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Reporter: A huge earthquake followed by tidal waves

in the Indian Ocean

has caused devastation from Indonesia to Thailand

and as far west as Sri Lanka and India.

Before, I thought I understood --

the world operated in a certain way;

I used to know when I was taking risks.

But when something so terrible came along without any warning,

the rules have changed.

It was a lottery --

some people won and some people didn't.

It taught me the most important lesson --

that nature's in charge.

We had brought my son to the other side of the world.

Dead or alive, we couldn't leave him there.

When we're born, we're given a name,

and we carry that our entire lives.

It becomes a central piece of who we are,

and when that is stripped from us,

it is so fundamentally dehumanizing

that all cultures

seem to agree we need to bring that identity back.

Reporter: For many tourists in southern Thailand,

this wasa paradise.

Not anymore.

The death toll is now rising

as the terrible picture of damage emerges.

Reporter: The Department of Foreign Affairs says

800 Australians believed to have been in Phuket,

in Thailand, have yet to be accounted for.

On the 27th of December,

at about 1800 hours or thereabouts,

I received a phone call from headquarters

advising that there had been a major incident in Thailand.

I contacted the AFP in Canberra,

and I said, look, it's my gut feeling

that we're going to become heavily involved in this.

We had a fully equipped team

ready to depart within 24 hours.

It constituted police forensic specialists,

forensic dentists, fingerprint experts,

and all the equipment

that they would require to set up a mortuary,

the postmortem work in the field.

At that stage, it was believed

there were 300 deceased persons on a beach in Phuket.

Suddenly, I realize there is no noise anymore.

There is no birds, no dogs.

I realized something was wrong.

Took my daughter,

take my wife and run away without seeing anything.

We'd probably been kayaking

for around 10 or 15 minutes at that point.

We hired two kayaks, one for Matt, my boyfriend, and me,

and then my mum and Alice where in the other kayak.

No one else around, calm,

I couldn't believe how beautiful it was.

Took a photo of my mum and sister.

As I started to lower my camera,

something just felt different.

It was a ridge of white.

And it was moving.

Um...

And it just looked so wrong.

Didn't know what to do, just a...

a moment of absolute stunned silence and disbelief.

None of us screamed, none of us cried.

It hit us.

I grabbed my daughter.

She was only six months.

And I run away from it.

And I run...

I don't know, not much -- like, 100 meters, not much.

And suddenly I feel like I have got something in my back,

something huge.

And I turn and I see, like,

this wall, black wall, five meters high.

uh, it was the -- it was the wave.

The current became really strong.

After one second, I lost my daughter.

She knows she was going.

I couldn't see her eyes.

We see each other,

and I saw she was scared because she realize something was wrong

because I didn't hold her anymore,

and she was in the water, and we see --

and that's the last time I saw her.

Suddenly, I heard my wife screaming,

"Where is she?! Where is she?!"

because she saw I lost her,

so I just grabbed her and she was screaming.

I think when she realized she -- we lost our baby,

she decided to die at this moment,

because I try to hold her and I put her on the trees,

but she didn't hold the trees, she was like...

she want to leave it.

And after a while, I lost her hand.

I don't know how long I was underwater for there.

I had absolutely no control of my body.

My head kept hitting the rock.

My body was being thrown around, spinning and spinning

and spinning and spinning like a rag doll.

I kept saying to myself,

"You're not going to die like this."

I got quite angry.

I was saying inside my head,

"There is absolutely no way you're going to die here.

This is not going to happen."

After a while, the water started to settle a bit around me

and went quiet still then.

And I immediately put my arms up

to swim up to the surface.

When I emerged, I saw my mum and Alice and Matt

all there together in a line in front of me.

They didn't look well.

They looked haunted.

I couldn't... couldn't quite believe it,

but there was another wave really, really close,

really close, coming really, really fast.

I was pushed under water again.

This time when the water calmed,

I came up to the surface and nobody was there.

I swam around trying to find my family, trying to find Matt.

My gaze fell on a body.

I instantly knew it was my mum.

I breathed into her mouth

and could just hear gurgling.

Absolutely no response.

As I was holding her,

I was aware of something else in the water --

again, the same kind of feeling --

and looked out,

and there was another wave coming towards us,

and it was...

one of the hardest moments in my life.

I couldn't get mum out, but I had to just leave her.

Within the region, Australia had developed

something of a reputation around disaster victim identification,

largely that had evolved from deployments

to the Bali bombings in 2002.

Northam: General Nopadol was the go-to man,

and he was the decision maker.

He had the ear of government

and that was really important for us.

He advised us that the biggest scale of the problem

was actually not in Phuket at all,

was actually to the north and losses were far greater.

And that that's where he would like the Australian team

to deploy to.

As you're coming into Khao Lak from the south,

you come in through some mountainous countryside

that's very close to the sea.

