LITMIR.BIZ

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police officer in the district remembered the unsolved MacDiarmid case from three years earlier. Debbie Fream’s disappearance from the same area was alarming.

      Also concerned for the safety of Debbie Fream was Detective Inspector John Noonan from the Frankston police. As head of the district’s six detective divisions, Noonan was informed on Friday morning that the young mother had vanished. He too made the link with the assault on Roszsa Toth, and put all his available resources into finding the missing woman.

      Senior Sergeant Chris Jones from the missing persons squad was lecturing new recruits at the police academy on Friday morning when his beeper sounded. An officer from his squad informed him that they had a missing woman in the Frankston area; last seen around 7pm the night before. The woman had left a 12-day-old baby with a friend and gone to the shop in the middle of cooking dinner. Both the woman and her car were missing.

      Chris Jones headed straight to Frankston thinking about the case he was about to investigate. Since his squad had been set up a year earlier, they had dealt exclusively with old missing persons cases, going over files trying to find a new perspective. This was their first call to investigate a fresh disappearance.

      At Frankston police station Chris Jones met with Inspector John Noonan for a briefing session and, together with other detectives, had a round-table discussion about the various possibilities. Debbie Fream was missing and so was her car. She could have suffered post-natal depression and sought refuge with a friend. She could have had a nervous breakdown, or she could have vanished in some sort of suicide bid. More sinister was the possibility that she had been abducted.

      Chris Jones knew that the missing person squad worked at a disadvantage compared to a normal homicide investigation. When a body is discovered, detectives can look for evidence to match the clues found on and around the body. If the victim is shot, the detectives look for bullets, bullet holes and a gun. But when a person is missing, there may be no evidence of a crime even when a crime is the most likely explanation.

      Chris Jones remembered his boss, Chief Inspector Peter Halloran’s favourite saying – always go back to the facts. The facts in this case were: Debbie Fream was missing, her car was missing and she left a 12-day-old baby in the middle of cooking dinner. After dismissing the more innocent possibilities, it didn’t take long to conclude that the most likely explanation was that something untoward had happened to her.

      The first priority was to co-ordinate a search for the missing woman. John Noonan telephoned Brian McMannis at the State Emergency Service office, ironically located on McCulloch Avenue not far from the milk bar closest to Debbie Fream’s home.

      Brian McMannis had been an SES volunteer for 17 years and had been in charge of the Frankston branch of the SES for the past eight. Inspector Noonan had great respect for the work the volunteers did and had called on them often to assist in searches and to provide lighting for crime scenes and road accidents. With 62 volunteers, the Frankston SES worked closely with the police. Various police experts would lecture the volunteers at their Monday night training sessions to keep their methods up to date. What Noonan appreciated most was the enthusiasm of the volunteers. If he asked them to search an area, they did it immediately and thoroughly. They also brought with them much needed equipment and even food and hot coffee.

      McMannis offered one of their caravans for a command post and he also offered volunteers to hand out pamphlets alerting the public to the missing woman.

      John Noonan asked Brian McMannis to organise a search of Kananook Creek and its surrounding areas. Although a daunting task with its thick surrounding scrub, McMannis had 230 volunteers ready within hours, calling in extras from surrounding SES units.

      After a briefing at the SES offices in McCulloch Avenue, the searchers in their bright orange overalls were transported to various points along the creek. McMannis also called in members of the Doncaster unit who were trained divers. They launched a rubber dinghy and searched the waist-deep creek and its banks while the other volunteers concentrated on the surrounding scrub. The search of the creek was an exact duplication of the one the SES had done three years ago for Sarah MacDiarmid. As with the earlier search, they found nothing.

      Michael Glowaski, who had earlier interviewed Garry Blair, was on his way back to the police station from another call when he noticed a grey Pulsar parked outside the New Life Christian Centre in Madden Street, just off the Frankston-Dandenong Road. Thinking it could be the car they were looking for, the detective turned around and headed to Madden Street. The registration checked out. It was Debbie Fream’s car.

      Without touching it, Glowaski examined the car and saw that the front passenger side door was unlocked and there was a dent in the centre of the bonnet. The damage looked recent. He notified Inspector Noonan at the Frankston police station, and remained with the car until the crime scene examiners arrived to examine, photograph and impound it as evidence.

      John Noonan and Chris Jones also drove to Madden Street and the first thing they checked was the driver’s seat. According to her description, Debbie Fream was short in stature and both detectives noticed the seat was pushed all the way back to the last notch, indicating that a much taller person had been the last to drive the car.

      From the moment her car was found, Debbie’s disappearance was definitely viewed as sinister. If the car had broken down, she could have walked home from Madden Street. Forensic examiners swabbed the interior of the car and found traces of blood.

      Noonan and Jones had another meeting to discuss tactics for the investigation. Jones offered the services of the missing persons squad and he offered to co-ordinate the vast amount of information that was sure to come flooding in. One person needed to sift through all the information reports and direct detectives towards further avenues of inquiry.

      Debbie’s friend Jeanette gave a statement to police at Frankston in the early afternoon. She told officers that she had called to see Debbie the previous morning around 11.30am and returned for their shopping trip around 2pm. Debbie had told Jeanette that she had felt a bit dizzy earlier in the day and that she also felt tired but, apart from that, the young mum looked fine. The two women had left the Kananook Avenue house as soon as Debbie finished breastfeeding. After shopping they visited Jeanette’s mother to show off the new baby.

      Chris Jones, from the missing persons squad, had his work cut out for him. As usual, members of the public came forward with many leads; all of which were painstakingly entered into a central data bank. Each lead was checked by detectives, which was a huge task considering that they were coming in at a rate of around a hundred each day.

      The main difficulty was that detectives didn’t know what they were looking for. Was it a murder or a disappearance? They weren’t even sure whether an offence had been committed. It wasn’t against the law to vanish.

      Most important of all the leads were those involving the grey Pulsar, and the times that people had first seen it parked outside the Christian Centre. Two women reported seeing the car at 7.50pm on the night Debbie disappeared. So what had happened to her in the 50 minutes between leaving home to buy milk and her car being parked in Madden Street?

      Two days after Debbie Fream’s disappearance, information came to light from Ann Smith, Debbie’s mother, about a telephone death threat that Debbie had received not long after she and Garry had moved to the house in Seaford. According to Ann, Debbie had told her that a man had telephoned her saying he was going to kill her. Mrs Smith had not been overly concerned. She knew her daughter had a way of dramatising things, and had assured her that it was probably just a crank call.

      In light of Debbie’s disappearance, that call was now being taken seriously.

      The following day, the Sunday Herald Sun ran with the front-page story: ‘Murder Threats to Missing Mother’. The link between the telephone call and Debbie’s disappearance seemed obvious; it was a lead that had to be followed. If the man who had threatened her was responsible for her disappearance, then there had to be a connection somewhere. Investigating officers began looking for someone who may have held a grudge against the young mother, although it seemed unlikely.

      Who could have hated Debbie enough to threaten her life?

      That

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