These days, not a lot remains of the town of Dalmorton. Located on the Boyd River in northern New South Wales, Australia on the traditional lands of the Gumbaynggirr peoples, Dalmorton came into being during a gold rush in the 1860s. At its peak it hosted up to 5,000 residents who were served by no less than thirteen pubs. Mining activity continued even after the gold rush subsided, supplemented by timber milling for the hoop pine that grew in the valley, and the town’s position on the road between the larger towns of Grafton and Glen Innes guaranteed it some traffic.

However, as the twentieth century progressed, Dalmorton was bypassed following the construction of the Gwydir Highway between Grafton and Glen Innes. Slowly its essential services closed, and by 1966 there was no longer a police station, post office or general store in the town. Today, Dalmorton is only reachable by dirt road. Only a few buildings and the cemetery remain, and a litany of abandoned mineshafts that speckle the nearby hills bear testament to the town’s gold rush origins. A popular campsite near the town is managed by the National Park Service, and the area attracts visitors who enjoy the gold fossicking and bushwalking opportunities that the area has to offer.

In April of 2003, one such visitor was on a bushwalk near Dalmorton when they noticed a car abandoned in the scrub. They reported the car to police, setting the scene for a missing persons case which is as bizarre as it is little-known. This post details the mystery of “John Ray Green”, a man with the rare distinction of simultaneously being both a missing person and unidentified.

The Car in the Scrub

On 15 April 2003, a bushwalker was hiking in the area of Jackass Creek outside Dalmorton. The walker noticed a blue 1990 Holden Apollo car abandoned in the scrub and notified police, whose enquiries established that the vehicle had been there for at least two weeks. Contemporary media coverage describes the location of the car’s discovery as ‘very isolated’, making it likely that it was some distance away from the area’s main thoroughfare, the Old Glen Innes road. Indeed, although this road crosses a waterway called Jackass Creek, the goldfield by this name is located a couple of kilometres north of Dalmorton in remote hill country. This area is reachable only by poor-quality tracks and would have been seldom frequented by others.

Police traced this vehicle to one John Ray Green, age 71, of Urunga, NSW, a coastal town more than three hours’ drive away from where the car was found. Photos of John are linked here: he was of European appearance, around 170cm tall with a thin build, grey hair, a moustache, and a full beard. He was described as a gold prospector who enjoyed the outdoors and went camping frequently.

Given how many old gold mineshafts there were around the area of John’s disappearance, it was immediately suspected that something had happened to him while he was prospecting. While extensive search efforts failed to find John’s body, it is believed to this day that he likely died in the area, possibly after falling down a disused mine shaft close to where his car was found.

Sorting Out the Timeline

Police attempted to trace John’s movements to establish when he went missing. The official missing persons page for John on the Australian Federal Police website states that he was last seen on 15 May 2003 by neighbours, who stated that he told them he was going to Sydney to attend a funeral. This source also states that his car was found on 15 April 2004.

However, I suspect that these two dates are incorrect, as they make no sense given the rest of the information which is available about the timeline of John’s disappearance. An ABC article from August 2003 states that his car was found on 15 April 2003, not 2004. The publication date of this article tells us that the location of John’s car was known at least eight months before the date of discovery stated in the missing persons case summary.

Furthermore, if the dates in this case summary are correct and John was last seen in early May 2003, this would mean that he somehow made it back to his home hundreds of kilometres away after abandoning his car in an extremely remote spot. He would then need to lie low during investigations about his whereabouts following the reporting of his car to police on 15 April, before announcing his departure to his neighbours and disappearing for good. A Coffs Coast Advocate article from August 2006 states that John had been missing since March of 2003, and I think that this timeline is more plausible.

Overall, I think it’s most likely that John was last seen by his neighbours sometime in March 2003. His car was then noticed in the bush near Dalmorton around the start of April, two weeks before it was officially reported to police on 15 April. Indeed, police note that “it [d]oes not seem as though he disappeared from there of his own free will”.

John’s Life and Personality

John was never formally reported missing by anyone; he is presumed to have disappeared based on the discovery of his car and police’s inability to trace him. Details about his life are scarce, but based on a birth certificate found in his home he was born in 1932, making him 71 at the time of his disappearance. 

It is known that between 1977 to 1990, John lived in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville, working as a cleaner for Randwick Council. He then lived in the central New South Wales town of Young for some years: this town is famous for its cherries, and John worked on Young Fairview Orchard as a cherry tree pruner until February of 1994. There is a gap of approximately four years in John’s known movements, but by 1998 he was living on the north coast of New South Wales in the Ballina area, with stints in Evans Head, Woodburn, and Wardell.

By the time of his disappearance in 2003, John was living in Urunga, a couple of hours south of the Ballina area. He was described by investigating officer Grahame Burke as “reclusive, polite but unsociable”. When searched after his appearance, his apartment contained no personal possessions such as photos, letters, a diary, or even old paperwork like tax returns. A search of his phone records revealed that he had only made one call in the six months before his disappearance (the available information is that this call was placed ‘to a newspaper’).

Police could only uncover one instance of John volunteering any information about his family: he told acquaintances about the death of an aunt, but police weren’t able to trace her and suspect this story was a fabrication. (It’s not clear whether there’s a linkage between this story about the death of an aunt, and the funeral which John told neighbours he was travelling to Sydney for prior to his disappearance.)

