Agony goes on for family of missing girl Siriyakorn 'Bung' Siriboon
by: Andrew Rule From: Herald Sun December 01, 2011 12:00AM
SIX months after Siriyakorn Siriboon set off for school her mother is still waiting for her to come home. ANDREW RULE reports on one family's grief beyond words.
THE last time her family see her, she turns on the doorstep and says "Bye, Mum, see you later." It is about 8.20am on a Thursday, six months ago tomorrow.
She crosses the street to the footpath and heads towards high school, a few minutes' walk.
Two doors down, a neighbour glances through his living room window and glimpses her: a 13-year-old girl in a blue and white uniform and blue rain jacket, carrying a dark backpack.
She moves from right to left across his vision - for about three seconds, he later calculates.
Then she vanishes.
Whoever sees her next, you'd think, is the only person who knows what happened to her, and why. The only one who knows if she is alive or dead.
Her family call her Bung, a short name standing in for the one on her passport, Siriyakorn Siriboon. She is a good girl: diligent, punctual, polite, never wags school.
People trust her, so when she doesn't turn up in her year 7 class that June morning, everyone assumes she has stayed home because of illness. It's the first week of winter, what teachers call "flu season", when kids wake up feeling awful and can hardly drag themselves out of bed.
If Bung were a troubled child, a repeat truant, teachers might suspect she is off on an escapade of her own. But she is none of those things, so no one worries until later.
At 3.30pm her mother, Vanidda Pattison, realises her daughter isn't home at the usual time. She calls her name from the kitchen, wonders why there's no answer.
About 4pm, the telephone rings. Bung's stepfather, Fred Pattison, answers. It's Dyamai, Bung's school friend. She asks to talk to Bung about what to wear to football practice next day.
It's the first Fred has heard that Bung wants to play football, as well as training for athletics and the school's rock eisteddfod.
"Why didn't you talk to her at school?" he asks, puzzled.
The girl hesitates. Bung wasn't at school, she says.
That's how the torment starts. First they go to the school, Boronia Heights Secondary College. The principal, Kate Harnetty, is still in her office, working late.
Harnetty has seen Fred Pattison at school functions and noticed he is calm and polite, and shows more interest in his stepdaughter's progress and behaviour - both good - than many fathers do.
She doesn't know his wife as well because Vanidda, only four years out of Thailand, isn't confident speaking English with strangers.
The Pattisons try not to panic. They look in the school library to make sure Bung isn't there. The principal checks the year 7 roll then finds a teacher who confirms Bung hasn't been in class.
That's when Kate Harnetty knows they have reason to worry. Bung doesn't "fit the mould" of kids who play truant or run away from home, as she later recalls. "She's just a sweet little girl. It was out of character."
She urges them to go straight to the police.
Minutes later, Fred Pattison walks into the police station in Dorset Rd. On the wall in the waiting area is a poster that says: When someone goes missing a day spent waiting is a day lost.
It's true enough but truth does not always equal reality in police work. The reality is that more than 35,000 people go missing in Australia every year, and more than half of them are under 18. The overwhelming majority turn up safely in hours, days or weeks.
But it's almost impossible to guess which tiny proportion of missing person reports could turn into something more sinister.
The policewoman who appears from behind the one-way mirror is polite and sympathetic but has no reason to think the report is different from the many that come to nothing.
In any case, the search has to start close to home, with friends and family that parents can reach quicker than the police can.
Fred has been up all day doing chores after night shift as a fitter in a Scoresby confectionery factory. Normally, he would take a nap and go to work. Instead, he calls his boss to say he won't be in.
In fact, it turns out he will not be back for a month.
Fred and Vanidda stay up all night. First, they visit Bung's friend Dyamai to get the names and telephone numbers of Bung's other friends. They call or visit each one.
Every blank they draw deepens their fear - and sends widening ripples of alarm. Late-night phone calls between other parents, school friends and teachers draw more people into the puzzle but no one knows the answer.
By 8am the Pattisons are back at the school, distraught, waiting to talk to the one classmate they missed overnight, but the girl knows nothing.
Kate Harnetty sees the overnight change in the couple: the hollow eyes and anguished faces. She urges them to go back to the police.
As soon as they leave, she calls the station to make sure they are taken seriously. With Fred Pattison's full-arm tattoo, cropped hair and tiny plait, she knows he looks "a bit like a merchant seaman" and fears he and Vanidda might be dismissed as trouble-prone time wasters.
As Pattison says later, he "hassles the police a bit" that morning. At that point it's still not unreasonable to suspect that Bung has run off with someone, and is now nervous about coming home.
Her parents are desperate to believe this, but too fearful to wait and do nothing. They make up simple posters: a snapshot of a smiling Bung in school uniform.
One of Fred's workmates helps put up the posters all over the district, first on power poles along the route Bung walked to school, then further away, in shops, bus stops and railway stations.
About 2pm, Knox Leader trainee reporter Erin Michael is buying a coffee in the Boronia Mall when she sees Fred Pattison taping up a poster. She introduces herself.
"He seemed quite vague and shocked," she would recall. "He came over to the office. He was pretty emotional." Half an hour later she puts the story online. That night, the Herald Sun picks it up. So as day two ends, the mystery is public - but deepening.
With every hour, the Pattisons grow more fearful. They put up posters all weekend.
By Monday, June 6, Knox detectives are on the case. A police spokesman concedes they have not "ruled out abduction". It's the first time the spectre of kidnapping is officially raised.
Inevitably, there are false leads and false hopes. On Tuesday, June 7, the trail is muddied when a schoolboy reports he saw Bung in Chandler Rd after school on the day she disappeared.
It turns out to be another Asian girl in school uniform. A security guard thinks he saw Bung at the railway station. He is wrong, too.
On Thursday, June 9, police set up an "information caravan" along the route Bung usually walked to school. People trickle in to talk. There is speculation but not much information. Nothing leads anywhere.
Detectives need a door to knock on, a car to trace. At the end of the first week they have neither. Twenty-five weeks later, they still haven't.
IT is just after 8.20am on a recent Thursday, much the same as the morning Bung walked out the door of the little house halfway along Elsie St. This is where suburbia meets the bush.
Cockatoos, magpies, crows and parrots squabble in the trees that fill the big post-war house blocks next to the Dandenongs. It's more Neighbours territory than the place for a horror story.
In the cream brick veneer at No.55, Vanidda Pattison is packing. Months of waiting for the news she dreads have taken a toll, though she tries to mask unspeakable fears with animated conversation, smiles and laughs.
She stays busy, but when she stops for a photographer to take a picture, the camera does not lie. Frozen in every frame, her eyes are full of pain.