IT IS the not knowing that torments Karen Fraser.
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Eight years ago to the day her beloved daughter, Krystal, disappeared without a trace and has not been seen since.
Police do not know for sure what happened to the heavily pregnant 23-year-old after she left a Pyramid Hill house at 9.40pm on June 20, 2009.
But they do strongly suspect she was murdered.
For the last eight years, Karen Fraser has been living every parent’s worst nightmare.
She does not know whether to grieve for a murdered daughter and grandson, or hold out hope that they will one day walk through her door.
“How can I farewell her or do anything like that if I don’t know what’s happened to her?” Ms Fraser told the Bendigo Advertiser yesterday.
“What’s the point in having a funeral or anything like it if we don’t know? People say ‘have you grieved?’ I don’t know what I am grieving for.”
Krystal was last seen wearing an orange top, black track pants, a camouflaged patterned baseball cap and may have been heading to Leitchville on the day she went missing.
Being nine months pregnant, as well as having a mild intellectual disability, Krystal was especially vulnerable to anyone who wanted to do her harm.
A substantial $100,000 reward for information offered in 2012 failed to unearth any new leads.
For reasons presently unknown, a coroner’s report promised by police last year has not eventuated.
More than 38,000 people are reported missing in Australia each year, according to the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre.
While the majority are quickly located safe and sound, there remain about 1600 people who have been missing for more than three months.
Many do not want to be found due to family crises or brushes with the law.
Some, inevitably, have met with foul play.
If Krystal was alive today, she would be 31 years old and the mother of an eight-year-old child, who she planned on calling Ryan.
Someone out there knows what happened to Krystal.
It is time for them to come forward and provide closure to her family and friends.
They have suffered enough.
- Ross Tyson, deputy editor