Missing Niamh - 5: Episode 5: Jack’s story

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Kieron finally tracks down Jack and Garth. Jack said he dropped Niamh off to hitchhike, but she had a bus ticket, so his story makes no sense. Jack told police he left her on Gocup Road in Tumut. The police begin a search of the area. https://missingniamh.com

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BidMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When 18-year-old Neem May failed to use her CountryLink ticket to Sydney on Easter Sunday in 2002, her family became worried. Nahum had booked and paid for the ticket in the small apple-growing town of Batlow in New South Wales, where she had spent the last six weeks fruit picking and enjoying her gap year between school and university. Her parents, Anne and Brian, reported her missing from their hometown in Armadale, 800 kilometres north.

Nahum's brother, Kieran, travelled to Batlow to search for his sister and found out the missing persons report that had been faxed to Batlow from police in Armidale had not been received because Batlow's police station wasn't staffed every day. This meant that until his arrival, nobody in Batlow knew Niamh was missing and the police were not looking for her. During his inquiries in Batlow, Kieran learnt more about the two men, Jack Nicholson and Garth Gemmel, that Neham had mentioned in phone calls back home. On his quest to track down Jack and Garth, who had left town after Easter, Kieran finally got Garth's mobile number. He tried calling, but it went to message bank. A short time later, Kieran got a voice message from Garth saying Jack had dropped Niamh off in Tumet, a town 30 minutes drive from where Niamh needed to catch the bus in Batlow. Just after 10am on Saturday the 6th of April 2002, Kieran's phone

pinged with a text message. In all capitals, it read, CALL JACK'S PHONE, followed by a mobile phone number. At 10.15am, Kieran called the number, hoping against hope that Jack would know where Niamh was. Air reception was really bad. You know, there was static in the background. You could tell that he was, I guess, in a vehicle or somewhere on the move. Garth had sent me a text saying, call Jack's phone. And as far as I knew, Garth was on his way one way and Jack was on his way another. And Garth had basically told me, well, you know, Jack said he dropped her at Tumut to get the bus to see her sister. That was that. In all the talking to people around town while looking for his sister,

Kieran found that concern was usually their first response, but not Jack. So then I called, well, I called Jack, obviously, hey, I'm Neem's brother, you know, we're a bit concerned, we haven't seen her, you know, it's what, six days, seven days later now? We really need to know what's happened, can you tell me where she is? He was as cool and calm as a cucumber. If you had just been told that one of your friends who you'd last seen a week ago was now missing, you'd be shocked, surprised, concerned. There was none of that. He was just super calm. And that was what was weird about it. The fact that there was no emotion, no concern, nothing. He simply said, look, I dropped her in Tumut on Saturday around 1 to 2pm. She was going to try and hitchhike to Gundagai or Kutamundra and save some money on a CountryLink

ticket. But it didn't make any sense. Niamh had already bought her ticket. Why would she need to save money on a ticket? Last the family heard, Niamh had gone down to Gingellic for a sightseeing trip with Jack and Garth in the hearse. Gingellic was an hour's drive to the south of Batlow. Why would Jack drive her past Batlow, then to Tumet, another half hour further on, when her bus ticket was for Batlow? And it was really hard to hear what he was saying. It was dropping in and out. But I remember saying, that doesn't make any sense. You know, why would you do that?

She had a ticket from Batlow. It was already paid for. And Batlow's closer than Tumut. Why would you try and hitchhike? Because you're going to miss your connection anyway. And I said, where did you drop her off? And he said, oh, on the top of town on Go Cup Road. So he knew the name of the road. He knew, you know, just outside, you know, I said, okay. And he was sort of avoiding it. He just repeated when I said, why would you do that?

It doesn't make any sense. He said, look, I dropped her in Tumut at this time, at this place. He just repeated it. And that was it. After the call cut out, Kieran tried to call Jack again, but there was no answer. Kieran was with Neem's butler friends, Nicole and John, and they were already close by to Tumut Police Station. So I felt like I'd been kicked in the guts and the phone kept dropping out. And I, yeah, it was bad.

