Mystery of the missing mum
In 1997, Marion Barter, the ex-wife of football legend Johnny Warren, quit her job, sold her home and then vanished.
Marion Barter is quite probably a murder victim, according to her daughter. But Australian authorities, despite being unable to offer proof that she is alive, are refusing to factor in foul play, in a cruel and unusual set of circumstances haunting a young Queensland mother. “It has been my gut feeling for a long time that something bad has happened to her,” Marion’s daughter Sally Leydon tells The Australian.
No one has seen Marion for 22 years — or, if anyone has, they’re not saying. Her family certainly has not seen the popular teacher and former wife of football legend Johnny Warren since she abruptly quit her job at a Gold Coast private school and sold her home to travel overseas in 1997, at the age of 51.
Once a prolific letter-writer and gift-giver, she has missed every significant family occasion without a word: her daughter’s wedding, son’s funeral, the death of both her parents, the birth of her grandchildren, not to mention birthdays, Christmases and everything between. There was no goodbye or explanation.
Leydon suspects foul play but police think otherwise. They point to a curious set of events in the year she disappeared — Marion secretly changing her name before her travels, her apparent return to Australia without telling family or friends, withdrawals of large sums from her bank account, and the use of her Medicare card in a visit to a doctor — as evidence she chose to vanish.
Despite confirming they have not sighted Marion and that they cannot now find any trace of her, police say they are satisfied on the threads of the disappearance that she did not want to be found; that she started a new life.
Leydon says this is based on assumptions. What if, she says, someone took advantage of Marion’s kind nature and her deep-seated yearning to love and be loved, and that she is the victim of fraud and murder?
She is deeply concerned that, blindsided by a name change, the police have made a mistake in failing to launch a full-scale investigation into a likely homicide.
Leydon wants to be proved wrong, and won’t rest until the mystery is solved. Her efforts to find out what happened to her mother have led to a Seven Network podcast, The Lady Vanishes, which is attracting a wave of attention to the case. It follows a series of cold-case podcasts including The Australian’s investigative series The Teacher’s Pet, on the disappearance and alleged murder of Sydney mother Lyn Dawson.
‘Really gullible’
“My mum was really vulnerable, and really gullible,” Leydon, 45, says. “She is not a street-smart person. For her to go and fake an identity and vanish is just something that seems so out of character and something that she could just not physically pull off. My gut feeling is, being the person she is … she met somebody and he promised her the world and she’s fallen for it and she met with foul play.” Marion had been married and divorced three times. Her first marriage, in the late 1960s, was to “Captain Socceroo” John Warren. She had her two children — Leydon and a son, Owen — with her second husband in the 70s. After the end of her third marriage, she moved to the Gold Coast in the 90s and took a job teaching boys aged four and five at the Southport School.
Outwardly, there was success. In 1996, she won a state teacher award of excellence and placed second nationally. But things were tense at the Anglican private school; Marion clashed with some of the other staff and told Leydon there had been unfounded accusations around her treatment of students, portraying it as a case of tall-poppy syndrome. She told her daughter someone had even accused her of touching boys.
Marion quit on just four days’ notice. She told her family she was going to the UK and Europe for a 12-month break. She put her house up for sale, accepting $165,000 within three weeks, for a loss of $15,000 on the purchase price.
As she prepared to put her belongings into storage, there was an event that in hindsight stands out. Leydon’s then fiance, Chris, now her husband, was helping her pack when Marion noticed the time and panicked, ordering him to leave. He drove away and picked up Leydon, commenting on her mother’s rude behaviour. On the way home the couple stopped at a service station with a McDonald’s drive-through and looked over to see Marion in a car with a mystery man. Leydon says her mother stared at her like a deer in headlights and, instead of filling up, drove off in a hurry. The next day Marion said it was just a friend. He has never been identified.
Other things that did not seem particularly unusual at the time have also taken on new meaning. Marion did not want her daughter to take her to the airport for her flight abroad, instead getting a friend to drop her off at a bus stop and making her own way. Leydon now wonders if her mother was travelling with someone when she left Australia in June 1997.
Letters, postcards and small gifts from Marion started arriving at the homes of family and friends, and even for her former students; her messages discussed her travels, and none gave any indication she was planning to disappear.
Late on the night of July 30, 1997, a landslide at Thredbo destroyed two ski lodges, killing 18 people. Leydon and her fiance had been at Perisher and returned home the next day to find an answering machine message from Marion, worried about their safety. She phoned again the following day, August 1, and spoke to Leydon at length. Marion was on a payphone and kept running out of money, the line repeatedly cutting out. Leydon offered to call, saying she wanted a decent chat, but Marion said she was out and had been having morning tea with some little old ladies in Tunbridge Wells, England.
