Police Life: The Experts podcast - Season 2 Episode 1: Missing or murdered transcript

A young mother has gone missing, and a tenacious detective begins an unrelenting pursuit to uncover whether she was murdered.

The case is complex, but the Missing Persons Squad specialises in investigations where they have no body and no crime scene.

Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.

Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 2 Episode 1: Missing or murdered

Voiceover: This podcast episode contains references to murder and other potentially distressing content. Listener discretion is advised.

[Music and sound of excavator operating, wind and seagulls]

Voiceover: Detective Leading Senior Constable Sam Russell stands at the edge of a trench, in a sea of garbage. She’s in full PPE, coveralls, respirator and through her visor Sam stares at the claws of an excavator carefully scooping up layers of rubbish.

It’s June 18, 2021. Victoria Police’s Missing Persons Squad has been digging into this trench at a rubbish tip on Melbourne’s outskirts for four days. Looking for human remains.

Today they believe the excavator is over the spot where the body of a missing young mother may be found.

Sam is looking for a flash of pink in the debris. That was Ju Zhang’s favourite colour. She was wearing a pink dressing gown when she went missing 137 days ago.

Detective Leading Senior Constable Sam Russell: Anything pink at the tip was picked up and brought to me.

You know, there was a pink suitcase.

There was a piece of pink fabric that was found in the search, and someone brought it and said, could this have been hers? And I said, no, but put it on the ground. It's pissing down with rain and it's muddy, and I'll stand on it. Maybe it'll bring us some luck.

Voiceover: Sam’s tenacity has led the investigation to this tip in the middle of winter. Ju simply has to be there. And Ju’s distraught family is depending on Sam to find her.

Every year in Victoria 20,000 people are reported missing, 99 per cent of them are found, almost all of them alive and well.

A small number of people are never found, and their fates remain undetermined. But these cases are never closed. Victoria Police’s Missing Persons Squad gets called in when a disappearance is suspicious, with murder a possibility. In their investigations there’s no body and no crime scene. The squad walks a line between providing answers to grieving families and holding possible offenders to account. And the answers may be found close to home.

Detective Senior Sergeant Tony Combridge: When you look at a missing persons case, you’ve got a family that is in a very unique form of grief that needs our help. And the strength that some of these families show is amazing and we are there to help support them. But we also need to recognise that one of them might be responsible.

[Suspenseful music]

My name is Tony Combridge. I'm a detective senior sergeant at the Missing Persons Squad. I've been with Victoria Police now for 34 years.

There's three investigative teams associated with the Missing Persons Squad, and myself and Detective Inspector Dave Dunstan lead those teams. The teams all carry significant workloads but are deployable anywhere in Victoria for missing persons cases.

Voiceover: As a senior sergeant, Tony Combridge is manager, mentor and font of wise counsel to the investigators.

All the experience and skills of the team came to the fore in the investigation into the disappearance of 33-year old mother Ju Zhang. Tony allocated the job to one of his most capable detectives.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: I've told her a number of times, I'll end up working for her. She'll go past me in this job. She's a natural leader.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: My name is Samantha Russell. I'm a Detective Leading Senior Constable with the Missing Persons Squad. And I've been with Victoria Police for 13 years.

I first learned about Ju Zhang being missing on the 4th of February, 2021. I was on a response shift working with Homicide, and we'd been notified by the local CIU of a missing person. It just didn't seem quite right.

She was a 33-year-old mother of a young son, Jack, and it had been reported that she left the house on the Monday night and didn't come home. Very out of character to leave her son. He hadn't spent a night away from her, and it was unusual that she would leave the house in a pyjamas and not contact anyone.

Jack was eight at the time, he lived with his Mum at a house in Epping. Her parents were in China. Jack's dad was also living in Melbourne. She had a close group of friends. She'd been in a relationship with Joon Tan for four weeks at the time of her disappearance.

Voiceover: Joon Tan was a 35-year-old Malaysian national, living and working in Melbourne. He had a wife and family back in Malaysia but he began a relationship with Ju after meeting her online. Things moved quickly, after only four weeks, Tan had given Ju money, more than $6000. He had even referred to her as his wife when talking to other people. Then, on February 1st, she had walked off into the night, leaving her son with this man. Three days later, Sam Russell joined the investigation.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: On the 4th of February, I headed out to the scene. A search warrant was being executed and I looked through the house just to get a general perspective of what was happening. And just reviewing the investigation. At that stage, it was still remaining with the local detectives.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: At this point, we are trying to establish whether or not this is a matter that we need to take on. It's a bit of a nuanced test to whether or not we'll take investigative primacy in these matters. And it's largely based upon what hypotheses are open in relation to how the person could have disappeared.

