When I first met Robyn Lindholm 22 years ago, her driver was a lad named Pat who kept a shotgun in the boot for country buck's parties. Pat told stories of peeling out, buck-shot spraying, horn-dog hayseeds giving chase, and young Robyn being the provocation.

She was 20 years old, an ice-skating champion, newly dropped out of a science degree, moving into animal husbandry studies. She talked to me about her dream of owning her own place in the country, horses, a quiet life. There was nothing to suggest she'd end up burying one, maybe two boyfriends at the wished-for homestead.

Stripping was a means to a real-estate end. Once she got enough money together, she'd be out.

At the time,I was editor in chief of the Truth newspaper, and an offshoot rag called World magazine that hired strippers to appear as characters in stories that were virtual cartoons. We also played pranks.

Robyn – who went by the professional name of Collette – was one of 15 strippers we hired for a stunt that was reported around the world. There was a US nuclear-powered warship in Melbourne at the time. We called media outlets and announced a nude protest, on the docks. The women carried placards reading ''NUCLEAR FREE NUDES" and ''PUSSIES FOR PEACE". I recall it was Robyn's g-stringed backside that appeared the next day in the Herald-Sun and the NT News.

Soon after I was looking for a new job – and Robyn apparently began to lose her way. She held to her dream of buying a farm but the men she became attached to were dangerous, unstable and involved in the city's volatile amphetamine trade. There was her much-reported but little detailed stint as the love of Carlton thug Alphonse Gangitano. As far as we know, Alphonse was the first of her boyfriends to be murdered (famously in his underpants, by a third party, 1998).

Ten years went by more or less respectably for me at The Sunday Age. I began writing cold case murder stories with colleague and friend Mark Russell, latterly senior court reporter. We had just finished The Case of the Playboy Pensioner (one stab wound to the heart, one closet with various samples of pubic hair sticky-taped to a wall of honour) and we were looking for something new.

Exotic dancer and former circus trapeze artist Shari Davison had vanished after leaving Crown casino in the breakfast hours of a Saturday morning, February 18, 1995. The vanishing of this young woman from such a place – a woman who happened to be the mother of a baby still in nappies – put an almost mystical shiver through the public imagination.

We started tracking down people who knew her. What followed was an endless plunge into rabbit holes and a story we never wrote. There were so many rumours, ratbags and depraved offshoots in our digging around, that Shari seemed to shrink further away, become less a person than a smudged icon – something like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks.

In the end, the story led us to someone else who was much like Shari Davison: small, blonde, pretty and off the rails. Robyn Lindholm. We'll get back to that.

An inquest in 2001 found that Shari Davison had a taste for drugs, booze and bad men – and was pronounced mysteriously dead. She had, in the weeks before her disappearance, confided that she was in serious trouble. A gang of young Greeks dealing in speed and guns around Richmond featured prominently in the inquest. Her housemate in Footscray, at the time of her disappearance, was gang member and prime suspect Nick Kitsoukilias.

I managed to speak with a soft-spoken Kitsoukilias via his mobile phone. I asked that we meet, he said he'd think about it. We never spoke again. (A murder blog lists him as a homicide but we understand he actually died in a bike accident in 2014.)

We talked to gang member Louis Roumeliotis, whose former girlfriend did ''double acts" with Shari. At the time, he was back home living with his mother in Abbotsford, a woman worried and confused when she opened the door.

''Yes, mama, a cup of tea would be good," he told her, before losing the sweet demeanour, turning on me and demanding: ''I have to frisk you."

Roumeliotis told a complicated tale about a handgun, 2000 rounds of ammunition, and six ounces of speed that a paranoid Kitsoukilias, under police investigation, had planted in Shari's underwear drawer. ''He told [the police] she got it from me. They think I've gone and whacked her for six ounces," said Roumeliotis.

What especially annoyed Roumeliotis was the poor quality of the speed. If the police had paid attention to how ''crap" it was, they'd have concluded ''it wasn't worth killing for," he said.

Then something weird happened. By May 2005, we were keen to talk with George Teazis, the gang's standover man who had done five months prison on drugs and weapons charges. Teazis was named at the Davison inquest in an odd story where he put a gun to a woman's head and ordered her to move home with her father.

We were also keen to speak with Robyn Lindholm. She and Davison had worked for the same agency – Simply Irresistible website – and were said to have been close friends.

It turned out that Teazis was living with Lindholm. However, by the time we spoke with Robyn, Teazis had gone missing, presumed murdered. And that's when people close to Shari Davison stopped talking to us.

But other people, notably stripping industry insiders, started talking ... about Robyn and George. They claimed Robyn hoped George might rise up in the criminal world and become another Alphonse Gangitano. Roumeliotis said Teazis had a reputation for doing "run-throughs" – storming drug dens and making off with the cash and product.

