Vanished without a trace: The disappearance of teenager Ursula Barwick | Australian Story

[Music] when ursula was leaving there was no bitterness she was in a joyful mood it was just a big adventure and she wanted to have that adventure like so many other country kids did she told us that she was going to sydney and we said okay and she was to ring us when she got there to give us the address but that phone call never came from the day that she got on that train there was just no record of ishla barwick we just didn't know where she was he eats at you all the time because you can't get away from it you wake up in the middle of the night and you think what the hell's happened it's a grief that you can't explain is she dead or is she live is she coming home is she not this could have been such an easy case to solve and it could have saved a lot of heartache it was sitting right there in front of them it was just there in front of them and they just missed it they had done their job back then like they've done now it would have made our life a lot easier a lot easier to live with the facts as a journalist i've reported on dozens and dozens of missing person cases i think ursula's case unfortunately highlighted some of the systemic and deep-rooted problems with missing person investigations i don't think ursula case is unique i think there's a failing all the way through i think that every single family should be ringing up the new south wales police now and saying please explain there's 600 long-term missing people in australia that's a lot of families and that's a lot of people who are affected there's so many challenges involved with long-term cases but if we put some dedicated resources onto it people shouldn't have to go through what we went through sean hi nice to see you okay last year in 2018 we had our 30th school uh reunion in korean day it's a small town in the northwest of new south wales but our friend ursula barwick wasn't there it's going to be pretty low-key we'll just wander around starting on the ground floor which is still maths i don't think ursula would have withstood us having school reunions without coming to them because she was such a good friend and she was so sociable she would just be itching to get to something like that so those things did not make sense yeah so i remember er she's just flutter around she used to sit underneath there sometimes and then she'd be over here i think a thought that was running through all of our heads was had she been taken by over my lap maybe she's been murdered we had no idea there was just hope that she was still out there in all of our minds ursula's still 17. i still really love that outdoors life she was always the first one to do something and she was always brave and confident her mother cherie and i parted when ursula was quite young and then elizabeth and i married we got to see quite a bit of her until we moved to the central coast we have it for school holidays and then andrew came along in 1980 and she was the first person we rang and then along came kate the kids adored her and she had all the kids when she was with us she ruled out world like i looked up for her so much and when she was there was just i loved it i loved having a big sister because it was always fun as ursula became a teenager i did notice some changes in her she didn't know where she fitted and i think as part of living in a small country town she was probably feeling stifled and wanting to go out and see the world towards the middle of year 11 her risk taking became more extreme excessive drinking passing out at parties not knowing what was going on around her some small drugs being a little bit promiscuous it started a rumor mill which started off through the school but then went through the wider community and i think ursula became quite scared embarrassed which made her act out even more sheree called me one night she said could you take ursula for a while because i just can't handle it and i said of course so down she came the last day that we saw osha was spring of 1987. she was in year 11 and didn't want to go any further she basically said well i'm 17. i can leave home i can do what i like and she said i found a job in sydney as parents we accepted the fact that we had to let her go my dad and andrew and kate took her to the train it was the middle of the week we were going down on the saturday and it gave her two days to get organised and call us she said i'll contact you as soon as i'm where i am that was the last thing she ever said to us [Music] each day went by and it got to be the two weeks and we thought we didn't think she would have left it that long to have made contact i was becoming very anxious so i went to sydney where the police headquarters were and reported her as a full missing person with photographs we just waited because we thought well they go and look but i don't know what we just thought that's what they did there was no follow-up whatsoever from the police nobody who was interviewed whatsoever no friends family or acquaintances i actually felt that there was a lack of interest from the police that she was just another runaway and that she'd come home i guess we believed that there was nothing that you could do you just had to wait at home and hope they turned up it was it was awful awful before she was leaving urshler wrote a letter to me and a letter to our small group of friends and she says i'm pretty good thanks i'm having fun down on the coast i'm down visiting my dad how's school i thought the police would come and get those