I knew it was bad. I was trying not to shake. I got in the car. Nicole and Johnny were with me. We were already on our way to the police station, which was five minutes down the road. And, yeah, so I got in there, pulled out my little notebook, started with the spiel.

You know, I'm here for a missing persons case. This is the case number. She was reported by my parents in Armidale. We've been investigating for the last four days. Here's everything we've done. We've obviously got serious concerns about her welfare. I've just spoken to the last person to see her alive that we knew about. And he's giving me a bullshit story.

Far from reporting his sister missing to police and seeing them mobilise the troops, Kieran was met with initial resistance by the officer at the desk. He felt the cops saw him as yet another relative jumping the gun on a family member who would soon show up. The police officer told Kieran there was not much they could do. That's when, in desperation to find his sister, Kieran lost his temper.

His sister, Fanula, remembers this. So he then went to the Tumut police station and walked in and basically said, you know, my sister's missing and nobody's investigating it, what's going on? She'd been reported missing, why hasn't anything happened? And the desk person, I don't know who they were, Kieran is, let's just say, pretty blunt, and he said I was this close to jumping over the bench

and just punching me in the face because they were just so unhelpful. Senior Constable Stan Waugh was at his desk at the station when he heard animated voices coming from the reception out front. So he heard it and was like, let me take this, and took Kieran into a room, started talking to him, and he said, you know, within five minutes of talking to Kieran, he knew that it was severe. And sometimes all it takes is one cop who listens.

That's when Stan, this big, towering, I don't know, he seemed like he was seven feet tall, big, towering country cop came around the corner and just quietly asked if I'd like to come into a side room with him and chat about it. And we went in there and he looked up the case number and I sort of went through the people I'd spoken to and the steps we'd taken along the way.

While Kieran was talking to Senior Constable Wall, he received a message. It was 10.35am, 20 minutes after he had last spoken to Jack on the phone call with the bad reception. It read, Given that he was the last person that they knew had seen Niamh, he was someone the police really needed to speak to. Senior Constable Stan Wall took charge. And he told me, listen, I want you to call this guy Jack back.

I'm going to be sitting here with you and we'll go through it together. We'll ask some questions. And I tried three or four times on my mobile over about half an hour to get in touch. And I couldn't. And I said, look, I know he's on the road somewhere. When the police couldn't get back onto Jack, they began mapping out the possible routes he could have taken to get from Gingellic to Tumut. It wasn't an easy task. And then of course the police were trying to nail down the timeline of Jack's movements. So Gingellic's down on the border

and it's about an hour and 30, hour and 40 minutes between Gingell and tumut and there are a number of different ways you can drive there so from gingellic to tumbarumba the next town is fairly straightforward from tumbarumba towards batlow there are there's forest everywhere and to the east is blowering dam and all sorts of dirt roads and to the west are all sorts of forestry roads and dirt roads. And just before you get into Batlow, there's a bypass, so you don't need to drive down into the town. You can continue on. You can also take some logging roads,

which come out north of Batlow and some come out near Adelong. But to Kieran, the very act of mapping routes to Tumut felt wrong. Why wouldn't Jack have dropped a knee him off in Batlow? So there are all these other possible routes that you could take. And it never made sense to me why he was heading towards Tumut when Batlow was right there. She had a ticket and she obviously had friends that she wanted to say goodbye to or hadn't seen before she was going to leave. I think it's possible that he said go Cup Road and Tumut because he knew there was every possibility that someone was going to report a sighting of the hearse there.

So I suspect that he was in that area for some other reason and that's why he wanted to make sure that, yeah, yeah, I told you I was there. Senior Constable Stan Wall finally got through to Jack's mobile later that morning. Finally, Stan picked up the police landline and called his mobile and he answered. And he was super friendly and super

cooperative. And Stan explained who he was and said, look, can I just get your name and date of birth? And he asked Jack where he was and he said, I'm on the road to Deniliquin. And he said, look, it's really hard to talk to you on the mobile. Do you mind going into the police station there so I can call you on a landline? I need to ask you about this girl. You know, we're a bit worried about where she's been. And he said, yep, no worries. We're about 15 minutes away from town. So when he got to the police station, they booked him into a room and they followed up and asked him some questions.

