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Imagine how difficult it would be to completely disappear. Not just to leave town, delete your social media or choose not to answer your phone, but to actually vanish, to reach a point where no one can definitively prove where you went or if you’re alive or dead.
Now imagine doing this with four people who need transportation, food, money & belongings. One would assume someone would see them filling up their gas tank, buying a bus ticket, boarding a plane, walking into a motel or even just down the street.
When one of these four people is a 5-year-old girl, disappearing altogether makes it that much harder to imagine. Yet in July 2007, this happened in the small town of Nannup, Australia.
Nannup is a very small town about 280 km/174 miles south of Perth in Western Australia where four people vanished without a trace. Although 45-year-old Simon Kadwill, 27-year-old Chantelle McDougall, their 5-year-old daughter Leela & their friend, 40-year-old Tony Popic, left a letter on their door saying they’d gone to Brazil, they never used their passports to leave Australia & their bank accounts remained untouched.
This left those who know them to grapple with the question: was this cult-inspired, a murder suicide or something else? Even more haunting, their families are also left with wondering how it even came to this.
Despite the passage of 19 years, Cath & Jim McDougall continue to search for answers for their missing daughter & granddaughter, Chantelle & Leela McDougall. The hopes & dreams they once held for their daughter are now reduced to a stack of newspaper clippings, missing persons posters, old emails as well as contact cards for police officers.
According to Jim, their daughter, who was born in 1980, was the biggest character you’d ever come across, someone who would tell her own jokes & laugh before she finished telling them. She went from doing little performances in their living room to being an aspiring actress in high school.
Chantelle was exceptionally close with her family, including her older brother & sister.
Cath feels regret in her heart since she had a feeling in her gut that something was off when she last saw her daughter & granddaughter in May 2007 when she’d flown across the country from her home in Victoria. Now looking back, she wishes she would have asked more questions.
Ten years before she vanished, Chantelle graduated from high school in 1997, left home & moved 321 km/200 miles southeast to Melbourne. Within only months, Cath & Jim were stunned by how quickly their daughter was transforming into someone they barely recognized.
She seemed more secretive while the way she spoke was entirely different & she’d given up her aspirations of acting after she met a man in his 20s named Simon Cookerman.
Simon was attending an ashram in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. An ashram is a spiritual place where most people visit as a temporary withdrawal from the world. It’s a sacred place where people generally go to reflect on the deeper meaning or purpose of their life, to study a particular teaching or for intensive spiritual practice.
He introduced Chantelle to a book by author Simon Kadwill, a self-proclaimed spiritual guru. In his book, Servers of the Divine Plan, Simon wrote about how humanity would enter a higher state of consciousness after a 75,000-year cycle, something he referred to as the great transition.
According to his book, the great transition was only for those who had learned the lessons of the physical plane.
In 1998 when Chantelle was still only 17-years-old, she & Simon Kadwill met in person, something that ended up changing the course of her life.
She moved in with Simon & his partner Deborah Fleisher to work as a live-in nanny for their 1-year-old son. Their home was in a secluded area along the hills on the outskirts of Melbourne & here, Chantelle became immersed in Simon’s world, a world she kept hidden from her parents.
Although she told Jim & Cath that she was exploring some new spiritual ideas, she kept the details very vague. Bit by bit, when she did share a little about Simon’s beliefs, they started to worry.
Based on the drastic changes they were seeing in their daughter, paired with what they were learning about this man that Chantelle was living with, Cath contacted a counselor for advice.
The counselor advised them to keep open lines of communication with their daughter, something that made Cath feel like she was walking on eggshells, fearful she would say or question too much, causing her daughter to pull away from them altogether.
When Chantelle moved on from this strange nannying job in late 1998 to travel, Jim & Cath felt a huge sense of relief. After traveling across Australia as well as the UK, she settled in Perth in Western Australia, over 3,300 km/2,100 miles from where she had previously been living with Simon in Melbourne & basically just as far from her parents in Victoria.
