Ric Blum’s web: Is Queensland mum Marion Barter missing, or was she murdered?
He’s the shadowy figure looming over Queensland mum Marion Barter’s disappearance. Fresh claims continue to emerge painting Blum as a master manipulator.
From her secluded bushland home in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges, Joni Condos has a breathtaking view that takes in one of Australia’s most famous landmarks.
Hanging Rock is known for its eponymous novel, adapted for film, plays, radio and a TV miniseries, about the disappearance of a group of schoolgirls – one named Marion – and their maths teacher on a Valentine’s Day picnic.
But for almost four years, Condos has been immersed at her home in an even more absorbing real-life mystery, the vanishing of Queensland schoolteacher Marion Barter.
“There are so many threads in this case, it goes in so many different directions,” she says.
“You have to keep your absolute wits about you because people can misconstrue a piece of information or misinterpret, and it just snowballs into some crazy story.”
That said, the facts that have emerged about Barter’s disappearance are “quite unbelievable”, she says.
In large part, those facts are down to a hit true crime podcast, the ensuing painstaking investigations of Condos and other talented amateur sleuths like her, and the singular determination of Barter’s daughter Sally Leydon.
Back in 2019, virtually all Leydon had when she first spoke to Inquirer about her missing mum was a steely will to find the truth, and a gut feeling “something bad has happened to her”.
Marion Barter disappearance
How deep and dark does Ric Blum’s backstory go?
He’s the shadowy figure looming over Queensland mum Marion Barter’s disappearance. Fresh claims continue to emerge painting Blum as a master manipulator.
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A man who has become the focus of inquiries into a schoolteacher’s mystery disappearance has denied having an interest in poisons.
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Conman ‘gave false evidence’ about daughter
The alleged serial fraudster who denied killing Queensland teacher Marion Barter gave false evidence when he said under oath that he’d never been in contact with his daughter, witnesses say.
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Deceit and duplicity: the toxic trail of Ric Blum
The stone cold mystery of missing mum Marion Barter and her secret ties to conman Ric Blum has sent sleuths into overdrive. Here’s everything we know about the case.
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Neighbours of the convicted conman — linked to missing mum Marion Barter — tried to raise the alarm when his bizarre stories began to unravel. Other lies were more disturbing.
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Ric Blum, a central figure in the mystery of a missing teacher, became a citizen and claimed welfare for decades despite a serious criminal history abroad.
Border alerts failed to apprehend fraudster
A convicted conman who had an affair with a Queensland teacher just before she vanished was previously on a border watch list as authorities considered charging him with citizenship fraud.
‘If authorities acted … he’d have never met mum’
Missing teacher Marion Barter’s daughter says officials should have taken action against a convicted conman when they first concluded he’d obtained his citizenship fraudulently.
Conman should never have been able to become an Australian citizen
Marion Barter’s daughter Sally Leydon has every reason to be upset, angry and frustrated over the light touch shown by authorities to Ric Blum.
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For Immigration, Mr Blum’s presence remains unfinished business.
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Conman made quick buck on coins, were they stolen from widow?
He’s a prominent figure at a missing teacher’s NSW inquest, and now serial fraudster Ric Blum has been found selling the exact same type of coins he’s accused of stealing.
Fraudster’s wife warned ‘he has a gun’
Serial conman Ric Blum’s estranged wife warned her new partner he had a gun in the car when he turned up at a Belgian ferry terminal, a new witness says.
Conman Blum ‘got me at a low point’
A woman says serial fraudster Ric Blum got her at her lowest before threatening to send intimate images of her to her family, friends and church.
Missing mum inquest extended amid new evidence
An inquest into the presumed death of Queensland mother of two Marion Barter will hold extra hearings to examine new evidence.
Conman’s $80,000 mystery ‘mugging’
Serial fraudster Ric Blum was ‘calm and relaxed’ when he told officers he had just been squeezed unconscious and robbed of €50,000 in a Gold Coast car park, police reports reveal.
Fraudster’s unguarded moment caught on camera
Momentarily left alone in a police interview room, with a camera still recording, convicted conman Ric Blum dropped his head and appeared to utter a single audible word.