I trust Sam's judgement implicitly, but I also think that, you know, we as investigators, as people, we know what normal looks like. When something doesn't look normal that starts to make us pay a little bit more attention, and we just need to then start to pull a few threads of people's stories to see which ones hold and which ones unravel.

Commit them to a position, where we can then go and validate what they've told us.

[Sounds of seagulls and suspenseful music]

Voiceover: Thursday February 4th. Ju has been missing for three days. Another detective interviews Joon Tan who gives his version through an interpreter.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I was provided with the statement Joon Tan made on the Thursday night. I was reading it on the Friday morning and it just didn’t make sense.

Tan’s version of events was that Ju left through the front door in her pyjamas with her mobile phone and didn't come back. He spent the evening looking. He took Jack out looking for her. That's when I tried to contact him, to ask questions. I hadn’t taken the statement myself. And that's when he started becoming evasive, turned his phone off and started avoiding us.

Voiceover: Joon Tan wasn’t the only person of interest. Ju, who was also known as Kelly, was a victim of previous family violence. Police had sought intervention orders against two former partners to protect Ju. And there was also Jack’s father and another man to be considered.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: It's not tunnel vision on one person. There was five different people of interest at that point. He wasn't a suspect. I just wanted to speak to him more about his statement, things that didn't make sense and had other questions.

So initially, all those people of interest are important to us, and we need to follow every avenue of inquiry for each person. It's a large task at the start, looking at phones, speaking to them, alibis, CCTV footage. It's a big task.

It really took days. They provided a version of where they were that needs to be corroborated by phone, speaking to other people, looking at footage, it's all, it's all evolving every minute. And it's changing.

Voiceover: Meanwhile, the Missing Persons Squad was ramping up the search.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: We were looking in the Darebin Creek and parks.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: And we say it often in the office. You know Victoria doesn't look that big on a map until you’ve got to go out and search it one square metre at a time. And then it becomes really big, really quick.

Voiceover: It seems a daunting task but this is a highly motivated team.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: It's probably the easiest stuff I have to do, though. The morale is not the issue. These guys are motivated. They want to get to the end.

Every case that we've got, if we had a sniff of where someone was, I would have a team out there straight away. That's the way they operate. That's the way this team operates.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: You’d probably try and hold us back, maybe.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: Yes, a lot of the times.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Yes, there's enough. Go and look. Can't not look.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: Yeah. But it really is a case of just, you know, supporting them and providing them with what they need to get the job done.

Voiceover: While teams of searchers scoured parkland and local creeks, Sam was drilling down into the evidence. There was a CCTV camera on Ju’s home. Sam reviewed the footage from the night that Ju disappeared. It should have included Ju leaving the property as Joon Tan had maintained. However, there was a crucial three-hour gap in the footage.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: The gap in the footage was from 6pm until 9pm. After that period we were looking at car movement. The camera was pointing to the carport. It showed a different position of Tan’s Mazda CX9, which had moved. The sheet on the line was moving. It was straightened out. There was wind, you could see that had pushed the sheet up. And then in the next lot of footage, you could see it had been straightened out. So, someone had clearly been in the backyard.

The rubbish bins became of great importance. There was rubbish bins in the back corner of the property that you could see were all sitting there, which changed.

Voiceover: Critically for Sam’s investigation one of the bins was now missing. And Joon Tan’s actions on the night looked very suspicious.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Tan spent quite a bit of time looking in Ju’s vehicle at the front dashboard area where we believed there was an SD card for a dash-cam and also in the back. And it appears he's taking something, fiddling with it, taking something out and dropping something very small on the ground. So, it was assumed it was an SD card. That was never recovered.