Deniliquin is a town about 350 kilometres west of Batlow and roughly 300 kilometres north of Melbourne, Victoria. It sits just near the state border in the Riverina region of rural New South Wales. Jack wasn't by himself when he arrived at Deniliquin Police Station. He had Garth with him and they had been travelling together ever since they left Batlow. It was certainly a surprise to Kieran that Garth was with Jack. He was under the impression the two had separated. Yes, now that's what shocked me. Garth was sitting next to Jack the whole time. I had no idea they were together.

Garth made no mention of the fact that he was still travelling with Jack. Jack would have been aware that I'd spoken to Garth. Garth on the Friday night had said, I'm on the road at the moment. And, you know, when he left his message and hung up, I thought, what the fuck? You're sitting right next to each other and pretending or acting like you're not together.

That's what it felt like and it didn't make any sense to me. Kieran wasn't backward in letting the police officer know exactly what he was thinking. And I said that to Stan, I said, this is fucking ridiculous. These two guys are travelling, sitting next to each other, and Garth was sending me text messages saying, call Jack, and Jack's, you know, telling me this other story. The whole time they're sitting next to each other in the vehicle,

travelling to Deniliquin, which means they've been together. But there's only so much a family member can do before the whole thing becomes police business. I was basically told, look, leave it at that, leave it with us, you know, we've got some stuff to do, you can't be here for the rest of this, i.e. they're going to interview these guys or at least call them and talk to them over the phone. The problem with the police in Denelequin interviewing Jack and Garth was that they didn't know the whole story. Niamh's mum, Anne, wonders if they were just given a brief overview before they put Jack in the hot seat. Police in Derniliquin didn't know the full story.

I mean, no-one knew the full story then, but they didn't know too many details either, so they just had to ask him about a few things. And of course, we've also got to remember that at that stage, it's only 18 years ago, but police computerised sharing information wasn't what it is today. So people can sort of make assumptions, but it wasn't quite so easy. Not only did Deniliquin Police not know the full story but Deniliquin is roughly four hours drive away from the Tumut and Batlow areas.

The interviewing detective didn't appear to be familiar with those areas. When you are unfamiliar with a location and someone gives you a timeline of their movements it's difficult to spot the holes in it. Leaving the police station behind, Kieran felt shattered. But he couldn't just walk away from looking for his sister. He decided to go to Gingellic where Niamh had gone camping just before she went missing.

But before he could set off, the police told him not to go. And Stan had called me and said, look, you can't go to Gingellic, which was the next step on my radar, to go down there and find out where they were, who they'd been with and whatever else had gone on. I said, whatever you do, you can't go down there because you'll contaminate evidence.

If you speak to witnesses before we do, there's a real problem. You could jeopardise everything. As frustrating as it was, I understood exactly what they meant, so I stayed away. Kieran called his parents to give them an update and Dan and Brian passed the news on to the rest of their children. Vanula remembers. The Saturday mum called me and she was like,

are you sitting down? And I was like, why? And she said, look, the police are investigating now and somebody claims that they dropped her off and she was hitchhiking. And, you know, the second that she said that, like, she might as well, like, I guess the reaction was the same as she's died pretty much because, like, what? She hasn't turned up.

She's nowhere to be seen. We haven't heard from her. And she was calling us every couple of days. We spoke to each other regularly. There literally hadn't been a week. Like by that stage it had been a week since we'd heard from her and that amount of time had never passed without speaking to her or hearing from her.

And so then I just, I don't know, I went home and I remember I was incredibly upset and then I rang mum and dad back and I just couldn't talk because I was too upset and I think dad had answered the phone and he said, just go to the airport, go to the Qantas desk, I'll buy you a ticket. Just head there and there'll be a ticket for you. And we were, we weren't poor but we definitely weren't wealthy

so that's not the sort of thing we would normally do. Like that's, you know, shit's bad when dad's willing to just fork out for a same day plane ticket sort of thing. Meanwhile, Senior Constable Stan Wall started a roadside search. He drove up and down Go Cup Road, where Jack said he had dropped a Niamh to hitchhike. Go Cup Road is long, about 30 kilometres, and as Stan drove along, he kept his eyes on the side of the road, searching for anything that might indicate Neem had been there. There was a drought at the time, and this meant that the long wavy grass that might have otherwise concealed the area beyond the roadside was gone, giving Stan a good view along both sides of the road

