4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
The Geese That Stopped Making Noise
Conservationists Karen and Chris Owen lived on a remote Collinsvale property where the geese never shut up. When neighbour Meredith Clarke called 000 on 30 July 2018, it wasn't the absence of the couple that alarmed her first — it was the silence. No geese. No movement. Just white trucks at odd hours and voices that carried across a distance her geography couldn't explain. Police found the front door open, daisies on the verandah, and blood on the floor. No Owens.
Karen Owen was an entomologist who studied the smallest things in the world. Chris Owen was an environmental scientist who studied the biggest. Together they lived in a colonial-era cottage in Collinsvale surrounded by native forest, domestic geese, and the kind of deep quiet that only exists twenty-five kilometres from a city when the road narrows and the trees close in.
Their nearest neighbour, Meredith Clarke, lived over a kilometre away across a heavily wooded ridge. She knew the Owens the way remote neighbours know each other — by the rhythms of their property rather than the details of their lives. She knew when the geese were loud, which was always. She knew when smoke rose from the chimney. She knew when the couple's vehicle moved along the access road.
On 30 July, Meredith called 000 because the rhythms had stopped. She hadn't seen the Owens since Thursday the 26th. The geese were silent. An unmarked white truck had visited the property at odd hours. She described details — cargo, movements, specific entrances — that her distance from the property made difficult to explain.
When Detective Karl Jenkins arrived thirty minutes later, he found a cottage that looked like its occupants had stepped out and never stepped back. The front door was open. Freshly picked daisies sat on the verandah. Inside, a blood trail led from the dining room to the coffee table. The blood belonged to none of the people the investigation would come to focus on. It has never been identified.
