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This podcast contains content that may be upsetting to some listeners. Before continuing, please prioritize your own well-being and mental health. Please check the show notes for more detailed descriptions of the episodes. It was a Monday morning when Joe woke with a sudden realization Louisa hadn't returned home since running out the front door the night before. The events of that fateful night must have been replaying in his mind, as after all, it had been an unsettling night for him. In this episode, we'll continue with Joe's account of events. There are two key areas we will explore here. Firstly, testing suggesting the statement that Joe was able to see Louisa running towards Darabin Creek that night. Secondly, well, it's about what Joe claims he did in the morning when he woke up and found her missing. Episode 7, Where Did She If you recall, it was around 9:45 PM the night before when Joe claimed to be standing in the backyard, patting the dog, when Louisa suddenly bolted out the front door in her pink dressing gown headed towards the nearby creek. We've said this in previous episodes. It's important to remember that Joe did not want to speak with us for this podcast, so all we have to go from is his statement to police in the aftermath of Louisa's death.

The purpose of this podcast is to ask questions that we think should have been asked, not to provide answers. So why did Louisa leave without warning? Was she seeking solace at a friend's house, hoping for support after the alleged recent breakup? Was she overwhelmed with emotions because she hadn't been able to get a flight at the airport? Was she headed back to George's house since arguing with Joe? Was it some psychosis? Whatever it was, the reality remained Louisa had not returned, and it was now morning. Joe would tell police that he began looking for clues as to where she may have gone. As he looked around the house, he noticed everything had been left behind. Her makeup, wallet, clothing, even the bag she had packed with a few essentials for her impromptu trip to the airport the day before. As he kept searching, he came across Louisa's journal, the pink one we learned about earlier, adorned with Louisa's his notes written on the cover that had been used for both schoolwork and her musings before she had abruptly stopped writing in it. As he held the journal in his hands, Joe stopped, grabbed a pen, and opened up a page.

He wrote the date, the third October 2011 at the top and began jotting down his feelings about George. The specific details of what Joe wrote in Louise's journal were never disclosed to Louise's family. And although the journal was handed back to them, That specific page has been retained by police. What I can tell you, though, is looking through the journal, Joe appears to have never written a new journal before. Considering Joe's actions, such as calling George at 2:00 AM and documenting his feelings in Louise's journal the morning he realized she was missing, it's natural to wonder if the initial investigation thoroughly explored whether Joe had some involvement in Louise's death. If this line of inquiry story was explored, at what point was it discounted? After all, both the police and the coroner concluded no third party was involved in Louise's death. This is something we should and will revisit later. But for now, we're still left asking questions such as, Where was Louisa running to that night? How did she end up in the creek? And perhaps the most haunting question of all, How on Earth do you even drown in there? Of course, we're not the only ones asking these questions.

In the early days after her body was discovered and her friends and family were grappling with this shocking tragedy, they naturally expected Over time, their questions would be answered by the investigators involved. But even the coroner, in their findings couldn't definitively answer these. They concluded that, The evidence does not enable me to be satisfied to the appropriate standard of proof whether she intentionally took her own life or whether she died from accident or misadventure. As it stands, the evidence does not support a finding that any other person caused or contributed to her death. So where was Louisa headed that night? Was her intention all along to go to the creek, or was she going somewhere else? Keep in mind, we only have Joe's word for it that she had left the house and headed to the creek. Speaking to her friend Indigo, Louisa's connection to the creek seemed nonexistent.

You would never see her at that creek. She wouldn't even wag school and hang out there. She would hang out, and this is the dumb stuff she'd do. She would wag school and go to Northland and hang out at the front of the restaurant. Where are you going to get caught there by your mom? You live around the corner. But she would do it. That's the stupid stuff she'd do. She'd sneak out of home and go to the drag races and then be in a car that's doing a drag and then get caught by the police and they would call her mom in the middle of the night and say, We've got your daughter here. Her mom would walk in her room and check if Louise was in bed and then realized, No, she's not in bed. She went to the drag races. She was naughty in that sense. Yeah, she was. She always pushed and done what she wanted to do. But in no way, shape or form, do I think that she would hang out at the creek. No, never.

