Gold Coast singer Fairlie Arrow disappeared from her home in the early summer of 1991.
Investigating police arrived to find her car in the driveway, keys still in the ignition and the front door to her home open. A handbag and a single earring were discovered nearby.
Having performed in nightclubs across the glitter strip, and following a string of reported break-and-enters at her home, police feared a “deranged fan” had abducted Arrow.
With all the ingredients for a “big story”, a media frenzy erupted.Â
Fairlie Arrow’s belongings were strewn across her driveway. (ABC/Docker Media)
But while Australians were glued to their television sets for every development, Arrow was hiding in a motel room, watching it all unfold.
What transpired in the days and weeks that followed is a story still being told 34 years later.
Fears of a stalker
Leading up to her disappearance, Arrow’s husband George Harvey was often on the road touring with his band The Four Kinsmen.
It was on these nights, when it was just Arrow and her young son in the house, that she started to suspect someone had been breaking in.
Authorities didn’t have much to go on, but Arrow was adamant not enough was being done to investigate.
“Someone came in, feeding the dog, putting her clothes on the bed,” Brad Morgan, a Detective Senior Constable at Queensland Police, says.
“It’s a strange one, because they’ve cleaned up a house, they’ve done the dishes, but there were never any threats or anything.
“Is this really a stalker?”
Brad Morgan was one of the Queensland Police officers assigned to investigate the case. (ABC/Docker Media: Dave May)
So, when 27-year-old Arrow disappeared on Sunday, December 15, police immediately feared a kidnapping.
Her two friends had raised the alarm when Arrow didn’t show up to a dinner date, and Detective Morgan was sent to investigate.
“We looked at the scene. The car was still running, keys in the ignition, the front door was open. It was taken very seriously,” he tells ABC iview’s I Was Actually There.
“We actually had some of the homicide squad people come across, we had additional computer terminals installed. We spent a lot of hours, a lot of overtime trying to find a suspect.”
Plotting a kidnapping
Robert ‘Bob’ Deering, as Detective Morgan describes him, was a “larger-than-life” character on the Gold Coast and a frequenter of nightclubs.
“We used to call him the oldest teenager on the Coast. And Robert Deering and Arrow were close,” he says.
Fairlie Arrow says Robert Deering “wanted to solve every girl’s problems”. (ABC/Docker Media)
With Arrow living in fear of a stalker, Deering says they devised a plan to force the authorities to act.
“I thought it was a great idea. Fakes her kidnapping, comes back, tells the truth, the police then do an investigation and really follow up on it,” Deering says.
Plan in place, the pair set the stage on her Isle of Capri driveway, and hit the road.
“She’s come over and jumped in my car, and I drove down to the Town and Country [Motel],” Deering says.
“They always had a sign up for vacancies, so I assumed that not many people would stay there.”
He left Arrow with the keys and took off.
Fairlie Arrow was at the Town & Country Motel for three days. (ABC/Docker Media)
Media fanfare
With an investigation in full swing, Channel Nine News reporter Deborah Fitzgerald was called to the scene, shocked to hear Arrow’s name surface as the suspected kidnapping target.
“I was really upset,” she says.
“I knew Fairlie from high school. We weren’t close, we weren’t best friends, but the fact that she could be hurt or possibly worse … I just thought, ‘This is terrible’.”
But as a journalist, she knew a big story was brewing.
“All the footage of her singing was just perfect for television. I think we realised very early on that it was going to be a national story.”
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As the media interest rapidly grew, the police called Deering in for questioning.
Afterwards, Deering drove back to the motel to collect Arrow and come clean.
But Arrow wasn’t on board with such a straightforward return. She wanted her reappearance to “look legitimate”.
Found on the side of the road
Driving down a long Gold Coast road, Martin Fielder and Nick Wilson were the ones to find Arrow.
“I’ve seen this thing out of the corner of my eye; it looked like someone lying on the side of the road,” Wilson says.
So, they turned the car around, instantly recognising Arrow from the unrelenting media coverage of the past two days.
“She had a bandana around her neck like she’d been blindfolded, and her hands were tied behind her back, and the rope just basically fell apart in my hands,” Wilson says.
They took her to the police station.
Making it up ‘on the fly’
Having reappeared unscathed, police were unrelenting in their interview, desperate to understand what had taken place.
“I certainly had not prepared for that. I had no idea. I made it up on the fly. I mean, I was not very creative,” Arrow says.
