KRYSTAL Fraser's phone sat still and disused for three days after she vanished, before briefly coming back to life at a different location on June 24, 2009, a Coroner's Court was told on Thursday.
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Ms Fraser's phone has not been used since she disappeared and an inquest is being held into her suspected death.
Timothy Miller, who worked for Telstra and assisted police with their missing persons investigation, gave evidence at the inquest on Thursday.
He said the phone could communicate information to the telco even when it wasn't being used.
He said he could see from records that the phone handset was moved on June 24 and reactivated for a time, even though it was not actively used to message or talk. It had either been switched back on, found a mobile signal or received credit.
Coroner Katherine Lorenz said she considered information about the phone's use and location as "crucial" to her investigation.
Mr Miller said that, in 2009, it was possible to see that texts were being sent but impossible to retrieve them remotely unless police made an urgent request to do so.
He said the sheer volume of text messages sent back then made it impossible to pull them out of the system months afterward.
Mr Miller said police would have had to seek a court order or inform Telstra of a "life or death" situation unfolding for it to intercept and reproduce the messages.
However, investigators have told the Coroner they treated the case in its early days as one of a missing person they expected to find. It was not until more than a month later they came of the view it was a probable homicide.
Ms Fraser's phone has never been recovered, but phone records showed that it abruptly stopped making and receiving calls and texts during the early hours of the morning on June 21, 2009.
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Detective Inspector Wayne Woltsche told the inquest that he had examined the phone logs and was concerned by the number of calls being made from a public phone box in Litchfield.
He said a frequent caller to Ms Fraser's phone stopped calling right before the payphone began contacting her. In the period between 14 May and 20 June 2009, the payphone called her 19 times.
"The last phone call made to Krystal was a connected call - it was a 40 second call - from that phone box," he said.
"And the concerning thing for investigators is that person has never rung Krystal from that phone box afterwards.
"The absence of another phone call - given that there's 19 in a period of - I think - 37 days - and then that last phone call on the evening she disappears and no further phone calls it (became) one of our hypotheses that that person is involved in her disappearance."
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