HE loved heavy metal, was into Pearl Jam and silverchair,
was a fan of Port Adelaide Football Club and an enthusiastic fisherman.
Daniel Sheppard, 19, also loved partying and had celebrated hard until 3.30am on
New Year's Day, 1995.
A non-driver, Daniel, his twin Michael, and other mates had used public
transport to do the pub and club rounds, starting at Lennies Tavern, Glenelg, SA.
They visited the Liberty Night Club in Hindley St at 2.45am and their last stop
was the nearby Jules Bar. Daniel walked from Hindley St to Adelaide Railway
Station and boarded the 4.13am train to Port Adelaide.
His destination was his home at Lord Hobart Way, West Lakes, where he lived with
his mother.
Detectives later determined he was on the train with 30 other commuters,
including three females he knew from school.
The atmosphere was boisterous but non-threatening.
On the train Daniel told two of the girls: "I'm partied out ... I'm going home
to crash."
The girls left the train at Alberton and he waved to them.
At 4.35am Daniel left the train and was seen on the southern pedestrian ramp
walking towards Baynes Place.
The walk home should have taken 10 minutes.
So how reliable was the sighting of a person answering to Daniel's description
hitch-hiking 2km from the railway station on Grand Junction Rd?
Twin brother Michael is certain Daniel was going home.
"I knew he was going home and nowhere else after he left the station," Michael
said. Hard-working and reliable was how Duncan Ollier described his young
employee at a Wingfield powder- coating factory.
"It's like he's been plucked out of the sky and disappeared," Mr Ollier said.
"He was loyal, reliable and trustworthy."
Daniel's workmates said he was "a good laugh, a funny bloke to be with'.
There was no hint of depression or anxiety.
Two weeks later, with no leads. Major Crime used his non-identical twin to "walk
through" Daniel's last hours.
Wearing a blond wig and identical clothing, Michael re-created the trip from
Platform 5 at Adelaide Station to where Daniel left the train and walked towards
Baynes Place.
Models of Daniel were put up around West Lakes and Port Adelaide shopping
precincts.
Divers searched the Port River and in April, 1995, police raided !he city homes
of known sex offenders after information Daniel had been seen with them.
"It seems he walked into oblivion,"retired detective Alan Arthur, who spear-
headed the Investigation, said.
Police now believe it likely Daniel was snatched and murdered.
Sunday Mail (28-12-2003)
Anna Merola/ Peter Haran
Missing SA teen 'probably dead'
November 08, 2005 - Daily Telegraph
A CORONER has ruled that an Adelaide teenager who disappeared during New Year
celebrations more than a decade ago is most likely dead.
South Australian Coroner Mark Johns today closed the case on the disappearance
of Daniel Sheppard, ruling that all avenues to find him had been exhausted.
Mr Sheppard was 19-years-old when he went missing in 1995.
He was last seen getting off a train at Port Adelaide at 4.35am on New Year's
Day.
Two reported sightings of Mr Sheppard later that day, and a third sighting in
1997, could not be confirmed and extensive searches of the Port Adelaide area
and the Port River failed to locate him, Mr Johns said.
Mr Johns said Mr Sheppard had enjoyed a good relationship with his family,
including his twin brother, and would have contacted them if he were still
alive.
Mr Johns did not determine a cause of death but said there was no evidence to
support numerous theories, including that Mr Sheppard had been murdered by
people with links to the occult or that he was bashed because he had substantial
drug debts.
Tuesday, November 8, 2005. 4:12pm (AEDT)
Coroner closes case on missing teenager
South Australia's coroner, Mark Johns, has found that a young man who went
missing during New Year's Eve celebrations more than 10 years ago is dead.
Teenager Daniel Nicholas Sheppard was last seen catching a train home to Port
Adelaide in the early hours of New Year's Day in 1995, but he never made it
home.
His family, including twin brother Michael Sheppard, has spent an agonising 10
years without hearing from him.
Detective Robert Stapleton told the inquest that blanket media coverage, police
investigations and a re-enactment failed to turn up any sign of the missing
teenager.
A friend reported seeing him at the Norwood Hotel in 1997 and, despite locking
the hotel's doors, police could not find the young man.
The inquest heard that Daniel Sheppard's bank accounts had been untouched since
the day he went missing.
Daniel Sheppard: New bid to solve baffling mystery
of missing 19-year-old from Port Adelaide
justine ford
SA Weekend
June 26, 2015
9:00PM
Daniel Sheppard’s
mother, Pat, (left), with his sisters Denise and Jennifer.
