Underbelly (35 page)

Next day, Tuesday, detectives spoke to Revelle's close friend Kate Brentnall and took a statement from her about the fact Revelle had called her from Samer's at 7.15 on the Saturday night to arrange to meet Kate around 8pm … but had never turned up. It was looking ominously likely that she had been killed soon after making the call – 22 hours before her mother raised the alarm with the police.

By now Revelle had been missing more than 60 hours and everyone was taking it seriously. When crime-scene police took photographs of Samer's scratches at the Sydney Police Centre, he knew he was a suspect. He took a lawyer with him.

Two homicide detectives joined the inquiry. They checked that Revelle's pre-booked air ticket from Sydney to Brisbane had not been collected. Any faint chance that she was ‘hiding' was gone. The detectives' inquiries that week began the painstaking process of ruling out suspects to isolate the most likely candidate. Samer's girlfriend, Michelle, voted with her feet – moving out of his house with police present in case of any unpleasant scenes. It is not known whether she ever got back her pawned clarinet.

Detectives spoke to Revelle's boyfriend Piers Fisher-Pollard and another friend, Zoe Brock, and were satisfied
they were hiding nothing. The same with her flatmate at Bellevue Hill, and so on through a list of friends and acquaintances.

By Friday 11 November, six days after the disappearance, four more homicide detectives were put on the case and the police force went public. They made a televised appeal for information and more people came forward with more of Revelle's belongings found in the streets near Samer's house, as if thrown from a car. A search and doorknock of two Kingsford streets that weekend produced more items – and some information.

One woman told police that she had been in her front garden a week earlier – on the Saturday night when Revelle had gone missing – and had noticed something odd. She had heard something metallic clink as it hit the bitumen near a dark-coloured station wagon which left the scene shortly afterwards. Curious, she had taken a look and found a set of keys, which she'd handed in. It turned out that they were Revelle's.

Why would someone in a car deliberately throw keys away? The detectives thought they knew the answer to that question.

They also knew what the family feared but could not yet admit: they were looking for a body. But they didn't know where to start. Fifteen years later, they still didn't.

ON DAY nine, Monday 14 November, it seemed that someone started running interference. Agnes Situe of 3D World Publishing answered a call from a woman who identified herself as ‘Revelle Balmain' and asked to speak to Alex Smart – editor of
Oyster
magazine. Smart was unavailable
and the so-called ‘Revelle' said she would call back, but never did.

It was never established who the caller really was but police were sure it wasn't Revelle. If it wasn't a stray crank call made by a lunatic it was conceivably someone conniving with a killer or abductor. Oddly, it had to be someone who knew about the
Oyster
magazine shoot, as few would have. Someone still out there may be wondering if their information can be turned into $250,000 reward.

Meanwhile, another mystery was laid to rest – the real identity of the caller who'd sounded like Revelle when she had spoken to Sonya Lynch the first Sunday morning after the disappearance. It turned out to be Sarah Pussell, another model who worked for Revelle's boss and friend, Lilli, at the Satellite Modelling Agency. By accident, Sonya Lynch had skewed the investigation at the most vital stage, persuading the police that Revelle was not really missing and giving the killer an extra day to fudge his tracks.

As police and the Balmain family pieced together information from Revelle's circle of acquaintances, they found out more about her secret life. One model told them Revelle had spoken of meeting a fabulously wealthy Arab sheik, a prominent racehorse owner who had taken her out several times – once to an Arabian horse show – and had wanted her to visit the Middle East with him.

At first the family grasped at this: was it possible the sheik might have whisked Revelle overseas? But the police established the sheik had not been in Australia for months before the disappearance and ruled him out.

Another client was a wealthy Asian businessman called
‘Michael' who had wanted Revelle to go to Thailand with him. But he and several other clients were all ruled out.

From day two, investigators had one prime suspect – and nothing would happen to change that. The family did not know what to think. It would take years, says Revelle's sister Suellen Simpson, to accept that she was not only gone – but dead. To accept her death was to give up hope, and in the absence of a body, or conclusive proof, they did not want to do that. Suellen and her parents were tortured by the possibility that people associated with escort agencies might have been involved.

