Disappearance
On 17 March 2004, Rau discharged herself from Manly Hospital and disappeared. The following day, Manly Hospital reported Rau to the New South Wales Police as a "missing patient", although they did not consider her to be in any serious danger.
On 29 March 2004 Rau arrived at the Hann River Roadhouse in North Queensland. She was hitchhiking and travelling alone. Since it was the wet season, and she did not have a consistent plan for travel, the locals were concerned for her safety. On 30 March, locals took her from the Roadhouse to the nearby town of Coen, on the Cape York Peninsula. She was taken to the Exchange Hotel in Coen, where locals called the Queensland Police. There Rau gave several versions of her story, identifying herself as Anna Brotmeyer and Anna Schmidt, and spoke both English and German. She said that she was a tourist from Munich, Germany, and that she was planning to continue north as far as Weipa. However, she could not provide any documentation and said there was no-one else in Australia who would know she was missing.
On 31 March, Queensland Police contacted the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) and gave it the details that Rau had provided. DIMIA said that it had no records of the arrival of any person called Anna Brotmeyer. The police returned to the Exchange Hotel, but Rau had left, and they later found her about fifteen kilometres north of the town, where they ordered her back to the Coen police station. There she gave several different stories about how and when she entered the country, none of them consistent. The police again contacted DIMIA, which advised them to detain Rau as a suspected unlawful non-citizen under the provisions of the Migration Act 1958. Rau was searched, and had a Norwegian passport, a book with two names (both different from Anna and Cornelia) on it, and A$2,413 in her possession. Later that day she was driven from Coen to Cairns.
Read more about this topic: Cornelia Rau