Even one year on from the disappearance of her close friend, Ballarat woman Samantha Murphy, Bianca Card cannot force herself to stop looking for the woman whose children grew up with her own.
The 46-year-old has spent countless hours walking through paddocks and drought-ravaged bushland near the forested country where Murphy, 51, went missing one summer morning in February 2024, not long after she was last seen on CCTV setting out for her regular early jog.
As Card travels along dirt roads, though pine plantations and farmland near her rural home 20 kilometres south-east of Ballarat, she wonders still if her friend’s body is buried somewhere nearby under the parched earth.
Samantha Murphy’s close friend, Bianca Card, still looks for her in the central Victorian bushland where Murphy disappeared one year ago.Credit: Justin McManus
“It’s not knowing where she is which is the hardest,” says Card, who like Samantha Murphy is a mother of three, and whose son, Will, attended a debutante ball with Murphy’s daughter, Milly, months before her mother vanished.
“You try not to dwell on what could have happened. But, you know, everything runs through your head. There are so many unanswered questions.”
Soon after Murphy’s disappearance, as hundreds of people from Ballarat and beyond mobilised for what became months of group searches, Card began her own quest for answers, one she cannot bear to abandon until details of Murphy’s final hours and fate are eventually revealed.
Card says that, particularly for women who enjoy running along the region’s beautiful bush tracks, Murphy’s disappearance has lost none of its disturbing impact.
From the moment she received a call from her husband to tell her “Sam’s missing”, Card says she has felt the unsettling ripple effects.
“From that moment, I just felt really unsafe,” Card says. “It’s a horrible feeling and everyone in Ballarat sort of put their guard up. Everything that’s happened it feels like a horrible movie.”
Analysis of GPS data from Murphy’s phone and Apple Watch showed she had run seven kilometres through Woowookarung Regional Park, which adjoins the suburbs of Ballarat East, Canadian and Mount Clear. Her phone last pinged from a tower about 11 kilometres south of Ballarat.
Police searched for Samantha Murphy’s body in Enfield State Park, near Ballarat, in April 2024.Credit: Joel Carrett
But despite intensive search efforts by Victoria Police, the Search and Rescue Squad, dog quad, mounted branch and air wing, the State Emergency Service, Parks Victoria staff and the Country Fire Authority, as well as huge crowds of locals, no evidence of Murphy’s body or clues as to her disappearance were found.
Locals opened Facebook pages to arrange searches and share information – causing speculation, conspiracy theories and rumours so intense that both the police chief and the then Ballarat mayor, Des Hudson, asked for it to stop.
By February 23, police announced they suspected Murphy was deceased, and believed “one or more parties” may have been involved in her disappearance.
By March 4, police said they had 12,000 hours of CCTV footage to comb, and 770 pieces of information, a volume of evidence later described as “unprecedented”.
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Murphy’s presumed death sent shivers through women’s running communities around the country, and in February and March, groups and individuals vowed to honour her by “finishing” the run she could not complete on the last day of her life.
On March 6, Ballarat man Patrick Orren Stephenson, then 22, was arrested and charged with Murphy’s murder, but police did not elaborate other than Chief Commissioner Shane Patton announcing police would allege Samantha Murphy died in a “deliberate attack”. Stephenson has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody awaiting trial.
By April 10, with still no evidence found of Murphy, and following the killings of two other women in the region – 42-year-old Rebecca Young and 23-year-old Hannah McGuire – Ballarat woman, and violence survivor, Sissy Austin, gauged that there was enough concern over the shocking toll of violence against women to arrange a community march that was so well-supported it made national headlines.
Violence survivor, and Take Back the Track organiser, Sissy Austin has started a movement to support women to feel safe again running in the bush.Credit: Penny Stephens
Austin had just one year earlier been hit in the face with a rock, knocked unconscious and badly injured as she jogged on another local track, by a still-unidentified assailant.
She told The Age as she arranged the Enough is Enough rally that women in Ballarat were afraid, and “a lot of women are just in survival mode in the town”. She has created a movement, Take. Back. The. Track, to support women to have the right to be safe while running.
“Many women I’ve spoken to are not lacking in fight, and will fight for our right to exist in the town,” Austin said at the time.
The fact it took until May 29, 2024, when Murphy’s phone and wallet were found on a dam edge a few kilometres from where her phone last pinged, for any evidence to be discovered (and there has been none since) has left locals with ongoing fear and anxiety about women’s safety in the bush, some say.
Long-time councillor, and former marathon runner, Samantha McIntosh, who knew Samantha Murphy, says her own daughter has adopted more protective running habits since Murphy went missing.
“She lives in Buninyong [near where Murphy was last known to be alive] and has consistently run along the tracks where everyone was searching for Sam, and she hasn’t run along those tracks surrounding her home since it happened,” says McIntosh, a former Ballarat mayor, who is in this case speaking as a runner and not on behalf of council.
“It is sad because these are beautiful parts of the countryside in our community, so many people have enjoyed these places and spaces.”
Lack of facts about what is known regarding Murphy’s disappearance has meant fears for women’s safety are unresolved. “As a result of the seemingly limited information conveyed to the community as to what’s happening, there’s this continuing negative conversation point,” she says.
“Runners continuously reflect on the sad news, it’s an enormous weight on people’s shoulders, enormous, and has absolutely battered the confidence of runners and people who like to walk in the bush, who love that serene alone time.”
Councillor Samantha McIntosh is a longtime runner and women’s safety advocate in Ballarat and knew fellow runner Samantha Murphy.Credit: Justin McManus
McIntosh, who several years ago initiated a women’s safety app in Ballarat, says women should be able to feel secure, and the ongoing impact of Murphy’s presumed murder while going about her business is “heartbreaking”.
