Well before dark, by Maryrose Cuskelly

Updated December 6 2016 - 4:44pm, first published November 30 2016 - 3:19pm

On 6 March 2015 at St Ambrose Anglican Church in North Mackay, Queensland, a funeral was held for Marilyn Joy Wallman. The day chosen for the service would have been her fifty-seventh birthday. Some three months earlier, in a televised press conference, Queensland's Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Condon announced that a fragment of skull found in October 1974, two and half years after she went missing, had been confirmed as belonging to the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. Beside him sat the Wallman family – Marilyn's parents John and Daphne, her brothers Rex and David, and her sister Lenore – heavy with grief, no less leaden for being more than four decades old.

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