Speaker 1: This unknown killer or associates had been spooked by something
Speaker 1: and it hidden the body in the suitcase and moved it.
Speaker 1: DNA in those child's bones match up with DNA from
Speaker 1: some unidentified bones found in New South Wales in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and those bones were found in the Bilanglo State Forest.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrew Rulis's Life and Crimes. The recent search for
Speaker 1: a little lost boy called gus Lamont in the Upback
Speaker 1: area of South Australia reminds us of another awful thing
Speaker 1: that happened in South Australia more than a decade ago.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's a crime that spanned several years from
Speaker 1: the time it happened until the time it was resolved.
Speaker 1: And that is a case that some listeners will vaguely remember.
Speaker 1: But it's the case of the body in the suitcase.
Speaker 1: It's the case of a little missing girl whose remains
Speaker 1: turned up in an old, faded suitcase by the side
Speaker 1: of a highway at a tiny, little one horse town
Speaker 1: called Wanaka, which is right out there in what they
Speaker 1: call the Murray Malley, which is emptied out farming country
Speaker 1: where the communities have shrunk to nothing much more than
Speaker 1: a pair of road signs. Just west of Winaka on
Speaker 1: the Karunda Highway, there's a patch of bush just before
Speaker 1: the big wheat paddocks start pushing up to the road,
Speaker 1: and it was there on the fifteenth of July twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: so that's just over ten years ago that a curious
Speaker 1: Matra has turned up when something caught his eye. This
Speaker 1: driver wasn't the first to notice the faded suitcase that
Speaker 1: had been abandoned under a bush. Others had been there
Speaker 1: over previous weeks and seen it, but no one before
Speaker 1: had noticed what he saw. Among the pile of clothes
Speaker 1: that were scattered around the old suitcase, which had burst open.
Speaker 1: It was a human jawbone, a very small one. When
Speaker 1: the police arrived, they found the rest of the skeleton
Speaker 1: was obviously a child's, almost certainly a girl's, judging from
Speaker 1: the clothes that were also in the case. It took
Speaker 1: forensic scientists to confirm the police's working assumption that the
Speaker 1: dead child was a female age between thirty months and
Speaker 1: four years. What investigators would not say at the time
Speaker 1: was whether they could extract a strong enough DNA sample
Speaker 1: from the bones to compare with samples already on record. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they'd be looking at samples taken from offenders, especially sex offenders.
Speaker 1: Their assumption, of course, was that it was highly possible
Speaker 1: the child was a victim of a sex offender and
Speaker 1: may well have been related to that sex offender. Having
Speaker 1: DNA in such cases gives police a tool to eliminate
Speaker 1: or implicate any person of interest. From the police point
Speaker 1: of view, anyone closely related to the child should be
Speaker 1: able to unlock the macabre mystery of what had happened
Speaker 1: to her. South Australia's Major Crime Squad made an educated
Speaker 1: guess that the person they wanted was probably in their state,
Speaker 1: and quite likely within close range of where the body
Speaker 1: had been found. They set up a task force called
Speaker 1: Task Force Malley, and it began its investigation by door
Speaker 1: knocking every house within twenty five kilometers of that scene
Speaker 1: of the little hamlet of Wanaka Warnaca permanent residents.
Speaker 2: List of eight people.
Speaker 1: At this point, the police were conscious of how many
Speaker 1: notorious murder cases in the past had been ruined from
Speaker 1: the start by slap dash investigations, and they were keen
Speaker 1: not to let that happen again, which.
Speaker 2: Is a good thing.
Speaker 1: The task for investigators did not reveal all they knew
Speaker 1: about what happened to the child because they had to
Speaker 1: keep some vital detail secret, something that only the killer,
Speaker 1: you and that time wasters did not know. Police interview
Speaker 1: rooms produced some bizarre and detailed confessions, and not all
Speaker 1: of them are true. It's a funny thing out in
Speaker 1: the world that people turn up at police stations and
Speaker 1: beg to confess and then make long, rambling confessions that
Speaker 1: are totally bogus. And this is one of the problems
Speaker 1: of investigating notorious crimes. The police knew that the victim
Speaker 1: was a little under a meter tall, tiny child, and
Speaker 1: had shoulder length fair hair, which would probably describe it
Speaker 1: about half the little girls you know, pre kindergarten kids
Speaker 1: in Australia. They knew she had died extremely violently. Certain
Speaker 1: factures suggested she was bashed to death. It looked as
Speaker 1: if the unknown killer or someone close to the killer
Speaker 1: had covered the body in a pile of clothes, maybe
Speaker 1: in an empty room or a cupboard or a shed,
Speaker 1: and then left it for years, long enough to be
Speaker 1: reduced to a skeleton. Then, probably sometime in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: they thought this unknown killer or associates had been spooked
Speaker 1: by something, and it hidden the body in the suitcase
Speaker 1: and moved it. Whatever the reason, it seems that someone
Speaker 1: took the suitcase from an earlier hiding pace to Wanaka.
