WHAT HAPPENED TO NANCY GRUNWALDT?
SOMEBODY KILLED THE 26-YEAR-OLD. BUT WAS IT AN ACCIDENT... OR WAS SHE MURDERED?
It’s been almost 30 years since Nancy Grunwaldt, a carefree, young German tourist who loved cycling and her family, set off on the trip of a lifetime – a bike trip around Tasmania.
Nancy, 26, a travel agent with a sunny personality, had spent $100 to hire a red mountain bike for two weeks and was heading down the island’s east coast to Hobart to meet a friend. At around 11am on March 12, 1993, Nancy was spotted on the Tasman Highway, peddling past the coastal hamlet of Scamander on her way south to Bicheno. But after that, Nancy was never seen again, sparking one of the biggest searches – and mysteries – in Tasmania’s history.
Undoubtedly, Nancy was killed. But did her perpetrator do so accidentally, maybe as the result of a car accident, or was she murdered?
For 28 years, Nancy’s shattered family – who, weeks before, had holidayed with her in New Zealand before she headed on to Australia – has agonised over what became of her.
“If you were here, we could celebrate our mother’s birthday together. Maybe I would have nieces and nephews. I could laugh with you about our shared memories of childhood,”
Nancy’s sister, Frauke, wrote recently in a touching essay to honour her older sibling – who would now be 54.
“The family still miss her dreadfully,” says family friend, Heather Donaldson, who owns a beach shack in Scamander.
She got to know the family soon after Nancy went missing and has been a supportive friend ever since. She clearly remembers the day she read Nancy had disappeared.
“My own daughter was overseas at the time and
I knew how worrying it felt when you don’t hear from her for a few days. So when I learnt that a young German woman was missing, I thought: ‘Her poor family.’ I had to help,” Heather recalls.
She raised funds to enable Nancy’s parents, Helga and Bernd, to fly to Australia, where the distraught family joined in the large search for their daughter. But Nancy, her bike and belongings have never been found.
“Over the years, they’ve come out many times, hoping for answers,” says Heather. “They’d stay at my place in Scamander, and always walk the beaches there and explore the area. They are wonderful, gentle people, very spiritual, from a small town near the border of Denmark, and they’ve had to go through so much over all this time.”
Compounding the Grunwaldt family’s distress, came the news in October 1995, two and a half years after Nancy disappeared, that a young Italian tourist, Victoria Cafasso, 20, had been murdered in eastern Tasmania.
Victoria’s partially naked body was found at Beaumaris Beach – just 5km north of Scamander, where Nancy had last been spotted. She’d been repeatedly stabbed on the quiet little beach, where she’d gone to relax in the sun one morning. Could Nancy have met a similar fate?
In March 2004, Tasmanian
coroner Peter Wilson concluded that while Nancy and Victoria shared some similarities – both were young European tourists, who had spent time on Tasmania’s east coast before their lives ended – there was “no firm evidence” to link their deaths.
He did, however, say of Nancy’s death: “I believe that foul play is involved in her disappearance, in the form of homicide.”
‘SOMEBODY OUT THERE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED’
But not everyone agrees Nancy was deliberately killed. The day after Nancy vanished, a Hobart solicitor found a message on his answering machine from a distressed motorist stating he’d accidentally killed a woman on the east coast.
“At that stage, Nancy’s disappearance was not public knowledge – it was to be several more weeks before the alarm was raised, so it wouldn’t have been a prank call,” says Heather.
Then, four years later, Queensland police received a similar message from a distressed caller saying he had “hit a cyclist and disposed of the body” in Tasmania.
“Somebody out there knows exactly what happened to Nancy. I urge them to come forward and tell the truth now, for the sake of her stillsuffering family,” says Heather.
Sadly, Bernd died in 2004 without ever knowing how his beloved daughter lost her life.
“If anyone knows anything about what happened to Nancy, please come forward and tell the police,” says Heather. “Helga is in her 70s now and no longer comes out to Tasmania as often. They have been waiting so long for answers and they deserve to have them.”
Retired detective inspector, Graham Hickey, agrees. “Two anonymous tip-offs over the years have led us to conclude Nancy was probably the victim of a hit-and-run, possibly by a motorist who then panicked and hid her bicycle,” he says.
There’s a $500,000 reward for any information about Nancy’s tragic death.