Last Seen Katoomba 01 | Belinda

This is an ABC podcast.

Just a warning before we start: this podcast contains some strong language and themes.

Belinda Peasley was 19 when she disappeared from a small town in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

20 years later, in December 2018, her dad, Mark Wern, got a phone call.

It was the police, asking Mark to meet at his missing daughter's house.

I met up with him on his way there.

Thank you.

Thanks.

How's it going?

Yeah.

Bloody phone hasn't stopped.

I'm sure.

Pretty major announcements that I wasn't expecting.

So, yes, it surprised me.

Are you nervous?

Are you feeling hopeful?

How are you feeling?

Pessimistically optimistic.

We've been down this path before, all the hopes and all the rest of it.

So we just pulled into the end of the street.

Here we go, television reporters everywhere right from the start.

So there's a big police squad car.

You seem

a bit agitated all of a sudden.

Is that taking you by surprise?

Yes, the amount of people,

particularly reporters that you see on television.

Okay.

Good morning.

How are you doing for us?

Just walking out the front of Belinda's house.

There's a helicopter just above us.

It keeps circling around.

There's trucks piled all up and down the street.

It's 20 years since Belinda vanished.

New South Wales Police have been walking in and out of the house all morning.

Chief Inspector from the Homicide Squad.

I'm just going to say a few lines and then you can ask some questions after that.

Okay.

The homicide squad today has commenced an excavation of under the house in the rear yard of the premises where Belinda Peasley was living back in September 1998 when she went missing.

And we're hoping we may be able to find the remains of Belinda.

Belinda was just 18 when she bought her house.

She'd got a big inheritance of $150,000.

And 20 years ago, it was enough to buy a house in Katoomba.

It was a little brown wooden cottage tucked away on a quiet, sunny street.

It had a red door, veranda, and a garden out the back.

Belinda was lucky to get this money so young, and it was the first real bit of luck she'd had in her life.

But this luck didn't last long.

Just six months after buying her house, Belinda disappeared.

Whatever happened, it started in this house.

I'm Gina McEwen and this is Unravel Season 3, Last Seeing Katoomba.

Belinda was last seen leaving Katoomba Hospital Emergency Department on the night of September 26, 1998.

Wherever Belinda ended up that night, one thing's become pretty certain.

She wasn't alone.

When I first heard about Belinda's case, it stuck with me because all the places she went before she disappeared, they're really familiar to me because I've spent a lot of time in the mountains as I've got family there.

But what was even more interesting was police had identified six persons of interest in her case and all six are still alive.

In this podcast, episode by episode, we're going to look at each of those people.

But first, I'm going to tell you about Belinda and the night she disappeared.

There was actually blood in the shower recess and on the floor.

Somebody knows something.

That's as simple as that.

You know, it's not a disappearing with the fairies that only happens in Alice in Wonderland movies.

Somebody knows something.

People in this town just talk shit for the sake of it.

But that's not my question.

Well, that's my answer.

Any town has lots of drugs.

You just gotta find the right people.

Rumours were going around Katoomba that somebody was standing over her.

At the balls, they fucking charge me with something.

Well, leave me alone.

Did you kill Belinda Peasmo?

To get to the Blue Mountains, you take the Great Western Highway, which weaves up across the top of a ridge, and it's the only road in or out.

Little towns dot all up the highway, and on either side of the road, there are these sheer drop sandstone cliffs which look out over huge valleys of thick bushland.

A blue haze covers the mountains which comes from the Euclid forest releasing oil into the air.

That's why they're called the Blue Mountains.

There's a wildness here and people come from all over the world to see it.

As I drive up the highway looking out at the bush, I can't help but think how bloody easy it'd be to get lost out there.

And lots of people do, even locals, just head out for a bushwalk one day and never come back.

One person's body lay just meters from a popular walking track for years before it was found.

Almost at the top of the mountains you find Katoomba, where Belinda lived.

It's a charming tourist town and it's the most popular spot in the mountains, home to the world-famous landmark The Three Sisters.

There's a scenic railway, lookouts and bushwalking tracks that trace all up and down the valleys.

But there's a side to Katoomba you never really see unless you're here long enough for the tourist shine to fade.

It's a small town and really tight-knit.

