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A BENDIGO court has heard missing teenager Maureen Braddy was upset and crying in the afternoon before she disappeared.
Jillian Anne Siddall told the Coroners Court that Maureen, a childhood friend, had been kicking the ground at a Long Gully oval on Saturday, November 23.
She said she approached Maureen to see if she needed a lift home to California Gully.
Mrs Siddall said Maureen said she was all right and her face lit up as soon as Allan Whyte appeared at the oval.
“Allan came and she changed. You could see it in her face. She had changed,” she told the court.
Mrs Siddall said she left Maureen and Allan at the oval, only to twice bump into them at a dance later that night in Mundy Street, Bendigo.
Allan Whyte.
She said she believed she last saw Maureen about 8.30pm that night.
“Maureen was definitely a quiet sort of girl,” Mrs Siddall said in her witness statement.
“I have never believed that she ran away. She wasn’t the type of girl to have done this.
“She wasn’t the type who would have had the ability to go out and meet other people who would have been in a position to help her.
“Maureen was certainly close to her mother. While she possibly didn’t get on with her father, she certainly had a lot of feelings towards her mother.”
Former neighbour Ngharee Todd told the court via video link from Queensland that “Maureen and her father had a very angry relationship”.
She said she had moved out of Vinton Street in either late 1966 or early 1967, regularly returning to her former home to visit her mother-in-law.
Mrs Todd told the court Maureen had showed off clothes she had recently bought before disappearing. She said she found it “most strange” that Maureen would disappear without the clothes, given how proud she was of her new possessions.
“I had always assumed that Maureen had met with foul play after having been at the dance,” Mrs Todd said in a statement.
“I never accepted that she had run away. She wouldn’t have been the type.
“She would certainly have been in contact with her mother and at least one of her sisters, and very much would have taken her recently bought new clothes and any money that she had.”