‘A cult stole our girls’
Heartbroken parents’ desperate plea
‘Then she said, “I love you.” And that was it’
Their daughter and granddaughter went missing but 10 years on, this couple still have no answers
The note stuck to the door of the farmhouse in Nannup, WA, simply said “Gone to Brazil”. Inside the home the fridge was full, but the four people who lived there had vanished.
Ten years on, they still haven’t been seen.
Chantelle Mcdougall, then 27, and her daughter Leela, six, lived at the farmhouse with Chantelle’s partner and Leela’s dad Simon Kadwill. Their friend Antonio Popic lived in a caravan on the property. Then one day in July 2007 they all disappeared without a trace.
Chantelle’s parents, Jim and Catherine, now hope a coroner’s inquest later this year will help solve the baffling disappearance that’s left them heartbroken and desperate for answers.
“It’s our last avenue,” says Jim, 67. “It’s not a crime to disappear but we just want to know they’re safe.”
Chantelle grew up in Melbourne until age nine, when her family, including her older siblings Adam and Colleen, moved to Kiewa, four hours north-east of the capital.
At the end of Year 12, she applied to do a drama course in Melbourne. When she didn’t get in, she moved back there anyway. She lived with her grandfather and became a swimming teacher.
It was around that time Chantelle met Simon, almost 20 years her senior, at an ashram. Born Gary Feltham, he’d moved to Australia from Britain and set up an online doomsday cult predicting the imminent end of the world. He had a partner and a young son, and soon Chantelle became their babysitter. However at some point during the next few years, she and Simon became romantically involved.
“We were concerned about her relationship with Simon. She said he wanted to be a cult leader and that he was going to write books to ‘save’ people,” says Catherine. “We certainly had a bad feeling about him.”
Chantelle and Simon travelled to the UK together, and just months after they got back – deciding to settle in Perth – Chantelle told her parents she was pregnant.
When Leela was six weeks old, Catherine flew to Perth for a few weeks to help her daughter. She and Jim met Simon for the first time, too. “I had a lot of concerns about him,” says Jim. “The house was falling down, but Chantelle wouldn’t let me fix it because Simon slept all day. He also said he didn’t want me to talk to Leela because I’d ‘corrupt her’, and he wouldn’t let me take his photo.”
Nevertheless, Chantelle kept in touch with her parents. “She called at least once a week,” says her mum. “She’d ring for advice on how to fix her car or how to fix the bathroom. And she’d always ring on Christmas Day and speak to the whole family. That day is hard now.”
Catherine last saw Chantelle and Leela on May 28, 2007. Two weeks before she disappeared, Chantelle phoned to say they were going to live in Brazil and that Simon had travelled ahead and she and Leela would join him soon.
Jim last spoke to her on July 14, 2007. “We told her to contact us when she arrived in Brazil, so we’d know she was OK. Then she said, ‘I love you.’ And that was it.”
When a few weeks had passed with no word from their daughter, Jim contacted the Australian Embassy in Brazil. But there was no record of the family having arrived.
There are also no records of them ever leaving Australia and their bank accounts have not been touched since they disappeared.
Police have revealed that on July 13, Chantelle, Leela, Simon and Antonio travelled the 40 minutes to Busselton and sold Chantelle’s car for $4000. That was the last confirmed sighting of the group, although either Simon or Antonio used Antonio’s identification to stay at a Perth hostel two days later, before catching a train to Kalgoorlie the next morning.
Since then, it has just been false leads and false hope for Catherine and Jim. Around the time Chantelle and Leela were supposed to have