The Lighthouse: podcast raises Theo Hayez army

The search for the truth behind a backpacker’s disappearance gains new energy from publicity.

Missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez.

On a Friday night in May, Theo Hayez walked out of a bar in Byron Bay and vanished. Theo was from Brussels and only 18 years old.

Two months later, Theo’s cousin, Michael Dorkhom, and Byron local Nicoletta Revis came to The Australian’s Brisbane office and went through some of their extraordinary efforts to find him. They had already done so much, but they wanted to broaden their quest for answers.

For a start, with two million visitors a year to the northern NSW town, its transient nature meant witnesses could have come and gone without knowing they had vital information.

The result of this meeting was The Lighthouse, a six-part investigative podcast that concluded on December 6 — at least for the time being.

Not that long ago, suggesting a podcast to a victim’s family was met with blank stares and the response, “What’s a podcast?” But the success of investigative series such as The Australian’s The Teacher’s Pet means victims’ families and friends are now the ones asking for them.

“I understand the power of a podcast at this level,” Revis said when asked why she wanted a podcast. She was talking about the power to move people, and she was right.

During the past 1½ months, as the voices of Theo’s family and Byron volunteers were broadcast around the world, tips and offers of support flowed in to an email address set up by The Australian for this purpose, and to the Looking for Theo Hayez Facebook page.

Theo’s disappearance had made headlines, particularly after his father, Laurent Hayez, travelled from Belgium and made an emotional public appeal for help. But the public knew very little about the efforts going on in the background to find him.

The series reveals how Theo’s family tracked him, via his smartphone and Google account, going to Byron’s Tallow Beach around midnight. Specifically, Theo went to an area known as Cosy Corner, just south of the 118-year-old Cape Byron Lighthouse. Armed with this new information, internet sleuths dived in and started scouring Instagram for photographs of Tallow Beach around the time he went missing.

“They’ve just been posting photo after photo on the site of people who were at Tallow Beach on the morning or the night,” said Byron resident Sheri D’Rosario, a clinical psychologist helping Theo’s family. “So we’ve got all these people we now need to contact to find out what part of the beach they were at. It’s a bit crazy.”

GRAPHIC: The Lighthouse podcast and Theo Hayez

Illegal parties

One series of Instagram images, of a small group of travellers around a beach campfire, was dated the night Theo went missing. Theo’s tech-savvy family had tried hard to find photos such as this before, without luck. Weeks later, the Byron volunteers were in a cafe meeting Jesse Martig, one of the young men in those campfire photos. Martig is from Geneva and he’s now following up to confirm the date it was taken. He says they were farther south on the beach near Suffolk Park and he doesn’t remember seeing anyone else that night. But Martig and friend Tom Wayan did know all about the illegal parties, known as “doofs”, held frequently at Cosy Corner on weekends. According to those who have attended, the parties are tailored to people on mind-altering substances, such as the magic mushrooms that grow in the fields around Byron.

The parties are popular among Byron’s visiting backpackers, who hear about them by word of mouth. It’s possible Theo was searching for one of these parties when he headed to Tallow Beach the night he vanished.

Another Instagram photo uncovered by the online sleuths was of the sunrise at Tallow Beach and was dated Saturday, June 1. “Pull up a log and watch the sunrise on a chilly Saturday,” reads the caption.

The photographer, who frequently posts photos of spectacular sunrises at east coast beaches, wrote back to The Australian to confirm it was taken within hours of when Theo was known to be there. She was there with two other people and “didn’t see anything unusual”.

“Have checked my photos from that day and there was only one guy at the beach surfing that morning. We’re not from Byron and after sunrise we left to head home,” she wrote.

Responses such as this help narrow the timeframe for something going wrong for Theo. Presumably, whatever happened to him occurred before the photographer captured the sun’s first rays.

Michael Dorkhom and Lisa Hayez. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

Help rejected

Dorkhom, Theo’s cousin, has lived in Brisbane for five years and works in IT. He says the discovery of the Instagram images was “exactly what we were hoping for”.

“Now that people have all the information, it’s not just going to be speculation, they’re actually going to try to figure out what was happening around that area at that time,” Dorkhom says.

Theo had visited Dorkhom and another cousin, Lisa Hayez, in Brisbane on the weekend before he vanished. Theo was just weeks from returning to Belgium, where he intended to study engineering.

“He was super positive and you could tell that he was in a good place,” Dorkhom says.

“He had a great few months in travelling around Australia, he met a lot of really nice people. He was really happy about his decision to come here. But he was also very happy to go back.”

Lisa is a backpacker from Belgium herself, and had spent more time with Theo than anyone else in the months before he went missing. “Everything was fine. We were just living our life. Backpackers’ life,” she says.

Theo had been in Byron for only a couple of nights when he vanished on May 31. He was due to check out of his hostel, Wake Up!, on Monday, June 3.

His belongings including his passport were left behind at his hostel, but hostel staff didn’t ­contact police until Thursday, June 6, the same day his family realised he was missing. The hostel won’t comment on the delay or on whether it has changed ­procedures.

As the suffering of Theo’s family was laid bare, offers of assistance were tangible and genuine.

Private detective Ken Gamble phoned from Brisbane’s international airport while waiting for a flight, after the first episode.