WHEN Sunshine Coast schoolboy Daniel Morcombe went missing in
2003 while waiting for a bus, it sent shivers down the spine of Adelaide
man Michael Sheppard.
Daniel Morcombe was a twin teenager and was abducted from a public place;
so too, was Michael Sheppard’s brother, Daniel. Even though Daniel
Morcombe’s disappearance was entirely unrelated, the coincidences hit a raw
nerve.
Sadly, Daniel Sheppard’s case has never been solved. But now there’s a
new homicide investigator on the block – Detective Brevet Sergeant Simon May
– who has just started looking at the case with fresh eyes. May knows he’s
been handed one of South Australia’s most challenging murder investigations,
but believes one piece of the puzzle may be all that’s needed to solve it.
The Sheppard boys grew up in West Lakes and spent their afternoons and
weekends fishing, swimming in the lake, riding their bikes and catching
lizards. They loved football and regularly went to Alberton Oval to barrack
for Port Adelaide. A slight boy, Daniel didn’t play much sport himself – he
left that to his bigger brother, Michael. The boys had five sisters, too,
but the girls were so much older that they’d already left home by the time
the twins were born.
Sadly, when Michael and Daniel were 15, their dad passed away, so their
mum, Patricia, raised them on her own. “We didn’t have a lot of money,”
Michael recalls. “We lived in a (Housing) Trust home.” But home life was
peaceful, which counted for a lot.
At 18, Daniel started working in a powder-coating factory. Michael got a
job producing metal parts. “We didn’t do Centrelink or anything,” Michael
says. “We just wanted to work. And Daniel loved it. Everything he did he
took great pride in.
“We weren’t getting paid a lot, just enough to go out on weekends,”
Michael says. “We used to go down to the Bay. We’d go into the city
sometimes and other times we just knocked around at home.”
The boys were so fond of their freedom they weren’t ready for steady
girlfriends either. “We were too busy carrying on with our partying and
going out with our mates,” Michael says. One such party, on New Year’s Eve
1994, would turn out to be a night to remember, but for all the wrong
reasons.
“We all met at a friend’s place at Cheltenham around six or seven
o’clock. We had a couple of drinks and caught the train and then the tram to
Glenelg,” Michael recalls. The group of eight friends kicked off the
festivities at a nightclub called Lennie’s, but after midnight, they went
their separate ways. “Daniel went with one of his friends and his
girlfriend. I didn’t,” Michael says. “I just caught the tram into the city
and the train home on my own.”
Daniel went with Ben Silvani and Ben’s girlfriend, Desiree Leyton, to
Rave nightclub in Hindley St, followed by Empire, a pool joint in nearby
Rose St. Ben and Desiree left Empire at about 3am, but Daniel stayed
chatting to a woman named Pamela Tanner for about half an hour. Tanner later
told police that she last saw Daniel at about 4am.
IT WAS around that time that Daniel left the club and walked to Adelaide
Railway Station, just a few minutes away, where he ran into another group of
acquaintances – Eliza Noack, Ami McNeill, Nicole Slabskyj and Nicholas
Wright. At 4.13am they all boarded a train and Daniel sat talking with the
girls, while Nicholas kept company with another group of friends. Daniel
told the girls he was going home to bed and waved them goodbye when they got
off at Alberton. A few minutes later, when Daniel reached his stop, he said
goodbye to Wright, who watched as Daniel left the train at Port Adelaide.
It was 4.35am on Sunday, January 1, 1995, and even though it was just a
10-minute walk home, Daniel never made it.
Detective Brevet Sgt May has never shied away from the tough jobs – the
Organised Crime Investigations Branch, Prison Corrections and now Major
Crime, where he has been posted to investigate some of the state’s gravest
felonies.
Daniel’s disappearance – and probable murder – has been investigated by
many fine detectives over the years, yet it is so perplexing, so bereft of
clues, that no one has put a dent in it. But as May re-investigates the case
from scratch, he brings with him a wealth of experience at second-guessing
some of South Australia’s worst crooks.
That makes him the Sheppard family’s greatest hope.
“It’s certainly very mysterious,” May says. “Daniel was obviously out for
a good night and from speaking to all his friends who he was out with that
night, he was in good spirits and having a good time, which makes his
disappearance very unusual.”
Michael remembers when he first realised his brother’s head never hit the
pillow. “It was the next day after we’d been out,” he says. “I’d come home
and Daniel wasn’t at home. I thought he must be back with our other mates at
Cheltenham.” Michael phoned them to make sure. “I said, ‘Where’s Daniel?’
