Elaine JOHNSON

   

Above right - age progressed image of what Elaine may look like today

 

 

Name: JOHNSON Elaine Sex: Female
Date of Birth: 20 Mar 1963    
Age when missing: 17 Height (cm): 0.0 Build:  
Hair Colour:   Eye Colour:   Complexion:  
Nationality:   Racial Appearance:      

Circumstances -  Missing from NSW since February 1st 1980. In the company of Kerry JOEL.  Last seen Cronulla.

 

Missing Persons Week: Vanishing painful for family, 33 years on

WHEN Sutherland Shire teenagers Kerry Joel and Elaine Johnson went missing more than 33 years ago, Malcolm Fraser was Australia's prime minister and Azaria Chamberlain hadn't even been born.

It may seem like a long time ago, but for Miss Joel's mother, Judy Rose, the scars of losing her only daughter have not healed.

"I don't usually talk about it because it brings back too much pain," she said.

"Every time I see someone dug up in the bush on the news, I wonder if it's Kerry.

"The only way to cope is to put it out of your mind."

Police said Miss Joel, 18, and Miss Johnson, 17, disappeared on February 1, 1980. They were last seen together at Cronulla.

At the time, Miss Joel was working on the register at Taren Point's Half Case supermarket.

She had attended Woolooware High School while Miss Johnson had been a student at Cronulla High School.

"Kerry had a boyfriend, Robert, and she didn't take any of her possessions," Ms Rose said.

"She had a lot of friends and what scares me is that no one has been in contact with her."

Ms Rose said her daughter was a vibrant, cheeky and confident teenager.

"She had such a lovely personality. You couldn't help but like her," she said.

"Kerry was the apple of my eye."

The day of Miss Joel's disappearance, Ms Rose found her car damaged.

"The car was in the garage all smashed up; Kerry must have taken it while I was at work. She never came home."

After reporting her disappearance to police, Ms Rose went searching for her daughter with her two sons and some friends.

"A group of us went looking for her at Woronora Caravan Park and someone said they may have seen her at Kings Cross, but none of the [leads] proved [true]," she said.

In the wake of the 25th anniversary of National Missing Persons Week, which runs until Saturday, Ms Rose said she was hoping someone would come forward with information about the disappearance of her daughter and Miss Johnson.

"I don't think she is dead and I find it hard to believe that she ran away," she said.

"I really don't know what happened."

Each year about 35,000 people are reported missing in Australia; that's one person every 15 minutes.

More than 95 per cent are located within a week but some, like Miss Joel and Miss Johnson, remain missing for decades.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

The case of missing women Kerry Joel and Elaine Johnson has been referred to the homicide squad

THIRTY-FIVE years ago Kerry Joel and Elaine Johnson went missing from the Sutherland shire. Today, a coroner said “I’m so sorry” to the families, before referring the case to the homicide squad.

AAP Daily Telegraph

 

For more than 35 years Judy Rose has wondered what happened to her missing daughter.

On Tuesday, a coroner told her 18-year-old Kerry Joel had probably met with foul play and was dead.

Ms Joel and her 17-year-old friend Elaine Johnson went missing from the Sutherland Shire in Sydney’s south in 1980.

There is no official record of either having accessed important services since their disappearance.

“I’m so, so sorry,” deputy state coroner Mary Jerram said before telling family members the cases would be referred to the homicide squad.

“I think we have to assume there must have been foul play.”

The inquest at the State Coroner’s Court in Glebe heard the age of the case made it extremely difficult for police to put exact dates on the last sightings of the young women.

A friend said she last saw the pair in what she thought was 1979, on the day Kerry crashed her mother’s car and left it in the garage.

The friend said she went to an arcade with the girls but left them to walk home.

The girls were among a large group who went missing in NSW in the late 1970s and 1980s, the inquest heard.

Ms Joel, who may have been pregnant, was known to hitchhike as far afield as Wyong on the NSW Central Coast.

“Around that area I think there was 14 girls (that) went missing,” the officer in charge of the latest investigation into the missing girls, Detective Senior Constable Richard McNally, told the inquest.

“I think every time they were hitchhiking they were running the gauntlet.”

The court heard the girls often spent long periods at friends’ homes and were not immediately reported missing.

A friend reported seeing one of the girls around 1982 but the sighting has not been corroborated.

Ms Jerram said it was extremely unlikely people so young would have the resources or inclination to start a life under a new identity.

Even if they had, the women, who would now be in their 50s, would eventually seek out their loving families, she said.

Outside court an emotional Ms Rose showed reporters a photo she carried of her daughter.

She said things may have been different if previous investigators had been as thorough as Detective McNally had been.

“It’s the first time in all these years I’ve felt somebody really, really was looking for Kerry,” she said.

