“It’s true,” Alison Sandy says, “there’s no doubt about it, it is absolutely undeniable that Ric Blum lied while under oath at the inquest.” Journalist, editor, and podcast producer Alison Sandy is telling me about the mysterious conman at the centre of the disappearance of Gold Coast woman Marion Barter, a case Sandy has spent nearly five years of her life investigating as part of the true crime podcast The Lady Vanishes. She doesn’t mince words about the prime suspect in Marion’s disappearance nearly 37 years ago. “He was definitely involved with Marion at the time of her disappearance. The case against him is very strong…the evidence is there which points at him having some involvement in her disappearance.”
Like any important and powerful true crime investigation, Marion’s case started as a mystery. When Sandy and her team at Seven began investigating the case in 2019, Marion wasn’t even officially listed as a missing person, a fact which was causing immense frustration for Marion’s daughter, Sally Leydon. Leydon was in the middle of a Freedom of Information battle at the time to get the brief of evidence from NSW police on her mother’s disappearance, but police were blocking the request, suggesting that the Gold Coast mother missing for over two decades was still alive and shouldn’t have her privacy invaded. Sandy, who is the Freedom of Information editor for Seven, was put onto the case by a journalist friend and thought the response by NSW police was “ridiculous” and saw opportunity to pursue the case as a podcast. “Not long prior to this, I’d been the main reporter when Alison Baden Clay went missing and was found murdered,” Alison tells me in an interview at the Seven Network offices on Mt Cootha, Brisbane. “They put in these TV screens at The Courier-Mail, and you could see how popular every story was as it would go online. And every time there was an Alison Baden Clay story, it was number one … people were just fixated on it. So, I knew how (true crime stories) rated, how popular they were.”
Leydon was pursuing her FOI action in New South Wales, which Sandy says has the best FOI laws in the country. “I knew that because the New South Wales laws were quite robust that we had a good chance of getting us over the line,” Sandy says. “Sure enough, New South Wales Police dug their heels in and wouldn’t give it to us.” The case moved to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, and Leydon’s search for answers formed the first part of the podcast, which also sought to apply pressure on the NSW Coroner to force an inquest into Marion’s disappearance. Both victories were won in the first month of the podcast’s release, which saw rapid success, attracting 1 million streams and downloads within a month and hitting number one in the charts.
IT was a listener, in the end, who started the chain of events that found the missing link between Marion and convicted fraudster Ric Blum. Joni Condos, conducting her own research through Trove, found a name in a newspaper linking Marion – who had changed her name just before she disappeared – to a man living in Luxembourg. NSW homicide police followed the tip and found the man’s identity had been stolen by another man residing in Australia – Ric Blum.
I interviewed Sandy a week before the inquest findings – after a five-year investigation – were handed down. Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan found that Marion Barter was dead, that she had died soon after she vanished nearly three decades ago, and that Blum was involved in draining her bank account at the time and was deliberating withholding information. She referred the case to NSW homicide police for further investigation but did not recommend charges of perjury against Blum.
Sandy, like many journalists, is more confident asking questions than answering them. She’s passionate and loaded with information in her answers, dropping and picking up threads as we speak, then returning to them later. Her ambition and relentless work ethic is obvious as she talks about her career, and I’m not surprised when she tells me she’s most comfortable as a “news breaker” out hunting for stories. Sandy has an innate sense of justice and I wonder where that comes from, but in my first interview for the podcast, I forget completely to ask her! She tells me she’s highly competitive, and twice in the interview talks (with lighthearted humour) about people she thought had unfairly “one-upped” her – the high-achieving girl in grade 12 who won the modern history prize (Alison’s favourite subject) and the newspaper reporters who put their bylines on a national story she had written. Alison explains: “I’ve always been someone who hates injustice and I knew I was competitive, but I didn’t realize how competitive I was (until I studied) journalism.”
Alison Sandy is the Freedom of Information Editor for Seven Network, and the executive producer for two true-crime podcasts, Shot in The Dark and The Lady Vanishes.
Sandy’s parents divorced when she was young, and she grew up in the small Victorian city of Portland, about a five-hour drive from Melbourne. She was an average student in school, preferring to coast along and hedging her bets with her study choices, which included accounting, which she says, “I was really, really bad at”. There was one subject that drew Sandy in and obsessed her: history. “I think history is so important, because it’s about understanding the world and people and politics and how things happen and why they happen,” Sandy tells me. She studied humanities at university, “wonderful subjects like philosophy and all the various histories”, before transitioning to journalism and instantly loving it. “I love information. I love knowing what’s going on. I love breaking stories, that’s my passion.”
When she returned to Portland after uni for a full-time gig at The Portland Observor, some in the working-class town weren’t ready for the ambitious young reporter. “I started out as a first year third year cadet, and within six months, I was Chief of Staff. It was quite overwhelming and I was really serious about it too,” she says. “You know, I was thinking I’m working for the Herald Sun here.” One critical story she wrote about a technology park the local council had invested in raised the ire of the town mayor. “I remember the mayor ringing me up once and saying that ‘you’ve bitten the hand that feeds you’. And you know, basically you’ll never work in this town again. I’m just like, ‘well, that’s okay’. And I quoted him.”
A memorable journalism experience for Alison was when, sitting in a Rotary Club meeting – she’d join Rotary wherever she worked to cultivate her business contacts – Alison found herself recording a stunning speech by an unsuspecting former liberal senator Amanda Vanstone. “It was just post-911. And they brought in new laws that banned proper cutlery on flights. And she was just saying how ridiculous it was, that anybody could just bring an HB pencil and shove it into someone’s temple basically, and they’d be dead.” The speech – Vanstone is a particularly funny orator – made front-page news across Australia. “Afterwards, I went up to her and said…’I work at The Sunday Mail, lovely to meet you’. You could see her face fall as she realised ‘oh shit’…I was pretty young at the time but Matt Price (at The Australian newspaper) wrote this nice little column about how I got the story and this is what good journalism is about…so that was a really great moment for me.”
Alison’s career has spanned broadcast and print. A book version of The Lady Vanishes is set to be released later this year in May. She tells me her sense of justice continues to drive her, though juggling a family has changed her priorities. “I look at the legal system, and I just see so much injustice …The great thing we have (as journalists) is we can put a spotlight on whatever is happening that shouldn’t be happening…You might only deal with one case, rather than the whole system. But it does make a difference. And even if it’s just one person that it makes a difference for, that’s still wonderful. I mean you feel very grateful that you’re able to do that. That’s the satisfaction that you get. And that’s what I enjoy so much about it.”