Heartbroken parents of Australian methanol poisoning victims Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles speak out
The mum of an Aussie who died from methanol poisoning was forced to personally switch off her daughter’s life support for “religious reasons”, it has emerged.
The Laos government has refused to meet with the families of a group of tourists who were killed in a mass methanol poisoning event, it has been revealed.
Melbourne teenagers Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles, both 19, were on the trip of a lifetime in the tourist town of Vang Vieng in November last year when they fell ill.
The pair were killed alongside four other tourists staying at the Nana Backpackers hostel after accidentally consuming methanol.
In an exclusive interview with 60 Minutes journalist Tara Brown, the parents of the Melbourne teens – Mark and Michelle Jones alongside Sam and Shaun Bowles – said the Laos government has refused to meet with them since the teenagers’ deaths.
“We’ve heard nothing,” Mr Jones said in the interview, which aired on Sunday night.
“I cannot have my daughter’s passing not mean anything.”
The teens were two of six tourists who died in the same week of methanol poisoning in Laos, including British lawyer Simone White, 28, Danes Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Vennervald Sorensen, 21, and American James Louis Hutson, 57.
The families say they now want justice and answers for the group.
“We want some form of closure,” Mr Jones said.
“We want to understand that people who have done wrongly our daughter and Holly and the other people are going to be brought to justice.”
Joy turned to horror
For the young Melbourne travellers, it was meant to be a trip like no other.
Instead, their parents are dealing with a heartache they never should have to experience.
“I was so happy for her,” Mrs Jones told 60 Minutes of daughter Bianca Jones. “She was so excited, but I just didn’t think that, you know, she wasn’t going to come back.”
While Mr Jones recalls the last conversation he had with Bianca: “I said, ‘Let’s take a selfie’. And she said, ‘Bugger off, dad’. It was the last conversation I had with her.
“It’s still hard to believe she’s not coming home. You wake up every morning, expecting her to walk out of her room.”
The devastated Melbourne families revealed just how dangerous methanol is.
“What it can do to your body is incredible,” Mrs Jones said. “It’s just so lethal.”
“They weren’t doing anything wrong,” Mr Jones recalled of the best friends’ trip. “They were having, having a drink, having fun. And yeah, there’s no way to determine if there is methanol in a drink. So it’s, it’s very much a silent killer.”
As NSW University clinical toxicologist Dr Darren Roberts warns, methanol is invisible and tasteless. A minuscule amount can blind a person, while a single serve of spirits can be deadly.
“30ml is the fatal amount that will kill someone if they don’t get help fast enough,” Dr Roberts said. “One shot to die. Two teaspoons to have severe lifelong injuries.”
Final goodbye
The parents of Ms Jones and Ms Bowles spoke about their despair at watching their daughters die, although they were grateful to make it to Laos in time to be by their sides.
The friends were later moved across the border to separate hospitals in Thailand.
Bianca Jones’ father will never forget a conversation he had with one of his daughter’s doctors: “He sat us down again and said, ‘The brain has continued to swell’. He’s like, ‘We’ll be calling her medically brain dead’.
“So yeah, then we made the decision to turn off all the life support. And then we said our final goodbye.”
Mrs Jones said: “And then she just passed away in my arms”.
She also recalled how “horrific” it was to learn of the rising death toll via social media, while at their daughter’s bedside.
Holly’s parents say they will never forget the last time they saw their daughter.
“Just seeing the girls on the ventilators and just all the tubes attached to them and you know they, it was just not what anyone would ever like to see their child,” Mrs Bowles said.
“It’s just something that you never expect to happen,” Mr Bowles warned. “Yeah it was just horrible.”
However, they were grateful to have the chance to say goodbye.
Mr Bowles reflected: “In a way, we were fortunate to be there with Holly when she passed, which we will forever be grateful for. And to not have that would’ve been just heartbreaking.”
“We got to brush Holly’s hair. Hold her hands, just hold her. We got to be in the same room with her,” Mrs Bowles recalled of Holly’s final moments.
Mother had to turn off daughter’s life support
In the 60 Minutes special, Parents Didier Coyman and Anne-Marie Orkild, Rikke and Karsten Sorensen and Sue White united with the Bowles and Jones’ to speak out in their daughter’s names and warn others against the danger of inadvertently drinking methanol.
Simone White, from Britain, was poisoned by the same batch of alcohol as Bianca and Holly, and was rushed into brain surgery. Her mother Sue White arrived at the Lao hospital from London just in time.
However, the 28-year-old was unable to be saved and remained on life support for three days, with doctors allegedly prohibited by their religion to switch it off.
“They just literally kept her on the ventilator, and it was only you know when I kind of said, ‘I just can’t do this any longer’,” Mrs White said.
“ … And they kind of came back to about an hour later and said, ‘Oh, okay, well, if you want
to, you can turn the ventilator off yourself’.”
