When Hobart Started Counting
Between 28 July and 2 August 2018, Southern Division received missing persons reports at a rate that had no precedent in the division's operational history. A financial analyst's brother and son. A fencing contractor. A conservationist couple. A construction company owner. Then, on the afternoon of 2 August, one of the division's own detectives. Five reports in six days. No bodies. No witnesses. No explanation that made sense.
Missing persons reports arrive at Hobart police stations with a regularity that most officers learn not to find remarkable. Teenagers who stay out too long. Elderly residents whose routines break without warning. Partners who leave and don't say where they're going. The overwhelming majority resolve themselves within forty-eight hours — a phone call, a sheepish return, an explanation that is either true or close enough to true that nobody benefits from pressing the point.
What arrived at Southern Division in the final week of July 2018 was not that.
On 28 July, Louise Jeffries walked into Hobart Police Station to report two people missing — her brother Jamie Greyson and her son Kain Jeffries. On 29 July, Jenny Triffett reported that her husband Nial had not returned from a job. On 30 July, a neighbour in Collinsvale raised concerns about conservationists Karen and Chris Owen, whose property showed signs of disturbance but no sign of its occupants. On 31 July, Sharon Pafistis reported that her husband Adrian, owner of Pafistis Construction, had failed to return from a client meeting the previous day.
By the time the fifth report came in — this one involving a detective who had been investigating the earlier disappearances — the division was no longer treating the cases as separate incidents. Something was happening in southern Tasmania that defied the ordinary explanations. The cases were formally consolidated under a single operational designation.
Tasmania Police called it Operation Vanished. The name was accurate. Nothing else about the investigation would be.
