Review urged after a decade without answers in mystery Krystal Fraser case
Krystal Fraser was just days from giving birth when she disappeared. Their Victorian town is awash with painful memories and gossip, but her mother can’t leave. She stays in the hope that she will one day know the truth.
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Krystal Fraser’s heartbroken mother says she has endured a decade without any clue what happened to her eldest child — and she wants answers now.
And former homicide squad detective Charlie Bezzina says that for the family of 23-year-old Krystal a comprehensive review of the suspected murder could just provide them answers.
Heavily pregnant, intellectually disabled Krystal went missing from her unit in Pyramid Hill, about 240km northwest of Melbourne on June 20, 2009, three days before she was due to deliver a little boy she planned to name Ryan.
She was never seen again.
Krystal received a call from a phone box in Leitchville, 30km east of town, around midnight on June 20.
Her phone last pinged off mobile towers near Leitchville around 3am on June 21.
There is a reward of only $100,000 on offer.
Police have few leads, have rejected Herald Sun requests for an interview and plan no media on the anniversary.
The most significant development in the case came in February 2018 when a 61-year-old Pyramid Hill man was arrested but released without charge over the matter.
That man has since died and Karen, who says she knew and did not like the man, believes he was no killer.
Mr Bezzina said although costly, a review could open new lines of inquiry and give the Fraser family some comfort.
“This is a human being with a loving family, and we have to do everything possible within our means to solve it,” Mr Bezzina said.
“We might not be able to afford an independent consultant, but what about getting someone from interstate to look at it and do the best we can? Bring the family right up to speed so they know the police have done everything possible.”
LIFE ON HOLD
Krystal’s mother Karen Fraser told the Herald Sun that her life has been on hold since Krystal vanished
“I’ve got nothing. I know today what I knew 10 years ago. My daughter disappeared into thin air, and there are no leads. How does that happen?” she said.
“She was nine months pregnant. Couldn’t drive. Didn’t have a car. She didn’t leave here on her own. Somebody came and got her that night. No one knows who. They haven’t found her phone. They haven’t found a thing.”
Krystal could not have been more vulnerable.
She had an undiagnosed intellectual disability.
Slightly built, she ballooned during pregnancy and struggled to walk a few hundred metres.
She never named her baby’s father. Karen says it’s likely she genuinely did not know his identity.
Krystal’s death never attracted the big headlines, nor did it become part of Victoria’s criminal folklore, but it should have.
Perhaps it happened too far from the big smoke. Perhaps it was too easy to forget about Krystal, but she slipped through the cracks all through her life.
FINAL HOURS
Krystal was checked into the Bendigo Hospital on Friday, June 19, 2009 to rest before Ryan’s planned birth the following Tuesday.
Her father was in hospital in Horsham with a near-fatal bout of pancreatitis and Karen and Krystal’s sister Chantel were somewhere in the Mallee keeping the family’s sweet delivery business on the road while Neil was laid up.
She was granted a “day pass” by hospital staff to spend a couple of hours out of the hospital, but she never returned.
Instead, she went to the Bendigo railway station to ride the train home to Pyramid Hill.
She phoned Karen before boarding the V/Line service north.
“We made plans to meet the next week for a family movie night. She was bringing the DVDs,” Karen said.
The line from Bendigo to Swan Hill is a vital lifeline for tiny Pyramid Hill, population 550, and Krystal was a regular on the train, but that ride home led her to her death.
She wandered from the station to nearby Albert St to visit a friend, heading for home on foot about 9.30pm.
Krystal’s phone received a call from a phone box at Leitchville, about 30km east, around midnight.
Then, she was gone.
Her mobile phone, her constant companion, pinged off mobile towers near Leitchville and Gunbower about 3am on Sunday, June 21 — three hours or so after that last call.
At the time, no one knew she was missing.
As far as everyone knew, she was safe in the hospital.
“The hospital phoned us on the Tuesday to ask us where she was. I said, ‘She’s in your care. Why don’t you know where she is? Didn’t you think to check when she didn’t come back Saturday?’.”
Frightened, Karen phoned home to Krystal’s grandmother, who checked her public housing flat in Kelly St, across from the station.
Krystal’s purse was there. Her porch light was left on. Tellingly, all her shoes seemed to be there.
“This was a girl who couldn’t stand walking on concrete in bare feet. She always had shoes on,” Karen said.
ASSERTING HERSELF
The Frasers came to Pyramid Hill 27 years ago and ran the local bakery for eight years.
Their kids — Krystal, Chantel and Arron were known to everyone.
Krystal’s intellectual impairment was never properly diagnosed, despite her parents’ best efforts, and the medical community of the day put her in the too-hard basket.
