01/04/2025
On the 22nd of November 1973, Sherrlynn Mitchell left her Ballarat home, planning to meet a friend at the bus stop. But when the bus pulled up, her friend stepped off to find nothing but an empty street. Sherrlynn had vanished.
She never returned to work at the Ballarat Woollen Mills. Her wages and holiday pay went uncollected. There were no calls, no letters, no trace of where she had gone. One moment, she was part of the world, and the next, she was gone – leaving behind a family trapped in a nightmare without answers.
Her mother, Betty, spent decades waiting, hoping, and dreading. From her home in Wendouree, she kept a silent vigil, expecting every knock at the door, every phone call, every passing face in a crowd to be the moment Sherrlynn came back. But as the years passed, the silence stretched on.
“It never gets easier, it’s really hard all the time,” she revealed years later. “It feels like it was just yesterday. You always get that feeling that she could walk in the front door.”
As if fate hadn’t already been unkind enough, Betty suffered another devastating loss when a second daughter was tragically killed in a car accident. But while she was able to bury one child, the other remained a mystery – a wound that never healed, an absence that never faded.
Even in her later years, Betty clung to hope. When a new police unit was created to investigate long-term missing persons cases, she dared to believe that, even after all that time, someone might finally uncover the truth.
But the answers never came. Betty grew old with the weight of not knowing, and when she passed away, she took with her the hope of ever seeing her baby girl again.
And decades later, the mystery still remains. What ever happened to Sherrlynn?