Things that happen here spread through the community like wildfire.

And being a small town, there's plenty of stories and rumours still swirling to this day about what happened to Belinda Peasley.

But a lot of people who knew Belinda are scared to talk about her, even 20 years later.

Because in a small town, people know where you live and who your family is.

I just want the truth to come out and if something has happened to Belinda, I want justice to be done.

Sharon Versace is Belinda's aunt and she's just 13 years older than Belinda so they were more like sisters.

She helped look after Belinda because she was living with Belinda's mum Leslie when Belinda was born.

She was such a lovely little thing.

She was one of those kids that was always bright and happy and she was a real little sweetie.

Yeah, and especially her mother.

She was always wanting to do things to help, you know, Leslie, even from a very young age, making her cups of tea and helping out with things around the house.

Belinda didn't have a lot to do with her dad growing up.

He was a big drinker and violent back then and her mum wasn't always the easiest to live with.

Leslie and my sister had mental health issues back then so that kind of been easy for Belinda as well to have to deal with.

As a teenager, Belinda started running away from home and spending nights in women's refuges.

And she even lived with Sharon for a while.

Sharon says Belinda changed when she started high school.

She

sort of, would you call it a gothic look?

She had very tall, very thin, beautiful blonde hair, which she changed to dark hair.

Yeah, she sort of, I would call it gothic, wore dark clothes, hugely baggy clothes for someone so thin.

That was her style.

Hippie goth.

I don't know what you call it.

This hippie goth look kind of confused her mum and her auntie, but it was the 90s and grunge was everywhere.

She also loved heavy metal, like Metallica.

Belinda was always what her mum calls a very individual person.

Sharon calls it strong-minded.

They say she always did her own thing and was outgoing and social, and she had a reputation in the family as being a mad animal lover, picking up and bringing home stray animals to care for.

By the time she was 15, Belinda was wilder and less controlled.

She fell pregnant and gave birth to a little boy, Cody, and then two years later, another boy, Billy.

Belinda tried to be a good mum, but she was young and made mistakes.

She went out, partied, took drugs.

She separated from both boys' fathers, and there wasn't a whole lot of stability.

So the inheritance came as a kind of lifeline at a time when she needed it, a way for Belinda to get her life together and set up her own home.

My great-uncle, actually, my father's uncle, was so proud that he was leaving this money to Belinda.

We just didn't want that money to get whittled away.

And we asked her to put that money into property, and she was good.

She did.

She bought that cute little cottage in Trow Avenue.

She's so lucky to have that opportunity to get that inheritance.

So, you know, basically, we made it known to her that this was setting her up for life.

She had a great start and then could, you know, start afresh.

Belinda moved into the house house with her eldest son Cody.

Her other son Billy lived with his dad in Sydney.

Belinda got the whole house set up, put up new curtains and made it look nice.

But her aunt Sharon thought some people in Katoomba resented what Belinda had.

I think a lot of it was jealousy.

A lot of it was jealousy.

This young girl is inheriting money.

You know, what has she done to earn it?

Nothing.

She's getting it for nothing.

She's got, you know, a nice stereo now, nice furniture.

Why should she have that and these other people not?

So, that can often turn people to do mean things.

Jealousy.

As winter rolled in and turned things dark and cold, it became clear the house wasn't the cure-all for everything that made Belinda's life so messy.

Belinda's little house, instead of being a safe haven, became the opposite.

It was no unusual day, no different from any other day.

Belinda rang me and asked me, could I bring Cody up?

The night Belinda disappeared, her mum Leslie had been looking after Belinda's son Cody.

It was 10.30.

and Belinda wanted to see her son.

But Leslie lived in Lawson and it had taken her almost 45 minutes to get to Belinda's.

Because it was late in the evening, I'd already given Cody his tea and he was in his pajamas.

And because we had to go by public transport, I said to Belinda, I'll bring Cody up the following day.

Nothing seemed wrong or out of place.

It was just a general

conversation.

And I never realised that would be the last time

that I spoke to her.

In the days after that phone call, Leslie didn't hear from Belinda.

So she went up to Katoomba with Belinda's aunt Sharon.

Leslie and I went up to the house and the house had been trashed.

I found that all the windows were smashed in her house and I called out and there was no answer.

