This year’s coronial inquest into the case has revealed more shocking detail. For those of us who have spent years looking for answers, it has been confronting and baffling
The last trace of Barter was her Medicare card being used at an optometrist in Grafton on 13 August 1997around the time the phone calls had stopped, and when postcards and presents from Barter, believed to be in Europe, were arriving.
For years afterwards Leydon was torn. Was her mother still alive but inexplicably didn’t want anything to do with her family? Or had she been the victim of some sort of foul play? Either way it was agony.Photograph: David Maurice Smith/OculiFor two decades as Leydon tried to get someone to help search for her mother, she had doors closed in her face.started looking into the case, often in his own time.
In 2019 Alison Sandy, the FOI officer at Seven News, heard about Leydon’s search through a mutual friend, and worked to turn the tale into a podcast. Within a month of its launch The Lady Vanishes had been downloaded 1m times. Today that number has reached almost 12m. It had a Lennox Head post office box and phone number. “Overnight I did mapping of the Remakel name around the world.” There was only one person of that name and age – he lived in Luxembourg.
Condos and Leydon put together a dossier. “Joni and I just had been working tirelessly for the entire year,” Leydon says. Nearly three years later, on that tropical day of sun and rain last February, I was not the only person getting the chills as the inquest commenced at the quaint old courthouse in Ballina.
Next up in the witness box, Blum’s fourth wife, Diane De Hedervary, said she didn’t know why her husband kept changing his name. The final woman, Janet Oldenburgh, told the inquest she was contacted by Rick West after her husband left her. After she was granted sole ownership of her home she said that West asked her to start a fresh life with him on the French Riviera. She told the coroner she had given him power of attorney over her “in case something happens” before they flew to Europe, with West carrying all of Oldenburgh’s identity documents and title deeds in a small tapestry bag.
He had admitted in a police interview that he had an affair with Barter in early 1997 but has always denied he had anything to do with her disappearance.Blum told the court “I can’t give you a proper explanation” why he had gotten a Queensland driver’s licence in the name of his former lover’s ex-husband, Fernand Remakel. He denied most of the allegations by Gaffney-Bowen and Oldenburgh.
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