Somewhere in the graveyard of Canberra's oldest church, there's a plaque for Megan Mulquiney.
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But for her mother, Dorothy Mulquiney, it means very little.
The plaque was placed there in the years after Megan disappeared without a trace, outside a south Canberra shopping mall in 1984.
That was 36 years ago, almost to the day, and the trail remains cold. No one has seen or heard from Megan - a quiet 17-year-old who was in Year 12, worked at Big W and loved ice skating - since.
For Dorothy, a plaque means nothing without a body, without answers, without closure.
It was the priest at St John's Church who suggested holding a service for Megan, all those years ago. Dorothy agreed to attend, but while she was driving there, she remembers, she listened to a radio news report about a murdered child.
She sat in the church for a few minutes, before getting up and walking out.
"I thought, I can't do this, God, what are you doing? And I went," she says.
Although the priest later came to her house, and told her he understood - told her she had every right to be angry - it was too late.
"I just decided, OK God, until you give me some answers, I'm not going back to church.
"And I haven't."
In the years since, she has done what, she supposes, any woman with two other children, a partner, a job, a household to take care of, would do - she has simply got on with it.
"I suppose I'm tough, but it still gets me," she says.
"I have my little crack-ups, but then you think, 'right, I have to get on with it'. There's nothing, nothing, nothing [I can do], it's all in somebody else's hands."
These days, she lives at the same address as she did back in 1984, although her son lives in the house with his family, and Dorothy lives in a granny flat out the back.
She has never been able to move away, not even with the Woden Plaza, where Megan was last seen, just minutes down the road. She's been back many times over the years, and is even able now to go into the Big W store where Megan worked.
It wasn't always easy; it was her old colleagues at what was then Grace Brothers - now Myer - who enticed her back and encouraged her to get on with life.
But since then, she's endured several setbacks and traumas relating to Megan over the years. False sightings, shonky psychics, a dodgy private detective, two inquests.
There's been just one main suspect - a serial rapist who abducted and assaulted several young women, including a 17-year-old in the Woden Plaza car park just months after Megan disappeared. He spent most of his adult life in prison, and died two years ago having maintained he had nothing to do with what happened to Megan.
Dorothy believed him. She felt, deep down, that Megan wasn't taken by a stranger.
In the years since Megan disappeared, she has split from her - now late - partner, and watched her other two children grow up and have their own families. Life has gone on. Megan's face has appeared, briefly, in news reports, magazine stories and on milk cartons over the years, always with the accompanying hope that someone's memory might be jogged.
But the further away she gets from the day it happened, the less likely it seems that she will ever have answers.
One of the saddest and strangest things about the case is that the facts haven't changed one bit since the day Megan disappeared. The story's contours have stayed the same, even as the years have gone by. Hope has faded and sadness has become deeply ingrained.
The stark facts: on July 28, 1984, Megan finished her Saturday shift at Big W in the Woden Plaza - back when all shops closed at midday on Saturday. She left the store after the doors closed and walked towards the mall's exit. She had told colleagues she was going to catch the bus home to rest, as she and her younger sister and brother would be going out for dinner with their father that night. Several people remembered seeing her walking to the exit leading to the car park and the bus interchange, and then, as the facts would have it, she disappeared. She never got on the bus and no one saw where she went.
At her suburban home 10 minutes away, Dorothy was worried as soon as Megan didn't walk back from the bus stop. She couldn't imagine what would have held her up. Megan was a good girl, a reliable girl. She didn't have secrets, she didn't have a boyfriend. Dorothy called the police within hours, and that evening found herself giving a statement at the station. She described what Megan had been wearing, what her plans had been, who her friends were. She knew - then and now - that there was simply no way Megan had run away.
She thought then - and still does - that Megan must have climbed into the car of someone she knew. Someone who may not even have meant her any harm.
"It could have even been accidental," she says.
"In my mind, as a mum, and with the type of person and daughter she was, I can't think why somebody would want to murder her. I can't! Maybe, maybe something happened and it got out of hand, I don't know."
It's something Anne Johnson also grapples with. She and Megan were best friends back in 1984. They were both Year 11 students at Narrabundah College, had part-time mall jobs, loved going to the ice-skating rink on Friday nights.
And if anyone was going to go missing and branded a runaway, it was her, not Megan.
"I was the wild one. If I'd have gone missing, people would have thought I'd run away for three days," she says.
"For Megan, she was uncomplicated. There was no double life. She had ambitions to be a teacher, she wanted to help people.
"Back in those days people used to smoke dope occasionally, and Megan was never that type of person. She'd come and mother everyone. There were no secrets."
