#7 - Jordy Honner
Jordy Honner was traveling through Western Australia’s mid-west region, on March the 18th
of 2022, on her way home to Pinjarra, when she was brutally attacked by a man who’d reportedly been
stalking her. 20-year-old Honner had first taken notice of the suspicious individual at about 5 pm,
after stopping at a roadside store off North West Coastal Highway. She drove for another 3
miles before pulling into a parking bay. It was at that point when the man approached her and
began repeatedly asking for her phone number. When Honner indicated that she didn’t want to disclose
that information to him, the stranger became hostile. The young woman reached for a knife
that was located in her car door, but her stalker launched his attack before she was able to grab
it. He reportedly beat her unconscious and dragged her underneath her vehicle, where she remained for
roughly five hours until a passing truck driver noticed her. Upon having water poured over her
face, Honner regained her senses and managed to drive herself to Jurien Bay Hospital. As of the
latest updates on the case, her attacker hadn’t been identified, but he was described as being
in his 30s or 40s and having dirty blonde hair. #6 - Jose Merlos and Nicky Wong
A couple driving through a remote section of the Australian outback became stranded, on January
the 3rd of 2021, after their car got stuck in the sand. According to subsequent reports,
Jose Merlos and his fiancée, Nicky Wong, had been traveling on rural back roads while returning home
from a vacation to Cairns. After their vehicle had become disabled, the couple were forced to
continue the journey on foot. They reportedly left a handwritten note in their abandoned car
indicating that they were walking to Innamincka, a small town near the South Australian border. Over
the course of the next two days, Merlos, Wong, and their dog, Loki, trekked nearly 25 miles in
the scorching heat, relying on a preloaded map due to the lack of cell phone reception in the area.
In a statement to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the couple revealed that they were forced to
drink dirty water from a cattle trough, as well as their own urine, to stave off extreme dehydration.
Then, on January the 5th, Merlos and Wong finally encountered a motorist on the secluded roadway,
who drove them the remaining 15 miles to Innamincka. As was later detailed by a nurse
practitioner from the outback, the temperature during the time in which they were stranded had
been about 20 degrees cooler than the typical annual average. If the weather had aligned with
the usual January temperatures, the couple would’ve likely died before being rescued.
#5 - Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees A pair of British backpackers went missing,
on July the 14th of 2001, after they’d gone on a hike in a remote area of the Stuart Highway,
near Barrow Creek, in Australia’s Northern Territory. One of the tourists,
Joanne Lees, re-emerged in the early hours of the following morning, when she flagged down
a road train driver, who took her into town. Lees subsequently went to the Alice Springs Police to
report that she and her boyfriend, 28-year-old Peter Falconio, had been attacked by a stranger
who’d been following them as they traveled along Stuart Highway towards
Devil’s Marbles. The man had gestured for the couple to pull over to the side of the road.
After they’d done as indicated, he allegedly claimed to have witnessed sparks shooting out of
their van’s exhaust pipe. Falconio went to the rear of the vehicle to investigate while Lees
sat in the driver’s seat, ready to rev the engine on his signal. The woman then heard
a gunshot ring out from behind the van, after which the stranger jumped into the passenger seat
and held her at gunpoint. He reportedly bound Lees’ hands and feet before also taping her mouth
and then dragging her to his car. While the gunman was preoccupied with attempting to move Falconio’s
lifeless body out of the road, Lees fled into a nearby bush. The attacker searched
for the woman, coming within inches of her position on three separate occasions,
before ultimately giving up and leaving the area. The authorities launched a search for Falconio,
whose body still hadn’t been recovered as of the latest information available of the case. In 2003,
investigators identified Western Australia resident Bradley John Murdoch as the individual
responsible for Lees’ assault and Falconio’s presumed murder. Following a trial before the
Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, Murdoch was found guilty of the charges levied against him
and consequently sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 28 years.
#4 - Phu Tran, Tamra McBeath-Riley, and Claire Hockridge
Three Australian citizens disappeared after going camping in the outback, near Alice Springs,
on November the 19th of 2019. It subsequently emerged that Phu Tran, Tamra McBeath-Riley,
and Claire Hockridge had been reported missing by family members on November the 23rd. Three days
later, Northern Territory Police launched an air search for the missing trio that primarily
focused on areas near Owen Springs, Stuarts Well, and Rainbow Valley. The extensive search effort
failed to yield any results for the first 10 days. Then, on December the 1st, McBeath-Riley
was found by a rescue helicopter east of Stuarts Well. As the woman later told investigators,
she and the others had become stranded after their car had gotten bogged down in the Finke River.
