Andrew Rule: It seems evil has turned up in idyllic Mt Macedon
IT’S taken thousands of hours for investigators not to find Karen Ristevski. After a walker stumbled over human remains at Mt Macedon it will take a few more hours to prove their search is over. Or not.
Andrew Rule
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IT has taken thousands of hours for investigators not to find Karen Ristevski.
After a walker stumbled over human remains near a track in the slopes of Mt Macedon today, it will take a few more hours to prove forensically that bones, hair and rotten clothes belong to the missing Avondale Heights wife and mother — or not.
LATEST: BODY IDENTIFIED AS MISSING MUM KAREN RISTEVSKI
But as the sun dipped in to the bush late on Monday, everything and everyone were suggesting that chance had delivered what so much hard work had not.
What investigators did work out not long after Mrs Ristevski vanished from her double story family home last June was that mobile telephones and possibly cars connected with her family had travelled northwest from Avondale Heights soon after she was last seen alive.
MOBILE PHONE OF KAREN RISTEVSKI TRACKED TO NEAR GISBORNE
POLICE FOCUS ON MELBOURNE’S NORTHWEST IN THE SEARCH FOR KAREN RISTEVSKI
It was clear within weeks, if not days, of her disappearance that police were looking for a body, not a runaway. And going on the available information police were keeping close to their chest, Mt Macedon was a good place to start.
It is in the northwest quadrant where certain mobile phones had “pinged” towers.
It has thick bushland — or would look that way, hypothetically, to a desperate suburban person trying to hide a body in a hurry.
And it is close to a fast road to Melbourne, the 110kmh Calder Freeway. Outside peak hour, you can be in the Macedon version of bush in little over half an hour.
Police were certainly treating the accidental find very seriously, as soon as the news broke just after midday. Local uniformed police blocked all the rough dirt tracks to the spot near the intersection of Salisbury Rd and Loch Rd and, just in case, noted the details of cars and drivers who turned up.
Mt Macedon feels remote, but it is a delusion.
The Calder traffic hums in the near distance and commuter trains stop close by.
The body was found just behind the local golf course and within sight of a couple of houses tucked into the trees.
It is not unknown for people to die, or to kill themselves, in the bush. But the betting is that whoever the body turns out to be, it was taken there by what coroners often call a person or persons unknown.
Whether the person or persons in this case remain unknown is another thing.
It would surely have been a day and night of mixed emotions at the house Ms Ristevski shared with her husband Borce and daughter Sarah.
Meanwhile, at Mt Macedon, grim-faced locals hurried their children home from school as others worked in their gardens or walked their dogs down dirt tracks so close to bitumen roads, in a place where the outer suburbs meet the bush.
Bushfires aside, it is an idyllic place.
But today it seemed that something evil had turned up in their little bit of paradise.
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