“She was a very kind-hearted girl. She wasn’t stupid, but she lived in her own little world,” she said.
Krystal had a poor short-term memory and, while friendly, lacked the social sophistication to understand when she had worn out her welcome after one of her many visits to friends around town, or to realise when people were taking advantage of her.
Nevertheless, when she turned 18, she rejected any further attempts to diagnose her condition and, thanks to a misguided friend who told her that she could do as she pleased as an adult, she asserted her independence.
She took up smoking and drinking, but Karen says it was a game.
She never drew back on a cigarette and would buy a Jim Beam and Coke at the local, the Victoria Hotel, but it would sit undrunk until it was warm. Then, she’d buy another.
She was a whiz with numbers. She could recite phone numbers and never forgot a loved one’s birthday, but she struggled to manage her finances without help.
Karen said she always looked out for Krystal.
She said Krystal began to keep some seedy company in town, and slept with men who were all too willing to benefit from her naivety.
“We were always worried about her, but the police and DHS kept saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do. She’s an adult’. And then it was me that got abused by DHS and all of them when she went missing. It was all my fault,” Karen said.
“Even when she started getting with blokes, and a lot of them were a lot older than her, I went to the cops, and they’d say, ‘Ah, Kaz, there’s nothing we can do about that. If she was 12, you’d call him a paedophile, but because she’s 21 …’.”
One of those men was decades older, Karen said.
“It was consensual, but she didn’t know what she was consenting to. She didn’t realise. She just thought she had to do that sort of stuff to make people happy.”
The issue of informed consent was never pursued by police, she said.
In the months before Krystal disappeared, Karen, Neil and Chantel relocated to Horsham for a while. The crippling distances involved with delivering sweets on his run across the Wimmera and Mallee from Pyramid was affecting Neil’s health. Krystal would not join them, leaving her grandmother and Arron in town with her.
BABY JOY
But the family was preparing to move home to help Krystal with the baby, planning to buy the house next door to assist her.
“I raised that girl for 23 years, and I was still doing as much for her as I had always done. I was going to raise her baby too, because she wasn’t going to be able to. I don’t know that for sure, but I had some deep concerns,” Karen said.
“She had no short-term memory, so if a mate phoned up and asked what she was doing, would she go and leave a newborn baby locked in her flat, which no one else had access to?
“She needed her independence, but I needed to be there.”
Krystal was overjoyed at the news she was pregnant.
“Why would a girl who was very family-oriented, who was about to give birth and was so friggin’ excited about it, just disappear off the face of the earth?” Karen said.
“It was seriously out of character. This was a girl who would call me 50 million times a day, text me a hundred. I could talk to her on the phone, put the phone down, the phone would ring two minutes later, and she’d say, ‘Hey Mum, what are you doing now?’, and I’d say, ‘The same friggin’ thing I was doing two minutes ago.
“Even if somebody had tried to tell her that this (leaving town) was something she should do, it would have lasted a day. She used to walk up to strangers on the train and ask to borrow their mobile phone because she needed to let me know where she was.
“She’s never touched her bank account since she disappeared and that tells me everything.”
THE INVESTIGATION
Police start at the centre and work their way out on a missing persons case, looking first at those closest to the victim and eliminating them for their inquiries as they check all those associated with the victim.
Initial suspicion fell on Neil, despite his hospital stay.
“That didn’t worry us because we knew we had nothing to hide,” Karen said.
The local copper and detectives from Bendigo conducted searches of the house and the backyard in full view of the town’s residents, and the gossip started. To some extent, it’s never really stopped, Karen said.
“They were quite vocal about it too. They told the cops that I’m a cold-hearted bitch, that I probably killed her myself,” she said.
“And it was five months before any detective spoke to us. They thought Neil did it.
“I only hang with three people in town, and my husband, my mother-in-law and my kids.
“The sad thing is that the last 10 years have been full of innuendo and rumours, and I don’t know if any of it’s true, so I’ve closed my ears and said, ‘I don’t want to know, p. s off, leave me alone. I want my life back’.”
NOT LEAVING
Karen Fraser is adamant, despite the intense town gossip surrounding the case, she won’t leave without knowing what happened to her daughter. How does she stay?
“Because my daughter means more to me than they ever will, and I will not be run out of town. what if she does come back? I need to be here. I might as well have given her away at birth and not worried about her. That’s how I do it.”
Neil even sold the house and took a job in Melbourne to try to give Karen a fresh start, but she baulked at the last minute.
“I pulled the pin. I might as well have given Krystal away and said I don’t care,” she said.
“I can’t leave until I get my answers, and if that means I go out of here in a pine box, that’s what’s going to happen. And my husband knows that now.
