Every Town - Down Under Disappearances: Abduction Cases That Rocked Australia Darren Saltmarsh & Julian Buchwald

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Two men from Australia, two different motivations BUT very similar strange and parallel stories. You see Love, greed and lust can make a man do unwise things — and in todays episode we’ve got a pair of stories about just that, you’ll need to hear to believe.  💥 Watch On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries🎧 Our Other Podcast: https://scarymysteries.buzzsprout.com💥 Exclusive Podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579/subscribe 💀 Follow Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 💀 Follow Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg👁 Follow Our TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald💥 Follow Our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial🗣 Business Inquiries: [e-mail] Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine, because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between. With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime.

Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Two men from Australia, two different motivations, but very similar, strange, and parallel stories. You see, love, greed, and lust can make a man do unwise things. In today's episode, we've got a pair of stories about just that. I'll need you hear to believe.

I'm Andrew. Welcome to this week's episode of Everytown. We're on separate occasions, Julian Bushwald and Darren Saltmolmol. Marsh, were convicted of kidnapping women they were interested in. While Darren kidnapped his victim for monetary reasons, Julian abducted his girlfriend because he wanted to impress her with a very elaborate and terrifying plan. But let's get into it. Darren Wayne Salt Marsh was an unlucky, jobless gambling addict,

who should have stuck to impersonating clumsy movie spy Austin Powers instead of trying to lure a foreign Asian student into his web of lies and deceit. A fortunate female victim, an Nepalese woman who remained unnamed, endured terror, that she had never dreamed of experiencing, and learned that while you yourself may be a kind and loving person, the world is populated with many strange and eccentric people, Darren Saltmarsh being one of them. Darren met his 29-year-old victim on the internet in 2011.

when 35-year-old Salt Marsh was already a married man, but he was creeping around online, as seen right off the bat with the username he chose, want Asian love. After some back and forth, they actually met in person. After that face-to-face, he felt confident in asking her if she was interested in paying for an arranged marriage with him, something that would cost her $20,000, but would get her a residency permit in exchange. Once he refused the offer, Darren felt jilted. He may have been angry because he was rejected, maybe because he really wanted that money,

or maybe a bit of both. But Darren, you see, was not going down without a fight. He was going to get that paper when he felt it was owed to him. In her own words, the biggest mistake the victim made was ever trusting this man in the first place. October 18th of 2011, Darren talked to victim and to meeting him in person. once again, this time in downtown Melbourne, a very public place under the guise of taking her

to a friend's house for a hangout. The details are not fully clear, but allegedly, as soon as he made contact with her, he bound the woman up with tape before stuffing her in the trunk of his car. He drove her around for a long time when she became ill. While alone in that trunk, thoughts must have flooded through her mind. Was he going to kill her? Was she going to do her? Was she going to die in this trunk where it was hard to breathe. Should she just play along, calmly, talk her way out of it? After all, she knew the man, at least sort of. So how could this be happening?

She thought of dialing triple zero, but she was too scared that Darren might catch her and do horrible things. When they finally arrived at his father's property in Packingham, a house in the outer Melbourne suburbs, Darren apparently held a knife to the woman's throat and said, Don't shout or yell, or you will be killed. He proceeded to tell her that he was going to get that $20,000, only this time it would be in ransom money. Calls were made to her family and friends for the cash,

and some money was stolen from her bank accounts. But when no ransom was forthcoming, little by little, the woman's fears started to increase. She was bound to a chair, only free to take a toilet break. By the second day, the fear of being caught. may have hit Mr. Saltmarsh. There was no money, but he had kidnapped the woman, and so now what? In the backyard of his dad's house, Darren dug a shallow grave where he tried to muster up

the strain to put her in there. Finally, by the third day of her captivity, it was time. He put a beanie over her head and let her out into the sunshine where he then shoved her in that grave. In her testimony, she said, At that point, I thought maybe I'm going to die today and it'll take all the money from my family. But when neither of them knew was that detectives had already been surveilling Darren.

