But on entering the house, police found Natasha hiding in a wardrobe. Only now, nearly five years after her disappearance, is the story of how she spent her days hidden from public view coming to light.

Meeting the police was Natasha’s first face-to-face encounter with anyone apart from her boyfriend, Scott Black, 27, in 4½ years. She had gone into hiding with him in 1998 and barely ventured out since — even after an alleged serial killer was charged with her murder.

Quite simply, she said, the lie “became too big”.

The last time she had been seen in public was when her mother Jenny, drove her to school on August 31, 1998. “She leaned over and gave me a kiss and said ‘I love you’,” Mrs Ryan later recalled. “I gave her a kiss and I just laughed at her because she said something really funny at the time.”

Natasha had been going through a troubled spell. She had been taking marijuana, amphetamines and cocaine and thought she was pregnant by Scott, who was then 22.

Natasha had already run away with him once but returned home later. In July l998 he pleaded guilty to wilful obstruction of police for aiding her disappearance. A month later she decided to vanish for good.

Natasha and Scott rented a house in nearby Yeppoon, a small seaside town on the central Queensland coast. There they lived until December last year when they returned to Rockhampton.

Seemingly confident of not being found, she moved into the Mills Avenue house, a cream split-level home, only a couple of miles from her mother’s address. Throughout the four years that followed Natasha emerged no more than half a dozen times.

There were occasional trips to the beach in the middle of the night so that she could dip her feet into the warm waters of the Pacific and scrunch her toes in the sand where she played as a child.

But she never ventured outside during the day. Neighbours said that they saw no sign of her at the Yeppoon or Rockhampton addresses. Nor were there ever any female clothes on the washing line.

Day after day Natasha would cook, sew, watch the television and trawl the internet. Scott lived a double life, occasionally frequenting nightclubs while keeping busy on his early morning milk round.

When members of his family came to visit she would hide in a cupboard for up to six hours at a time.

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