“She was doing her resume with me, wanting to find employment, anywhere,” says Tash*, the last youth worker to look after Katrina.

Up to six children lived in the building and officers were regularly called about assaults or runaways.

It was an address police knew well.

Katrina was 15 and living in a unit on her own in Greenacre in Sydney’s west. It was a red-brick block on a cul-de-sac lined with paperbark trees, her latest placement after a decade spent in foster care, in refuges or homeless.

“gotta love shopping at 10pm in Kmart bored as f---,” she posted in 2012.

Katrina Bohnenkamp leans into the camera, eyes wide, and sticks out her tongue. For another Facebook selfie she lies back with her earphones in. In another shot, she checks out a zebra-print bra.

But a Herald investigation has uncovered an apparent lack of urgency among police who waited eight months to put out a media release. Family members say police took months to interview them about Katrina’s disappearance. Police say she had brown eyes, when photos show they were blue-green. Police reports also disagree on when Katrina was last seen.

Time is critical in missing persons investigations and NSW Police instructs officers on how to avoid delays in launching public appeals.

Six years later, Katrina, a ward of the state, has never been found. Believing she may be dead, police have referred her case to the coroner.

Sometimes Katrina stayed the night with a boyfriend but it was staff policy to call the cops whenever a child was absent after curfew. Tash says she waited about 30 to 45 minutes to call. Police came, took details, said to ring back the next day if Katrina was still gone.

The Greenacre unit block Katrina vanished from in 2012. It is no longer used to house children. Credit:Wolter Peeters

“I tried to encourage her to stay. She just said ‘I’m going’ and she left.” She did not say where she was going.

She had worked at Pizza Capers and a horse-riding club before, but the resume went unfinished. She was upset with some of the other girls that night, Tash says.

“They’re obviously tucked away somewhere with a mate or a friend,” one officer told the researchers. “But they always return.”

Recent research has found the responses of NSW police and care agencies to these reports “criminalises and endangers the safety” of children missing from care, raising concerns about who advocates for them.

( Editor's note: In January 2019, the law was changed to mean media require permission from the Coroner to identify a child who has died while in the state's care. The Coroner has granted the Herald that approval, meaning Katrina's story can be told in full. )

Without that permission, it would be a criminal offence to report that Katrina disappeared from a dysfunctional out-of-home care system that accounts for a torrent of missing persons reports.

And from next year, new laws pushed by her department would require media to gain a coroner’s approval to identify a child who has died while in care.

Minister Pru Goward, who had legal parental responsibility for Katrina, has refused to answer questions about her department’s handling of missing persons cases.

In addition, relatives say the department of Family and Community Services downplayed months of no contact by claiming she would turn up when she was hungry.

For roughly a year she lived with Indigenous family members on her mother’s side in Dubbo, then with a relative on her father’s side in Sydney, then with a succession of foster families and care agencies - a total of 11 placements in 11 years by the time she was 13.

Born in May 1997, Katrina was removed from her parents’ care when she was a toddler because of their homelessness and drug problems, an agency report shows.

“She was such a witty, funny girl,” Jaide says. “She was gorgeous. She had the best heart.”

Jaide Simpson found her “hilarious” half-sister on Facebook after a childhood spent apart.

But Melissa*, another relative who took over her care, says she eventually settled down more. She was doing distance education, staying home at night, not smoking.

Cuddly, aggressive, cuddly again - Katrina snapped between different moods and resisted Lee’s rules.

Cousin Lee Schellnegger lived with Katrina and says she mentioned being sexually abused. Credit:Max Mason-Hubers

Katrina mentioned being sexually abused and acted provocatively around older men, Lee says, while FACS alluded to her having been paid for sex.

“From the minute she closed her eyes, she screamed and cried,” Lee says.

Katrina had been using cannabis for years and was still smoking cigarettes, despite her bronchitis. She had spent time in juvenile detention and had terrible dreams.

“I found her on Facebook, just after her 14th birthday,” says Lee Schellnegger, a second cousin whom Katrina came to live with in Dubbo.

“I think she realised she could be a child again,” Melissa says. “She always wanted to help the kids do stuff. She loved horses.”

According to her family in Dubbo, FACS offered little support, only more money, when Katrina’s behaviour worsened again.

She wanted to go back to Sydney and her caseworker arranged the flights but Melissa says Katrina felt there was nowhere she belonged.

“She said ‘no matter where I go there will always be a part of me missing because I can’t be with my mum and dad’.”

The Herald has been unable to contact either of her birth parents.

