MISSING MUM:
In 1997, devoted teacher and mother Marion Barter was on a dream holiday in the UK. A week later she’d vanished, leaving family and colleagues in shock. Susan Chenery investigates the baffling case.
the Aussie teacher who disappeared into thin air
When Marion Barter boarded a flight to London in June 1997, it was for a year-long sabbatical, the big adventure. All her life she had wanted to go on the Orient Express and now she was on her way. She had left her job, sold her house, she was cashed up, she was free. She was going to visit all the places Jane Austen lived, she excitedly told a friend two days before she left.
But those who loved her would never see her again. When she vanished, Marion left behind a trail of bewildering behaviour, unanswered questions and a mystery that only deepens with the passing years. In her last months in Australia, Marion had been keeping secrets – secrets that throw any investigation into her disappearance into disarray. As her story unravels and conflicting information emerges, friends and family could be forgiven for wondering if they really knew her at all.
Marion Barter, then 51, was a primary school teacher, passionate about her work with children, a cultured, gentle, slightly eccentric person. A highly sought after teacher, she had moved around and changed schools, had a bumpy romantic life and been married three times, the first time to the soccer legend Johnny Warren. Her failed love life was something that caused her sadness. She wanted to be loved, to be in a relationship. Creative, a dreamer, her houses were always beautiful, says her friend Janice White. She owned paintings by Norman Lindsay and Arthur and Jamie Boyd, none of which have ever been found.
In her last conversation with her daughter, Marion gave no indication that there was anything wrong. Feeding coins into a phone box in Tunbridge Wells, she said she was having “such a lovely time having morning tea with old ladies” and that she missed her daughter Sally. They spoke until she ran out of coins. “She said I was the best daughter and that was the last time I ever spoke to my mum,” says Sally Leydon now.
From the UK, Marion sent postcards to friends and family, and birthday presents. She was having a “wonderful” time. She’d been “brave” and hired a car, and was on her way to Amsterdam. “I’m in a holiday mood and beginning to unwind with all this beauty surrounding me,” she wrote to Sally. She missed “my beautiful little boys”, her pupils at The Southport School where she taught.
But after the phone conversation on August 1, Marion was suddenly silent. Sally became concerned when she did not contact her brother, Owen, on his birthday on October 18. Marion had been exceptionally close to Owen when he was a child. Sally knew she wouldn’t miss a birthday, and realised she had no idea where her mother was. Friends suggested she contact Marion’s bank. At first, the bank was reluctant to disclose personal information – until they saw what had happened to her accounts. Over three weeks, $5000 a day had been withdrawn – the proceeds of the sale of her house – more than $105,000 in total from banks in Bryon Bay in northern NSW and Burleigh Heads on n the Gold Coast. Sally and her fiance Chris raced to Byron Bay the next day y with a photo, asking people if they had seen her. No one had. “She had friends and people she knew all up and down the coast,” says Sally.
Whoever withdrew the money had entered the country on August 2, the day after Marion’s loving phone call to her daughter in which she talked about travel plans and being interested in a school near where she was staying. There had been no mention of returning to Australia.
Sally and Chris took the photo to Marion’s bank. The teller took the photo, “walked off and closed the door of the manager’s office, walked out, took a photocopy of the photo and said, ‘What would you like me to say to her if I see her?’ It was like he knew something, it wasn’t quite right.”
The Byron Bay police didn’t pursue an investigation because they said they’d spoken to Marion or someone claiming to be her on the phone. This person said they didn’t want to be found, or for anyone to know what they were doing. There’s now no police record of this conversation. The NSW Police declined to speak to The Weekly.
“Why would she risk coming back and running into people she knew if she didn’t want to be noticed?” asks Sally. “That doesn’t make sense to me.” Marion’s Medicare card was used in Grafton in September 1997 and that is the last trace we have of her.
A daughter’s devastation
I meet Sally in the sleek, modern house she designed herself in Brisbane. Sally and her husband, Chris, run a satellite communication business. Their children Ella, 17, d’Arcy, 14, and Caleb, 11, never met their grandmother, but have grown up with her painful absence – with a mum who has been searching for her own mother for more than 20 years.
“I have tried to protect them and not let it affect them but I know that my anxieties and stresses have been exacerbated since I have become a fully-fledged mother myself. I have tried to be the best mother I can be but I have this real issue. I don’t want them to be motherless either.”
Sally believes something happened to Marion in her last months in Australia – something catastrophic – something that caused her to sell her house at a loss and in a hurry, and to give only four days’ notice in resigning from The Southport School in the middle of the term, which was totally out of character for such a conscientious teacher. It seems that when Marion left Australia she was running from something. That year, she’d won the Queensland Excellence in Teaching Award and came second in Australia. Her plans were open ended but she did take the precaution of renewing her teaching registration for the following year. “The kids were so special to her,” says Sally, “and so important to her. She loved them. Everybody loved her – all the parents loved her. She was invited every day to the parents’ homes for afternoon tea.”
