Deadline: The Australian policing blindspot in searches for missing people

What if a trained tracker dog is given Samantha Murphy’s scent before the trail is hopelessly compromised, and the hound follows it from her home to the point where it stops? Sadly, in Victoria this isn’t a reality.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

The dogs are barking … again

This week the Victorian coroner considers the sad case of Colleen South, the missing Adelaide woman whose body lay under a tree in a wheat paddock within sight of her car for many weeks despite searches by police, family and friends.

Families are highly motivated but not resourced well enough to mount a proper search for a loved one. A 20,000-strong police force with its own air wing, mounted branch and search and rescue unit should perhaps be better.

In the case of poor Colleen South, who went missing in the winter of 2022, they were not. A farmer eventually spotted her body from his tractor by chance after supposedly comprehensive police-directed searches.

In May that same year, the family of Christos Pittas didn’t even get the cruel comfort of finding his body after he was lost while walking near Mt Hotham. He was never found and is unlikely to be.

Veronica South and daughter Meia with a photo of her mother Colleen South whose body was finally found after a long search. Picture Mark Brake

These are just two of many cases that highlight the blind spot, or maybe black hole, in Australian policing: despite terrific technical advances in most areas, police are not much better at finding missing people, dead or alive, than they were a century ago.

Which brings us to the tragic Ballarat murder case. As in the Wonnangatta campers mystery and the Jill Meagher murder, the investigation of Samantha Murphy’s disappearance on the first Sunday of February has been painstaking, thorough and ultimately effective, using mobile telephone data, security cameras and other electronic ways and means.

It has also been slow, adding to an unspeakable ordeal for the missing woman’s family.

But let’s assume that things were different and that Australian police forces had, between them, a small but highly-trained group of trained tracker dogs, the ones known in the business as “trail dogs.”

If such a dog and handler were available (which they aren’t) they should be able to reach a missing person search scene in the first 24 “golden hours.”

In the case of Samantha Murphy, who went for a run at 7am, we now know she probably died that morning, before our hypothetical tracker dog could have reached Ballarat. But that doesn’t alter the fact that a speedier resolution would have been much better for family members and everyone else.

Here’s a “what if” scenario.

What if a trained hound is given Samantha’s scent later the day she vanishes or early the next, before the trail is hopelessly compromised with hundreds of others.

What if police let the hound do its work without distraction from a crowd of volunteer searchers? And what if the hound follows the missing woman’s scent from home in Ballarat East to the exact point where it stops.

The slow search has added to an unspeakable ordeal for Samantha Murphy’s family. Picture: Nicki Connolly

The hound casts around and returns repeatedly to where the scent goes cold: in other words, the exact spot where Samantha met her fate.

We are talking about a tiny area, a few square metres in the middle of thousands of acres of scrub, bush and grassland. It’s the needle, not the haystack, the most likely crime scene — revealed inside the first 24 hours, perhaps less.

Expert detectives and crime scene analysts then comb that confined area for clues: fresh wheel tracks, a drop of blood, a thread of clothing, a scrape of coloured paint, a shattered car lens, even some dropped item that might hold prints or DNA.

Even if investigators sense they are looking for a body in that first day or two, the unknown killer has not had a month to hide it and fabricate a story. Meanwhile, under the trail dog scenario, the police’s brilliant use of telephone data triangulates the position of certain potential suspects — especially ones located near the crime scene indicated by the dog.

The list of cases where trained scent hounds would potentially have made a huge difference is long and getting longer.

Here’s a few.

Bung Siriboon, the schoolgirl who disappeared while walking to school in Boronia in June, 2011. No one has any idea whether she was snatched, presumably by someone in a car, a few metres from her house or a few metres from her school a kilometre away, or anywhere in between.

Fred Pattison, the stepfather of Bung Siriboon, who disappeared in Boronia while walking to school.

There’s Marcia Ryan, who vanished with her pet dog after abandoning her car on the Princes Hwy at Darnum, near Warragul, in August, 1996.

There’s Warren Meyer, the experienced Canadian-born bushwalker who never returned from a walk near Mt Dom Dom in March 2008. And so many others.

Australia’s Border Force breeds and trains world-class sniffer dogs to detect contraband. Australian army dog handlers train working dogs to detect bombs in war zones. Skilled volunteers breed and train scent-detection dogs and are happy to share the knowledge and the genetics for the greater good.

If there’s a good reason why seven state police forces and the Federal Police can’t organise a handful of hounds between them, it’s not obvious.

Meanwhile, the sad search for Samantha Murphy’s remains drags on. The coroner in the Colleen South inquest has already asked questions about why dogs were not used in that case.

Elevated tensions

Could it be that our State Government is becoming increasingly sensitive about law and order issues?

Clearly, the answer from Channel 7 TV reporter Sharnelle Vella would be in the affirmative, if a recent X post is anything to go by.

Vella seemed mightily unimpressed with the handling of her attempts to talk crime with Jacinta Allan.

Tried to put questions to the Premier today about crime in Melbourne only to have a State Goverment media advisor purposely trap myself and my crew in a lift so we couldn’t approach her. Twice I told the advisor to step back. Ignored both times.

