Marion Barter mystery: Ric Blum a ‘first-class manipulator and first-class liar’
As an inquiry continues into Marion Barter’s disappearance, a victim of serial fraudster Ric Blum speaks out, with the extent of his crimes of deception becoming clear.
Let’s call her Victim A. In 1998, she was a divorcee single-handedly raising twin daughters and running a busy childcare business at her home on Sydney’s lower north shore. With precious little time to meet new people and well before smartphone dating apps, she placed a “lonely hearts” ad seeking companionship.
It’s too long ago now to remember the message, but one ad in a Sydney newspaper that year matched her to a T.
French lady, Christian, well educated, good background, would like to meet tall, caucasian gentleman, same kind, 50-60 years.
It was answered by 6-foot-2, French-speaking Ric Blum, then calling himself Frederick De Hedervary. She thinks their shared language lowered her guard, and she let him come and go from her spare garden studio at will.
Romance wasn’t the way to her heart, it was her dreams of true financial independence and not being confined to four square walls five days a week.
Blum quickly figured this out, and when he proposed a joint business buying and selling rare coins she jumped at the chance, trusting him with her bank card and letting him withdraw about $30,000.
Over a bottle of red and a meal he’d prepared of steak tartare, he upped the ante, urging her to sell her home and to entrust him with the cash to buy a luxury Paris apartment. She outright rejected the idea of selling property she viewed as belonging to her children; then he viciously and vindictively turned on her, she says.
One evening he’d undressed her and taken photographs. He started making veiled threats of sending pictures to her family, friends and church.
“I had the feeling I had been drugged because I really wasn’t 100 per cent myself,” she tells Inquirer. “I functioned quite well with my business and my children, but somehow with him I wasn’t my normal self.”
Valuable gold and silver coins and a gold necklace suddenly went missing from her home, and overhearing a phone call she realised he was married.
After she found out he was messing with her childcare business, complaining to authorities that her residence smelled of gas and was infested with mosquitoes, she reported him to police.
She was the first of five women to independently do so in Australia and Belgium after the disappearance of another woman who crossed Blum’s path, Marion Barter. Like Barter, all the women were in their 50s or older and were divorced or widowed. None landed a single criminal charge against him.
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The five women who made police complaints
VICTIM A
Aged 53, divorced mother of two, went to NSW police and took out a restraining order against Ric Blum in December 1998. Going by the name Frederick De Hedervary, he persuaded her to give him about $30,000 for a coin business, and was suspected of stealing her gold and silver coins and jewellery. When she refused to sell her Sydney house at his urging, he turned nasty.
VICTIM B
Janet Oldenburg, 51, was swept off her feet by Blum. Calling himself Rich West, he contacted her in June 1999 following her divorce and claimed to have a $12m fortune. They travelled overseas together and planned to start a new life in the French Riviera. She told NSW police in January 2000 that she suspected he’d stolen her identity documents and jewellery.
VICTIM C
Ghislaine Danlois, 72, had been a widow for two decades when she met Blum in Belgium in 2006 after she placed a personal ad. He was again using the name Frederick De Hedervary. Danlois says she thought they’d spend the rest of their lives together. She says he pushed her to get married in Bali, urging her not to tell her children, then robbed her of €70,000.
VICTIM D
Andree Flamme, 80, opened her Brussels home to Blum in mid-2010 so he could value her late husband’s rare coins. While she was at the shops, she says he fled with the collection. She made a complaint to Belgium police and wrote to the Queensland governor after tracing him to the state.
VICTIM E
“Charlotte”, in her 60s and from Belgium, says Blum suggested they buy a house together in Bali. They travelled there in 2012, but after booking Charlotte in for a hairdressing appointment and massages, Blum left for a purported business meeting and never returned. She says she was robbed of almost €150,000. Blum was the cousin of her late husband, who died only the year before after 40 years of marriage. A complaint that year to Belgian police brought no result.