Speaker 1: It was tempting to assume it must have been moved
Speaker 1: in a vehicle, but that did not tally with a
Speaker 1: fact that ended up being a red herring. But the
Speaker 1: fact that at the time seemed a very strong clue,
Speaker 1: and that is this strange coincidence that in early twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: between March and May sometimes in the tiny township of Warnaka,
Speaker 1: which is just a flyspeck on the map, two of
Speaker 1: the town's eight permanent residents, Denise Edwards and Monica Martin,
Speaker 1: were out walking their dogs when they saw something that
Speaker 1: stuck in their memory. It was a man aged about sixty,
Speaker 1: they thought, walking briskly up the main street towards the highway.
Speaker 1: The man was average height, lightly built, a neat looking
Speaker 1: with short gray hair. He was a complete stranger to
Speaker 1: both women, who are locals, born and bred. The most
Speaker 1: unusual thing about the stranger was that he had a
Speaker 1: large suitcase and was carrying it rather than wheeling it,
Speaker 1: as if it wasn't especially heavy. In other words, if
Speaker 1: it had a big suitcase, be very heavy. If it's
Speaker 1: full of clothes and shoes and books and things, they're
Speaker 1: shocking things. But if it only had a handful of
Speaker 1: clothes and a skeleton.
Speaker 2: Of a child, it would be very light.
Speaker 1: And I think it's fair to say that in modern times,
Speaker 1: you say this century, you could drive around Australia and
Speaker 1: probably never see someone walking along a highway with a suitcase.
Speaker 1: Carrying a suitcase, it's just not something people do much
Speaker 1: these days.
Speaker 2: They had backpacks or whatever.
Speaker 1: The stranger with the suitcase had been close enough to
Speaker 1: see both women, but he made no eye contact, that
Speaker 1: made no greeting, which was unusual in the country. When
Speaker 1: these two women told the police about it, it did
Speaker 1: obviously seem like a really good clue. If they find
Speaker 1: the man who had been carrying the suitcase and eliminate him,
Speaker 1: it would be a very good start on an investigation. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: of course, the forensic experts are back at the labs.
Speaker 1: They're doing their best to extract usable DNA from these
Speaker 1: bones found at Gwanaka. The other things they were looking
Speaker 1: at were the clothes that were in the case and
Speaker 1: a quilt, an unusual quilt that was with it. The
Speaker 1: clothing was mostly cheap and mass produced, and most of it.
Speaker 2: Was available all over Australia.
Speaker 1: From dozens and dozens and hundreds of stores like Target
Speaker 1: and those sort of bargain stores. The most distinctive garment,
Speaker 1: much more rare, really, was a.
Speaker 2: Glittery, dark blue tutu.
Speaker 1: There was also one pink slipper like shoe with a
Speaker 1: butterfly emblem, the sort of thing that people buy for
Speaker 1: little girls. Police traced the likely origins of most of
Speaker 1: the fifty odd items of clothing they'd found, but five
Speaker 1: brand names took longer. There was Sally Brand, there was
Speaker 1: miss x Australia, there was HF and GAFF, and there
Speaker 1: was another quite strange under the long complicated name. But
Speaker 1: they found out that the blue tutu was sufficiently rare
Speaker 1: that only twenty eight of them had been sold in
Speaker 1: South Australia in the previous eight years. But it was
Speaker 1: the quilt that was found in the suitcase or near
Speaker 1: the suitcase that seemed the most intriguing clue. It was
Speaker 1: a one off. It was custom made, homemade, apparently homemade
Speaker 1: from mostly hexagonal patches of bright material, but had been
Speaker 1: machine stitched, not hands sewn, so someone had made this now.
Speaker 1: Of course, it could have been made by some relative
Speaker 1: of the child, grandmother or aunt or something, or just
Speaker 1: as likely it could have been picked up at an
Speaker 1: opshop or from some charity group. Either way, investigators were
Speaker 1: very keen to know who thought they might recognize the
Speaker 1: quilt and tell them about it, even anonymously. There was
Speaker 1: not much value in the suitcase itself. It was the
Speaker 1: Lands brand.