He offered to help, and since then has been formally engaged by Theo’s family to investigate. He’s working pro bono.

Assistance such as this should be viewed as a help, not a hindrance, by overstretched police, who have limited resources. But the detective in charge of the Hayez investigation, Phil Parker, rejected an offer of a meeting when Gamble was in Byron. “The matter has been referred to the Coroner,” Parker wrote. “We will not be making any comment or taking any meetings. Thank you.”

Final hours

Gamble is concerned by revelations in the podcast that detectives do not appear to have followed up potential leads. For instance, Queensland beauty therapist Leesa Horn came forward during the series to say she had called Crime Stoppers because she thought she had seen Hayez lying dead on the highway just south of Coffs Harbour. No one called her back. “If it’s a genuine report, then why would they not follow up on this?” Gamble says.

“There’s so many different scenarios that it could be, but it’s something that has to be pursued thoroughly, in case it’s a lead.”

Others also have come on board, including ethical hackers who are uniting to examine leads such as Theo’s online accounts, which may contain location ­information.

After Theo left the bar, Cheeky Monkey’s, his location was being logged every 15 seconds by Google. The raw Google data showed his latitude and longitude, time­stamped to the millisecond. His family was able to obtain these and many other details before police by hacking into his Google ­account.

These records show Theo at first went from the bar to the end of Tennyson Street. It’s on the edge of bushland around the Youth Activities Centre, where the homeless live in hidden camps.

Theo spent almost seven minutes at the end of this street, some of this time pacing back and forth on a concrete slab behind cricket nets. Was he alone and thinking of his next move? Or did he meet someone there?

When The Australian visited this site, there were remnants of a small fire and alcohol bottles were scattered around. Locals say youths gather there at night. Theo’s phone then logged a dramatic change of course, heading east through suburban streets, up a hill to a small road called Milne Street, leading directly into Arakwal National Park. It’s assumed Theo still had his phone by the way it was used through the night.

Confounding everyone who has analysed his route, Theo was searching Google Maps on his phone for the way back to his hostel at Belongil Beach. But the hostel was in the opposite direction to where he was walking.

Theo went down part of the Milne Track, but instead of following it to the right to go straight to Tallow Beach, he followed a different sandy track. At the end of that track, after checking Google Maps again, he headed deep into the bush on no track at all in the pitch dark. He walked through the bush for almost eight minutes before coming out on to a tiny path to the beach that emerges from nowhere. It’s next to where there’s a now-abandoned homeless camp. The Lighthouse identified a homeless man who may have been staying at the camp; he’s a potential witness who is yet to be found.

Theo headed north along Tallow Beach towards Cosy Corner. Here, his Google account recorded a strange detour, up into a tangle of vines, where he stopped for five minutes before returning to the beach.

The precise monitoring of Theo ended at 12.05am on Saturday, June 1, when he deactivated his GPS at Cosy Corner. It may have been to save battery, but it shows at that time he wasn’t in need of directions on Google Maps..

During the next hour, Theo’s phone was used to send a couple of brief messages to friends and to watch a French TV comedy on YouTube. The phone use indicates he was not scared at this time; something happened after then.

New clues and theories

Detectives have suggested to Theo’s family that he was lost and ended up at Tallow Beach by mistake while trying to get back to his hostel. This explanation became increasingly shaky as The Lighthouse progressed. It was revealed the way Theo had walked, up Milne Street to the Milne Track, was one of the ways Google Maps recommends to walk to get to Tallow Beach.

This seemed to indicate Theo wanted to go to Tallow Beach. He should have been able to see his location at all times as a blue dot on his screen, so he should have known he was going away from his hostel.

It’s a complicated path, so it appeared he must have been that way before or was with someone who was leading the way.

At the 11th hour, on the day before the final episode of the series, a new option emerged when a listener emailed in a tip. She said Theo may have searched Google Maps for the way back to his hostel, but added a waypoint to Tallow Beach. The listener said that adding a waypoint like this would not show up in Theo’s Google logs.

Hours before the final episode was released, the Byron volunteers raced out to do some experiments. They tried adding the waypoint as suggested, and found it indeed did not show up in Google’s My ­Activity logs. Adding a waypoint to Tallow Beach at the end of Tennyson Street, where Theo had stopped, the volunteers were directed by Google Maps to walk almost exactly the same way Theo went, up to Milne Street and then on to the Milne Track. If Theo did this, he wasn’t lost at all.

But was he alone? Police can analyse data from phone towers to try to determine what other phones were in the same areas at the same time. However, there’s another method growing in popularity for international law enforcement. US police are obtaining reverse-location search warrants, requiring Google to hand over information on all devices recorded within defined geographical areas at specific times. This could and should be used to try to see if Theo was alone.

The police theory is that after getting to Cosy Corner, Theo tried to climb the cliffs to the lighthouse and had an accident, plunging to the bottom and then being washed away. They say analysis of signals from Theo’s phone matches this scenario.

But the family has learned to be sceptical of police interpretations of phone data, and believes the signals could match other scenarios. A darker side of Byron emerged during the series, revolving around drugs and violence, and an alternative to an accident is foul play.

Theo’s family needs to know every effort has been made to find out what happened. Their torture of not knowing goes on, but they are not alone. Byron Bay volunteers are continuing to support them, and now they have a lot more help.