Marion was such a dedicated teacher that on the school holidays she would still be at the school, painting Beatrix Potter characters on the windows. “When Owen and I were little we would get there early and were always the last to leave because she would be preparing for the next day.” When she was teaching at Springwood she would take the children to the ballet at the Opera House every Christmas. “She would stand at the front of the bus talking on the microphone, telling us what the ballet was about,” says Sally. But things were going badly wrong at The Southport School. “She was warm, bubbly, sweet, open,” says a former teacher assistant, Jane Kerr. But cracks were starting to appear. Personal problems were spilling into her professional life and she was having mood swings, Jane told Channel 7 podcast The Lady Vanishes. Marion was having problems with another teacher, Luke Glover, since deceased, who lived in the grounds with his family and who was, claims former colleague Carrie Allwood, a bully. At one point, 11 out of the 17 teachers resigned because of Luke. Sally alleges: “She was talking to me a lot about him and he wasn’t a nice guy. She did not like him at all. I think she was scared of him.” Sally has since discovered that it was a toxic environment at the school.
Luke had accused Marion of being a paedophile, of touching the boys, which was devastating for Marion, though an official complaint was never made. Barbara Petfield, who was Marion’s assistant at the time, told Sally: “That is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard, touching boys. There is no way on the planet.”
More recently, allegations have emerged of sexual abuse over decades at The Southport School. In April 2017, Queensland police launched an investigation into the allegations and the headmaster, Greg Wain, urged victims to come forward.
Private investigator Bill Edgar is behind the allegations. “I started up a Facebook page and over 130 boys came forward. I was abused by teachers. I have got statements from boys from 1969, ’71, ’78, ’79, all through the ’80s up until 2006. One teacher was alleged to be the main culprit.”
Greg Wain and Queensland Police told The Weekly that no one had come forward to their inquiries.
Lies and confusion
Once she realised something was wrong, Sally went to get the boxes Marion had left at Chris’ grandparents’ house. “It literally looked like she had pulled drawers out and dumped them into a box. There was no organisation, pins and crap everywhere. It looked to me like she was in a hurry to get out of there.” In the weeks before she left, Sally went to her house for dinner. “She fell asleep sitting upright with her hands facing up, in complete exhaustion. Her face was all sagging, she looked dishevelled. I thought, this is not my Mum, she is not happy.”
Her friend Janice White visited Marion in early 1997. “She was stressed and short tempered,” Janice told the podcast, “not as outgoing as she usually was. She was unhappy and very short with me. She made me feel unwelcome.”
“She did not like him at all. I think she was scared of him.”
It distressed Marion that she had been married three times: the first time to the famous footballer Johnny Warren, her great love. They had unsuccessfully tried to have a baby. Before their divorce was through, she fell pregnant with Sally and then Owen, to her new partner, Stuart Brown. She felt they had to marry “because it was the right thing to do. But it didn’t work out,” says Sally.
Marion’s third husband, Ray Barter, was an Afghan dog breeder who left her for another woman from the dog breeding world, even though Marion had done everything she could to make this marriage work. Ray had not got along with Owen, and for a time Marion blamed her children for the break-up. “She needed a man in her life,” says Sally, “but she was unlucky and didn’t find the right person.”
Sally had been through all her mother’s marriages and relationships with her, and Marion had always been very open and upfr upfront about them. But in her last months in Australia she had become secretive.
One of the boys in her class had a single father who was a pilot. Marion’s assistant, Barbara, told Sally that when the little boy would turn up to class, “she would run out to the car to see the dad, and they would go across to the residence. It would take her a while to come back to class. She was keen on this guy.” One day, Sally says, the little boy pointed to another single mother and said, ‘my daddy is going to marry her’. Mum just kind of collapsed and walked out of the classroom. She wasn’t her normal self, she wasn’t coming to class as much. When she did, she was distant. It was like she had a nervous breakdown.”
A year before she left, Marion’s wallet was stolen from her car by a woman who looked uncannily like her. “We saw the CCTV photos,” says Sally. Even though this woman was caught, the police have not located her since.
At a goodbye dinner with one friend, she sat on their son’s bed for a long time just watching him. And then asked her friend to stand under a light post “so I can remember you”. “She said a similar thing to me,” says Sally. “She wanted to come to dinner so she could remember me in my house.”