‘She had a lot of nasty people around her,' Suellen told the authors. She was unimpressed with Zoran Stanojevic, proprietor of Select Escorts. And she found out that Revelle had fallen out with the proprietor of VIP Escorts – the one who had introduced her to at least one super-rich Middle Eastern client – because he had demanded a bigger share of the fees she charged clients.

Early in the New Year, police spoke to Gavin Samer's relatives, who told them Gavin was argumentative and was known to have been involved in domestic violence. Around the same time, on 25 January 1995, listening devices were put into Samer's house until warrants expired on 10 February. There were no warrants to monitor anyone else.

IT took four years to get the Balmain case to the Coroners' Court, by which time the police, media and the family had exhausted every angle. Photographs and stories had been run on the anniversaries, and the family had distributed posters.

Gavin Samer's family, prosperous and respectable Jewish people in the ‘rag trade' in Surry Hills, had done their best to look after their prodigal son's legal interests. The surf-chasing, hard-drinking and marijuana-smoking Gavin was a black sheep compared with his hard-working brother and sister, and the parents had employed him in the family business transporting fabric around in the Holden Commodore station wagon that doubled as his surf wagon.

The family invested in the best lawyers they could afford to represent Gavin. And, according to Sydney police sources, they got what they paid for: a skilled advocate who – four years after the event – was able to suggest enough alternative scenarios to win the main suspect the benefit of the doubt.

The lawyer was able to point to the proprietors of both escort agencies, hint at the possible guilt of other escort clients, and throw a little mud at a circle of friends that Revelle's own mother described in the witness box as ‘evil' people who had led her daughter astray.

The main alternative scenario put to the inquiry was that Revelle might have fallen foul of the owner of Select Companions. The agency owner, Zoran Stanojevic, provided contradictory evidence about his whereabouts on the day Revelle disappeared, but consistently denied he had anything to do with it.

He would technically remain as the second suspect. But, to be fair, given that police did not seek evidence of his alibi until years after the event, it was little wonder he was unsure of his movements on a given day. The fact that detectives had not checked the alibis of Stanojevic or another
escort agency proprietor in 1994 was not so much due to laziness as their belief that they already had a better suspect.

The coroner heard a claim that a former client of Revelle Balmain, a wealthy commodities trader called Mark Coulton, had told a friend she had been murdered by the agency for ‘moonlighting' – doing extra sex work for cash on the side.

‘She's ten-foot under and no-one will find her body,' Coulton was alleged to have told a friend but he strongly denied under oath ever making the statement. It was all grist to the mill for the lawyer that Gavin Samer's parents reputedly spent their life savings to hire. A little bit of mud clouds a lot of water.

Jan Balmain's evidence was the outpouring of a twice-broken heart. She told how her daughter, born at Manly in 1972, had been cherished. She had gone to Locket Valley, an Anglican primary school at Bayview, then to St Lukes at Dee Why before taking up the ballet scholarship in England at sixteen.

And she revealed another family tragedy – a far more private one – that could have had a bearing on the behaviour of her doomed and beautiful daughter. When Revelle was four, she had found her fifteen-month old brother Matthew drowned in the family swimming pool.

‘And I don't think she ever really fully recovered from that,' Jan Balmain said to a hushed court room. ‘It was a very big impact on her life and I know it took us many years to deal with it and we never really knew with Revelle how she dealt with that.'

In court, says Revelle's sister Suellen, Gavin Samer cut a strange figure ‘frozen in his seat, glaring at a fixed spot at the back of the room' as if he didn't trust himself to make eye contact with the Balmain family. Or had been instructed not to.

After several sitting days, the deputy state coroner John Abernathy identified Samer as the main person of interest but fell short of recommending charges.

‘While Mr Samer certainly had the opportunity to kill Ms Balmain, and rightly in my view is the main person of interest to police, there is no plausible motive proved,' he said.