Voiceover: The CCTV footage they did have showed that Tan was active late into the night around Ju’s home, but a second gap in the CCTV in the very early hours of the next day raised their suspicion even more.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: It appeared that he was cleaning up. The sheets on the line. The movement of his steps in the time that he was at the house showing he wasn't asleep. What was he doing in the house? Major crime had analysed the scene and nothing had been found. Just trying to establish what he was doing in that time period and in what part of the house.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: It's like you're five scenes ahead in the movie and you actually just want to rewind back and go right, what was happening then? What did I just miss? What was happening right here between these times because they’re the critical times. And that's not just in the house, but where was everyone else?

We were really keen at that point to speak with Mr Tan again, because there’s actions that are occurring at the house that we need him to be able to explain to us and there might be an explanation. And we’ve got to be open to that.

Voiceover: In the meantime, Sam was also getting valuable information about Ju’s habits and homelife from her best friend to compare against Joon Tan’s account.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Tan told us that Ju walked out the front door in her pyjamas and left and was gone all night. That was a difficult concept for Ju’s best friend and family to understand because she hadn't left Jack overnight with anyone before, especially a partner of four weeks.

Ju used the back door as her main door as well. He said she left via the front door. She has inside slippers and outside slippers. And her outside slippers were all accounted for. The clothing she was wearing had not been found in the house.

Voiceover: On Sunday February 7, six days after Ju’s disappearance, Joon Tan was avoiding police. Sam and another investigator went to find him at his Doncaster home.

By chance, they saw Tan walking on a nearby street and arrested him. He was carrying $3500 in cash and his passport. Police learned he had contacted a friend in Western Australia and planned to travel to Perth. When interviewed through an interpreter, Tan stuck to the same account of Ju’s disappearance.

Audio from interview 8 February 2021:

Interpreter for Joon Tan: I had not any involvement. I was at home looking after her kid. She went out and did not come back.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: The questions I have are about your statement and providing more information, more detail.

Interpreter for Joon Tan: I really don’t know where she is. I was hoping you could find her.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: That’s why it’s very important to find out all the information I can from you.

Interpreter for Joon Tan: I told everything I knew to the police.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: He was released. There wasn't enough at that point to charge him.

Voiceover: But police seized his phone, which would tell a very different story.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: The phone was downloaded and in search history it had how many years for killing someone in Australia? How was rubbish disposed of in Australia? And how to dispose of stinky garbage, stinky rubbish.

When we got the phone examination back and saw the Google search history, then, that's when we decided, to go and get him, arrest him again and located him at the airport, trying to leave again.

Voiceover: On February 10th, nine days after Ju’s disappearance, police arrested Tan at Melbourne Airport as he tried to board a flight to Adelaide, with an onward flight booked to Perth. Sam interviewed Tan again through an interpreter.

Audio from interview 10 February 2021:

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Why were you at the airport?

Interpreter for Joon Tan: Why did I go to the airport today? Because I wanted to leave Victoria. I wanted to go to Perth. Because the news here every day about me and I couldn’t make any money. There’s nobody who’s willing to hire me.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: What were you going to do in Perth?

Interpreter for Joon Tan: I wanted to go and make some new friends and make some money, because my girlfriend went missing and I feel really upset. I can only wait for the news from the police.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Joon, your phone has been analysed. The one that we seized last Sunday. When we download your phone, we can see everything that you have done on the phone. Who you’ve called, who you’ve messaged, what you’ve been searching on the internet.

Joon Tan: What I searched on the internet?

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Yes.

On Saturday afternoon, Saturday the 6th of February, at 4pm you typed this into a Google search, ‘How many years you get for killing someone in Australia?’

Joon Tan: And?

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Why?

Joon Tan: I’ve got no idea.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Why would you search that?

Joon Tan: I don’t know.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: On the same night, at 9.45pm, you typed this into Google search, ‘How to deal with stinky rubbish in Australia?’

Joon Tan: I have no idea.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Why are you searching that?

Joon Tan: I have no idea. I have no idea.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Why? Why were you searching that?

Joon Tan: I’ve got no idea.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: ‘How to deal with stinky rubbish in Australia.’ Your girlfriend’s been missing for five days. Four hours earlier, ‘How many years you get for killing someone in Australia?’

Joon Tan: I really have no idea. I really have no idea.

Det Sgt Combridge: Ultimately, after the second interview and on review of the evidence that we had at that point in time, I was satisfied that Ju was dead. That the only modality of death that made any sense based upon the circumstances was homicide. And the only person that could have committed that homicide was Mr Tan. And on that basis, we charged him with murder.