Mrs White said she was then faced with a heartbreaking task no mother should have to endure.
“She still had the tube in her mouth, I then had to take the tube out of her mouth. It was just absolutely terrible. It was just so traumatic.”
‘Too late’
Another set of long-time friends, Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman and Freja Sorensen had travelled to Vang Vieng from Denmark. They booked in to the same hostel as the Melbourne teens and on November 12th joined other backpackers at the bar.
Anne-Sofie’s father Didier Coyman explained that’s when she became very ill: “She did vomit and then fell on the bar floor and had, had seizures mostly and cramping”.
An American tourist then came to her aid, with Anne-Sofie’s mother Anne-Marie Coyman recalling: “And the American girl is trying to get help from the hostel, and they didn’t even get an ambulance to bring them to the hospital. So Anne-Sofie was brought to the local hospital by taxi.
“And I think that it was too late for her when they found her.”
The same backpacker who helped Ms Coyman then returned to the hostel to find Ms Sorensen unwell, taking her to the same clinic.
Freja’s father Karsten Sorensen said: “And then, at this point, Freja is also started to be confused, eyes rolling and so forth.”
The families didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to their daughters, alleging Lao officials failed to notify them of their deaths. Instead, the parents claim they learnt of their daughters being in trouble from a fellow backpacker and conducted a search, tragically unaware they had died three days ago.
Mr Sorensen asked: “How can your kid be dead three days and you still have absolutely no information? I don’t know. I don’t understand. When I was there, all of her belongings were sitting in the police office so they can’t just say they didn’t know.”
Fighting for answers
Besides the hostel being shut down and eight staff initially detained, little else is known about any investigation into the fatal mass poisoning.
In a bid to break the Laos strategy of silence, Mr and Mrs Sorensen travelled to Melbourne to meet the parents of Holly and Bianca.
During an emotional conversation, Mr Jones revealed he simply doesn’t have faith the Laos government is investigating his daughter’s death.
“We’ve heard nothing,” he said. “So I can’t be confident about anything. Yeah, confident would be a gross overstatement. Ah hoping.
“The Lao government sent their condolences via the federal police, and that to us means nothing, nothing at all. For them not to reach out is, that’s just not good enough.”
Mr and Mrs Bowles are also sceptical about an investigation.
Mr Bowles fumed: “We haven’t heard anything from the Laos government. Not a thing. It’s appalling.”
Mr Sorensen agreed: “No, neither, neither have we.”
While Mrs Sorensen said of the investigation: “It’s like they’re stalling it, and like they’re wanting people to forget it.”
Mr Jones agreed: “ … It seems like a complete cover-up. We’ll absolutely make sure that they are accountable for the loss of our daughters and make sure that … other people don’t suffer what we’ve suffered.
‘Cut short’
Mr Jones spoke publicly for the first time about the tragedy in December, at the time saying his daughter’s “lust for life and adventure” had “cruelly been cut short”.
“Our daughter was on the trip of a lifetime with one of her best mates,” he said.
“This was meant to be a trip full of lifelong memories, and was to be the first of many.
“Bianca wanted to explore the world, meet new friends, lead and create change for good.”
Following the tragic deaths of Ms Jones and Ms Bowles, an outpouring of sympathy came in from around Australia and the world including from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, while hundreds attended a vigil held in the women’s honour in Melbourne in November last year.
Ms Jones was farewelled at a funeral service on December 6 at her old school, Mentone Girls’ Grammar.
Family and friends who attended the funeral wore bright colours and red ribbons made by Mentone students, representing the school colour.
Ms Jones’ dog, a golden retriever named Zara, lead the pallbearers as hundreds formed a guard of honour.
Days later, friends and family — with wearing pink and others with blue and yellow ribbons in their hair — farewelled Ms Bowles at Beaumaris Secondary College, in Melbourne’s southeast.
In a statement before Ms Bowles’ service, acting principal Peter Bartlett said the funeral was “a profoundly significant day” for the family of Ms Bowles as they — along with friends —” come together to celebrate Holly’s life and her spirit”.
Following the deaths of Ms Jones and Ms Bowles, the families of the teenagers created a crowd-funding page to assist with covering out-of-pocket expenses incurred by the tragedy. The funds would also be put towards support awareness, education and prevention initiatives around methanol poisoning. More than $450k has been raised.
60 Minutes’ Tara Brown said attempts to talk to authorities in Laos have been unsuccessful: “Last November, in a letter to our Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the Lao Government did express its ‘profound sadness’ over the deaths. And it said it ‘was investigating the cause of the incident to bring the perpetrators to justice’.
“But so far despite those words there’s been very little action. When we tried to go to Laos to find out why we were denied access to the country because they claimed the case is still being worked on.
“More significantly, and cruelly, no Lao officials will meet with the devastated families, not even in private.”
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