as he drove by. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary on this initial drive. Later that afternoon, Kieran received a call from Stan Wall to notify him that police were going to send an officer to the Batlow Caravan Park that night to take down the names of witnesses who were staying there and may have known Niamh. Kieran agreed to meet the officer there to assist. So we went back and this highway patrol officer rocks up in the hotted-up V8, lowered patrol car with the antennas everywhere, and you can imagine

it's a bit like watching rabbits scramble in this caravan park. Some people when they see police obviously get a little bit fearful and I did actually go around and talk to a handful of people in caravans and I said look they're not going to ask any questions about outstanding warrants are they? I was thinking what are you an axe murderer? Turns out most of them just had fines or because they're itinerant people you know they wouldn't turn up to court because they'd moved on or whatever. Several witnesses at the caravan park recalled seeing Niamh and remembered seeing the hearse. However, a week in the fruit-picking world is a long time,

and some of the people who had been staying when Niamh, Jack and Garth were around had already moved on. Following in his sister's steps, Kieran pitched a tent and spent the night at the Batlow Caravan Park. Kieran woke on Sunday morning and began speaking once more to some of the people staying there. He started receiving some bizarre theories regarding Nahum. I had a man, absolutely straight-faced, tell me that she was part of the white slave trade and he knew people had been abducted and were travelling around in central Australia somewhere in these mysterious caravans.

So I called Mum and Dad again and I was sort of just updating them on what was happening, but I was kind of frustrated that things were going, I thought, slowly. And it turns out that Stan had obviously progressed things. The fact that they had allocated detectives to drive out from Wagga to start this process. And he discussed with me that it wasn't a missing persons case. I'd made it clear that I didn't have a good feeling and I knew it was a homicide.

And Stan had made it clear that he had an open mind but he was leaning towards that as well. We will be back after a short break. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas-drift excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions

or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette. Download the BetMGM casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for T's and C's, 90 plus to wager Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling On Monday, the 8th of April, 2002, the police announced the formation of Strikeforce Yola to investigate Naeem's disappearance. Police were up front with their suspicions and the media reported that police held grave fears for her safety. Kutamundra Local Area Commander, Superintendent Frank Agudja, described Naeem for the media. She's recently completed her HSC and she's on a bit of a working holiday. She keeps in regular

contact with her family. Police are seriously concerned about the circumstances of her disappearance. However, if Nahum is out there, anyone is with her, or Nahum herself is listening, your family and the police are very concerned about your safety. In this first media release, Superintendent Gudja said the last sighting of Niamh was at Gingellic on Easter Saturday March 30th. The superintendent said, We know she was there on Easter Saturday, but after that we aren't certain. She had planned to travel to Sydney by train on Easter Sunday to spend some time with her sister. Our enquiries reveal she didn't use a pre-purchased train ticket to travel on that day.

We have real concerns for her safety. People engaged in fruit picking move from job to job. Locating them is one focus of our investigation. It is difficult tracing her movements because we are unsure if she made it back to Batlow and then went on to Kutamandra or perhaps went somewhere else. Kieran returned to Tumut Police Station on the morning that Strike Force Yola had been established. And when I arrived at 8.30 in the morning, there was a huge presence. You have a quiet country police station in an old brick house, essentially,

and you have a parking area at the back and a large demountable, and there were police everywhere. I'd say there were close to a dozen if not 16 police in this room and there were three big wigs including I guess Frank Goodyear in uniform. There was a briefing underway. They had I guess other uniformed analysts, and there were between six and ten detectives. Kieran was kept well informed by the police working in Strikeforce Yola. He was invited to sit in on their meetings and kept detectives informed about what he had been doing to search for his sister. Detective Steve Rose was one of the detectives assigned to what he had been doing to search for his sister.

