Fears conman Ric Blum had a gun: New claims in Marion Barter mystery

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.

Ilona and Michael Reid, pictured here in the 1970s. Ilona was Ric Blum’s third wife.

Serial fraudster 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.

Mr Blum, now a central figure in inquiries into a Queensland teacher’s mystery disappearance, arrived just as wife Ilona and her new partner Michael Reid were about to board the ferry at Ostend.

“We were going over from Belgium to the UK,” Mr Reid told The Weekend Australian.

“He walked in and he’s about 6’4. I said, ‘who’s this?’ She said, ‘Oh, Willy – stay where you are, he’s got a gun in the car’.”

Mr Blum was then using the name Willy Wouters, one of 50 identities he is known to have used over his lifetime.

He towered over Mr Reid, who asked Ilona what she was going to do.

“She said, ‘I’m going out with him, I’ll be back shortly’,” Mr Reid said.

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“That was the first time I’d ever met him, but I’d heard a lot about him of course from Ilona.”

Asked why Mr Blum went to the ferry terminal, Mr Reid said it was to try to stop Ilona from leaving.

“Definitely. She warned me off doing anything because I am a bit of a terrier, or I was in those days,” Mr Reid said.

“When we eventually walked to the ferry to get on, I kept looking back. I’m on the bloody ship and I’m looking everywhere. I was quite terrified. “I asked her how he knew we were there. She said her mother told him.”

Ric Blum attends the Barter inquest in 2022. Picture: Tessa Flemming

Mr Blum had previously told Ilona he was being sent from Sydney to cover the Vietnam War as a news photographer, but turned up in France.

The convicted conman was also reputed to have hired a luxury car in one country and sold it in another, Mr Reid said.

The recollections shed new light on Mr Blum’s past as he faces scrutiny at a NSW inquest into the presumed death of Marion Barter, a mother-of-two who vanished in 1997 after they had an affair.

He denies any involvement in her disappearance.

Queensland mother Marion Barter receiving a teaching award in 1996, the year before she vanished.

Mr Reid and Ilona first met on a P & O cruise ship in 1970, when he was working as head waiter and she was a passenger.

Ilona and Mr Blum were then married and had a six-week-old daughter, who was being cared for by a friend.

“I said `what are you doing on a cruise leaving a child behind like that’,” Mr Reid said.

“She said, ‘well my husband was working for … one of the Sydney newspapers’, and he told her that he was being sent on an ­assignment to Vietnam.

“So she saw him off with a girlfriend and the baby at the airport and the next thing she knows is that he’s in Lille in France.”

Mr Blum has been separately accused of claiming to be captured in Vietnam, but denies this.

Ilona and Mr Reid spent time together in Australia and in ­Europe, although for a period she went back to Mr Blum.

Mr Reid estimates the ferry ­terminal incident occurred some time in 1970. He went on to marry Ilona in Budapest in December 1971.

Mr Blum was jailed in Rouen, France, in 1971 for four years for fraud. An article about his crimes appeared in the French press, Mr Reid said.

“He had 17 different passports when he was caught. He was caught by a jeweller I think it was, using one of his many aliases,” he said. “Apparently when he left Australia he had a group of French friends and he had stolen all their passports, then taken them with him.”

Once, when Ilona was still with Mr Blum, Mr Reid was in need of cash. She wouldn’t give him any.

“She said, ‘No, I’m not giving you any of his dirty money’. I also know that he hired a Porsche in Switzerland and sold it in Italy – Ilona told me,” Mr Reid said.

“She said he used to really upset her. She did say, ‘I hit him with a beer bottle one time’.”

Ilona’s mother didn’t approve of Mr Blum, already twice married when they met.

Mr Reid said Ilona was also warned off by one of Mr Blum’s previous wives.

Ilona Reid died at the age of 31 from apparent heart failure.

“When she was going out with him there was a knock on the door, and there was his ex-wife or his wife with a child. (The woman) said, ‘Don’t get involved with him, he’s a very nasty man’. This is what she told me.”

Coincidentally, Mr Reid and his current wife Olivia, recently lived on Scarborough St in Southport on the Gold Coast, almost within sight of where Barter was last independently seen alive at a bus stop on the same street.

He did not have any suspicions about his wife’s death in 1977 at the age of 31 while driving home from work in Melbourne. She was found slumped over the steering wheel of her car from apparent heart failure.

“Her mother was dying of cancer and she’d just come back from looking after her in Brussels. I think she died of a broken heart,” Mr Reid said.

Mr Blum also lived on the Gold Coast but is now in Ballina on the northern NSW coast.

Despite his criminal history, Mr Blum was granted Australian citizenship in 1976.

“We couldn’t believe he was in Australia,” Mr Reid said. “We knew he was in jail. How did he get back in?”