A car belonging to missing woman Yvonne Whear has been found in northern New South Wales, about seven months since the 73-year-old was last seen.
Police divers found the car in the Rous River in Dulguigan on Saturday 12 September – a short distance from Whear’s home.
Police confirmed the vehicle had undergone forensic investigation – the mechanics of the vehicle were also under examination.
“Several personal items, believed to belong to Yvonne, were also recovered,” police said in a statement.
“Yvonne was not located with the vehicle and remains outstanding as a missing person.”
Whear’s family said they were devastated by her disappearance and expressed deep gratitude to “Sun State Search, our dedicated team of volunteers, NSW water police, the specialist police dive team, Tweed Heads police, and the local recovery services who assisted with the operation”.
Whear was last seen on CCTV on 19 February buying orange juice and putting $50 credit on her phone at the Shell service station in Murwillumbah, before she drove out through the cane fields to her small hobby farm at the hamlet of Dungay.
She had lived there for 23 years with a menagerie of the animals she cared for.
At 8.30pm a member of the public reported seeing the car, a gold Ford Escape wagon, parked in the dark without lights, on Dungay Creek Road, less than a kilometre from where she lived.
Her daughter Gillian Hallac said that she never drove at night if she could help it.
Her boots and hat that she had been wearing in the CCTV footage were still in her house, she had food in the slow cooker, her usual shoes were at the door. Her clothes were folded on her bed ready for the next day. Her family said she would never leave her animals, even for one night.
Her phone last pinged at 10am the next morning from a tower that put her phone in the area where her car was found on Saturday.
Hallac, who was in constant communication with her mother, says there was nothing to indicate anything was wrong. She didn’t suffer depression, she wasn’t on medication, and didn’t have mental health issues.
“She’s the type of person who would let you know if she was unhappy,” Hallac told the Guardian in August.
Dept acting insp Chris Elliott, Tweed-Byron district’s crime manager, said there was no evidence to suggest Yvonne would voluntarily disappear.
Hallac has said she believed someone may have taken Whear and hidden her car.
“That is my belief based on what I know about the circumstances in which she disappeared.”
