Where to now as search for Samantha Murphy approaches third week
As the search for missing jogger Samantha Murphy approaches its third week, there appears to be more questions than answers over one of the most mysterious disappearances in years.
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It’s Friday, or day 12, in the search for Samantha Murphy, who went for an early Sunday morning run in Ballarat East and never returned.
Ordinary people don’t often vanish, especially those last seen tying up what appeared to be a bag of dog poo.
Where did Murphy go next? Up Cathie St, into Woowookarung Regional Park, where dead leaves crunch under a jogger’s foot? Somewhere else? Or was she intercepted?
There are still no answers.
Not at the family home, where the pool is covered and the agapanthus blooms.
Not in the nearby tracks, where the phone reception is strong.
Not at the family panelbeaters, a bustling hub of cars and workers.
Murphy, at 51, is a mother of three kids and wife of Mick. There are private schools and nice cars and a big house, amid long held impressions of a hardworking family unit.
At Buninyong Bakehouse, a Murphy “missing” poster hogs the noticeboard. Tradies and gardeners dine on the street, which is sleepier than a week ago, when the town doubled as a staging area for the bushland search.
Some locals still hold on to the fallen-down-a-mine theory, mainly because it’s more palatable than most of the alternatives.
Yet they also acknowledge the rumours. Dozens swirl.
The stories might all be nonsense.
Each day without verifiable news has hardened fears. Sadness. Worry. Confusion. Around here, any and all of the above sit better than accusation.
Even the mayor, Des Hudson, doesn’t want to talk; no new developments, nothing to add,
comes the message.
“They seem like lovely people,” says Tracey Spencer, fresh from serving a Taylor Swift disciple in her Lana-Rose fashion shop a few doors down from the bakery.
Spencer has met all the Murphy family members. She argues that the good manners of children often reflect the ways of their parents.
Chief Commissioner Shane Patton surprised some investigators, serving and former, when he said on Wednesday that investigating police had no leads to follow.
As a former detective says: “When you’ve got nothing, you look at everything. People just don’t go missing.”
Many observers assumed that the police were withholding information, as is usual, when such information could impede the investigation.
Media leaks have not dogged this case so far. That almost no evidence has been publicly disseminated does not mean that avenues of interest are not being vigorously explored.
The notion of no leads certainly goes to a perceived lack of starting points. A seasoned observer can list eight distinct scenarios for what has happened to Murphy, including the dimming possibility that she could walk back through the door.
All of them will need to be run down. Establishing what has not happened is vital to finding out what has.
When someone vanishes, a web of details quickly forms for investigators. Police must support family members, obviously, while also corroborating their recollections pertaining to habits, whereabouts and impressions.
Murphy was thought to be going about a daily routine, and need not have been treated as a victim of foul play in the initial phases.
Her welfare was paramount. Sunday, February 4, promised to be a scorcher. Her absence was out of character. She may have had an accident. Finding her began as a search and rescue mission.
Police sources say that phone triangulation technology means a phone, which is on, can be precisely located “within minutes”.
We don’t know what happened in this regard, along with the Apple Watch that Murphy was thought to be wearing.
The search amplified, drawing on the police dog squad and air wing, as well as the CFA and SES.
Last weekend inspired the best in human nature.
Some locals describe feeling summoned by the urge to help. They left work to search, telling their managers that they could not concentrate from worry.
They avoided wearing black or maroon/brown, as instructed, to avoid confusing the images shot from police drones.
Hundreds volunteered, many from Melbourne. Some stayed on after the police ground operation disbanded.
The missing persons squad probably made discreet inquiries with attending officers on the Monday morning, day two, to ascertain the question of suspicions.
If initial suspicions were not high, the unit ordinarily remains in the background for a few days or more. Something like 80 people a day are reported missing in Victoria; the specialist squad investigates a very small proportion of them.
Internal pressures might have mounted in those coming days. On day six, in what was the biggest public development of a baffling case, the Herald Sun revealed that the missing persons squad had taken over the case.