Identity Fraud

However, by far the biggest twist that emerged from the police investigation is that “John Ray Green” was not the real name of the missing man. The real John Ray Green was alive and well in Western Australia, and he had no idea that this man had been using his name and identification for nearly three decades.

Police’s suspicions were first aroused when a birth certificate located in the man’s Urunga home ‘did not match his name’. The exact timeline of the man’s identity fraud is a little unclear, but from what I can make out, he began using the name John Green when he started working for Randwick Council as a cleaner in 1977. To quote police, he then “hit the jackpot” in 1990 when via unknown means, he managed to obtain a copy of a Western Australian birth certificate for John Ray Green. He then updated his personal details to fix any discrepancies between those he’d previously been providing, and the ones on the birth certificate. Reading between the lines, the references to the birth certificate ‘not match[ing] his name’ refer to the Randwick Council employment records from the 1977-1990 period, when the impostor didn’t have access to all the information needed to accurately assume the identity of John Ray Green.

New South Wales police tracked down the real John Ray Green to the small town of Narrogin in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, situated a couple of hours southeast of the state capital of Perth. Amazingly, Green believed that he recognised the man from church services in the nearby town of Brookton some years ago. To quote Green, who was a Jehovah’s Witness: "I'm pretty sure I've seen him before. A scruffy-looking bloke like that tends to stand out at one of our meetings because we are a pretty clean-shaven bunch.” Furthermore, Green claimed that other people also recognised the man, including Green’s daughter and a businessman from neighbouring Pingelly.

Police believe that the man who stole John Ray Green’s identity is likely to have been from WA originally, but to date they have been unable to establish his original identity or locate any relatives. Furthermore, there have been no matches to the identity thief in fingerprint records.

Standstill: Summary and Questions

The last new information I could find about this case was shared in July of 2006, and even then the lead investigator (Detective Senior Constable Grahame Burke) clearly felt the case was at a “standstill”. After three years of investigation, he was unable to present a case to the coroner: not only was there no body and thus no confirmation of death, but the identity of the man was not known. Police continue to appeal for information from anybody who had dealings with the man in late 2002. They have also tried to publicise the case in Sydney and Western Australia in the hopes that people who recognised the man would come forward.

However, nearly two decades on from these final updates, the conundrum of the man known as “John Ray Green” remains not only at a standstill, but is now in danger of being forgotten entirely. Very little information is freely available about this case online, so I hope that by sharing what I have learnt from trawling the newspaper archives, the true scale of this mystery will be better known. (As a side note, this is a tough case to research as search results get swamped by content about John Green, the young adult novelist!)

Few individuals have the dual distinction of being missing persons while also being unidentified. This case involves a fascinating twist of fate: if this man had not gone missing, it is likely that nobody would ever have discovered his act of identity theft. However, this combination of features also presents some unique barriers to resolving this mystery. In concluding this write-up, I want to pose a few questions which are still on my mind, which I’ll order from least to most mysterious:

• Did the man die near Dalmorton? If so, how? To me, this is the least intriguing part of this case. We really don’t have any concrete evidence on this point, but circumstantially, I think it is most likely that he died while prospecting for gold. If he fell into an abandoned mineshaft, he might never be found: they’re notoriously hard to search safely, and can spontaneously collapse which would conceal his remains permanently. While we can’t definitively rule out suicide or foul play, Occam’s razor tells us that death by misadventure is a perfectly plausible explanation. On the other hand, I think the idea of the man intentionally planning his disappearance and secretly leaving the Dalmorton area alive is so implausible and involves so much difficulty that it can be ruled out.

• Did the man lie during his last encounter with neighbours? Given how little we know about his life and movements, it’s not clear whether the man’s story about attending a funeral in Sydney was true or false. If he could be connected to a funeral in Sydney, this would improve the chances of identifying him. However, he also seems to have been so secretive that this could have just been a cover story to explain away his extended absence on a prospecting trip.

• Was the man in hiding or on the run? On several occasions, police stated that they believed the extent of the man’s secrecy, lack of personal possessions and identity fraud meant he was likely in hiding or on the run from something. If so, what was this? Was his life genuinely in danger (giving rise to possible foul play theories), was he on the run due to criminal history, or did he just not want to be found by certain people from his past? To me, the man’s pattern of behaviour is equally explainable by the idea that he was a recluse who wanted to be untraceable to family and old acquaintances.

• What was the man’s real identity? Will it ever be known? These are obviously the million-dollar questions in this case. Some circumstantial signs seem to point to the man being from Western Australia or having spent time there, especially being seen in church services by (among others) the man whose identity he stole. However, in the absence of an identification from members of the public, it’s hard to imagine that this case will be solved. His fingerprints (presumably taken from his home or his council personnel records) have not been matched to any on file, and unless some of his belongings happen to be stored in evidence, it will be impossible to do any forensic genealogy work without his body to extract a DNA profile from. Even details such as the man’s age are no longer certain: while it’s widely reported that he was born in 1932, this information is taken from the birth certificate and therefore may not be accurate.

Sources

AFP Missing Persons Profile

Newspaper Articles (From Archives; Not Accessible Publicly)

Coffs Coast Advocate - August 25, 2006