When Colin McDonald came out as gay, his mother Lucy played him the Pretenders song I’ll Stand by You. “She already knew,” he recalls. “She was telling me, ‘I don’t give a sh*t –you’re my baby.’” Colin cries when he hears that song now. It is a memory of a mother who is no longer here. Lucy disappeared from her house in Lismore, New South Wales, on Tuesday, April 30, 2002. Colin is speaking now, he says, because “I just want to give my mother a voice”.
On the Sunday, he and his boyfriend had returned from the Gold Coast to find 11 messages from Lucy on their answering machine. “I didn’t have a mobile at the time. She was saying, ‘Help! Please pick up.’ Someone was tapping on her windows and prank-calling her.”
Colin, who was studying in Lismore, told her he would go see her on Tuesday. But by then, she was gone.
On the Monday, a maintenance man heard her screams for help from across the road. Sometime between then and the next morning, Lucy vanished, leaving her keys and wallet behind.
“She’d never go anywhere without her house keys and wallet,” Colin says. He insists Lucy wouldn’t have left the house on her own because she’d been suffering depression and anxiety attacks, not getting out of her pyjamas.
“I believe she left with someone she knew or trusted,” Colin tells “She was a very committed preschool teacher. If she went out with the girls and they all got on it, she was still at work at 7am. To this day, I don’t understand what caused the depression, but something did. She was the most kind-hearted, beautiful, positive
