Why would they accuse Lorna in the first place? Did they have any evidence?

I don't think so.

I don't...

Uh, there were some neighbors who had some strange stories.

Um, one of them was about a fire.

Um, and Anita, I spoke to Anita about this directly and, and said, "Well, you know, tell me about the fire." Um, one of the neighbors reported that Lorna had burned, um, Brad's body on a mattress in the bedroom, and Anita said, "Absolute rubbish." Anita still lived in the same house.

She lived in the same house her entire life.

Wow

... over 20 years of experience?

Yeah, that's, that's absolutely a myth, I think perpetuated [laughs] by American crime shows.

We don't have to wait any amount of time to report someone missing.

So that, that 24 hours doesn't exist in Australia.

Um, you will sometimes find police who might be reluctant to take a report if they think, "Oh, maybe the person just has taken off a little bit." But, you know, the, it's the families who really know the missing person the best, and if you know that someone is not meant to be dis- have, have disappeared, is not meant to be uncontactable, then, you know, tru- trust your gut and go and report them as a missing person because, uh, it, it is those early days, those early hours that are absolutely crucial in finding them if something terrible has happened.

Um, you wanna get onto that really quickly, and particularly when you've got really vulnerable people, when you've got young children or really elderly persons, you need to be reporting them missing within minutes rather than hours.

Yeah

... that no one knows who this young man is? And we have- Hundreds, literally hundreds of sets of remains in morgues around Australia that we haven't identified.

W- were you, um, sort of someone close to you has gone missing? Why the interest for yourself?

Yeah.

No, I've never had a missing person in my own life.

I was just one of those people that is, was a very curious kind of child and, and teenager.

Um, it was always fascinating to me why someone would go missing.

You know, has it...

What's the mystery? Is it foul play? Is it, have they chosen to go missing? So, it, that kind of was always, it stuck with me.

... over 20 years' experience?

Nielsen, that's a fascinating story, that.

Oh, she was – I have such admiration for her because she took on a cause and was passionate about it and let nothing stand in her way.

Even when she was getting – she would have had daily threats against her life.

She knew how much danger she was in.

If you have visited inner city Sydney, so Darlinghurst, Surrey Hills, all around that area, Paddington, and seen the beautiful terrace houses – that are there, they are there because Juanita Nielsen stood up and said, you're not going to knock them down.

We are not going to make this part of the expansion of the city.

And so all of the people that owned that land and wanted to develop all of that land were very angry about this because she was able to, being a newspaper owner, she was able to get the word out through Sydney.

Do you think rewards help solve some of these things? There was a million dollar reward put up for Janine Vaughan and she's still missing.

What can you tell us about that?

Oh, it's...

I still can't believe.

I- I've been making appeals for h- him for so long, and I can't believe I still am, to the point where I thought, "Oh, I have to put him in the book," because it's been so many years.

So, uh, in 2003, uh, skeletal remains were found, um, in the Rainforest Reserve at Iluka Beach in New South Wales.

Um, which is a very pretty spot, um, but sadly, it looks like this young man had taken his own life.

The police I spoke to said, you know, "We never say that definitively unless we have absolute proof," but it, it appears that way, that he has taken his own life.

There are a couple of men in the mix that, uh, other kids have, have nominated.

Have you seen, do you think anecdotally there has been an increase in homelessness and in, um, uh, home insecurity in Australia?

I think so, yeah.

I, I think so.

I think it's certainly, um, contributed to mental health crisises, which then leads to people going missing, to adults going missing.

But, um, yeah, I think...

And, and I'm quite often seeing the same kids pop up over and over again, the same, you know, they, th- they've been missing before, and you recognize their name, and, and again, missing again.

And you just think, "What is going on in this poor child's life to cause this?" I think absolutely all of these pressures contribute to immense head pressure, immense head, um, confusion, and that, uh, you know, is obviously gonna lead to bad choices.

Oh.

What, what's your take on it though? 'Cause I'm sure you would've seen situations like that before, and how, how do you deal with it?

I actually wrote an entire chapter on this exact topic.

I wrote a whole chapter that was supposed to be, I think it was supposed to be in the second book, and it was a young man missing from the Newcastle area, and he had a history of severe mental illness.

Um, he was the, the, the most distressed, tortured young man.

It absolutely broke my heart.

Um, his mum found him in a really terrible state.

He hadn't showered for weeks, he hadn't been eating properly, he was, he hadn't been taking his medication, and she took him home with her for a few days, and he disappeared from her home.

... yeah, all the, all these cases, is there one that jumps out to you, one that, uh, uh, resulted you didn't see coming? Like, when you've sat down and spoken to the families or seen how that played out or when you were researching any of the cases, did it have a twist and turn that you didn't expect?

Have you seen that working in

action in a positive way? It's really hard because when you write about cold cases, cold cases are really almost impossible to solve.

As I said, it's a miracle when you get a conviction after such a long time.

But I think the hope is always there.

What the first books definitely achieved was in Vanished, I spoke about 16-year-old Norman Lawson, who was exactly the same age as me, about a month apart we were born.

So I always think of Norm.

And he went missing in Kakadu.

So if you could change one thing about the way Australia approaches missing persons, what would it be?

But let's go back in time and kind of look at the transition from 2015 today as a start to that.

top of mind, yeah, you know, because we were partnered with another institution, it was very academic.

You know, it's interesting, as I think about the evolution, it was very academic in the sense that we were really grounded with, you know, a lot of business school principles, a lot of doctrinal intellectual property and legal thoughts.

And I've kept some of those The core aspects of the sort of academic learnings, I know business school folks hate to think of this term, they don't like it anymore, but I think it's still applicable, like lean startup, right? What it means now, agile, I don't even know if they use agile anymore, but...

Those principles are consistent, whether you want to brand it with some new shiny term.

I've kept some of those teachings, obviously the legal teachings around intellectual property, licensing, tech transactions, super important.

But we've evolved in the sense of, I bring in a lot of guest speakers to kind of talk about what are we doing now? In the last three years, the disruption has, to the legal industry with AI has been so pronounced that we can't ignore how legal work will change and is changing.

I think of it as like

it feel like it is a bit more of a systemic issue.

Yeah, and it's certainly, definitely not something I intended to do.

I've always had a really good working relationship with the police, and it's definitely some- not something I wanted to do or intended to do, but I couldn't, uh, change the stories that were coming from the families.

Uh, and it's, and it's very much from them.

Uh, and because I would say to the question, "Okay, how did police handle your case?" And in Kay and Tony's case, Tony's stepmom went to the police and said, and said, "Has there been any news about, about Tony?" And they said, "Oh, you know, if there is, we'll let you know." And she, she walked away, and the words she used to me were, um, "I felt like they were talking about a missing dog." And, and how awful that the police would make you feel that, that that's how they felt about your child.

And, and so I can't portray that in any other way than that's how it made them feel.

Uh, and there's, there are amazing police officers out there.

What do we know about her disappearance, and why was it back in the headlines recently?