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Victim A gave evidence at an ongoing NSW inquest into Barter’s presumed death but asks her name be withheld from this article due to the nature of the events.
Looking back now, at 77, she has no doubt about the kind of person she was dealing with. “He opens his mouth, he lies. That’s a liar, that guy. First-class manipulator and first-class liar,” she says.
Barter was a mother of two and an award-winning teacher from Queensland’s Gold Coast, three-times married and divorced, including once to Australian soccer legend Johnny Warren.
In 1997 Barter began a secret affair with Blum and within no time sold her home, quit her job, gave herself a bizarre new name and travelled overseas.
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Returning to Australia the same year without contacting family and friends, she withdrew large sums of cash from the bank, then vanished.
A year later, Blum turned up on Victim A’s doorstep.
Blum, who denies any involvement in Barter’s disappearance, is a man of many faces. He has claimed to be a British special agent, press photographer, rare coin collector, prisoner in the Vietnam War and Holocaust survivor, witnesses say.
He has adopted at least 50 identities and, despite a lengthy criminal history, managed to become an Australian citizen, and to obtain nine Australian passports under seven different names, the most recent of them Ric Blum.
So who really is Blum, why has it taken a band of amateur sleuths to expose him as a lifelong grifter, and what does he know about Barter’s disappearance?
It is now possible to construct a detailed picture of Blum’s life since his childhood in Belgium, and the extent of his crimes of deception, most of which were committed against women.
Blum was born Willy Coppenolle in Tournai, Belgium, on July 9, 1939.
After the 1942 death of his father during Blum’s formative years, his mother remarried. As a result his name changed for the first time, to Willy Wouters.
Some of this was in his testimony at Barter’s inquest. Other details are in archived newspapers and immigration records unearthed during almost four years of digging by volunteer researchers helping Barter’s daughter, Sally Leydon.
In 1956, aged just 16, Blum made the Belgian press after being shot at by police trying to evade capture. He’d been caught stealing lead piping and copper fittings from a construction site in Herstal and received a suspended five-month prison sentence.
Through the mid to late 1960s he faced Belgian courts for offences including larceny, embezzlement, impersonation and false documents.
Several terms of imprisonment were imposed, according to his immigration file. This included a six-month prison sentence in April 1969 for writing bad cheques, which earned him another Belgian press mention.
His first three marriages, all in the 1960s, were short-lived. The third was to Hungarian-born Ilona Kinczel in May 1969.
The same month he visited Australia and successfully applied for permanent residency in Sydney, falsely declaring he had no criminal convictions.
Why he wasn’t in prison following his recent sentencing in Belgium is unknown.
As detailed by The Weekend Australian previously, his marriage to Ilona fell apart after he told her he was being sent to Vietnam as a press photographer.
He turned up in France instead and was jailed in Rouen from 1971 to 1974 for more fraud.
On his release he returned to Australia and in early 1976 legally changed his name to Frederick De Hedervary, married Australian woman Diane Walker, and applied for Australian citizenship.
Files released by the National Archives of Australia show immigration officials in Canberra went into bat for Blum, telling Sydney colleagues the “applicant’s father dying and he wishes to depart for o/seas soonest”.
Urgent police and ASIO clearances were obtained by phone on March 23 that year, his application approved on March 24, and citizenship granted at a Sydney ceremony on March 25. Bureaucrats have never been more efficient.
A decade later, when the proverbial hit the fan, an immigration official acidly noted that Blum didn’t leave Australia until more than four months after becoming a citizen.
“Where was urgency of father’s illness???” the official wrote.
Of course, there was no real rush; Blum’s father had been dead for more than 30 years.
Blum would later claim to Gold Coast neighbours his whole family was exterminated at Auschwitz.
In reality his dad, Desire David, died from abdominal swelling, according to a family historian. His Catholic funeral in Tournai was a long way from the Nazi concentration camps.