There's, like, a bend in the road

that goes down into Khao Lak.

And so you can see the whole of that district.

And, um...

Just, um...

Yeah, just unbelievable.

Oh!

I will never forget that first 24 hours in Thailand.

We could see fairly clearly that we were no longer talking

about a disaster involving hundreds of deceased,

that in fact that number was now

going to definitely be in the thousands.

And the extent of the disaster wasn't one single location,

but was rather affecting

hundreds of kilometers of coastline.

It's one thing to see on the news

a figure that says so many thousands have been killed.

To appreciate that of those thousand,

you have to try and look at every individual one

and try and give them a name.

This is an absolutely surreal environment

on a scale that we'd never imagined.

There had been no international

disaster victim identification operation

ever mounted on the scale

that we were witnessing in Thailand.

What would be our approach,

how would we absolutely deal with this

in any sort of sensible fashion?

And actually questioning

whether we could do it or not at all.

Shonti and Stu and I got up very early,

about daylight,

and went down to the dive shop

and took a boat out to Koh Bon Island.

My sister decided she wanted to hang out with my brother

instead of going out with us.

They were going to go swimming and play

and just hang out at the beach.

We jumped in the water and immediately

knew something was up.

It was just -- there was no fish.

The water was just full of bubbles.

No fish.

I don't know where they were, they were hiding.

And while we were eating lunch, the live-aboard,

which is a big boat,

went up in the air and paused

and then it went down.

And everybody on the boat went, "Whoa, what is that?"

And then the dive master said, "Everybody,

get on the speed boat, we're going back to shore."

About a mile from the Thailand coast,

we started to see these trails of debris in the water.

First it was boards,

and then there were palm trees and mattresses,

all this stuff that -- and we didn't know what --

Pulled in a few people who had been killed

and then a few people who were injured,

and the captain took as many people as he could,

but he had to stop because the boat wasn't big enough

to be carrying too many people.

We went in to shore from there, and the dive master said,

when you get to shore,

jump off the boat and run as fast as you can,

as far as you can, as high as you can,

because we don't know if another wave is coming.

I've never been that scared in my entire life.

I remember having to pee and I didn't even dare stop.

I just peed while I was running.

And you were stepping over bodies

and you're stepping over debris and people's belongings,

and it looked like a bomb had gone off

and just leveled everything on the beach.

Sally: I was thinking the kids were okay

because this wasn't the beach they were on.

And I just assumed they would be okay.

The further north we went,

the larger the numbers of deceased that we witnessed.

The bodies had been recovered

and were then being taken to "wats," or temples.

Travers: You'd see bodies arrive in the back of utes,

you'd see bodies arrive in dump trucks,

you'd see bodies arrive in garbage trucks --

every time you turned around,

you might start to clear or move five bodies,

five or 10 more would arrive.

The Thais believe that the spirits of the deceased

needed to rest in a holy place,

which was the temples or wats, where the bodies had been taken.

Families began to arrive very early on

in search of looking for their loved ones at the temples.

I was their link into the forensic operation,

their link into the Thais,

and they were just hungry for information,

and it was really challenging because all they wanted

was to bring home the body of their loved ones.

And it wasn't going to be quick.

And we'd spoken to Christian and Moi on Christmas Day.

You know, the whole calling everybody,

they called and they're having a wonderful time in Thailand.

So he rang on Christmas Day,

thanked me for the presents, and he said,

"By the way, you're going to become a grandfather."

And I thought, "Oh! Dear, oh, dear!"

And I... I thought later

I probably should have sounded more excited than I did,

but I'll make that up for the next time I speak with him.

Was such a wonderful moment

and hearing that they'd found this incredible, beautiful place

and were having such a wonderful time.

Reporter: It's a terrible and developing story

from Southeast Asia tonight where a massive earthquake...

Reporter: Hundreds of Australians missing

in the tsunami-hit areas of Southeast Asia.

Reporter: ABC's Peter Lloyd

now reports from the resort town of Phuket,

which bore the brunt of the tsunami.

I think it was the morning of the 27th

that we saw something on the news

that there were -- something had happened in Phuket.

We didn't even take much notice of it because we thought,

"Oh, they're not in Phuket.

They're somewhere out there in Khao Lak

and that's somewhere further north."

Richard: And I saw it on the front page of the paper

that there'd been this massive tsunami.

So I rang my daughter and said,

"Look, I'm not familiar with this part of Thailand.

Is this where Christian was staying?"

And she said, "No, don't worry.

I think he was around in the bay behind."

The tsunami toll is now reaching levels

no heart or mind can truly comprehend.

Many of the worst affected areas still haven't been contacted

or assessed.

Because we couldn't get hold of them,

you know, we started to become increasingly worried.

And then all their friends and all the families

started to call us and call them, and nobody knew.

We said, "We have to go to Thailand, someone's got to go."

Basically, we just all rallied together --

within 24 hours, we got people on planes,

we put posters together.