“Police should have done this in the first instance.”

Family members in the court said `yes’ and one clapped as Ms Jerram said she would refer the cases to homicide police.

Were Elaine Johnson and Kerry Anne Joel killed by Ivan Milat?

TWO teens were walking up a quiet road, thumbs stuck out, looking for a lift. That would be the last time they were ever seen.

Olivia Lambert and AAP
AUGUST 11, 2016

TWO teens were walking up a quiet road, thumbs stuck out over the bitumen, looking for a lift.

They were hitchhiking to the Central Coast and it was the ‘80s and hitting the open road with strangers was common and considered safe.

Any story of hitchhiking these days could end in a horror movie, but 30 years ago it was just another mode of transport.

But for two young women, it appears the person who picked them up was not somebody just heading their way, but instead a psycho killer with a sadistic desire to cause pain.

Cronulla girls Kerry Anne Joel, 18, and Elaine Johnson, 17, were believed to be hitchhiking to the Central Coast when they disappeared on February 1, 1980.

They have not been seen since they left Cronulla 36 years ago.

But now an inquest into the disappearance of the two teens has suggested they may have had a run in with notorious backpacker murderer Ivan Milat.

The Daily Telegraph reports Detective Senior Constable Richard McNally said the teens’ missing person case was similar to other disappearances in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Milat was found guilty of causing those comparable disappearances.

According to the Ivan Milat Biography, the backpacker murderer was jailed in 1971 after being charged with the abduction of two women and the rape of one of them.

Charges against him were later dropped.

In 1996 he was found guilty of seven backpacker murders and was jailed for life.

Many of his victims were found in the Belanglo State Forest, 140km southwest of Sydney.

Kerry’s mother Judy Rose has never been able to get over her daughter’s mysterious disappearance.

She told Fairfax Media whenever she heard about somebody being dug up in the bush, she wondered if it was her daughter.

“The only way to cope is to put it out of your mind,” she said.

Kerry had a job at a supermarket and went to Woolloware High School.

Her friend Elaine attended Cronulla High.

Ms Rose told Fairfax Media her daughter was popular and had a cheeky personality.

“Kerry had a boyfriend, Robert, and she didn’t take any of her possessions,” she said of the day she disappeared.

“She had a lot of friends and what scares me is that no one has been in contact with her.”

On the Australian Missing Persons Register Facebook page, Kerry’s friend Ann-Maree Carr spoke of how the disappearance affected her.

“Kerry was my best friend and her disappearance has affected my life to this day and will until the day I die,” she said.

“Not a day goes by without her in my thoughts.

“I hold so much guilt because it should have been me with her (the day Kerry went missing).”

On Tuesday, a coroner told Kerry’s mother her daughter and Elaine had probably met with foul play and was dead.

“I’m so, so sorry,” deputy state coroner Mary Jerram said before telling family members the cases would be referred to the homicide squad.

“I think we have to assume there must have been foul play.”

The inquest at the State Coroner’s Court in Glebe heard the age of the case made it extremely difficult for police to put exact dates on the last sightings of the young women.

A friend said she last saw the pair in what she thought was 1979, on the day Kerry crashed her mother’s car and left it in the garage.

The friend said she went to an arcade with the girls but left them to walk home.

The girls were among a large group who went missing in NSW in the late 1970s and 1980s, the inquest heard.

According to Australian Associated Press, Kerry, who may have been pregnant, was known to hitchhike as far afield as Wyong on the NSW Central Coast.

“Around that area I think there was 14 girls (that) went missing,” the officer in charge of the latest investigation into the missing girls, Detective Senior Constable McNally, told the inquest.

“I think every time they were hitchhiking they were running the gauntlet.”

The court heard the girls often spent long periods at friends’ homes and were not immediately reported missing.

There have been reported sightings since their disappearance, with some suggestions they were seen in 1982.

There were also reports the girls were seen in Kings Cross after they went missing.

Possible sightings could never be confirmed.

Ms Jerram said it was extremely unlikely people so young would have the resources or inclination to start a life under a new identity.

Even if they had, the women, who would now be in their 50s, would eventually seek out their loving families, she said.

Outside court an emotional Ms Rose showed reporters a photo she carried of her daughter.

She said things may have been different if previous investigators had been as thorough as Detective McNally had been.

“It’s the first time in all these years I’ve felt somebody really, really was looking for Kerry,” she said.

“Police should have done this in the first instance.”

Family members in the court said `yes’ and one clapped as Ms Jerram said she would refer the cases to homicide police.

