The questions of what happened to 13-year-old Clare Morrison in the hours before her body washed up on Bells Beach still haunt her brother Andrew, 25 years later

NDREW Morrison was just 11 when his big sister’s body was found in shallow water at Bells Beach in the summer of 1992.

They were living in the family’s Thompson Rd home in Norlane with their mother Vera and older brother Kevin after leaving Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs for a fresh start.

It’s a relocation that has forever haunted the family, who have since battled through the emotional turmoil of 25 painstaking years without answers as to who killed 13year-old Clare.

“She used to always love the beach, that’d always been the case, but how she ended up there that night I don’t know,” Andrew says.

“Had she gone to try and catch up with everyone else at Point Addis and got in a second vehicle somehow?

“From what I’ve been told she didn’t make it there, so what happened during that car ride?

“I’m just trying to put that jigsaw puzzle together and find that missing piece.”

Surfers found Clare Morrison’s remains as the sun rose early on December 19.

Her partly-clothed body had been in seawater for several hours, but still showed that she had suffered severe head and neck injuries while she was still alive.

What made the police investigation into her unsolved murder even more challenging was that her body had suffered damage in the water and her injuries failed to conclusively prove exactly how she died.

Seven hours earlier at 12.30am, Clare had been spotted hitchhiking on Ryrie St after spending the night with friends in Geelong’s notorious mall, at Eastern Beach and the city’s McDonald’s restaurant.

Dressed in maroon-coloured jeans and Rossi-branded work boots, the later, police were still unable to make a swift arrest and exactly what happened to Clare during those seven lost hours and the 30km journey to the Surf Coast remains a mystery.

“It’s the what-ifs that stay in your mind forever. Particularly when you live in a small town like this, your circles start overlapping — everyone’s friends or friends of the family,” Andrew says.

“Someone out there would’ve looked me in the eye at one time and known something.”

The subject has clearly haunted Andrew for decades.

“I was just 11-and-a-half, it was just before Christmas when Clare died,” he says.

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