Gone without trace: the missing Victorian children that haunt us to this day
MANY years have passed, but for the families of these five missing Victorian kids, the pain and sorrow of their loss remains. Will these cases ever be solved?
Melbourne
Don't miss out on the headlines from Melbourne . Followed categories will be added to My News.
THE disappearance of a child strikes at our deepest fears.
Some cases end innocently — a child that simply strayed a little far from home. Others end in death, accidental or otherwise.
But a few cases baffle our best and brightest detectives, and no trace of those kids is ever found.
The unimaginable pain felt by their families is multiplied by their inability to lay their beloved girl or boy to rest.
Here are the cases of five young Victorians who never came home, and whose faces still haunt us to this day.
CHERIE WESTELL
Cherie Westell left her foster home in Mooroolbark and headed to a midday dental appointment at the Knox Dental Group in Wantirna South on December 12, 2000.
It was just days before her 16th birthday.
Cherie left the dental clinic about half an hour later.
She headed north from there, trying to get home.
Homicide squad digs into baffling missing persons cases
At 1.58pm, she phoned home from a public phone at the corner of Wantirna and Selkirks Road in Wantirna, about 5km from the dentist.
It was the last time anyone heard from her.
In 2014, her sister Tanya told AAP of the anguish of Cherie’s disappearance.
“My sister literally vanished into thin air,” she said.
“Shock, disbelief takes hold of you as you question why.”
Frances Schulz, her foster mother, believes Cherie fell victim to foul play, and says a failure in the child protection system caused a six-day delay before Cherie was reported missing.
“When a child goes missing, there is no time to waste. A missing-person report must be made as soon as possible,” she told AAP.
TERRY FLOYD
It’s been more than 40 years since Maryborough schoolboy Terry Floyd vanished, but his brother Daryl still searches for Terry’s remains in an abandoned mineshaft at nearby Avoca.
Terry, 12, was waiting for a lift home from Avoca, where he had been playing with a mate, on June 28, 1975.
He was last seen standing beside the Pyrenees Highway near Avoca, about 15 minutes west of Maryborough. It’s thought he accepted a lift from a stranger and was abducted and murdered.
Convicted paedophile Raymond Kenneth Jones is a suspect for the crime but police don’t have enough evidence to charge him.
At the time, Jones was on bail over an indecent assault of a boy in a Ballarat toilet block for which he was later convicted.
He drove a fawn Holden panel van similar to one seen in the area on the day and has admitted to police that he was on the Pyrenees Highway on the day.
Jones has repeatedly denied any involvement in Terry Floyd’s disappearance.
Daryl Floyd, Terry’s younger brother, says his own investigations led him to conclude Terry’s body was dumped in the mineshaft he’s now excavating in search of Terry’s remains and other clues.
In January this year, Premier Daniel Andrews announced a $50,000 government donation to allow Daryl’s excavation of the mineshaft to continue.
This came after an earlier donation of $50,000 from Victoria Police and another announced by former Police Minister Peter Ryan.
The government has also put up a $1 million reward for information that leads to the conviction of the person responsible for Terry’s disappearance.
“A conviction would be absolutely brilliant, that would be the pinnacle for us,” Mr Floyd told the Herald Sun in 2012.
“But the bottom line for me is to find my brother’s body and give him a proper burial. He would be buried with his parents out at the Maryborough cemetery.”
LINDA STILWELL
The disappearance of Linda Stilwell is one of Victoria’s oldest cold cases, and the prime suspect in her 1968 abduction has now met his maker, perhaps ensuring the little girl’s remains will never be found.
Linda, 7, was last seen on the St Kilda Beach foreshore on August 10, 1968.
It was decades before the prime suspect in the case, paedophile killer Derek Ernest Percy, came into the frame for Linda’s murder.
Child killer Derek Percy dies in hospital
His name was on a list of 80 suspects reviewed by cold case detectives from 2004.
In 1970, a Supreme Court jury found him not guilty by means of insanity of the murder of Yvonne Tuohy, who he snatched from Ski Beach at Warneet on July 20, 1969.
Percy, a sailor, was arrested at HMAS Cerberus and following the Tuohy trial became Australia’s longest serving prisoner.
The Victorian cold case revision of the Stilwell case also linked Percy to some of Australia’s most notorious child murders, including;
THE disappearances of the Beaumont children Jane, Arnna and Grant from an Adelaide beach in 1966;
ALLEN Redstone, 6, in Canberra in 1966;
SIMON Brook, 3, in Sydney in 1968;
THE murders of Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt on Sydney’s Wanda Beach in 1965.