— Sharnelle Vella (@SharnelleVella) March 1, 2024

Maybe it was just some kind of misunderstanding and he’s hard of hearing but Vella might take some convincing.

The media advisor did have some support on social media from the usual band of useful idiots.

They’re the same ones who, in slightly different circumstances, might have stridently defended a female journalist allegedly being impeded from doing her job by a man.

Gangitano: win some, lose more

It’s been a big week for the Gangitano crew. When the galloper with that name won at Echuca on Saturday it was arguably an omen tip following the successful sale of a Carlton shop that the two-legged Gangitano half owned back in his pomp.

Alfonse Gangitano was known as the Black Prince of Lygon St, which suggests he seemed a lot more successful than he was. When he was shot dead in early 1998 by his vicious “mate” Jason Moran, Al didn’t leave much.

He had inherited half the Lygon St shop with his sister Muccia and he had a mortgaged suburban house with his life partner, the well-liked Virginia McNamara.

Both those women turned up last Thursday to see the shop at 225 Lygon St finally be sold — $1.75m — for although the Herald Sun’s property experts noted that the sister and the spouse didn’t sit together. Wills and estates can be tricky like that.

A Lygon St building connected with the Underbelly-era Carlton Crew when it was run by Alphonse Gangitano gets sold at auction for $1.75M. Picture: Brendan Beckett

Interestingly, given certain Carlton identities’ connections with the emerging dope trade in the 1970s and 1980s, the shop was snapped up by the flourishing (and legal) medicinal cannabis business, Doctor Canna.

The $1.75m price will come in handy for the various Gangitano descendants, given the shortcomings of Big Al’s business ventures before his death.

The Lygon St shop is, incidentally, not the premises that Gangitano renovated at huge expense in partnership with various other colourful types to set up a small illegal casino modelled on plush gambling clubs in London.

Gangitano and friends called their venue at the corner of Reid St and Nicholson St in North Fitzroy the “Carlton Association”.

Nuccia Gangitano, sister of Alphonse Gangitano, at the auction. Picture: Brendan Beckett

Alphonse Gangitano outside a Melbourne court in 1996. Picture: Ben Swinnerton

Some things are too big to fail — such as Crown Casino, for instance — but Gangitano’s venture was not exempt. It was the ideal target for a new generation of police less likely to be copping slings from SP bookies and the like than some of their predecessors.

The cunning cops sat back and watched Gangitano and his partners (one of them was drug baron and harness racing identity John William Higgs) spend a million dollars in 1987 money setting up the place. Trial runs went well, raking in good money for six weeks. Then the police raided and it all went downhill from there.

The clubby little casino never reopened for business. Years later, new tenants setting up a successful wine bar there found a secret compartment containing decks of cards and other interesting evidence of a shady history.

By then, of course, Crown had done deals at a much higher level than with a few dodgy cops. It was the only game in town.

Porno fiend went for the doctor

People who have worked around the courts long enough have pretty well seen and heard it all.

Defendants have mooned judges, thrown faeces at juries or resorted to the time-honoured gesture of defiance known as “bronzing-up”.

Ray “Chuck” Bennett was shot dead in a gangland hit in the old magistrates court complex in 1979 and Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim punched on with a gangland rival a few years back.

Lawyers frequently make spectacles of themselves with desperate Hail Mary claims aimed at securing an acquittal.

Deadline even recalls how one alcohol-affected reporter — sitting with police — was lucky to escape with his career after opening a backpack containing a half a pound of most pungent cannabis while looking for a pen to report a murder trial verdict.

Certainly, no one was ready for the latest strange episode that unfolded in court five of the Supreme Court last Thursday.

Dr Valerie Peers was up, accused of handing out illegitimate Covid vaccination exemptions.

The matter was being heard via some kind of Zoom set-up, with multiple faces on screen, when things went haywire.

The split-screen faces quickly started being replaced with hard-core pornography.

Our court reporting colleague Laura Placella was able to assure readers that one much-seen obscene scene showed two men having vigorous sex.

There were also images of well-endowed owner operators engaged in solo work.

Deadline would never prematurely speculate on who might have been behind such an unseemly display.

We’ll also ignore a pathetic comment from one witness about the irony of jabs being administered, in the circumstances.

That fellow was just grateful there was no audio.

Mistaken identity

Bad news recently for Victoria Police and a man wrongly accused of some sex offences.

The suspect, who admittedly had some form, was grabbed and charged with getting hands-on with at least one victim on the streets of Richmond.

Unfortunately, the man responsible was allegedly someone else, a similar-looking chap who was arrested and charged on Friday.

It brought to mind an old balls-up from yesteryear in which police released an image of a bloke strolling through a major Melbourne shopping centre.

The material suggested that the fellow in the grainy CCTV was a suspect in a particularly brutal murder out in the eastern suburbs.

The press release was quickly withdrawn when the bloke came forward and was quickly able to establish he hadn’t killed anyone lately, or ever.

He was, in fact, an acquaintance of a member of the same police media unit which had sent out the image.