‘We thought they had a chance’: DNA solves cold case
THE family of a man who went missing in a tragic boating disaster 40 years ago have spoken of their relief after a DNA breakthrough identified a washed-up jaw bone as his, cracking a decades-old cold case.
Bill Moran was 24 years old when he and his 21-year-old wife Philippa died after their boat was swamped by horror swell off the NSW north coast in 1979.
While the body of Philippa – known as ‘Pippi’ to her family – was found shortly after the disaster, Bill’s family waited more than 40 years to find out what happened to the man described as “young, fit and a champion swimmer and footballer”.
Ray and Maria Moran, Bill’s sister-in-law and her husband, were on board the boat that day.
What was meant to be an idyllic day spent on the ocean off Evans Head turned tragic when they ran into “the biggest southerly you’d ever come across”, according to Ray.
Swamped by waves, the foursome and the boat’s captain ditched into a dinghy, only for it to overturn. What followed was a six-hour struggle for survival.
Rough swell ripped Ray and Maria away from the overturned boat and they bobbed in the ocean until they were winched to safety alongside the captain in a daring helicopter rescue. They had been confident Pippa and Bill would survive.
“They were both young and very athletic people, we thought ... they had every chance,” Maria told the NSW Police’s ‘Lost at Sea’ podcast.
But answers as to what happened to Bill would take nearly four decades, beginning after a jawbone was discovered washed up on Kingscliff Beach in 2011 – 32 years to the day after that boat sank.
It triggered an extensive NSW Police Investigation, but for nine years the jawbone remained among the dozens of unidentified remains contained in the Missing Persons Registry.
Continuous searches on DNA databases failed to find a direct match, until a ‘familial DNA’ search in August 2020 linked police to a potential living relative.
It led investigators to a 34year-old man imprisoned in Goulburn Jail, a nephew of Bill.