Sadly, they came to learn that their daughter had not actually left Simon behind as he’d been meeting up with her along her travels. They later discovered a photo of their teenage daughter in the UK, standing close to a tall man who was nearly twice her age, with his arm wrapped around her back.
Simon was from the UK & there were rumors about Chantelle falsifying documents to get him back into Australia. By 2000, when he did return to Australia, he moved in with Chantelle along with his partner Deborah, their son Daniel as well as another woman named Justine Smith.
As was the case with Chantelle, Justine had connected with Simon through a spiritual group & she’d traveled & lived with him.
Jim was distressed with his young daughter’s living arrangement. While Chantelle was in one bedroom, Deb was in another & Justine in another. During this time, Simon was carrying on an intimate relationship with all three women simultaneously.
By the time Deborah moved out with their son later that year & left Australia, Simon & Chantelle were in a relationship.
In 2002, Justine left the house, breaking away from Simon’s influence as she felt the group had a cult-like influence over her as Simon discouraged her from contacting her family.
According to Justine, Simon’s teachings & beliefs were a mix of many religions. At its core, it was about knowing & being a servant of God, but also a belief in aliens & the idea of living in other dimensions. When she was with the group, going to different dimensions had never involved suicide or doomsday scenarios.
When the phone in Jim & Cath’s kitchen rang in early 2001, their daughter was on the other end of the line, letting them know that she was pregnant with Simon’s child. On September 6, 2001, she gave birth to their baby girl, Leela McDougall, but she didn’t declare Simon as her father on the birth certificate.
Six weeks later, when Cath landed in Perth with a suitcase full of handmade baby clothes, she was instantly smitten with her granddaughter. It was also the first time she would meet the man who her daughter had been living & traveling with over the past three years, Simon Kadwill.
Cath was confused to say the least, when she, Simon & Chantelle went to a winery together & after a few drinks, he asked her seriously, what planet are you from? She kept her thoughts about the bizarre man under wraps because she knew she could lose Chantelle & Leela in an instant if she made a misstep.
She & her husband continued to hold out hope that their daughter would eventually break away from his spell & come back to her true bubbly, outspoken, happy self.
With nearly 3,200 km/2,000 miles separating them, over the next few years, they spoke with Chantelle on the phone often & sent care packages.
After Justine Smith moved out, a man named Tony Popic moved in, living in a tent in their backyard despite there being extra bedrooms. He was a nomadic person who was drawn into Simon’s spiritual teachings after he came across him during a seminar in 1996 called Turning Point.
Those who knew Tony described him as a kind, gentle person who loved nature & generally got along with everyone. He didn’t use drugs, but was an occasional binge-drinker & according to his brother, Tony suffered from depression from time-to-time & had been lacking direction for many years.
The foursome, Simon, Chantelle, 2-year-old Leela & Tony, moved around to increasingly isolated locations until late 2003, when they arrived on the outskirts of Nannup. They began renting a little blue farmhouse on a rural property about ten minutes from town. While Simon, Chantelle & Leela lived in the house, Tony lived in a caravan/RV on the property.
While Chantelle & Tony were very well-liked among the community, working at various jobs around town, Simon was rarely ever seen outside the house, spending his days sleeping & his nights awake on his computer. He morphed his books into an online forum called The Gateway, where his followers referred to themselves as servers.
He wrote about dark negative forces, believing himself to be a higher being or messenger in a cosmic path with the theme of his teachings being very doomsday in nature.
It was very rare that Jim & Cath were able to spend time with their granddaughter & when they did, Simon made it very difficult for them, accusing them of corrupting her. He wouldn’t allow them to take photos of Leela or of him with Chantelle, telling Jim that it would take their souls away.
He would also prevent Cath from bathing Leela & when they visited in 2005, he refused to allow them to say goodbye when they left. As they pulled away, he stood holding Leela, who was crying because she wanted to kiss her grandma goodbye.