Voiceover: With Joon Tan remanded in custody, his telephone provided more critical clues to Ju’s fate. It showed Tan had made car trips on the night of Ju’s disappearance from her home in Epping that raised red flags.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Tan's phone moved from Epping through Heidelberg to Doncaster to his home address about midnight. So, he arrived over there and then drove back. And then in the early, early hours of the morning, on the 2nd of February, he moved from Epping to Heidelberg and Heidelberg back to Epping.

Voiceover: An horrific scenario was unfolding. Tan had murdered Ju in her home and disposed of her body. The trail was now leading Sam to waste disposal units and council rubbish tips across Melbourne.

But did Tan act alone? His phone showed intense communication between Tan and his housemate Jeff Chan on the night Ju disappeared.

On February 8th Mr Chan was interviewed.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: He was all over Tan's phones. Tan had called him. Initially he said that he called Mr Chan out to give him some money that he owed him from years prior, which didn't make sense to come from Doncaster to Epping to collect a small amount of money.

And then, Mr Chan, following CCTV footage and phone records, left Epping and went into the city and stayed there for a long time. In the time period, leaving Epping to get to the city, Mr Tan called him a ridiculous amount of times, 90 to 100 times. And we were very keen to speak to him and then when we did, he provided this statement, which was very difficult to obtain.

I remember the investigator that took that statement said it was very difficult, the most difficult in his very long career, which probably made sense in the end because it was so different to what actually happened.

He was trying to make a false statement to go along with what Tan told him to say. I think he was probably battling with what he wanted to say, the truth and what he was told to say in fear.

Voiceover: Because of that fear, Chan did not want to give up his housemate at this stage. Sam would go back to Chan at a later date but for now the search for Ju’s body came first.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: It was just prioritising, I guess at that point. We were, like I said, trying to capture everything. So many things going on. It wasn't sort of put to the side and forgotten. You know, we're doing search warrants, we're searching Darebin areas, creeks, parks, making inquiries into rubbish. It wasn't forgotten. It was just, took that little bit time extra to get back to him.

Voiceover: By this point, Ju’s parents had flown to Melbourne from China to look after Jack. They were desperately hoping Ju was still alive somewhere.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: They were supporting Jack and waiting for Ju to come home. They believed she'd been kidnapped, and they were waiting for a ransom letter with an amount of money to be put into the mailbox so they could get her home.

Voiceover: Eight-year-old Jack had been crying for the return of his mum every day. He had been told by Tan that Ju had just walked out that night.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: He took Jack for a drive looking for her through Epping, which was very traumatic for him. Later on, he believed she was missing. He thought she would come home. Trying to understand that concept, for a child, I can't even imagine how he processes that.

Voiceover: The missing persons squad knew they not only needed to convict Ju’s killer but, for the family’s sake, they needed to find her body.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: They go through a very unique form of grief and it's been categorised by various scholars as ambiguous grief, where they know that the person's not coming home, but they can't let go of that last flicker of hope that they might just walk through the door.

Our job is to extinguish that last flicker of hope. And, as callous as that might sound, what it actually does is it breaks that ambiguity around their grief, and they’re then allowed to get on and do what they need to do.

Voiceover: Using phone signal data, Sam and her colleagues tracked Joon Tan’s movements between Ju’s home in Epping and his house in Doncaster on the night she disappeared. This helped to narrow down the possibilities.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: When we started looking into the garbage bins initially it was the industrial bins.

The CCTV canvass of the Heidelberg industrial estate was a very intense point of the investigation, the resources put into obtaining all of the footage at that point. Also speaking to the rubbish companies, picking up rubbish from those industrial bins, capturing footage they might have had, which led us on to each truck. When your bin is picked up, there is a camera in the hopper which captures the rubbish being emptied into the truck. Obtaining all of that footage, which has a short life, was vital.

Voiceover: The investigation took a pivotal turn in April when Sam re-interviewed Joon Tan’s housemate Jeff Chan. With Tan now in custody he was ready to co-operate.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: So, I spoke to Chan myself and, through an interpreter he provided the truth about what had happened. He said he was scared and that's why he told the told the lie in the first statement. He was told by Tan to say what he did.

