In 40 years, no inquest was ever done.

So, uh, I don't believe that this has gone to the coroner.

So we are going through all our, uh, a number of our long-term missing persons cases that haven't, haven't been to the coroner yet and, uh, putting those forward to close the case from a, a legal sense, but still, it will always remain on our books as a case because that person has never been found.

Would that form part of the report to the coroner?

In relation to all of these long-term missing persons and our unidentified human remains, in the process of, um, reconciling, uh, those two to ensure that, uh, we can hopefully, uh, identify all our unidentified human remains.

Um, so that's a process that's in consultation with, um, ourselves, obviously the coroner and, uh, the state, uh, mortuary.

Or is there?

Um, most of the stuff that we've spoken about is in the report really.

Um, you know, other than other bits and pieces of sightings and stuff that we've-- that's been investigated and then proved or believed not to be correct, which happens in all inquiries.

There's people that see people all the time and call in and say they thought they see missing persons, and those... all those inquiries obviously naturally get investigated and either deemed as valid or not.

We did follow up this story when Sid first called, and the police, as I expected, said...

Yeah, from our records, there was a, um, an incident in Broome which occurred during the late evening of the sixth of August, where a Japanese diver has fallen overboard, uh, from a pearling lugger, which was traveling southwest off Broome.

Now, that was not reported to police until the following morning, the seventh of August, from what I understand from the records.

Uh, that would have taken, um, obviously, uh, two major incidents in a short space of time for Broome, which would have definitely impacted on their resources.

Yep.

He believed he saw him.

He didn't stop at the time.

He drove past with his truck, and then approximately 10 years later, whilst he was going past this same particular spot, so back in like 1989, he stopped and he's walked around the area and he's found an old black and white sock.

And then he, for some reason, did not report this to police at the time, and then reported it in 2014, this information, and he advised that it was due to his memory loss.

So did police ever question why this man took over 30 years to come forward?

I spoke, um, to the missing person investigator at the time, actually.

He said to me that he was, well, initially quite excited about the information that came through, thinking that there might have been a, uh, breakthrough in the case.