Was my father calling me,

and he told me he had seen on the news

that something bad has happened in Thailand,

but he told me not to worry

because they're only talking about Phuket.

And my girls were up in Khao Lak with my ex-husband, Joun.

But as I didn't get contact from them,

I started to get worried about

if something had happened to them.

We decided to go down to look for our family ourselves.

My purpose with the trip was to go down

and get them back to Sweden alive.

I couldn't think in any other way.

For me they were alive.

And actually, when we went on the plane,

I felt a little bit, "This is just stupid --

probably when we land in Thailand,

I will have information

that they are already back in Sweden."

There were Thai teams that had deployed

from the Ministry of Public Health

and they were working on the deceased on the ground

in terms of trying to conduct some process

that would assist them in identification.

So Dr. Porntip is a Khun Ying.

She's recognized by the royal family.

So she has enormous standing in Thailand.

She had a great deal of gravitas and influence

with the Thai people.

And so she had set up her operation at Takua Pa,

which was probably one of the largest DVI sites initially.

Dr. Porntip was a strong believer

in separating the Thai deceased from non-Thai deceased

and running a separate process.

From her perspective,

you could quickly identify whether someone was Thai or not

based on their physical appearance,

based on their clothing.

Ellis: If you have a line of 20 people who've died,

they may have looked quite different during life,

but if you observe them after one,

two or three days of death,

they will develop an appearance

that is quite indistinguishable from each other in the sense

that they will all look bloated and green or black.

Trying to make a determination based on visual was impossible,

almost from the time I arrived on the 29th

and started looking at deceased.

It was a very rapid decomposition process

that to continue to utilize that method was a facade --

even if you had early photographs of that deceased,

how are you gonna have confidence that that photograph

was then definitely still that deceased?

And enable body release would, to me, be extremely high risk.

And so you realized that you have to use

more scientific methods to distinguish them.

Do you have to look at various aspects of the body

that are unique, of which, of course,

the DNA is one,

fingerprints, the dental appearance.

In those early days of the -- of the disaster,

there would have been hundreds of bodies

released by different Thai groups

operating at different sites to families

who had believed they had identified a missing person.

We didn't know how many of those were correctly identified.

Because you don't make one error.

If you release the wrong body,

that body was a different identity.

You then immediately create a second error.

For me, that was untenable.

It was a concern for families, though,

because they were aware of the foreigners

being separated out from the Thais,

they were also aware that bodies were being cremated.

The concern was,

how do I know that wasn't one of my loved ones?

How do I know that it hasn't got caught up

in a different process?

I was in the middle of nowhere.

I don't know what happened really.

And I was naked and I was so black

because I've got so much mud everywhere.

I was like a nuclear bomb or something like that, you know?

My first thing, instinct was,

"Where are they? We have to find them."

I say, I'm going to go where we were, to the hotel,

or try to find something there if they're there.

So when I arrived there,

it's like everything gone.

There's no hotel anymore.

I became obsessed about finding her any case.

Going to hospital, every room.

From 6:00 to midnight,

doing that for days and days.

I was really on a mission.

My mission was, I need to find them, I need to find them.

So we were the only hospital, but also we were doing temples.

I gradually got up and started shouting, just thought,

surely someone's got to hear me, there's got to be someone there.

I wanted to find Alice and Matt,

so I started screaming for them.

I started screaming for help.

The whole top half of my right leg was open down to the bone.

I saw two guys.

And they stared back at me.

I was covered in blood from head to toe.

They picked me up, they carried me

in kind of a fireman's lift.

I told them about my mum and that I saw her body.

Suddenly, Matt was there by my side.

Um...

With a bandage round his head, but he was walking.

Just knew that...

whatever was going to happen,

it was going to be easier now.

I couldn't work out where Alice had gone.

I hadn't seen her since that first wave.

And I thought she must be there somewhere, she must be.

And maybe she is alive, maybe she's stranded.

The bungalow where the kids were sleeping was leveled.

You know? I found my suitcase.

Found Sally's suitcase,

and we found most of our stuff.

But didn't find the kids.

So I just prayed that they had survived

and somebody had taken them to a hospital

and, you know, they were...safe.

A Thai woman came up who had been one of the women

who cleaned at the resort,

and she said, "Babies."

So she just mimed that they were sleeping and the wave had come

and had taken them, and, you know,

and I said, "Did they get out? Did anybody warn them?"

And she didn't understand what I was saying.

But she -- so she just kept repeating,

"Baby sleeping,"

and then doing the wave motion.

And at that point, we both started crying because it was--

We just kept searching, searching and searching

and searching, and from dawn till dark.

Before there was some control,

there were families going through

piles of bodies, trying to find,

you know, their loved one,

and the despair

and the desperation and the chaos,

the screaming, the wailing,

it was just an absolute complete sensory overload.

