A young boy vanished in the desert one year ago. Why are there still no clues?

(CNN) — Little Gus Lamont was wearing a gray sun hat over his long blond curls and a blue Minions T-shirt as he played in the sand outside his grandparents’ house in the Australian outback last September.

When his grandmother went to check on him, he was gone.

The disappearance of the four-year-old boy from the fenced front yard of a home on a remote sheep station, almost 30 miles from the nearest town, sparked the largest police search in South Australian state history.

Over hours then days, hundreds of police officers, military personnel and other search teams scoured a 3.4-mile radius around the house on foot. But there was no sign of Gus – not his hat, nor his shirt, nor the small boots he was wearing.

Detectives drained three dams, searched six mineshafts and sent up drones with specialized cameras to take detailed imagery, later analyzed with artificial intelligence.

Still, nothing. Then five months later, Police dropped a bombshell announcement –– the case was now considered a “major crime.”

Young children go missing all the time, and statistics will tell you that most are found within hours, inside their own homes, or having wandered not much more than a mile away.

Some are caught on doorbell or security cameras that offer vital clues; others are taken within sight of witnesses who can point police toward a potential abductor.

None of that applies in the case of Gus Lamont.

Police narrowed their focus to three family members who were at the property on September 27, 2025, when Gus disappeared: his mother and her parents.

Detective Superintendent Darren Fielke, of South Australia Police, told reporters in February that “inconsistencies” had been found in information provided by the family members.

“As a result of these inconsistencies and investigations into them, a person who resides at Oak Park Station… is no longer cooperating with us,” Fielke said.

Fielke ruled out Gus’ parents as suspects, leaving the finger of suspicion pointing at one of his grandparents –– who has issued a public denial.

Seven months on, no one has been charged and, publicly at least, police seem no closer to solving what’s become one of Australia’s most cryptic missing-person cases.

Isolated outback station

From the air, Oak Park Station is a dot on a vast, mostly barren landscape scattered with trees, low-lying vegetation and long lines of roads and fences, around 150 miles north of Adelaide.

Two long dirt tracks lead miles away from the nearest town, Yunta, past other pastoral stations and through several gates that police say were regularly locked by landowners.

Until last September, the residents largely kept to themselves – it wasn’t hard given the distance and the long hours needed to maintain a working sheep station.

The ranch is owned by Gus’ grandparents, Josie and Shannon Murray, the parents of Gus’ mother Jessica Murray.

Josie Murray and Jess had been mustering sheep in the paddock with their dogs and returned to the house at about 5:30 p.m. on the day Gus disappeared, Josie told CNN affiliate Channel 7’s Spotlight program.

Shannon had been at the homestead looking after Gus and his little brother Ronnie and had taken her eyes off him while he amused himself, as he often did around the property.

“Shan said that Gus was just down near what we called the bomb shelter, playing,” Josie said in June.

“When we had a look, no sign. And we said to Shan, ‘When did you last see him? And she said, ‘5 o’clock.’ And so, in that … half-hour time frame, he disappeared.”

Josie said Gus loved to explore the property on foot or on his bike, and had wandered away before, but never too far.

Video released by the family to aid the search showed Gus in a large hat, using his bare feet to push his balance bike across a rocky driveway.

“He loved his push bike, pushing that around and just letting it roll down the hill,” Josie recalled. “He was just a normal happy four-year-old child.”

On day one, daylight was fading

When they realized Gus was gone, his mother and grandparents started searching for him around the property, starting with the cellar they were constructing, the pool, and all the buildings.

‘We’ve got 45 minutes of daylight,” Josie remembered telling Jess, so they jumped on their motorbikes to check further afield: the tanks, the dam, the shearing shed.

By 8 p.m., the roads around Oak Park Station were bathed in a darkness only broken by headlights and torches, and the family realized it was time to call the police.

One officer from the nearest town arrived to help them search the property, while a police helicopter with an infrared camera circled above. Daybreak saw the start of a foot search that spread 36 square miles (94 square kilometers), as drones scanned the dusty land.

But high-tech gear has limitations in such an unforgiving environment. Outback sand caught in scrubs and desert grass retained warmth long after the sun went down, meaning “every single bush looked like a heat target,” said Daniel Wood, CEO of Working Drones Australia.

