Miss you more
On Christmas Day in 2014 Loren O’Keeffe’s phone rang. A young tradie was on the line pleading for help to find his missing mate. Two weeks earlier Dane Kowalski, a 27-year-old plumber from Melbourne, had told buddies he was going fishing ‘up north’ but no one had seen or heard from him since.
As she’d done so many times since her own brother Dan disappeared three years earlier, Loren snapped into action. In just a few minutes she’d devised and launched a national media campaign for the distraught young man and his mates through the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), which Loren established after Dan’s disappearance. By that evening, thousands of people were on the lookout for Dane.
Knowing she’d been of help eased a little of the heartache caused by the empty seat at her own family’s Christmas dinner table.
Three months later, an Adelaide woman came across an abandoned ute parked off the side of a remote dirt road in the South Australian outback. She recognised the vehicle from pictures she’d seen on the Find Dane Facebook page at Christmas. It was Dane’s. Police found his body less than a kilometre away in scrub. “Even though it wasn’t a happy ending, it was still
