Vanishing Cousins: Friends of Raelene Eaton and Yvonne Waters speak out on 50-year mystery

Two teenagers disappear after a night out in Scarborough. You can imagine the teeming police presence, the scores of people searching nearby scrub, the door-knocking, late-night press conferences and a harrowing appeal for answers from the distraught parents. You can picture, too, the numerous front-page stories, the headlines spanning the country and globe, the media frenzy of reporters, photographers and camera operators nipping at the heels of the police for answers. When 16-year-old Raelene Eaton and her 17-year-old cousin Yvonne Waters vanished after attending a Sunday session at the coastal suburb’s White Sands Tavern on April 7, 1974, none of these things happened. The media apathy around the sudden disappearance of the two teenagers reflected the police department’s apparent indifference about the case. At the time, they dismissed Raelene and Yvonne as runaways, despite strong evidence to the contrary. But now, Vanishing Cousins: Evil by the Beach, a groundbreaking five-part video series by The West Australian, sheds new light on the decades-old investigation, unearthing fresh leads and lines of inquiry including the possibility of bikie links to the case. Detective Senior Constable Peter Shanahan, who headed Operation Trace, a four-year review that began in 2015 into the case of the missing cousins, says he found that the missing persons file for the teens wasn’t escalated for about six or seven months. “My understanding is it was still treated as a missing persons file for that period of time, then it was transferred to the homicide squad,” says Shanahan. Raelene and Yvonne were not troublemakers, drug users or criminals, which might have explained but not excused the lack of interest in their whereabouts. Rather, they were simply victims of a time when, if girls went missing, they were considered more likely to have run off with boys than to have been the target of foul play. “It seems hard to imagine that the police would say that they were just naughty girls that had run off with blokes, but that was the attitude of police and society back in those days. Sadly, we know it wasn’t true,” says Jill Broom, older sister of Yvonne, who has waited almost 50 years to find out what happened to her sister and cousin. No trace of Raelene or Yvonne has ever been found. The desperate search for answers Tears spring to Lynne Caporn’s eyes as she recalls how Jean Eaton, who she fondly calls “Mum Eaton”, never gave up hope of finding her daughter. “Mum Eaton did everything humanly possible to find her Raelene,” says Caporn, who was a close friend of Raelene. “She never declined an interview and I think the last one she did was just 12 months before she passed away. She would have been about 94 at the time. She just never, ever gave up hope that one day she would find out what happened.” “What the hell happened?” It’s a question investigative journalist Melenie Ambrose has found herself asking over and over in the two years since she first came across the case of the missing cousins. “I found a Facebook page called Help Find Raelene Eaton and Yvonne Waters and I remember looking at the pictures of the girls and thinking, ‘am I seeing this right?’ This is two girls, not just two girls but cousins, who have disappeared in Perth and all I had was a vague recollection of the case. So I thought, well, there’s something here.” Ambrose first wrote about the missing cousins for Marie Claire magazine but couldn’t let the story go. And the deeper she dug, the more dirt she uncovered. “It has been quite extraordinary in the sense that you can’t walk away from this case. The minute I did there would be another clue or another person coming forward,” she says. A year into her investigations, Ambrose reached out to The West Australian’s head of digital, Natalie Bonjolo, with the idea of creating a video series about the case. “As a journalist it’s the type of story you might come across once in your career,” Ambrose says. “And it’s not just because of the twists and turns in that story, even though they are enough to grab you — there’s serial killers, the underworld, murder, shocking tragedy, broken lives — but then there’s the fact these people have been almost forgotten. It’s just been buried for so long and it needs to come out into the light, and I feel enormous privilege to be able to do that.” Caporn, along with two more of Raelene’s friends, Sue Kneller and Ali Russo, chose to be involved in the series in a desperate bid to finally unravel the mystery of what happened to the cousins. “This is really the first opportunity we’ve been given in 50 years,” Caporn says. “I wasn’t even interviewed by the police for two years.” Sadly, answers didn’t come for Jean Eaton and Yvonne’s mother, Alice Waters, who, despite living long lives — Jean passed away in 2018 at 95 while Alice was 100 when she died in 2021 — never found out what happened to their daughters. That’s something that Caporn, who remained close to Jean throughout her life, still struggles with. “The difficulty for me is that I actually maintained a relationship with Mum Eaton, so a lot of what I feel and think now is reflective of the grief that she went through,” she says. “Mum Eaton never gave up. She was so strong but she deserved to know what happened.” Compounding Jean’s grief was the fact that two weeks after Raelene and Yvonne disappeared, her son Graham was critically injured in a car accident while out looking for his sister with Yvonne’s boyfriend of two years, Bob Webb, and another friend. Graham died from his injuries on April 29, just 22 days after his sister vanished. In the space of a few weeks, Jean Eaton lost her daughter, her son and her niece. “That period was a blur. I know I was at Graham’s funeral but I have very few memories of it. I think it was all just too much,” Caporn says. “As a young woman I think for a long time I lived in denial, I just refused to accept that anything bad had happened to Rae and Yvonne. I think in my heart of hearts I knew but I couldn’t accept it and I just expected her to come through the door at any moment. “Actually I had a conversation with Mum Eaton one day, probably only about five or six years before she passed, and I said to her, ‘I don’t know how you dealt with me, when you were trying to cope with the loss of your children and I was still talking like Rae might turn up’ and her reply to me was: ‘well, at least you were there’. That was gut-wrenching.” Sliding doors Ali Russo’s eyes still twinkle with affection when she remembers her friend Rae. The pair met when Russo enrolled at John Forrest Senior High School in Year 9. She was instantly drawn to the “friendly, fun-loving and fearless” Raelene. “I really liked her straight away,” Russo says. “Rae had a great sense of humour and we just got along well from the start.” After the girls