Daytime temperatures were close to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), and the nights were cold, less than 10 degrees Celsius.

“When it gets dark, most small kids have the ability to find somewhere to sleep, whether it be under a park bench or under a bush or something like that,” said retired Queensland Police Senior Sergeant Jim Whitehead, who wrote Australia’s search and rescue guidelines.

“But they don’t have the skills to find water, to find food, to find heat, to modify their environment,” he added.

And searching for children requires looking at the world from their point of view.

“They generally never walk in a straight line. They’re often doing things that adults won’t understand; looking for dappled light, or following a butterfly, or even following a pet.”

Was Gus abducted?

When a child goes missing in the city, police are on alert for a possible abduction.

In the US, roadblocks are erected as the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Response team swings into action. Drivers in the vicinity are questioned, neighboring households searched, and any available video scrutinized for suspects.

In the sparsely populated Australian outback, help takes time to arrive. A second police officer called to the farmhouse that night got lost, and despite the family’s best instructions, gave up trying to find them, Josie Murray told 7 Spotlight.

Oak Park Station is not signposted, and finding the property requires knowledge of the area, Fielke told reporters in February, as he explained why police didn’t believe Gus had been abducted.

“It’s not a place that you just go to,” he said.

No unexplained vehicle tracks were located running to or from the property, he said, and everyone in the area with a risk profile of child offending had been questioned and discounted.

Gus had no routine that regularly put him outside his grandparents’ house at that time of day, so it was “very unlikely” that someone had compiled a dossier of his movements and was there at exactly the right time to snatch him, Fielke said.

“The opportunity for anybody to abduct Gus is extremely low.”

Josie Murray disagrees. She believes it’s entirely plausible that someone drove along the remote road and snatched Gus from outside their house.

And she says that evidence of an intruder – tire tracks or footprints – could have been lost in the flurry of activity that whipped up dust on roads around the property in the early days of the search.

“There would be something out here. There has to be something,” she told 7 Spotlight.

A search by air and AI

Hope of finding Gus alive faded as the days and weeks passed. And with no answers, the aerial search zone was widened to 706 square kilometers (273 square miles).

If he died in the bush, his body should be out there. Or at the very least a scrap of clothing.

In late October, police turned to Nearmap, a company that captures images for insurance claims, in far higher resolution than anything you’ll see on Google Earth.

From a plane flying at 6,000 feet, their photos can show cracks in roof tiles after a hailstorm.

Their plane flew for several days over the entire search zone, taking photos so large and detailed that they needed to be analyzed by AI. For that, Nearmap turned to Sci-eye, a company that uses its AI models to count kangaroos, to inform government culls.

In the images of Oak Park Station, Sci-eye found 10,000 sheep, 6,000 goats, 6,000 red kangaroos, a few hundred emus, grey kangaroos, wallaroos, and a few wedge-tailed eagles.

But they didn’t find Gus Lamont.

Fifteen inconclusive items were flagged to police but “there weren’t any objects in there that were obviously related to what we would expect from Gus,” said Andrew Walsh, Sci-eye’s founding director. Police checked the inconclusive objects, and found nothing.

The technology isn’t perfect, Walsh said; if Gus had crawled beneath a bush to sleep, the camera wouldn’t necessarily find him.

“Maybe he wandered off and is hidden under a tree, and we can’t see under that specific tree,” he added.

Was he taken by an animal?

A friend of the family, Bill Harbison, shared a theory with 7 Spotlight that maybe a wedge-tailed eagle had swooped down and picked him up.

Raptor expert Ian Falkenberg said it’s an example of the misleading folklore shared among farmers about the power of Australia’s largest bird of prey. “Could an eagle have taken the child and flown off into the distance? Absolutely not,” he told CNN.

Female wedge-tailed eagles are larger than the males, but even they don’t weigh more than a few kilograms, he said. And both are too light to lift a child of Gus’ age – roughly 13 kilograms, according to pediatric guidelines.

Falkenberg said wedge-tailed eagles have an undeserved reputation for killing livestock, and in all his years, he hasn’t come across any credible reports of attacks on humans.

Dingoes are a different story.

