Miss You More

When Loren O’Keeffe’s brother went missing, she dedicated years of her life to finding him. Sue Smethurst meets the tireless advocate for those whose loved ones have vanished.

- Sue Smethurst

On Christmas Day in 2014, Loren O’Keeffe’s phone rang. A young tradie was on the line pleading for help to find his missing mate. Two weeks earlier Dane Kowalski, a 27-year-old plumber from Melbourne, had told buddies he was going fishing ‘up north’ but no one had seen or heard from him since.

As she’d done so many times since her own brother Dan disappeared three years earlier, Loren snapped into action. In just a few minutes she’d devised and launched a national media campaign for the distraught young man and his mates through the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), which Loren established after Dan’s disappearance. By that evening, thousands of people were on the lookout for Dane.

Knowing she’d been of help eased a little of the heartache caused by the empty seat at her own family’s Christmas dinner table.

Three months later, an Adelaide woman came across an abandoned ute parked off the side of a remote dirt road in the South Australian outback. She recognized the vehicle from pictures she’d seen on the Find Dane Facebook page at Christmas. It was Dane’s. Police found his body less than a kilometer away in the scrub. “Even though it wasn’t a happy ending, it was still a resolution, which is incredibly important,” Loren says. “Dane’s mates and family had driven up and down to Queensland and Darwin searching with no sign of him, and they could have easily been still looking now. Instead, they were able to bury him and say goodbye properly. That state of ambiguous loss, losing someone and never knowing what happened, would be torture.

“This is Dan’s legacy.”

Loved and lost