I was very concerned.

Belinda had beautiful long glass mirrors in the house and they were also all smashed.

There was stuff, quite a lot of stuff being strewn around the place and there was actually blood in the shower recess and on the floor.

They think it was about a quarter of a cup of blood.

You could see that there'd been a bit of an altercation or something.

You could tell that you know there'd been definitely some rough play that had gone on there.

But I wasn't really thinking about what was in the house.

I was just worrying what had happened to my daughter.

Leslie thinks she went and reported all this to the police, but there's no record of it and her memory's a bit hazy.

Sharon didn't go to the police either.

I still think back now and I think, why didn't I contact the police myself?

It does sound strange when you hear this at first.

Sharon's just seen her niece's house all smashed up and there's blood blood inside, so why wouldn't she go to the police?

But it kind of makes sense if you know where Belinda was at around this time.

She'd been drinking and smoking a bit of weed, but after she moved to Katoomba, she started to get into harder drugs and she became a bit unpredictable.

Sometimes she'd be out of touch with her family for days at a time.

I have to say I do sort of understand why her family didn't react straight away, because I know what it's like to have a family member whose life has gone off the rails with drugs.

My family's grown used to living with a kind of fluctuating chaos around my uncle.

It creates an unreliability around his actions, so things that should be surprising become kind of expected, and unpredictability becomes the norm.

So, in some way, I get why they might not have gone straight to the police.

And there was another reason why they didn't raise the alarm.

I honestly thought that Belinda was

interstate or in another country.

Just a week or two before she vanished, Belinda randomly showed up at Sharon's place in Sydney, over an hour away from Katoomba.

One of the last points in time I remember seeing Belinda was when she drove down to my house from Ketoomba.

She was worried that someone was trying to hurt her.

Sharon says Belinda seemed distressed and agitated, way more than normal.

She was just worried for her safety and felt that someone was threatening her and she was talking to me about getting a fake identity and clearing out.

She said that she had connections where she could get passports and fake identifications where she could, you know, start afresh.

So my response was, I want you to go to the police.

get their help,

but she was very against that.

She felt that even going to the police, police, that would not offer her enough protection.

They couldn't stop these things from happening.

And she was sure that somebody was trying to kill her.

So when Belinda disappeared, Sharon thought Belinda had escaped, that she'd run away from all this like she said she would, that she'd fled to a new life in another state.

So that gave me the hope, well, you know, maybe she has taken off somewhere.

Maybe she's unwell somewhere and can't get back in touch with her family or just doesn't want to due to you know embarrassment or something she felt she'd done.

But I certainly didn't think there would be any reason for someone to hurt her, and I think that's why I was still living in the hope that she'd just taken off of her own accord.

On a sunny Saturday, almost 20 years to the day since Belinda went missing, I met up with Belinda's dad, Mark Wern.

Mark drives with his tattooed arm glued to the gear shift, the other drifting between the steering wheel and his two-way radio, while he keeps a steady eye on his phone.

Everything in Mark's Ute is set up exactly as he likes it because he's someone who drives for a living.

He's a truckie, which means he also gets a lot of time alone to think about Belinda.

It's always in the back of my mind 24-7.

You know, it never fades away.

And how does it play out in your head when you're driving?

Well, just various

scenarios of what could have happened.

Belinda didn't know Mark growing up.

He admits he was violent and drank a lot back then.

But about a year or so before she went missing, Belinda gave him a call.

They started meeting for dinners and talking on the phone.

And then three months before she disappeared, she rang him asking for help.

Oh well she rang asking me to come up there that

was smashing the house up and he was going to kill her and could I get on the bike and bring some of some

of my mates up and come up with a gun or a baseball bat and sought him out.

And

I remember saying to her, you know, I'm not into that crap anymore.

She told me to get stuffed, I'm an arsehole and

she doesn't want to talk to me again.

And as it turns out, she didn't.

You say, do you think now you wish he'd have gone?

Yeah, there were times when I do.

Mark is a fairly intimidating guy, so I can see why Belinda wanted him to come up to Katoomba on his Harley with some mates.

And again, here's Belinda turning to her family, not the police, with another call for for help in the months before she vanished, saying someone was threatening to kill her.