They said, ‘We don’t know. He went home.”’
Right away, Michael and his mum didn’t like the sound of it. It just
wasn’t like Daniel. “We started to ring around other people, and we thought,
‘This isn’t right.’” Once they’d exhausted all of Daniel’s friends, Patricia
Sheppard reported her son missing. “It was a terrible time. Everyone was
crying. It was woeful. It was awful,” Michael recalls. “My gut feeling – it
wasn’t good – ’cos you just don’t believe someone’s going to disappear then
bob up later…”
The police didn’t like the look of it either and began extensive searches
of the area from Port Adelaide Railway Station to the Sheppards’ home in
West Lakes. They also combed the riverbed to look for any sign of the
missing teen.
“Police divers were used to search vast areas of the Port River,” May
says.
“They grilled a lot of people. They grilled one of our mates. They
grilled one of the people he worked with, too,” Michael recalls. “Mum was
like, ‘Maybe they did [make Daniel disappear],’ but I was like, ‘Mum, no. I
know at the local level the guys he worked with were great. They loved him.’
He was like that – a very likable fellow.”
In fact, 19-year-old Daniel didn’t have any enemies and there was no
obvious reason why anyone would have wanted him gone. “I would’ve been
truthful to the police and said, ‘My brother’s a loose unit,’ but he
wasn’t,” Michael explains.
After a while, the original investigators speculated that Daniel had
decided to walk somewhere other than home that morning. “There was a
possible sighting on Grand Junction Rd at Rosewater, which is in the
opposite direction,” May reveals. “A person driving by was positive he saw
Daniel, but it can’t be confirmed.”
The Sheppards appreciated news of the sighting, but didn’t believe Daniel
would have changed his plans on a whim.
“I knew his character well enough to know what he would and wouldn’t do,”
Michael says. “It wasn’t just him. And my mum was like, ‘No, I don’t believe
it.’”
Daniel Sheppard's
mother Pat and his twin brother, Michael, the outside Coroner's
Court during an inquest into his 1995 disappearance.
SIGNIFICANTLY, Daniel was a homebody, and his brother Michael knew that
whenever Daniel said he was heading home, he meant it. “He knew what train
to get on and where he was going. He was street smart; he wasn’t completely
naive. I would say he was heading home to his bed,” Michael says decisively.
Three weeks after Daniel disappeared, police tried another tack. “I did a
re-enactment,” Michael says. “I put on a wig. I went down to the [Port
Adelaide] station and they filmed me coming off the train.”
The re-enactment of Daniel’s last known movements was shown on TV in a
bid to extract more information from the public. The public did come forward
with more information and police followed up every lead, tip-off and rumour.
“There was every theory you can imagine and they’ve all been investigated
to the nth degree and they’ve come to nothing,” says May. Among those
theories was that Daniel had disturbed a group of skinheads who were
breaking into the local rugby club. That theory was investigated, but police
could find no substance to it. Of course, police had to consider the
possibility that Daniel had simply had an accident.
“It’s possible, but you’d think if he had gone missing he would have been
found somewhere,” May says. “If he’d fallen into the Port River or fallen
over somewhere, you think he’d turn up. I think it’s unlikely.”
“We’d have found him by now,” Michael says. “At least we could accept
that.”
One piece of information that came through to Crime Stoppers was that
Daniel had a drug debt,” May says, “but that wasn’t consistent with his
lifestyle. “He seemed to be a social cannabis user, but there was no
indication he was into hard drugs, so I doubt that’s the case.”
Police were also told that a man from the Port Adelaide area, after
consuming an intoxicating mix of cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines,
allegedly implied that he had been involved in Daniel’s disappearance. “He
was a suspected drug dealer and there was a suggestion Daniel was supposedly
buried in his backyard under concrete,” May says. “Police searched the area
using ground-penetrating radar. They found that old asbestos was buried
there, which suggested the ground had not been disturbed for some time.
There have been a number of those types of scenarios, but they’ve all been
discounted.”
Police even investigated the bizarre claim that Daniel was murdered by an
occult group and another suggestion he was kidnapped by sex offenders. Both
tip-offs led to dead-ends. “They’ve been investigated as much as they can,
but they’ve led to nothing,” May says.
Police divers
search the Port River for Daniel Sheppard. Picture: Campbell
Brodie
MORE specifically, one suggestion linked Daniel’s disappearance to The
Family, a group whose members abducted, drugged, sexually abused and
murdered young men aged 14 to 25 in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Only one “member”, Bevan Spencer von Einem, is serving time behind bars,
and that’s for the 1983 murder of Richard Kelvin, the son of Adelaide’s
favourite newsman, Rob Kelvin.
