Michelle Ryan

So when I sent Daddy the message to say, Daddy, I need you to ring me, it's important.

Come hell or high water, whatever that man was at, my phone would have rang.

But then to try and ring his phone again and it went into the message minder, that wasn't... No, his phone was never dead to go into message minder.

Might have been out of reception for a few minutes, but you can be good and sure that wouldn't be any longer than a few minutes.

Yeah.

And then 22 months later, so when his body was found, this sounds a strange way of putting it, but was there any sense of...

of relief?

I mean, had you convinced yourself he was dead or was there still some part of you that thought maybe there's a sliver of a chance he's alive somewhere?

No, it was always kind of like a fight of conscience, you know, because like we'd say there was certain people saying, oh, well, you know, maybe he had enough of it and he went away and like we were there.

No, not at all.

But you do dislike.

And the more days that went on, like to me, I would say the morning after, we'd say the third of June, I went up and I was walking down.

I started to walk as part of the Christ King and I was walking down and I was like,

No, we're never going to see him alive.

Like whatever is after happening to him, it was a case of getting him back.

Now it's a case of finding him.

And so it was really and truly was a battle.

And like we had to be treading on careful ground as well.

And because we had kids and the kids were asking questions, I think the more we were saying it,

the more we wanted to believe in ourselves that, no, he's going to come, he's going to come back in and, you know, like, you know, we'll kill him and then we'll give him a hug and all of this business.