Mr Tan called Chan to the house. When he got into the house, Jack was sitting in the lounge room, and he asked him to speak in a different language so that Jack didn't understand what he was saying. He said that he'd had an argument and that Ju was dead, and her body was in the laundry cupboard, and he wanted to dispose of her body in the bin. He asked him to go and find a bin and Chan didn’t want any part of that and left.

He explained the phone calls from Tan to Chan after he left the house. I assume he was pretty panicked. He just told Chan that he killed Ju and that her body was in the house, and he ran away. I imagine he was pretty nervous and that's why he called him so many times and probably why he drove over to Doncaster.

He said that they'd had an argument. He had wanted to stay in the country, and Ju wasn't happy in the relationship and wanted to end it. And I was always of the belief that was probably the conversation they had just prior to her being killed.

Ju was seeing someone else. He had gone to her house the night before and seen another car in the carport and put two and two together and realised that she was seeing someone else.

He was jealous. He invested into the relationship. In his mind, he was calling her his wife after dating for four weeks.

Voiceover: Chan’s new evidence and Tan’s movements on the night had pointed their search in the direction of household bins, instead of industrial bins. Tan had taken her body to Heidelberg in her own bin and put it out on the street for the garbage truck to collect.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: When the focus came around to the domestic bins, it stood out that the only area between Epping and Doncaster that had residential bins out on the Monday night was in Heidelberg, which is directly where Mr Tan drove through.

We looked back at the rubbish trucks that were servicing that area on the morning of the 2nd of February and reviewed the hopper footage from each truck. Seven trucks, six had recordings for the 2nd of February and one didn't. It had copied over itself, it was a busy truck.

We didn't see Ju’s body going into the six rubbish trucks. And so the focus became onto the one truck that was left that we didn't have footage for.

[Background sound of machinery]

Voiceover: Sam followed the path of that truck to Wollert waste management facility, on the outskirts of Melbourne, 25km north of Heidelberg.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: In my mind, she couldn't have been anywhere else. I spoke to the staff at Wollert tip early in the piece about the facility, just as a general question of, how do you track your rubbish? Do you have a process? And do you know when rubbish comes in on this certain date? Do you know where that would be? And the manager that I spoke to said, ‘Wow, this is a massive task’. And I said, I explained the situation of what we were looking for.

Through help from Waste Services we spoke to the staff at Wollert tip and provided them with the registration plate of the seventh truck. It was captured going over the weighbridge and into cell 13.

And they were amazing. They said, we'll do whatever we can to help and then when we got to the point where we were actually planning on going to the tip and searching, they'd stopped putting rubbish in that area, so it was a smaller area that we were provided with.

My husband's also in the police force, so he understands the demands of the job. I just remember speaking to him, the first night of the search saying, “I know she's there. What if we don't find her? What if we're searching, you know, this direction, but she's that direction, having confidence in the analysis of the staff about the area that had been narrowed down from such a big area to a small area. What if that was wrong by a metre or half a metre or 30cm?”.

His support from that end was amazing, as well as the office. Like, everyone that was out there, understood exactly what we were doing and we were all on the same journey and wanted the same destination.

And the staff at the tip, involved in the search, we’ll be forever friends and the staff, the members – Tony, Sophie, Jen – the members that were looking for Ju, we'll always be tied with this job.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: I think it's a no brainer for me. The intelligence was strong that she was in that waste management facility. I remember having some fairly robust conversations at fairly high levels within our organisation, around the cost of not doing it as opposed to the cost of doing it.

We talk about the cost of not doing a search. The cost of not doing a search is just not knowing. So, we're effectively exacerbating the ambiguous grief that this family's going through, saying, ‘We believe she's in there but we're not looking for her’. I mean, we have a social contract with the Victorian community that we're going to do our best to bring people home.

That wasn't the hard part of the conversation. But I remember having a conversation with a very senior member of Victoria Police Force. And he asked me, what do you think? Do you think she's in there and do you think you can find her? And I remember saying to him, I'm 90 per cent sure she was in that truck, the one that we didn't have the CCTV for. I'm 90 per cent sure she's in there. And if she's in that truck, I'm 100 per cent sure we'll find her.

We had planned to search for up to 12 weeks, and we had a budget that extended into seven figures if it was required.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I wasn't leaving until we found her. I was supposed to take leave the following week. There was no way I was taking leave.

