For two long, lonely decades, Rosalind Wright has not stopped searching for answers about what happened to her lost daughter.
“I lost a part of myself when Amber went missing,” she said years after her daughter vanished, “not knowing where she is or what happened to her.”
Wright’s daughter, Amber Michelle Haigh, was a 19-year-old new mother when she disappeared without trace from country NSW in June 2002.
One of Australia’s enduring mysteries takes another critical step on Monday when two people face trial for her murder in a judge-alone trial before Justice Julia Lonergan in Wagga Wagga.
Robert Samuel Geeves, 64 and his wife, Anne Margaret Geeves, 63, now of Murrumburrah, each face one charge of murder in the NSW supreme court. They have pleaded not guilty.
In 2011, nine years after Haigh’s disappearance, the state deputy coroner, Scott Mitchell, found that she was dead “and that she died probably in early June 2002”.
“The evidence,” Mitchell found, “does not permit me to be more specific as to the cause or manner of her death or to say where she died.”
But the coroner recommended the case remain live and be sent “to the unsolved homicide squad for further investigation”.
Grist for the mill of gossip
Haigh’s life was marked by dislocation and drift.
She was shifted between family members as a child, seeking refuge from a violent father. She toiled to manage her epilepsy amid a chaotic, unstable home life. She had an intellectual disability and struggled at school.
The coroner heard she was “easily led” and “vulnerable”, “loving and caring” but also “very needy”.
Haigh was a girl without a secure place in the world – a child without a voice.
She had moved to live with her great-aunt in the Riverina and pick fruit. She subsequently lived with the Geeves in the tiny farming community of Kingsvale, when she vanished.
Her son was five months old.
In the years since, the circumstances of Haigh’s disappearance have sparked widespread speculation and occasionally cruel and casual conjecture.
It became, in the words of the coroner, the subject of persistent “rumour-mongering”: a dark chapter that became grist for the mill of gossip, in the way of small places, where everyone knew everyone’s business.
Much of what has previously been made public in news reports and as the subject of television specials cannot be republished now, in the shadow of a criminal trial. Witnesses will be asked to independently recall what they saw and knew. Evidence will be tendered and tested anew.
This eight-week murder trial may be the last chance for a final reckoning – for answers to questions that have lain unresolved for decades.
At the 2011 inquest, Mitchell said Haigh was “entitled to be cared for and protected”.
“She was looking for love and acceptance … Her sad death has robbed her little boy of his mother … What happened was a tragedy.”
In 2007, the NSW government offered $100,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction over Haigh’s disappearance. Little, outwardly at least, moved in the case.
In April 2022 that reward was increased to $1m. The Geeves were arrested eight days later, at 7.30am.
Speaking outside the coroner’s court more than a decade ago, Rosalind Wright vowed she would never give up on her lost child.
“I would like to know what happened to my daughter,” she said. “I want to find some answers. I want some justice.”
Guardian Australia’s podcast Who Cared? The disappearance of Amber Haigh launches on 22 June. Each Saturday Ben Doherty will speak to Bridie Jabour about the key witnesses and evidence in the trial. Find all the episodes on the Full Story podcast feed