McBeath-Riley added that her 2 travel companions had set out to find help, after they’d run out
of supplies, but added that she hadn’t heard from them for several days. Then, on December the 2nd,
Tran was found by a cattle farmer who’d gone to look for the missing hikers after hearing
about the situation on the news. 40-year-old Tran, who’d survived by drinking groundwater,
was taken to a local hospital. A couple of days later, the police came upon Hockridge’s remains in
the Northern Territory outback. It later emerged that the trio’s ill-fated hike had actually been
a drug smuggling operation gone wrong. An official investigation into the matter uncovered that Tran,
McBeath-Riley, and Hockridge had traveled into the outback on the day of their disappearance in order
to recover methamphetamines that they’d previously hidden in a remote section of the countryside.
#3 - Reg Foggerdy
A 62-year-old man embarked on a hunting trip in the remote West Australian Goldfields,
on October the 7th of 2015. The West Australian Police Force would later reveal that Reg Foggerdy
had last been seen at a campsite roughly 100 miles east of Laverton. Foggery subsequently got lost,
reportedly while hunting for a camel, and his family declared him missing the following morning.
He remained missing for almost a week until, on October the 12th, Tactical Response Group trackers
began finding footprints he’d left behind. They eventually came upon Foggerdy under a tree, about
9 miles from the campsite. The man was said to have been extremely dehydrated and delusional
at the time of his rescue. Upon being transported to a Kalgoorlie hospital
by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, Foggerdy’s condition was reportedly stabilized. According to
subsequent reports, the wayward hunter had relied on the consumption of black ants for his survival,
which the authorities deemed miraculous given the dearth of food and water at his disposal.
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#2 - Paddy Moriarty
On the evening of December the 16th of 2017, an elderly resident of the small Northern Territory
town Larrimah went missing along with his dog. Paddy Moriarty had last been seen leaving the town
pub on his quad bike. In the days that followed, local authorities organized extensive searches
and Northern Territory police also offered a $250,000 reward for pertinent information
that might lead to Moriarty’s recovery. Despite the large-scale rescue effort,
Moriarty was never found, and investigators thus began suspecting that his presumed death in the
outback had been precipitated by foul play of some kind. It subsequently emerged that the 70-year-old
man had been entrenched in a long-standing feud with a neighbor of his named Fran Hodgetts.
The latter had called the police, a few months before Moriarty’s disappearance, to report that
the plants in her garden had been poisoned. She blamed Moriarty outright for the occurrence but
she was unable to provide any evidence in support of her allegations. Nevertheless, the incident
had caused tensions between the two neighbors to escalate dramatically. According to a 2022 inquest
into the matter, the police had captured secret recordings, made between January and June of 2018,
in which a man had allegedly confessed to murdering Moriarty and his dog. The individual
in the audio was identified as local resident Owen Laurie, who’d worked for Hodgetts in the past and
had gotten into a verbal altercation of his own with the missing man. In the wake of the inquest’s
findings, coroner Greg Cavanagh referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who was
tasked with deciding whether criminal charges could be pursued against Moriarty’s neighbors.
#1 - Kate Ellen Alford In September of 2020, Kate
Ellen Alford had been out drinking with colleagues at the Springsure Hotel, in Central Queensland,
when she decided to drive them back to the cattle station where they worked. Court records indicated
that one of 19-year-old Alford’s colleagues had expressed concerns regarding her ability to drive,
while she was obviously intoxicated. Nevertheless, the young woman set out on the 80 mile trip
through the Queensland outback with Amy Pilgrim, aged 23, in her passenger seat. It was later
reported that neither of the women had fastened their seatbelts upon getting into the car,
an aspect which ultimately proved disastrous when Alford lost control of the vehicle. She’d been
filming a video for Snapchat and consequently hadn’t been looking at the road in front of her
when she mounted the dirt shoulder, clipped a tree, and rolled the car several times.
Pilgrim was flung from the vehicle, and Alford ultimately found her, unconscious, roughly 65 feet
from the crash site. Alford fruitlessly attempted to perform CPR on her workmate, who was later
pronounced dead after having suffered “multiple catastrophic injuries”. The police tested Alford’s
blood alcohol content, which was determined to have been above Australia's legal driving limit
at the time of the deadly incident. She was taken into custody and charged with several offenses,
including dangerous operation of a vehicle leading to death. Upon reaching a plea deal with
prosecutors, Alford was given a suspended sentence that only jailed her for a period of 3 months.
Thanks for watching! Would you rather try to survive in the outback or
sail the Atlantic with no navigation? Let us know in the comments section below!