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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
Chapter 2: What happened to Jack McLennan?
One night, Jack is hanging out with a friend in a park, not far from where he lives, but then he's gone and he's never been seen again. What happened to him is the mystery being unpacked in the latest season of Unravel, one that you might be able to help solve. I'm Stephen Stockwell. This is The Case Solved.
There's no sign of him, no messages, no contact, no footage, nothing.
Just gone.
Chapter 3: Who is Rob Burgin and what is his role in the investigation?
You could nearly see an alien took him away because he's just vanished. So we knew something was off here big time. Something was off. We were told by so many people, don't go there, you'll get killed, you'll get chewed. You don't really know what to believe, who to trust.
Is it a murder?
Chapter 4: What details surround Jack's last known moments?
Is it someone just gone missing?
There seems to be foul play, Rob, involved here. Nothing else makes sense of it.
The latest season of Unravel, What Became of Jack, is fresh in your feeds at the moment. And in it, Rob Bergen is trying to find a young man who disappeared in Queensland almost two years ago. Episode three has just dropped and there is so much to talk about. So I'm very pleased that Rob could make some time for a chat on the case of. Rob, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me, Steve.
In the first two episodes, I've gone from thinking that Jack has just wandered off to being suspicious of almost every single person in this story. And this is just the start. To get us going, Rob, who is Jack?
Jack is a guy who'd recently transitioned from, he'd worked in gyms most of his life and he'd just gone into a construction company. He'd hit that age of 27, I guess, where a lot of things change for us in our lives. But it seems particularly the case for Jack here.
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Chapter 5: How did Jack's personal life contribute to his disappearance?
He'd changed his social circle. That day that he goes missing, he broke up with his long-term partner and And just his world was a state of flux. His car wasn't working properly. He was trying to find a new place. It just seems like this crescendo of things in his life. But for us, I think we can all, you know, have a little bit of a relatable moment to that.
It all happens to us in our 20s at some point. But he goes out to hang out with a mate. They go five kilometres out of the nearest town and it's a waterhole with a picnic spot next to it. And then things just go wrong and weird from there.
Yeah, this is the thing that really surprises me. This seems like such a normal kind of experience, right?
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the location where Jack went missing?
You know, you're growing, there's lots of changes in your life. You know, one of them is kind of dramatic and, you know, you go away with a friend. You know, you just, you know, jump in a car, let's go, have a couple of drinks, sit in a park that we know and are very familiar with. And then, you know, he just vanishes at that point.
This is all happening in Mergana town, kind of a couple of hours northwest of Brisbane. Can you tell me a bit about what this area is like?
Yeah.
Yeah, so he goes missing in a spot called Fixed Crossing, which only has less than 40 people live there. And it basically is agricultural ground around a specialist Indigenous school and the waterhole where Jack's been hanging out. Now, I would say if you grabbed 100 people off the street in Queensland and asked them where Fixed Crossing is, maybe one or two could answer.
But they would maybe know Mergan, which is 5km up the road. Mergan itself... It's got a really... upheaval, a lot of upheaval in its history. It's just six kilometres down the road from a forced indigenous settlement that a lot of people would know, Cherbourg.
And although there's not that racial tension in this story about Jack, it's a place where you don't have to scratch far under the surface to find some sort of angst. And because it is that three hours northwest of Brisbane, it's not near the Sunshine Coast. It's not near Toowoomba. It's not near Bundaberg. It's kind of slips between the gaps in a geographic sense, but also a socioeconomic sense.
And out here, the average living income is $350 a week less. So the average household income is about $700 a week less than you get in the rest of Australia. So imagine that every week getting $700 less, what impact that has on the broader community there. So there are things like higher than average divorce rates, higher than average
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Chapter 7: What clues have been found related to Jack's disappearance?
people in their 20s leaving the area. You've got a very low educational profile for the region. So it has fascinated me. And the reason I originally went out there, and I think probably the reason a lot of people would go there, was just for rugby league. Steve Renoff comes from Mergen, and that's what we know that area for, and not much else aside from maybe cattle, cotton, peanuts. So
It's just a mysterious place and it's always seemed to me like somewhere where the stakes can be high because people get forced into tough positions and a lot of it occurs in the shadows. There's not the police numbers or the resourcing that perhaps that area warrants.
Yeah. He's such a strange part of Queensland. The way that you're talking about it, not many people would know West Crossing, maybe a few more would know of Mergan, but really the place that I'm familiar with around there is Gympie.
I grew up in Queensland, I grew up in Brisbane and never really spent any time at all out in any of these places except for passing visits through places like Gympie and Maryborough, which are separate to what we're talking about here.
So So Gympie's like two hours away from here, but a lot of the cases from the courts will be heard there. So that gives you an idea of how sparse a region it is.
That's it. Yeah. That's the sort of the, you know, how big it is, but also how, I guess, small it is in that same way.
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Chapter 8: What theories exist about Jack's fate?
And Rob, you talk about the courts there. I mean, the case office is usually a court podcast. We've had Jack missing for a couple of years at this point, almost two years now. Has anyone ever been charged in relation to his disappearance?
Yeah. No one's ever been charged and no one has been declared a person of interest in this case. That's the official line. If you've seen things online from all the citizen sleuths, there's probably 100 suspects in this case. But at the moment, it's before the coroner's court. It hasn't been determined if it will go from being an investigation into an inquest.
And the family's still waiting to hear some details around what is happening with that. But mentioning courts, an interesting thing here is while I've been out there frequently, I've noticed some days in those tiny towns where there might be two police officers on at any time, there's up to 90 listings in a court on a day. So you can imagine that workload.
I'm kind of painting the picture of what sort of place it is.
Yeah, yeah. What the police are trying to work through and deal with alongside the disappearance of Jack. And I mean, that's the background of this. And there really is so much happening in this story. And I think one of the key pieces, something that's really stood out to me as I've been listening to the first couple of episodes are some of the things that Jack ended up leaving behind.
And I wanted to take a listen to some of the things that Jack ended up leaving behind. And I wanted to give everyone a chance to kind of catch up on this if they haven't been listening to what became of Jack. So let's take a listen to some of the things that you've kind of like been left in his wake almost.
And when this finishes in a few minutes, Rob, I'm keen to talk a little bit about some of the citizen sleuths that you've mentioned just there and also more about Jack's ex-girlfriend, one of the last people to ever have contact with him. 26 past 10.
It's been one week since missing man Jack McLennan was last seen in the South Burnett. Inspector Scott Stallett is leading that search and has more of an update for you, including some shoes of Jack's that have been discovered. A promising sign several days ago were a pair of shoes which were located on a creek line.
The first clue is Jack's white trainers. They were found, the laces still tied, as though he'd just kind of stepped out of them and walked away barefoot.
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