How can a woman vanish without a trace?

Sam Hawley: On a Sunday morning more than three weeks ago, Ballarat woman Samantha Murphy set out for a run in dense bushland near her home. She was expected back mid-morning for a family gathering, but she never arrived. She’d vanished. Police have now wound back their search for the missing mother, but the community has rallied to try and find answers. Today, what happened to Samantha Murphy? I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.

Norman Hermant: My name’s Norman Hermant, I’m with 730 Report, and I’m one of the ABC journalists who has been covering the Samantha Murphy story.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, and you’ve been down to Ballarat a few times, haven’t you?

Norman Hermant: Yes, been down there monitoring the search and taking the pulse of the community, really.

Volunteer: I think as a community, we just want answers. Hopefully this support is just showing how together the Ballarat community is.

Volunteer:  You sort of sit on the sidelines for a while and you’re just wondering what you can do, and today is the day that you think you could possibly help.

Sam Hawley: On the weekend, the Ballarat community launched its own search effort, didn’t it?

Norman Hermant: It did, and that’s because there’s a huge desire, obviously, in the community for answers. People are really concerned about what’s happened, they want to help, and the official search has been substantially scaled back now, so people are taking it upon themselves in the hopes that maybe they would find something, anything that has been missed.

Volunteer: As a young woman, it’s so daunting and scary to think that something like that could happen to anyone, so anything, just come out and help.

Sam Hawley: And as we said, you’ve been down there, you were there again this week. What have people been telling you?

Norman Hermant: Well, as you can imagine, Sam, we’re sort of in the realm now, you’re more than three weeks into somebody just completely disappearing, and there’s been a very substantial large search and they have found nothing. So you begin to get into the realm of theories and conspiracies and rumour, all sorts of crazy ideas. But you know, there was a press conference, this is nothing that people hadn’t heard, been following the story, the question was raised, could, is there bikey involvement? And as far as we can tell, that entire line of rumour and questioning traces back to one media conference with one question from one reporter…

Journalist: Are there any bikie links that you’ve uncovered?

Mark Hatt, Detective Acting Superintendent, Victoria Police: I can’t comment on specifics of the investigation at this time.

Norman Hermant: …That one question has just been picked up by everyone and no one’s quite sure where that reporter had that information from. So you sort of get into this situation where these stories become, start to run around the community, but nobody really has any idea of whether they’re accurate or not.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s norm step back a little bit and tell me, what do we know of Samantha Murphy’s movements before she disappeared?

Norman Hermant: So this goes back to Sunday, the 4th of February. She left her house at around 7am and we know that because she had told her family she was planning to go for a run, quite an extensive run, something like 14, 15 kilometres in a local regional park. And we also have the only footage, the last footage we have of her is from a CCTV camera at their house where at around 7pm there was an image from the camera of her getting ready to leave. She was expected to come back at around 11 o’clock for family function, I believe a brunch. She never got back for that. So she was reported missing soon after that. Really, all they have in terms of what we know about her whereabouts are that one image at 7am in the morning and then of course, police won’t say exactly when, but later in the day, her phone did ping on a mobile tower south of the region she was expected to be running in, but in the general vicinity. But that ping, as we sort of explored in some of our reporting, is not terribly specific because unlike the movies where you have triangulation and people can take a ping and work out where a location is if a mobile device registers with the tower, in most of Australia outside very urban areas, you just don’t have enough towers to create that triangulation.

Sam Hawley: Right, okay. Well, Norm, just tell me about Samantha Murphy. What do we know about her?

Norman Hermant: We know she’s 51. She’s got three kids. She and her husband run a business. It’s basically a panel beaters. It’s called Inland Motor Body Works. In Ballarat this week, we sort of found out that she is involved in the running of the business. She does a lot of the administration and she’s a very good person. Running of the day-to-day activities. She’s a regular runner, so it wouldn’t be unusual for her to go on a Sunday and go for quite a long run. And the only thing you’ve heard in the community are just positive things about her. Just a very upstanding citizen who has a lot of friends in Ballarat.

Sam Hawley: And her husband and daughter actually spoke to the press, didn’t they, a few weeks back?

Norman Hermant: They did. That’s the only time we’ve heard from them. And if people have been following their story, they’ve seen probably clips of that.

Jess Murphy: Mum’s a really strong woman and she’s far too determined to give up this fight.

Norman Hermant: It’s a very powerful, emotional press conference of both Michael Murphy and her eldest daughter Jess Murphy saying that, you know, they just want their mother and, of course, Michael’s wife back. But also just, you know, people just don’t disappear. And that was something that was said at that press conference and obviously resonated with people.

Mick Murphy: People just don’t vanish in the thin air. Someone’s got to know something. You know, whether it be any little thing that you might think is relevant, just call the police, let them know, you know. It’ll give us a bit of peace of mind. We’ll get some hope from someone.