As Leela reached school age, Chantelle homeschooled her daughter, but they attended playgroups regularly & she was also in swimming & karate lessons.
Over the next four years, Simon became more & more isolated as he worried about psychic interference & his peace being affected by electromagnetic forces.
Of the handful of friends that Chantelle had, many got the impression that she was only allowed to socialize with them when Simon allowed it.
One of these friends is a woman named Dianne Abbott, who ran a homeschooling group in the seaside town of Busselton, about 40 minutes from Nannup. Chantelle brought Leela to a group every two weeks where mothers would connect while their children played together.
While describing Leela as a pocket rocket of energy, Dianne said that Chantelle was smiley & shy. She could see the loving way they interacted together; Chantelle always listened to Leela & it was clear they loved each other very much.
After she was invited out to the blue farmhouse for a play date, Dianne was able to meet Simon for the first time. She described him as polite after having a brief conversation with him.
However, when she got home, he called her, saying that Chantelle has end-time syndrome, meaning, they don’t go anywhere because she worries about the end of the world. Dianne couldn’t understand what he was talking about since she only saw Chantelle as a lovely, normal person.
Dianne wasn’t the only one who felt that Simon was a very controlling man. Chantelle’s co-workers from the Nannup Hotel where she worked as a waitress noticed that he sometimes waited outside while she worked. On these occasions, they could see that Chantelle seemed more nervous & on edge.
Another local woman, Kay Savory, tried to help Chantelle set up a business so she could begin to establish financial independence. When she bumped into Simon, he cornered her in a room, interrogating her about her interactions with Chantelle & that was the last she saw of her.
In the lead-up to the vanishing, the landlord at the blue house was having a transformer installed which caused Simon to have an erratic outburst. He went over to the home of electrical apprentice Jodi MacDonald & her husband Bruce, after they had just finished for the day. He told them that the electromagnetic frequency (EMF) that was coming out from the power pole was making him sick.
Bruce tried to reassure him that not only was the transformer not even connected yet, but the EMF from the home’s appliances were greater than what the transformer would be giving off. Regardless, Simon became increasingly agitated each time Bruce saw him until he eventually told him that they had defenses in place to protect themselves. He, Tony Popic & Leela began digging around in the dirt to uncover buried silver balls that were spread about 10 meters/33 feet apart throughout the corners of the yard, as if creating a protective barrier.
On May 5, 2007, just over two months before they vanished, Simon was pulled over by the Nannup police for speeding. Sergeant Jeff Taylor looked at his license & asked him questions about himself.
Sergeant Taylor was familiar with Simon as three years earlier, Chantelle’s ex-boyfriend Simon Cookerman told him a crazy story about how Simon Kadwill wasn’t who he claimed to be.
As part of the investigation during that time, Taylor ran checks on him after their conversation, but nothing unusual came up. However, he could now sense how nervous Simon seemed about the questions regarding his background & where he was from.
The next day, on May 6, Chantelle applied for a passport for Leela with an intended travel date of June 26, 2007.
When Leela’s passport arrived two weeks later, Cath just so happened to be visiting. During that time, Chantelle had voiced her concern about living near high voltage wires.
When she spoke to her parents on June 24, 2007, she told them that she & her family would be moving to a community on the outskirts of Rio Branco in Brazil in about six weeks.
Cath was stunned as her daughter had never mentioned any interest in moving there before. When they spoke about it again in early July, Chantelle told her mom that she was packing & planned to send their things to Brazil by boat. She said that Simon had already left & she & Leela would follow by plane while Tony was going to travel for a bit before settling in Brazil.
According to the coronial inquest which was completed ten years later in 2017, the idea of Brazil likely came from the members of Simon’s online group, who talked to him about a church there. It appears that they started making plans of leaving as early as April 2007, three months before they vanished.
