Greg Jenkins finds his mother Anna Jenkins' remains dumped in Penang Malaysia ... trends now
A devoted son's desperate search for his missing mother has ended with the harrowing discovery of her skeletal remains in rubble at a Malaysian building site.
It's believed that Anna Jenkins, 65, was snatched off the streets while on a trip to Penang in 2017.
But her Adelaide family claims that, when they raised the alarm, Royal Malaysia Police did little to help, sparking her son Greg's own epic bid to find her.
He spent more than $300,000 on 34 trips to Malaysia to crawl through rat-infested sewers and tsunami tunnels on an 80,000km trek criss-crossing the country looking for any trace of his mother.
Devoted son Greg Jenkins found the skeletal remains of his missing Australian mother dumped at a Malaysian building site as he rummaged through the construction rubble
He found part of his mother's vertebrae lying among the rubble and boulders. There were also many of her possessions including a cross and her favourite Vicks cold lozenges
Australian grandmother Anna Jenkins, 65, is believed to have been snatched off the streets while on a trip to Penang in 2017 and was never seen again
Greg Jenkins spent three years in a relentless search for his mother after local cops showed little interest.
The serviceman was helped by his veteran mate who now works in the security industry and they were given tips on how to conduct the investigation by a contact in the police who specialises in missing persons.
He interviewed more than 1000 people and created 12,500 flyers and posters which he personally put up and handed out across Malaysia.
He faced the gruesome task of checking countless random unidentified bodies in morgues and scoured lists of amputated limbs in the hunt for his mother - and even crawled through sewers.
Greg Jenkins interviewed more than 1000 people and created 12,500 flyers and posters he put up around the country
'There are tsunami tunnels around the area where mum was that you can lift the grates off and go through them,' he said.
'I saw rats there that are doing gym workouts! They were huge...
'But there was never a moment I was ready to give up. There were moments I s***myself - but I was never giving up.
'I was chased by a Chinese gang once - they use these gangs to protect certain areas and they have free rein to ignore some laws as long as it's not against people who live there.
'I went to hand out flyers to them and then two guys came out of the bushes with machetes and came towards me, followed by the 10 other guys I had seen, so I just thought I needed to show them how quick I can run.'
The flyers, offering a $20,000 reward eventually paid off when one construction worker made contact by WhatsApp with pictures of his mother's possessions and the remains of her coccyx bone.
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Finally, three years after she vanished, a tip-off led him to the spot where a construction worker had found some of her possessions, including a dentist appointment card, and her coccyx bone.
Mr Jenkins, 43, alerted local police as he waited an agonising five weeks for permission to travel to Malaysia during Covid lockdown.
But it took another 10 days before he could persuade the police to go to the site and check the worker's claims.
When Mr Jenkins finally managed to get to Penang, he was assured police had done everything they could to search the area but nothing else had been found.
He insisted on travelling to the spot at Kensington Gardens, a newly-built wealthy suburb 10 minutes from Penang's Georgetown CBD, which backs onto jungle.
And within moments of arriving he spotted his mother's shoe lying loose on the surface, despite the police insisting the area had been thoroughly checked.
When he returned to the scene a few days later, he finally made his crucial breakthrough after years of searching.
'I asked the building site security guard to just take a video of me lifting the rocks and searching,' Mr Jenkins told Daily Mail Australia.
'It was weird. At that moment, the whole place just filled up with these dark blue and black butterflies. It was just flooded with these butterflies.
'I sat down but didn't think much of it apart from it being weird - and then I just looked down and spotted mum's vertebrae.'
A thorough search eventually revealed dozens of other bones and bone fragments lying just beneath the soil surface.
'The gravity of it didn't really hit me for months,' he admitted.
'It was very much a mix of emotions... I'm very good at compartmentalising everything.
'But I know it destroyed [his sister] Jen and dad [Frank] as well.'
Mr Jenkins later found out the remains were originally discovered six months earlier by workers at the $107million housing development.
But rather than go to police, the worker who tipped him off told Mr Jenkins they were ordered to move the bones off the main site and dump them in the nearby rubble where they were eventually rediscovered.
'I believe my mother was snatched off the street, robbed and murdered, and then her body dumped in what was then jungle,' Mr Jenkins said.
'The remains of a man and a child had also previously been found there. I think it was just a dumping ground for killers.
'But the new housing development was aimed at wealthy Chinese buyers - and traditionally they can't buy a home anywhere that's had human remains on it.
'This development cost over $100million to build but the selling price of the luxury villas meant it was worth more than a billion - so everyone just hushed it all up.
'They didn't want word leaking out that dead bodies had been found there as it's taboo and could have killed off the market for Chinese buyers.
'So they moved my mother's bones off to the side to an area which was going to be a water feature in parkland, and wouldn't be residential land.'
Greg Jenkins and his sister Jen Bowen (pictured) searched relentlessly for their mother
Anna Jenkins' family have endured a constant battle with Royal Malaysian Police who they say refused to thoroughly investigate her disappearance.
Police initially said the beloved Malaysian-born grandmother, from Glenelg in Adelaide, South Australia, was an adult and could choose to abandon her family.
She was last seen leaving her dentist and getting into an Uber to visit her 101-year-old mother who lived nearby - but she never arrived.
The Uber driver claimed she asked to be let out on a busy road close to a mosque.
The last contact anyone had with her was a phone call she made to her husband Frank to tell him she was being followed by 'two Ukrainians who were after her passport'.
Anna Jenkins' family have endured a constant battle with Royal Malaysian Police (pictured with Anna's sone Greg, centre) who refused to investigate her disappearance
Daughter Jen Bowen, 44, raised the alarm with her brother Greg when she couldn't reach her mother on the phone.
Greg is a serving member of the Australian Defence Force and was on duty in Hawaii at the time of the call but wasn't initially concerned.
'I honestly didn't think much of it,' he admits. 'Because, you know, at the time you don't think the worst is ever going to happen to you.
'We thought she had just stayed over at grandma's.'
It was only after they heard about the panicked phone call to their father - who suffers from dementia - that the alarm bells began to ring and Greg returned to Australia to fly out to Malaysia.
His father filed a missing person's report but Greg says the local cops wrote the disappearance off as a 'family issue, not a police issue'.
The family handed out flyers across the country in the hunt for Anna
'We just thought that if this happened in Australia, police would do ground searches,' he said.