 

Exclusive: Coroner's handwritten note baffles family decades after NSW teens vanished

A handwritten note with crossed out sentences remains one of the biggest mysteries Helen Cooper has faced in the search for her missing sister.
Ms Cooper was just 12 when her blue-eyed, blonde haired older sister, Elaine Johnson, vanished from southern Sydney one day in early 1980.
Elaine is one of four siblings who grew up living a “good family life” in the beachside suburbs of Cronulla and Kurnell after relocating to Australia from the UK as Ten Pound Poms.
The beloved carefree hippie child, who rode bikes, skateboards and wore flower pants, was the kind of big sister who of an evening, after their parents had gone to bed, would wake up her younger sibling to sit up together and watch Monty Python on TV.
The last known sighting of the then 16-year-old was at a caravan park not far from the Johnson’s family home in the Sutherland Shire.
Elaine had been rooming with neighbourhood friend, 17-year-old Kerry Joel, at Woronora caravan park.
The teens left their homes over friction - Elaine from her father after an argument about a party and Kerry from her mother after she smashed her car.
 
Yet, on or around 1 February, 1980, both Elaine and Kerry disappeared never to be heard from again. In the almost 40 years since that time, the Johnsons, their friends and even police continue to grapple with how the pair could just vanish.
In the past few years alone, Ms Cooper has lobbied to have her sister added to the digital missing persons’ database   
First missing poster after 38 years
Elaine was only placed on a missing persons poster for the first time and age progression photo completed last year - 38 years after her disappearance.
“There’s nobody that we feel we can talk to about the case,” Ms Cooper told nine.com.au.   
She said when her father first reported Elaine missing police didn’t take him seriously, treating her as a runaway. By the time police started investigating Elaine’s case the trail had gone cold.
In 2014 Ms Cooper and her husband met with a detective who reopened the case. She said the detective got back in touch in 2015, informing them two detectives were now on the case.
“They started looking into (the case) and said they would interview friends and then it (the case) went to coroners,” Ms Cooper said.
After all the hard work to get the case to the coroners, it feels like nothing is now getting done, as the case is just sitting there. She also incredibly claims that it was only in 2015 police realised they were looking for two missing girls.
“They know they’re getting benched and they don’t have the staff due to insufficient funding and staff to handle the cold cases,” she said.

“Police said they’d interview all of the friends and go through their statements and they’d bring back (people to interview) and no-one got re-interviewed due to being moved to unsolved homicides.”
In August 2016, the New South Wales Coroners Court held an inquest into Elaine and Kerry’s disappearance and suspected deaths. In a single sentence, Magistrate Mary Jerram ruled the pair were likely “deceased”. She referred the cases to the Unsolved Homicide Squad.
The lost file
The scant details in the coroner’s findings stands out as unusual, given the police’s assurances to Elaine's family that individuals would be interviewed, though it might be explained by police stating at Coroner’s inquest that Elaine’s file was lost.
“Magistrate Mary Jarram asked was it put to Microfiche? Police replied no it does not exist,” Ms Cooper said.
What is perhaps more incredible is that another inquest into the teens’ disappearance was held in 2007. However, this inquest was allegedly held behind closed doors.
“They (the coroner) pronounced them deceased as 1979 and I refused to let them go with that. You don’t have any (evidence) to come up with that finding. I refused to get the death certificate,” she said.   
“That’s the biggest question mark over our head - why did they do that… one bit of paper hand written from the coroner.”
These days Ms Cooper and her family continue to follow any and every possible lead into Elaine’s whereabouts. They are hoping to raise enough funds to hire a private investigator to work through the case.
“I believe the police that dealt with the case did what they could and the best they had. They came in with nothing.” she said.
“When they picked up the case in 2014 they had little information. As Elaine didn’t really have a file and no statements from any friends.”
Ms Cooper has even taken on the task of looking for Kerry too. She believes if there’s evidence on one of them it could lead to finding Elaine or, even better, both.
A sister’s plea
“We are striving to get in contact with any residents or visitors of the caravan park at that time,” Ms Cooper said.
“If anyone saw the girls at the Woronora Caravan Park back then, or spoke to them about where they were going, please come forward.
“If someone has any information at all, no matter how little it is, it could help.”
Ms Cooper has set up a Facebook page Help Find Elaine Johnson- Missing persons, to gain help and more exposure into her sister’s disappearance.
“There are many leads that we’ve followed up over time that has come to dead ends but you’ve got to,” she said.
“We’re at a standstill. I don’t believe myself that they left the Shire. I can’t, there’s nothing that says they have. There’s nothing to prove they went anywhere else.
“You get someone say I seen the girls here there or somewhere but nothing. They’ve essentially vanished.”
A NSW Police Force spokesperson told nine.com.au Elaine and Kerry’s case “will be formally reviewed under the Unsolved Homicide Unit’s new framework in due course.
“Anyone with information that may assist Strike Force Derrington investigators is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.”

Crime Stoppers can be contacted on 1800 333 000.