finished school they stayed in touch and would often catch up to attend Sunday sessions together. “The Sunday session was big in those days and although we were underage there weren’t the checks or anything,” she says. “We would just put on make-up and could easily pass for 18. Everyone did it back then.” Russo and her boyfriend Mario had been at the Sunday session with Raelene the week before she went missing. That day Raelene asked if Russo would like to go with her to the White Sands the following week. “My boyfriend Mario and I had a wedding to attend, otherwise things might have been different,” Russo says. She calls it a “sliding doors” moment, referencing the movie about how small decisions can change the course of our lives. “Things would have been different if we’d gone with her,” she says. “The Sunday before, Mario and I had picked up Raelene in the car, gone to the pub and dropped her back home so I imagine the same thing would have happened that Sunday, but unfortunately it didn’t.” Russo knew when the girls never came home that they had met with foul play. “Obviously the police view, in particular, but also the society view at the time was that they’d probably just run off, but I knew from the start that wasn’t the case,” she says. “Raelene got along well with her parents and she was saving quite hard to go to Canada to visit her penpal there. I think she’d saved around $600, which was a lot of money at the time, so she had plans. I knew she didn’t run away. Something had gone very wrong. It would have been obvious pretty early if it had been properly investigated that these were not runaways. “The thing that I found difficult was that I wasn’t even interviewed by the police, nor was Mario, yet we’d been with Raelene the week before.” Caporn, Kneller and Raelene’s neighbour Tina Calleja, who all share interesting insights into the case in Vanishing Cousins, were also not interviewed by police at the time. “That’s why I am speaking now because there didn’t seem to be any effort in the beginning,” Russo says. “Back then the parents and the family had to lead the case, whereas today there would be resources allocated. There was no effort and it just seemed so unfair that these beautiful girls didn’t have the full force of the law behind them investigating this case.” Bikie links In Vanishing Cousins, a new line of inquiry explores whether there could be bikie links to the girls’ disappearance. At the time, Graham was staying at a house in Hastings Street, Scarborough. Through her investigations, Ambrose has established there were bikie sightings at the property. Kneller, who had known Raelene since primary school, recalls going to Hastings Street looking for her friend not long before she disappeared. She vividly remembers feeling extremely uneasy at the house. “I did not like going there at all,” she says. “I got a horrible feeling being there. To me it seemed like a bikie, druggie place and not the kind of place Raelene would want to be either.” Kneller spoke to a woman at the house and when she established Raelene wasn’t there, she left straight away and never returned. She still cannot fathom why Graham would be living there. “Yes, that really surprised me,” she says emphatically. “I couldn’t work that out at all.” Lost opportunities The case of the missing cousins haunts Ken Gregson, years after he handed in his badge. “I think most detectives would carry through into their retirement one or two unsolved cases and this fits the bill,” he says in Vanishing Cousins. “It’s a real puzzle. To put it bluntly, I’d crawl on broken glass to see this solved, no matter who solves it.” Gregson, an acting superintendent with the WA Police at the time of his retirement, was given the case as a “watch and act” in 1986 when he was a detective sergeant with the major crime squad. He says while it is difficult to determine exactly why the files stayed with missing persons for so long, there is no doubt vital clues and opportunities were missed. “If it was upgraded to a criminal investigation earlier, things might have been found that weren’t found,” he says. Vanishing Cousins: Notorious Aussie killers labelled suspects in baffling cold case Detective Senior Constable Shanahan, who conducted the cold case review, agrees. “It would be a totally different investigation today than what it was in 1974,” he says in Vanishing Cousins. Through his investigations, Shanahan identified several individuals who, for various reasons, cannot be dismissed as suspects. They include the man who was keen on Raelene at the time, who is interviewed in the series, as well as the “three scruffy strangers” who were spotted with the girls at the White Sands just before they went missing. Two serial killers who were thought to be in Perth at the time of the girls’ disappearance also cannot be ruled out. In Vanishing Cousins, Ambrose discovers new information that, for Caporn, changes things. “I know where Mum Eaton’s suspicions lay and that’s where mine lay initially as well, but Melenie has uncovered some really interesting information that has taken things in a whole new direction,” she says. A tragic legacy As of May this year, there is a $2 million reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the case of the missing cousins. Russo hopes the exposure the case receives through Vanishing Cousins and the potential to pocket a life-changing sum of reward money will result in someone coming forward with information. “Someone knows something, I’m sure of it. I would urge them to come forward,” she says. “It might be almost 50 years on but there are still people grieving. Raelene and Yvonne still matter to people.” Caporn says at the very least, she would like loved ones to get the closure they so desperately seek. “The best outcome I could hope for is to find who did it and to find Raelene and Yvonne,” she says. “But in the absence of the best outcome, my wish would be to find Raelene and Yvonne and be able to put them to rest. I know there is a place for Rae beside her family. “That was very important for Mum Eaton — she wanted her family to be able to be together again — so I would like to see that happen for her sake.” Three months before her disappearance, Yvonne stood next to her sister Jill as her bridesmaid at her January wedding. The photos taken that day are some of the last ever taken of both Yvonne and Raelene. “I would love closure on this case,” Jill Broom says in the series. “I was hoping and praying that it would come for Mum and Aunty Jean but it didn’t. “I just want . . . to finally give them the respect that they deserve and put them to rest.” Watch Vanishing Cousins: Evil by the Beach episodes one and two at thewest.com.au/vanishing, or by scanning the QR code. More episodes to follow.

Vanishing Cousins: Friends of Raelene Eaton and Yvonne Waters speak out on 50-year mystery

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