Victoria police have found an 18-year-old jogger more than 24 hours after she went missing on Wednesday afternoon, after police on a routine patrol spotted her in a car.
Police believe the woman was abducted and held captive after setting out for a jog at around 3pm on Wednesday from the One Tree Hill lookout, a bush reserve in the Spring Gully about 160km north-west of Melbourne.
A large search operation involving the state emergency service was carried out as temperatures dropped to -1C on Wednesday night, but the woman was found by officers on a routine patrol in Bendigo just before 5pm on Thursday in Maiden Valley, about 11km from where she went missing.
On Friday morning, police said the sexual crimes squad had taken over the investigation, and that the woman did not want to be identified.
A 38 year-old man from a small town near Bendigo was taken into police custody on Thursday evening where he remains, and police would only say he was helping them with their enquiries.
The exact circumstances of how the woman ended up in Maiden Gully were still to be determined, Inspector Michael Talbot said.
“It’s quite a distance, it’s not somewhere you’d just walk to,” he told reporters.
At one point during her jog, the woman had sent a photo to her friends indicating her location, he said.
“It’s believed she ran further into the hill and down the other side, where she sent some text messages to friends,” Talbot said.
According to Fairfax Media, her friends became concerned because the texts did not read as though they had been written by her. Further attempts to contact her by family and friends failed and it was believed her phone had been switched off, police said.
She had no obvious physical injuries, Talbot said, and she was taken to Bendigo hospital in a stable condition before being discharged on Thursday night.
Her brother and uncle told the Herald Sun they were grateful for support from emergency services.
“The community support has also been incredible,” they said.