Speaker 2: Of suitcase, which is a budget.
Speaker 1: Line about the cheapest line of suitcases sold by one
Speaker 1: of the big national luggage retail chains. Police learned that
Speaker 1: the still gave away a large number of these Lands
Speaker 1: Of suitcases for as little as nine dollars each over
Speaker 1: the preceding years, so there were hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: them scattered around the place and the chances of tracing
Speaker 1: one of them were very remote. So as the investigation
Speaker 1: moved into its second month, so we're now getting very
Speaker 1: late in two thousand and fifteen, the unknown neat man
Speaker 1: who carried a suitcase in Wanaka early that year seemed
Speaker 1: to be the only lead. Every day that he failed
Speaker 1: to come forward to clear himself seemed to confirm him
Speaker 1: as a potential suspect. Fair enough, you would think that,
Speaker 1: but it's a lesson for all of us that you
Speaker 1: can't look to those conclusions because, as with so many
Speaker 1: promising leads, it turned out to be a dead end.
Speaker 1: What actually happened was the breakthrough that investigators needed came
Speaker 1: with two calls made within days of each other in
Speaker 1: October twenty fifteen. On the eighth of October, caller number
Speaker 1: twelve hundred and sixty seven, that's quite a few callers
Speaker 1: on this case, inform police that the mystery child could
Speaker 1: be called Candalise Kiara Pierce, who had in effect been
Speaker 1: missing with her mother, Carly Piers Stevenson since two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, when they'd left their hometown of Alice Springs.
Speaker 1: A second call, this is soon afterwards, number twelve hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy one, so it's only four calls later confirmed
Speaker 1: police interest in the missing mother and daughter that is
Speaker 1: Candalesse and no mother Carly, because it's it seemed that
Speaker 1: the pair's family and friends had not physically seen them
Speaker 1: since they'd left the Northern Territory back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, so that's years before, seven years before a
Speaker 1: quick check showed a missing personal report have been filed
Speaker 1: in the territory in September two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: But that it had lapsed after Carly's.
Speaker 1: Mother, Colleen Povey. So we've got Candillies and her mother, Carli,
Speaker 1: and Carly's mother Colleen, all starting with the same sound.
Speaker 1: So the little girl's grandmother, Colleen Povey had reported hearing
Speaker 1: from her daughter. Now that was a genuine.
Speaker 2: Report by her because she believed she had heard from
Speaker 2: her daughter.
Speaker 1: Police were intrigued by the reasons for the family's misplaced
Speaker 1: confidence that the pair, the missing pair, was safe.
Speaker 2: But now they had.
Speaker 1: Names to work with, they could really focus on those
Speaker 1: two people, a little girl and her mother, both missing
Speaker 1: for years. The search narrowed drastically. The more the investigators looked,
Speaker 1: the more they didn't find about Carli and Candlease, which
Speaker 1: reenforced the growing suspicion that something had gone terribly wrong
Speaker 1: for them. Medical records showed that little Candlease had received
Speaker 1: the usual vaccination shots at eighteen months old, but she
Speaker 1: had not reappeared in any database in Australia after that. Significantly,
Speaker 1: she had never been enrolled in any kindergarten or school,
Speaker 1: which sort of tells you that she's missing gone missing.
Speaker 1: Something happened back then before kindergarten age. Now. The South
Speaker 1: Australian Police called a media conference on the twenty first
Speaker 1: of October, this is months after the skeleton was found,
Speaker 1: and he announced the lead investigator that's detected, Superintendent There's Bray,
Speaker 1: announced that he had DNA evidence to back up what detected.