They had, in fact, watched the previous day as he removed the dirt from the ground. So, once he threw her in, authorities were quick to jump to the rescue where they arrested Darren, who was still holding his shovel. Down at the station, he told the police that he had searched the internet looking for foreign students to blackmail because he believed they were working in violation of their student visas. He seemed particularly annoyed that they were granted Australian visas while his Filipino wife couldn't get one. So he was trying to justify his actions like some do-good vigilante. Darren also allegedly claimed that he and his kidnapped victim were going to marry each other

and that she had actually participated in the plot so they could get money from her family. And in order to cover all his bases, at the court hearing, the man also claimed that the grave he had dug was just so it could be photographed as part of the plot. But all of this was a lie, of course. Darren ultimately pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, robbery, theft, and extortion, and the court found him guilty of kidnapping and attempted murder. Justice Betty King jailed him for nine and a half years with a seven-year minimum. She said in her statement,

You are not any form of criminal mastermind, that this was not a well-thought-out offense is obvious. You used your own motor vehicle, you used your father's house in which to detain the victim. She also went on to say that the story he told the police was laughable, that it was only his own incompetence and using his own phone to seek ransom, and allowed the police to find him and prevented this crime from coming, to a dreadful conclusion. Both Justice King and prosecutor Julian Ayers agreed that the victim's

kidnapping experience must have been horrific. He further underscored that the alleged offenses were calculated pre-planned plot against a vulnerable and isolated student. The director of public prosecution successfully appealed the sentence, and it increased a 12-year jail time with a nine-year minimum. The lawyer of Mr. Saltmarsh, Rob Deville, came to his defense by saying that Darren was a man with no prior history, a strong support system from family and friends, and lived in a stable residence. However, Deputy Chief Magistrate Dan Mulling refused bail, saying the prosecutor's case was strong, and the woman had been put through extreme trauma. And meanwhile, Darren's mother Pamela was able to avoid jail because of her minor involvement. In her Supreme Court hearing,

it was discovered that she had performed errands for her son during the October 2011 abduction, including using the victim's bank card to withdraw $800 from an ATM, 400 of which he kept, and she hadn't questioned her son what the money was for. Interestingly, the case of Darren Saltmarsh wasn't the first one like this in the suburbs of Australia. Just a few years before in March of 2008, a young man's passionate love for his girlfriend drove him to abductor, hoping to force her to marry him in the end, but as Faye would have it, there was no blissful ending for them. This young sweet romance involved 22-year-old Julian Bushwald and 17-year-old Carolyn Watson, who had met a church. Julian was just one year old

when he migrated to Australia from Germany with his family, and it's the only place he's ever known his home. He was a mild-mannered young adult. He was a timber logger when he met Carolyn, the local church, and soon romance blossomed. However, they maintained a non-sexual relationship for two years as Carol Lynn wanted to finish high school. Perhaps even way for marriage. As their relationship was getting serious and heading towards tying the knot as they had planned, Julian started building a house on a rural block that he bought near Gippsland, a rural region in the southern part of Victoria. It was to be their haven as a couple. However, some friction arose as to actual details of when they would marry. See, Julian wanted to settle down as soon as his

girlfriend turned 18. Well, Carolin wasn't so sure about that. She was possibly interested in college and taking things at a bit of a slower pace. As their dispute went on, the couple sought the help of their pastor about their splitting views, and they were advised to take a break. from each other for about a month and think things over. So they did as the good pastor said, but strangely, when they got back together, things didn't feel the same as before. There was still tension about when to marry. Nothing magically changed, and perhaps, not liking the forceful nature of it all.

Carolyn started to withdraw a bit, and clearly this pissed off the lumberjack who then hatched a plan he hoped would leave Miss Watson so much in love that she would have. have no reservations about finally tying the knot. In March of 2008, Julian asked his parents if he could take his girlfriend on a romantic picnic on his parents' sprawling rural property. He told him that he and Carol Lim planned to plant trees, pick some flowers, and check out the waterfalls. The seemingly romantic and harmless Julian later claimed that part of his grand plan was a treasure hunt, with the prize being a handcrafted wooden platter that Miss Watson would find near the waterfall filled with sandwiches yet prepared. And if we're being honest, that sounds like a perfect spring date.

But behind all those romantic innuendos was something much darker. And if that date seemed too good to be true, it's because it actually was. On that morning, Julian went to the property not to hide sandwiches and a cheese plate, but to hide gloves, a mask, a jacket, a yellow blanket, ropes, duct tape, and military pants. Later on, he drove his girlfriend out to the property, where he left Carolyn in his four-wheel vehicle with an excuse that he had planted a deer skin near the track that he was going to go get. He then returned, wearing fresh clothes and the ski mask, and pretended that he was a kidnapper. Caroline was terrified and disbelieved. Carolin was terrified and disbelief.