letters from me so i held on to them but they never did and she misses us all that's three or four times through he says i miss you can't wait to see you on her little cartoon see soon there was no indication at all that she wanted to just disappear for a 17 year old girl to run away it always has surprised me that nobody came and spoke to us about what was going on in her life what she was thinking what she might have told any of us with no results from the police at all we started to look ourselves wherever we went we never stopped looking dad's to go down to sydney a fair bit i didn't realize what he was doing because obviously i was young i didn't realize that he was going down to look in the back of my mind at that stage there was the chance that she had gotten involved with something that was sinister and couldn't get out when you go looking in those places you soon realize what sort of deviate people are around and it was pretty sad to see it all first hand it was like a slow burn christmas comes and she doesn't come home you know then birthdays come round and she doesn't get in touch as years went by we would often get a phone call to say that somebody had taken up her case but then nothing would happen it would just be a phone call ursula's mother cherie passed away in 2004 and that was 17 years after rushford disappeared and just before she passed i said to her i'm sure she's gone and she said i'd finally agree with you she said i'm on the way to meet her that really kicked me when auntie sheree died then all the conversations about ursula you know the memories we used to share that all stopped we just pretended that it wasn't happening in 2008 we had our 20th school reunion we're all sitting there talking about ursula surely somebody out there's got to know something about her where she is facebook was so new and someone suggested that i put together a facebook page which i did andrew who's ursula's brother he joined the facebook page in 2010. i'd always wanted to be a policeman and always used to think oh once i'm there i can then maybe do something i can just i can i can look for it i made some inquiries with some people that are missing persons you know that's pretty much the first thing i did because it's the first thing i ever thought i could do he was at the same station as a senior constable out of marsh and adam was seconded to missing persons unit and andrew actually said that his sister urshila was missing he goes yeah if i if i can i'll have a look someone having a poke around's always handy new forensic imaging technology is giving families of missing persons fresh hope of finding their loved ones so in 2010 there was a campaign with the australian federal police and the missing persons unit and that was to use the age progression technology and i think it was the first time that that had been used we really felt this was our last chance of maybe if she was alive that you know surely somebody would see her federal police have launched the first poster using sophisticated age-enhanced photos i grew up thinking i was just her and then you start to realize that wow there is so many people that just go missing i had friends calling me just saying is that that's your sister she's on the she's on the bus stop when i saw ursula on the television it concerned me that her hair color was wrong her eye color was wrong and the date she went missing was wrong so i made phone call after phone call it's at least three to four weeks incorrect this is a really sloppy profile and really someone should do something about that because how are you gonna find her with information like this as the time went by nothing came of it so it was basically then okay and we're back to square one in 2014 there's a statewide initiative to follow up on stalled long-term missing person cases at king's cross a detective by the name of kurt haywood ends up with ursula barwick's missing person's file he said we thought this may have been a homicide but he said i think there's more in this story than what you and i can even envisage something's gone wrong somewhere we were both interviewed we hadn't been officially interviewed before by anybody he got sergeant amy scott on board as well and he seemed to be doing more than anyone i ever had and they went all over firstly background they went back to grindai and to the high school and gathered little snippets of information i think during my interview amy was very open about the fact that um not much had ever been done and she worked so hard um every little name that i gave her that had a vague connection to ursula's case she followed up today police released a reenactment of ursula barwick who's been missing for 28 years in 2015 we had the missing persons week and she was the face of that and a lot of publicity went around with her face on it she told her family that she just won a new job and she would ring her family with a new address so they could bring the remainder of her belongings down to her the barwicks are still waiting for that phone call urshler will turn 45 in less than two weeks time but in my mind and the minds of everyone who knows and loves ursula she is still 17. as a result of all the attention on ursula during national missing persons week there was a call into crime stoppers almost three decades after ursula barwick went missing police there's fresh hope a woman who vanished from the central coast 30 years ago could still be alive we've recently received new information that ursula was in fact working at the coach and horses hotel in randwick in