Speaker 1: He has already felt in their bones that the child's
Speaker 1: remains in the suitcase were all that was left of Candalase,
Speaker 1: and by comparing the little girl's DNA with DNA obtained
Speaker 1: from bones found in far away rural New South Wales
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, they cleared up a second mystery. So
Speaker 1: what they've said is we've just tested the bones from
Speaker 1: the suitcase that is certainly the small girl Candalise, who
Speaker 1: hasn't been seen since two thousand and eight. And not
Speaker 1: only that, DNA in those child's bones match up with
Speaker 1: DNA from some unidentified bones found in New South Wales
Speaker 1: in twenty ten. And those bones were found in the
Speaker 1: Bilanglo State Forest, which of course is notorious because it's
Speaker 1: where the several victims of the Terrible murderer Ivan Malatt
Speaker 1: had been found and these unidentified bones found in twenty
Speaker 1: ten at Blanglo State Forest had been called They had
Speaker 1: been named in the media as the Angel of Blanglow
Speaker 1: because I think there was a T shirt or something
Speaker 1: with the angel on it, but the police didn't know
Speaker 1: who the bones belonged to. But now the suitcase bones
Speaker 1: had shared DNA with the Blanglow bones, and what the
Speaker 1: police had was a scenario where the mother and daughter
Speaker 1: had both been killed and disposed of a thousand kilometers
Speaker 1: apart in two states. And once they'd established that, I
Speaker 1: think they were very keen to talk to the last
Speaker 1: people to see the mother and daughter alive, which person,
Speaker 1: which male person they would be thinking had been with
Speaker 1: Carli and candales Now it didn't take the police long
Speaker 1: to work out that they were probably looking for a
Speaker 1: called Daniel Hold them, that's h O l M hold them,
Speaker 1: not hold them as in car hold on, and to
Speaker 1: go back and work out what probably happened. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons the police had such good DNA results was
Speaker 1: that they were able to obtain a tiny sample of
Speaker 1: Candalesse's blood from her medical records, so they weren't just
Speaker 1: looking at these old dry bones that have been kicked
Speaker 1: around out beside a road somewhere. They were able once
Speaker 1: they knew who it was that they were probably looking for,
Speaker 1: that is Candalesse, they were able to access her medical records,
Speaker 1: and in the medical records was a tiny sample of
Speaker 1: her blood which gave them really good DNA results, and
Speaker 1: that led them to the match up on the database
Speaker 1: with her missing mother, Carli. So the scenario is now
Speaker 1: doubly sinister to apparent murders young mother and then her daughter,
Speaker 1: bodies dumped one thousand kilometers apart. The police go looking
Speaker 1: for their prime suspects. They found a witness who had
Speaker 1: seen Candalise and her mother at Adelaide's Marion shopping center
Speaker 1: in November two thousand and eight. Now, this witness, who
Speaker 1: was not a bad person, this witness who's helping police
Speaker 1: at this stage, photographed to Candlease in a pink dress
Speaker 1: identical to that found in the suitcase. So that was
Speaker 1: a great piece of evidence for the police to get.
Speaker 1: Police also obtained photographs of Candlease in a stroller a
Speaker 1: pusher with the handmade quill that had been found in
Speaker 1: the suitcase. Each of these findes moved them closer to
Speaker 1: the people they wanted. But even when Detective Superintendent des
Speaker 1: Bray was outlining the facts at his big media conference
Speaker 1: on twenty first of October in Adelaide, he already had
Speaker 1: a suspect in mind, and he knew that that suspect
Speaker 1: was in fact behind baths on unrelated charges.
Speaker 2: Surprised surprise, Top.
Speaker 1: Adelaide crime reporter Nigel Hunt, one of our colleagues here
Speaker 1: at News Corp, broke the story next day. Nigel Hunt
Speaker 1: is one of the great South Australian news reporters of
Speaker 1: all time, and he was able to tell the world
Speaker 1: that police had identified a man who'd been seen with
Speaker 1: Carli and Candalies around the time they'd last been seen.
Speaker 1: It turns out that Carly's family, that is, her mother
Speaker 1: and I think a grandmother, had falsely believed that the
Speaker 1: missing pair was still alive because they'd received text messages
Speaker 1: from Carl's mobile phone purporting to be from Carli. Naturally,
Speaker 1: when you get a text message from somebody's mobile phone,
Speaker 1: you tend to think it's from them, and on one occasion,
Speaker 1: one of these texts had been a begging from money
Speaker 1: from home, which was sort of classic Carli behavior anyway,
Speaker 1: so they believed it. They had obligingly placed money in
Speaker 1: her account, from which it was then withdrawn, so you know,
Speaker 1: they were, oh, yeah, Carli's out there somewhere, she needs
Speaker 1: some money. We'll put some money in her account and
Speaker 1: it's been withdrawn. Happy days. She's alive somewhere now. In
Speaker 1: the seven years from when Carli and Candalesse were last
Speaker 1: seen on the Stuart Highway just south of kober Pedy
Speaker 1: in November two thousand and eight until the suitcase bones
Speaker 1: were found at Wenaka in two thousand and fifteen, that's
Speaker 1: a seven year gap. Ninety thousand dollars had been harvested
Speaker 1: from Carl's bank account because her bank account was replenished
Speaker 1: by her Center Link payments. And this is all very Snowtown,
Speaker 1: very similar. It says a lot about the private ingreed
Speaker 1: of some people that someone had killed a young mother,
Speaker 1: probably before her twenty first birthday, presumably to steal a
Speaker 1: benefits money, which of course is much like the Snowtown
Speaker 1: killers had around Adelaide a few years earlier. And if
Speaker 1: killing Carly young mother, you know, twenty twenty one whatever
Speaker 1: wasn't sickening enough, the killer had then murdered her tiny child,
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine a more cold blooded crime. If
Speaker 1: one death wasn't premeditated, if it was a crime of
Speaker 1: passion or you know whatever, the other one surely must
Speaker 1: have been premeditated. If there was one small mercy, it
Speaker 1: was that Carly's mother, Colleen, had died in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: not actually knowing that her daughter and granddaughter had been
Speaker 1: murdered so foully. The killer's cruel trick of sending false
Speaker 1: messages on Carli's phone was a sort of an accidental kindness.
