Prue Bird

On February 2 1992, 13-year-old Prue Bird was preparing lunch in the kitchen of her family home in the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy. A friend who was staying at the house went outside to put something in the garage and when they returned, Prue was nowhere to be seen and her lunch was sitting uneaten on the table. 

Investigators soon discovered that Prue had an unlikely link to another major crime. Her grandfather was Paul Heltzer, one of the men arrested in relation to the Russell Street Bombings. What’s more, Heltzer had agreed to provide evidence against his co-accused in exchange for a lighter sentence, one of whom had warned, “It would be a shame if anything happened to your sweet little Prue, wouldn’t it.”

Was Prue’s disappearance linked to the Russell Street Bombings, or was that threat just a bizarre and unfortunate coincidence?