Missing You by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5646477567576756756
Published: 2017-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Digging up the Truth

The search for Terry Floyd

‘I don’t want to find my brother in a mineshaft with cow bones and engines and skulls dropped on him. But I have to find the answers …’

Daryl Floyd, Terry’s brother

Daryl Floyd is a man obsessed.

In 1975 his older brother Terry, a keen footballer for the local Under 15s, was abducted from the roadside while waiting for a lift.

Back then, the police thought he’d run away but Daryl knew his brother better than that.

Nearly forty years on, Daryl remains convinced that on the day of his disappearance, Terry met with foul play. Now he just wants to locate his brother’s remains and will journey to the centre of the earth to find them.

•••

Terry Floyd’s dad, Ken, once said his twelve-year-old son was a bad-tempered liar who’d threatened to run away, but to his ten-year-old brother Daryl, Terry was someone to look up to. ‘He was a typical young boy going into his teens,’ Daryl recalls. ‘He loved his cricket and football.’

There were six children in the Floyd family, three boys and three girls, and while loved and cared for by their parents Ken and Dot, they were no cotton-wool kids. Growing up in Maryborough, Victoria, they spent every spare moment playing outdoors.

Daryl’s fondest memories are of all the simple, rough and tumble fun he had with Terry. ‘We loved kicking the leather footy,’ Daryl recalls. ‘We used bricks as goalposts.

‘We were always running around in the bush too, playing cowboys and Indians.’

Of course it wasn’t all fun and games. The boys had outdoor chores to do as well. ‘We were always collecting bark and wood for the fire, stuff like that.’

One of the other jobs for the boys was to take it in turns to stay over at their Nan’s place next door because she didn’t like sleeping alone in the house since her husband died.

On Friday 27 June 1975, a chill winter’s night, it was Terry and Daryl’s turn to stay at Nan’s. The boys, who slept in a room at the front of the house, went to bed at eight o’clock, but by eleven, Daryl awoke to find Terry had got up. When he went into the lounge room to investigate, young Daryl could see his brother had something on his mind. ‘He was laying on the floor staring into the fire, prodding it with a poker,’ Daryl recalls.

‘What are you doing?’ Daryl asked.

‘Nothing,’ Terry replied. ‘Go back to bed.’

The next morning, Daryl and Terry were meant to go to the Under 15s footy game together, but Terry left his Nan’s house before breakfast without saying goodbye.

Daryl now believes he knows why: one of the trainers at the Maryborough Rovers Under 15s – a man known as ‘Uncle’ or ‘Unc’, was going to drive Terry to Avoca, about 30 kilometres away, so he could visit friends.

Unc’s real name was Francis Robert Drake and he was the son of the local mayor. But despite the apparent veil of respectability, Daryl’s mum, Dot, had a bad feeling about him.

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