“This is my home. This was Krystal’s home. This was where she grew up. I can’t walk away from that.”
CASE REVIEW
Charlie Bezzina was one of Victoria’s most respected homicide detectives.
Mr Bezzina says investigators had a tough job because they had no body or crime scene but finding Krystal’s killer was still a possibility.
“It is solvable because you can narrow it down to an area,” he said.
“We know she left the Bendigo Hospital, so we can tick that off. She was seen on the train. We know she visited someone in Albert St when she got home and she left about 9.30pm. We’re pretty firm on that. So, you canvass for witnesses on the train, get information from the friend.
“We know the family was away, you look at the family and close friends and associates.
“She was going to name the baby Ryan. You’d start looking at all the Ryans in Pyramid Hill and Leitchville.”
Checking men in the Leitchville/Gunbower area may still be viable, he said.
“She didn’t conceive on her own. We have a male person out there. I would be concentrating on all those males in the Leitchville area and looking for some connections.”
Krystal’s friends included drug users and dealers in the area, and upping the reward — and rewards for all unsolved murders — to $1 million might help the region’s criminal underbelly to come forward.
“It’s convincing those people that we’re not concerned with their drug dealing and drug taking. All we want is for you to tell us what you know. Rewards entice people, and people’s allegiances change over time”
Mr Bezzina said he did not want to criticise detectives involved in the case because they may have covered all those bases, but a review would possibly help.
He also argued for the reward for all unsolved murders to be equalised at $1 million.
“In all my years as a homicide investigator and in the police force I’ve seen that very few rewards are collected. I’ve had one in my time,” he said.
“But Victoria Police have set a rod for their own back because some murders have got a $1 million reward and people can say, ‘Why isn’t my daughter’s murder worth $1 million?’
“I think it’s incumbent on them to say that all unsolved murders will get a $1 million. It can’t be dollar-driven to solve a heinous crime like murder, and families deserve answers. There are many families that have nowhere to grieve.”
Karen Fraser agrees.
“I think it should be the same amount no matter who it is, whether it’s $50,000 or $100,000 or a million. It needs to be the same amount for all, because all people are equal.”
“I think when they set that, I think they took into account that a lot of Krystal’s friends were junkie scumbags and that $100,000 was a huge sum of money for those people.”
“I don’t think you can put a price on a human life, but of course I want the highest possible price for Krystal because she’s mine, That’s not fair to all those other people, so it should be equal.”
LOST OPPORTUNITY
Mr Bezzina says he’s staggered that detectives have not used the media more to move forward with the investigation.
“It’s great for an investigator who has nothing else to put it into the public light through the media. That is so, so important, especially with these older, unsolved cases. I can’t emphasise that enough,” he said.
The case must stay in the public arena, Mr Bezzina said.
“We need to keep it in the public’s mind at every opportunity they get, and it’s disappointing that Victoria Police hasn’t taken advantage of that. It can’t interfere with the investigation. This was 2009. You need to put it out there, and the prime time is to do it on the 10th anniversary.”
Criminals have a habit of divulging details of their crimes, Mr Bezzina said.
“(Media coverage) puts it out in the forefront of the minds of the people and get someone to pick up that phone and say, you know, ‘I spoke to someone in Perth who said something about this’. Don’t just marry the investigation to Victoria.
“The person who’s involved with this will have told someone. It’s human nature. People rarely take these things with them to the grave.”
Karen says she blames herself, in part, for the lack of media coverage in the past.
“There was never a lot of attention for Krystal. but I always thought that it was my fault that didn’t get a lot of coverage because I didn’t want to talk to the media, but then it’s not about me. It’s about Krystal, so why is it solely my responsibility to get the word out?”
“When Krystal first went missing, the papers didn’t really want to know until the police said they suspected it was murder. And then, holy s---. Rain down on me. Oh, now you’re interested! They said now there might be murder involved, and I said that murder was always involved if they had cared to take the time to look at it.”
GRIM TRUTH
In her heart, Karen Fraser knows she will never see Krystal again.
“She’s not coming back,” Karen said. She draws a long breath.
“I just don’t know, and I think that’s more frustrating than anything else. If she'd been hit by a bus or a car, a train, at least I’d know what happened, but she just disappeared.”
“I have got no idea.
“I’ve said to the cops, ‘So you’re telling me aliens took her? She came into town, she went here, she went there, and poof!’ You’re telling me she disappeared into thin air!’
“They just looked at me. I don’t do well with stupid.”
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Victoria Police has been approached for comment.
In an earlier statement, a spokeswoman said the investigation is ongoing and detectives are keen to speak to anyone with information via Crime Stoppers -— phone 1800 333 000 or submit a report online at www.crimestoppersvic.com.au.