The Disappearance of Sharron Phillips

Sharron was last seen at almost 11:00 PM on May 8, 1986, at a phone box near a railway station in Wacol, Queensland, Australia. Her car (a yellow Datsun bluebird sedan) had run out of petrol on Ipswich Road, near the door to the Wacol Migrant Centre. Many people saw someone matching her description between the station and her car, but she has not been heard from or seen since, and her body has never been found.

It is believed before using the phone box, she stopped at the nearby Wacol Army Barracks, where she was warned by soldiers there were no phones she could use. 20 years after her missing, a newspaper received an unknown letter that Sharron had witnessed "strange sex acts" at the barracks and was murdered to keep her silent.

After leaving the barracks, Sharron called a new friend, Martin Balazs, at 11:18 PM and asked him to pick her up. After some initial confusion as to where to pick her up from, he ended up with a flat tire. After repairing the flat, he saw Sharron's car, but no sign of her, so he returned home. Sharron had attempted to call Martin again at 12:03 AM, but it's understood he had already left and missed her second phone call. Martin has been interviewed by the authorities and eradicated as a suspect.

A week later, Sharron's belongings (bag and shoes) were found near where her car was abandoned.

In the early hours of the 9th of May, a group of truck drivers was negotiating a hidden, little-known dirt track near a coalmine dump when a car without headlights raced past them at nearly 3:00 AM. Described as a "carload of hoons", the speeding vehicle caught truck driver Tony Prowse's attention. Not only was it unusual to see a car on that little-known road, but it was "coming out of there at 100 miles an hour" and the next day, Prowse found tracks leading to the edge of the dumpsite:

"We could see where something had backed up through the long grass. You could see where they'd hit a big rock.

"It just didn't look right.

"When we heard the girl had gone missing and we added everything up, we thought it might be something worth reporting."

A few days later, Prowse flagged down a police car and said the officer what they'd seen. Despite offering to show the police the location, he was told: "they would check it out later". Unfortunately, anything dumped at the spot would have been wrapped by tonnes of fill within days - dropped from 20m above by dump trucks.

In 2013, police interrogated claims that a soldier from the former Wacol Army Barracks had bragged about both abduction and murdering Sharron. It seems the police not only questioned him many times but also tested his clothing for the presence of blood. They never found any evidence of his involvement.

Also in 2013, newspapers reported that the soldiers had always refuted that Sharron had ever been at the barracks. An anonymous woman reported that a soldier had told her that they had "been told to lie about Sharron's existence at the barracks".

In May 2016, three of Sharron's siblings spoke out for the first time in 27 years, asking police to examine their father's alibi on the night she vanished. Sharron's father - Bob Phillips - provided an alibi that he was collecting one of their trucks on the night of her disappearance. The siblings, despite not being questioned by the police for 30 years, claim that their father was not working and didn't own any trucks at the time, throwing doubt on his alibi. They think the police don't want to talk to them:

"Because these basic things were not done and they don't want to solve the case."

Another problem with Bob's alibi -- he claimed he carried his wife, Dawn, to pick up the truck -- but Dawn couldn't drive. How did Bob's car get back home? To add further suspicion to the alibi, in 1991, a heavily medicated Dawn took a detective's wife aside and told her:

"Bobby murdered Sharron and put her in a box. And I want him to kill me and put me in a box too."

These comments were hard to examine due to how heavily medicated Dawn was at the time. Bob dismissed her comments as confusion from the medication.

They asked the police to check a block of bushland next to the family home. According to police, there isn't enough evidence to search this block of land:

"The family has given us some information, but it is not detailed enough to go into a search there and we have spoken to the family in detail about that," he said.

SHARRON Phillips may have been murdered by a taxi driver as she waited for help after running out of petrol, it has been revealed.

It is understood the data was supplied by a man who said his father – a taxi driver – may be responsible for the 20-year-old’s death