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It's July 2007, and in a small place station in Victoria's Keyworth Valley. Officer in charge, Peter Graves, is putting the kettle on and sitting down to talk with his friends, Jim and Kath McDougall.
“I think it was the first time I'd ever seen Jimmy really concerned and serious about something.”
He was very, very stony-faced.
He's the only police officer at the station in 10-gamberlanger.
It's an old building with dark brown brick and limo floors. Peter and his family live in the house next door. It's a small town, and he's used to people popping in unexpectedly. Jim and Kath aren't here for a catch-up, though. They need Peter's help.
Jimmy said, "Look, I'm not sure what to do about this." Jim and Kath told Peter their 27-year-old daughter, Shantel, her partner Simon Cadwell, and their five-year-old granddaughter Lila had recently moved from a small town in Western Australia to an off-grid community in Brazil. But they seemed to have disappeared.
We've had no contact from Shantel since she left. She told Kath who that she would get back to as soon as they got settled somewhere to let them know that they were safe and everything was fine. They had no idea where she was, or if she'd even made it to Brazil. They've tried making phone calls, and they've tried sending emails, and they've tried all these other things, and nothing happened.
I'm Dominique Bayons, and this is episode five. Simon says. Peter had moved to the 10-gambalanga station one year earlier, after about 11 years in the Melbourne Crime Department. I worked in drugs, chocolate exploitation in it. I did a student at the Homicide Squad.
There I worked with National Crime Authority on a joint task force, which was stewed with the importation of heroin from Asian countries. And with all that experience behind him, he's worried. There was elements of the way Shantel had to live her life, which showed a perspective of control.
“And when you get that control, it also then starts to trigger, is there violence?”
Peter had known Jim and Kath for 14 years. Their old four were driving buddies. And he's heard about Shantel's strange relationship with Simon Cadwell. Now he tells them they need to report her missing in Western Australia, where the family lived. But when Jim contacted the WA police, he was told to fill out an online missing persons
report.
He felt uncomfortable about that, and then basically came back afterwards, but that was when
we started to move on from there. Jim felt like the police weren't taking it seriously. As far as police knew, an adult woman and her family had moved overseas. There's no crime in that. But knowing what he did, Peter thought it needed looking into, so he hit the phones.
Oh, I contacted Sergeant Tyler at Nana Policius, the officer in charge of Nana. And spoke to him about what was going on. Once Peter explained the situation to the Nana officer, Sergeant Taylor knew straightaway exactly who Peter was calling about. When it turns out, he had his own suspicions about Simon Cadwell.
He said, "Look, I have serious concerns about him because he's a very odd guy."
“You might remember, Sergeant Taylor was the officer who turned up when Shantel's ex.”
Simon Cookman went to Nana up in 2004, and had started claiming that Simon Cadwell wasn't who he said he was. At the time, Sergeant Taylor had fired off an email to a colleague, asking them to look into it. They replied a couple of days later, saying they'd done some checks, but nothing came up.
But it was still there in the back of Sergeant Taylor's mind when in May 2007, just two months before the disappearance, he pulled Cadwell over for speeding. Sergeant Taylor started asking about his ID, and Cadwell had reacted strangely. The very next day, Shantel lodged an application for Leela's passport.
Sergeant Taylor didn't know about the passport, but he was still sure that so...
was off.
“He relays all this down the phone to Peter, then says he'll go and take a look around”
for him. Jeff went to the house, had a look, and he told me that the house looked like people had just walked out the door. Everything was still in the city, you know, furniture, all that sort of stuff. That was really odd that if someone was moving to the other side of the world, the house
would be sort of packed up to a certain degree. From that, I started to become more concerned about what was going on.
Peter knows that missing persons cases aren't always given top priority.
So he takes what Sergeant Taylor was able to discover on the ground for him and starts to work his contacts. Bank investigators he knew from his time working in fraud confirmed that no money had gone out of the accounts since the date that they said they were going overseas. Immigration confirmed no one had used their passports to leave the country.
Peter scuvers Shantel sold her car three days before they disappeared, but the deal
“doesn't remember much. He thought an older guy had been waiting outside for her, but couldn't”
be sure. Untouched bank accounts, no proof they'd left the country, Peter had to get creative.
I started looking at potentially what other processes could there be to leave the country
with our trace. The only things I could come up with was for maybe a cargo vessel in free mantle, or perhaps a private boat or something like that. But to be smuggled onto a cargo ship or using a private boat to travel to the other side of the world, would have taken money and contacts.