Percy admitted he was in the area at time in all those cases but said he could not remember any of the murders.
Despite intense questioning in the lead-up to his death, he took his evil secrets to the grave in July 2013.
An inquest into Linda’s death concluded in October 2014 when Deputy State Coroner Iain West found Percy was responsible for Linda’s death.
The finding as a relief to Jean Priest, Linda’s mother.
“We just hope that eventually somebody will find Linda’s remains so that we can give her a decent funeral and show her the respect she deserved, rather than how it’s been left,” Mrs Priest said outside the hearing.
“But this has just been marvellous today. A sort of closure.”
ELOISE WORLEDGE
The Worledge home in Beaumaris was like many others in Melbourne in the summer of 1976.
Airconditioning was a rare and expensive home improvement in the ‘70s, so people opened up our homes to take advantage of any night-time breeze as they slept.
That was what made Eloise Worledge’s abduction so chilling; it happened all too easily.
Eloise, 8, was snatched from her bed on January 13, 1976, and was never seen again.
Her father Lindsay checked on her sleeping safely at 11.30pm.
Related: Crimes that shocked Melbourne
Victoria secretly starts fresh probes into 63 unsolved murders
Her brother Blake found her missing at 7.30 the following morning, sparking a massive manhunt.
The flywire screen had been cut, but police believed Eloise was lured away because the hole was too small for an adult to climb through without waking the household.
A neighbour reported hearing a car speeding down their street about 2am but an intense search yielded little information.
Police cars patrolled Beaumaris streets, using bullhorns to call for witnesses to come forward.
Officers visited more than 5000 houses and prepared 1700 files of evidence, but it was all for naught.
No-one has ever been charged with Eloise’s abduction and her body has never been found.
“I don’t know if she’s alive,” Eloise’s mother Patsy said in 1988.
“I think about the situation but I try not to dwell on the unanswerable. I’ve got a little box in my brain I can pull the blind down on and that’s usually the way I leave it.
“Sometimes I can have a bad day when the blind goes up. I can’t help it.”
SIRIYAKORN “BUNG” SIR IBOON
Known as “Bung” to her family and friends, Siriyakorn Siriboon, 13, was last seen by a neighbour as she walked from her Elsie Street, Boronia home to Boronia Heights College about 8.30am on June 2, 2011.
Her disappearance first became apparent when a friend phoned her home at 4pm and revealed she wasn’t at school that day.
Her mother Vanidda and stepfather Fred Pattinson reported her missing at Knox police station and spent the night scouring the streets and checking with her friends in the hope that Bung turned up.
More: New information on anniversary of Bung’s disappearance
The homicide squad took over the investigation two weeks after Bung vanished.
A $1 million reward has been posted for information leading to a conviction in the case.
In 2016, homicide Detective Inspector Mick Hughes announced investigators were seeking a white 1971-73 HQ Holden station wagon with no rear seats or the rear seats folded down in relation to Bung’s suspected murder.
A girl fitting Bung’s description was possibly seen in the front seat of the wagon in Napoleon Road, Rowville, between 8.45am and 9am the day Bung disappeared.
The male driver is described as caucasian and in his late 30s to early 40s.
He was either bald or had light coloured hair. He had a large tattoo on the left side of his neck and sleeve style tattoos on both arms.
Det-Insp Hughes said police had dealt with around 1200 information reports and identified almost 30 main suspects as part of the case.
Not all suspects had been discounted.
Fred Pattison says the family still holds hope Bung is alive.
“We miss Bung a lot. We want her back. Somebody’s got to know something,’’ he said in June last year.
“It’s very difficult for someone to disappear off the face of the earth with no one seeing anything or knowing anything. We need her back.
“There are so many things that have happened that we have missed out on or we haven’t been able to do.”
Was bizarre shooting suicide pact or murder?
Two men walked into a Melbourne photography studio one afternoon in 1872 to pose with their pistols in a bizarre series of pictures. Hours later a gunshot rang out in nearby Treasury Gardens and their true intentions became clear.
Why Curtis Stone wants to come home
Curtis Stone is the Keilor East boy turned celebrity chef who now lives in a multimillion-dollar house in one of Los Angeles’ coolest suburbs. So how does he show his young kids how to be everyday Aussies?