Shortly after Cathy Lawton posted a photo on Facebook of her and her husband Bob enjoying a drink at Kuala Lumpur Airport on March 7, 2014, her sister Jeanette Maguire sent her a text message.
Cathy, 54, and Bob, 57, were at the beginning of a much-anticipated Asian holiday, and Jeanette was hoping she would reach the couple before they boarded her next flight.
WATCH NOW: Malaysian PM confirms that wreckage ‘conclusively confirmed’ as from MH370. Article continues after video.
“I texted, ‘Have a good flight, stay safe,’” Jeanette, 58, recalls to New Idea from her home in Brisbane’s Forest Lake. “Her reply was, ‘I’ll try.’”
It was the last time Jeanette heard from her sister, as just a few hours later Cathy, who was visually impaired, and Bob, a plywood factory worker, boarded MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that vanished shortly after departing Kuala Lumpur.
The Boeing 777-200ER seemingly disappeared into thin air on March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing, China, carrying 239 passengers and crew.
“Cath and Bob were nervous about the trip,” recalls Jeanette. “Bob didn’t like flying. And Cathy had been having nightmares about things going wrong.”
Despite an extensive Australian Government-led search in the Indian Ocean, the fuselage has not yet been found, and the cause of the tragedy remains a mystery.
Speaking to New Idea on the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, Jeanette admits, “It doesn’t get any easier.”
“You just learn to deal with it. But the feeling of hurt, and the pain of not knowing what happened, is as raw today as it was 10 years ago.”
Cathy and Bob, who had raised three daughters – Glenda, Amanda, and Melissa – in Ipswich, QLD, were travelling with their friends, Rodney and Mary Burrows.
“Cathy was always a happy person, and loved being around people,” says Jeanette. “She loved life.”
On that fateful morning in 2014, Jeanette, a payroll manager who has two sons with husband Sean, was getting her boys ready for a soccer match when a friend of Cathy’s called with the news the plane had not arrived in Beijing.
“When I called my older sister Eileen to tell her, I completely fell apart,” says Jeanette.
Initially, Malaysia Airlines was unable to confirm Cathy and Bob were on the flight.
“It took quite some time,” says Jeanette. “We stayed at our mum and dad’s home for four days waiting for information.”
A decade on, the family still waits. Today, Jeanette longs for a new search for the plane, with hopes it will provide the answers the family desperately needs.
She shares with New Idea, that from the beginning, authorities told her someone was flying the plane “until the end”.
Indeed, among the raised possibilities of what may have happened, is the data-based theory the aircraft deliberately deviated off course and was flown to a point in the Indian Ocean in an act of murder-suicide.
The plane’s pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, reportedly used a home flight simulator to fly over the Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane disappeared. Some speculate he may have hijacked the plane for political reasons, but evidence remains scant.
“I do believe it was deliberate,” says Jeanette. “But I don’t know who was flying that plane.”
And she believes Malaysia Airlines knows more than what they are saying.
“I think there is more to the story than what we’ve been told,” she says. “There’s something amiss in this story. We need answers.”
