Strike Force Villamar was set up to investigate the disappearance of Amber Haigh, but even in 2007 police said they had exhausted all avenues of inquiry resulting in the posting of a $100,000 reward to prompt someone to come forward with new information.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The officer in charge of that investigation at the time, former Detective Sergeant Gai Crea - a 30-year veteran of the NSW Police Force - said this week he left no stone unturned.
Amber was reported missing on June 19, 2002 by a married couple who she had been living with in Kingsvale.
The couple, Robert and Anne Geeves, told police that they dropped Amber off at the Campbelltown railway station on June 5, 2002 and never heard from her again.
Amber was also the mother to Robert Geeves’s six-month-old son Royce.
In July 2011 a coroner returned a finding that Amber was dead as the result of homicide or misadventure, her body possibly disposed of down a disused mine shaft.
The Geeveses had been primary targets of the police investigation but no charges were laid and they refused to answer questions at the inquest when called to give evidence.
Crea said Robert Geeves had told him he and his wife Anne, with whom Amber had been living, had dropped her off at Campbelltown Railway Station to visit her gravely ill father in Mt Druitt Hospital.
“Why they travelled from Kingsvale to Campbelltown to drop a girl with the mentality of a 12-year-old off at a train station that was just half an hour from Mt Druitt was odd,” he said, “and there was the fact she left her son with the Geeveses - why wouldn’t she take him to meet her father who was dying in hospital?”
It never stacked up for the detective who spent four years trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
But he isn’t surprised at Detective Sergeant Huxtable’s assessment.
“There’s nothing they can do - it’s all been exhausted,” he said.