There was one excavator that was digging a trench. The area that had been pencilled out was 20 by 30 by four metres. They started on the boundary with their excavation experience and working down a trench. They went the length of the trench on the first day and then realised they'd go back and we started on the outside of the 20, 30 metre corner and they started digging it.

Their process was the excavator would pick up a scoop and shake it, pick up a scoop, put it in the truck. The truck would move around, dump that truckload into a small pile. A little excavator would move the rubbish around. And then police members that were searching would go through that rubbish as it was flattened out.

Voiceover: There had been 250,000 tonnes of waste deposited on the site since February and Sam’s team would have to search all of it to find Ju.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I didn't think about that really until probably the first night after we got home and thought, ‘Wow, this is a massive task. What if, what if we don't find her?’ I was confident she was there, as confident as I could be. It was just about getting back there the next day.

Voiceover: Tony Combridge was in the command post set up on-site at the tip and watched the progress on a video monitor while managing a huge deployment of people and resources.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: So, Sam's team, was there with me as the forward commander but then we brought resources in to do effectively the heavy lifting and these resources, you know. This is the amazing thing about working in an organisation like Victoria Police. We got resources from our Public Order Response Team. We had resources from within Crime, and we had resources drawn from all over the place. And at any given time, we would have, we had two shifts of, I think 12 members out on the line every day of that search.

And I think we probably passed maybe 70 or 80 people through that site. Gave them all safety inductions, gave them all a full briefing on what we were doing. And every one of them shared in the result, they shared in the outcome. They were all invested from the moment they walked onsite.

There was a point in this search where I probably wavered a little bit. And that was where I, where I called in the drone unit and said, "look, this is going to take a while. We’ve dug a big hole and we are going to dig a much bigger one. I want to get some comfort around the fact that we can demonstrate what we're doing with the resources Victoria Police is supplying us".

So, I called in a favour from the Remote Piloted Aircraft System unit with a drone and said, “Can you just come and do a flyover of this and get some footage for us, and I might get you back here every few days just to show progress”. I got the drone out there to basically measure productivity to say, “‘Well, this is, this is how far we've gotten in three days or four days”. I think it was day four we had them out there.

Voiceover: The staff at the tip tell police that it was likely that on day four the excavator would be over the site where the truck that dropped its load. This was Friday June the 18th, 137 days since Ju’s disappearance.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I don't post stuff on social media about work, but I woke up that morning, the Friday morning, and I was like, “Today's the day. I'm not telling anyone though, just in case I jinx it”. Like, I'm not superstitious. But I posted a pink page on my Instagram story with a pink heart because Ju loved pink. Her whole deck was pink. Everything about her life and house was pink.

[Sound of machinery]

Voiceover: Just before 2pm the drone was launched and despite poor conditions captured the scene below. The excavator gently scoops each bucketload, then shakes it and loads it in a truck for sifting. And Sam Russell is standing by the now massive trench. She is buffeted by wind and rain but keeps her focus locked on what’s being revealed before her.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I was standing on the trench line, was watching the excavator as the rubbish was being pulled out. And I just remember thinking it was just not going down. Every scoop that would come out didn't look like anything had changed, just the way that the rubbish was compacted in when it comes in, into the truck, there's a little machine that runs around and squashes it in. There’s layers of dirt. There's layers of rubbish. There’s layers of dirt. There's layers of rubbish. It just seemed like it was not going anywhere.

I stopped Steve and asked him to get out of the excavator and pointed out what I couldn't look away from. He said he didn't think that it was Ju. I didn't know what she would look like. I didn't know what I was expecting. But I just couldn't look away, and I just said ‘can we get a closer look? ‘

And he moved Ju to the edge of the trench where I was standing. And yeah, thankfully the drone footage is there because it's all a blur. But I do remember it, and it's something that I'll never, ever forget. Stepped around and saw her blue and white stripy pyjama pants and her pink dressing gown, and her hand and her hair. [Sound of Sam taking a deep breath, distressed.] Sorry.

The moment of finding Ju was a very bizarre combination of happiness that we found her, happiness that I was right, that she was there. Sadness that she was in that environment. It was horrible, the smell. And sadness that we had to go and deliver a death message to her 8-year-old son and her parents.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: We'd actually set up an operations command centre right there.