july of 1989. there was a sighting of ursula in sydney two years after she disappeared police have been able to verify i was just stunned he was like oh this is really really good but then it was a sad feeling as well because it was by choice that she didn't come home please do if you're out there anywhere please contact us just to know that you're okay your life's okay and the rest of it doesn't matter but it turned out to be a mistaken identity of a kurindai girl very similar in stature and was going to university down there about six months later in may 2016 i got a call late in the afternoon from curt he said i've got a set of photographs i want you to look at you know he said it's going to be very hard on you but i want you to look at every one of them i think that this may be the end of your case they showed us a report of a young girl who had died in an accident in 1987 and she went under the name of jessica or jessie and we reading it were wondering what did this have to do with us i thought oh my god this is better but then i looked closer her eyes and her teeth was ursula [Music] her hair was it her body was he was like i can't see her face but that's her i got up i went and sat on the bed i couldn't handle it it's been so long so hard and there it was sitting in front of me it was only then that we found out how much investigation went into finding these photos and the background of how it all came about the reason why the detectives at king's cross had these photographs was because of senior constable adam marsh adam was the former work colleague of ursula's brother andrew barwick we now know that it was five years earlier at the missing persons unit that adam marsh was reviewing a file involving a young girl who died in a car crash he started to notice striking similarities between that file and the case of ursula barwick he was particularly struck by the photographs five months after the crash a friend identified this victim in the morgue as jessica pierce but he couldn't find any trace of this mystery friend while adam marsh had his suspicions that this victim could be ursula barwick he couldn't prove it we now know that his concerns were dismissed by his superiors and he didn't mention anything to ursula's family fast forward to 2015 and adam marsh saw something that absolutely convinced him ursula barwick was in fact jessica pierce well it is the start of national missing persons week in police ursula barwick who has when we had the missing persons week back in 2015 adam saw a different photo of ursula a different one to the one he had been looking at in 2010 2011 and he said he had chills down his spine because he thought it is her at this time he's no longer missing persons this is just him doing it because he remembers my name and he remembers me and that tiny little thing went to kurt and amy and then all of a sudden it just it just took off when we found out that adam had made a connection five years earlier between jessica and ursula and he was discouraged to go ahead it was like why didn't they let him go ahead with it when he had such a strong feeling the question of why adam marsh wasn't allowed to pursue his hunch is one of the most baffling aspects of this case years on we still don't have an answer as to why he wasn't allowed to investigate that link any further after we identified that it was ursula in the photos and we were sure of it the police still had to go about proving 100 that it was who and so they began by finding the other three guys in the car kirk contacted me just asking me if i remembered mostly if i remembered what happened in the in the accident and do i remember jess and of course i did i first met jess in king's cross mark and rob myself jess a few other girls few other guys we all hung around at the girls i met jess in a pool hall which just used to be across the road in the orange doorway we used to come up here and play pool and just muck around listen to music [Music] jess just come out of the blue and she was a real spark very innocent compared to us like we were just a dead sad bunch of mugs i'd never heard of the name ursula before i only knew her as jess and her boyfriend i think it was mark we knew she wasn't from around here just the way she was dressed um denim jacket denim jeans white shirt jess or ursula had been in king's cross for about three weeks when hands as he told police decided to steal a car and we went driving around they said they'd stolen the car and they were going to melbourne and did we want to come and and i knew at the time my dad would kill me if i left jess decided to come with us because mark was going mark was the one showing me around melbourne and she weren't letting him go nowhere without her i was driving initially [Applause] we pulled up down around yes i suppose and that's when robert took over australia said to him you do not use the cruise control and i've gone off and done my own thing gone to sleep etc jess and mark they've laid down on the back seat cuddling and gone to sleep that's exactly what he did set the cruise control at 120 kilometers now and we've ended up going head on with a truck at that speed it was four teenagers going on a joyride and we don't feel any animosity towards him it could have been anyone driving that car it was just an accident and the sad part about it was it happened three weeks after she disappeared she wasn't a prostitute and she wasn't taking drugs she was just there being part of the gang i guess a car accident was much better than what we all thought um because you do start to