A cold case, a new suspect, and fresh hope for a mother desperate for answers

Before he died in 2023, Roger Membrey spent three decades hunting for answers over the murder of his 22-year-old daughter, Elisabeth. Her mother, Joy, is desperately trying to avoid meeting the same fate as her late husband.

“I’m getting old… I don’t want to die and not know what happened to Elisabeth,” she tells John Silvester on the Naked City podcast, one of many conversations they’ve had since 1994, when Elisabeth went missing from her share house.

Elisabeth was rostered to work at a pub in Ringwood, Victoria until 8.30pm, then planned to go for dinner. But the hotel was busy and she finished at 11.45pm.

She drove home, went to her bedroom and, police believe, was writing a letter to a friend in Britain when someone she knew knocked on the door.

Police believe Elisabeth – a politics graduate who had been offered a trainee journalist position with Channel Ten – was killed in the hallway and taken from the scene, though her body has never been found.

There have been false dawns. First, the Membreys were told by police the killer had been found. But he was cleared. And now, police have reason to believe there is a new suspect.

“Somebody definitely knows,” Joy tells Silvester. “How that person has kept going... or keeping it at such a secret for 30 years? That’s a heck of a long time. I’ve gone from middle age, shall we say, to old age, which is hard going.”

Not knowing the location of Elisabeth’s body, Joy says, is one of the hardest things for her to cope with.

“We have to bury our dead to have some sort of closure, so I’ve got a grave ready,” Joy says. “If somebody you know does know something small, they might think, ‘Oh, that’s not worth reporting’. But… every little [piece of] information does help.”

Listen to Silvester’s full conversation with Elisabeth’s mother, Joy, about her enduring quest to find her daughter’s body, and police investigator Andrew Stamper about the new investigation below.

John Silvester is a columnist for The Age. He has covered Melbourne’s crime beat and justice system since the 1970s, winning numerous accolades, including three Walkley Awards and six Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards. He has written or co-authored more than 30 books, including the Underbelly series, which was made into a TV series.

In the seventh season of crime podcast Naked City, Silvester talks to the cops and the crims. New episodes drop each Wednesday.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.