Around this time, Chantelle, Tony & Simon began giving their belongings away. Both Tony & Chantelle sold their cars in July while Tony visited his parents on July 11 to say goodbye to them.
Chantelle also sold her pet dachshunds as well as their puppies. Carolyn French, a travel agent in Perth, swung by the home on July 14 to collect the remaining puppy & the adult dogs.
She later told police that when she arrived, Chantelle was waiting outside, appearing to be very anxious for her to leave as quickly as possible. They went inside together & when Carolyn asked her if she wanted to give Leela an opportunity to say goodbye to the dogs, Chantelle told her that Leela was outside in the caravan with their roommate & she was sick. After Chantelle came back from another room in the house that was not in the direction of where the caravan was parked, she told Carolyn that Leela may need to go to the hospital.
Carolyn is the last person to have seen Chantelle before she vanished. When she called the home the next day, the answering machine picked up. That same day, either Tony or Simon took a train to Perth & stayed overnight. When they left the next day, July 16, they traveled by train to Kalgooorlie and/or Northcliffe.
When the landlords came by that day, they found a letter that was dated for July 16 that was attached to the door in Chantelle’s handwriting that read:
To Beth & Lyndon,
We have left suddenly due to the lack of sleep created by the EMF. We have moved overseas to Brazil & could not take most of our furniture with us. All our personal effects have gone but whatever we have left is yours to do as you wish. Power, phone & gas have been disconnected. Sorry to leave so quickly. All animals have been taken care of & the keys to the house are on the kitchen bench. The caravan has also been cleared of Tony’s personal items, you are also welcome to the caravan with all the furnishings.
From Chantelle, Simon, Tony & Leela
The house was spotless while some very expensive pieces of furniture & electronics had been left behind.
Meanwhile, Cath was waiting patiently to hear from her daughter once she arrived in South America, but no phone call or letter came. As the weeks dragged on, their concern grew & in October 2007, three months after they last heard from their daughter, Jim & Cath officially reported her missing.
Tony’s brother, Joseph Popic, reported his brother missing in November.
Early investigations proved they hadn’t utilized their bank accounts & no one had left the country using their passports. Although nearly $7,000 remained in Chantelle’s bank account, before they vanished, she’d withdrawn about $5,000 from her savings account while Tony withdrew $420.
Two years after they vanished, in July 2009, Jim & Cath printed off thousands of missing person fliers with their daughter & granddaughter’s photos & descriptions. By that time they would have been 28 & 7-years-old respectively. They drove from Victoria to Far North Queensland, handing them out along the way, but nothing ever came of it.
During this trip, Cath & Jim received a phone call from a news reporter with information that shocked them to the core. He told them that they found the real Simon Kadwill in England & he’s been arrested. However, very quickly, they realized that this was not the man they knew. Instead, it was a man whose identity had been stolen by a former colleague.
Their daughter’s partner & their granddaughter’s father, the man they knew as Simon Kadwill was actually Gary Felton, who had moved from England to Australia in the 1990s under a false identity.
Jim & Cath came to learn that their daughter’s ex-boyfriend, Simon Cookerman, had tried to warn Chantelle & the police about Simon three years earlier after he discovered his true identity. This was when he had a conversation with Sergeant Jeff Taylor.
Although they were hoping that this information would lead to a breakthrough in the search, the years continued to go by & they were no closer to an answer.
In December 2017, a decade & a half after they vanished, a coronial inquest was held, something Jim & Cath hoped would finally give them the answers to questions they’d long been seeking.
They spent three days at the courthouse, taking notes on everything. According to medical records, Chantelle, Tony & Gary Felton (formerly known as Simon), had gotten strong sedatives & anti-anxiety medication before they disappeared.
Felton had also been prescribed anti-psychotics as well as an opioid that can be fatal when combined with other nervous system depressants, such as the sedatives.
