Light shone on Far North Queensland cold cases
National Missing Persons Week
The Far North Queensland missing persons cases of Joanne Butterfield, of Mossman, and Coen woman, Allison Bernard, are now central to the citizen investigations driven by true crime podcast Sleepers.
And the women who have been missing, presumed murdered, since 1998 for Ms Butterfield and 2013 in the case of Ms Bernard, are firmly on the minds of missing persons advocates this week during National Missing Persons Week.
Founder of the Australian Missing Persons Register and author Nicole Morris shone a light on Ms Butterfield’s baffling case in her first book, Missing, a deep dive into a collection of missing persons cases.
She has followed that up with two more books, Vanished and Lost which was launched last week to coincide with National Missing Persons Week from August 2 to 8.
“Back when I started the register 21 years ago, there was not much information at all on missing persons, so I started to build it even with scans of photographs from books, some of them still on there,’’ Nicole said.
There are 2800 long term missing persons in Australia and Nicole has made it her job to keep their stories in the spotlight. That includes Joanne Butterfield who went missing from her Mossman home and was last seen at 9am on June 24, 1998.
At the time she went missing, Ms Butterfield was 37-years-old, 160cm tall, medium build with a fair complexion, blue eyes and red hair. She has a ‘Tweety Bird’ tattoo on the right side of her chest area and a ‘Bluebird’ tattoo on her left shoulder.
“The information that police provide in missing persons cases can be very specific - their height, how they looked at the time and where they were last seen. I feel it is important to ask the people who knew the person best to give details that may lead to more information.’’
Nicole said her selections for the book are based on the family supporting that move and in Joanne Butterfield’s case it was a complex family dynamic.
“Jo’s sister Belinda, who has since passed, very much drove it and other family members were aware of her inclusion in the book.’’
Joanne’s brother, Barry, gave what stands to this day as the best possible lead to chase in the mystery, convinced he had an interaction with his sister in Sydney after she had gone missing.
“She was a free spirit and she did tend to put herself in the company of people who had the potential to do wrong by her,'' Nicole said.
“Did something happen to her in Sydney where she had gone to look for her son, Thorne? Did she go into hiding, into witness protection? There are many possibilities.
"Even after writing the book and interviewing all of these people, I have no idea what happened to Joanne Butterfield.''
Ms Bernard was last seen at Archer River quarry on February 10 2013, around 11pm, the man charged with her murder as of January 2024, Thomas Byrnes, revealed in a 2022 Cairns inquest he was the last person to see her alive and was quarry caretaker.
She had been seen at the Exchange Hotel in Coen earlier that evening, and was expected to travel to Kowanyama, but never arrived.
Further searches were undertaken around Coen in late 2022 but nothing to advance the investigation, which has been heavily criticised.
Sleepers podcast host and Newsport journalist Bryan Littlely has captured interviews for the podcast which narrows a potential search location for Ms Bernard, with infrastructure built at the time shortly after her disappearance a red flag.
“It is certainly a point of interest when the location of some new, seemingly out of the blue infrastructure is built by the person last known to have seen a missing person,’’ Littlely said.
“It may not be anything, but when and why slabs of concrete were laid is a question that should not be left unanswered in a missing person murder case.’’
A full interview with Nicole Morris, founder of the Australian Missing Person’s Register, will feature on the podcast SLEEPERS in coming weeks.