Was she headed back to George's? If she was, then her choice of direction is unusual, as there was a more direct route. This would mean traveling by foot for an hour, mostly on concrete and gravel, likely only in socks. Is it plausible that she could have veered off course within such a short distance, around six minutes into her journey? According to Joe, Louisa was running faster than he had ever seen her run before. Maybe she did run out of path and in her exhaustion, took a misstep and ended up in the creek. After all, the creek was believed to have been elevated levels due to heavy rainfall. Could she have been running to hide? In that case, there were several options closer to her than the creek that would have provided better hiding spots, such as dark front yards, side streets, a large shopping center, or a school. These locations would have seemingly been more logical choices if her intention was to avoid being seen or to seek refuge. Her direction seems simply an odd choice, considering the lack of close friends or assistance in that area. If she was running for help, it also raises the question of why she didn't simply go to the nearby neighbors who would have been more than willing to assist her.

Perhaps Louisa became disorientated, her mental health reaching the point where going to the creek actually made no logical sense. Could her visit to the creek have been influenced by some psychosis due to the drugs she had smoked earlier that Let's keep exploring this. Firstly, if Joe's timing is accurate, it was only an hour before when Louisa appeared to be composed and polite while requesting to use the neighbor's phone. This suggests she wasn't showing any obvious signs of delusions or paranoia during that interaction. Nonetheless, mental health conditions can manifest and escalate rapidly, so we can't make any definitive conclusions either way. Coming back to the phone call Louisa made at her neighbors around 8:45 PM that night, she was overheard saying on the phone, Joe, where are you? I'm waiting for you. Although it sounds as perhaps they had plans later that night, this was never mentioned by Joe in his statement. After all, according to Joe, he had broken up with her earlier that day. Perhaps Louisa was ringing to try and get him to come back home. Perhaps, yes, but it seems like the statement, I'm waiting for you, wouldn't seem to quite fit under those circumstances.

Speaking with domestic violence experts such as Jolene Allet from Dart Institute, Australia, another theory has also been inadvertently raised.

When survivors are calling or monitoring, they do so for safety planning reasons. We know that survivors are safety planning and monitoring their abuse of behaviors on They're experts in the abuse of behavior that's been perpetrated towards them, and they know the patterns of behavior. This can happen minute by minute, can happen within seconds. A survivor can monitor perpetrators' voice tones, their statements that they're making, even the way they're breathing. Then we can talk about how they come home. How the abuser drives into the driveway. Was the car going faster than usual? Did the brakes hit harder than usual? What does the car door shutting sound like? Are the steps to the front door heavier than usual? And so on. We know that survivors are constantly safety planning and preparing for what may take place based on the perpetrator's response. Violences. In terms of phone calls, in terms of text messaging, in terms of seeing where they're at, whether or not they've got Snapchat or whatever it might be, where you can see locations or they're posting pictures on Facebook, survivors will be monitoring that for their own safety and well-being. Also to prepare, if we know that a user of violence is coming home at 10:00 PM, and we may have protective factors that we use to ensure that we feel safe enough.

That might be through self-medication. A survivor may have two glasses of wine. It might be through putting the kids to bed earlier or ensuring that there's no access to any heavy metals around the bed. Whatever that might look like, the survivor will do to ensure that they are safe.

We will be back after a short break.

A cast recommends, Podcasts We Love.

This is Not Without My Sister, the podcast where two sisters from Kildare, Ireland, now live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and have lots of things to do with their time, but decided to do a podcast instead. We talk about the time Beatrice got kidnapped by a man who looked like Santa and then tried to squeeze her into his ex-wife's poochy pants to no avail. And not to be outdone, the time that Rosemarie dawned her best Game of Thrones larping costume and showed on some unsuspecting handsome boy's doorway. He was not even that handsome. Trying to woo him back. This and more can be yours, not without my sister.

