Milly Spencer ABC/Supplied
NEED TO KNOW
- Tony Ryan is still appealing for information 30 years after his sister Marcia went missing.
- She was last seen on a highway in Gippsland in Victoria, around midnight on August 19, 1996.
- After a recent callout on ABC Gippsland radio, Tony wants to locate an area of interest.
- Anyone with information about Marcia Ryan can contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Tony Ryan’s sister, Marcia, was last seen by a truck driver on a highway in Gippsland in Victoria, around midnight on August 19, 1996. What happened to Marcia after that is a mystery, and three decades on, Tony is still trying to solve it.
As the truck driver headed along the Princes Highway he noticed Marcia in the rain. She’d stopped her Mitsubishi Sigma on the side of the road and he pulled over to see if she needed help.
Wearing black jeans, brown Blundstone boots and a brown biker-style jacket, she seemed distressed but refused any assistance even when the truck driver warned her it was a dangerous place to be walking. After he drove away it was the last confirmed sighting of the 33-year-old.
On the day she vanished, Marcia left her job at her uncle’s trucking logistics company in Melbourne early as she felt unwell. Another brother, Mark, visited Marcia at her home in Seaford and remembers she was upset.
Days earlier, Marcia had taken in a boarder to help cover her mortgage but regretted it.
That day, Mark remembers Marcia throwing the boarder’s belongings onto the nature strip. And that night she suddenly announced she was going to drive the 17 hours to Queensland to visit her parents, Johanna and John.
“Mark tried to dissuade Marcia from leaving late that night, but he couldn’t stop her,” Tony, 64, from Melbourne, tells New Idea.
Marcia jumped in her car with her dog, Ziggy, a black and white border-collie cross. At 10.50pm she called her parents from a payphone, probably in the Bunyip or Yarragon area, and told them she was on her way and then, after that highway sighting, nothing.
Tony realised something sinister had happened when Marcia’s car was found abandoned on the highway near the Yallourn turn-off at Moe. Her wallet, bank card, Melway directory and address book were scattered along the road.
But there was no Marcia and in 2001, the Victorian State Coroner presumed her dead. Her parents and Mark have since passed away not knowing what happened to their loved one.
Tony is torn between accepting the coroner’s findings and suspecting Marcia is living under a new identity. He believes when she went missing, Marcia was struggling due to witnessing the death of their sister, Dianne, years earlier.
Dianne was killed by a drunk driver in a stolen car in 1980 and Marcia saw the accident. A few years later, she had a breakdown.
For a while, Tony says Marcia experimented with marijuana and he believes memories of that tragedy were re-triggered when Marcia’s boarder began smoking marijuana in her home.
“A day or two before she disappeared, Marcia told me ‘My past is coming back.’ I think she was telling me that she was about to have a breakdown again,” says Tony.
But Marcia’s diary and her conversations with Tony suggest she had plans for the future.
“She was looking forward to her 10 years long-service leave and was going to travel. She loved riding her motorbike and was learning to belly dance – she thought she might earn some extra money doing that. She’d also booked theatre tickets with friends for the Saturday after she left home. She was getting on with life,” Tony says.
But Tony understands there’s also a chance Marcia has died and, if so, wonders if she met with foul play.
“A few years ago, a woman from the area where Marcia went missing told me her brother-in-law found two graves in Moondarra State Park,” Tony explains.
“He said one of the graves contained a dog and he said he’d seen a woman’s hand sticking out of the other grave. When she heard that story, the woman reported it to police but by then, her brother-in-law had died. We don’t know exactly where those graves are.”
The plot thickens when, during a recent callout for information on ABC Gippsland radio, someone came forward with a similar story of two graves in the state forest.
“A man got in touch with me and said his wife used to ride horses through the forest. One day she was riding with a friend and came across two graves,” Tony says.
“They got scared and rode away. That was about 30 years ago.”
Now Tony wants to try and locate the area to see if the Moondarra State Forest can reveal Marcia’s fate.
“Any information about what may have happened to Marcia helps, each piece is part of the puzzle,” he says.
“After all these years, Marcia’s disappearance stays with me and I have to try and get answers.”
Anyone with information about Marcia Ryan can contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Support for families of missing persons is available from The Missed Foundation at missed.org.au
