To the untrained eye, the skull numbered JX25321 at the Memorial Stupa in Cambodia is no different from the many thousands of others that bear silent witness to the horrors of the killing fields of the early 70s.
In a world exclusive, The Bug can now disclose the skull's bizarre link to a famous incident that has mystified Australians for the past three decades.
A team of senior reporters, commissioned by The Bug to finally put to rest the bizarre disappearance of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt exactly 30 years ago this week, stumbled upon skull JX25321 as part of their extensive world wide investigations early this year.
An eagle-eyed member of the team noticed that the skull's facemask and snorkle were the exact same brand - Aqua Master - and colour - midnight black - that the Liberal Prime Minister was wearing when he waded into wild surf at Cheviot Beach near Porstea, Victoria, on December 17, 1967.
Initial inquiries revealed that the Aqua Master range, which was never exported by its Melbourne-based manufacturer, was phased out in 1968!
The excited team then could not believe their luck when their examination of meticulously kept Khmer Rouge records revealed that skull JX25321 belonged to a Cambodian peasant named Harri Holtee, executed on December 15, 1977, at the height of Pol Pot's murderous regime of terror aimed at turning Cambodia into a Maoist, peasant dominated agrarian co-operative.
But were the mask and storkle - and the similar sounding name - sufficient to satisfy the team that they had indeed solved the 30 year old mystery of what happened to Holt?
With the permission of the recently installed People's New Improved Democratic Popular Front Government in Cambodia, The Bug investigative team took the skull to the State Forensic Laboratory in suburban Phnom Penh.
Their excitment grew when head forensic examiner Tran Sient declared after only a cursory examination that the skull's cranial space was indeed small enough to have been an Australian Liberal Prime Minister's.
Any lingering doubts the team harboured that the skull was indeed that of a highly placed Australian Liberal politican were dispelled when Tran discovered the skull had an exceptionally under-developed apical mastecal lobe - that part of the brain responsible for allowing people to remember where they've left their trousers.
"But we still weren't confident enough to go before the world media with the news we'd finally found Holt," said a senior member of The Bug investigative team, who cannot be named as he is currently researching paedpophile and environmental disaster stories disguised as a seven year old choir boy in a upper-crust Christian Brothers college in suburban Perth and a female dugong in the seagrass fields off Cardwell in north Queensland respectively.
The team asked Tran to reconstruct the skull's facial features, using the latest computer technology and 21st Century imaging techniques.
"The result was simply quite staggering," our chief reporter said.
"It was uncanny. There before us on Tran's workbench was an exact replica of former United States president Lyndon Johnson's big fat arse.
"We knew then that we had our man!"
Positive proof that the skull was Holt's was only part of the journey of discovery by The Bug's crack team of reporters.
What happened to Holt in the 10 years since he vanished only months after recording a sweeping electoral victory? Where had he been in those years before he fell victim to a Pol Pot soldier's rifle butt in a reasonably sized killing field at Choeung Ek not far from the Memorial Stupa itself? Why hadn't he come home to the arms of his beloved wife Zara? Okay, so they wanted answers to the first two questions.
Inquiries to the Australian Foreign Affairs Office proved futile.
"We haven't a clue what happened to Holt after we put him on that Red sub," a senior Foreign Affairs bureaucrat during the Holt Government years told The Bug in strictest confidence.
Following this paper's extensive research, we can now disclose for the very first time that Holt on his arrival in the then Peking was forced by his Chinese kidnappers to work for several years as a courtesan to a regional war lord in a southern province of China. He stayed on after he had served his term because he liked the work.
Holt apparently eventually fell out of favour with his master for always calling out "Lyndon" on the vinegar stroke, and fled into neighbouring North Vietnam where the Communist regime, suspicious of his previous right-wing political activities, forced him to work for some years as a supply courier working the cramped tunnels of the infamous Ho Chi Minh trail. Because of his stature, Holt proved surprisingly adept at the job, being one of the few people who could do the work standing up.
Once the war in Vietnam was over, Holt drifted west into war-torn Cambodia, where he worked for some time as a tour guide at the world famous Angkor temple.
He fled into the countryside when the Khmer Rouge overran the country, and was working in the fields at Choeung Ek until that fateful day when he was mistaken for an intellectual and bludgeoned to death.
As Holt's extraordinary movements became clear, The Bug's reporting team was still bewildered as to how an Australian, no matter how short, could have passed himself off as an Asian for so long. That was until they interviewed a killing fields survivor, Hoc Woy Woy, who befriended Holt in the final weeks before his murder.
"Harri once told me over a shared quarter bowl of rice how he tricked the Khmer Rouge soldiers," Hoc, now 79, said. "Whenever he saw them approaching, he'd just think of the frequent demands for sex that Zara used to make on him.
"The change in his facial features was remarkable."
