As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re up in the Dandenong Ranges. Things are few and far between up here, but everyone knows each other, and everyone knows the terrain. It’s steep as all hell, which is why Paul and Mary have Milo take shortcuts on his bike through the bushland to deliver food directly – it’s quicker than making a customer drive to the shop and risk getting bogged or stalled on the way, especially when the weather is looking rank. And Milo knows all the shortcuts off by heart, so it’s never been a problem.

It was the 6th of February 2008. Milo biked directly to the Fish & Chip shop after school (he’s just started grade 5), leaving at 3:15pm and arriving at 3:30pm. From then on, he was in and out of the shop on his bike, strapping fish & chip orders into his basket and delivering them to different homes all afternoon. Each of those he delivered to would later come forward saying they’d seen him and received their orders, and other customers had seen him coming in and out of the shop. He’s a hard kid to miss – always bright and happy, lighting up every room he enters.

It was 6:04pm when Dave Hackett, a plumber and then a friend of the family, ordered a flake, four dim sims, two potato cakes, chips and aioli, for himself. He’d lived alone since his divorce a few months earlier.
Paul got on the order, and by 6:23pm, he’d passed it onto Milo. No one else was in the store but the two of them, but it’s not as if they could have been anywhere else, and Paul isn’t one to leave the shop unattended, especially during a Wednesday night (his second busiest after the Friday night).

Milo strapped in the order, jumped on his bike and sped off. It should have been a ten-minute trip there and back – but it would be the last time Paul would see Milo before he’d vanish.

Twenty minutes later, Milo still hasn’t returned, and Paul starts to worry about the weather picking up – but Milo is a smart kid, and he’s been through worse storms. Another ten minutes later, at 6:52pm, Dave calls up and tells Paul that his order hasn’t arrived. The first thing that jumps to Paul’s mind is that he’s injured himself somehow, so he shuts down the store, cancels any pending orders, and gives Mary a ring, telling her to meet him at the dirt track leading into the bush behind the shop.

As he’s waiting, the storm starts to pick up, and by the time Mary meets up with him at 7pm, it’s almost pitch black and full downpour. They each had a heavy-duty flashlight as they walked the trail and called out for him, but it was impossible to see or hear anything through the heavy rainfall.

Soaked and realizing they wouldn’t find him, they made it back to the store by 7:30pm and called up the police using the store landline (mobile signals aren’t great up on the mountains) and reported Milo missing. And the officer told them something they’d never forget:

“Maybe wait till the morning, and if he doesn’t turn up by then, let us know.”

They say the first 24 hours is the most important, especially when it’s a kid, and especially when that kid is by this point, obviously either missing or hurt – possibly both. It was as if those pig bastards didn’t give a shit. They told us searching was pointless in the storm, and that he’d probably just found shelter.

Paul and Mary didn’t sleep a minute that night, but they did wait until morning. Surprise surprise, he didn’t just turn up. They call up the police again, who tell them to stand by. Half an hour later, a couple of officers arrive, and act like a pair of dickheads. Immediately suspicious, thinking Paul and Mary are up to something. Paul and Mary tell them what they know, and these two clowns obviously don’t believe a word of it.

The lot of them go out onto the dirt track, where by now it’s bright and clear enough to see where they’re going, but the trail is thick with mud. It’s impossible to even see any bike marks. They have a scan around the whole track, going up and down, scanning the surrounding bushland, or any crevasses he might have fallen into. There was a cliff face just before the bend towards Dave’s place, that you wouldn’t want to take a dip from. Police got down to the bottom of it and didn’t find him there either – though we could’ve told them he’s smarter than that.

They catch up with Dave, who says he has no idea what happened to him and lets them have a gander around his property. No sign of Milo, or his bike.

Paul and Mary spread the word, and the whole community, bless them, came out and helped us look. We spent the whole rest of the day looking for him, but there was still no sign of Milo anywhere. Now we were getting really worried. It was getting dark, and it’d been over 24 hours.

There was a glimmer of hope when Hank (the butcher) tripped up on a mud patch out from the bottom of the cliff. There’s something buried in there. Him and his misses calls me and the wife over and we help them dig it up – and it’s Milo’s bike. It was far out – the only way it could’ve got this far is if it’d of been thrown.

We trek a little further and find the fish and chips Milo was running to Dave – the packs been opened, and the flake is missing. You can tell me that animals got to it or that we didn’t find it in the mud, but here’s the kicker; the aioli tub had been opened, eaten from, and closed again. Someone had had a feed.

We tried to tell that to the police, but they didn’t think it was anything. They still reckoned Milo had gone out and got himself lost, but that didn’t make any sense. Milo is a smart kid, and he knows the ranges like the back of his hand. He’d been doing this for his Dad for well over a year now and had never had any trouble.

We expanded the search radius the next day, searching the ranges as much as we could. We even had a couple of searchers diving into the creek that runs along the bottom of the mountain to see if he’d fallen in there, but that seemed impossible. It was unlikely enough he’d even gone out that far.

There was a report a few days later from someone across the road from Dave (Marcy Roberts, from the school) who had seen an empty car parked by the cliff face at around 5pm on the 6th – they said it was a blue 1993 Ford Sedan, but they didn’t get the license plate. She didn’t think it was anything suspicious until after the fact, but had thought it was weird to see a car get in there. She’d helped with the search and it only clicked a couple days later. There was no tire marks that provided evidence of this claim, but they could have been washed away with everything else.

The other thing was an anonymous tip to the police that they'd seen a young man and a middle aged man out in bush the night of the storm. One was in a black coat and jeans, with jet black hair, and the other was a tall, thin grey-haired man in a raincoat. They had torches, like they were looking for something. The tipper thought they were lost so he shone his own light on them and called out to them. The man in the suit covered his face, and they both took off in the opposite direction. He didn't get a good look at either of them. It's hard to know if this is anything or someone trying to throw us off the scent. I reckon Paul and Mary would've seen their torches.

