4336.87 · March 27, 2016 AD
Thirty-One Hours in the Pines
On the afternoon of 27 March 2016, a family bushwalk in Three Pines National Forest ended with one fewer child than it began. Six-year-old Adele Norring vanished somewhere between the Banksia Loop track and the car park. What started as a missing child report escalated within hours to a Tier 2 abduction response — the largest coordinated search operation Southern Division had mounted in over a decade.
The call reached Hobart just before five o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. A family at Three Pines National Forest, ninety minutes northwest of the city, reporting their daughter missing from a bushwalk. The duty sergeant logged it as a welfare concern — children wander off trails, get turned around, sit down and cry until someone finds them. It happens every summer, and it almost always resolves itself within an hour or two.
This one didn't resolve itself.
By dusk, volunteer searchers and park rangers had covered the immediate trail network without result. By nightfall, a constable from the nearest station had located a child's scarf thirty metres off the formed track, alongside boot impressions too large to belong to anyone in the Norring family. The missing child report became a suspected abduction. The welfare concern became a crime scene.
Southern Division activated its Tier 2 abduction response protocol at 9:47 PM. Sergeant Miriam Kettle assumed field command. Aerial surveillance was requested from Cambridge Aerodrome. Mounted patrols were dispatched to cover fire trails inaccessible to vehicles. And a call went to the Rokeby K9 Training Centre, where Programme Director Claire Morgenstern authorised the deployment of a three-year-old German Shepherd named Milo — a dog whose solo-tracking capabilities had never been tested in an operational environment of this scale.
What followed consumed thirty-one hours and rewrote the way Tasmania Police responds to child abduction.
