
It was a Saturday morning in November 1994, when Jan Balmain started to feel something was very wrong.
She was waiting at a Newcastle train station for her 22-year-old daughter to arrive from Sydney, to have lunch before Revelle flew to Japan for six weeks. When the train arrived, however, her blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter wasn’t there to meet her.
Unbeknown to her parents, the model and aspiring dancer was working for two separate escort agencies at the time.
The day before she was due to meet Jan — Friday, November 5, 1994 — Revelle had a 4pm appointment with a man named Gavin Samer through Select Companions. She then had a booking with two associates of Zoran Stanojevic, the co-owner of the agency.
This is where the details get murky.
It appears Revelle never made it to her second booking.
In a statement to police, obtained by The Good Weekend in 1999, for an investigation by Caroline Overington, Gavin Samer said he entered into a private agreement with Revelle after their official appointment ended. Once this was over, he said, he dropped her off at the Red Tomato Inn in Kingsford, before returning home alone.
The last known contact Revelle had with anyone close to her was a phone call to her best friend Kate Brentnall at 7.15pm. She told her she’d call when she got home in an hour and they’d meet up for drinks. But Kate never heard from, or saw, her best friend again.
Listen: Journalist Caroline Overington unpacks the mystery of Revelle's disappearance.
In the days following Revelle's disappearance, police found curious pieces of evidence in Kingsford. One of the shoes she was wearing that night, a cork platform shoe, was located in a rubbish bin, and her house keys and diary were found on the street.
A coronial inquest into Revelle's probable murder, held in 1999, identified Gavin Samer as the main person of interest.
His girlfriend at the time, Michelle Oswald-Sealy, who was in Brisbane on Friday, November 5, told the inquest she had called Samer several times that night, and he eventually answered the phone at 9.22pm.
When he picked her up from Sydney airport two days later, she noted he had scratches on his neck and finger. She also noticed her partner's car had been cleaned out, and he had washed and hung out their bedsheets.