Detective Steve Rose was one of the detectives assigned to Strike Force Yola. Steve had been in the New South Wales Police Force since 1982 and a detective since 1988, working in the western suburbs of Sydney before moving to Gundagai, about 40 kilometres from Tumut. Even after retiring in 2009, Steve Rose still remembers the day he first found out that Niamh was missing. If I remember right, I think Kieran spoke to Stan and I arrived to work on Monday, basically, and I got filled in as to what the circumstances were and things like that and I was the officer in charge of detectives there at the time and yeah just got the brief that way

and went from there. Steve saw the gravity of the case right from the start. His colleague Stan Wall thought it was serious and that was enough for Steve to follow suit. The initial briefing was basically through Stan, Stan Wall. He had sincere concern about the whole thing and, you know, Stan was an experienced detective as it was, but he was working in uniform at the time. So I sort of took on board exactly what he had to say and how he felt. It was like I knew, I didn't have any reason to doubt Stan's feelings about the whole circumstance of them going missing. In those early days, they didn't have much to go on. Stan Wall had spoken to Jack Nicholson on the phone on Saturday the 6th of April and Jack and Garth agreed to attend Deniliquin Police Station

to be interviewed by local detectives there. These interviews took place two days before Steve Rose was even aware of the case. But, you know, at the time we didn't have anything else to go on. Nicholson was interviewed, I'm pretty sure, before I was told about the whole investigation by guys in Dinelupin. He gave a version of his dealings with Niamh and what he did and the last time he saw her and all that sort of thing. Niamh's sister, Fanula, said that Jack Nicholson gave an accurate description of her sister and what she had with her, including a fire-twirling stick.

The other girls had been teaching Niamh how to do it. Jack gave a description of what she was wearing on the day that he claims to have dropped her off on the Go Cup Road and we had a photo of her wearing that outfit. So she was a bit quirky and she was wearing a pair of old army cargo shorts that I'd bought from an op shop and outgrown or decided I didn't like anymore and gave to her and she'd cut out some yellow fur and stitched it onto the pockets and she had, I think, a checked shirt or something on

and she was carrying a long stick because she had been learning to fire twirl. Despite Jack being the last known person to see Niamh, the police in Dinniliquin had nothing to charge him with in relation to her disappearance. Not only that, they told the media that he was not a person of interest. From Detective Steve Rose's point of view, this kind of deliberate deflection is a strategy police use. Yeah, particularly in the early stages because we couldn't say that he was a person

of interest because he gave us a version of events and we were unable to discredit what he had told us, you know, at that early stage. So, you know, you've got to play your cards fairly tight and we didn't want him going underground, you know, because we wanted to be able to keep tabs on him. Yeah, so that was probably a reason for that, and plus you can get yourself in trouble

by calling someone a person of interest when, you know, you don't really have any evidence to support it. But regardless of the police logic, for Liam's panicked family, it was a hard pill to swallow. Even more so for Kieran after his conversation with the Jack, which he'd found highly suspicious. It's the nature of the case, not necessarily the police or their actions. It's the fact that you're not getting answers.

It's very hard. And I did ask a few times, I was like, why did you let this guy go? You had him, you know. And they were saying, well, A, we had no reason to hold him, and B, he wasn't telling us anything anyway. We had nothing on him. So you're really going to have to keep a rapport with him and keep him cooperating.

If he thinks that you're out to get him, there's a problem and we can't follow him or do anything else because we have no probable cause or no reason to. When the weekend came around, marking two weeks since Niamh had gone missing, Kieran made the difficult decision to go back home. He had done everything he could to try and find Niamh. But there came a point when there was nothing more he could do in Batlow. And then pretty much by the end of the week,

you knew that the situation was pretty hopeless in terms of making breakthroughs. So I drove back to Sydney on the Saturday and I just, I walked into my house and I remember my flatmate, Kev, the Irishman was there and he just, he didn't know what to say. He was just bewildered. And we sat there with a cup of tea in the courtyard out the back and then we threw the tea away and went and got a beer. And we just sat there in silence. Just, I

don't know what to say. The longer Niamh was missing, the more hopeless everyone felt. Hopeless and helpless, Kieran headed back to Armidale to join Fionnuala and the rest of his family. They all did what they could, even Niamh's eldest sister Catherine who lived in Singapore and was too heavily pregnant to travel back to Australia. So the rest of the family, we all travelled back to Armidale over that weekend and for the first two or three days of the next week. And Catherine from Singapore had organised PR contacts

to help get the story out there and talk to media outlets and everything else. So, yeah, I guess you go from us being all at home, shocked, grieving, not sleeping much, just that horrible anxiety, knowing something really bad's happened and not knowing what and, you know, all of the emotions. And not being able to do anything about it. Yeah, yep, all of that.