The move need not have hinted of this or that scenario, but rather a paucity of answers.
The bush search was formally stopped the next day. Police had probably concluded a day or two earlier that Murphy was not there. When a woman expressed fears to a local police officer about running in the bush, he told her she need not worry.
By now, investigators would normally intensify the analysis. Eliminate ambiguity in the missing person’s movements.
Any police chat with a family member, and typically there are many, can set off various lines of inquiry.
The police log and cross-reference every conversation and statement from the time of the reported disappearance.
Family dynamics would be explored, as would finances. In some cases, the so-called “phone work”, as well as computer checks, begins within days. Who’s been talking to who? What communications have they exchanged?
“The first thing to try and establish is motive,” says an ex-detective. “Who’s got motive?”
Veteran detectives grasp the “the deadly sins and the prime motivators for murder”. They don’t believe in coincidence.
If this case is about foul play, police will trade on the perpetrator making mistakes. The less planned a serious crime, the more likely the errors.
The bottom line? It is extremely difficult to commit a murder without leaving traces of evidence. Similarly, it is extremely difficult to choose to disappear without leaving a clue.
We all make mistakes.
Some former investigators chatted after Murphy disappeared. They referred to released CCTV footage which turned out not to be Murphy but someone else.
Retrospect is a wonderful thing, of course. But the investigators wondered at the lack of formal searches of the family property and other places of interest which may have yielded physical evidence, such as a secret phone.
Their judgment was harsh. They concluded that the opening days of the regional investigation appeared “sloppy”.
Jane Thurgood-Dove returned home from the school run to be shot dead in front of her children in her Niddrie driveway in 1997.
There was no obvious motive. Two men sharpened in the suspect spotlight – her husband, and another man who lived nearby, a police officer, who was said to be obsessed with her.
Before the sad rise of trolls and online vitriol, speculations compounded about Thurgood-Dove’s murder. Few facts could be pegged to the unsolved crime.
As nature resists a vacuum, so do crime mysteries. Think of Karen Ristevski’s disappearance in 2016. Or the rumours which served as “facts” when Elisa Curry vanished in Aireys Inlet the following year.
In the Murphy case, Facebook pages have filled with toxic allegations that serve only to upset and enrage. Even a psychic from afar offered their thoughts (wisely, the resident psychic in Buninyong demurred).
Similarly uninformed thoughts were (and will continue to be) posted about the deaths of three people in Leongatha after eating mushrooms.
You’re less likely to be fed such speculations about Murphy in Ballarat, which can boast a small feel, a kind of two degrees of separation kinship.
The place is well versed in grief. A ground zero for priestly evils. A town where three women, in separate cases, were killed in unsolved murders in the 1990s.
One local calls it a 90/10 rule. Almost everyone exudes compassion and worry over this mystery. They know someone who knows someone.
And he makes a fair point. What family, under such intense light, could avoid perceived faultlines, real or imagined, being picked over?
A business competitor of Mick Murphy pounced when the Herald Sun called this week.
The media was shonky, he concluded, citing a published photo of Mick Murphy smiling as he walked alongside a police officer.
The car repair industry has nefarious elements, he said. But Murphy was not responsible for any of them. Murphy was a “top bloke”, “always with a smile”.
Similar reports emerge from other sources who dismiss unkind chatter about the family press conference on day five, and what Mick Murphy did or did not do or say.
He is “quiet and unassuming”, says one person. The kind of gentle Dad who “just follows, goes where he is told to”, says another.
Back in Buninyong, a tradie who helped search for Murphy bites into his sausage roll. “It’s a weird one,” he says. “I just hope we’re not still wondering in 20 years’ time.”
It took a long time to settle on accepted facts in the Thurgood-Dove murder. The killer was not either of the two main suspects. Instead, it seems that bikie hit men went to the wrong address and killed the wrong person.
Such unexpected truths are unusual. But they might be worth noting in the chatter about the unusual disappearance of Sam Murphy.
“In my experience, there will be a very simple answer to it,” says a police source.
For now, no one seems to know what it is.
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