Missing person

Because I was actually looking at, uh... and we'll get to a little bit of it today.

I was actually looking at certain police reports regarding this land and certain missing persons reports that have been filed and stuff like that and so you'll have the documentation of every time the police went and, uh, like patrolled the whole area.

So it is crazy dude.

Like and they, they're not necessarily even patrolling it very often.

Like, a lot of it really just has to be theory or myth or something like that because there's no local records.

Like, they're completely washed, and it seems like the...

It seems like they're covering it up for a reason, and we're actually gonna be getting into the, uh, the freedom of, uh, Freedom of Information Act requests from certain people that were trying to figure out about this land, and whenever we get into the, the missings per- the missing person requests, like the list of missing persons, it seems like there's a, there's, there's a conversation between the police or the municipalities of that area and a phone call that was made by people who were possibly living there or people who were trying to, you know, take a little, take a little stroll through that forest, right?

Yeah.

So it had gotten to the point where there was eight victims in six barrels being stored by the killers in this bank, this disused bank, in the vault in the disused bank at Snowtown.

And for several months before this time, police, through a series of unrelated at first missing persons investigations into some of these victims, had started to realize that the names John Bunting and Robert Wagner were coming up over and over again.

Mm.

And so there was some limited surveillance on Wagner in particular and Bunting as suspects, and they had made a trip to Snowtown while under police surveillance.

His skeleton, his skull wasn't matched with his photograph by a forensic expert, who really should've been able to do that, and so the alarm wasn't ringing as loudly as it could.

But there was a, a senior copper, Paul Schramm, who got put in charge of major crime, and he instituted a new system, which is really quite common now, for reviewing cold cases.

And in particular, he was concerned about the number of cold missing persons cases that might really actually be murder.

And you've gotta remember, this is 20 years ago, so the computer systems, the intelligence systems, they weren't then what they are now.

So about 49,000 something per year, uh, which works out to 130 a day.

Um, but the bad news is that long-term missing persons, the number of those has increased, so we're looking at 2,800.

So 2,800 long-term missing persons.

Um, a mis- a long-term missing person is anyone, uh, missing longer than three months, uh, because then it becomes very difficult to find them.

Uh, out of the 49,000, um, it, there is a, a, a very good location rate.

It's something like 98% of people are located within a couple of weeks.

So you know, that w- things are improving there, uh, but long-term missing persons, um, yeah, still a problem.

Doing this for two decades as you have, what stands out to you the most about the systems we currently have in place to find people? You did say that there are some improvements in that space.