Whilst on a tour showcasing the Blue Mountains classic vistas on 2nd May 2022, our tour guest group at iconic Echo Point happen-chanced upon a rescue operation.
There was a camera drone performing with his drone ‘pilot’ and all!
It was a spectacle on a perfect clear sky day with no wind and total visibility to the horizon.
What better day then, a Monday mid-morning, to practice and indeed do a bit of PR by Police Rescue at the Blue Mountains visitation in front of international tourists replets with iPhone cameras and video?
There was no real rescue. It was a practise session.
One is not aware of anyone abseiling down Echo Point’s escarpment, let alone getting into trouble to call Police Rescue.
This is the very place where early morning base jumpers are regularly observed outside the guard rail before plunging off into the Jamison ether for 3 seconds before tugging the parachute strings to land below, and then hiking back up the Giant Stairway.
No police in sight.
However, there was a sad case in the area back in 2008, not at Echo Point itself but just up the road about 400m west at Lady Darley Lookout.
On 6th May that year, the body of a woman was found by local hikers in the Jamison valley at around 2pm located more than 150m below the lookout. But detective investigations indicated that she hadn’t jumped off. Rather, she had been murdered and dead body thrown off the lookout in the early hours when no-one was around.
Investigations reported in the media stated that her recent Internet husband from India (aged 41) was violent, murdered her (aged 38) in their home in Sydney’s Blacktown before taking a “body dumping trip” with her nine-year-old stepdaughter (not his) along with his own children to the Katoomba escarpment.
The husband didn’t just toss his new wife off the cliff but also her nine-year-old stepdaughter as well, whom police then discovered in the bush just 20m away from the dead mother.
A month later, the husband had reported the two “missing”.
Police documents tendered to Blacktown Local Court today say the Indian couple met online in 2006. They say the woman moved to Australia with her daughter to marry the man in May last year.
But after her Internet husband then threatened to kill her and her daughter, the wife went to a domestic violence service for help in January 2008. Police states that the wife had been depressed because she didn’t have permanent residency in Australia, so the only way she could remain here was to stay with her violent husband.
So aftet the husband murdered his wife and step-daughter, he put their dead bodies in the boot of his car and took off on his family excursion from Blacktown to the Blue Mountains with his own two children. Upon arrival in Katoomba at Panorama Drive, he told his own two children to go for a walk somewhere, before going back to the boot, descending the steps a few times to throw his wife and stepdaughter’s bodies off Lady Darley Lookout.
The Blue Mountains hold many stories like these, little known. May be some monitored CCTV at known ‘serial locations’ would be justified.
