The stooped old man shuffled laboriously along the corridor of Ballina local court on his walker, muttering under his breath. In these court rooms, he had taken the stand, a picture of a befuddled, grandfatherly man with shaking hands and a fading memory.
As a key witness Ric Blum was under interrogation by the sharp and precise Adam Casselden SC, assisting the coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan.
It was all leading to the one central question. The reason we were all there. To find out what happened to Marion Barter.
That this day, the inquest into the disappearance of Barter, had come was almost surreal to most of us in the room – her family who loved her, those of us who never knew her but had joined the search, covered the story and become invested. After all the leads we chased, after all the clues that made no sense, after all the years of wondering, it was a day that we feared might never have happened.
Barter’s daughter Sally Leydon had been looking for her mother for 25 years. Now here in front of her was a man who might hold the answers.
The daughter searches
I first heard about Barter in 2010, when a detective chief inspector handed me a torn piece of paper with a name and number on it. A woman had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, but was not officially listed as missing by the police.
I rang the number and Leydon answered – she had been waiting for someone, anyone, to call.
We met in Brisbane more than a decade after Barter disappeared and she would tell me a story that has haunted me ever since. Leydon was then the mother of three small children and utterly bewildered. She had spent her wedding day in 1999 looking around for her mother to arrive. She had missed having her mother to help her through pregnancies. Though years had passed, she retained meticulous detail of her mother’s last known movements.
Barter had been a primary school teacher at The Southport School in south-east Queensland. “She loved ballet, opera, the finer things of life,” Leydon says. “She was not a street-smart, savvy woman. She was naive and gullible.”
More than anything Barter wanted to be in a relationship. “She needed to have a man in her life,” says Leydon. At 51 her romantic life had been bumpy; she had been married three times. Her failed love life weighed on her. She just wanted to be loved.
Leydon had been through all her mother’s marriages and relationships with her. They had always been close and open with each other.
Then in March 1997 Barter made an abrupt life change. She quit her job, sold her house and announced she was going on a sabbatical to Europe.
And she became uncharacteristically secretive.
Not long before Barter was due to fly to Europe, Leydon had stopped at a local McDonald’s and saw her car at the petrol station. Leydon would describe a tall man sitting in the car with her, partly obscured by the lights on the windscreen. Barter got out of the car to get petrol, Leydon recalls, but seeing her daughter got back in and sped off the wrong way through the drive-in.
Barter left Australia on 22 June 1997. For a few weeks, she would call to check in on her daughter, making sure she was OK.
On 1 August Barter phoned Leydon from Tunbridge Wells. They spoke until she ran out of coins in a phone box. Barter was tying up loose ends in Australia, housekeeping. She said she was going to stop writing postcards and letters for a while – “I need to rest”. There was no indication that there was anything wrong. She said that she missed her daughter. “She said I was the best daughter,” says Leydon. “That was the last time I spoke to my mum.”
After that call, postcards and birthday presents for friends and family arrived. Leydon would receive postcards from the Sussex coast and London. Her mother 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 Leydon. There was no mention of returning to Australia.
And then there was silence.
On 18 October, when Barter didn’t contact her son Owen for his 23rd birthday, Leydon became concerned. Barter had been exceptionally close to Owen as a child and Leydon didn’t believe she would have missed his birthday. Leydon realised she had no idea where her mother was.
She contacted Barter’s bank. At first the bank was reluctant to disclose personal information – until it saw what was happening to her accounts. On 2 August, only one day after her carefree phone call to Leydon from Tunbridge Wells, money began disappearing from her accounts. Over a three-week period in August and September, when her family believed she was in Europe, $5,000 a day had been withdrawn in Byron Bay and Burleigh Heads in northern New South Wales. Leydon reported her missing to police. Just a few days earlier, on 15 October 1997, $80,000 had been electronically transferred to an unknown account.
But the Byron Bay police did not pursue an investigation. “I got called probably a week to 10 days after [reporting her missing] telling me that they had located my Mum and that she didn’t want anyone to know where she was or what she was doing,” Leydon recalls. She remembers the police reporting they had spoken to a bank teller who said Barter had talked to her of “starting a new life” as she withdrew the last of her money.
There is now no police record of this conversation. The case was marked “not a priority”.
The last trace of Barter was her Medicare card being used at an optometrist in Grafton on 13 August 1997 – around the time the phone calls had stopped, and when postcards and presents from Barter, believed to be in Europe, were arriving.
Since then there has been no proof of life. Her superannuation has never been touched, nor the money she deposited in the UK before travelling, she has never had a parking ticket, or been to a doctor, or received a pension from Centrelink.
In the first year after her mother stopped communicating, Leydon was desperately worried about her. She was 23 years old and trying to plan her wedding, which her mother had organised to be held at the chapel at The Southport School. “It should have been the most exciting time of my life.”
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.
A new name
For two decades as Leydon tried to get someone to help search for her mother, she had doors closed in her face.