Risking safety

Of the 38,000 people who go missing across Australia each year, about half are children aged 13 to 17. Of these, many are in state care, running away to family or friends or into exploitative relationships. Neglect, domestic violence, bullying, drug and alcohol use and racism are among the triggers.

“There has traditionally been a view that young people who go missing a lot are at lower risk because they always come back,” says Victorian detective Boris Buick, who has researched the area.

“But the reality is that people who repeatedly go missing are in fact at higher risk of sexual exploitation, among other risks, and are easily targeted.”

Both Family and Community Services in NSW and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have made similar findings.

Under trial reforms, Victoria is gathering more information on frequently missing children while also issuing more “no harbouring” notices to older men they are found with. Queensland, too, has embarked on reforms after the disappearance and murder of 12-year-old foster child Tiahleigh Palmer.

But in NSW, responses from authorities and carers “criminalise and endanger the safety of children missing in care”, according to Charles Sturt University researchers.

Lecturer Emma Colvin says people who want to exploit children or recruit them for criminal activity know where the care homes are.

“They know the kids are vulnerable and that people are less likely to look for them and that the kids aren’t going to seek out the cops for help,” she says.

Children missing from care require enormous resources from police but often they turn up within a day.

“That can lead, when they go missing, to it not being treated seriously,” Colvin says.

Her study - published this year in the peer-reviewed Howard Journal of Crime and Justice - found poor co-operation between police and care agencies as well as a punitive approach to runaway children.

“While some police participants acknowledged that children might be unsafe both in care and when missing, their concern was overshadowed by a prevailing attitude of irritation and annoyance,” the researchers found.

“These responses, coloured by resentment at being involved in missing children cases, may also mask potential risks faced by vulnerable children.”

A former youth worker at Guardian says police receiving missing persons reports for children as young as 14 had told her to wait 12 to 24 hours before calling back to make an official report.

A police spokeswoman declined to comment on the study but said police took all missing persons reports seriously. She said in some instances "it is not operationally viable or appropriate to make public appeals".

"Any child who is missing or absent from placement is deemed to be at extreme risk of exploitation and it is a serious concern for police and our partner agencies," she said.

The agency and the investigation

“It was really not a good time,” says Tash, the youth worker who last saw Katrina.

Having left Dubbo and another foster home, Katrina returned to a residential care agency she knew, one that claimed to take the children no-one else would: Guardian Youth Care.

The publicly-funded charity was not meant to run at a profit. But after Guardian went bust last year, liquidators reported subcontracts worth millions of dollars had benefited ventures owned by its shadow director Roy Bijkerk, a one-time cocaine smuggler, and his business partner Ned Bikic, a convicted murderer.

FACS accused Guardian of a $20 million misappropriation, a claim former directors deny. Former residents and staff have described chronic money shortages, dilapidated homes, marathon shifts and dangerous combinations of children.

Tash says she was working on her own in 14-hour shifts at times and had struggled to stop girls from severely bullying Katrina.

“I really do believe if she wasn’t there she would have been fine,” she says.

The then chief executive of Guardian, Ivan Brown, said only “we notified police and we notified FACS".

A week after Katrina disappeared, police returned with forensic detectives and interviewed some of the other children. Early on, she was reportedly seen in Blacktown, Quakers Hill and Riverstone but police have not confirmed any sightings.

Katrina has not used her bank accounts, family say.

The police missing persons notice for Katrina Bohnenkamp. Credit:AFP

Once a person is missing for more than three months police can add their profile to a national database. But NSW Police waited a further five months before providing Katrina’s details.

Police media sent out two releases in mid-2013 but newspaper archives show no stories about her disappearance. Channel 10 aired a brief appeal on its show Wanted.

In 2014, A Current Affair reported Katrina had connected with her father Maiko Bohnenkamp and his then partner’s family. The program said she had lived in foster homes but did not say she was still under the care of the minister. Many media outlets at the time had interpreted privacy laws as limiting discussion of children’s care status.

“Sittin at home wif my daddy nd my mummy havein the best nite eva it so good to be in his arms again,” Katrina had written on Facebook in in 2012.

Maiko told A Current Affair he still cried and would keep looking for his daughter.

“I just want to know, one way or another, what has happened to my little girl,” he said.

Maiko Bohnenkamp with his daughter Katrina. Credit:Facebook

The program repeated the “last seen” date of police media releases: November 2. However, the computer screen of detective sergeant Christie Houldin said Katrina was last seen on October 25, the date on the national database. It is understood November 2 is the correct date but that Katrina had also gone missing the week before.

“You can only imagine the heartache that her family and close friends are going through, and me myself,” Houldin said.

