To those who knew her, Lisa Mott was a sociable, happy 12-year-old who loved playing basketball and the clarinet, and spending time with friends.
Very thoughtful and with a “lovely nature”, she “always smiled,” her mother, Marion Flower, recalled. “She was just a lovely kid.”
Sadly, Marion, now 82, never saw her little girl grow up. At around 9pm on October 30, 1980, Lisa disappeared from her home town of Collie, located about 200 kilometres south of Perth, WA.
Lisa vanished while walking home after playing basketball with friends in the town centre and has never been seen again.
With local police baffled, what happened to Lisa that fateful night has become one of the state’s most enduring mysteries.
“I went into shock and I ended up in the Collie Hospital in the middle of the night,” Marion told WA Police’s Cold Case Western Australia podcast.
“I was screaming and I could not stop myself.”
Four decades on, police are convinced Lisa was murdered.
They are pinning their hopes on locating the owner of a yellow 1970s Holden HQ panel van with no number plates, which was found in bushland near Collie in 1996.
Back then, officers ruled it out as being connected to Lisa’s disappearance. However, cold case detectives now think otherwise.
Two days after Lisa vanished, one of her friends, Susan McMullin, told police she’d seen Lisa walking home on October 30 – before getting into a yellow panel van. She’d been with Lisa just minutes before she vanished.
“She just stopped and turned around like as if someone called her,” Susan also shared on the podcast.
“She walked back towards the panel van … and I don’t know if she got dragged in or if she jumped in. And then the van drove off.”
Susan, who was 10 years old at the time, hadn’t realised her friend was in danger until she saw a TV report that she was missing. She said she “jumped up and down” and told her mother.
Police investigated the owners of hundreds of panel vans, but all leads came to nothing. Then in 2004, another Collie local told police that he, too, had seen Lisa getting into a yellow panel van that night.
Somewhat suspicious, he’d jotted down the vehicle’s number plate.
But he never gave police those vital details, mistakenly believing detectives already knew who they were searching for. By the time he came forward, 24 years later, he’d lost the information.
“It’s a missed opportunity, but it does point out that any information is relevant,” Detective Sergeant Greg Dowding said.
In late 2024, cold case detectives set up a mobile police van in Collie and urged people with any knowledge about the abandoned yellow van to come forward.
Detective Sergeant Dowding says the response so far has been “amazing”, with more than 100 pieces of new information received.
“It comes as no surprise that the WA community is so eager to help – it’s every parent’s worst nightmare to lose a child and spend decades without any explanation,” he said.
“They’ve never forgotten Lisa, they’ve never forgotten the family.”
For Lisa’s loved ones they cling to hope that they will finally receive answers.
“My only hope is, after all this time, that somebody is still alive who might know something,” Marion said.
“If you are still out there, Lisa, somewhere, I still love you. I still love you to bits.”
Lisa’s sister Bernadette also told the podcast: “I just want to find my sister.
“I just want somebody to say ‘this is where she is’ or ‘this is where her remains are’ so we can actually start to heal.”
There is a $1 million reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest of Lisa’s killer.
Know something? Contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or on their website.
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