Acast is home to the world's best podcasts, including In the news from the Irish Times, Irish History podcast, and the one you're listening to right now.

Could this have been why Louisa rang Joe that night? To try and We don't understand what mood Joe was in and when he was coming home so she could prepare herself for what was yet to come. Perhaps, but we must add that despite facing assault charges at the time of her death, Joe said in his statement to police that he never once hit Louisa. Here we are, trying to piece together the puzzle of Louisa's final moments. We know she was awake when Joe arrived home, although the exact time of his arrival is still uncertain. At this point, all we have to work with is one time, the time of approximately 9:45 PM, when, according to Joe, after having a disagreement with her, Louisa ran out the door when he was distracted. To get a better understanding of how this may have played out that night, producer Claire and I decided to recreate Louisa's final evening based on the information available. This was how we found ourselves standing outside Louise's former residence in Preston at 9:45 PM, exactly 12 years to the day, armed with a replica pink dressing gown.

It is the second of October, 2023. It's really now or never to reenact the events of that night. I'm here with producer Claire. Trying to work out.

Our security.

Yeah. We have brought some team members along with us. We've roped in family because we're working on a big budget here. We've got the husband who's camera crew and the dog who is sleeping in the car.

But he's there if we need him.

Yes, it's true. While we were working on a limited budget, we had a very simple and straightforward experiment we wanted to test.

The point of the exercise tonight is once it hits 9:45 PM, we are going to reenact the events that Jo has provided to the police in his statement to see if that's even plausible for Joe to be standing at the end of Seston Street, looking down Tyler Street, and he was able to see Louisa in her pink dressing gown headed towards the creek.

To be specific about what was in Jo's statement, it read.

It was about 9:45 PM. I went out the door into the letter box and looked left and right up and down Seston Street. I then went right to Tyler Street. I looked left and right, and I saw her all the way to the end of Tyler Street. I whistleed, but she ignored me. She was bolting. I have never seen her run that fast in my life. She was on the left-hand side of the footpath. I didn't go out of Seston Street and I didn't chase her. I saw the robe under the street light as she ran away. It was done up. It wasn't raining.

In order to recreate the events Joe speaks about back on the second of October, 2011, around 9:45 PM, we needed to stand on the corner of Seston Street and look all the way down Tyler Street to where the road ends and the parkland surrounding Darabin Creek begins.

And according to his words, I saw her all the way to the end of Tyler Street. So for an idea of exactly what this looks like. The distance from Seston Street to the dead end of Tyler Street is approximately 370 meters. It's flat. There's no curvature in the road. It's just a single straight line. If you're running down Tyler Street to get to the Parklands, there's actually another street you can turn off before you get down to the Parklands.

Just a note here. This side street that you can turn left to before reaching the Parklands at the dead end of Tyler Street becomes more important during our experiment. I'll be referring to it by its title, Davis Street.

There are 17 houses between Seston Street and the end of Tyler Street. On the other side of the street is the Islamic College with a rather large fence, so it doesn't seem plausible that Louisa would try to jump over that. There's a total of nine streetlights between Seston Street and the dead end of Tyler Street. It's these nine streetlights on one side of the road. The streetlights face the road, so the pavement is concealed from the light as such. It's only going to be the back light. Claire and I have done some digging around these streetlights as best we can, and we've established that after 2011, these particular bulbs in the streetlights changed to LEDs, which means that the lighting is actually better in this day and age and that there's better color balance. Anything we see today is going to be more enriched than it was back in 2011. As far as Claire and I can find out, there were no known outages of of these streetlights on the night of the second of October, 2011. It was a clear night. There was no indication of rain that night. So at the end of Tyler Street, it's a dead end which enters Parklands, where the Darrobin Creek is.

What are we now?

Okay, we're five minutes away.

Five minutes away till 9:45 PM. The approximate time recorded on Joe's statement when he believed Louise Louisa made her dash to the creek.