Police were becoming increasingly suspicious that Arrow had faked the whole thing, and her responses had done little to convince them of her story.
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Detective Morgan says her story “stank right from the start”, and they decided to put her in front of the cameras, at 2am.
“It all seemed a bit far-fetched,” he says.
At the press conference, media quickly caught on to the fact that Arrow’s demeanour didn’t fit with that of a kidnapping victim.
“I was standing out there in front of all these cameras,” Arrow says.
“I didn’t know whether I should smile. I didn’t know whether I should look down, look away. I didn’t know how to act.”
Meanwhile, watching the press conference from home, was Bob Deering.
“[I] turn the TV on, wait for her to come out and say ‘Well, I faked my kidnapping’, which I thought was a great idea,” he says.
“So what happens? She walks in, this great big smile on her face, smiling like a Cheshire cat, and she was lying.”
Fairlie Arrow appeared happy to front the media. (ABC/Docker Media)
Even Arrow admits that her appearance, and commitment to the kidnapping narrative, was less-than-convincing.
“I’m completely making it up,” she says.
“You’re not supposed to be asking me all this. This wasn’t in the plan.
“I think I felt so guilty that I probably sunk myself.”
Media catches on
Reporter Deborah Fitzgerald says there was a consensus in the media that there was something strange about the story.
“I definitely had the idea that it was a hoax, but it hadn’t been confirmed. And I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt,” Fitzgerald says.
Fairlie Arrow appeared on multiple television programs after her return. (ABC/Docker Media)
After seeing news reports, staff from the Town and Country Motel came forward.
“She ordered room service a couple of times, and one time the cleaner was taking some towels and she saw Fairlie and gave her the towels, and that pretty much set us on the track that this was definitely false,” Detective Morgan says.
“That’s when she put her hands up and said that, yes, she did stage it all.”
In the police interview, she took full responsibility, claiming she planned everything and Deering assisted her.
The snowball effect
That’s when the media fanfare kicked up a gear.
According to Arrow, her reason for vanishing was a good one. She had felt unsafe in her home and not enough was being done to investigate. She had decided to take matters into her own hands.
“It’s like this snowball that rolls downhill and just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and all of a sudden this crazy idea that we cooked up wasn’t so crazy after all,” Arrow recalls more than three decades later.
In the aftermath, she appeared on multiple news and interview programs to defend her actions.
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“She was making the most of her 15 minutes of fame, which I found really distasteful,” Fitzgerald says.
“She was grilled, which to her credit, I don’t think I would’ve survived some of those brutal interviews.
“I wish she had apologised more. I understand people make mistakes, I feel like they should be able to move on from them, but she was never, in my estimation, very contrite.”
But Arrow says she wasn’t sorry.
“Maybe I should have fallen on my sword, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t sorry I did it. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I didn’t do it,” she says.
But others weren’t as clear on her motivation.
Sydney journalist Steve Barrett believed it was all a publicity stunt.
Steve Barrett says Fairlie Arrow became the butt of jokes. (ABC/Docker Media: Dave May)
“That side of it worked, but there was a cost. And of course, very quickly she became the butt of jokes,” he says.
“She was naive. She was just a young woman who craved major publicity. That was it.”
Charged with making a false complaint to police, Arrow was fined $5,000 and ordered to pay $18,500 to cover the cost of the investigation.
“In 1992, that was a lot of money and I had nothing,” she says.
Arrow agreed to a photo shoot with Penthouse Magazine to cover the costs, which only added fuel to the fire.
Fairlie Arrow says people took her Penthouse Magazine photo shoot personally. (ABC/Docker Media: Dave May)
Images from the photo shoot showed her lying on a bed with her hands bound together, as if kidnapped.
She was accused of a making a mockery out of the hoax.
‘You can’t bury it’
One consistency throughout the story is Arrow’s insistence that she had a stalker, and that she hasn’t had an issue with one since.
“I did something stupid, but there were real reasons for it,” she says.
Nearly 35 years later, Arrow says she’s still not escaped the ordeal.
In the aftermath of the hoax, she and her husband split, and she relocated to the US with her son.
“It’s never gone away. Jobs, career moves. I lost a record deal. You just Google my name and all this stuff comes up that you wish you could just bury, but you can’t bury it,” she says.
“Yes, I lied. I did. If I have any disappointment, I’m disappointed that I felt like I had no other choice. I don’t know what else I would’ve done differently.”
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