The first police report about Marion Barter, a schoolteacher not seen in 24 years, was marked as an "occurrence only" because there was no sense of urgency and no explicit request to file a missing person report, its author assumes.
Ms Barter's disappearance was reported to Byron Bay police in October 1997 but the police file wasn't marked as a missing person's report and lay dormant for a decade.
Former senior constable Graham Childs on Wednesday said he had no independent recollection of taking the report from Ms Barter's Gold Coast-based daughter Sally Leydon, but assumes from his notes she only wanted the matter noted.
"Without trying to sound dismissive, it would appear the information I was given didn't create a sense of urgency," he told the NSW Coroners Court.
"To record a matter as occurrence only, it would be a person coming into a police station and saying I just want this recorded."
He doubted he'd known the then-51-year-old had secretly changed her name to Florabella Natalia Marion Remakel or that a passport in that name was used for re-entry to Australia on August 2.
Such information was "out of the ordinary" and he would have noted it, Mr Childs said.
Ms Barter, a former NSW and Gold Coast teacher, hasn't been seen by relatives or friends since June 22, 1997.
On that day, she was dropped at a Southport bus stop ahead of a flight from Brisbane to England on what was to be the trip of a lifetime.
Having last heard from her mother on or about July 31, Ms Leydon's concern grew when her mother failed to call brother Owen on his birthday on October 18.
Significant withdrawals from her mother's bank account led Ms Leydon to Byron Bay, where she spoke to Mr Childs on a Wednesday afternoon.
Mr Childs said he could only assume he'd have filed it as a missing person case, had the words "I want to report my mother as a missing person" been used.
But he denied he made an error.
By practice, many people would walk up and report things they only wished police to note, he said.
Mr Childs, who joined NSW Police in 1977 and retired in 2002, admitted he'd not been aware of the standing policy on missing person reports when speaking to Ms Leydon.
He'd also never run a missing person case.
In a statement to the inquest, the boss of the NSW Missing Persons Registry says Ms Barter should have been considered a missing person in October 1997.
But Mr Childs was "a little astounded" someone could form an opinion in hindsight "when they weren't there at the time and didn't have the information I had at the time".
A police officer who picked up the case in 2009 has told the inquest two years of inquiries led him to believe Ms Barter had covertly arranged to estrange herself from her family.
He suspended the case in 2011 and marked Ms Barter "located", saying she wasn't "missing" and there were no fears for Ms Barter's safety.
"It's not the job of the police to find out why, it's the job to find out what happened," Detective Senior Constable Gary Sheehan told NSW State Coroner Teresa O'Sullivan on Monday.
The inquest continues.
Australian Associated Press