It was certainly not unreasonable for the public to speculate that
members of the group might still be active in the mid-1990s, when a number
of deviants suspected of being involved in the notorious group were still
alive and kicking. And not only was Daniel in the target age bracket for
those monsters, but, at just 165cm, the affable teenager would have been
vulnerable to predators. It is a sickening possibility that is never far
from Michael’s mind. “What I’m thinking is someone’s planned to go out and
do something on that night,” May says. “You think of The Family because they
pulled off those stunts. If it was someone trying to get a wallet, you might
get a black eye but you’re still there next day.”
The disappearance
of Daniel Sheppard features in a new book by true crime author
Justine Ford.
And while investigators have found no evidence that The Family, or any group
like it, was involved, May thinks Daniel was most likely the hapless victim
of a stranger who abducted him.
“It would appear to me that it was not a targeted attack,” he says.
“Daniel had been in town and his decision to say ‘I’m going to go now’ was
on the spur of the moment.
“The time he chose to leave the club was known only to Daniel and not
anyone else, which takes away from a targeted attack.”
The likelihood that his brother was simply in the wrong place at the
wrong time will always plague Michael, who, like most people, finds the
crime unfathomable.
Five or six years after Daniel disappeared, Michael, his sisters and
their mum went on an outing, which was part commemoration, part research.
“One New Year’s we went out at four in the morning and put flowers at the
railway station,” Michael says.
“We wanted to see the kind of people who were out at that time. There
were all sorts. Some were wobbling home after drinking all night and some
were just going fishing.” It astounds the family to this day that, with so
many people out and about, no one saw what happened to Daniel.
As he spearheads the new investigation, May’s hope now is that the
passage of time will work in his favour. Even though old leads have gone
cold, there is the hope that, as allegiances shift, people with information
will come forward.
“People’s personal situations change over time,” May explains, “The
people who those with information might have been hanging around with 20
years ago may be different now, which may prompt them to come forward. It’s
only that one piece of information you need that could set the whole thing
in motion.”'
Nurse believes she overheard the abduction of Daniel Sheppard on the night
he vanished without a trace
Exclusive — Andrew Dowdell
Sunday Mail (SA)
AN Adelaide nurse is “haunted” by what she believes were the
desperate screams of Daniel Sheppard being abducted outside her home early on
New Year’s Day, 1995.
Carol, who did not want her surname published, said she was
bewildered and frustrated by the lack of interest shown by uniformed police and
homicide detectives, despite the incident happening 10 minutes after he was last
seen, and a two-minute walk from his home.
“In my heart I know it was Daniel. Over the years it has really
haunted me at times,” she said. “Why have I just never been listened to?
Particularly when the police were going after other leads, I just thought they
were totally barking up the wrong tree.”
Now in her early 50s, she told the Sunday
Mail she would never forget the commotion on Jane Flaxman Court about
4.45am, after she woke to attend to her sick young daughter.
“I’d heard someone screaming along the lines of ‘I don’t need a
lift’ and ‘f … off, f … off’ and it sounded distressed, but then there was
nothing but a bit of a muffled noise,” she said.
Startled and alarmed, Carol went outside and sat on a stool,
where she had a view of the street and the large, “square-shaped” car which was
similar to a Holden Statesman or Ford Falcon.
She was surprised to see one man in the driver’s seat with nobody
in the front passenger seat.
“I thought that was odd, then I saw the car had no lights on and
thought that’s weird, why haven’t they got their lights on?” she said.
At the time Carol thought the figure in the middle of the rear
seat was a female, but learned later that Daniel was small with long wavy blonde
hair.
“All of this happened within a minute and it just didn’t feel
right and I just couldn’t process it and went to my husband and said ‘something
really weird has just happened in our street’,” she said.
“He reminded me that it’s New Year’s Day and everyone is drunk
and people are doing stupid things. But something just didn’t sit right and I
rang Port Adelaide police station after I got up around mid-morning.”
Accepting the initial disinterest, Carol again contacted police
when Daniel was declared missing and received a call back from a detective.
“They spoke to me over the phone but they never came and saw me,
never came and saw where I was saying these things happened, which surprised
me,” she said.
Then in the early 2000s, she received a phone call out of the
blue from a detective, who wanted her to recount her story.
“I remember him saying he’d been so caught up in the Snowtown
case that this had taken a back seat,” she said.