I stop looking at those dead body.

If I -- I find her, we never know.

You collect hundreds of bodies,

and for the babies,

which I was sure about my daughter, she was dead,

but I say, I have -- I need to find her body also.

So for the babies, they cover the face and everything.

So you have to unwrap to see which baby was inside.

So I unwrapped, like, so many of them.

They had lists that were missing people,

lists that were coming from the hospital,

and then they had lists that were for survivors.

You would sign a missing person list

and put everybody that you're missing.

And then on the survivor list, you put your name.

Everybody is, like,

trying to put photos on the board.

"Have you seen this -- this -- those people," you know?

And, uh, yeah, and you...

you try, you hope, you put in a number,

and you hope someone's going to call you,

and say, "Oh, I see this woman, I see that..."

Edie: We just didn't know about Alice

because we were told such conflicting information

during the time we were in hospital in Krabi.

We were told my mum had died,

but my sister was officially missing.

We were then told that Alice was definitely dead.

And -- but then I was also down on the list as having died, too.

So it was all incredibly confused.

Krabi Hospital was just packed full of people

lying on the ground, crying.

Part of my leg were they were sewing up,

the anesthetic didn't seem to have worked,

and I could just feel everything

and started screaming out for more,

but they wouldn't give me any -- any more.

And all around me, I could just hear people

screaming and crying.

And then I started screaming and crying.

And it was just...

Yeah, it was just horrible.

I knew how important it was to try and find them

as quickly as possible

and try and identify them.

We felt very cut off from what was happening,

but we had a television.

We could see and understand more

the fact that this had really been almost a global event,

global catastrophe that had happened.

Other foreign nations, they had started to arrive...

And were looking for their own --

so their process was, they wanted to identify

their own nationals.

Everybody's been sent there by their government,

and their job is to identify their citizens

and return and repatriate their citizens.

Now, you can't look at somebody and go, "They're British."

You know, we don't have the flag tattooed generally

on any part of our body that allows you to do that.

You come from Asia, come from Europe,

come from Australia, America -- they all look all the same,

because decomposing is a natural process,

and body change in the same way.

Doesn't matter what color you have before or what religion,

you know, what culture.

It doesn't matter because the body decompose in the same way.

And I think every police force that responded

from around the world had that same initial belief.

And it was only when we got there

and we saw the condition of the victims,

that we realized what a difficult task

that was going to be.

Because in that heat

and in that humidity

and with the fly and maggot activity that's going on,

then you can see identification

disappearing in front of your eyes.

More a body decomposes, you're losing forensic opportunities

quite significantly.

Black: The whole thing is about a race for time.

We need to get these bodies cooled down.

We need to slow decomposition; we need to halt it.

Get them frozen so we could preserve

as much of the forensic evidence as we could.

And then the next stage was to be able

to get what they call the "reefers" in,

which are the refrigerated trucks.

Each nation has a way of doing business in their home nation,

so when they come and deploy somewhere,

they want to just do what they would normally do.

But that's not possible in an international operation

on this scale.

Some teams, field teams in some countries had,

in the instances of of identifying fingerprints,

found it easier to remove the hands of victims

in order to correctly roll a set of fingerprints

to forward for identification.

This certainly, from a moral perspective,

we had a problem with that,

and we needed to issue a very strong sanction

because we wanted to ensure that everyone understood

that if you came to Thailand and you joined the team,

that you would operate to the protocols laid down

by the Interpol compliant process.

So it was very, very soon clear

that we cannot work just for our own victims.

On the 12th of January, we got agreement

that it would be an integrated process.

Separation of Thai and non-Thai would cease,

and that all postmortem information

relating to deceased persons,

whether they be Thai or non-Thai,

would be combined and sent to

the information management center in Phuket.

It was absolutely pivotal that all countries that were involved

had to put aside the fact

that they were representing their own nation first,

had to put that aside and join the TTVI,

the Thai tsunami victim identification operation.

And if they agreed to that, then they agreed to a new protocol

that we would identify all persons deceased in the tsunami,

irrespective of race, creed or nationality.

We moved from this very difficult early stage

to something which was more coherent,

more sustainable.

It was our best prospect of getting the results

that everybody needed

as far as identifying their family members

and having them return.

The mantra was, we will get them home.

It was defining, I guess, the mission for the whole TTVI.

We'll get everybody home --

we're not just going to take some home,

we want everyone home.

We turned their area where they prayed

into a mortuary overnight.

We left at five o'clock one night and nothing was done.

We came back at, you know, six o'clock the next morning

and there was basically four walls and a roof,

and we were able to start doing the things we needed to do.

It passed no building regulations.

It passed no health inspection.

By putting up boards, by installing air conditioning,

by moving in the examination tables,

that us and other countries had brought in for them,

but the Thais were very smart.