Left unsaid was that police had already referred the case to the coroner, a step they take if they believe the person is dead or they can make no more enquiries.

Savannah Olden, the daughter of Maiko’s former partner, says it was she who organised the TV segment and other media, as well as running the Find Katrina Bohnenkamp Facebook page.

Savannah Olden, Karen Walters and Maiko Bohnenkamp appeal for information about the disappearance of Maiko's daughter, Katrina. Credit:A Current Affair

She questions whether officers are seriously trying to find Katrina.

“If they were they would push, push, push, trying to get her story out there,” she says.

Family suspect Katrina has met with foul play. The homicide squad never took control of Katrina's file but was consulted by investigators from the local area command.

One relative says police have outlined a theory in which Katrina may have been killed in a dispute with people she knew.

But police declined to comment before an inquest in February, while the Herald’s request to inspect the referral to the coroner was denied.

Melissa and Lee say they have contacted police about errors in Katrina’s missing person’s description, including her eye colour and build, but the errors remain.

“I feel like they are doing what they have to do,” Lee says of police. “But I don't feel like it was ever anything urgent, not like when a nice 15-year-old girl from a nice home and a nice family goes missing ... I don't feel like they ever really cared a whole lot about Katrina."

Are there others?

In a statement, FACS said “we are deeply saddened by the tragic disappearance of this young person in 2012”. The department declined to comment further, citing the inquest and police investigation.

It will not say how many cases like Katrina’s there are, where children living in out-of-home care have been listed as long-term missing.

In a phone conversation, a spokeswoman said “we have the information” but that providing it was “not in the best interests of the public”.

Later she said she “misspoke”, before adding: “given the low amount, providing the figures could potentially identify the children involved”.

FACS says staff are trained to respond quickly to missing persons but refuses to say whether any practices or policies have changed since Katrina’s disappearance.

Lee says she felt “very brushed off” when she called first in November 2012 and then again a month later.

“They just said ‘that’s what she does, she’ll pop up when she needs some money or food or somewhere to stay’.”

Karen Walters, the then partner of Katrina’s father, said she called FACS almost every day for weeks but her caseworker never rang back.

She had gone missing before - once for 24 days when she was living with Guardian Youth Care in 2011, an internal document shows.

Katrina rang the agency at that time and said if she came back she would be arrested. Police did arrest her, for breaching bail, and she spent two nights in custody.

But Jaide says when her sister was missing she would let people know she was safe.

NSW Minister for Family and Community Services, Pru Goward. Credit:Wolter Peeters

Katrina’s legal parent, Minister Goward, said in a statement “my heart goes out to the family and loved ones of this young person”.

Goward declined to discuss Katrina’s case because of the inquest and police investigation.

Goward did not respond to a range of detailed policy questions, including questions about the number of children missing from care long-term, child sexual exploitation in the sector and her legal obligations to children under her parental responsibility.

“I can understand the minister isn’t going to be sobbing on TV saying ‘where’s my child?’,” says Colvin, the Charles Sturt researcher, “but the minister still has a duty of care.”

In the past, FACS has warned media against identifying children in care, using an interpretation of a privacy law now twice rejected twice by the courts.

When a woman on Facebook started saying missing boy William Tyrrell was a foster child, Goward’s department took her to the Supreme Court.

Justice Paul Brereton refused the injunction.

“Public scrutiny of the care system, if there has been a breakdown in it, is plainly a matter of public interest,” Justice Brereton found.

“Without wishing to suggest that it is the motive in this case, that also provides a reason for the Minister to embrace the view that disclosure is not in the child's interests.”

The department appealed, lost and then sought new laws, passed in November, that will explicitly prohibit naming children as having been in state care.

“The amendment strengthens pre-existing privacy measures for children,” a FACS spokeswoman said.

The changes also curb an exemption, requiring a coroner’s permission to reveal the past of children who have died.

By the time the laws take effect in January, this story would have to treat Katrina as an anonymous child or leave out the fact she was a ward of the state.

‘Nowhere to go’

“Some days I think ‘someone’s done something to her’,” Jaide says. “Other days I’m like ‘It’s Katrina, she’s just taken off’.”

But the girl with the exhibitionist streak has never appeared again on social media. Her Facebook page - where she ‘liked’ swimming, soccer, Home and Away and the NSW Police Force - has been frozen for six years.

Jaide says FACS had her contact details but never rang to say her sister was missing.

“Katrina was this little girl who had nowhere to go. She was put in the foster system and it failed her and now she’s gone.”

*Names with asterisks have been changed on request for privacy reasons.

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Herald investigations editor: Michael Evans

Digital art production: Dionne Gain

Photo editor: Mags King