It's not the sort of thing you walk out to a commercial freighter, doctor, port in free mantle and say, excuse me, can we hitch a ride, just don't tell anybody we're going with you. So, I could pretty much rule that out. Which put paid to a popular theory that they might have disappeared when a plane traveling
in Brazil crashed, killing all on board.
They also weren't in the passenger manifests. The dead ends are mounting, and so too are Peter's fears for Shantel and Leila McDougall. I was starting to think this is not going to end well. When Jim McDougall next drops into the station, Peter has to break the news to his friend. I do remember saying to him, "Look, it's too early to make any sort of decisions about
what's happened or what's happening or where we're at yet, but for me the signs are not good when people who need money to survive aren't using or accessing that money." Peter watched Jim who could make a joke out of any situation, taken what Peter was telling him. I remember you very clearly about Jimmy being really pretty much not diver that day, because
“I think the reality of where things were started to actually sink in that potentially”
this could be quite bad. What was it like for you to have to have that conversation? You often hear people talk about the police putting on the blue suit and it takes you away from all connection to all emotion, everything else, but this case it was like trying to tell a close friend of something that they didn't want to hear.
Peter writes up everything he's found in an official report to send off to WA Police. Peter thinks if he runs this up the police chain, they'll be obliged to take a decent look at it. He's done all he can from the other side of the country to help him out. Then Peter got a call from Sergeant Taylor that changed everything.
The next thing I heard which was quite some time later was that there was potentially Simon Cadwell had been arrested. Simon Cadwell detained in the UK. It's a long way from Brazil or nanop. There's an international interpol alert against his name.
He's listed as a suspect and now he's turned up nowhere near either of those places. The house of cards was about to come crashing down. Simon Cadwell that we knew is Simon Cadwell was not actually Simon Cadwell that the person that was detained was actually the real Simon Cadwell. Hang on, there are already too many Simon's in this story.
To be crystal clear, we now have another, the real Simon Cadwell, who is very much not the
Man Shantel has been living with for the past 10 years.
So who the hell was the man placed just arrested in the UK?
“And who was the man living with Shantel in the Blue House?”
This person, who we thought was Simon Cadwell was actually a Prisma, no, of Gary Felton. And he'd been travelling on that false passport. Simon Cadwell's true identity was Gary Felton. He'd spent years lying about who he really was. Shantel's ex-boyfriend, Simon Cuckerman, had been telling the truth.
He'd seen a letter written by Gary Felton signed as Gary and he tried to warn Shantel in the place three years before. So who was Gary Felton?
And if he was lying about who he was, what else was he capable of?
The end my producers have been scouring around to try and find out who this man Gary Felton was before he became someone else. We find a birth record that looks like his, born in West Ham England in 1962, eight years later a brother comes along. So we start hitting up nostalgic Facebook pages of the area and hit lucky.
We start sending messages, then they start coming back. I'm not really sure how well we would have been then maybe 20s, gave me a lift.
“I remember thinking after what good lady was and probably never got to know him that well.”
Someone else went to primary school with him. All I can really remember was at the time he was good at art and obsessed with horror, even at the age of 11. Another person, a woman who was friends of friends asks why we're interested. What do you mean?
He's got missing. Did you just leave his family or is the violence or drugs involved or something because he wasn't a violent person? She also says he was a punk, very clever, tall and really good looking. A nice guy being scouring my photos, that's me in the front, red bondage trousers.
The Indian guy to my right is called Fubba and he was one of Gary's best friends and the
“guys that indirectly behind him to the right, you can just see is Gary.”
You can't see much other than that he's tall, but we have something else now, a nickname of his best friend. No one we've been messaging with is up for an interview, but thanks to this intel, I've found two people I'm hoping will give me precious insight into who Gary Felton was, before he became Simon Cadwell.
A couple called Adrian and Davis, aka Fubba, and they've agreed to a call, so with the time difference, I set my alarm for 3/30 in the morning, that was such a good conversation. I spoke to them for over an hour, they also declined an interview, but are happy to share what they know. In the 1970s Davis became best friends with Gary at the age of 12.
They bonded over punk music, they loved the sex pistols, Adam and the ants, slaughter and the dogs. They went to a pretty rough school, and Gary was tall and gangly and stood out in the crowd. He would get bullied and beaten up by the other students.
