source : the age
Ivan Jakus is a man of habit. Every Sunday morning, he catches the bus from his home at a western Sydney aged care facility to the Istra Social Club, a gathering place for Croatian expatriates who, like the 75-year-old, fled their homes amid the political and economic unrest of what was then Yugoslavia searching for a better life.
It is more than a social outing for Ivan, though. The club is a part of who he is and a connection to the home he left as a 16-year-old; missing a visit is non-negotiable. So every Sunday, like clockwork, he arrives by 11.30am. But on April 12, something unusual happened: Ivan arrived four hours late. Questioned by his friends about the out-of-character tardiness, and his dirty clothes, Ivan – known to his friends as John or Johnny – said he had been visiting the graves of his late wife and son.
Exactly where Ivan had been in those four hours remains a mystery to his family and friends, but it is what the beloved father and grandfather did in the hours after he left the club that has left his loved ones searching desperately for answers. Almost eight hours after leaving the club, CCTV cameras at a nursery on The Northern Road at Bringelly – more than nine kilometres away – captured Ivan walking along the deserted arterial road. He hasn’t been seen since.
“You think of a million different possibilities,” Ivan’s daughter, Victoria, tells this masthead. “Where has he ended up?”
Lives put on hold
The Jakus family is one of hundreds in NSW desperately seeking answers; currently, 875 disappearances are classed as long-term missing persons cases across the state, the oldest of which dates back 85 years.
On average, 10,000 people are reported missing in NSW each year, or 192 people a week. More than 99 per cent are located within three days. For the families of the less than 1 per cent, though, the search for answers can last decades.
“It’s the uncertainty that’s the hardest part for a lot of families,” says Missing Persons Register manager Detective Inspector Paul Fenwick, who today will launch a renewed appeal to find Ivan as part of Missing Persons Week.
“It’s about people’s lives that have been put on hold.”
The key to solving many long-term cases, Fenwick says, can come from members of the public reviewing old dashcam or CCTV footage, and casting their mind over long-held memories.
“If there’s information that they felt at the time wasn’t that important, it still could be important,” he says.
“It’s those small amounts of information that might be able to progress a lot of our investigations.”
The Missing Persons Register, established in 2019, oversees all disappearances in NSW. Part of that work includes the complex and time-consuming effort to name hundreds of unidentified bodies and human remains held by police and dating back to 1961.
Advances in DNA technology and genealogy this century have led to breakthroughs in cold cases, where investigators are often grappling with decades-old medical and dental records. When police match remains to DNA on file, a case can be open and shut; when there’s no match, the door may never close. “The challenge is always the historical matters,” Fenwick says.
Still, answers in fresh disappearances like Ivan’s can prove equally elusive.
A broken heart and a sharp decline
When Ivan hadn’t returned home an hour before his 10pm curfew on the day of his disappearance, Victoria suspected her father would turn up at one of his local haunts. Earlier this year Ivan had wandered off before returning home a little confused but unscathed. Where he went that day is still unclear.
But Ivan’s mental health in the months before his disappearance had sharply declined, having worsened after the death of his son, Vlado, from melanoma in 2021, and the sudden loss of his wife of 45 years, Visnja, from a brain aneurysm two years later. “Dad just went downhill after that,” Victoria says.
Victoria initially attributed his struggles to severe grief, but when Ivan was admitted to hospital shortly after, he struggled to recall the year; soon, finding his way home became a challenge. Testing revealed Ivan had developed frontotemporal dementia.
Despite his diagnosis, though, Ivan remained well enough to retain some independence; he took regular medication, was happy, could hold a conversation, and based on medical advice, wasn’t relocated to a secure ward in his aged care facility. But eventually Ivan stopped taking his medication and rejected his diagnosis; there was nothing wrong with him, he told Victoria, who says her father was in denial. When he found out Victoria could track his mobile phone, he stopped using it. Slowly, the outgoing and loving man retreated into himself.
As the hours stretched on the night Ivan disappeared, Victoria’s worry turned to fear. Around the same time Victoria met with police at her mother and brother’s graves to begin the search, the nursery cameras captured Ivan 10 kilometres away. By then, she knew something was very wrong. “His day was very off,” she says. “His whole day just doesn’t make sense.”
‘You can’t stop’
On Wednesday morning, Victoria joined a search party hoping for the best but expecting the worst. With a cadaver dog in tow, police set out on the 14th day of the latest search for Ivan, but as in previous efforts, turned up nothing. Days beginning with hope and ending with disappointment and lingering questions have made the past three and a half months an emotional rollercoaster of the kind Victoria never imagined she would ride.
In the first week after Ivan’s disappearance, Victoria would search with police and volunteers from first light until dark, return home to feed her teenage sons, Oli and Luka, and carry on looking into the night. “You’re just in constant overdrive to try and find something,” she says. “You drive yourself insane.”
Initially, Victoria hoped Ivan would find his way back to the club where he made so many of his most precious memories. In the months since, Victoria has exhausted every avenue to find her father, investigating community tip-offs at all hours of the day and night. She has spent hours driving the stretch of road where Ivan was last seen, and collected items from the roadside that well-intentioned passersby suspected could be the white Adidas T-shirt he was wearing when he vanished.
In a notebook, Victoria keeps a meticulous record of her father’s last known movements, along with reported – but unsubstantiated – sightings of him. Beyond the large-scale searches, attempts by psychic mediums and clairvoyants to track Ivan down have turned up no new information.
“Since Ivan’s last confirmed sighting, investigators have pursued every line of inquiry, including extensive land searches and multiple public appeals,” says Acting Superintendent Gavin Beck, who is coordinating the search effort. “Despite significant resources being deployed over several weeks, we have not located him, and we continue to follow up all new information as it comes in.”
There is no way for Victoria to know what her father was thinking the day he disappeared, but Ivan’s known movements that day appear to have centred around the most important aspects of his life. Leppington train station is a few kilometres from the social club that was like a second home; nearby, his wife and son are buried; the property where he was last seen on camera is less than five minutes’ drive from Victoria’s home; in the direction Ivan was last seen walking is the Bosna Croatian Club where he Visnja met at a picnic in 1976. “Maybe he was going to look for Mum,” Victoria says.
Looking over the farmland that surrounds her home, Victoria is overwhelmed at the ground that remains unsearched. Finding her father among the sprawling acreages and scrubland of Sydney’s semi-rural south-west fringe, she says, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. “Are we looking in the right place? I don’t know,” she says, pleading with every truck driver travelling along the area’s roads to look out for her father, and every property owner to search their properties, sheds and dams.
On August 30, a dozens-strong search party of volunteers from as far as Wollongong will join Victoria to search again for answers and long-awaited closure. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” her son, Oli, 16, says of his beloved Dida – or grandfather.
If her father is dead, Victoria says, finding his body so he can be laid to rest beside his wife of 45 years is the most important thing to her. “I’m hopeful that he’s alive. Do I feel like he’s alive? No – which is really shit,” she says.
Until then, she will keep searching. “You don’t stop,” she says. “You can’t stop. You can’t rest until you have something.”
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