If this woman's body has been chucked down an opal mine shaft, the cops will never find it. Guaranteed.

Adelaide has the reputation of being the serial killer capital of the Southern Hemisphere because of two opal mining towns: Andamooka and Coober Pedy. Both are out in the desert hundreds of miles from anywhere.

Now opal mining is not like conventional shaft-and-drive mining, such as for gold, where you sink one or two primary shafts and set horizontal drives into the gold reefs. Opal seams are fragmented pockets spread miles apart, not continuous veins in the way metals are.

Thus, the most practical way of mining it is to drill an assay bore, with deflections, until you hit a seam. You then sink a shaft, which is usually between half a mile and two miles deep, mine out the opal seam, then do another assay and sink a new shaft when you find a new seam.

As a result, the area for dozens of miles around these towns is pocked with tens of thousands of abandoned opal shafts, averaging a mile or more deep. There are signs all over the towns warning tourists and fossickers to be aware of these shafts. You're supposed to cover them when they're mined out, but wooden or metal covers don't last long in the harsh desert conditions out there and a lot of shafts are exposed.

If you fall down one, you're gone. You won't be found. And local gangsters and bikers know that disposing of unwanted bodies down there is a more certain way of ensuring they'll never be found than sinking them in the sea with da cement shooz.

I guarantee the cops have not searched more than 1% of the shafts this woman's body could have been dropped into. If that's where her body is, there's no way she'll ever be found.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-13/trisha-graf-renewed-search-at-andamooka/106673762