Episode 154:
She Tried to Escape Her Best Friend and Vanished the Next Day
At 5:49 p.m. on August 5, 2013, Teresa Marsden received a text from her daughter Renae: "Mom, I love you. And I'm sorry." The rest read like a goodbye. An hour earlier Renae had left home in Sydney saying she was going to dinner with coworkers, after dropping her youngest sibling at their grandmother's. Teresa called back at once, but the phone was off, and she called the police. Renae's best friend, Camila Zeidan, drove around all night looking for her.
That night police traced Renae's phone to her red car, parked near The Gap, a cliff at Watsons Bay. Inside were her wallet, her phone, and a Valentine's Day card from her boyfriend, Brayden. Her shoes were found the next day on a nearby walking trail. A large search, including a helicopter, found nothing more. Police began retracing her last hours and learned that the last person she had been in contact with was that boyfriend, Brayden Spiteri.
The Boyfriend No One Had Met
Camila and Renae had been inseparable since they were 15. In November 2011, Camila introduced Renae to Brayden, describing him as a great guy: handsome, privately educated, from a good family. He was also in prison, serving a sentence over a motorcycle crash that had killed his best friend, and he told Renae he would be out soon. They could only text, he said, because his lawyer had smuggled in a phone and a call or a visit would get him caught. In a year and a half Renae never met him or heard his voice, but she believed him. He talked about marriage and children, and she looked at wedding photographers, planned a honeymoon, had his name tattooed, and showed his photo to everyone. On August 5, 2013, he texted that they should take a break. That afternoon Renae called the correctional center directly, a call that lasted 90 seconds, then came home and told her mother she now knew who Brayden really was. A text from Brayden reached Teresa saying her daughter was threatening suicide. Renae calmly said he was only lashing out. An hour later she fixed her makeup, changed, said goodbye, and left. When police checked with the prison, they were told no inmate by that name existed. Neither did his school record, his family, or his father's construction company. The man in the photos was a Sydney carpenter who knew neither woman and said his face had been pasted onto someone else's body.
11,000 Messages and a Father's Spreadsheet
The answer had to be in Renae's phone, but it was locked, and in 2013 police could not get in. The investigation stalled and the phone went back to the family. A friend of Renae's 13-year-old brother found a $100 program that bypassed the passcode in ten minutes, recovering more than 11,000 messages in scrambled order. Her father, Mark, read every one and rebuilt the timeline in a spreadsheet. A pattern emerged. When Renae was texting Camila, Brayden went silent. When Camila's conversation ended, Brayden reappeared. The two were never active at once, as if one person were switching between two phones. Mark took the chart to the police and demanded they reopen the case. They found that both phones always connected through the same cell tower, and that Brayden's number was registered in Camila's name. By the time her home was searched, weeks had passed and the second phone was gone. What officers did find was a stack of the letters Renae had written to Brayden in prison.
A Friendship With No Exit
Camila was possessive of Renae. She once called her sixteen times in fifty minutes, threatened to take away any new friend, and on one occasion pushed and hit her hard enough to leave bruises, then turned affectionate again. Renae told her family she was afraid of her. Camila crashed Renae's dates and undermined every relationship, with one exception: the boyfriend she had introduced herself. In the summer of 2013, Camila went overseas, and Brayden said he would be hard to reach while preparing for a parole hearing. With both of them quiet, Renae told her mother how suffocating the friendship had become, and then texted Camila to end it. On Sunday, August 4, she stayed away from Camila's soccer game for the first time. The next day Brayden broke up with her. Two minutes before her last message to her mother, Renae sent one to Camila: "I'm sorry for everything. You'll always be my best friend." After the disappearance, Camila kept relaying news of how devastated Brayden was when nobody else could reach him, and took Teresa to a house she said belonged to his sister that turned out to be a stranger's. When she learned that Renae's parents had handed his number to the police, she screamed at them.
Final Thoughts
Questioned by police, Camila admitted Brayden was not real but said she and Renae had been secret lovers and had invented him together to hide their relationship from their families. At the inquest in 2020, the coroner rejected that account as a lie. Nothing in more than 10,000 recovered messages suggested Renae knew, and she had planned a wedding and called a prison looking for him. The coroner found that Camila alone had created Brayden and that Renae had most likely taken her own life on August 5, 2013. Her body has never been found. Camila was not charged, because pretending to be someone else was not a crime under the law at the time and there was no evidence of extortion. Renae's family campaigned to change that. In 2024 a coercive control law took effect in New South Wales, making psychological abuse a crime, but it applies only to intimate partners. A friend who does what the coroner found Camila did would still fall outside it.
The coroner found that Camila Zeidan alone invented Brayden and deceived her best friend for a year and a half, yet nothing she did was a crime under the law at the time, and the coercive control law passed in 2024 still covers only intimate partners. Do you think deceiving someone with a fake identity should be a crime in itself, and where would you draw the line?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
