Missing Persons Week 2025 in Bathurst

WATCH: How the Centre for Missing Persons and Search Dogs Sydney are supporting the families of missing persons.

Transcript

00:00From the symposium last year that Search Dogs did, we sat down and there was a big group

00:14of us and we know what the issues are and we know the support that families need. Once

00:21the police can't do anything more and we're here to try and fill that up. I'm helping

00:26a family at the moment with inquest information and if somebody wants support just at an inquest,

00:33I'll go and sit with them and hold their hand. Because there's stuff to this day that I wish

00:38people had told me at inquest.

00:48So we start the investigation from scratch again, including using cadaver dogs to actually

00:53go out there and search for the long-term missing.

00:55At the moment, there's 836 people, according to the New South Wales Police, but that's

01:01only on their register, but there's a lot of people that aren't on that list.

01:04Yeah.

01:05For example, there's a lady called Heather Scott. Sadly, she was washed away in the floods in

01:11a landslide in Wismore back in 2022. It went through a coronial inquest and because the

01:18coroner determined that she was deceased, she's not been placed onto the missing persons register.

01:23However, we've not recovered her remains. So how many of those other people are out there

01:29that have not been located? So we need to make sure that these families are getting the support,

01:34are getting the resources that they need. Hence why we held the National Missing Persons symposium

01:40last year, in November last year, to investigate for ourselves and to bring these families together

01:46together, to find out what occurred.