“This is such an important area, there hasn’t been anything like it done in the world. There are no profiles of missing persons at all. Having a tool where there are strong indicators or markers for what’s happened to the missing person is a first.”

 

Dr Shaunagh Foy from Charles Sturt University (CSU) is talking about her ground breaking research into who goes missing and why. The NSW Police Force hope it will help solve missing persons cases more quickly.

 

Dr Foy divided a sample of missing persons into three categories; runaways, suicides and foul play. The amount of data varied enormously. “There were so many runaways but not much information. With the foul play and suicide cases there is a vast amount of information because they tended to be on-going investigations.”

 

Age and gender immediately emerged as obvious indicators. The under 18s tend to be runaways, the majority of foul play cases fell into the 18 - 25 age group, while most suicides were 40 and over.

 

For runaways there were no gender differences, but foul play victims were more likely to be female, while the suicides were more likely to be male. Suicides were more likely to be married, while the foul play cases were more likely to be single.

 

Dr Foy says the Police could speed up their enquiries by listening carefully to what the relatives and friends of the missing are saying. “The relative is the expert. Not the police. They know what’s typical behaviour. What the reporting person thought had happened was a really strong predictor of what had actually happened. With foul play and suicide cases, they would often come in panic-stricken.”

 

Surprisingly, the old story of the husband disappearing after saying he was going out for cigarettes turns out to be true.

 

“That happens. Those cases are so ambiguous, there’s such a lack of information. There were quite a number of cases where people were going to get a packet of cigarettes. One man was last seen talking over his fence to the neighbour who had just pulled in to his country property. So he was right on the boundary just talking over the fence on a public road and that’s the last time he was seen.” Detectives have told Dr Foy that her research which shows that most foul play cases were last seen in a public place is especially interesting.

 

Dr Foy says she is fascinated by the criminal mind and forensics generally. And yes, it is just like an episode of CSI. “As far as sitting in the missing persons head office and going through police files and looking at photos and autopsy reports, from that point of view, yes, it was like that. The suicide cases were particularly awful. You sense it all.”

 

The NSW Police Force is now planning on incorporating the information into a main frame computer which can be accessed by mobile units. As they deal with a missing persons case, they can feed the information in, and a prediction will come back. “And the more information fed in, the more accurate the prediction of what has happened to that missing person.”