They realized it was something they had to achieve

and they changed it very, very well

within one week of the disaster,

we had the first postmortem examinations performed

in that mortuary,

which, given the scale, was quite extraordinary.

The purpose of this examination wasn't to establish

a cause of death -- that was not an issue.

But the purpose of the examination was to collect data

that could be used to identify each individual body.

But knowing that we've got literally thousands of bodies

to go through, so you have to start somewhere.

So the pressure is just, let's get it started.

The way in which it worked was just unique

because it just brought 31 different nations into one room,

into one office, into one process,

and everybody worked alongside each other

because we were all there for the same reason

and we were all there for a common goal,

and that was to identify the victims,

return them back to their families,

and try and help Thailand recover from

the situation they -- they found themselves in.

What I met in Thailand, at the worst days of my life,

was all this kindness from the Thai people.

I knew that was Thai people that have lost everything,

lost not just relatives,

but everything -- homes, jobs, everything,

and still they were helping the Western people.

They were actually not of this world.

For me, my daughters were alive.

I wanted to go up and see with my own eyes

what had happened up in Khao Lak.

At that moment, I realized if...

if anyone has survived here,

they were the lucky ones.

I lost control over my body, actually, I couldn't move.

It was like ev--

It was like...

Like all the strength just left me.

And then we left the day after.

And I came home without them.

Edie: The British government had chartered

a plane leaving Bangkok.

I had to have some medical attention

very quickly back in the UK.

The moment that the plane left the tarmac,

I just had a real feeling of -- feeling in my gut

that it was just wrong, that...

Why were we leaving

when my mum and Alice were there somewhere?

Why were we leaving them and where was I going?

Well, I was going home, but where was that to now?

I cover quite a lot of the area

and I don't see her name anywhere,

I don't see her in any room in hospital.

After two weeks, got no chance, you know,

I was sure I'd done everything to find them.

And it started by -- I think it was my friends,

and they realized I was getting a bit crazy

and they say, "You have to go, you have to quit this."

Because me, I want to -- I want to stay there

until I find them.

But I was getting a bit -- without sleeping, you know,

so I think that's why they put me on the plane.

You know, I couldn't fight that.

I was told that Patrice needed to get back

because of suicidal survivor's guilt.

And it was very important that he would get back to Paris

and be looked after medically.

They put him in hospital for a couple of days to sleep

because he needed to sleep,

he just -- just had -- he couldn't --

he didn't want to sleep because he didn't want to close his eyes

and have that vision again.

But he kept saying he didn't think that Ruby had to live.

That's what he kept saying to me.

He didn't think it was possible that she could have survived

because he'd seen her go into a whirlpool.

And, um...

A-and he did say to me sometimes that he thought

that Sam had given up because she'd seen her baby go.

Uh...

But I kept saying to him that I didn't believe that.

I didn't think that she'd given up.

I said she probably went down,

because he said she went down under

and he said that was giving up.

And I said, no, she probably went down to look for her child.

I thought that Sam was alive.

Well, she was bigger than life.

I think that's what most people would say.

Somebody from -- from the hotel in Khao Lak had told me

that they had seen a lady go up to the hills

with a baby --

she had long black hair and a baby,

and that they'd seen her going up to the hills.

Really, sometimes you just say, "Okay, maybe she --

there is hope if she find her."

You never know.

Until you don't have the body, you never know.

So...

Slater: I think the not knowing is -- must be an awful thing.

And particularly in these open disasters

where there's always that nagging question in their mind,

are they somewhere else

and have they not -- just not come forward?

We've tried to de-- to deceive ourselves

sometimes, you know, that, you know,

if -- if they haven't been identified, they must be alive.

Well, that's not necessarily the case.

We would continue to hold the belief

that they were okay,

that they had made it up the mountain,

that they were in a camp somewhere,

and that, you know, we would find them.

We searched the lists.

There was a dive shop there on the main street,

and the dive shop had lists of people who were alive.

Yeah, we found my brother on a list at this dive shop.

incredulous.

It was just ecstatic, you know?

"Oh, my God, thank you, God."

It was just such a relief.

It was... It was Joy.

Well, his name was spelled correctly,

and so that was a good sign,

since he's -- we all have very different names.

If it was spelled correctly, then he must be coherent enough

to tell someone how to spell his name.

And so that became the mission, then, was to go to the hospital

where they said he was and -- and find him.

And we wandered around looking for him

and couldn't find him anywhere.

We did find out that he'd been moved to Phuket,

so we went down to Phuket at that point.

And when we got to the hospital there,

they told us that he had checked himself out.

He had left against medical advice.

And so we were left with the fear that --

and the anxiety that he was wandering around Phuket,

and we didn't know what kind of condition he was in.

We thought maybe he was just wandering around thinking

that he didn't have any family anymore.

Couldn't find him.

The U.S. embassy in Washington had gotten a call from Jai,

from Bangkok Hospital in Bangkok,

and he had been medevacked to Bangkok.

