A Perth family has doubled the reward for their missing Cavoodle to $50,000, and after more than seven months without a single lead they are still holding out hope he will walk back through the door.
Franklin, known to everyone as Frankie, disappeared from his home in Brabham sometime between 2.30pm on December 28 and 1am on December 29. His vanishing sparked one of Perth’s biggest missing pet searches.
Family friend Mark Ramsden has become the public face of the search, alongside Skye Cooper, mother of one of Frankie’s owners. Between them they have refused to let the trail go cold.
Mr Ramsden is the one funding the reward, and he has raised it again and again in the hope someone, somewhere, will finally speak up. “I got to meet him about a year ago and I kind of look after him when they’re busy working,” he told Perth radio network 6PR. “We became really, really best friends.”
He started with an offer of $5000 and simply could not stop adding to it. “Actually, it’s coming from myself,” he said. “We started at about $5000 and I’ve incremented and incremented.”
His hope was always that the sum would be tempting enough to end the silence, no matter the circumstances. “I was hoping that amount would be something that even if someone had the dog for breeding or something like that, they would just return him. No questions asked.”
Even at $50,000, nobody has come forward with information that has led the family any closer to Frankie.
The search began the moment the Cavoodle vanished, with a community campaign that has grown into something remarkable. Volunteers went door to door through Brabham, handing out roughly 400 flyers, plastering posters around the suburb, knocking on neighbours’ doors and setting up the Facebook page Bring Franklin Home.
They also sat through around 80 hours of CCTV footage from nearby properties, hoping the cameras had captured some clue to what happened that night.
What that footage ruled out was almost as important as what it might have shown. It proved Frankie did not simply slip out through an open gate, door or garage on his own. “We covered most of it, well, all of it basically,” Mr Ramsden said. “He never got out.”
That single detail is what keeps Mr Ramsden and the family searching, certain that Frankie did not choose to leave and that somewhere out there, someone knows exactly where he is.
Seven months on, the flyers are still up, the Facebook page is still active, and the reward keeps climbing. For a family who simply want their best friend home, no amount feels too high to ask.
Image: Facebook