Premonition of burial site sparked search for missing teacher
Police searched a rural area of NSW for the grave of missing teacher Marion Barter after a man reported a vision of where she was buried.
Barter, the former wife of Australian football legend Johnny Warren, was 51 years old in 1997 when she quit her job at The Southport School on the Gold Coast, sold her house, quietly changed her name to Florabella Remakel, and travelled overseas on a holiday.
She returned the same year without contacting family or friends, used her Medicare card at an optometrist’s appointment, made a series of large cash withdrawals, then dropped off the face of the earth.
Among the few clues was that Leydon had fleetingly seen her mother, single and looking for love, in a car with a mystery man at a petrol station shortly before her big overseas trip.
Barter appeared startled to be spotted, and hurriedly drove off.
Police in NSW, where Leydon first turned for help, viewed the curious circumstances as evidence of someone not wanting to be found, and refused to list her as missing.
There has been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since then.
Now, the authorities assume that Barter is dead, and a man with a disturbing past – Belgium-born Ric Blum, 83 – is front and centre of investigations. Blum has been based in Australia for more than 40 years with his fourth and current wife, Diane De Hedervary.
Previously jailed in France for fraud, he has at least 50 aliases and a long history of deceiving and exploiting women. It’s also said that he happens to have shown a keen interest in poisons.
Blum confirmed to NSW State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan at an ongoing inquest that he had been in a secret relationship with Barter for about four months before she vanished, but denies any knowledge of her fate. When asked outright by homicide detectives whether he murdered Barter, he emphatically denied it. He did the same at the inquest and maintains his innocence in all allegations against him.
Yet new claims continue to emerge that paint Blum as a master manipulator, raising the question of just how deep and dark his backstory goes.
This week, in a joint investigation between the Luxemburger Wort, Luxembourg Times and Nieuwsblad newspapers, it was reported that Blum swindled a Belgian woman out of €100,000 in 2012 following her husband’s death the previous year.
Blum was the cousin of the woman’s late husband and is said to have convinced her to travel with him to Bali to jointly purchase a house. Then, after booking her in for a massage and hairdressing appointment, he disappeared with her cash and some of her dignity.
Back home, valuable and sentimental jewellery was missing, including her wedding ring.
It was an all-too familiar story for Blum.
Late last year, he was accused of stealing about €70,000 from another Belgian widow, Ghislaine Danlois, in 2006 after she placed a personal ad in a newspaper. Blum’s long and eloquent handwritten letter in French responding to the ad had perfect spelling and stood out from the other replies. Danlois’s daughter-in-law, Alexandra Peereboom, has prepared a statement about what happened next for the NSW Coroner, seen by Inquirer.
Peereboom recounts in the document the family’s shock and discomfort when Danlois invited her nearest and dearest to her home in Tervuren, poured champagne and introduced them to someone they’d never met.
“Here is Frederick, we love each other, we are going to get married and we are going to live in Australia,” Danlois announced.
It was Blum, using one of his many assumed names, Frederick De Hedervary.
Over dinner that evening, Peereboom’s stomach churned as Blum regaled the gathering with morbid stories of his life, including an extraordinary tale of being a prisoner of war in Vietnam. According to Blum, after being captured he’d been placed in a hole and watched a Vietnamese woman’s agonising death in another hole beside him.
While discussing the star anise flavouring of the spaghetti bolognese he’d prepared, Blum “also talked about poisons”, Peereboom says. “I remember this because this topic came up a few weeks later,” she adds.
Family members subsequently gathered to help the lovestruck Danlois pack up her house. Her abrupt plans to sell her home and car before moving to Australia with Blum was a red flag for relatives. So too was the discovery that Blum, who claimed to travel the world collecting rare coins, was slumming it in student accommodation in Brussels when he claimed he usually bedded down in luxury at the five-star Astoria Hotel.
While stacking Danlois’s belongings into trunks for transport, her son came across a book she owned on “poisons that kill without leaving a trace”, and showed it to Blum because of his previous comments on the subject, Peereboom says. Blum immediately seized the book and said he’d keep it, she said.