Marion said she wouldn’t be writing very many postcards, as she wanted to enjoy her holiday. That was the last time Leydon spoke to her mother.
Leydon didn’t know it at the time but a day later, on August 2, 1997, Marion was registered as returning to Australia. Her passport was under a different name, one her family had never heard of: Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel. On her Customs card, Marion was listed as being a married housewife from Luxembourg. She had changed her name by deed poll before travelling overseas and had obtained a new passport.
Marion’s family knew nothing of the name change or of this return journey, presuming she was still overseas.
Months went by without a call from Marion, but it was only after she failed to contact her son for his birthday on October 18 that Leydon became alarmed and phoned Marion’s bank.
“She said, ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t tell you anything due to privacy’,” Leydon says. “Then she paused and said, ‘Did you say your mum’s overseas?’ I said yes, and she said: ‘Oh my god, there’s money coming out of her account in Byron Bay.’ ”
The bank staff member read out details of the withdrawals, all in amounts of $5000 at a time, daily for more than three weeks. For three days in the middle of that period, the money had been withdrawn from bank branches at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast.
“She taught at Southport and I lived at Mudgeeraba. They’re all five minutes within each other,” Leydon says. “If you wanted to go missing, why would you risk coming back?” Leydon and her fiance drove to Byron Bay the next day with a picture of Marion. They asked around the beachside town, but no one recognised her.
Then Leydon went into the Commonwealth Bank and asked a staff member if the ATMs had CCTV cameras, explaining why and showing a photo.
The staff member told her it rang a bell and, after checking with someone that Leydon assumed was a manager, he returned and asked: “What would you like me to say to her if I see her?”
Leydon went straight to the Byron Bay police station and told them everything she knew. The officer who took the details phoned her back within days with distressing news.
“He said, ‘We’ve found your mother, she doesn’t want anyone to know where she is or what she’s doing,’ ” Leydon says.
The problem with this phone call is that police never documented it. When Leydon last year obtained a heavily redacted version of the NSW police file, the call was not logged; there was nothing to show what led the officer to say Marion had been found. The officer, who has since retired, says he has no recollection of it.
Leydon also was disturbed to discover in the documents that when she reported her mother’s disappearance to Byron Bay police, it was recorded only as an occurrence — Marion was not listed as missing.
There are other apparent errors in the file. Marion told police that in total about $80,000 was withdrawn from her mother’s account over three weeks. But a police note says $80,000 was electronically transferred overseas, and that this was presumably to buy a house with her new partner. There is nothing to explain why police thought she had a new partner. Significantly, police have confirmed to Leydon that her mother’s passport was never used again, and has since expired.
Super untouched
Police have confirmed to Leydon that Marion hasn’t accessed her superannuation, estimated to be a six-figure sum. Marion also had an account with Barclays bank in London, with about $20,000 that hasn’t been touched.
Leydon says there’s “nothing to say anywhere or prove anywhere” that it was actually Marion who returned to Australia, or that it was Marion who withdrew money from her account in Byron Bay and Burleigh Heads. She also remains upset about other material in the police file, including an email in which an officer refers to her trying to find a “scapegoat”. The same person claims in the email that it was believed Marion had been located as recently as a couple of months earlier.
“They need to be able to provide me some decent evidence,” she says. “They can’t just sit there and throw these things out there.”
Byron Bay detective Gary Sheehan inherited the case years after Marion disappeared and remains in charge. He confirmed to Leydon that Marion had never been sighted by police and that he did not know where she was.
No record
Ahead of the launch of the podcast series earlier this month, Sheehan said he had sent out 17 requests to agencies around the country, checking on Marion’s identities. There was no record of any activity in either name.
Sheehan this week referred inquiries back to police media, who said he was unavailable. But he told the podcast that Marion’s behaviour led him to believe she was “trying to remove herself from the family”. His investigations had identified Marion’s name change, her apparent return to the country, and the use of her Medicare card to see a doctor in Grafton in northern NSW in the days that followed. In about 2012 Sheehan arranged for her name to be removed from the national missing persons register.
“There’s been nothing to suggest that she is in grave fear of her safety,” he said. Disappearing is not a crime. A person only has to satisfy authorities they have made a conscious decision to leave and are not in danger.
Tragedy struck the family when Marion’s son, Owen, took his own life five years after she went missing. It’s inconceivable to Leydon that Marion deliberately cut off all contact. “That’s all I’m asking for — show me proof,” she says. “Even if she’s alive and well, I just want proof. Because in my world, I can’t sit back and not know that’s she’s not buried in some ditch somewhere and no one’s searched for her.”