Natasha Ryan's, the missing Australian Girl who hid in a cupboard for five years

On the morning of August 31, 1998, 14-year-old Natasha Ryan's mother dropped her off at her high school in Rockhampton, Australia. Then, the teenage girl vanished without a trace. ⁠

For five years after she went missing, Natasha's family feared the worst and even held a memorial service for her, assuming that she was dead. In reality, she had been hiding out at her much older boyfriend's house — less than a mile from her mother's home. During that time, Natasha had moved about the house freely with the curtains drawn, spending her days cooking, reading, sewing, and hiding in a cupboard whenever people came over. She later explained that she stayed in hiding for so long simply because "the lie had become too big."

And she only re-emerged after a serial killer was wrongly charged with her murder —

⁠Natasha Anne Ryan (born 1984) is an Australian woman from Rockhampton, Queensland who went missing on 31 August 1998 when aged 14. Police had wrongly assumed that her best friend Maioha Tokotaua, who was 15 years old at the time of her disappearance, killed Ryan, but local serial killer Leonard Fraser was later accused.

In 2003 police received a letter saying that Natasha was alive and provided a phone number and address at where she could be reached. The police raided the location that was mentioned in the letter and Ryan was discovered alive in 2003 at her boyfriend’s house hiding in a wardrobe, almost five years after she went missing, during the trial of the man accused of her murder. It was discovered that 14-year-old Ryan had left home willingly to be with her older boyfriend, Scott Black, a 22-year-old milkman, and had been living and hiding in his home for years. In 2008, they married and reportedly the two have three children.

Natasha Ryan disappeared in August 1998 after her mother dropped her off at school, and was subsequently reported as missing. Hopes of finding Ryan alive soon diminished and police concluded she had been murdered by Rockhampton serial killer Leonard Fraser, who was subsequently charged with Ryan's murder. An extensive and exhaustive search was undertaken for her and three other girls two years after her disappearance by police and local State Emergency Service volunteers as part of an investigation into a serial killer.

In the month before she went missing, Ryan had already run away from home once, aided by Scott Black, her 22-year-old boyfriend. During that incident, she was found after two days. Black faced Rockhampton Magistrates Court in November 1999, where he pleaded guilty to wilful obstruction of police after he had told officers that he did not know Ryan's whereabouts. But after she could not be located when she went missing the second time, Ryan's family eventually conceded that she was dead. They held a memorial service in Bundaberg, Queensland on her 17th birthday in 2001

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