Transcript of 5: Episode 5: Jack’s story

When 18-year-old Niam May failed to use her country link ticket to Sydney on Easter Sunday in 2002, her family became worried. Niam had booked and paid for the ticket in the small apple-growing town of Batlo 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 kilometers north. Naim's brother, Ciaran, traveled to Batlo to search for his sister and found out the missing person's report that had been faxed to Batlo from police in Armadale had not been received because Batlo's police station wasn't staffed every day. This meant that until his arrival, nobody in Batlo knew Niam was missing, and the police were not looking for her. During his inquiries in Batlo, Kieran learned more about the two men, Jack Nicholson and Garth Gammel, that Niam 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 Niam off in Tunet, a town 30 minutes drive from where Niam needed catch the bus in Batlo.

Just after 10:00 AM on Saturday, the sixth of April, 2002, Kieran's phone pings with a text message. In all capitals, it read, Call Jack's phone, followed by a mobile phone number. At 10:15 AM, Kieran called the number, hoping against hope that Jack would know where Niam was.

Reception was really bad. There was static in background, you could tell that he was, I guess, in a vehicle or somewhere on the move. Garth had sent me a text thing called Jack's phone. As far as I knew, Garth was on his way one way and Jack was on his way another. Garth had basically told me, Well, Jack said he dropped her at Tumet 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 Jack, obviously, Hey, I'm Naima's brother.

We're a bit concerned. We haven't seen her. It's what, six days, seven days later now? We really need to know what's What 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 He'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 tumor on Saturday around 1:00 to 2:00 PM. She was going to try and hitchhike to Gundagai or Kudamundra and save some money on a country link ticket.

But it didn't make any sense. Naim had already bought her a ticket. Why would she need to save money on a ticket? Last the family heard, Niam 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 Batlo. Why would Jack drive her past Batlo, then to Tumet, another half hour further on, when her bus ticket was for Batlo?

It was really hard to hear what he was saying. It was dropping in and out. But I remember saying, That doesn't It doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? She had a ticket from Batlo. It was already paid for, and Batlo is closer than Tumet. 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 just outside. I said, Okay. And he was 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 tumor 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 Naimes' butlo friends, Nicole and on, and they were already close by to Tumet 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 Nicole and Johnny were with me. We were already on our way to the police station, which was five minutes down the road. So I got in there, pulled out my little notebook, started with the spiel. I'm here for a missing person's case. This is the case number. She was reported by my parents in Armadale. We've been investigating for the last four days. Here is 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 given me a bullshit story.

Far from reporting his sister missing to police and seeing them mobilize 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 sister, Kieran lost his temper. His sister, Fannula, remembers this.

So he then went to the Tumet police station and walked in and basically said, My sister's missing. And Nobody's investigating it, what's going on. It should have been reported missing lives, and anything happened. 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 Wall was at his desk at the station when he heard animated voices coming from the reception out front.

He heard it and was like, Let me take this, and took Kieran into a room, started talking to him. And he said 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, it 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 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 10:35 AM, 20 minutes after he had last spoken to Jack on the phone call with the bad reception. It read, Please call me back, Jack. Given that he was the last person that they knew had seen Naim, 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 Gingelik to Tumet. 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 is down on the border, and it's about an hour and 30, hour and 40 minutes between Gingellic and Tumet. And there are a number of different ways you can drive there. So from Gingellic to Tumberumba, the next town is fairly straightforward. From Tumberumba towards Batlo, There's forest everywhere. And to the east is Blouring 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 Batlo, there's a bypass. So you don't need drive down into the town, you can continue on. You can also take some logging roads which come out north of Batlo and some come out near Adalong.

But to Kieran, the very act of mapping routes to Tumet felt wrong. Why wouldn't Jack have dropped a name off in Batlo?

There are all these other possible routes that you could take. It never made sense to me why he was heading towards Tumet. When Batlo was right there, she 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 Tumet 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, 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. He was super friendly and super cooperative. Stan explained who he was and said, Look, can I just get your name and date of birth? He asked Jack where he was, and he said, I'm on the road to Daniloquin. 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. We're a bit worried about where she's been. And he said, Yes, 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.

Denelequin is a town about 350 kilometers west of Batlo and roughly 300 kilometers 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 Denelequin Police Station. He had Garth with him, and they had been traveling together ever since they left Batlo. 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 traveling 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 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.