Davis tells me how Gary was always messing about, but never got in serious trouble.
Gary Felton's teenage years sound kind of rough, but fairly normal working class English living. It sounds like it's in Gary's early 20s, that his life begins to head in a different direction. When I ask if they knew Gary started going by another name, I'm surprised when
they say yes. Gary Felton started traveling overseas for months at a time, but during one of his visits back to the UK in 1994, he starts asking his friends to call him Simon. He told Davis he'd committed computer fraud and didn't want to be found out. He says he stole the identity from a dead baby.
After the call, I start looking to see if I can confirm this, because everything I've been reading says he stole a colleague's identity. I can't find any death record for a baby called Simon Cadwell in any likely year. What I can find is a man, very similar to Gary, going by the name Simon Cadwell Kelly,
Who advocates against identity fraud.
It takes a while, a few unanswered emails, a follow-up text, sorry who's this again from Simon,
“but eventually I managed to connect with him by a video call, while he's on holiday in Thailand.”
My name is Simon, Simon Cadwell Kelly, and we're round about up to 40 years ago. I met Gary Felton. This is probably going to get confusing. So for clarity, from here, the man we've known as Simon Cadwell, I'll call Gary. And Simon, well he's actually Simon, the real one.
And this Simon Cadwell story has never been recorded before.
We were work buddies in a sales department in a company called Ferrari Software. He was a kind of fun guy, quite happy to go lucky, in a sense of humour. By now, it was the 80s. Gary was in his 20s, well built into body building. He ditched the suit and hit the gym after work.
People would take the Mickey out here because he would have his nutritional shakes for lunch, whilst everyone else is having just sandwiches and stuff. And he was good for a lot. Yeah, we just sort of hit it off, and it led into going to the nightclub or a party. And soon enough, we had a little group of sort of party people where we would each have a party in rotation.
Simon and Gary became mates. These parties sound pretty eighties, and a lot of fun. We would hire tech stuff like smoke machine, lasers, DJ consoles. Sometimes we hire a marquee and have a pig roasting, so they were quite flamboyant party. We would work hard in the week, and then party hard Friday Saturday.
We could have been on Sunday, and then do the same in the next weekend.
During these parties, they would drink and smoke weed, always in the privacy of a home they were kicking on at.
And Gary was also partial to other things.
“I do remember, and Gary did like LSD and I think nowadays it's something that people don't tend to do, but back then it was more popular.”
It's actually squares with something Adrian and Gary's best mate from school Davis told me. In that hour-long, early morning phone call, I had with them. The one he started working at that software company, Gary was introduced to LSD. And Davis says it changed him. What he actually said was that he thinks it blew his mind.
And from there, he started getting into new age spirituality. From that point onwards, Davis describes Gary felt as a loony. Again, his words, not mine. Seeing him pretty well every day though, Simon didn't notice any immediate changes. But one day, about a year after they'd been friends, Gary was over at Simon's.
And for some reason, Simon was showing him his birth certificate.
I never thought that my birth certificate would suddenly go astray without my knowledge.
“Simon can't remember if it was weeks or months later.”
But when he needed it again, he couldn't find it. Because he was the only person that knew where it was. Or had seen it, I said to him, "That can't find it. Do you remember where I put it?" And he told me that he'd corrode it.
And I said, "Why? Why would you want to do that and why didn't you ask me?" And he wouldn't return it. You could get with that one knowledge, so you could say that's just theft rather than, "Let's say a friend making themselves the sandwich in your kitchen."
You know, some things are acceptable, some things are not. And that was not. This seems like quite the understatement. He explained that he'd used my birth certificate to get a new license. Simon remembers that Gary had lost his for drink driving.
I was horrified, and he put me in his awkward situation because, you know, he was a friend,
That was short-lived because after that he went triving.
Simon thought that was the end of it.
“After around a year, they both left the software company.”
And Gary began taking these sabbaticals to India, which continued through the 90s. He would say that he'd gone to India to find some inner spiritual peace. Through meditation, he would go for a sea several weeks, perhaps even several months. He'd sometimes pulled the UK and asked Simon to do little things for him while he was away. And when he was home, Gary tried to share this new found spiritual utopia with Simon.
He was come back enthusiastic about being in India and say what a great thing it is and why don't I change my lifestyle and find more peace and harmony in connection with the universe. But Simon was quite happy with his life, work, and then party on the weekend to let off steam. Part of me also said that he'd like to still come back to that normal day-to-day tech life,
“you know, with computers, and I think he enjoyed the contrast.”