So, I was actually in the I was actually in command of myself at this point in time in the command centre, all on my own.

The only comms I had was a remote CCTV camera so I could see something was happening and by radio, but probably a matter for the debrief of future jobs, radios and carbon filter respirators aren’t a really good mix.

So, I had a very excited member, James Nichols. So, James had a fairly pronounced American accent. He had a respirator on and he was quite excited and he was trying to convey to me that something had happened, and I had no idea what he was saying. None at all.

Not long after that, I got a phone call from Sam. And Sam doesn't have an American accent, so she was a little bit easier to understand, but she was still very excited, obviously.

I had that moment of euphoria that you only get in a job like this where you've committed so much of, not just in resources, not just in, you know, human and financial resources from the organisation, but so much yourself into. And I just remember just thumping the desk in the command post, and then stopping myself, and thinking ‘I better stop this.’. The command post is certainly probably due for renewal. And I thought that this could end with the desk being taken off the wall if I'm not careful.

So, I had to stop myself from that and then I had to make those phone calls. And you talk about the conflict of emotion and the juxtaposition of that euphoria. I didn't experience it the way Sam did because I wasn't seeing what Sam saw.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: It's horrible to think that someone could treat another person like that. What her body had been through to get to that point and the environment it had been in for 137 days. Being able to remove her and get her home to her family and give them closure. And for her to be resting somewhere peacefully is something that's massive.

The primary objective at that moment was to go and tell her family that we'd found her. And then, yeah, just to gather as much evidence as I could at the scene. A mobile phone was found in the trench near her body. And some good work found that phone was put into a bin into one of the streets in the mapping zone in the Heidelberg area. Just tying it all together.

Voiceover: Tony Combridge went with Sam to deliver the news to Ju’s parents and son Jack.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: Sam did an amazing job with an amazing amount of professionalism to deliver this news to an audience that included parents who'd invested so much in their daughter and a son that knew no one else in the world like he knew his mum. And she delivered that news so professionally. But it was never lost on me, we were telling these people that we just located their mum and their daughter in a waste management facility, and she was dead. And that was the best news that they'd had since February. And that is the real conflict in our job is that we deliver bad news as good news.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: Yeah, that's a moment I won't forget. Delivering a death message to a child about his mother. Who then had to interpret that to his grandparents, about their daughter. And then providing initial support, whatever they needed in that moment, which I'm sure will be a big blur to them as well.

Although that was the worst outcome that we provided to them, them not knowing was worse. With what I was telling them, I knew that that could then provide closure to them. Ju’s mum and dad thought she'd been kidnapped and that she was going to come home. Delivering that message enabled them to be able to say goodbye and to give them closure and learn and move on to the next stage of their life without Ju, but at least knowing where she was.

Voiceover: Ju’s parents’ ordeal was not over yet. Joon Tan continued his denials for two years right up to his trial in May 2023. Ju’s parents were put through the agony of a trial. They had no financial means and were forced to stay in Australia to see justice done for their daughter.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: You just never know what's going to happen. You're putting it into the hands of the jury. I was confident that it was a strong case, and it made sense to me there was only one outcome, but you are handing it over to these 12 people of the community that sit there and listen to the evidence. It was a long, long process and an emotional rollercoaster the whole way.

The pathologist had an undetermined cause of death, but she could say that there was stab wounds to her chest, abdomen and her arms suggesting she'd been stabbed with a knife.

Voiceover: After a three-and-a-half-week trial, the jury took just three-and-a-half hours to find Joon Tan guilty of murder.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: The family had been drawn throughout the whole investigation. The delay, 137 days of not knowing where Ju was. And then the years before the trial, the trial, waiting on the jury to come back. It was only three-and-a-half hours, but still a long time. Then the process of writing their victim impact statements, where they finally get to stand up in court and they get to actually say how this has impacted them.

It's the first opportunity they really get to be heard.

Voiceover: One of the tip workers, Harry Taylor, also told the court of the impact the search had on he and his colleagues. His poignant statement revealed how they tried to, in some way, restore to Ju ‘Kelly’ Zhang the humanity and dignity that Joon Tan had denied her.