When I walked in the hospital room,

he was sleeping

and I just stood there and watched him breathe.

And then I went over and kissed him on the forehead

and he opened his eyes and then said, "Hi, Sal."

And I... "Hi, sweetie, how are you doing?"

And he said.

And I really think the only way that I survived it

was I just knew that it wasn't my time to go

and I kept telling myself, like, "This is not my time.

This is not how I go.

I can get through this.

It's not my time. It's not my time."

My sister Kali, she woke up,

and she just started screaming,

"Oh, my God, Jai, come look at this,

you've got to see this, you've got to see this."

And I really had no idea what it was --

I was half asleep, all I was wearing was boxers.

So, I -- I mean, I took my earplugs out

and then all of a sudden through the palm trees,

I saw this giant 30 foot wave

coming, like, right at the bungalow.

And at that point, I just said,

we have got to get the hell out of here.

And I just ran for the door.

And the glass shattered

and the whole thing was under water,

and I was under water the second I open the door,

and just being tossed and turned.

And I finally surfaced after about 30 seconds and realized

I was still holding the earplugs

that I had taken out of my head a few minutes ago

because I wouldn't even have been awake

had my sister not woken me up.

I had to deal with being injured at 16 with no money or passport

and just a pair of boxers that I was wearing to my name.

Sally: And he said, "How are Dad and Shonti?"

And I said, "They're still in Khao Lak

and they're looking for Kali,"

and he said, "She didn't make it."

And I said, "Well, you know your father,

and he will keep looking until he's decided that for himself."

Nathalie: I decided to fly straight away to Thailand

to see if I could find them.

I kept thinking that she was alive.

I think, you know, it was...

too hard for me to -- to even contemplate

that she was dead.

And so we were appointed two rangers and a driver.

We went up into the -- into the hills.

I was loaded with photocopies of a photo of Sam and Ruby.

Reporter: Miles away from Thailand's beaches,

Nathalie Archer is on the loneliest of searches,

she's been told her missing sister, Sam,

and baby niece Ruby Rose might have been spotted

walking into the hills -- for weeks,

she's been trying to find them.

Until a body or the DNAs have been done,

you know, I think that I will, you know, carry on believing.

After, I think, the second or the third day, we'd --

we'd walked, and then they said, "That's it, that's finished."

And, you know, I just burst into tears and told them that

I knew that she was out there somewhere

and that they had to help me.

And, um...

and I took these maps and said,

"I don't think you've taken me here,"

which was the immediate mountain hill above,

or that's where their resort was.

When we came back down and we hadn't found anything

or... or anybody,

I just felt the whole time that everybody would see.

I -- I kept saying, "You'll all see, I'm right."

Phuket was a holiday destination

with a lot of families and a lot of young children

from very, very young, from, you know,

from a few months old,

brought up and through -- through teenagers.

These families are absolutely devastated,

and you really want to try and protect your people

from being exposed to something which is too real

because it makes it very hard for them

emotionally to deal with their work.

But when you actually start to personally connect

with their grief, and their loss,

that's -- that's really hard.

I don't think there was anybody

that I worked with that didn't connect.

Very early in the police, my, um...

one of my team came to me...

And I was quite surprised about it,

but she came to me and she said,

"Boss, we'd like to do all the kids first.

Can we work through the children and get the children all done?

Once the antemortem information comes in,

we'll have that postmortem information for all the children

and perhaps they can be some of the first identified."

Black: What we always think about in a mass fatality event

is the mortuary and the deceased

and identifying the deceased,

but it's only one half of an equation.

There is a complete other half of the equation

because disaster victim identification

is about matching information.

The body gives us the information

in the postmortem examination;

we need to record that.

But we also need to have information to match it to.

And that's the antemortem information.

We have to collect as much information as we can

on every single body

and hope that some of it we collect

will match something from the postmortem information.

And it may be a dental record,

or it may be a fingerprint record,

or it may be the DNA profile.

The difficulty is collecting the information

about the missing persons,

is the fact that we have to go

to some village in the far north of Norway

because there's a small -- there's a couple

who've been on holiday from some village

in the far north of Norway who happen to died in Phuket.

I managed to -- to hold him

as we were tossed around under the water.

Eventually, we reached the surface

and I was still holding him with both hands.

And I remember that we were traveling inland

and the speed of 40, 45 kilometers per hour.

And I remember the palm trees sticking up,

sticking up like small bushes.

I tried to hold him with both hands

and still pedal with my feet

in order to keep us both at the surface.

But I was constantly pulled down by the water.

And when I was, I also pulled him down with me.

So I tried to change grip and just take his one arm.

And that way, I could have one arm to pedal better

and also to push him up and hold --

keep him at the surface as we were flushed inland.

But he had sun lotion on his arm,

and so I lost him.

He was only two years and eight months old when this happened.

