Police found a phone in the mud. Now they hope for a breakthrough in the Samantha Murphy search

Ballarat and its high, cold-country districts wait, its people having already waited so long they seem barely capable of daring to hope that finally, the ghastly mystery of Samantha Murphy’s disappearance may be approaching an answer.

A farm dam alongside a country road 15 kilometres south of Ballarat has given up a secret:  Murphy’s mobile phone, long buried in mud.

The dam on a property outside Buninyong where Samantha Murphy’s phone was found.Credit: Joe Armao

It is the first tangible physical clue to what may have happened to the 51-year-old mother four months ago.

But whether this is the breakthrough that might finally reveal the location of Murphy’s body remains unknown, the hope unspoken.

Police, for so long frustrated and deprived of physical clues to the mystery, embraced each other as the phone came out of the mud on Wednesday, and a specialist sniffer dog that had helped in the search was showered with pats and praise.

Since then, police have declined to say anything publicly. They are waiting, too, until whatever the phone’s secrets may be, have been examined forensically.

But Seven News reported on Thursday night that husband Mick Murphy had confirmed to it that his wife’s iPhone, credit cards and licence had been discovered in the mud at the small dam. Detectives and cadaver dogs also searched an area of bushland about 2.5 kilometres from the dam on Thursday.

Police hope the phone is not so badly corroded that it won’t have retained data that might reveal the path of its last journey over the hours or days between whatever befell Murphy and her phone’s trip to the dam. Even a badly damaged mobile phone almost always retains a memory, according to forensic experts, often securely lodged in the cybersphere’s cloud.

As to how police came to search the dam – one of many in the rolling farmland south of the village of Buninyong – there was no information forthcoming. The occupants of a nearby farmhouse expressed no wish to speak to reporters or be filmed.

It was not difficult to speculate, however, how the instrument, which is believed to have credit cards lodged within its casing, might have come to be in the dam.

Whoever wished to be rid of the phone needed only to pull up on the side of the road and toss it over the roadside fence.

It may have stayed there, under water and beyond discovery, if Victoria’s Western District had not experienced a relatively dry period. The dam’s water level has receded over the months. The phone was found lodged in mud near the water’s edge.

Divers discovered nothing more in the small dam, and police were gone from the site on Thursday, having declared they would be issuing no statements for the time being. No one was answering the gate outside the Murphy family home at East Ballarat, either.

Only media cars and their occupants lined the dam site on the Buninyong-Mount Mercer Road.

A chill wind blew across the undulating farming landscape not far from high forested country that was combed fruitlessly by searchers in the early days of Samantha Murphy’s disappearance.

Rain began to fall at 2.30pm on Thursday. Could the only clue to Murphy’s fate have disappeared beneath the water again if it had not been found on Wednesday?

Until now, the scarce pointers to Murphy’s disappearance seemed as insubstantial as the thin air into which she seemed to have vanished.

She was captured by CCTV in running gear outside her home about 7am on February 4, having told her family she was setting off on a morning jog.

Since then, the only publicly revealed lead was that her mobile phone had “pinged” on a communications tower close to Buninyong in the immediate period since her disappearance.

But in the absence of other towers from which the “ping” could be triangulated, the whereabouts of the phone could not be ascertained beyond the general area of Buninyong and district.

And now, all these long weeks later, the Murphy family, their friends and the hundreds of community members who have never given up searching, can only wait. This time, with some hope.

A Ballarat district man, Patrick Orren Stephenson, 22, has been charged with murder over Murphy’s disappearance. He remains in custody awaiting a court appearance in August.

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