Police gave Dave an interview but ended up letting him off because of “lack of evidence”, and wouldn’t release the transcript. They say there’s no DNA samples to compare anything to, and that the storm washed away any kind of tracks they might have been able to follow. They’d basically given up before they’d begun. Didn’t stop them from hounding after Paul and Mary, but.

But now the trail has run cold. There’s been nothing since.

At the time of this writing, Milo has been missing for three weeks. We’re scared for him and we want him to come home. That’s why I’m doing this. Making this website, putting everything in one place, and sharing it on the social media as much as possible. The more people see this the sooner word will get out, and we’ll find Milo.

And if you had anything to do with his disappearance, please return him safely. You don’t have to give yourself up, or even tell us what happened. Just bring him back. Please.

UPDATE

So a lot of people who might be flooding in will already know some of the details of the news I’m about to share. I understand there’s a lot of attention on this website now, and I want to thank everyone who has sent kind words our way wishing us their compassion and prayers. The whole family appreciates it at this extremely difficult time.

I’ve taken some time since these new details came out. There are some of those who are close to Milo who will feel it is too soon to share what we've been told and disagree with the choices I'm making, but it is my duty to keep everyone informed with what I know. This isn’t easy for me to write, and I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. I feel like I never will.

Okay. Here goes.

On July 10th, 2012, at 2:48pm, Milo Richards body was found. I won’t be including pictures, so please take my word when I say that yes, he has been identified. It is Milo. The coroner’s report has determined from a significant fracture in his skull that he suffered a death by blunt force trauma. Right now the family is in mourning, so we ask that anyone who has any brilliant theories they want to share about Paul and Mary refrain from emailing this page.

In any case, I will be pressing on and do my best to summarize what was found, as I understand it, in as clear terms as possible.

Milo was found in a clearing adjacent to the creek and walking trail running across the far north of the ranges. This is the aforementioned area that we’d dived into our 2nd day of the community search. However, his placement was extremely unusual.

Firstly, his body was only partially decomposed, and despite his skin and bones showing heavy signs of water damage, he’d been significantly preserved by the freezing temperature of the creek water. But he’d been found outside of the water, still wet. Just twenty-five minutes earlier, the hiking group that would later find him had stopped in this clearing for a quick snack break, where no one saw anything out of the ordinary. It was on their return that they saw him, unmissable and in clear view.

He’d been moved.

Secondly, there was no sign of movement having occurred. That’s to say no trails, footprints, or a path of water leading up from the creek to his body. It was a dry day, but the only spot that was wet was the area directly underneath Milo.

His clothes remained, also still wet, and his hat was missing. When police arrived at the scene, they searched the creek and found the area he had been kept for the last four years. Judging by the discovery of bones at the bottom of the creek bed, they determined he’d been wedged between a crevice and a jagged rock which prevented his body from rising to the surface of the water. It’s hard to know if he’d been placed there with deliberation or had been left to the current of the river and landed in that spot. Expect me to elaborate on this when I update my theories with regard to this new information.

Nevertheless, it would appear that someone, between 2:23pm and 2:48pm, had returned to this location, retrieved his body from the creek, and displayed it for all to see. They did this with the foreknowledge of where to find him, and without leaving any evidence of their presence.

And it gets weirder than that. Because Milo’s right arm and left hand were, and remain, missing.

And it wasn’t like the other bones, like those found at the creek bed. They were removed with intent, as though they were lasered clean off. This doesn’t at all fit with the modus operandi the coroners report had determined. How could they have attacked him with such imprecision, but then dismembered him so smoothly?

And somehow, it gets even more bizarre. This is the part I truly understand the least, so please try and excuse my writing not making sense, as I’m still trying to make sense of it.

Adjacent to his body, right where the limbs were missing were a recently severed, freshly bleeding, adult right arm and left hand. The coroner would determine that these mystery limbs had been removed within that hour, and by the same inexplicable, laser-like method. Both hands were smooth where there should have been fingerprints, and neither had any evidence of being handled – just like Milo’s body. There was no trail of blood leading to their placement.

Within the day, we’d learn of a Melbourne man named Trey Docketty. He had vanished from the Royal Children’s Hospital where he was waiting on the birth of his twin girls within the same hour. We immediately pursued him as the owner of the arms, but his family were quick to dismiss us. His wife, Michelle, said it was impossible for it to be him, seeing as they were nowhere near the Ranges, and that Trey obviously had fingerprints. She couldn’t deny that the limbs matched his physical description but refused a DNA test against his newborn children. She’s on the record as saying, “I don’t think so.” Hopefully she changes her mind.

So let’s take a step back. At some point after 2:23pm, but before 2:48pm, someone dove into the creek, rescued Milo’s body, returned to the surface, displayed his body, miraculously lasered through his remaining skin and bones to remove his right arm and left hand, and replaced them with the similarly lasered limbs of Trey Docketty, which would have had to of been done within the same hour. This individual did all this in the span of twenty-five minutes, without being seen or leaving any evidence in their wake.

I’m flabbergasted. I truly don’t know what to make of any of this. I always hoped a new lead would turn up eventually, but I never expected a call like the one I received that day. There has to be something we’re missing that helps us understand this, but somehow this just feels like more questions rather than the answers we’ve longed for.

I hope we can all find comfort in knowing that Milo is in a better place now. We can only hope that his pain was brief, and that he didn’t have enough time to realise what was happening. I hope he was enjoying the encompassing beauty of the nature around him as the sun set on his last day.

This fucker killed my nephew and now they’re playing with his dead body.

When I find out who they are, they’re fucking dead.