Marion Barter mystery: `They had told me many times that they hate the podcast’
It’s time police and the courts recognise true crime podcasts and highly skilled private researchers can help solve murders, says the daughter of missing Queensland teacher Marion Barter.
Sally Leydon is closer than ever to finding out what happened to her mother, missing Queensland teacher Marion Barter.
Three weeks ago, a coroner found Barter died after she vanished almost 27 years ago, and that an international conman was involved in the draining of her bank accounts and was deliberately withholding information.
The case was referred to the NSW Police homicide squad for further and ongoing investigation, and scathing findings by the coroner called out years of past inaction that may well be responsible for Barter’s disappearance remaining unsolved today.
It can all be attributed to Leydon’s extraordinary campaign for the truth, which led to a five-year hit podcast series and rallied an army of supporters including highly skilled private researchers.
But after all that work, she is now concerned her mother’s disappearance could go to the bottom of the pile of hundreds of unsolved cases on the homicide squad’s books.
That was what she took away from a brief conversation with a detective as she walked into the Coroner’s Court at Lidcombe in western Sydney to hear the findings delivered.
“I said to him ‘what’s the status?’ and he said ‘it’s a cold case, it will remain open but inactive’,” Leydon says, in her first interview with The Weekend Australian since the inquest ended.
“I said, ‘well, what does that mean exactly?’. He said ‘it means that we’ve got 800 cases and we need to prioritise’. I took it that Mum is not a priority.”
Bungled investigations
Leydon’s relationship with police is fraught.
As NSW State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan chronicled in her 163-page findings, investigations into Barter’s disappearance were bungled from the start.
Almost nothing was done for the first 10 years after Leydon reported her 51-year-old mother missing at Byron Bay police station on October 22, 1997.
Barter was tracked to the popular tourist town because she’d seemingly made bank withdrawals there, and it has meant NSW police have always had carriage of the case.
Following later investigations, Barter’s name was removed from the missing persons database in 2011 and the case status was changed to “located”.
Gary Sheehan, the NSW Police officer previously in charge of the case who recommended her removal from the database, remained of the view that Barter “went to great lengths to change her identity and start a new life, estranged from her family and friends”, O’Sullivan said.
But the investigation up until 2019 was “not adequate”, nor was it consistent with policies at the time, the coroner found.
The Teacher’s Pet
There was much more to Barter’s disappearance, and it only started coming out following the launch of Seven News podcast The Lady Vanishes.
Rather than seeing the exposure as a useful tool to draw out information, police told Leydon it was complicating and interfering with their own belated investigations.
“They had told me many times that they hate the podcast, that the podcast was damaging,” Leydon said.
The series began in April 2019, five months after the arrest of Chris Dawson for the 1982 murder of his wife, Lyn Simms.
Dawson was later convicted of the murder of his wife and unlawful carnal knowledge of a former student. Lyn’s family and senior retired police have said there wouldn’t have been a prosecution for either without The Teacher’s Pet.
Police “constantly kept bringing up The Teacher’s Pet, how damaging it is”, Leydon says.
The opposition to long-form investigative reporting in an audio format was clear to her from her first meeting with the homicide squad in Sydney in December 2019, she says.
She was there with her eldest daughter, Ella, and they were met by a detective who spoke of the importance of the integrity of the case. She recalls a detective told her: “We don’t like podcasts.”
He spoke specifically about Chris Dawson “and the problems that they’ve had to fix up from all of that happening”.
“I said, ‘you guys need to understand that it’s been a catch 22 for me. If I hadn’t done the podcast, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now’.”
Breakthrough
How the case got to where it is today should by now be the stuff of legend.
A former social worker turned cookbook author from Victoria, Joni Condos, was listening to The Lady Vanishes and decided to see what she could find.
Condos had honed her research skills while investigating the disappearance of a member of her own family, and jumped on the Trove online database to search publicly available records.
When nothing materialised, she put a space between each letter of the surname Barter adopted, Remakel.
It brought up an ad in French-language newspaper Le Courrier Australien in 1994, seeking a relationship and potential marriage, placed by a man with the same unusual surname.
The ad included a phone number and a post office box address at Lennox Head in northern NSW.
This was the crucial breakthrough.
A retiree then went to Ballina’s library and went through old phone books looking for a match.
He found the number, linked to a local coins business. The man behind the business was a Belgian national who has used many aliases and is now known as Ric Blum.
Leydon went to police with the “huge” phone book discovery and got a very hostile reception, with a detective firmly telling her: “You’re not to investigate this. Do you understand?”
She didn’t know it at the time, but following Condos’s discovery of the ad, police had already found the same person.
Amateur sleuths
Blum was jailed for four years for fraud in France in 1971, before obtaining Australian citizenship in 1976.
He has since admitted to an affair with Barter shortly before her disappearance, but denies any knowledge of what happened or harming her.
Five women in Australia and abroad have said Blum, now 84, defrauded and deceived them, but their evidence has not led to any charges. Federal immigration authorities so far appear to have taken no action against him despite being alerted to evidence he became a citizen fraudulently.
Leydon says she finds the ongoing inaction hard to accept.
Coroner O’Sullivan had deep reservations about Blum’s evidence, saying nothing he said should be accepted without corroboration.
O’Sullivan found Blum secretly travelled with Barter overseas, despite his denials on oath, and on their return encouraged her to withdraw $80,000.
The coroner declined to refer him to prosecutors or the attorney-general for perjury, saying that was up to the police.
Leydon says of Blum: “He was a hard witness to watch. He has put himself on my mum’s timeline on multiple different occasions, throughout the time frame of when she went missing. There’s definitely more to investigate there, and more for him to tell.”
Leydon has put a lot of the mystery’s pieces together herself, and was commended by the coroner for her “unwavering commitment” and for showing “fortitude, dignity, resilience and grace”.
But the pivotal role of media and amateur sleuths was not acknowledged.
Condos said: “Perhaps I represented an uncomfortable truth. Erasing the truth of what actually happened to get to this point in the official record does nothing to address the increasing access of the public at large to information and the effect of this on police investigations, good and bad.
“Where do skilled private researchers fit into the system? Not `armchair detectives’ but people who actually know what they are doing and produce results? It’s an interesting question.”
Leydon says she would never have interfered with the investigation by making confidential information public, and believes it’s time for police and the judiciary to accept the value the public can bring to solving murders.
“There’s a lot of value to gain by them being open and accepting of it,” she said. “These people have some exceptional skill sets. People like Joni have done it before because they’ve had their own experience, and they’ve already been down that route.”
At the same time, Leydon wishes she didn’t have to fight every step of the way for assistance. “It’s actually very difficult and can be quite damaging for me as a person to have to do that,” she said.
‘A hard day’
The podcast ended following the inquest findings, but Leydon’s journey continues. She and Condos have been fundraising so they can travel overseas later this year to continue their investigations.
They have just done four live events at the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Sydney, attended by more than 500 people and watched online by many more. One was hosted with poise by Leydon’s daughter Ella, 22, almost the same age Leydon was when Barter went missing. Ella tells her mum she couldn’t imagine her suddenly not being around.
On May 12, Mother’s Day, Leydon will turn 51, the same age her mum was when she went missing.
She accepted a long time ago that her mum was not alive, but hearing the coroner make it official was “a hard day”.
A NSW Police spokeswoman said the coronial findings would be considered, and declined to comment on the investigation’s status.
After the live event at the Miami Marketta, attended by The Weekend Australian, women were asking: How many murdered women are out there, dismissed as runaways or forgotten among the mass of unsolved cases?
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