The Lady Vanishes
They were painful words to hear but ones Marion Barter’s family have been waiting 25 years for, “It is reasonable… to conclude Marion is deceased.”
After changing her name and taking a trip to the UK in 1997, the Gold Coast teacher was never seen again.
Local authorities dismissed her as just another runaway mum. But daughter Sally Leydon has been searching for answers ever since.
The coroner’s findings at a recent inquest follows decades of unanswered questions and a dogged pursuit by the team – and listeners – behind the podcast The Lady Vanishes.
“Police made it clear to us they didn’t believe that Marion was missing, nor that she could have possibly been the victim of foul play. Now they do,” executive producer Alison Sandy, 45, tells Woman’s Day.
“We had to start from scratch... and fight for the release of confidential documents into the so-called investigation.”
After hearing about Sally’s search in late 2018, Alison spun the case into a podcast, assembling a global army of armchair detectives to discover incomplete leads, new persons of interest and 51-year-old Marion’s secret European fraudster lover with 38 aliases.
More than 13 million streams and one coronial inquest later, these super sleuths may have just cracked what police were willing to ignore for decades – what happened to Marion Barter.