I said that to Stan. I said, This is fucking ridiculous. These two guys are traveling, sitting next to each other. Garth was sending me text messages saying, Call Jack, and Jack's telling me this other story. The whole time, they're sitting next to each other in the vehicle, traveling to Daniloquin, 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. We've got some stuff to do. You can't be here for the rest to 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. Naim's mom, Anne, wonders if they were just given a brief overview before they put Jack in the hot seat.

Police in Denelequin 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 computerized sharing information wasn't what it is today. So people can make assumptions But it wasn't quite so easy.

Not only did Denelequine police not know the full story, but Denelequine is roughly four hours drive away from the Tumet and Batlo 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 In Ireland, Kieran felt shattered, but he couldn't just walk away from looking for his sister. He decided to go to Gingellic, where Niam had gone camping just before she went missing. But before he could set off, the Police told him not to go.

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 jeopardize 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. Vanilla remembers.

The Saturday, Mom 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. The second that she said that, she might as well... I guess the reaction was the same as she's died, pretty much, because she hasn't turned up. She's nowhere to be seen. We haven't heard from her. She was calling us every couple of days. We spoke to each other regularly. There literally hadn't been a week. 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 Mom and Dad back, and I just couldn't talk because I was too upset. And I think Dad had answered the phone. He said, Just go to the airport. Go to the Quantis desk, I'll buy you a ticket. Just head there and there'll be a ticket for you. And we weren't poor, but we definitely weren't wealthy.

So that's not the thing we would normally do. You know, shit's bad when dad's willing to just fork out for a same-day plane ticket 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 name to hitchhike. Go Cup Road is long, about 30 kilometers, and as Stan drove along, he kept his eyes on the side of the road, searching for anything that might indicate Niam 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 Butler Caravan Park that night to take down the names of witnesses who were staying there and may have known Niam. Kieran agreed to meet the officer there to assist.

So we went back and this Highway Patrol officer rocks up in the hotded up V8, lowered patrol car with the antennas everywhere. 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. I did actually go around and talk to a handful of people in caravans. They said, Look, they're not going to ask any questions about outstanding warrants, are they? I was thinking, What are you, an ax murderer? It turns out most of them just had fines or because they're itinerant people, they wouldn't turn up to court because they'd moved on or whatever.

Several witnesses at the caravan park recalled seeing Nahum 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 Nahum, 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 Batlo 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-face, tell me that she was part of the white slave trade, and he knew people had been abducted, and We're traveling around in Central Australia somewhere in these mysterious caravans. So I called Mom and Dad again, and I was just updating them on what was happening, but I was frustrated that things were going, I thought, slowly. And it slowly. It turns out that Stan had obviously progressed things, the fact that they had allocated detectives to drive out from Waga to start this process. And he discussed with me that it wasn't a missing person's case. I'd made it clear that I didn't have a good feeling, and I knew it was a homicide. 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. On Monday, the eighth of April, 2002, the police announced the formation of Strike Force Yola to investigate Naim'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, Super Lieutenant Frank Guja, described Naim 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 Naim is out there, anyone is with her, or Naim herself is listening, your family and the police are very concerned about your safety. In this First media release, Superintendent Goodia said the last sighting of Naim 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 uncertain. She had planned to travel to Sydney by train on Easter Sunday to spend some time with her sister. Our inquiries 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 Batlo and then went on the Kooja Mandra, or perhaps went somewhere else. Kieran returned to Tumet Police Station on the morning that Strike Force Yola had been established.

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. 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 Goody in uniform. There was a briefing underway. They had, I guess, other uniformed analysts, and there were between 6:00 and 10:00 detectives.

Kieran was kept well-informed by the police working in Strike Force 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 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 Gundergaia, about 40 kilometers from Tumet. Even after retiring in 2009, Steve Rose still remembers the day he first found out that Niam was missing.

If I remember right, I think Keira spoke to Stan, and I arrived to work on Monday Basically, they got filled in as to what the circumstances were and things like that. I was the officer in charge of the detectives there at the time. 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. Stan was an experienced as it was, but he was working in uniform at the time. So I took on board exactly what he had to say and how he felt. I didn't have any reason to doubt Stan's feelings about the whole circumstances of them going missing.

