Breaking the rules helped family trace backpacker’s last movements

A bank broke the rules to help the family of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez.

Jean-Philippe Pector with his wife, Julia Malcolm, and their children, Morgane, 9, and Felix, 2 on their property in the Otway Ranges in Victoria. Picture: David Geraghty

It’s the way things should work: a bank branch knowing its customers, and common sense and decency trumping red tape.

When it dawned on Theo Hayez’s family that the young Belgian backpacker was missing, his godfather Jean-Philippe Pector — or JP — raced to his bank at Apollo Bay on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.

READ MORE: Early footage gathered by family revealed | Locals kept light on in search for missing Theo | Tourist ‘was just living backpacker life’

JP urgently needed to know when 18-year-old Theo had last used the account that JP had helped him open at the branch.

When JP arrived at the bank on the afternoon of Thursday, June 6, it was already closed, so he waved through the window.

“They opened the door to tell me that they were closed,” he told The Australian, for a new investigative podcast series, The Lighthouse, which is number one on Apple’s podcast charts in Australia and Belgium.

“But I explained that we really wanted some information because we had suspicion that Theo had some trouble.”

Recognising it was an emergency, the staff bent the rules.

TIMELINE: Theo Hayez’s last known whereabouts

“Even though if normally they’re not supposed to, because they know me, I also have my bank account there, they understood the emergency of knowing where he was and where was his last transaction,’’

It was a key moment. JP was told Theo’s last bank transactions were six days earlier on the night of Friday, May 31, at a Byron Bay bar called Cheeky Monkey’s.

He was also told Theo had made a recent payment at the Wake Up! hostel at Byron’s ­Belongil Beach.

Theo’s cousin Lisa Hayez, also backpacking in Australia, immediately phoned the hostel. She discovered his belongings, including his passport, had been left in his room, days after he was meant to check out. The hostel had only just contacted police when she called.

The Lighthouse podcast is ­investigating Theo’s disappearance at the request of his family and Byron volunteers supporting them. “It’s an attempt to reach more people,” JP said of the podcast. “Hopefully we will have some kind of additional information or someone come forward with some information about Theo that we haven’t got.

“It’s to try to get some answers because five months after Theo’s disappearance there’s very little we know — nothing about what really happened. It’s really important we do all we can to reach a broader audience. It’s part of trying to get the truth out there.”

When Theo arrived in Australia last November, he went straight to the home of JP and his Australian wife, Julia Malcolm, on a 22-acre property in Victoria’s Otways.

“He always wanted to go to Australia, it’s a place that he was really keen to visit,” said JP, a landscape architect.

“But knowing that I was here and being his godfather, he did rely on me quite a lot. He did spend a lot of time ­before leaving Belgium, in liaising with me to get ready, to know what he should do, what he should take with him.

“Even during that month that he spent with us, we were looking at all the different places that he could visit and helping him to ­organise the way he was going to travel.

“That’s also part of who he is. He wouldn’t go fully on the adventure side; he always wanted to know, to plan a bit ahead what he was going to do.

“It was important for him, and for me too, that we did spend some time together. And we were really, really pleased to have him with us and that time.”

Ms Malcolm said Theo was like a big brother to the couple’s nine-year-old daughter Morgane.

“He was ready to go on his ­adventure,’’ Ms Malcolm said. “A bit nervous, a bit kind of ­tentative I think about planning his trip.

“Probably others have said that — he’s a planner. He likes to know all the details of things.”