It has now been more than ten days since little Gus Lamont vanished from the remote family property in South Australia. The search, from all appearances, has been extremely thorough. Police have combed the area with drones, ground teams, and every resource at their disposal.
Yet at this stage, they have found no clues, no signs of where the child might have gone.
That silence from the ground naturally leads to a question: what would police be doing behind the scenes now? What has been going on out of the public eye while the search continues without a single lead?
According to a report from the Daily Mail, there is one detail that stands out as enormous. It is understood that Gus’s father, Josh Lamont, only found out that his son was missing when police woke him up at his home in Bali North. That happened hours after Gus had already vanished.
The implication is staggering. Not only was Josh not informed during the critical first few hours, but by inference, his own wife, Jess, did not inform him either.
The Daily Mail has also reported that while Josh and Jess remain a couple in the legal sense, Josh does not live on the station. The reason is said to be family clashes with Jess’s transgender parent, Josie. That arrangement makes one wonder: are Josh and Jess really a couple only in name?
Is this a case of no love lost between the parents, and could that explain why not one biological parent, nor their family members, have made a single public appeal for Gus?
The brother of Josh Lamont, Samuel, insisted that Mr. Lamont, who once performed as a country music singer in South Australian pubs under the name Billy T, was in no state to talk to anyone. But for how long can that state of not talking persist?
A day? Two days? Ten days?
At some point, a father should be able to recover enough to say something. This is an extraordinary case. It is the first I have dealt with where a child goes missing and neither parent condescends to speak to the media and ask for help.
Think of Summer Wells. Think of Ganon Stalk. Think of Sebastian Rogers.
Think of the Sullivan siblings. Think of Madeleine McCann and JonBenét Ramsey. In every single one of those cases, both parents appeared before cameras.
Sometimes even the non-custodial parent and the grandparents weighed in. In the Ganon Stalk case, which I wrote about in my book “Boy Interrupted,” even Ganon’s crooked, wicked stepmother spoke to authorities. She gave a televised interview that was fraught with resentment.
You could see from the interviewer’s face that the stepmother had a very large chip on her shoulder. Yet she still spoke. Here, there is virtually no on-camera interview from any family member.
It seems the fear of being on camera is worse than the fear of not finding poor little Gus.
Let me put this into additional context. If Gus simply disappeared and Jess did not feel she could tell Josh right away, what would happen if something worse occurred? Suppose an accident or injury, or even a terrible fate, had befallen Gus.
Would Jess have been able to tell Josh then? Could she have called him and explained what had happened? That question haunts this case.
There are also statistics to consider. According to FBI data, abductions by a parent form almost 50 percent of all child abductions. That is nearly one out of every two cases.
Stranger abductions are far rarer, representing only 24 percent of all cases. And interestingly, only two percent of missing children reported to hotlines turn out to be stranger abductions. The important point to consider here, and this is the number two clue everyone missed, is that custodial abductions do occur.
As you can imagine, during custody battles, children can also be harmed within the context of enmity or a falling out between their biological parents. When parents argue, when they are upset and emotional, the children become emotional as well. That can lead to harm of some kind.
The inevitable question arises: were or are Gus’s parents involved in a custody battle at the time he disappeared? According to research from ebsco. com, parental abduction is a significant issue that typically arises in the context of custody disputes, especially during or after divorce proceedings.
Whatever friends and family have said on this issue, actions speak louder than words. The fact is that Josh lived very far from his child. And Gus’s bicycle, which we have seen in the front of Josh’s home in Bali North, proves something important.
It proves that the arrangement was not simply that Josh would visit Gus on the farm. It shows that Gus came to visit his father as well. One must wonder how often that happened and how it was arranged.
Did Jess drive Gus, or did Josh have to drive all the way there and back? It is clearly not an arrangement that happened on the weekend of September 27. That Saturday was not a visiting weekend.
If it was not one of those weekends when Josh would see his son, why not? That day would have been, one imagines, Josh’s day off. So what was the arrangement?
It also becomes clear that Gus did not simply wander off. Why would he? He was on a farm.
The sun was going down. When a child is outside at five o’clock in the afternoon, the only place worth going is back inside. It is going to get dark.
It is going to get colder. Why would any child wander off in those conditions? And there are no footprints.
It is becoming clearer that some unknown third party was likely involved.
The New Zealand Herald ran a headline that says it plainly: “Criminologist says third party likely in disappearance of Gus Lamont.” Speaking to news. com.
au, criminologist Zanthy Mallet said all signs now point to third-party involvement. She noted that given Gus is so young, it is very unlikely he would have run away. That is more of a teenage behavior.
She pointed to the scale of the search, how detailed it was, the drones, and everything else. If they have not found anything at this stage, it sadly suggests third-party involvement. The question is which third party.
Remember how the missing Ganon Stalk case turned out? The stepmother, Leticia, was ultimately convicted of viciously murdering that child in his own bedroom. The parallels are disturbing.
Mallet also said that given the remote nature of the area near Oak Park Station, the lack of evidence found in the search also points to a third party. She added, “The lack of evidence suggests something happened and it was covered up, and that cover up is continuing. It might be time to search more carefully inside the house.”
In a statement, South Australia Police said they were continuing to look at all options. That is the official line for now. I will not take it further than that.
The mystery of Gus Lamont remains, and the hidden truth behind his disappearance may yet unravel with each passing day.
