On Thursday morning at the NSW Coroners Court in Lidcombe, western Sydney, the long-awaited inquest findings on the disappearance of Queensland school teacher Marion Barter were delivered to a packed room and about 2000 people watching on YouTube.
Highly experienced NSW State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan delivered the findings with empathy, but they fell short of what Barter’s family wanted, and what a convicted serial conman deserved.
Barter’s daughter Sally Leydon had submitted through her lawyers that the coroner could and should refer Ric Blum, the key witness in Barter’s disappearance, to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions or Attorney-General to consider charging him with perjury and making false statements at the inquest.
Blum’s lying, dissembling, self-serving testimony has previously been exposed by this newspaper and other media outlets in Australia and abroad.
For instance he claimed a Belgian widow he stole from, Andree Flamme, had Alzheimer’s and dementia in 2010.
NSW Police with all their resources and skilled investigators were apparently unable to find Flamme, but I reached her in Portugal with the assistance of a volunteer researcher who has been tirelessly helping Leydon, Joni Condos.
At the age of 92, Flamme was still remarkably sharp, and most definitely did not have dementia.
“I think he’s the one who has Alzheimer’s because he’s obviously forgotten a lot of things,” Flamme quipped.
After this, Flamme was called as a witness.
Coroner O’Sullivan accepted that her evidence, along with the testimony of four other women, “demonstrates a tendency on the part of Mr Blum to misrepresent himself to single vulnerable women for financial gain”.
She further found that Blum “had a tendency to exploit vulnerable women”.
Another potential perjury ground was Blum’s denial of travelling with Barter in the UK in 1997, shortly before she vanished.
“Marion and Mr Blum travelled together in England as a couple in a relationship for at least some period of time when Marion was in England in 1997,” O’Sullivan concluded.
Blum also claimed he met his daughter Evelyn Reid from a previous marriage only once, when she was a baby.
That was another lie, Reid told The Australian in February last year, saying she’d reconnected with him as an adult and he’d terrified her with talk of how to kill people with homemade poison.
For undisclosed reasons, Reid said she’d never been asked to give a statement.
Despite all of this, and much more, the coroner’s counsel assisting, Adam Casselden SC, baulked at the perjury proposal, submitting that the “primary role of a Coroner is to make findings as to whether Marion is deceased and if so, to determine the manner and cause of death”.
It was up to police to assess criminal liability, he said.
O’Sullivan agreed to leave it to police, “particularly because the investigation has not concluded”.
If people can lie in court without any real fear of repercussions, the likelihood of a coroner getting to the truth must be somewhere between Buckley’s and none.
Blum should have been made an example of by the coroner after she rejected his evidence, if it was within her power as the Leydon family’s lawyer suggested.
Better yet, act to kick Blum out of the country.
This newspaper has prominently reported that authorities suspected more than four decades ago that Belgium-born Blum became an Australian citizen fraudulently.
He was made a citizen despite a criminal record that included him being jailed for four years in France for fraud, after a change of names and a rushed approval when he claimed he urgently needed to see his dying father overseas.
In reality, his father had died more than 30 years earlier. You couldn’t make it up.
He was subsequently able to stay, obtained at least nine Australian passports in seven different names, and used this country as a base for a series of alleged scams.
If action had been taken against Blum when the alarm was first raised about his character in the 1970s, he may never have met Barter.
What has Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, the Australian Border Force and state and federal police been doing to investigate Blum’s citizenship?
It can be withdrawn in certain circumstances. These include when a person has been convicted of making a false statement or misrepresentation in the application that resulted in citizenship.
Maybe well-paid bureaucrats have been busy behind the scenes, but we haven’t heard boo from anyone since reporting the skulduggery behind his application.
Listening to the findings, it was hard not to think of Lynette Simms, who vanished in 1982 after being murdered and disposed of by her husband Chris Dawson.
Again it was a mother vanishing and police not taking it seriously.
It was The Australian’s podcast The Teacher’s Pet on Lyn’s murder that inspired Leydon to tell her mother’s story in a podcast, resulting in Channel 7’s lengthy The Lady Vanishes investigation.
That in turn resulted in citizen sleuths such as Condos volunteering their time.
It should never be forgotten, overlooked or underplayed that Condos’s research in the Trove newspaper database connected Blum to Barter for the first time.
Condos, a social worker, cookbook author and self-described “housewife from the Macedon Ranges”, whose research cracked the case, is mentioned only once in the 163-page coronial findings.
How information comes to light in a failed police investigation matters, and there should have been a more detailed explanation.
Leydon’s heroic search for the truth continues.
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