Marion Barter Bio – Marion Barter Wiki
Marion Barter is a missing Australian person, teacher, and mother of two, who disappeared on Sunday, 22 June 1997, from Southport, Queensland. She was dropped off at a bus station in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, to go to the airport for a planned, long-term vacation in England. She has not been seen since.
AGE:
Marion Barter was 51 years old.
DETAIL OF INCIDENCE:
Marion Barter won plaudits for her warmth as an elementary school teacher, but in 1997 the 51-year-old mother-of-two became restless, quit her job, sold her house, and flew from Australia’s beach-lined Gold Coast to start a new life in Europe.
Her family never saw her again.
If Barter had vanished without a trace, Australian police might have taken her case more seriously. Still, when her daughter, Sally Leydon, reported her missing, she wasn’t added to the missing person list, and later a police officer told her Barter wanted no contact with her family.
For Leydon, there were too many unanswered questions, and 25 years later, she is still searching for answers. Did her mother leave on her own accord, and did she genuinely want to vanish?
For over three years, journalists working with Leydon and a band of amateur sleuths have chased down clues, charting their progress in the podcast, “The Lady Vanishes,” with 14 million downloads, according to the podcast’s executive producer.
After the podcast aired, New South Wales police launched a formal review of the case, which gathered enough evidence to warrant a deeper investigation and eventually an inquest that ended last month.
To date, nobody has been charged with wrongdoing related to her mysterious disappearance.
On Wednesday, New South Wales State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan will hand down her findings into a case that tested evidence unearthed by the podcast and its listeners and information gathered by police.
Multiple witnesses gave evidence into Barter’s disappearance. Still, proceedings were dominated by the questioning of one man, Ric Blum, who, for the first time, responded directly to the question: “Did you kill Marion?”
Blum, now 83, emphatically denies killing Barter or involvement in her disappearance in 1997, though he told the court he had an affair with her for four months before she disappeared.
During the inquest, Blum was asked several times about multiple “coincidences,” including that Barter had changed her name in the days before she left Australia to an alias that Blum had used in an ad looking for companionship – that Barter answered.
Other women told the inquest of their encounters with Blum, claiming that he had presented himself as a single, wealthy coin dealer who, in some cases, promised a “new life” abroad.
Instead, the court heard Blum was a married father-of-two living on a disability pension with his wife in a small coastal town in New South Wales with criminal convictions in France and Belgium for fraud, forgery, and confidence tricks. Blum acknowledged he had affairs but denied any wrongdoing.
“It’s not just my mom who has been affected by this now. We’ve exposed a way bigger fish than what I ever expected to find,” Leydon told CNN. “I believe there are more (women) out there. And I really need to encourage people to come forward.”