The plan is Claire and our backup support are going to be standing on the end of Seston Street, the T junction between Seston Street and Tyler Street, and they're going to be looking out down Tyler Street towards the dead end to see at what point will they be able to identify the girl in the pink dressing gown. I'm going to be standing in the pink dressing gown. I'm roughly the same height as Louisa with additional 20 kilos on me. But hey, look, we're hoping that it's not going to make too much of a difference. We're going to keep this experiment simple. We're just going to test it out. This is something that the police have made no mention of doing themselves. So what harm is it to try it out and see what we can find out from doing this?

It's now 9:45 PM. While Claire stands on the corner of Seston Street, I set up 370 meters straight down the road where the dead end of Tyler Street meets the entrance to the Parklands. Given the distance we're apart, my audio quality isn't the best, but we quickly determine we can't see each other from where we're both standing.

I've got the tape. Yep. Recording is recording.

All right. Can you see anything? No.

Okay.

I'm standing outside, literally the entrance to I'm in the creek now.

Okay.

I'm coming towards you guys now. Okay. I can't even see you guys.

No. Because I feel like there is a slight incline, but maybe not. In the night, it does look like there's a slight incline. We can't see anything.

I can see shadows, but I don't know if that's you guys or not.

Could be trees as well. Do you know what I mean?

So far, it seemed very unlikely Jo would have been able to pick up Louisa at the dead end of Tyler Street. But for the sake of this reenactment, if I kept approaching towards Seston Street, at what point would Jo most likely have been able to spot a figure dashing down the road? Okay, I'm now at Davis Street.

You're at Davis Street?

I'm now at the corner of the road.

Can't see a thing. And I can't even see any movement. Oh, hang on. I feel like...

I'm coming. I'm going to go back. There's a car coming. There's a car coming.

Okay. All right. Let's wait. All right. Wait for their lights to clear altogether.

Okay. I passed one, two light.

Stay where you are for a minute because the car lights are helping. Do you know what I mean? Say, Stop for a minute. I think I can just see a figure. Can you maybe put your arm above your head or something? No. I think I can see you, though. I can see something lighter than the dark, if you know what I mean. And I think it's you. But I cannot tell that there is anything pink on you, and I can't even tell it's a human.

And this was the difficulty we continued to have. No matter how many attempts we did, walking forwards, running back towards the park, standing still, cars coming, cars going, no cars, going no cars. The fact of the matter was Claire just couldn't see me or my robe anywhere near the end of the street. At best, she was barely making out shadows.

Pretty sure I can see something, but it's not me.

Can you see me now?

No.

As I kept moving closer towards where Claire was, the response remained the same.

We can see a shape, and it is a lighter shape. I wouldn't to someone, That's a pink dressing gown, though. But we can definitely see something.

In fact, what this experiment was proving was that neither Claire nor my husband, who was also there filming, could work out where I was, what I was wearing, or more importantly, what direction I had taken. Okay, tell me if you see this. Are you ready? Ready.

Okay. Yeah, something illuminated. Your head?

I'm running towards the tree.

You're running?

Yeah.

Okay, well, we just saw something, and then now it's gone.

I repeated the same exercise each time choosing a different direction. Across Davis Street to the Parklands, then I would change direction and turn into Davis Street, then the next time just standing still and hiding in a driveway. But each time, the response was the same. They couldn't see the direction I was taking, and They definitely weren't making out the pink dressing gown. They could barely make out anything beyond some possible object. If you're wondering how close I got before Claire was able to accurately make out my shape in the pink dressing gown, it was only 145 meters down the road, nowhere near the end of the street.

Now I can see you. Well, I can see, again, a shape, definitely. Yeah, and it's definitely pink. Yeah. See you now. This is probably- This is the first time that it's obvious that it's pink. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely.

For Claire to see me, I had to be much closer to her and to home. I was nowhere near the end of the street. Or to the Parklands. Okay, Claire, it's getting late. Let's finish up. What do you think the key takeaways are from this?