Strange revelations don’t end there.
Peereboom says she witnessed “a disturbing scene”: a healthy Danlois on the phone to her doctor, and Blum aggressively and repeatedly demanding she ask for a liver ultrasound.
Danlois told Luxembourg journalists Blum insisted she go to hospital for the test, despite her liver being fine. “But why? I think he wanted to poison me,” she said.
She cleared out her bank accounts, handed Blum the cash, and he failed to show for a family dinner. She feared he’d been robbed, maybe killed, until police let her know he’d just arrived in Australia. Blum describes the various claims as a “pack of lies” and “completely untrue”.
Forty-eight hours before Coroner O’Sullivan was due to hand down findings last November into Barter’s disappearance, the case was unexpectedly put on hold pending further investigations.
Condos was about to fly to Sydney for the inquest’s conclusion, while Leydon and her whole family had already travelled there from Brisbane.
It was just one more twist in a case which should have the motto “expect the unexpected”.
“This whole story is nuts, it’s just so involved and complicated,” says Condos, whose involvement began after she started listening to Channel 7 podcast The Lady Vanishes.
A former social worker turned cookbook author, Condos developed formidable online investigative tools while helping her mother-in-law look into the disappearance of a family member after the First World War. That was a 15-year project, culminating in the pair discovering the relative had a secret new life.
Drawn to Barter’s story, Condos started tapping away on her keyboard, using tricks she’d picked up in trawling public databases. It led her to a remarkable discovery on Trove.
A man with the same unusual surname that Barter changed her name to, Remakel, had placed an ad in French-language newspaper Le Courrier Australien in 1994, seeking a relationship and potential marriage.
A retiree, also a fan of the podcast, could see Leydon needed help, then went page by page through telephone books at the library in Ballina in northern NSW and found a match to the phone number from the ad. It was linked to one of Blum’s businesses, and further ties to the convicted conman flowed from there.
Leydon is full of praise for Condos and other research buffs such as the retiree, who have become like family. “Joni, when she did the Trove search, put a space in between the letters to actually bring up that ad in the paper. The detective on the case at the time actually contacted Joni and asked her how she found it,” Leydon says.
Condos says she was “very content living a low-key life, taking care of my family” beforehand.
“Suddenly, I found the ad, and ever since then I haven’t been able to stop,” she says.
Five days before Barter departed to the UK, Blum left Australia for Europe. Two days before she came back, Blum returned.
Barter or someone posing as her was subsequently in the Byron Bay area, making daily cash withdrawals, with Blum living just down the road in Wollongbar with his wife and teenage children.
On October 14, 1997, Blum opened a safety deposit envelope with the Commonwealth Bank. The next day, $80,000 was taken out of Barter’s Colonial State Bank account in Byron, the biggest single withdrawal. Soon after that, Barter’s trail goes stone cold.
Blum says he secured old coins and other valuable and sentimental items at the bank, and “never got a razoo” from Barter.
Condos believes from her research that Barter did return from overseas, not an impostor. She was able to access, from the National Archives of Australia, both Barter’s incoming and outgoing passenger cards. “Police didn’t know about the outgoing card so I sent it to them as well, then they were able to corroborate the handwriting between the two,” she says.
Another discovery stands out.
Before Barter went overseas, she had her mail diverted to a close friend, Lesley Loveday. Luckily, Leydon kept the letters, some from Medicare. “I went and found the 1997 Medicare Schedule Benefits Book,” Condos says. “I was able to ascertain from that, that Marion had had a full liver function test in mid-May, just before leaving.”
Condos and Leydon were confused, as Barter had no known health issues. Then Belgian widow Danlois spoke of Blum insisting she undergo liver tests.
Widening her net, Condos says a priority is to locate anyone with information about Blum, whose other names include Willy Wouters, Richard Lloyd Westbury, Richard West, Willy David-Coppenolle and Rich Richard. That includes other possible fraud victims, or families of missing women thought to have also “gone off to start a new life” never to be seen or heard from again.