“For everyone that knows Sam, and that didn’t know Sam – and there’s more than just the Sam situation,” McIntosh says.
“There’s so much about the different cases [women’s deaths] that’s unknown.”
”I think our community just wants answers … the limited explanation really does exacerbate or elevate that lack of confidence, it is a continued pressure and weight.
“People are shattered.”
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Marianne Hendron, chief executive of the violence prevention agency Women’s Health Grampians, agrees with McIntosh that “there is no doubt a shadow has been cast” by the alleged killing of Samantha Murphy: “The unknown part of it is what is particularly discomforting,” she says.
“One reflection is, over the past year, we have very frequently woken up to a news story saying the police are again conducting a search, and they announce these searches are taking place in advance, which first of all is triggering,” says Hendron.
“It leads to massive speculation on social media when that happens because it’s in the news on those community pages, and it leads to a million comments … then invariably, there’s nothing [no new evidence].”
Chief executive of Women’s Health Grampians, Marianne Hendron, says continual announcements of fresh searches for Samantha Murphy’s body have been difficult to endure when no further evidence is found.Credit: Penny Stephens
It may seem a small thing to those outside Ballarat, but emotions are still raw enough around the spate of killings of women in the region in 2024, that Hendron says even an announcement of another impending, but eventually fruitless, search produces distressing emotions.
“I come into work and my staff say, ‘They’re looking for Sam Murphy again’, and I think, this is being played out all over the place; everybody wants her family to know where she is … not the speculation of not knowing.
“To know the truth would make a massive difference for everybody,” Hendron said.
Though Ballarat was drawn into the national spotlight by the deaths of three women in rapid succession in 2024, Hendron says the city’s problem with violence against women mirrors the higher rates in regional areas.
“Crime statistics show the incidence of violence against women in Ballarat is up since COVID at about the same rate as everywhere else [regionally]: around 10 per cent pretty much across the board,” she said.
“Consistently, in rural and regional areas it is massively higher than in metro areas. Of the 79 LGAs in Victoria, the top 20 with the highest rates of reported incidents are all regional areas. The Grampians [the region including Ballarat] is up there, but so are Gippsland, Mildura and Swan Hill – all extremely high.”
Crime Statistics Agency data shows Hendron to be correct: Ballarat has one of the highest rates of family violence in the state. There was a 13.3 per cent increase in the rate of family violence incidents between 2022/23 and 2023/24 compared to 3.8 increase for all of Victoria.
The city reported 2143 family incidents per 100,000 people compared to the Victorian average of 1418 incidents per 100,000 people.
Mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse and the after-effects of pandemic lockdowns are all believed to be influencing trends in violence against regional women, Hendron said, but since Sissy Austin’s rally in Ballarat, she has noticed more local men engaging in the fight to reduce violence.
“A feature, post the murders in Ballarat, that is really striking to me is the number of men who get in touch with us saying they want to be a part of change, and asking how can we be part of making a difference,” says Hendron.
She is encouraged by this, and by the warm reception given by the community to a state government trial of a “saturation model” of violence prevention messaging, but even so Hendron says the unanswered questions community members have about Murphy’s death are a heavy weight.
As the anniversary approaches, “nobody doesn’t know about it; it’s pervasive and incredibly sad”, she says.
Though she has decided to tackle the safety fears created in women by Murphy’s disappearance head on, even the campaigner Sissy Austin feels there is, so far, not yet much change visible to the problem of violence against women in the region.
“My fear is, this is something that people are going to use in the forthcoming election; I fear that our pain and suffering, the town is going to be dragged through this election campaign,” says Austin, whose Take. Back. The. Track movement – supported by champions Robert de Castella and Steve Moneghetti – launches on the two-year anniversary of the attack on her while jogging, February 9.
Austin recently supported a woman close to her through her application for a family violence intervention order against a partner who had crashed his car into her home and then pursued her all the way to the Ballarat police station and assaulted her outside it. Terrified, she spoke to Austin on the phone as she fled.
“Being in court that day it was like nothing’s changed in the town, there was woman after woman standing up in court and getting intervention orders, it just broke my heart,” she said. “The violence statistics in this town are terrible, it’s shit that it only gets attention when someone dies.”
Bianca Card, who was given permission to speak to The Age on behalf of the Murphy family by Samantha’s husband, Mick Murphy, says as February 4 approaches, her chest still feels heavy each time she drives past her friend’s home.
She recently took Murphy’s daughter, Milly, who just turned 18, shopping to try and take her mind off her mother’s disappearance for a few hours.
Bianca Card still looks for the body of her close friend, Ballarat woman Samantha Murphy, in bushland where Murphy disappeared, now presumed murdered, on February 4, 2024. Credit: Justin McManus
“You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy what the family is going through,” she says. “It has struck fear in everyone … that this could happen to a person like Sam. The kids are just completely heartbroken.
“Mick and the kids just try to keep going, but it is so hard.”
One anecdote symbolises Samantha Murphy’s personality, she says. When the family decided to move off their farm and closer to Ballarat a few years back, Samantha and Mick arrived in Card’s driveway unexpectedly with a trailer overflowing with furniture and homewares.
Card has Samantha’s couch in their front living room, her tea light lamp with pink roses embroidered on it on a wooden table, and her colourful prints on her kitchen walls.
“It makes me feel close to her,” she says. “That she is still here. That was just Sam. The kindest and most generous person you could ever meet.”
Patrick Orren Stephenson pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder via video link to Ballarat Magistrates’ Court in November 2024. He opted to have the case fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, where he will appear on February 15.
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