From where I was standing, you could have headed in any direction, and I wouldn't have been able to see you, even though I was trying to spot you. I don't know how Jo was able to pick Louisa out from so far away. If you ran down that side street, there is no way I could have seen that. Even standing here on Seston Street, if I was running from her unit, my natural instinct would be to turn right, which is in the other direction to the creek, because then I wouldn't have had to cross the road. This simple test doesn't appear to support the claims Joe's made.

Following this reconstruction, we couldn't help but wonder if the police investigators had undertaken a similar approach. How was Joe so sure Louisa had ran towards the creek and not down the side street? Based on the difficulties we had, perhaps it was just a lucky guess. This leads to what he did the morning after she ran out. Now, we don't know exactly what time he woke up, but we do know at some point he wrote in her journal and started to look for her. In addition to searching for clues within the house, Joe decided to go out and search for Louisa himself. Taking the dog with him, he stated he walked down the street into the surrounding parklands of Dareban Creek, the same place Louisa had last been seen running towards. Standing on the footbridge that stretched over the Dareban Creek, connecting the banks of Preston to Heidelberg, he claimed his eyes were drawn to something. It was Louisa's pink dressing gown, alone and without any other belongings, snagged on a branch and floating in the middle of the water about four meters downstream from him. Had Louisa intentionally thrown it into the creek, possibly to make him think she had run away or that she was overheated from running?

The unsettling truth is that it wouldn't have been just Louisa's dressing gown floating in the water that day, because of course, wrapped within the confines of it was Louisa's lifeless body Her head and lower limbs, apparently, submerged in what must have been the murky depths of the creek. So rather than approach the dressing gown, Joe claims he decided to turn around and go home. Over the next few days, he would ring people and let them know Louisa was missing and her dressing gown was in the creek, but he claims never to have returned back there. Tragically, her body would remain undiscovered for an additional eight days, undetected until was ultimately stumbled upon by passers-by Diane and Alice. One thing seems certain. The only person who knew Louisa, or at least her dressing gown, was in the creek before the tragic discovery was Joe. We asked the police whether a reconstruction of Joe's account of seeing Louisa running towards the creek or reviewing her dressing gown in the creek was ever undertaken. And if not, why not? Their answer was simply that they considered there to be no value in conducting a reconstruction. The police may have been satisfied that there was no third-party involvement, but for others like Indigo, they were harboring serious doubts, not only as to what happened, but even convincing themselves that Louisa was even dead.

I didn't really know who to contact. I started messaging these randoms who were posting on her wall on Facebook, like, What are you talking about? Is this true? I was driving from my house to my dad's for dinner, and I rang and he answered the phone. And I remember the fear in me wasn't there for that call. And I said to him, What the F has happened? Where's Louisa? And he said, She was at the creek. She slipped. She hit a rock. She drowned, or she fell. She fell, she slept, she hit a rock. I'll never forget that because he said it like that. So I was just screaming at that point because I'd realized that's when the penny had dropped, that she was dead.

Coming up on Troubled Waters.

There's only three ways you can enter any environment.

One is purposeful, one is accidental, and the third way is by the hands of another.

Would she go jumping into a creek? No, disgusting.

If they can't come up with any logical reasons, then by the hands of another is something that absolutely needs to be investigated.

In this podcast, we've looked into whether Louise's death was properly investigated and all explanations considered. We're not suggesting that Joe had any involvement in her death, and we're not aware that he was ever a formal suspect. As he has chosen not to participate in an interview, something that he is perfectly entitled to do, beyond his police statement, we don't have the benefit of his responses or insights. Casefile presents Troubled Waters is written and produced by Julia Robinson and Claire McGrath. Audio production by Mike Magus. Audio editing by Anthony Taufer. Special thanks to Jolene Allet. If you need any support regarding any of the topics raised in this podcast, please reach out to services such as Lifeline on 13114, 1800 Respect, or the Men's Referral Service on 1300, 766 491. Listeners outside of Australia should refer to their local services.