When we reported that Teazis and Lindholm had suffered money troubles with bikers – being forced to kneel with guns to their heads in a car park outside a cinema – Lindholm called and left a threatening message. ''You better watch what you say."

By that point, any chance of a friendly reunion was gone.

We also learnt that Robyn had another boyfriend at the time, a Hawthorn gym owner/trainer named Wayne Amey. He was working as a personal trainer for a strip club owner who I'd known since the Truth days. She told me that before Teazis had gone missing, Amey had been routinely in tears. ''He said George was knocking Robyn around. He kept saying he was going to kill George. It went on and on. It got scary and I stopped training with him."

I spoke once with Amey by phone. He simply said ''talk to Robyn."

Ross Teazis, George's son, was 16 years old and living with his father and Robyn in a Reservoir house when George went missing. He said that George didn't want to go back to jail, that being a gangster was no longer fun. He changed his name to Templeton, and was trying to go straight, having returned to the family trade as a carpet layer. He took Ross on as an apprentice. The hours were long, the work hard on the knees and the back.

"I don't know where he would have found the time to do anything else. By the end of the day we were both worn out," said Ross of the rumours that George was still hectic in the gun and drugs trade.

As far as the boy could see, his father was building a new life. They were making plans. "We were talking about buying a house and starting up a new business and he was trying to get to know the younger kids," he says.

He said it was very late, the night of May 2, 2005 when George Teazis disappeared. He'd drunk an entire bottle of brandy in memory of his father, Spiros, who'd taught him the carpet trade. As he celebrated the old man's birthday, George was also numbing himself against the guilt he felt for not being around when Spiros had died from cancer in 2000.

Ross Teazis doesn't believe – as was widely reported – that George drove away from Tambo Avenue that night in his 1999 silver Holden Rodeo utility with a silver tray, registration PKS 803, and the words "Carpet layer" written on the side of the tray."He was stumbling when he came to say goodnight," says Ross. "There's no way he could have got the car into first gear. He was just too drunk."

Ross was housed in a granny flat at the back of the house. He usually had his music turned up loud. He rarely heard whatever was going on inside the bungalow that George shared ​Lindholm. Sometimes the three of them ate together but otherwise Ross says he didn't have much to do with Robyn.

Two weeks before disappearing, George called one of his brothers in tears. He'd just caught Robyn in bed with another man (presumably Wayne Amey), and they'd had a violent fight.

The only Teazis who agreed to be named in this story is Ross. But the family insist George had planned to leave Robyn.

At around midnight on that last evening, with George full of brandy, Robyn Lindholm left with a friend named Linda. She says she came home to find the front door open and George gone. The next morning she told police she'd received a text from George at about 2.30am saying he might be in some trouble and needed to be picked up, but didn't say where he was calling from.

Ross Teazis noticed the next morning that the furniture had been moved around, and that a three-metre long rug – black with a brown circular pattern – was missing.

Over the next couple of days, Ross, then 16, says he was given a number of marijuana buds by Robyn to keep himself calm.  About a week after the vanishing, he came home to find the house had been emptied, and there was a moving van outside.

Ross noticed that his father's F100 campervan was missing, along with his motorbike, a boat, a rear-projection television, jewellery, and other assorted goods worth an uncounted tens of thousands of dollars. Ross says he was so stunned at the time, he immediately went to a friend's home to settle himself. Later he tried calling Robyn, to claim his father's belongings.

"She eventually sent me a text ... that there was some stuff at the [Tambo Avenue] house ... it was a couple of boxes on the doorstep. Some clothes and his remote-controlled cars," he says.

When he asked about the vehicles, Robyn told him he'd be "getting nothing ... and she forwarded her solicitor's details."

By then, Robyn Lindholm had tearfully fronted a police press conference, calling for information about George's disappearance. Ross and other Teazis family members attended. They say that prior to fronting the cameras, Lindholm was seen laughing with her friend Linda. Robyn shed some tears as the conference played out, and was seen laughing again when it was over.

Afterward, Ross and family went to the Reservoir house to retrieve some of his clothes. One family member remembers standing in the kitchen, looking at the doorway, expecting George to walk in. Robyn allegedly said: ''I wouldn't worry about that. He's not coming back."

In December, eight days before Christmas, Robyn Lindholm was jailed for 25 years for organising the murder of Wayne Amey. The two men who actually killed Amey were besotted with Robyn. She was living in a car, addicted to ice at the time. Among Amey's sins: he'd planned to take half of Robyn's rural property in a settlement. As for George Teazis, we understand that police are gathering evidence that indicates Robyn was behind his disappearance. The Teazis family have been assured that charges are pending.

Then there's the matter of Shari Davison, 21 years lost. We understand police no longer regard George Teazis as a suspect in her murder, and have shifted their focus to Robyn Lindholm and presumably other besotted fools. There were plenty.