Blum could hardly claim his stepfather was on his deathbed either; he died in 1989. His mother, Maria Coppenolle, lived until 1990.
Returning to Belgium after running rings around Australian immigration officials and police, Blum was convicted again in 1978 for fraud and importing and possessing Lebanese hashish, and received a three-year prison sentence.
By 1980, still married to Diane, he was living in Luxembourg and having an affair with a woman named Monique Cornelius, the Barter inquest heard. Cornelius was in the process of divorcing a footballer, Fernand Remakel.
It’s an important name because almost two decades later Blum was calling himself Fernand Remakel when he had a secret relationship with Barter, who then legally changed her name to Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel.
Cornelius says Blum told her he was a special agent at the British embassy in Luxembourg, and memorably wrote in a love letter that she was “a song in a man’s testicles”. The music died when Cornelius realised Blum had a wife and immediately called things off.
She has since said he was interested in only one thing: money.
Back in Australia, the penny was dropping that Blum was a ticking time bomb who should never have been given citizenship.
Interpol inquiries led in 1980 to the Australian Federal Police obtaining Blum’s lengthy criminal record abroad.
Suspected at the time of obtaining citizenship fraudulently, he was put on a border watch list in case he returned, his file shows.
After Luxembourg, Blum and his wife, son and daughter spent time in the rural village of Burwash, England, where a neighbour called police with suspicions he was running drugs. A short time later, Blum and his family said they were moving back to Australia.
The border alarm was triggered on January 2, 1986, when Blum arrived at Sydney airport. He was somehow in possession of a NSW driver’s licence under yet another name, Chaim Frederic David De Hedervary.
Little appears to have been done either then, or when the border alert went off again on October 6, 1986, on his arrival from Germany.
In 1997, Blum and Barter’s overseas travel movements were closely aligned, the pair arriving back in Australia just two days apart.
Barter’s final cash withdrawal of $80,000 was from a Byron Bay bank in October that year. It was a short drive from Blum’s then home in Wollongbar, where his wife Diane and two teenage children were entrenched in the swimming community. There has been no trace of Barter since.
Blum quickly moved on to Victim A, who took out an apprehended violence order against him in December 1998.
The following year came Victim B, Janet Oldenburg. Her former husband collected coins, and after they broke up Blum got in touch. Calling himself Rich West, he claimed he was worth $12m and swept Oldenburg off her feet. They travelled to England together via Bali and Amsterdam and planned to start a new life in the French Riviera. But after he claimed he was mugged and robbed of her identity documents, title deeds and house keys, she became suspicious and called police. Jewellery that Blum had buried in her backyard for safekeeping went missing.
Fast forward to 2006, and Blum had hooked up with Ghislaine Danlois, Victim C, in Belgium after she placed a personal ad. Danlois says he pushed her to get married in Bali, urging her not to tell her children, then robbed her of €70,000.
Her family says he put them on edge with his interest in poisons, and his claims of being captured and imprisoned in a hole during the Vietnam War.
In 2010, 80-year-old widow Andree Flamme, Victim D, told Belgian police he’d stolen her husband’s valuable coin collection while staying at her home in Brussels on the pretext of valuing them. And in 2012, Victim E, known by the pseudonym “Charlotte”, reported that Blum robbed her of cash and goods worth almost €150,000 after suggesting they buy a house together in Bali. She was his cousin’s widow.
Other names he used include Richard Lloyd-Westbury and Willy David-Coppenolle.
Volunteer researcher Joni Condos found the crucial clue that eventually linked Blum to Barter – a personal ad he placed in French-language newspaper Le Courrier Australien under the name Fernand Remakel.
She has been on his trail ever since, seeing him up close at the inquest. He still has traces of charisma that must have been potent in his younger years, she says.
She pegs him as a master of “future faking”, the practice of making false promises, tailored to what a victim wants to hear.
Victim A says in her case it was the promise of a business that would secure her and her daughters’ future.