to keep her flat clean and manage her pension.
Krystal was always friendly, but she lacked the social sophistication to understand when she’d overstayed her welcome.
“People would come and say she’s overstepped a few boundaries, and I would say, ‘Then, tell her! If I tell her, I’ll be the wicked witch of the west who doesn’t want her to have any friends, but if you tell her, she will listen’,” Karen says.
“She just thought she was being a good friend to you.”
Krystal also had an independent streak.
“Once she turned 18, she went through a few stages where she’d say that nobody could tell her what to do anymore.”
In part, it was a charade. She smoked, but never drew back. She’d sit on a Jim Beam and Coke at the local, the Victoria Hotel, until it was warm, put it aside buy another.
She moved from the family home and into a public housing unit nearby.
Karen says she made some dodgy friends in town.
“I don’t know who she saw and who she didn’t because she saw some people who weren’t very desirable, not people that I would allow into my home,” Karen says.
“I couldn’t do anything about her befriending these people. She was an adult. I went to the police to see if there were things that could be put into place because she was an adult. They didn’t want to know.”
Krystal was well-known in town and to V/Line passengers. She rode the Bendigo-Swan Hill line frequently.
Her phone was her constant companion, connecting with towers up and down the line to mark her travels.
The Frasers bought a business selling sweets from a truck serving shops across the Wimmera and Mallee.
Neil soon tired from the long route, made much longer with Pyramid Hill as the base, so in the months before Krystal went missing Neil, Karen and Chantel moved to Horsham on a 12-month trial, returning on weekends wherever possible.
Krystal’s brother Arron and paternal grandmother were in town with her, but she phoned Karen several times a day at times.
“Family was a really big thing for her,” Karen says. But Krystal kept one secret for a while — her pregnancy. Karen says Krystal always wanted a baby. Krystal was 22 weeks’ pregnant when she told Karen in early 2009.
“We don’t know who the father was, and neither did she. We asked her a hundred times and she’d say, ‘I’m not really sure’,” Karen says.
“I went to DHS and all the others trying to get help for her, but nobody wanted to know.
“I knew she wasn’t going to be able to do it on her own, so I said to Neil, ‘We’re moving back to Pyramid Hill’.”
The slight young woman was ballooning, and began to struggle on her feet.
In the week before Krystal disappeared, Neil was laid up in Horsham suffering a near-fatal bout of pancreatitis.
Karen and Chantel were forced to maintain the sweets run to keep the business and the family afloat.
On Friday, June 19, Krystal was admitted to Bendigo Hospital to rest before Ryan’s birth, due the following Tuesday, and for weeks of one-on-one post-natal parenting classes.
By Saturday, Krystal got a “day pass” to leave the hospital for a few hours but never returned.
She spoke by phone to Karen, who was in the truck somewhere in the Mallee, about 7pm. Karen knew she was at the station and heading home, although Krystal denied it.
They made plans to meet up on the following weekend in Pyramid Hill for a family movie night.
Witnesses saw her on the train. By 8.40pm, she arrived at Pyramid Hill, and visited a friend in Albert Street, leaving about 9.30pm.
Phone records show Krystal took a call on her mobile made from a phone outside the Leitchville post office, about 30km away, shortly before midnight.
In the wee hours of Sunday, Krystal’s phoned pinged off mobile towers at Leitchville and Gunbower, well off the railway line, then went dead for good.
Krystal can only have been driven towards Leitchville. There’s no other way she could have been there.
No trace of Krystal or her phone has ever been found.
Karen tried to phone Krystal on Sunday but, on the road and in and out of mobile contact, she wasn’t too worried until she heard from the hospital on Tuesday and it was realised Krystal was missing.
Krystal’s grandmother checked her house. The porch light was on, as if she planned to return and, unusually, her wallet was inside.
Karen shifts in her seat uncomfortably. She’s been burned before by journalists, and while she presents a brave front, opening up is painful for her.
“It stresses me out when I talk about her. I mean, I talk about her all the time, but having to go through it all ... you’ve got to remember that I’ve got eight years of fact, bulls**t, rumours, what the police have and haven’t said, what I’m allowed to say and what I’m not allowed to say, and I just don’t know anymore. It’s like a little whirlwind in there (she gestures towards her chest) because ... (she hesitates)
Chantel continues: “It’s got past the point of wanting to know what happened to just wanting to bring her home”.
Karen responds: “I still don’t know where Krystal is. Some days I don’t think we’ll ever know, then other days I think that maybe — maybe — it will come out.”
The rumours about Krystal’s disappearance started almost immediately. There were wild red herrings that kept diverting police.
Two men repeatedly accused each other of killing Krystal via a Facebook page set up to aid the search.
A regular midnight caller repeatedly alleged to Karen another man killed Krystal.
A blow-in tradie took a keen interest — questioning Karen and giving his theories outside the pub one night.
Announcing the $100,000 reward in 2012, homicide Detective Inspector John Potter said he hoped it would draw out anyone with information, particularly from Pyramid Hill, Leitchville or Gunbower.
“Over past the three years there has been constant rumour and misinformation about Krystal and her whereabouts, which has subjected the Fraser family to false hopes and heartache over their missing daughter,” he said.
The reward didn’t crack the local wall of silence, Karen says.
“Most of the people Krystal associated with were drug addicts, and nobody would talk to the police because they were frightened of getting done for buying a bit of pot,” she says.
Homicide detectives declined to be interviewed for this story.
A Victoria Police spokeswoman told the Herald Sun the investigation remained open, but the reward won’t be increased for now.
“In some cases the timing of the reward increase may enhance our prospect of solution (of a crime) which is what we are all, both the public and police, about. This does not devalue the other cases. It just means the timing may vary,” the spokeswoman says.
But the Frasers are painfully aware of the rewards offered in other cases and that Krystal’s disappearance is a long way from the public’s consciousness.
They don’t begrudge other victims or their grieving families, but they want more prominence for Krystal.
“It’s not that I don’t feel for all of them, but I feel for me because my daughter never got any of that. She deserved as much attention as any of them and she never got that,” she says.
Eight years on, Karen says the family still wonders why Krystal vanished.
“I’d like to know, and I’ll never know why he took her life and the life of her unborn child,” she says.
“If it was because Krystal told him he was the father, for Christ’s sake we have DNA testing, and it didn’t mean he had to put his hand up. I don’t get it, and I have pondered that question for the last eight years.”
“I couldn’t keep a secret like that — and somebody else must know he did it.”
Karen’s face hardens. “That person is as bad as he is. And I hope it gnaws away at them like cancer. I wish them a really, really horrible death one day, when their time’s up. I just want it to happen now. And when they die, I hope it’s excruciating.”
In the meantime, Karen just wants Krystal’s remains to bury with her or Neil, depending on which dies first.
“She always had a fear of being on her own, and I don’t her on her own. I want her at home,” Karen says.
The findings of a coronial inquest, due last Christmas, have not been released.
Karen says she has contact with Sergeant Wayne Woltsche, the lead investigator in Krystal’s case.
She says Woltsche and she know the prime suspect’s identity.
“Wayne says that case will always be his and he will always work on it,” Karen says.
“He has a picture of Krystal on his desk and a picture of who he thinks did it on his desk, and he’s just waiting for that one phone call that will give him the break he needs.
“We just sit and wait.”