Valerie Dawn EASTWELL
Valerie Dawn EASTWELL
Eight-year-old Valerie Eastwell was last sighted after she was sent to her neighbour’s house on 15 August 1945 to deliver a message. She often went to this residence to play. The town (Gol Gol, NSW) had just received news that the war had ended, and everyone was celebrating. Since this time there has been no contact with Valerie, her whereabouts remain unknown.
If you have information that may assist police, please contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Truth newspaper, Sunday 15th August 1954
Gol Gol is a sleepy little backwater on the N.S.W. side of the Murray River, a few miles from Mildura. It was around here that young Valerie lived and died, perhaps, because no one knows what happened to her after she left a neighbor's place on August 15, 1945. She had been playing with the neighbor's children and is believed to have left about mid day. Her parents, worried by her non-appearance for dinner that night, called the police who began Australia's biggest, longest search. Men left a local dance to look for the little girl. The dense bush around Gol Gol was searched yard by yard. A long line of beacon fires was lit in the hope of attracting the child's attention. R.A.A.F. planes scouted overhead. Police patrolled the river by launch. Police dogs Zoe and Souri were put on the girl's trail. Famous blacktracker, Sgt. Riley, and his tracker son combed the country for signs of the girl. More than 120 searchers in one day combed every part of a 6000 acres scrub patch after a tractor had systematically marked the area into sections to be searched. Ace man-hunter, Det. Insp. (later Det.-Supt.) James "The Fox'' Wiley was sent from Sydney to lead the search. Valerie Dawn Eastwell was only a little girl, but it seems unbelievable that she could vanish so completely.
Still "open"
- Sunraysia Daily
AUGUST 15, 1945, was meant to be a day of celebration.
It marked the end of World War II, when Victory in the Pacific was achieved and the world returned to some semblance of normality.
But the day fills 78-year-old Gol Gol resident Tom Modica with sadness.
As well as securing the defeat of the Japanese after almost six years at war with Allied Forces, it was also the day that Mr Modica’s young school friend Valerie Dawn Eastwell was last seen alive.
Mr Modica was one of the final people to see Valerie before her disappearance as she rushed to spread the word that the war was over.
Her remains have never been found despite an exhaustive search which lasted for months and involved thousands of volunteer searchers, sniffer dogs and black trackers mainly through an area just north of Gol Gol.
No evidence has emerged to suggest how Valerie disappeared and met her likely death.
Valerie vanished in broad daylight and while initial investigations honed on the likelihood that she became lost in scrub and died from exposure, police later raised theories that she may have been murdered or kidnapped.
Mr Modica vividly recalls his fleeting exchange with Valerie that morning – a moment that still haunts him to this day.
“I was coming from my parents’ property to go to the Gol Gol School where Valerie also attended,” Mr Modica said.
“But on this day as I went to step over a fence from the property and head off to school Valerie came along heading in the opposite direction,” he said.
“She asked me what I was doing and I told her that I was going to school, like normal.
“But her family had a radio and we didn’t, so she told me there would be no school today because the war was over.
PARTS of Gol Gol Creek are still bordered by the dense Mallee scrub that used to
cover most of the town.
The creek is also thought to keep the secret of what happened to Valerie Eastwell, the eight-year-old girl with the light auburn bob who disappeared 70 years ago today.
It was the end of World War II in the Pacific, the day Japan had unconditionally surrendered, and Gol Gol students had been sent home in celebration of the Allied victory.
“If they had stayed at school, she could still be here,” said niece Lyn Pitt, who was just two at the time and has never given up the search.
Valerie was last seen near the creek, behind the family’s home, dressed in a faded blue tunic and black shoes about 11.30am.
Accounts of her activities that morning varied in newspaper reports at the time, most including her duties to purchase lettuce from a nearby market garden and to take the news of the war’s end to her brother working on a nearby block.
It was believed friends were the last ones to see her. The case is an eerie one, and one of Australia’s most baffling and longest-running mysteries.
Her father believed she had met with foul play, but police were also investigating if she wandered into the bush and died from exposure.
Reports of a child’s screams, auburn hairs pulled from the river by a fishing line, reported sightings as far away as Hopetoun, and even the discovery of a skeleton near Wentworth, were eliminated.
Decades later, a man even travelled from Swan Hill to tell remaining family members Valerie was alive and living in Melbourne with a family of her own.
The licence plates on his vehicle were false and he was dismissed as one of the many “kooks”.