Privacy blocks search for mum

The daughter of a Gold Coast woman missing for 22 years says she has been blocked in her search by privacy issues.

Sally Leydon, daughter of missing mother Marion Barter, says she has been blocked in her search by privacy issues. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The daughter of Marion Barter — a Gold Coast schoolteacher and the ex-wife of soccer great Johnny Warren, who has not been seen by her family in 22 years — says she is stuck in a privacy and jurisdictional nightmare.

Police are treating the case as a deliberate disappearance, suspecting Barter started a new life, but admit they have not sighted her and cannot find her.

Since a flurry of unusual events in the year she went missing, there has been no known evidence she is alive.

“I’m at the point after all these years that I’m left with no choice but to believe she has been murdered,” said her daughter, Sally Leydon. “This is something police don’t appear to have even considered.”

Ms Leydon is pushing for renewed investigations and for Barter’s name to be returned to the national missing persons register after police removed it in October 2011 and marked her case “located”.

Barter quit her job at The Southport School, sold her house and told her family she was going to the UK and Europe for an extended holiday. She flew out of Australia in June 1997 and there have been no confirmed sightings of her since.

A NSW coroner won’t look at it because the last confirmed sighting of Barter alive was in Queensland, Ms Leydon said.

But Queensland police say they can’t be involved because Ms Leydon first reported her mother missing in NSW and police in that state have carriage of it.

Ms Leydon says each time she has sought information she has been told nothing can be provided due to her mother’s right to privacy.

“In the first 10 years of this case police just said it’s an ‘occurrence’ and put me in a box — that’s where you fit, that’s where you’re going to stay,” she said.

“Every time I tried to get help, doors shut in my face and (it was) her privacy, her privacy, her privacy. We are 22 years down the track now. When does her privacy become null and void because no one can find her?”

After Barter failed to contact her son, Owen, for his birthday, Ms Leydon called her bank, where a staff member bent the rules to tell her large sums had been withdrawn from her mother’s account from Byron Bay and the Gold Coast.

Police discovered Barter had secretly changed her name by deed poll before going on her travels.