She badgered the Byron Bay Senior Detective Constable Gary Sheehan, who in 2011 started looking into the case, often in his own time. Even though the original police file had been lost, he kept digging until he uncovered a stunning piece of information.
In May 1997, two months before she left Australia, Barter had changed her name by deed poll. Leydon didn’t believe that Barter would have had the wherewithal to do this on her own.
“For her to change her name is beyond me,” Leydon said.
But because of the name change police maintained that Barter had staged her own disappearance. Sheehan closed the case, marking her as located.
Some years later, Leydon got hold of the name change documents. Barter had changed her name to Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel. It was a wildly decorative name that made no sense. Leydon had never heard her mention the name Florabella.
“I need a drink,” Leydon said when she told me this in 2019, and I have to admit, so did I.
The podcast detectives
Leydon never gave up hope that her mother was alive and hiding somewhere.
“If she chose to disappear, I will understand. But I just want to give her a hug,” she told me in 2019.
Leydon’s life went on. Her children grew. Her search continued, she never stopped pushing for answers. And then came the true crime podcast which changed everything.
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.
Among those listeners grew an armchair detective army, pursuing leads and digging into Barter’s case. Joni Condos, a cookbook writer and former social worker, was one of those amateur sleuths. Condos revealed herself to be a formidable investigator. The name Remakel struck her.
“When they said the name I got this weird feeling in my gut,” she says. It was such an unusual name. A month after the podcast was launched she ran the name “through all these active online databases”. “If you just put Remakel in you would never have got it.” She tried putting spaces between the letters in different combinations.
And then she found it. “My heart just went into my throat and I felt like I could hardly breathe.” A 1994 lonely hearts ad in Le Courrier Australien, a French-English bilingual newspaper. Fernand Nocola Remakel was “47 years old, single, large, brunette, sober, non smoker, university graduated, multi home owner, intelligent, multi lingual, genuine, morally aligned. Searching for a lady with a free heart. Looking for a permanent relationship and or marriage.”
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.
Another listener contacted Leydon to say he had researched at the library and located the owner of the phone number on Remakel’s lonely hearts ad. In the 1995 White Pages the number was linked to a business called Ballina Coin Investments owned by Frederick and Diane De Hedervary. The phone number had only been active for six months.
“That is when everything just closed in,” Condos says. “I got into the National Archives and ordered up every record under this guy’s [De Hedervary] name.”
She found an immigration file in which there were notes on the back of a notepad written by an Asio agent. There was a list of 30 aliases this person used.
In the supreme court registry Condos found he had changed his name by deed poll 12 times.
All the while, it was the single phone number on the lonely hearts ad linking De Hedervary to Remakel which kept the podcast fans digging.
Condos and Leydon put together a dossier. “Joni and I just had been working tirelessly for the entire year,” Leydon says.
Leydon flew to Sydney on 29 November 2019 and spent a day with NSW police crime command. “I took down all my documents that I could possibly carry,” she recalls.
Twenty-two years after Leydon first reported her mother missing, the unsolved homicide unit established Strike Force Jurunga to investigate Barter’s disappearance. The investigation would lead police to the man now known as Ric Blum. Police would find a lapsed Queensland driver’s licence in the name of Fernand Remakel that linked to De Hedervary and hence to Blum.
Finding the passport
While the police investigation continued, the sleuths did not stop.
In 2020, Condos found documents showing that just one day after Barter had called Leydon for the last time, in August 1997, a person travelling on a passport as Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel flew in to Australia. On her passenger form it stated that Florabella was married, living in Luxembourg, and that her occupation was “home duties”. Barter had never mentioned Luxembourg to anyone. It declared the person would be in Australia for eight days. The passport was never used again.
For years we had all suspected that whoever took her money had a female accomplice posing as Barter.
Then Condos found Florabella’s returning passenger card in the National Archives. When Sally saw it for the first time she saw the handwriting was her mother’s. It was the same distinctive cursive as on the postcards. Now she had to face the fact that her mother had come back to Australia. She was not in Europe, dead or alive.
The moment it all clicked into place was, Leydon says, “quite terrifying”.
The four women of the inquest
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.
A series of women would come before the court; wives or lovers of Fernand Remakel, Frederick De Hedervary, Rick West. All had been offered to be whisked away from their humdrum lives, Casselden would allege. And all would identify Ric Blum as the man they’d had a relationship with, although he had used different names over time.
Over five days, Casselden would weave the stories of the women together, seeking to establish a pattern that he alleged Blum – going by the name Remakel, De Hedervary or West – followed. The counsel assisting would tell the court that NSW detectives had found 30 aliases linked to him across multiple jurisdictions nationally and internationally. They had identified 10 passports that had been issued to him with eight different names.
The coroner would hear that Blum had had a relationship with Monique Cornelius in Luxembourg in the early 1980s. While he was at it, it was submitted, he had taken the identity of her ex-husband Fernand Remakel. A surname which, decades later, Barter would assume.