Actor reading Harry Taylor’s Victim Impact Statement: Myself and the team had been working long hours and we were strangely both exalted and depressed. We were glad that we had found her but also depressed that a young lad was now without his mother and that a mum and dad had lost their daughter in terrible circumstances. Although I never met Ms Zhang when she was alive, it seemed to me, in a strange way, that she and I, who had never met, were on a journey together. I attended her funeral in Springvale, contributed to the limits of my capacity in an appeal to support her destitute parents. My wife and I put together and delivered a hamper for her mum and dad and Jack for Christmas. On behalf of all the landfill team, Kelly, we did our best for you and it turned out that our best was good enough.

Voiceover: After hearing the impact statements read out, Joon finally relented and confessed in court to murdering Ju. Although the judge rejected Tan’s new account of the details of the murder as partly self-serving, the confession is what Ju’s family needed to hear.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: It did provide answers to them. I think they really wanted him – they wanted to hear him say he did it. So, it did help Ju’s mum and dad.

Voiceover: Joon Tan was sentenced to 28 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 23 years.

Sam, Tony and the Missing Persons Squad had spent two-and-a-half years investing all they had in this case, professionally and even personally.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: People often ask me, they say, “oh, you know, have you got have you spoken to someone? Have you had some professional help? Make sure you process this, so it doesn't come back and, you know, haunt you later on”. I'm comfortable with it. I don't feel like that. Had we not – had I not have found her, I don't know how I would have processed that.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: I trust them. I trust them to know when they are on top of it and that they have sufficient support in their lives outside of Victoria Police to be able to move through it. And I trust them to say that they don't. And we give them space to say that they don't.

It's all right not to be okay. You know, this is not normal things that we're dealing with. And if you are okay all the time dealing with this, I'd probably be more concerned. So, knowing that the support’s here, we have excellent supports within the organisation, we have excellent support through our external assistance providers and we put people in touch with them.

Importantly, I think as leaders, we've got to resist the opportunity to try and fix everything. Sometimes we can't fix it. We’ve just got to put people in touch with the right people. And I've had to learn that lesson the hard way through my journey through VicPol, too.

We used to always, you know – it would be a couple beers down the pub and everyone would be okay. But I don't think everyone was okay.

And I think I've seen I've seen enough people fall by the wayside through my journey through the organisation that underwent that level of counselling that had they been exposed to what we've got now I think they’d be in a lot better place.

Det Ldg Sen Const Russell: I am a talker. I've got great support around me. Like I said, my husband is in the police force. I can talk to him. He gets it. I'm a talker. So, if I'm not talking, you know I'm not okay. The office is a great group of people, we know each other well and I think I've got great family and friends as well.

Work and home, there is a boundary. But in moments like this, if your family and friends are on – you know – they're on team Ju. They want you to find her and get her home to her family as well.

So, I spoke to my parents and told them that we'd found her and, you know it's such a weird moment. You've just found someone dead in a tip and, like, you’re sort of celebrating.

I think, and it is probably a bit a bit of guilt around that. Not guilt. Like I said, the moment that I saw her body, and then I was jumping up and down to the other people to come over and help me, and Sophie and Jen ran over. They’re two of my closest friends in Victoria Police, and they were there at the moment, like the people that you would want in there in that moment for that support. Like it doesn't get any better. And my phone call to Tony. Even Steve the excavator driver, like we were, you know he was in that moment. Such a raw... I don't expect to ever feel a moment like that again in my life.

To experience that moment of finding her myself. Seeing her, pointing her out to Steve. The whole case really coming together in front of your eyes. And it's on drone footage to watch again, if you ever would forget it. Not that I will ever forget it, but I don't think that will happen again.

Det Sen Sgt Combridge: One of the things that I try to encourage our people to do is to be in the moment.

Let yourself be in the moment. Let yourself enjoy this part of it. Let yourself deal with what you need to in this part of it, but you can't compare two jobs.

I've been involved in so many amazing investigations in my role with Missing Persons, and every one of them is unique, and every one of them at that time was the best job I’d ever done.

So, I think that's the perspective I take to it. The next job will be the best job I've done.

Because if I can deliver some answers to a family, that's my job done. That's when I'll feel I've met the objective and it's when I feel I've done what Victoria Police is paying me to do, and what the community expects us to do.

Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

It was written by Adam Shand.

Additional writing and research by Jesse Wray-McCann.

It was produced by Adam Shand and Jesse Wray-McCann.

The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Beck Angel.

This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.

Voiceover: To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.