Police have called in more than a dozen detectives from specialist units to assist in the investigation of missing mother-of-three Samantha Murphy, almost three weeks after she vanished without a trace.
Ms Murphy’s mysterious disappearance during an early morning run on February 4 has generated hundreds of leads as officers hone in on known violent offenders living close to her home in Ballarat in regional Victoria.
The extra detectives on what has become Victoria’s highest priority police inquiry include personnel from the sex crimes, counter-terror, fraud and armed robbery divisions in Melbourne.
They have travelled to Ballarat due to their experience with difficult investigations rather than a suggestion of a terror or sex crime link, the Herald Sun reported.
While it’s been almost two weeks since police wound back the official search, dozens of local community members remain out in force conducting their own searches.
Police last week changed the status of Ms Murphy’s (pictured) disappearance to ‘suspicious’
Searchers continue looking for clues into the disappearance of missing Ballarat woman Samantha Murphy
The group of volunteers is looking ‘for any answers, any solution, any hints, any evidence that might be able to contribute towards bringing Sam home’.
The ground crew has been ‘looking for Samantha continuously’.
The group will meet this weekend, when the desperate mission enters its fourth week.
‘The amount of mothers and women, there have been fathers and other people jumping in on the group chats which is absolutely fantastic, but a lot of the driving force, a lot of the community, a lot of the people getting involved are the women,’ Cristie-Lea King told A Current Affair on Wednesday night.
The community mood in Ballarat remains ‘sombre’, where Ms Murphy’s disappearance continues to impact daily lives of many locals.
‘I think it has certainly been felt, spoken about,’ Ms King said.
‘Even getting out of my car last night, I suddenly heard a noise.
‘I shouldn’t be thinking about that or worrying, but it creates a sense of until we get answers you don’t know what happened.’
She added that the group refused to give up hope that Ms Murphy will be found,
‘Until there is an answer, we are not giving up hope on her if she is there,’ Ms King said.
‘Nobody knows until there is evidence, but realistically, it’s about getting big numbers and big groups out there coming together to do whatever we can.
‘If there is evidence, we want to be able to find it. If there is something to help the authorities, we want to be able to help,’ she said.
While the police have publicly said they don’t have any leads, sources told A Current Affair that they believe the missing mum may no longer be in the area around her home.
‘The fact they’ve wound back the search I think obviously they know things we may not know about,’ criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro told the program.
‘Clearly it’s affected the community, clearly they’re worried about the situation and clearly they’re very supportive of the woman who disappeared.
Police still have no standout theory about what happened to Ms Murphy, almost three weeks since she her home, never to be seen again.
Volunteer searcher Cristie-Lea King (pictured) said they are looking ‘for any answers, any solution, any hints, any evidence that might be able to contribute towards bringing Sam home’
It’s understood they believe Ms Murphy made it into the forest area where she regularly ran.
There are no witnesses, no CCTV and no dashcam footage to help crack the mystery – which is very rare in a time when consumer surveillance technology plays a vital ole in many police investigations.
The only solid clue has been that her mobile phone ‘pinged’ off a tower at Buninyong, on Ballarat’s southern fringe, later on the day she went missing.
The phone has not pinged anywhere since then.
The area she was running in – bushland around the Woowookarung Regional Park – has a lot of old mine shafts
However it likely she would have been found by now if she fell down one of them.
The theory that Ms Murphy would disappear of her own choice has been looked at, but there is no evidence to suggest that’s what happened or that she would do that to her children.