Police also found disturbing emails that Felton had sent to one of his followers that indicated he, Chantelle & Tony had a plan for a family suicide with a quick-acting drug. They would all wander into the wilderness where he, Chantelle & Leela would take the drug while Tony would bury them before wandering deeper into the forest where his body wouldn’t be found.
When the follower advised him that it would be murder to kill Leela, he seemed to distance himself from her. He sent her one last email in early June 2007, saying he was planning on ending his life alone. Although Tony was aware, he planned to do it while Chantelle & Leela were asleep.
There ended up being four reported sightings of the group in the seven to ten months after they vanished as well as travel movements in the days around their disappearance, but nothing was conclusive.
The sum of the investigation concluded that a definitive finding couldn’t be made. Coroner Barry King noted that while the group’s spiritual beliefs would suggest a suicide, he didn’t believe Felton wouldn’t make his death a publicized message to his followers as he would have viewed this a powerful message.
According to the coronial inquest, although Chantelle & Felton were partners, their relationship wasn’t emotionally intimate. To those who often interacted with Chantelle, they saw her as subservient to Felton, describing her as controlled & brainwashed by him.
Not only was she earning all of their household income, but she was also the main caregiver for Leela & the person who handled the household as a whole. Her friends described her as happy & outgoing, believing that if it wasn’t for Felton, she would have been far freer.
The coronial inquest indicated that Gary Felton, whose mother is deceased, was not close to his brother or his father. Little is known about his early life. While living in England, he was convicted of fraud after he used his friend’s password to access a computer system to send emails to this man’s family & friends.
While he was working at a software company in 1986, he met the real Simon Kadwill & stole his birth certificate. He then got a UK passport under Simon’s name before he began traveling on a spiritual pilgrimage under this false identity.
After leaving England, it didn’t appear that he held any formal pay-earning jobs. He either lived off the charity of others, the income of the three books he published about his spiritual or philosophical beliefs, or the income of his wives.
However, since the group vanished, their bank accounts have not been touched, they haven’t contacted family, utilized their passports to leave Australia or come under the notice of any authorities or government agencies.
This, paired with their spiritual beliefs about ascending through a higher plane through death as well as Felton’s previous remarks about a suicide pact & the fact that the three adults had access to sedatives, would suggest they are deceased.
On the other hand, if the plan was a suicide pact, why did Chantelle withdraw money & obtain a passport for her daughter? Why did they remove the bedding & towels from their rental house, if not to use them elsewhere? There was also the fact that Felton had the ability & the history of assuming a false identity as he had done so with Simon Kadwill.
Behavior analyst with the Western Australia Police Force (WAPOL) Major Crime Division, Kris Giesen, believes that Felton likely killed himself. It’s likely that Chantelle & Leela are also deceased as Chantelle was easily influenced by him & held the belief that suicide wasn’t really death, rather a transformation. If she were still alive, she believes that Chantelle would have contacted her family at some point. It’s her belief that Tony is likely also deceased.
In the end, Coroner Barry King was unable to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Gary Felton, Tony Popic, Chantelle or Leela McDougall were dead or alive.
Jim & Cath McDougall are left to wonder how their daughter got swept up in a life they never wanted for her, leaving them to reckon with the different possibilities of what happened to her & their granddaughter. They don’t know if they were met with foul play, if Chantelle believed they were actually relocating to an off-grid community in Brazil or if she was so immersed in Felton’s teachings that she took her own life & that of her daughter’s.
Even after the passage of nearly two decades, there are still more questions than answers. Whatever happened, four people had families & friends who were left behind without the one thing grieving people eventually get: an answer.
As devastating as it is, when someone dies, those who love them can at least try to understand what happened, but in this case, there is no ending. The Australian wilderness is vast enough to hide almost anything, but until someone finds the evidence that finally connects the missing pieces, the disappearance of the Nannup Four remains one of Australia’s most unsettling mysteries.
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