Mark didn't go up the mountain that day, but since Belinda disappeared, he's been key in pushing for answers in Belinda's case.

What I feel I owe Belinda is pushing this case as hard as I can to get a resolution, whether that resolution is a prosecution of people that harmed her

or just

a resolution of actually finding her remains and being able to put her to rest where the family can

go.

Both her sons deserve to really know

what's happened to her.

Do you want to jump out and we'll do a quick walk around?

Yeah, as long as we don't go on the property because we're...

Oh, okay.

We'll just look from the street.

That should be all right.

i've seen police photos of belinda's house from around the time she disappeared so it's pretty surreal to stand in front of it because it looks about the same as it did 20 years ago mark starts telling me about a time he came here not long after belinda disappeared there was still blood in the bathroom when we came to clean the place out

the family had got word that people were coming and going from belinda's house stealing things because she wasn't there so sharon and mark went to board the place up that's when mark saw some things that made him fear the the worst.

Her favourite pair of shoes was a pair of Doc Martins.

They were thrown on the floor.

Other clothes that I knew she wore, there was a cardigan that she lived in.

You know, if you whistled, the cardigan could probably walk and have been worn that much.

But that was there.

That is what...

convinced me very, very

clearly that Belinda was dead.

And although Belinda had been missing for weeks by the time Sharon and Mark boarded up her house, Sharon still believed Belinda had left town.

I really did believe that Belinda had taken off with her boyfriend just to clear ahead, get away from these people that she thought were trying to kill her.

I thought, one of these days, I'll get the phone call and she'll be like, here I am, you know.

But that phone call never came.

That's the hardest thing, I think, just not knowing if she's alive or if she's not.

You know, every

time you go out, even now, you know, you're at the shopping centre and you see someone, and I follow people.

It's ridiculous.

You know, just on that off chance that maybe it is her.

It's quite silly, but it's just a bit obsessive, you know.

You see people and

it's,

yeah, it's the not knowing.

I think that's the worst thing.

After Belinda went missing, her older son Cody went to live with his grandfather Mark, Belinda's dad.

For years, Cody used to ask when his mum was coming back.

And all I could say to him was, I don't know.

And the simple truth is, how do you tell a three or six, nine, or even a 12-year-old that in actual fact,

all the evidence points to his mother being brutally murdered?

Belinda's Belinda's other son Billy was just one when she vanished.

So he doesn't have any memory of her, only stories and old photos.

So this is a photo of me and my mum, would have been about six months old at the time.

I don't really look at the photos too much like I've got them, but it's not like I've got them out because then it's just like a

constant reminder

sort of sort of thing.

Billy's tall with long brown hair.

He's the spitting image of his dad dad Andrew.

He's open to talking more about his mum because he wants to get an idea of what happened to her.

I guess with her with her being missing

when I was younger, I just didn't really know anything was wrong.

Then as

you get older you start to notice that everyone around's got two parents or they at least know what's happening there.

It's just been really hard.

Just not knowing with all that.

I think

back when I was about eight years old, I found an old

sleeping bag of hers with the phone number on there.

For a while, I thought I could just ring the number and she'd answer or something.

Yeah, sorry, it's hard.

I never

talk about this, I guess.

I always just sort of push it to the back.

Billy's lived with his dad Andrew since Belinda and Andrew separated, way back when Billy was just a baby.

But Belinda stayed in touch.

They used to talk on the phone and Andrew used to bring Billy up to Katoomba for visits.

But after she moved there, Andrew says he noticed things starting to change.

But yeah, basically,

the last year when she got herself involved with,

I don't know, whatever crowd it was up in the mountains there and drugs and stuff like that.

There's one phone call that sticks out in his mind.

She said she'd got herself into trouble.

She'd dug a hole for herself and she was getting herself out.

Through her exact words.

No idea what she meant when she was telling me that she was getting herself out of this hole she'd dug.

She didn't wouldn't go into it too much.

She was stressing that

for me to know that she loved Billy and me and always remember that she loved us both.

And that which I found kind of weird and strange at the time.

You didn't realise she was in as much trouble as what she was

actually in.

So who was threatening Belinda?

Why did she want to go interstate and change her identity?

And why didn't she feel safe enough to go to the police, like Sharon suggested she do at the time?

