Search Widens For Missing Man
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 6, 2008
A NEW search will begin today for bushwalker Warren Meyer, missing in the Yarra Ranges National Park since Easter Sunday.
Police search-and-rescue officers and volunteers will comb a previously unsearched area of dense bushland next to the area around Mt Dom Dom, in Melbourne's outer-east, where Mr Meyer, 57, was last seen.The renewed search comes as the homicide squad reveals it has cleared a man questioned last week after suggestions that Mr Meyer may have been murdered. Suspicions had been raised after a man in his early 30s was seen in the area around the same time.A police spokesman said the man had come forward, as had a group of other men who had given him a lift, and he had been eliminated from the investigation. He said the man was simply another tourist to the park.Inspector Phil Shepherd said this week: "We have found absolutely nothing to suggest foul play at this stage."He said police were "absolutely mystified" by Canadian-born engineer Mr Meyer's disappearance. More than 100 police, State Emergency Service members and volunteers spent six days searching the national park but failed to find any clues.Mr Meyer's wife, Zee, said she and her family were going through "a living hell" not knowing what had happened - and clairvoyants were not helping. "Police have been inundated with so many false leads from clairvoyants, to sightings that go nowhere, and they have to chase every useless lead," Mrs Meyer said.She said her family was having a difficult time coping with the situation because Mr Meyer was "a loving husband and father and this is an unbearable loss to us all". She believes her husband is dead.Inspector Shepherd said Mr Meyer was a fastidious bushwalker who left nothing behind when he trekked. "In one sense that hasn't helped him or us either because he's left no trace of where, and if, he might have left the track," he said.
© 2008 The Sunday Age