In those early days, they didn't have much to go on. Stan Wall had spoken to Jack Nickleison on the phone on Saturday, the sixth of April, and Jack and Garth agreed to attend Denelequin 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 at the time, we didn't have anything else to go on. Nickleison Nickleison was interviewed, I'm pretty sure, before I was told about the whole investigation by guys in dinner with him. He gave a version of his dealings with Niam and what he did, and last time he saw her, and all that thing.

So Niam's sister, Faneula, said that Jack Nickleison gave an accurate description of her sister and what she had with her, including a fire twirling stick. The other girls had been teaching Niam how to do it.

Jack gave the description of what she was wearing on the day that he claims to have dropped her off on the Go Cup road. We had a photo of her wearing that outfit. 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. She'd cut out some yellow fur and stitched it onto the pockets. She had, I think, a checked shirt or something on. She was carrying a long stick because she had been learning to fire twirl.

Despite Jack being the last known person to see Niam, the police in Denelequine 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 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 at that early stage. You got to play your cards fairly tight, and we didn't want him going underground because we wanted to be able to keep tabs on him. That was probably a reason for that. Plus, you didn't get yourself in trouble by calling someone a person of interest when you don't really have any evidence to support it.

But regardless of the police logic, for Niam'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, so they're 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. 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 Naim had gone missing, Kieran made the difficult decision to go back home. He had done everything he could to try and find Niam, but there came a point when there was nothing more he could do in Batlo.

And then pretty much by the end of the week, you knew that the situation was pretty hopeless in terms in terms of making breakthroughs. So I drove back to Sydney on the Saturday, and I walked into my house, and I remember my flatmate, Kev, the Irishman, was there, and he didn't know what to say. He was just bewildered. 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 don't know what to say.

The longer Niam was missing, the more hopeless everyone felt. Hopeless and helpless, Kieran headed back to Armadale to join Fanaula and the rest of his family. They all did what they could, Even Niam's eldest sister, Catherine, who lived in Singapore and was too heavily pregnant to travel back to Australia.

The rest of the family, we all traveled back to Armadale over that weekend and for the first two or three days of the next week. Catherine from Singapore had organized PR contacts to help get the story out there and talk to media outlets and everything else. 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 all of the emotions.

And not being able to do anything about it. Yeah, all of that.

And then seeing Mom and Dad and the state they were in, it was horrible.

On Thursday, the 18th of April, Niam's parents took on the difficult task of frunting a press conference about their youngest daughter's disappearance.

We're extremely concerned with the circumstances of Niam'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 Niam that we She loved her very much and that all her family and all her friends are really missing her, and if we would like her to get in touch.

Kieran and Fennula accompanied them to the press conference, but stayed away the cameras. Fannula remembered the surrealness of it all as she watched her parents.

Kieran and I just stood in the background, and Mom and Dad did the press conference. 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 cliched stereotypical thing like, We just want to know you're okay. Just call us, and all that 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 witnesses to come forward because whatever corroborating evidence or any evidence they need to come forward.

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 shrug and go, Oh, well, that's that then. So you need to be very careful with how you what you say and how you say it. And they're not overly emotional people anyway. So I don't know how that plays. 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 bull at a gate. I want everything done yesterday, and it's easy to get frustrated.

Another idea The idea that Anne and Brian had was to search porn shops around the area in case any of Niam's belongings had been pwned by someone looking to make a quick buck. Because of Niam's meticulous itemized record keeping, her belongings were Well documented, even down to the serial numbers of her discman and photography equipment.

Brian went through the phonebook, found every porn shop, second-hand shop that he could, and We put out notices to all of them, the list of her belongings and the serial numbers. 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 porn shops everywhere, none of Niam'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 second of May 2002, the most comprehensive search for Naim since she went missing began. Forty police officers focused their search along Gokarp Road, from Tumet to Gundergey, on foot, trail bike, and in the air.

As Poleair searched bushland and nearby properties, dozen Tons of police and rescue workers combed the roadside.

Police are focusing their search within 20 kilometers of the last confirmed sighting of Niam May. 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. 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 Niam 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 Niam went missing. Investigators feared that she had met with foul play and were conducting their inquiries along those lines. Nothing was found on Go Cup Road to indicate Niam had ever been there. It was as if she had simply vanished. On the next episode of Missing Niam.

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. Something had obviously worked in me suddenly because I was disorientated. That's when I realized that there was just a cold, rough hand holding my hand.