I've always wondered at this contradiction in Gary too, the new age spirituality and fear of
electro-magnetic frequencies alongside the massive computer set up and late night hours on the web. It sort of gave up on society working 95, and yeah, he seemed to have the amount of money to do it. I still don't really know how Gary financially supported himself in Australia either. Clearly Shantel worked hard, and it seems that for a number of years before they moved to Nanop Simon Cookman was a follower and transferring Gary money.
But his computer set up wouldn't have come cheap in the early 2000s, and I haven't been able to pin down what his income stream was. Even back in the 90s, as he was traveling back and forwards to India, it seems he was relying on others to support his self-exfloration. Another childhood friend called Nick, who I've spoken to, recalled that Gary once asked Davis,
Nick named Baba for money, and afterwards Gary said, "I always know God will provide."
Davis replied, "That's fine, but I didn't know I was God." It's around this time that Davis noticed the biggest change in his school friend. When he returned to England, he'd be wearing pointy wool and hats and Aladdin style shoes, and describe himself to friends as a true teller. He'd usually have a woman with him that he'd met along the way.
Simon remembers the women too. "You always had a girlfriend, or maybe too.
“I think he'd like to be kind of a bit controlling with his relationships."”
When you say he was a bit controlling of his girlfriends, what do you mean by that? "You know, I'd like want to know where they are, what they're doing, that's sort of thing." Here it is again, the control thing. From what I've heard from a number of people, this era of Gary, going back and forwards to India, seeking spiritual enlightenment, was a real shift away from the young punk who liked a party,
or the bodybuilder who'd don't suit for work and light up the weekends with lasers and synthesizers at a house party. It's like he was a chameleon reinventing himself along the way. His friends say he started out a staunch atheist. He didn't believe in any kind of religion. But then he began talking about having God-like experiences and meeting aliens who could cure cancer. Anyway, Simon Cadwell, the real one, just kept living his life as Gary sort of faded out of it.
Until Simon needed to get some medical treatment. "I was in extreme pain in my love back and leg and had been for some while." It had been recommended he gets surgery. So he booked an appointment with his GP. "She confronted me and said, I've already had an operation." Simon is really confused. He tries to tell her that he hasn't, that he's in a lot of pain. "She didn't relieve me. She had us three. Have I ever had any psychiatric
Problems?
know, schizophrenia or something like that." When Simon refused to say he'd had the surgery,
“the doctor refused to see him anymore. When he did find a doctor who believed him, he got”
hold of these medical notes and something stuck out to him. "I recognize one of the addresses in Church, he's sorry, as being Gary's temporary address. And I thought, "Ah, this is strange. So then I went to the police." It took some doing at a lot of time proving he was really
who he said he was. But finally it became clear that Gary had not just used Simon's birth certificate
to get a license. He had built an entire new identity around it. Slowly, more and more things were coming to light. As well as the license, the medical fraud, Gary had bought property under Simon's name. Had even invited Simon to a party there, a nice three or four bedroom terrace house. But it was when Simon was making his way back home after
“a holiday to France that the extent of Gary's deception really came home.”
I was coming back from France on a ferry. There was this long queue of cars and I thought, "Ah, be nice to get through the border control and drive home." I got pulled over to one side. I thought, "Okay, they're just doing a routine car check." They asked me to go into the border control offices,
sat me down in a room and they said the first question they said to me was, "When was I
last in Australia?" I was rather puzzled at the question because I hadn't been to Australia. I said I hadn't been to Australia and they said, "Well, we need to ask you lots of questions about what you've been doing and what you've been." Simon asked what this is all about. But they won't say. They ask a lot of questions. Then they say he's wanted by Interpol and he
“starts to get scared. They showed me a picture of me supposedly and said that the picture of Gary”
looked rather like me and I said, "No, that's not me, but I knew who it was."
Gary felt in, along with Shantel, Lila and Tony had gone missing on the other side of the world.
An Interpol had put out an alert for anyone travelling on a passport as Simon Cadwell. This is the arrest that Peter heard about. Simon Cadwell turning up in the UK. Actually, just a man looking forward to getting home from holiday. Eventually, Simon was let through and into the country. This same debacle would happen for years. Simon would almost expect to be stopped at the airport.