Carol said she believed her information would finally be taken
seriously when the detective allegedly told her “I think you are probably pretty
spot on with what you thought happened to Daniel”.
Carol said she had spent years “pulling my hair out” as a 2005
Coroner’s Inquest passed without her evidence ever being made public or delved
into by police.
Carol said she agonised for years on whether to contact the
Sheppard family with her story, before contacting their Facebook page Missing
Person Daniel Sheppard several months ago.
Carol’s meeting with the Sheppards left her “just overwhelmed by
what they live with for so many years, it would be your worst nightmare not
knowing”.
While happy her story was finally public and that police had
confirmed that she had reported the incident before Daniel was even noticed
missing, Carol said it was “really scary too”.
“I have been a little bit creeped out today, the people who did
these terrible things are still out there and they know exactly what happened,”
she said.
“I just hope someone, even on their deathbed, has the conscience
one day to say they do know what happened, and give the family some closure.”
Family just wants answers
DANIEL Sheppard’s relatives have spent 23 years agonising over
what cruel fate befell him in the hour before sunrise on New Year’s Day 1995.
They have been resigned to the likelihood his death will be
another unsolved case with more questions than answers.
But after police confirmed a West Lakes woman had reported a
violent incident outside her home at the time Daniel vanished, there is one
question they say can be answered.
“The question we have is why wasn’t this released in the media
and why wasn’t there a re-enactment,” Daniel’s nephew David Sheppard said.
“And why didn’t we know about it?”
The family, including Daniel’s elderly mother Pat and his twin
brother Michael, have endured the double blow of never receiving answers amid a
litany of “insulting” theories.
These included the 19-year-old being killed by members of the
occult, a homosexual gang, or drug dealers over a debt.
But in 23 years, the Sheppard family have been unaware of
evidence which backs their initial suspicions that he was abducted by strangers
as he walked home from a night out with friends.
The Sheppard family were pessimistic when a woman called Carol
messaged the Facebook page Missing Person Daniel Sheppard several months ago.
“When we first read it we thought ‘oh, here we go again’,” he
said.
“But we double-checked it on the record, and the detectives over
the years have spoken to her and it checked out.”
On Thursday, the police officer leading a cold case review
confirmed that detectives had interviewed Carol soon after the disappearance —
adding to the family’s anguish, as they now believe police could have squandered
their best chance to solve the case.
“If it is true, those people in that car could have been trying
to get other people that night and someone might have said ‘I remember that car
or those people’ — you never know,” Mr Sheppard said.
Despite their frustration at only hearing of the report via
Facebook — and then by asking police this week — the family said they hoped a
cold case investigation launched three years ago could finally give answers.
Sergeant Simon May has been appointed to lead the renewed probe.
One of Daniel’s five older sisters, Denise Scarborough, said a
series of detectives assigned to the case over the years.
“The first detective running the case was called Weeding and he
had an offsider, a bit later on Weeding was transferred somewhere else,” she
said.
“Then the detective Stapleton came on, and then Stapleton left
and I thought ‘oh well, who is handling the case?’ and if you wanted to know
anything I wouldn’t have known who to speak to until Simon was put on.”
Mr Sheppard said the family was hopeful that Sgt May would bring
a fresh focus to the case.
“He contacted Daniel’s mother in 2015 to have a meeting with her
and we went there and met him … it was a good meeting,” he said.
“He’s done everything I guess you could ask, the only thing is
this information. I guess he wasn’t in charge then, but we still wanted to know
about this now.”
Carol’s call to police before Daniel was missing boosts the
family’s long-held view that he fell prey to sex predators on the 12-minute walk
home.
“The scenario I picture in my head is they have seen him walking
and somewhere between the (train) station and his house approached him in the
car and possibly said something like ‘happy New Year, do you want a lift?” Mr
Sheppard said.
“This whole scenario, from the location to the time, it all adds
up and it is a red flag.”
Mr Sheppard said when the Snowtown serial killing victims were
found in barrels in 1999, they expected Daniel to be among the victims but
another infamous Adelaide case had been in their minds for years.
“It has a lot of similarities to The Family as well, they were
the stunts they pulled off, targeting young men and Daniel only looked about
16,” he said.
“It’s mind-blowing isn’t it? There is nothing about it in the
Coroner’s inquest either, so it was a big shock,” Ms Scarborough said. “All of
it adds up, the time fits in perfectly and we have always known he was taken. He
knew what he was doing and was going straight home, but he never made it.”
