A British backpacker has been bailed out a hairy situation after sending a series of frantic texts to her dad in the UK asking him to contact the Australian police because she’d been “taken by a man” who was driving her to Cairns.
Mary Kate Heys says she thought she was “going to die” after a 20-something Swedish traveller she met at a hostel in Mooloolaba on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast – where she’d been staying since her arrival from Manchester two weeks ago – refused to let her out of a car.
The man allegedly woke her up at about 4:30am asking her to “go on an adventure”; fearing for his safety because he appeared drug affected, the 20-year-old got into the car and immediately regretted her decision.
“He took off really fast and that’s when I realised I was in trouble,” she told the Courier Mail. “He said we were going to Brisbane on an adventure and I was really concerned, his eyes were all wide and I couldn’t tell if he was on drugs or not. I was so scared and I thought I was going to die.”
Heys convinced him to stop at a petrol station so she could get a drink and asked the attendant to take down the car’s rego and call police.
When police didn’t show after another hour on the road, she secretly texted her dad with their location on Google Maps.
“I was using maps to direct him to Cairns and I kept pretending there was something wrong with the app so I could secretly message my dad to call the police. My dad told me he had called police and asked me to keep sending my location.”
The pair made it to Gympie when a police car that had been following at a distance pulled them over, at which point Heys “just ran out because I was so terrified”.
She text her worried dad to let him know she was safe before she attended the Gympie police station to give a statement on the incident.
A Queensland Police spokesman said the man was taken to the mental health unit of a nearby hospital after the incident.
Heys says she’s decided not to press criminal charges and will continue holidaying in Australia.
Source: Courier Mail.
Photo: Instagram / @mkheys.
