Getting Away With Murder

- Susan Chenery

The path to the police station is lined with palm trees. Its pitched corrugated-iron roof glints in the sun. Its lawns are neatly mown. Just down the road is a parallel universe, the main drag of Nimbin, with its psychedelic storefront murals, lingering marijuana smoke in the street, dreadlocks, beads and long greying hair. A free spirit, Lois Roberts used to come here, to this alternative world, most days.

“She was such a sweet woman,” says Michael Balderstone, president of the Nimbin Hemp Embassy, a local landmark. “A sweet energy. There was a real innocence about her, with her freckly face, she was just a very lovable and loved person here in this community, and very vulnerable.”

On the evening of July 31, 1998, at about 5.30pm, Lois, 39, had just missed the last bus home to Lismore. She walked from the bus stop outside the hospital to the corner of Cullen Street, the road out of town, to hitchhike home. Across the road at the police station, an officer looked up and saw her. When he looked again a few minutes later, she had vanished.

When Lois didn’t pop in to see her mother, Muriel, the next day or the day after, her brother Mark went around to her house. The groceries that had been delivered were untouched. With no sign of her, he went to the police. “The police knew Lois,” says her twin sister, Rhoda. “They said she was probably around somewhere and not to worry too much. Then, on payday, Mark went to the bank and they said she hadn’t been in. That’s when it really hit home. We knew something was very wrong.”

By then, Rhoda had dropped everything and driven up from Sydney. The family went around Nimbin putting up posters, asking at every shop and cafe if anyone had seen Lois and walking to the outskirts of town, looking for something, anything, a clue.