think the worst but then as much as that was a relief the frustration started kicking in as to well why wasn't there any answers or how did this go so wrong for so many years after the crash in 1987 we've got two separate investigations going on at the same time but no one has joined the dots she didn't have a license no mobile phones no id the other boys just said they know her as jessie they couldn't give her a last name or anything like that it was just jesse through the letters that ursula had written to melissa she had made mention that if in the future she'd ever have a daughter she would name her jessica she changed her name to the name she would have given her future daughter police investigating that crash we're only looking for a woman named jessica he has stated there were a large number of inquiries made in relation to attempting to locate relatives of the deceased around the same time we've got ursula's family who report her missing you know great lengths they weren't looking at missing person records for young women say age between 16 and 25 or flicking through the photographs of recently reported missing women as well he could have just easily found the missing person's report if if he you know exhausted all inquiries to do that in missing person investigations it seems like the obvious place to look would be the morgue but police didn't check against bodies that turned up over the past few months when we found out that ursula had laid in the morgan gleam for 15 months and nothing or nobody went to look at it or to to even explain or do anything like that we were bitterly disappointed the problem is you've got new south wales health that looks after them all then you've got new south wales police that's in charge of the investigation they all have different records and databases and systems that aren't talking to each other and this is an issue that's carried on throughout the decades and something that police are still grappling with now in 2014 i was asked to conduct a review of missing persons unit from the new south wales police from my review there was failures at every level the intake of the police report the level of care that is shown when someone first reports there were wrong date of births wrong genders wrong addresses wrong next to kin what essentially occurs is we get dirty data probably thing that shocked me the most was what was happening in the morgue where there was so many unidentified bodies these could be some of our long-term missing persons when you have an unidentified body turn up it's not automatically matching against a missing person's report that's made at the same time right i'm just about ready once the detectives wrapped up their investigation we knew it had to go to the coroner's court to have jessica officially declared as usually diane barwick here we go according to the inquest i had the jitters because you're thinking oh god what's going to happen now there's something going to go wrong kurt and amy aren't allowed to comment as yet because there is still a process of the inquest still happening but they were with us that day they were such a great help to us and always supported us too and we can't thank them enough it was their work that got us there how are you feeling how's the feeling oh it's a bit it's a bit surreal kurt yeah kurt and amy definitely they've formed a very strong bond with my mom and dad i'm so appreciative of the way it has worked out for them that's the best part about it they did an amazing job for them and they just become such good friends out of it urshler is buried at the emu plain cemetery they don't know whereabouts in that cemetery because there were no records and there is no headstone we've just got a plaque on this wall that's down there that's as much as we could do to say goodbye there is a second inquest coming up in 2020 that will focus on the ursula barwick investigation where the shortfalls were and why she wasn't identified so much sooner i suggest that the coroner will find systemic issues with the investigation and failure on the side of the new south wales police without a doubt we will never ever know for sure no that's just the sad thing you never ever know for sure there is nothing that you can do as a family member of a missing persons that makes please follow their standard operating procedures or take action i would love a legal duty of care placed upon the police to investigate then police can be held liable personally that will make police do their job when we had the memorial for ursula because it'd be nothing done i just thought to myself there was a lot of other people who would have been touched if she had survived there was a lot of bad luck involved even in finding her but i think that she would be extremely happy that we did find her and i think that she would have been overjoyed to see us there that day [Music] it seems quite unbelievable that that it could actually happen but it has happened so what can we learn from it and that's urshler's legacy it's never too late to find your missing person [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 392,960

Keywords: news, abc, abc news, australia, Australian Story, true crime, Ursula Barwick, Peter Barwick, missing persons, NSW police, morgue, unidentified body, missing persons week, age-progressed images, missing person documentary, missing girl documentary, missing person Australia, Kings Cross, full length documentaries, missing persons case, missing persons unit

Id: 5KeMQtZXsMQ

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019