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.
Wed in 1976, early in their marriage they had lived in Luxembourg and a village near Tunbridge Wells. Prickles ran down my spine. This was where Barter had last made contact with her daughter.
Diane De Hedervary said he had a “small” extra income trading rare coins.
Then came the lovers. The witnesses’ stories were strikingly similar.
The next woman, Ginette Gaffney-Bowen, said she met Frederick De Hedervary through a lonely hearts ad. Soon, she told the inquest, he would suggest that they start a coin trading business together and that she sell her Sydney house and he’d buy an apartment in Paris. She said she gave him her bank card to buy a fax machine for the business and he allegedly took $30,000 from the account. When she refused to sell her house, she told the coroner, he tried to blackmail her. “He only wanted money,” she said.
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.
They travelled to the same places that Barter’s postcards had come from, before she said West left her with a cousin in Manchester, claiming that he had urgent business elsewhere and then that he’d been robbed, was in hospital and all her documents had been stolen. When Oldenburgh rushed back to her house, after borrowing money from her cousin to return home (she said West was unable to get her a return flight for weeks), she said she found West there – without any sign of injury.
The court adjourned, and after a six-week break the inquest resumed on 27 April at Byron Bay courthouse.
Blum responds
Dark-haired, blue-suited and wiry, Casselden had been circling, expertly building a case. Now Blum took the stand.
Blum shuffled into the court and heaved himself into the witness box. Now 82, breathing through his mouth and speaking with a thick accent, he took long pauses and went off in tangents.
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.
And he could not explain why he changed his name so frequently.
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. He denied suggesting that he and Gaffney-Bowen start a coin collecting business together, and of the allegation he had taken $30,000 from her bank account he said “no, didn’t happen”. “I never did,” he said of allegations of blackmail. “I never took advantage of anyone, my God.”
Blum denied telling Oldenburgh he had been robbed and assaulted. Casselden asked: “Was there any intention of wooing Janet so you could take advantage of her for personal and financial gain?” Blum replied: “I never had any money from her.” Blum had, said Casselden, “the title deeds to her property and power of attorney”. Blum replied: “I never had those in my hands.” Casselden asked: “Do you accept that you misled her in your true intentions?” He replied: “I never promised her anything.”
He said he had only seen Barter four times between February and June 1997. He had met her through a lonely hearts ad, he admitted. As Leydon sat in the courthouse, Blum told the inquest that he had ended it with Barter because he was married and she was “insatiable”.
He met Barter in February 1997. She had engaged a real estate agent to sell her house on 15 March. He denied suggesting to her that she should sell it and start a new life overseas. On 20 May Barter changed her surname to the same name as his fraudulent driver’s licence.
The “coincidences”, as Casselden would call them, were piling up.
Casselden told the inquest that Blum and Barter had flown out and then back into the country within days of each other.
On 14 October he had opened a safe custody envelope at the Commonwealth Bank in Ballina, Casselden told the inquest. That was one day before $80,000 was electronically transferred from Barter’s bank account. There are no bank records of where that money went.
The safe custody envelope was closed again after 13 days.
Casselden played a video to the inquest from Blum’s police interview last September. He was being interviewed by Detective Senior Constable Sasha Pinazza from the homicide squad.
“Did you murder Marion Barter?”
“Are you kidding?” he replied.
Pinazza said: “No, I’m not kidding. And I expect you to answer my question seriously. Did you in any way harm Marion Barter?”
“No,” Blum replied.
“Did you have any interaction with Marion Barter after she returned to Australia on 2 August in 1997?”
“No,” Blum said again.
“Do you know where she is?”
“No.”
Casselden pointed out, as he had before, that Barter’s family were in the court. “Is there any information you could provide to assist Barter’s family and the police in locating her?”
He replied: “I wouldn’t know where she is.”
Leydon dropped, her head between her knees, burst into tears and couldn’t stop shaking. “My body was having a complete meltdown like I’ve never experienced before. I felt the pain of 25 years searching for answers and stress all came to a head and hit me like a freight train.”
‘I can’t rest’
Leydon looks exactly the same as she did 12 years ago when I first met her. She is the kind of person who hits the gym when she is stressed. Strong, capable, patiently answering media questions. But Leydon is profoundly changed by the long fight for justice. “I often wonder why I am not sitting in a corner rocking back and forward.”
Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan is due to hand down her findings on 30 November. Meanwhile, police continue their investigations and recently increased the reward for information to $500,000.
Outside the court Leydon said she had done it all for her children. Her daughter, Ella, was by her side through the inquest. She was a little girl when I first met her, but she’s grown into a young woman studying aeronautical and electrical engineering. Leydon worries about the effect this has all had on her family. But, she says, “I can’t rest, it causes my heart to ache every day.”
She still doesn’t know what happened to her mother, or where she is. Or if she ever will. But she says: “The truth is like water, it will always find a way.”