What seems to be the problem? They would take me to another room. I could be waiting for an hour. They'd take very long. Maybe even two hours. I just got someone picking me up. A little into here, some photos, some phone calls. I've been held up at Border Force before because someone stole my idea. It's late in the day. That was the worst time.
Simon would only book daytime flights. So when he landed and customs needed to call Scotland Yard, they'd get an answer. I now carry with me my own passport, my new passport, and a letter from Scotland Yard, saying that I am me and Border Control have special notes so that I can pass through. He sounds really matter of fact about it. But he says he was pretty worked up at the time.
He ended up changing his name, adding the Kelly so it would stop. And a lot of time has passed since then. It also sounds like it just happened so often. He ended up almost having to laugh at it. In fact, one time, I got stopped by the police, routine check, by the roadside. They looked me up and they said, "Ah, we can see here there's a warrant for your arrest." And I said to them, "Almost with a smile, I said, "Oh, is that for kidnapping and murder?"
And they said, "Yes. Can you imagine saying that at the roadside?" And they said, "Well, we've got to arrest you. I said, "No, don't worry, it's a mistake."
Possible kidnapping and murder.
An eerie for shadowing of what would happen decades later. In 1994, the foreshantel had even
“met him. Gary Felton returned to England from Australia, accompanied by his girlfriend.”
On the day after they arrived, Adrian remembers a phone call from the Australian embassy. The parents of Gary's girlfriend had reported her missing. Adrian told the embassy she didn't know what was going on and would call them back. When she asked, Gary's girlfriend told her it was okay to tell the embassy where she was and let her parents know she was safe. More than a decade before Shantel is reported missing by her parents,
this woman's parents were doing the same thing. As I was talking to Adrian and Davis, I sense that they still feel a lot of disbelief about how Gary's life turned out. With all of Gary's old friends, it strikes me that despite everything, they don't really seem
“angry at him. That football may be, but not antagonistic. Like they remember what a good time they had,”
the friends they were. My opinion is that initially it was probably to do with his driving license. And I just think that he maybe got carried away maybe his mind started to think,
"Well, if I can do that, maybe I can do this." He never struck me as somebody who could
net somebody or, you know, one of them earned of somebody. He struck me as somebody who wanted to have a good time travel and follow his spirituality and just a little bit selfish at times. Everything I've read about this whole case, Gary Felton is painted as this shady character who appeared out of nowhere one day and turned everyone's world upside down. But the stories I'm hearing give so much context to how Gary Felton became Simon Cadwell.
“It's like finding out the Wizard of Oz was just a small man with a microphone.”
It also makes sense of all these strange little moments in the years leading up to the
force disappearance. Shantel's called a gym about fudging some paperwork to get him in the country again that he wasn't on Leela's birth certificate. Not letting Jim take his photo. The way he reacted when Sergeant Taylor pulled him over and questioned his ID. Moving ever further away if he felt like people were getting too close. I have found myself wondering how much Shantel knew about all this. Or if she just like her
parents, Jim and Kathy thought Simon Cadwell was just who he said he was. If when she spoke about needing to do something to get him into the country, she knew his real name wasn't Simon Cadwell. It's the questions about who this man really was that shattered Catholic dogle. I just I was in such a shock. I just then I just imagine all these terrible things.
What is he? Is he, you know, a murderer or whatever because it's got someone else's name. So he's living a lot. In the months after Peter typed up his investigations and sent it to his West Australian counterparts, the police were trying to piece together the trail of bread crumbs. There were still no answers. In this case, we don't have to quite a while then. Just more questions,
no answers. Opportunities to speak to people who might have seen something dried up. Jim and Kathy felt helpless. But there was one date coming up that they were hanging on for. The one day of the year Shantel would call without fail wherever she was in the world. Christmas, was she going to call? And if she didn't, would they have to accept she was really gone? Local police then conducted a search, and they found an item of clothing.
I'm Dominic Bayons, host of expanse, the none up for. Please subscribe so you get every episode as they drop. And leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps others find us. If you can add to this story or have information, you think might be important. Please get in touch.
This season of expanse was developed in collaboration with ABC's regional WA ...
onward Andy and Bibelman Country.
“Sound design is by Grant Walter, who is also a producer, along with Meghan Woods,”
with additional production and research by Jessica Hinchliff, Kate Stevens and Louise Mylin.
Our supervising producer is Pia Wursu. Executive producer is Blifemore.
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