Of course, when we searched for him in case of he being

alive and well somewhere, we stayed on.

We felt that we had brought Ragnar

to the other side of the world,

we couldn't leave him there.

Children are inherently difficult

in any mass fatality incident.

They generally don't have dental records

of not any significant,

particularly if they're young babies,

and trying to recover babies' antemortem fingerprints

is extremely difficult,

and of course the same would apply to DNA.

You don't get an idea of the children very quickly...

You have to wait, you have to wait.

Then again, I think the human mind,

with a mother or father, or grandmother and grandfather,

will start to spin on,

"Did she suffer? Did they have pain?

She crying out?"

Not knowing.

Um...

You go from hope to despair

maybe many times every hour or every day,

and it's very hard to relate to

because you don't know and there is nothing you can do about it.

Now, the problem with regards to the Thai victims

was that quite often families,

whole families were killed in the tsunami.

So you couldn't get necessarily

the same degree of antemortem data

that you would have got, say, from Europe.

Not only were we dealing with the recovered deceased victims,

but there was an enormous amount of property

that was also recovered,

and that led to another operation in its own right.

I don't know what was -- what was more bad --

working on the bodies or with the -- with the property,

because I think the property was like a surprise pack--

every pack you opened,

you didn't know what was inside.

Was it a finger with a ring?

Or was it a skull with something in the hair?

I think the first thing that we got news back in Sydney

was they'd found some personal effects --

Christian's, you know, a bag and part of a passport.

Part of a phone.

We take off all clothing, because the brand,

the name can give us some information --

maybe this brand from underwear come from Sweden.

So we cleaned it.

We had a dirty area

with high pressure water and people cleaned.

But you can see also the power of the tsunami,

if you see, you know, the power of these waves,

you can see on the item, you know --

watches destroyed, glass destroyed,

telephones broken,

credit cards broken,

um, glasses.

It costs a lot of money and manpower.

But at the end,

people who lost their loved ones get something back.

Well, when Christian was married,

as part of the service, the wedding rings

were put onto a -- onto a table,

and they were passed amongst all the guests

to touch and bless and passed them on.

And I did ask whether my son's wedding ring

had been found,

and they said no.

So when we got the initial news

that there were personal effects had been found,

but there was no body, we still held out...

some h-- obviously some hope.

It took five months for confirmation

that that body was Christian, so it was May 2005.

Moi, she was identified earlier,

a lot earlier, actually, in February.

It was difficult to receive that information,

but in other ways, it was...

it was almost helpful

because the limbo is so excruciating.

But once you know,

you can then deal with, or process,

and we needed that confirmation, because otherwise,

you just -- you can't put any parameters around it,

you can't grieve properly,

you can't deal with it.

And when the belongings were given to me at Sydney Airport

by the federal police, I happened to look at them all

and then I ran my hand through the seam of the bag

and there, locked in the seam,

was the wedding ring.

And of course, I wear that today

as part of my reminder of him

and him still being -- being with me.

By rejoicing in having that and having him

as a part of the remaining journey that I have to make.

The property, many people think

as a part of the soul of the lost relative, you know.

I think that importance of,

there's a body you want to honor

that that body of your loved one,

and make sure its journey

is done respectfully and with with honor.

And each -- each item tell you a story finally --

shows you the last second

or last 10 seconds of this human.

And they would photograph rings, clothing, scars,

and so you'd have a sheet of four or five pictures

of this body with a number.

And so instead of looking at

the bodies at this point, we were just looking at

a wall of images.

Shonti found Kali's picture

on the board.

Dad! Dad, this is her!

This is her shirt, the one that she bought!

Oh, my God. Oh!

No doubt in my mind it was her.

And I can't even talk about the boards.

So...

We knew it was there.

I don't remember ever breaking down

because of what we were doing operationally,

but I do remember getting very upset about

the kind of -- you know, when you think too much

about the personal loss that people are having.

Anders: After seven months, we were pretty convinced

that he actually had died.

When they came and informed us

that he was -- that Ragnar was identified,

it was sad information because it meant

that all hope of finding him alive was gone,

but also a relief.

Anders: We then knew what had happened

and we also had the opportunity

to take him home

and give him his final resting place here at home.

Forest: Every identification that was made

in its own way was celebrated.

It was celebrated because it was part of the success story

of what we were trying to achieve.

But for thousands of identifications that we made,

one mistake would undo all of that.

And to my knowledge,

there were two separate incidents

where identification mistakes were made.

A Dutch male that was identified as a French male,

I always remember the mother of that Dutch man

coming at Phuket with her family

just to ask us what went wrong.

We took them all the way around the operation.

We explained to them how the mistake had taken place.

But for me to look that mother in the eye

at that particular time

and tell her how sorry we were but we'd made a mistake

is probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Because I looked directly into her eyes,

and for me,

that was a situation that should never have arisen.