Belinda's case is shrouded in a kind of fog.

And as the years go by, people's memories fade, along with the hope of ever finding her.

It's a fog made much worse by the lack of police action in the weeks after she disappeared, because these are the weeks that are the most critical, when police can collect physical evidence and when people's memories are fresh.

But it had taken police almost two months to interview Belinda's boyfriend, who was one of the last people known to have seen her alive.

It had taken another five months for them to doorknock her neighbours, and it would be 10 years before police spoke to all the key people of interest in Belinda's case.

I've been tracing back through those last few months of Belinda's life trying to understand what might have happened to her.

I've been splitting my time between Katoomba and the New South Wales Coroner's Court in Sydney.

where cases involving suspicious deaths and disappearances end up.

The court is heavily secured because of the kinds of cases in the building and the racks of dead bodies that lie unidentified in the morgue on the ground floor.

Above the morgue is where I've been sitting for months, holed up in a windowless back room reading through Belinda's case.

What greets me as I walk through those doors is a big wooden table, a few office chairs and 10 plain brown boxes stacked up against a wall.

The boxes are filled with police interviews, statements, photos, videos, phone taps, criminal records, all from Belinda's case.

There are thousands of documents.

On one of my first days at the court, I read through the documents from the night Belinda disappeared.

So I've just come out of the coroner's court, and in front of me, I've got my notes from the ER nurse who was on duty that night and triaged Belinda the night she disappeared.

And

records show that 7:30 on the night she disappeared, police arrive at her house.

This is after one of Belinda's neighbours had called to report a domestic dispute at Belinda's place, saying they could hear yelling and things smashing.

Police arrive at Belinda's to find her intoxicated and alone.

So they take her a short drive, five minutes maybe, up to Katoomba Hospital.

Now, my notes from the ER say that police brought Belinda to the hospital around 8.30 p.m.

The notes, they're written in this, you know, swirly hard to read medical writing, so I've deciphered them from that and this is what I've got.

The nurse writes, patient admitted to drinking a lot of alcohol this PM,

argumentative and not wanting to be here, intoxication, question mark.

alcohol.

And then it says, has a laceration on the right hand, not willing to remove jacket to show any other laceration present.

Uncooperative.

Patient looks pale.

And then, yeah, it was really hard to read it after this, but what I got down was, did not want to come here.

And then it says, walked out.

Yep.

So at 8.50pm, just 20 minutes after Belinda was brought to the hospital, she's walked out of the ER.

And this is the last definite sighting of her alive.

In the first few pages of Belinda's case notes at the court, there are six names listed.

Six persons of interest identified as possibly having some knowledge of or involvement in what happened to Belinda.

All six people were called to give evidence at Belinda's inquest, and we've gained access to recordings of everything that went on behind the closed doors of that courtroom.

In this season of Unravel, you'll hear from these people as they're questioned in the witness box.

Episode by episode, episode we'll look at each person of interest along with key evidence in interviews as we try to understand what happened to Belinda Peasley.

Silence, please all stand.

Yes, proceed.

Do you swear by Almighty God that the evidence you shall give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Did you ever say that night to

I'm going to fucking kill Belinda or what?

Smash your fucking head in I could have all I'm asking is you tell the truth that's what I'm trying to do

did you ever no don't shout it well stop accusing me of shit I'm asking you a question you've been fucking making up shit no

if you think I've done something wrong chose me with murder go on do it

If you know anything about this case, get in touch by emailing unravel truecrime at abc.net.au.

This season of Unravel is hosted and reported by me, Ginnie McEwan.

Co-executive producer for this season is Helen Barrow, who originated the story.

The interviews were conducted by Helen and me, and the inquest recordings were made by Helen for the TV documentary Who Killed Belinda Peasley.

In Australia, you can see it now on ABC iView.

Thanks to the Evershine production team, including Fran Tinley and sound recordist Dan Maui.

Unravel's supervising producer is Tim Roxburgh.

Our audio producer and researcher is Emma Lancaster.

Fact-checking by Ellen Lee Beder.

Sound design by Tim Jenkins and Martin Peralta.

And music composed by Martin Peralta.

Angela McCormack is our digital producer, and Unravel's executive producer is Ian Walker.

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