The native dogs are known to have killed baby Azaria Chamberlain, who was taken in the outback in 1980, and mauled Canadian tourist Piper James, who died on K’Gari off the coast of Queensland earlier this year. But according to Walsh from Sci-eye, no dingoes were seen in the massive search area around Oak Park Station.

Highly venomous brown snakes are also found in the area, and a bite could have killed a small child. But even if Gus had sadly died in the outback, an influx of scavengers would likely have alerted searchers to the presence of his body, experts said.

Birds would have been circling in the sky above, said Falkenberg.

Feral pigs are also known for scavenging carcasses across most of Australia. But Walsh said Sci-eye’s analysis found no feral pigs in the search area.

“Are they actually here?”

The absence of clues, even a scrap of clothing, has pointed police in a direction initially considered unthinkable.

“When we don’t find anything at all, then we’ve got to start thinking: Are they actually here?” said Whitehead, the search expert. “Were they missing in the first place?”

SA Police didn’t name their suspect when they announced they were treating Gus’ disappearance as a “major crime,” but it wasn’t long before word spread that their suspect was Gus’ grandmother – Josie Murray.

Police had earlier said they were considering three options: Gus had wandered off; he was abducted; or someone known to him was involved in his disappearance and suspected death.

Having discounted the first two options, the possibility narrowed to the third.

“They think that I buried him,” Josie told 7 Spotlight in her only public interview. “For so many reasons, it’s ludicrous,” she added. “To think that I could face up to the trauma of doing that would also be ridiculous.”

When asked by CNN to confirm that Josie Murray was a suspect, SA Police declined to comment, citing the active investigation.

Josie and Shannon Murray used to be married, before Josie transitioned in the 1990s. They remain business partners, living and working together at the property.

Their friend, Bill Harbison, suggested to Spotlight that police had focused their attention on Josie because of her “transgender situation.” That was quickly rejected by South Australia’s Deputy Police Commissioner Linda Williams, who told 7 News the claim was “nonsense.”

In January, detectives seized several items during a search of Oak Park Station, including a vehicle, a motorcycle, and some electronic devices. By May, police said forensic examination of those items produced no new lines of inquiry. Nor did they help exclude any suspect, they added.

In June, Josie faced court on an unrelated charge after police found an unregistered silencer during a search of Oak Park Station. In Australia, silencers are classed as prohibited weapons, and owning one requires a permit.

Her lawyer, Andrew Ey, told the court: “This isn’t some James Bond movie where you’ve had a villain or an assassin walking around the corners taking out targets with little more than a whisper of a gun – that is not what the court is dealing with.”

Murray was fined around 10,000 Australian dollars ($7,000) and barred from holding a gun license for five years.

Murray’s lawyer did not respond to CNN’s request for an interview. Lawyers acting for Shannon Murray told CNN she was cooperating with police and had no further comment.

Falkenberg, the raptor expert, said he knew the Murrays for a decade or so when he worked near Oak Park Station, years before Gus was born.

“Most of those pastoral people out there, they’re salt of the earth… That community, they help each other. They’re part of the community,” he said.

“Sitting around the kitchen table talking to them… they were delightful people.”

People are still looking for Gus, one year after he disappeared. Search parties were sent out again in May after heavy rain in the hope that water would uncover more clues, to no avail.

Nearmap took more images of the search zone in August that Walsh from Sci-eye is still examining. “It looks very different from the first time the plane was out,” he said.

Rain has brought new life to the barren, red earth and, rather than giving up new clues, it may have further concealed any evidence of Gus’ whereabouts.

“If there’s anything obvious out there that we feel should be reported back, then we will immediately let the police know,” Walsh said.

Whitehead, the police search expert, often testifies in the Coroner’s Court to comment on the strength of the police search when a person goes missing.

Asked whether SA Police had done enough to find the young boy, he said: “Absolutely.”

“They searched way beyond any chance that Gus could have survived by himself,” Whitehead said.

Gus’ parents have kept a low profile throughout. After police announced they were treating his disappearance as a “major crime,” they thanked the search parties and urged anyone with information to come forward.

“Even the smallest detail could give us the answers we so desperately need,” they said in a statement.

“All we want is to bring Gus home and understand what happened to our beautiful boy.”

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