It aris-- it arose

due to an administrative mistake.

A set of fingerprints was filed in the wrong file.

Hugo: I never think in Thailand --

I have no time for thinking

about all these bad images I have in my head.

And you come home, then all of a sudden,

you know, something is different,

and you have time to think

about what happened the last 12 months.

I was thinking too much sometimes about

how does the family feel now?

I couldn't switch off.

And after one year, my body collapsed.

Diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder.

And just take me to hospital

for seven and a half months to recover.

I think this was the main problem,

because when you work under these circumstances

for a long time,

suffer with the relatives or be sad like the relatives,

this makes you sad and sick afterwards.

It's my story and it makes me proud too.

Before you would do this again? I say yes.

Even though I know I --

maybe I become sick afterwards,

I would do this again.

We were told by a Australian pathologist, wonderful man,

can't remember his name, but that he had

absolute certainty that the body in this casket

was Kali from her dental records.

He encouraged us not to look.

But my -- for myself personally,

um...

I would have wanted to look at the remains.

I think not viewing the body or the remains,

um...

There could have been anybody in that coffin.

Sussi: The last time I saw them were in Sweden

when they were jumping into the taxi, going to Thailand.

And here I stood in front of a white coffin.

And when it came to my own daughters, I --

I told them I had to see them.

I can't stand at the white coffin

and you telling me this is my daughter.

And they really -- at first, they really didn't want me

to -- to see them

because they didn't --

they weren't sure I would... make it.

Swedish police, they actually brought me pictures

of her before

so I could look at them before I met her

to prepare myself.

And I mean, it wasn't so much left of them.

But I -- I could recognize my daughters.

And actually, Eleanor had my bikini on still,

my bikini -- on the pictures, not when I saw them.

Just...

skeleton left,

but I -- you know, you -- if you're a mother,

you recognize the bone,

the hip bones, every -- you can see that it's your kid.

And people they told me you should remember them

as they was, and blah, blah, blah.

I still remember them as they was, because that was --

for me, it was a little bit, "Okay, it's them,

but they are not here any longer."

I couldn't save them,

but at least I could be with them...

Until the end, kind of, for me.

Until I didn't find Sam's body,

sometime I was thinking, "Maybe she's alive,

someone just grab her and save her," you know,

so I think it's really important that people knows

straight on what's happened with the bodies

and the identification should be really efficient.

Nathalie: When they found the body and they told us

that they'd autopsied it and showed me the proof...

And I didn't believe them,

because it wasn't like seeing a photocopy,

it was like, well, this is a dental record from her dentist

and this is the dental record from from the corpse,

and they completely different.

So I was going, "You're trying to make me believe you,

but you're showing me something that, you know,

I'm not a forensic and I haven't studied forensic science,

but I can't, um, I can't believe you,

now, with what you're showing me.

It wasn't until the 19th of February

that the postmortem took place.

By that time, they had actually got the odontograms

and the fingerprints

and they used that to identify Sam putatively,

together with the jewelry.

Straight on, I saw her watch and a ring,

I say, for sure it's her now.

Mm-hmm.

Christine: And it was so obvious to everyone around the table

that it was an exact match,

but she couldn't take it in, she couldn't accept it,

and she ran out of the room saying,

"No, it's not my sister."

So I had to go out and actually just cuddle her and say,

"We have got to accept this.

This is Sam."

All your illusions have... have been shattered.

I think I just ran out, um...

into the street...

Um, and cried and...

Because I think grief within a family

is always very difficult

and it usually either brings you together or it tears you apart.

Even though I wasn't actually in the -- in the tsunami,

I did have awful guilt.

I felt I should have been me, it shouldn't have been her.

And I start drinking.

I start drinking and taking drugs.

It took me eight years to deal with

and face what happened to me.

When I stop drinking and taking drugs

and I see a therapist, now is hope --

and I'm lucky, I've got a new wife and a new baby,

so I'm not alone,

and they have me, but it's not easy every day.

This little thing, she's four months, and, uh,

she's beautiful, so I have to fight for her,

I have to be here for her.

Edie: Why wasn't Alice found?

It didn't make -- it didn't make sense.

Everything else seemed to have got washed up

or have reached a beach eventually.

But why...

why didn't Alice?

What had happened?

Maybe she'd lost her memory.

Maybe she'd been misidentified.

I would see people walking down the street who looked like her,

her height, walked in the same way.

It still feels unfinished.

She's still here with me.

If you never get that body back --

and you speak to families who have a missing person,

they talk about their life going into a stutter,

that they just can't get beyond there because they don't know.

And it's the not knowing of where they are

and what happened to them that causes this gaping hole.

There's no closure.

So that whole notion of identity is one that

is due to the human condition,

and that is why it has to be treated

with such respect and dignity.

It's the only dignity we can offer

a family who've lost someone that they loved,

is, well, here is your loved one back,

and this is their name.