And then seeing mum and dad and the state they were in, it was horrible. On Thursday the 18th of April, Neham's parents took on the difficult task of fronting a press conference about their youngest daughter's disappearance. We're extremely concerned with the circumstances of Neham's disappearance and that's why we've established this strike force. It is utterly out of character and something is amiss. We just desperately need help to try to focus on something that will give us a clue as to what has happened to her. We'd also like to say to Niamh that we love her very much and that all her family and all her friends are really missing her

if we would like her to get in touch. Kieran and Fanula accompanied them to the press conference but stayed away from the cameras. Fanula remembered the surrealness of it all as she watched her parents. Kieran and I just stood in the background and mum and dad did the press conference. And it was just weird because you see it, you've seen them on the news before.

You've seen other families and you can't help but say the clichéd, stereotypical thing like, we just want to know you're okay, just call us, and all that sort of stuff. But in the back of their heads, they're going, we know that the police are treating this as a homicide investigation. We know that they've potentially got somebody in their sights.

But they do it to just shake the tree and get, you know, get witnesses to come forward because whatever corroborating evidence or any sort of evidence they need to come forward. And it's hard because you do get coached in definitely don't say anything to do with. So first of all, if people think she's dead, they're less likely to help. They all sort of shrug and go, oh, well, that's that then. So you need to be very careful with what you say and how you say it. And they're not overly emotional people anyway.

So, you know, I don't know how that plays. You know, you see tearful relatives and that's obviously great for the media. I don't know if it helps with these cases, but, no, I think they were just supportive of the police and following along. Me, I'm a bit more of a bullet a gate. I want everything done yesterday

and it's easy to get frustrated. Another idea that Anne and Brian had was to search pawn shops around the area in case any of Niamh's belongings had been pawned by someone looking to make a quick buck. Because of Niamh's meticulous itemised record keeping, her belongings were well documented, even down to the serial numbers of her discman and photography equipment. Brian went through the phone book, found every pawn shop, second-hand shop that he could, and we put out notices to all of them.

A list of her belongings and the serial numbers. So we sent all of that out because they are required to put serial numbers into a police database, which is very handy. But despite the blitz on pawn shops everywhere, none of Niamh's belongings were located. When she went missing, so did her bags of clothing, camping equipment, camera gear, and a collection of CDs, and none of these items ever surfaced.

On the 2nd of May 2002, the most comprehensive search for Niamh since she went missing began. 40 police officers focused their search along Gokarp Road from Tumut to Gundagai on foot, trail bike and in the air. As pole air searched bushland and nearby properties, dozens of police and rescue workers combed the roadside. Police are focusing their search within 20 kilometres of the last confirmed sighting of Neah May, and if no evidence is found, investigators are almost certain that she was picked up and taken out of the area. It's going to make our task very, very difficult if she has been picked up.

No-one has seen her being picked up, and this road leads to the Hume Highway, which takes you north and south of the Australian coastline. The basis for this search was Jack's statement that he dropped Niamh off on this country road to hitchhike, as well as some witness statements that seemed to support his claim. By this point, just over a month had passed since Niamh went missing. Investigators feared that she had met with foul play and were conducting their inquiries along those lines. Nothing was found on Gokap Road to indicate Niamh had ever been there. It was as if she had simply vanished. On the next episode of Missing Niamh... I remember him rolling me a joint

and from that point on, I really don't recall too much from that evening. I said, well, we'll go home now. And she said, well, Jack's coming with us. And something had obviously woken me suddenly because I was disorientated. And that's when I realised that there was just a cold, rough hand holding my hand.