The Lady Vanishes: Listening to this sprawling missing person podcast is like witnessing a plane being built midflight

If you’re new to the Australian podcast The Lady Vanishes, then buckle up: you’re in for a very, very long ride. The first episode of this podcast from Australia’s Seven News dropped in March 2019, introducing us to the disappearance of Marion Barter. And more than four years and hundreds of audio hours later it’s still not done, with new episodes anticipated next month. Before that, you can take a fathoms-deep dive into this investigation into a missing-person case that was never resolved.

To synopsise: Barter, a respected teacher and mother of two, went on a trip to England in 1997. She tootled around Tunbridge Wells, sent postcards home, even called her daughter, Sally Leydon, at one point from an English payphone to make sure she had made it back from a ski trip. But that was the last time Leydon heard from her mother. And for years afterwards she was fobbed off by authorities, told by police that her mother had wanted to disappear, and that there was nothing more they could do. Leydon didn’t buy it, however, and her persistence, as well as the painstaking – and, honestly, at times painful – thread-pulling by the Lady Vanishes producer Alison Sandy and investigative journalist Brian Simmond, is the driving force of this Australian audio smash hit.

The Lady Vanishes is a real-time chronicling of their investigation as it unfolds. That means if you go back to the start you’re going to be brought down a few blind alleys – digressions into the details of the witness-protection programme or the workings of a particularly badly named cult based near the Australian tourist town of Byron Bay. The reward for starting at the beginning is the insight gained into how an investigation into what amounts to a cold case can be reignited: the tedious, slow chase of every errant detail and potential clue, interview after interview, circumventing obstacles with dogged persistence and doorstepping people who do not wish to talk to you. The downside is the shagginess of this particular dog, the noise-to-signal ratio, the so many digressions into subjects that turn out to be beside the point.

Longueurs aside, there is a chutzpah at the heart of The Lady Vanishes that you have to admire: over her long years of unanswered questions, Leydon has learned to push back, and Sandy and Simmond match her in determination. All manner of experts are called on and witnesses interviewed; even a psychic gives her take about what happened to Barter. As they gain listeners around the world, amateur sleuths join in the investigation, some of them ending up on the podcast and engaged in the search.

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It’s a strange tale, jagged in the telling, an attempt to prise open a book that has been closed for decades. The turning of every stone as they find it can feel messy and unsatisfying but it’s also this podcast’s calling card: many’s a true-crime podcast that comes packaged neatly after the fact, but this time the plane is clearly being built while flying. It’s at times gripping, at times dull, often uneven and sometimes truly moving: The Lady Vanishes runs the gamut, all the while pushing, persistently if not always elegantly, for the truth.