Much like Dorothy, she has never really stopped thinking about Megan over the years, even after moving away and starting her own family.
And she says no matter how hard she thinks about it, she knows deep down that Megan must have left the mall with someone she knew.
"There's not one cell in my body that says that she ran away," she says.
Prima Pandji is another person who still wonders.
He was an infatuated teenager who, on that Saturday morning in 1984, managed to get Megan to agree to meet him after her Big W shift. Known back then as Phillip Tu - he changed his name in the early 2000s - he was a student in the year above her at Narrabundah College, and had spotted her across the quadrangle, thought she was "cute and pretty", and worked up the courage to ask her to pose for a portrait he had to do for his photography class.
She agreed; the portrait is the one that everyone knows, the one the police put on posters, the one that's still framed in Dorothy's living room.
"I had a crush on her from then," he says, over the phone from Melbourne.
In the years since Megan disappeared, he has become a Buddhist, and lectures in industrial design at Swinburne University. But the memories of Megan are never far from the surface.
"Megan was pretty quiet, she had to put up with some of my silly sense of humour," he says.
"Whether anything would have come out of it, I don't know in terms of a relationship or anything like that. It was just one of those crushes."
One of those otherwise meaningless crushes that, 36 years on, still has more meaning than it ever should have.
Tu had arranged to meet Megan for lunch after her shift that day. He turned up outside Big W a few minutes late, and she was gone.
As he later told police, he left the mall, thinking he'd been stood up, went home, hung out with friends, and later went to his parents' restaurant in Braddon. It was there, that evening, that Dorothy rang him in a panic, saying Megan hadn't come home. He drove over to the Mulquiney's home and stayed there until the early hours of the morning.
For a time afterwards, he was a person of interest. The police interviewed him several times, and he remembers how anxious he was to help, to find answers, to be as open as possible.
"How I felt exactly I don't know, but I just remember they were long interviews, it was only afterwards that I realised how it affected me," he says.
"And do you know what, ever since then, I suppose, because I was that person of interest, because I was going to meet Megan that day, because I had a high school crush, I figured I'll probably always be that guy, it's always going to be there.
"You feel like, if I didn't organise to meet her, or if I was actually able to meet her, what would have happened?"
He has no theories: in his mind, something happened and she is gone. He can't see anything beyond that.
He says his life would have been completely different if Megan hadn't disappeared.
"Sometimes I think to myself, why the hell am I even still here? I never got married, I don't have my own family, it's like I've never, ever gotten over the trauma," he says.
"It must have some influence or effect, right? The way I found my lama (teacher) in the Buddhist practice was failed relationships, or falling for the wrong person, I just never had good, loving romantic relationships."
As he has learned compassion over the years, he has also become, as he puts it, "more weepy", finding the news - about fires, coronavirus, shark attacks, murders - more and more affecting.
Still, we're both taken aback when he starts crying, openly down the phone. He's weeping for all the things that have been lost, for the life Megan might have had.
"It's been so many years, and it still hurts," he says, sobbing.
Johnson, too, says her life has been shaped by Megan's disappearance. She was hyper-vigilant with her own son when he was growing up, constantly worried that someone would take him from a shopping mall.
But most of all, she says, there was a loss of innocence that has permeated life ever since.
"I felt that someone had broken the trust. Someone changed the way you think of the world - which then does change your life moving forward," she says.
"It stays with you forever."
She was on a working trip in Lismore in the late 1980s when she remembers seeing a young woman across the street.
"I thought she looked like Megan would have looked at that age, and I yelled out across the street. You run up to people and you tap them on the shoulder. I've done that numerous times in different areas where they turn around and it's not her.
"It's a hyper-sensitive thing - what would she look like now? Part of you wants to know that she didn't come to harm, that's the worst bit, that there's a part of you that just thinks, maybe."
Johnson is weeping too.
"It's horrible to not know. Poor Dorothy, it just blows me away with what she's been through - I don't know how she functions every day, but we have very blunt conversations and she doesn't have a choice.
"I know a very small part of her is still expecting that one day she's just going to come home."
Dorothy herself doesn't need to spell this out; it's obvious. It's the reason she hasn't moved away, the reason she keeps steeling herself to have these conversations.
For a long time, she says, she too would scan every crowd for Megan's face. But as the years go on, the searching has changed. All she wants now is for someone to tell her what happened, even if it means a confession.
"I don't hate, put it that way, I don't hate anybody," she says.
"All I want to know is what happened to my beautiful daughter, so that I can put her to rest."
- The Megan Mulquiney investigation remains active. Anyone with information is urged to contact investigators directly on 0457 844 917 or anonymously to Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or on their website.