She was hog-tied quickly, blindfolded, duct-taped, and prone in the car's back seat before being driven six hours to the Alpine National Park in Victoria's northeast region. Once there, Julian cut off all his girlfriend's clothes

and dumped her on the side of the road. She later said that she could hear the kidnapper digging a grave for a long time before suddenly taking off. A while later, she heard footsteps approaching thinking the man was back, but in a weak voice she heard her boyfriend call out instead. Julian pulled down her blindfold and she saw him naked with ropes around his wrist.

He explained that he bravely fought off two kidnappers, but it smashed his head with a metal rod, a wound which he saw was bleeding. In reality, though, Julian had scratched his head when he jumped into the car and decided to leave the blood on his face to support his fabricated story. Luckily, though, one of the kidnappers apparently left him. behind the knife he had used to remove their clothes. They used that to break free from the ropes. They tried to get to the car, but they didn't have the keys, which is when Julian urged Carolyn to grab what she could and run should the kidnappers come back, shoving a sleeping bag into her

arms. Now all this time, the poor girl had been traumatized by the events that unfolded. She was sure she was going to die when she heard the grave being dug. But Julian saving her, She would follow them anywhere now. They plunged into a freezing river and kept going. Eventually, she found, she was carrying a sleeping bag containing a toothbrush and half a pillowcase filled with dried coconut. Julian had the knife, a shovel, and one jar each of peanut butter and tahini, condiment made of ground sesame seeds, which is kind of a bizarre choice for a survival pack,

but to each their own. For the next six days, Julian and Carol, Marilyn spent the days and nights wandering naked through the bush with only those items. They took the most rugged routes to deter their non-existent pursuers. They slept together under the one sleeping bag as the nights got cold. Julian went on to officially propose to her, thinking it would be a great story to tell someday. After that, he slipped in that maybe, in order to stay warm, they should have sex. She refused, though.

On night four, he tried again and said, they were likely to perish in the cold they should marry in the eyes of God before they died. Again, the 17-year-old Ms. Watson refused, saying her parents wouldn't approve. After almost a week, a farmer driving a utility truck, came across them, and that's when the couple retrieves some of their stolen clothes. The two were taken to the Boochim police station with a story, as you can imagine, just didn't add up. Eventually, Julian will go on to admit that he staged the whole kidnapping because he wanted to spend more time with his girl, but that he wasn't guilty of actually kidnapping. During the trial, a jury, though, found him guilty of kidnapping,

and making a false report to police. He got lucky and was freed on bail while awaiting sentencing. Julian would go on to dye his hair black and darken his pale skin with a fake tan, and substituted his photograph onto a genuine Indian passport. And he fooled immigration authorities in Sydney, managing to fly to India via Singapore on a planned journey to Germany, where he had relatives. He almost managed to get away, but the Indian authorities were able to decipher his absurd disguise and detained him. At Julian's hearing, the county court heard he suffered a pervasive development disorder, which meant he struggled to empathize with others. He was sentenced for kidnapping and making false reports, which got him a five-to-seven-year sentence.

Later he pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to appear in court when he had tried to flee and six months was added to his minimum term. In 2014, the Immigration and Border Protection Department told Julian his permanent residency visa was under review in Australia. He responded by showing he had job offers upon his release, spotless record before his crazy kidnap plan, and that his life, friends, and family were all in Australia. His pleas were rejected, though.

And in October that year, immigration minister Scott Morrison cancelled his visa. Julian appealed to the federal court, but the minister found he had no case. Had Julian applied for citizenship before his botched kidnap scheme, it would have been granted and then residency would not be an issue. But he didn't, and so he was chucked on a plane and dumped back in Germany. So, where Julian has gone from here is anyone's guess. Darren Salt Marsh could be freed any day now. These two did some horrifying and strange things for love and money.

Both committed the same crime for different reasons, but in the eyes of justice, both men deserve the penance they had to face. Hopefully, they don't do anything weird like this again. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Go check out this episode in video form over on our YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries, where we have a bunch of other true crime and strange content for you to watch and listen to. Thanks for tuning in today.

Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.