A mysterious stranger
Not long before she left, Chris was helping her pack. Suddenly Marion started panicking and said, “You have to go, just leave it and go.” That night at 9.30, Chris and Sally stopped at McDonald’s where Sally saw her mother’s car at an adjoining petrol station. There was a “tall, dark, European” man sitting in the car with her. Sally couldn’t see him properly because of light reflecting on the windscreen. Marion got out of the car to get petrol, then seeing Sally, got back in and took off the wrong way through the drive-in without filling up. Sally ran to the car window and said “busted”.
Later, when Sally asked her mother about the mysterious stranger, she said he was a friend from the Gold Coast Arts Centre taking her out for a goodbye drink. “She’d always loved the theatre, but I thought it was strange that she took off like that.” This mystery man has never come forward. “Why did she panic?” asks Sally. “Why didn’t she want me to see him?”
Another night, Sally rang her at a friend’s place where she’d said she was staying after she sold her house. But her friend said, “No, she told me she was staying at your house.”
It wasn’t until 2011 that Sally was given the most stunning and inexplicable piece of information of all by NSW detective Garry Sheehan. In May of 1997, two months before she left, Births, Deaths and Marriages confirm that Marion changed her name to Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel. Sally had never heard her mention that name.
A person carrying a passport with this name did come into the country on August 2, 1997, perhaps to withdraw her money. The customs form stated Florabella was married,
living in Luxembourg, and her occupation was home duties. This person declared they’d be in Australia for three days, but the passport has never left the country again, nor was it renewed when it expired.
“She was not a street-smart, savvy woman,” says Sally. “For her to change her name is beyond me. She was naive and gullible, she could easily be lead down the wrong path if she fell in love with someone.”
Searches by private investigators in the UK, Luxembourg and Australia, as well as calls from The Weekly to every Remakel listed in Luxembourg, have found no traces of Florabella or Marion. The authorities in Luxembourg stated that there would be a record of her at any time she used their health-care system. Two private investigators have assessed her as “presumed dead”. She has never accessed her superannuation, which, given that she had started paying into it in the early ’70s, would be considerable. She would be 73 now, and would have needed her super in old age. The $20,000 she transferred to Barclay’s bank in the UK for her trip sits untouched.
When Sally was married in 1999 she looked around for her mum, who, prior to leaving, had organised for the wedding to be in the chapel at The Southport School. Marion wasn’t there. When Sally had asked her if she would be there before she left, she had said “we’ll see”. And when Owen committed suicide in 2002, there was no sign of his mother. One of Marion’s sisters put a white rose on his coffin from her. “Dad was crying, saying ‘she should be here. I shouldn’t be here by myself burying our son’.”
Those who knew Marion, including her sister Deirdre, say she loved her children and family passionately, and would never have left them willingly.
Sally has been looking for her mother for 21 years, hitting brick walls again and again. “I’ve written to every minister in NSW and the Premier and they have bumped me and referred me back to the Minister for Police.” A letter from the Justice Department stated: “NSW Police Department has advised that t substantial inquiries were conducted both locally and nationally in respect of your mother. In spite of these inquiries no information could be obtained of her whereabouts. In the absence of information since 2011 there has been no evidence to have concerns for her safety. Your mother’s missing persons status has been removed.”
Because of the change of name and the selling of the house, and a bank security guard who was said to have had a long telephone conversation with her as she withdrew the last of her money on the Gold Coast, Gary Sheehan and the NSW Police believe Marion is alive, her disappearance was premeditated and she has deliberately disappeared. But periodic checks of Medicare, Centrelink and all the usual places a person would be found have turned up nothing. Sally would like her DNA to be sent to the UK to see if it matches any Jane Does there.
No one has seen Marion since 1997. And because no death certificate has been issued, Sally has been prevented by privacy laws from gaining crucial information, such as bank records and credit cards, that might tell her where her mother was when she vanished.
When a person rang Crime Stoppers and said a woman named Marion was buried in bushland near Armidale, Gary Sheehan searched with a police dog but found nothing. Sally believes they need to go back and do a much more thorough search.
The year Marion went missing, Sally was a bewildered 23 year old, trying to plan her wedding, “which should have been the most exciting time of my life. Instead, I spent the year worrying about my mum, to the full extent of devastation and not knowing what happened to her.” Trusting the police, she handed over bank records and critical information that was lost and never returned. Had police acted when Sally first reported her mother missing and her bank account being stripped, there might have been a very different outcome from a trail that grows colder with the years.
Did Marion Barter simply decide to leave everything and start a new life? If she did, she hasn’t left a single trace. Or did someone murder her for her money?
Marion would be so proud of the woman her daughter became and her fierce love for her mother. And Sally will not give up until she knows what happened to her mum. “If she chose to disappear, I will understand. But I just want to give her a hug.”