Speaker 1: It had lulled her mother, her worried mother, into believing
Speaker 1: they were safe out there on the road somewhere, out there,
Speaker 1: on the road to nowhere. Okay, for the police, having
Speaker 1: a prime suspect exactly where you wanted him, that he's
Speaker 1: behind bars on other charges was one thing, a good thing,
Speaker 1: but proving the case against him was another. So the
Speaker 1: police worked out that the victims mother and daughter had
Speaker 1: visited Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide and Canberra at different times.
Speaker 1: They appealed for people from those places and the roots
Speaker 1: between them to think about possible contact and to think
Speaker 1: about who was with them, who was the last to
Speaker 1: see the victims alive. This is always the big question.
Speaker 1: Police asked hotel and caravan park owners to check records
Speaker 1: for Carlly P. Stevenson, and for landlords to check leases
Speaker 1: for the same more similar names. They also appealed to
Speaker 1: the public to study photographs of Carly and Candales and
Speaker 1: scan their memories of whether they'd seen either of them. So,
Speaker 1: while friends and family of Carly and Candales started an
Speaker 1: online appeal to bring home their remains and to give
Speaker 1: them a decent farewell, the police doggedly built their case
Speaker 1: against the man in jail. We can now name this
Speaker 1: fellow openly in a way that we could not do
Speaker 1: back in twenty fifteen, because at that stage, of course
Speaker 1: he faced looming murder charges. Daniel James Holdham. He was
Speaker 1: then forty one. In twenty fifteen, the police were able
Speaker 1: to establish that his mobile phone news put him at
Speaker 1: both crime scenes. The mobile phone triangulation put him at
Speaker 1: both scenes. Very very good evidence. But there's a more
Speaker 1: sinister thing. When the police looked through Holdham's belongings, they
Speaker 1: found a digital camera, and in digital camera they found
Speaker 1: a data card, and on the data card they found
Speaker 1: an image of Carly's body. Holdham had killed his so
Speaker 1: called girlfriend by stomping at a death essentially a brutal,
Speaker 1: brutal murder, and he'd taken a trophy photograph and he
Speaker 1: kept it and the police found it. This would seem
Speaker 1: to be overwhelming evidence, and so it proved to be.
Speaker 1: He was arrested in jail and prison in Cessnock and
Speaker 1: he appeared by video link within days now. Back when
Speaker 1: we were writing about this story back in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: we weren't naming him, and he's had charges to face.
Speaker 1: But the reality is that he eventually worked his way
Speaker 1: through the court system, and in twenty and eighteen, just
Speaker 1: before the day before, two days before he's due to
Speaker 1: appear in a Supreme court to face double murder charges,
Speaker 1: he pladed guilty and that was locked up for a
Speaker 1: very long time. You'd like to think that he has
Speaker 1: locked up with people that would take offense at his offenses,
Speaker 1: but we'll never know. A view sort of postscripts to
Speaker 1: this story look back on without exploring the relationship between
Speaker 1: the victims and Holdham, one thing is overwhelmingly clear. As
Speaker 1: with so much crime at every level, from the top
Speaker 1: end to the very bottom street crime, drugs are at
Speaker 1: the center of it in one way or another. The
Speaker 1: dead rode only the truth, and the truth is that
Speaker 1: this little girl, Candeleise, even as a baby, was condemned
Speaker 1: from the time she was born, to suffer from the
Speaker 1: so called lifestyle choices of those around us, especially, but
Speaker 1: not only her mother. Reporters who uncovered a photograph of
Speaker 1: Carli as a six year old, this is Carli, This
Speaker 1: is the mother of Candlease. They found a photograph of
Speaker 1: Calie as a six year old, and reporters were struck
Speaker 1: by the similarity with Candleise, that the mother and daughter
Speaker 1: looked so similar it was hard to believe. One reporter
Speaker 1: wrote that the child, with her strawberry blonde hair and
Speaker 1: angelic face gazing at the camera she blew up a
Speaker 1: balloon at a birthday party, would so soon be drifting
Speaker 1: to the dark side. That birthday party snapshot was taken
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four. Just fourteen years later, almost to
Speaker 1: the day, Carli would be dead, obviously at the hands
Speaker 1: of the reptile boyfriend who was heavily involved in the
Speaker 1: drug scene and had snared Carly into his world when
Speaker 1: she was a rebellious teenager with no real friends. Police
Speaker 1: came to believe that carl had run up a twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars drug dead in the months before she
Speaker 1: was murdered. In fact, they believed that she fled Ella
Speaker 1: Springs with money meant to buy drugs to be smuggled
Speaker 1: from Adelaide to the Northern Territory along the Inland Highway.