Samer's evidence could be summed up in a line. He stuck to what he had told the police from the start: that he had dropped Revelle at the pub and then gone home, watched television and fallen asleep.

After the inquest, he was hardly seen in Sydney again.

IN the decade since the inquest, new detectives have come and gone without making any impression on the Balmain file. It was as if the coroner's finding had ruled a line under the investigation. Nothing new turned up to spur fresh efforts and apart from occasional anniversary coverage, the disappearance became just another cold case – one of a list of heartbreaking mysteries filed away at police headquarters.

The families of the disappeared endure a special sort of hell. Their torment is even worse than for relatives of unsolved murder victims because they do not get to lay their dead to rest and then to grieve. When people vanish, it
takes years for those left behind to accept that their loved one is dead and never coming home. Some never accept it.

Suellen wrote to the authors in 2009: ‘Mum is still having nightmares about what may have happened to her. I am fairly matter of fact to get the information I need but I can tell you it is the saddest story, it rips the heart out of your chest – the shock, the disbelief, the anger, the pain and the not knowing. Except the fact that the murderer is still wandering our streets. Still free.'

The family took years to accept that Revelle was gone forever. But they have never given up hope that her killer will be found and justice done.

In July 2008 the authorities offered a $250,000 reward for any information that would help convict Revelle's killer. The announcement was linked to a statement by the homicide squad that they had used advanced forensic testing to gather new evidence from Samer's former house in McNair Avenue, Kingsford.

Homicide Squad commander Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford nominated the house as the crime scene. A ‘full forensic search was carried out of the crime scene at Kingsford' and exhibits from the original investigation had been re-tested to establish links with either of two suspects, he said.

‘We have fresh evidence as a result of those examinations', he said. ‘Following that evidence, coupled with the announcement of today's reward, we are hopeful that we will get additional information that will bring this investigation to a successful conclusion.'

Translated, the police-speak meant they had run DNA tests on Revelle's diary, keys, her make-up bag and one shoe – and were trying to rattle the prime suspect and maybe even lure a witness who no longer felt bound to keep an old and awful secret. The $250,000 reward – up from $100,000 – looked as if it was meant as bait for someone. Or perhaps it was just an attempt at public relations for a struggling Government. Rewards make cheap headlines because they are rarely, if ever, paid out.

One line in the police media release stated that ‘both suspects' still lived in Australia. One of the two, however, could hardly get any further away. When five detectives went looking for Gavin Samer to ask him some questions, they found him nearly as far south as he could go – a long way from his Sydney life in every way.

FOR a middle-class Sydney boy who once had expensive tastes, Gavin Samer is slumming it these days.

He first came to Cygnet in southern Tasmania some time in 2005, washed up after the apple-picking season along with other drifters. There are – or were – a million apple trees in the Huon Valley and the annual influx of pickers is part of the rise and fall of the seasons in those parts.

Cygnet is a one-horse town with three pubs – known inevitably as the top, middle and bottom pubs, a description that relates to geographic position rather than their respective quality.

It was to the middle pub that Samer turned up after one apple harvest. The pub needed a cook and the stranger with the dark hair, Roman nose and cheesy grin said he was one. He pulled on the check pants and started
knocking out counter lunches – but it didn't last. In a week or so, he came into the bar along the street at the bottom pub, the Commercial, where the proprietor noticed the check cook's pants and promptly offered him a job. This time he stayed.

He eventually acquired a local girlfriend – a big woman who also got a job in the pub. When not working, Samer drank a lot and gambled more, mostly on Keno. One week he won $3500 but kept gambling until it was all gone.

Samer didn't endear himself to anyone but no one took much notice of him until the five Sydney detectives came to town in the winter of 2008. As soon as they hit town, Samer bolted. But after his boss appealed to his girlfriend, he came back to be interviewed voluntarily. First he went to see local ‘bush lawyer' Michael Munday, well-known for brushes with authority over alleged abalone poaching, a profession in which he is acknowledged as an expert.