Norman Hermant: You know, there was this funny issue in Ballarat that has gotten a lot of attention, and that’s that police have gone out of their way to say that Mick, Michael Murphy, or Mick Murphy as he’s known, is not a suspect. And that was probably in response to early on in the days of this, he was pictured with police and he was sort of pictured smiling. This one picture of him sort of having smiling in this interaction just sent tongues wagging that, oh, my goodness, he’s not acting the correct way. And there’s something funny about that. So they sort of have gone out of their way to say that he is at the present time not a suspect. And, you know, that has been said several times at media conferences.

Sam Hawley: All right. So her husband’s not a suspect and there’s no evidence that she left of her own accord. I know you’ve said there’s lots of theories going around, but what do police think may have happened, Norm?

Norman Hermant: Well, late last week, Sam, we got this update that they now believe, you know, this much time passing that she’s it’s very unlikely she’s still alive. And they had come to this conclusion that more parties are likely to have been involved in her disappearance.

Mark Hatt, Detective Acting Superintendent, Victoria Police: We’re looking into a number of people from information that we have received. And all I can say is that our avenues are taking us down certain directions and we’re following everything. Everyone in relation to Samantha is a person of interest in our investigation. We are speaking to everyone that was in her life.

Norman Hermant: So, they are certainly setting up this theory that somehow she has been assaulted, maybe attacked and removed from the area. Whether they believe that there’s more than one person involved in this, who knows? But the thing, the reason the official search has been scaled back in terms of maybe she has run into some sort of medical issue and collapsed when she was on a run and just hasn’t been found. I don’t think that they think that that is a likely theory anymore. And that is simply because these areas have now been combed by hundreds and hundreds of people repeatedly.

Mark Hatt, Detective Acting Superintendent, Victoria Police: On the particular day, we have ruled out that she suffered any sort of medical episode. And we have no information to suggest that she left the area of her own accord. So we then start looking at other possible scenarios which may have led her to be missing.

Norman Hermant: It is a difficult area. The landscape is not inaccessible, but it’s, you know, there’s a lot of dense bush. There’s small, low-level grass trees and other shrubs in the area. So if somebody was, had fallen down on the ground, it would be difficult to see them. The other issue that people have talked about is there are mine shafts in the area that she runs, but not a lot. We spoke to a mining, a former mining engineer, and he thought it was pretty unlikely she would have fallen into a mine shaft in that sense. So as I say, it’s not just that they haven’t found her. There is almost nothing, Sam. There’s no physical evidence, not a piece of clothing, nothing at all has been found of her. So that’s probably why police have sort of started to introduce people to this idea that it’s very likely she’s been removed from the area.

Sam Hawley: And Norm, you also spoke to another female runner who told you a really unnerving story about her experience in bushland near Ballarat.

Sissy Austin: My mind is, yeah, kind of a lot thinking about what Sam could be going through or may have gone through. So yeah, my mind’s been drifting in all different places with the lead up to the anniversary of my, yeah, attack.

Norman Hermant: That’s right. So this is Gunditjmara woman, Sissy Austin, who about this time last year was trail running in an area not far away from where Samantha Murphy went missing. And while she was on her run, a man stepped out and hit her with a rock tied to the end of a stick. And she had pretty severe injuries and knocked her out. And this attacker was never found. She had not been contacted by police yet even about this latest situation. We’d heard from her recently that she did email police about her case and whether this investigation has connected to her case. And they have simply responded by saying that the investigation is still ongoing.

Sissy Austin: I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the community’s 100 per cent on edge, especially the running community. But everyone’s out here. It’s kind of an eerie feeling out here.

Sam Hawley: Well, Norm, there’s been, as we’ve mentioned, a huge response from the local community. People who didn’t even know Samantha Murphy have spent hours scouring the bushland to try and find her. Did you get a sense that there’s a concern from the community that the police aren’t doing enough to try and find her?

Norman Hermant: Look, I’m not going to go that far. The people we spoke to are definitely uncomfortable. And it’s not only there’s a lot of runners in that area, particularly women who go running, and they’re obviously now having substantial concerns. And we even spoke to people who are just bushwalkers who go on their own. And even they are thinking twice about what they do. I wouldn’t say it’s fear. That’s definitely too far. But there’s no question people in are talking about this and it’s on their minds.

Community member: They want to know, like everybody wants to know something.

Community member: Just sort of mysterious. I mean, very mysterious, that one. Who knows?

Sam Hawley: So it’s definitely sparked concern about women’s safety and safety overall in that area. Norm, what are the next steps? What comes now?

Norman Hermant: Well, as you’ve seen, Sam, the immediate threats are some of this community search has had to be curtailed and even suspended because of the terrible, serious fire dangers in Ballarat in that vicinity. And it’s probably too dangerous to have people out there searching. But when that lifts, I would imagine those community efforts will continue. I can only assume we wait for our next update from police. One of the big things they’re talking about is they have 12,000 hours of CCTV footage from various locations that they have to go to. That is an incredibly painstaking effort. So, you know, that’s the sort of stage we’re in. It’s a very frustrating stage because there isn’t a lot of new information, but that doesn’t mean the investigation isn’t ongoing.

Sam Hawley: Norman Hermant is a reporter with ABC TV’s 730 program. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald and Nell Whitehead. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on abcnewsdaily at abc.net.au. Thanks for listening.