Speaker 2: Route, which was used.
Speaker 1: By, among others, the convicted Falconio murderer Bradley John Murdoch,
Speaker 1: who of course has now left us. He exited the building.
Speaker 1: Tone Now, Carly's family knew a bit about drugs. Police
Speaker 1: dole report us that Carl's grandmother, Connie Duffy. All these
Speaker 1: names is Connie, There's Colleen, there's Carli and his candle.
Speaker 1: There's a line here, four generations. Police stile reporters that
Speaker 1: her grandmother, Connie Duffy, then eighty, was charged with possession
Speaker 1: of a commercial quantity of cannabis in twenty ten. Carlie
Speaker 1: had lived with that old woman as a young teenager.
Speaker 1: So she's had a fractured life and the dear old
Speaker 1: Grannie that she's living with is mixed up with growing dope.
Speaker 1: A man who was charged along with missus Duffy claimed
Speaker 1: that Carlie had been doing drug runs between Adelaide and
Speaker 1: Darwin before her murder and had been heavily involved with Holdham,
Speaker 1: the man charged with her death. This witness said that
Speaker 1: Carlie had insisted on taking baby Candlease with her when
Speaker 1: she left Ellice Springs, despite pleas from family members to
Speaker 1: leave the little girl with them. Tragic, and of course,
Speaker 1: the family's fears were well founded. When Carli's grandmother that
Speaker 1: would be the one called opened the missing girl's mail
Speaker 1: in late two thousand and eight and noticed her senti
Speaker 1: link payments had not been touched for a fortnight, she
Speaker 1: immediately suspected something was wrong and began looking for.
Speaker 2: Her lost girls.
Speaker 1: Sadly, however, that worried mother was persuaded by the bogus
Speaker 1: messages sent from Carly's phone. She was persuaded that Carli
Speaker 1: and Candalesse were still alive and well and interstate, and
Speaker 1: so she was relieved, as she would be. You were
Speaker 1: always looking for good news in those situations, and she
Speaker 1: went down and withdrew a missing persons report after only
Speaker 1: a few days. So officially, Candalesse and her mother officially
Speaker 1: had only been missing a few days because Granny had
Speaker 1: pulled out the missing persons.
Speaker 2: Report because she thought it was all going to be okay.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, as we know, Carly's bank card was used
Speaker 1: for more than a thousand transactions at fast food stores
Speaker 1: and service stations over many years. It does tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about how there's probably not enough checks
Speaker 1: and balances on social Security payments hard the know. None
Speaker 1: of this surprised the retired detective who had led the
Speaker 1: investigation of the infamous Snowtown murders years before. Retired Major
Speaker 1: Crime Chief Paul Schram told reporters that the Snowtown case
Speaker 1: had been made so hard because stolen identities meant that
Speaker 1: many of the dozen victims were never declared missing until
Speaker 1: much too late, if at all. Before Snowtown, he said,
Speaker 1: police assumed that someone's Social Security payments were still being drawn,
Speaker 1: then that person was probably still a li Snowtown changed that,
Speaker 1: but it didn't save Carlie and Candales from bad company
Speaker 1: that eventually condemned them to death. And that is all
Speaker 1: we can say about that sad story. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for
Speaker 1: true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
Speaker 1: features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au
Speaker 1: forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go
Speaker 1: to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au.
Speaker 1: That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if
Speaker 1: you want further information about this episode, links are in
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