'I thought I was lucky because I had found my wife's body'

Kathy Salvatori was an all-Australian party girl. She grew up on the beach just outside Sydney and lived there all her life – an energetic, sporty, classically good-looking woman who stuck close to her friends and family and did everything she could to make sure they were enjoying life as much as she was.

Nothing slowed her down. Not the responsibilities of adulthood, not marriage – to the former Australian national rugby league prop forward Craig Salvatori – not even the birth of her two daughters, Olivia and Eliza, who are now nine and six. She was 38 when she died, but looked younger. "She was just an incredible spirit, larger than life," her younger sister Angela Morgan said last week. "She was wild and gorgeous, never boring."

Throughout her life, she stuck to the friends she had made attending Brigidine College, just a few miles from her parents' home in Coogee Beach. She trained as a primary school teacher, but worked mostly as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. It was while she was running the gym at Sydney Football Stadium that she met her future husband. They were together for 10 years and were virtually inseparable. Friends said they even began to look like each other.

There was hardly an outdoor activity she did not adore. She surfed, boxed, went skiing and played netball. She also loved organising parties and never needed an excuse to start dancing.

Unlike many of the victims of the disco bombing, for whom a trip to the Kuta beach was the closest they ever got to seeing the world beyond Australia, Kathy was a regular traveller, partly thanks to the job she held at the time of her death working in customer relations for Qantas. She was on her fifth trip to Bali, surrounded by her immediate family and also by a big clutch of friends. On the night of 12 October, it was her turn to go out. Craig stayed behind in their hotel to babysit the girls.

At first, nobody knew what had happened to her. After a day and a half of uncertainty, Craig decided to put his daughters on a plane back to Sydney while he kept searching. By then it seemed likely she was dead and sooner or later he would have to identify a body. The only question was when – or whether – her remains would be found.

Shortly after the girls left, there appeared to be a breakthrough. The Balinese authorities showed Craig three photos, two of which he felt sure were of his wife. A volunteer at the hospital crisis centre inspected the corpse and confirmed the presence of a caesarean scar and a tattoo on one of her buttocks. Feeling some measure of relief, Craig made the hardest phone call of his life. "I love you, it's Daddy. I've found Mummy," he told his daughters. At first they thought that he meant he had found her alive, but he quickly corrected them. "I'm sorry," he said, "Mummy's gone to heaven." The girls, who were with their grandmother, were put under heavy sedation.

At that point, agonisingly, everything then started to unravel. The body did not materialise, even though the authorities had a body bag number. After 24 hours Craig was told that the body bag had gone missing and that nobody had any clue where Kathy was.

Craig was beside himself with fury and grief. "This is bureaucratic bullshit. What the hell is happening?" he told reporters. "I thought we all had closure. I thought I was one of the lucky ones having found my wife. I'm shattered. It's bloody unbelievable."

Such has been the frustration of many of the victims and their families. A week after the bomb blast, just one body – that of 19-year-old Angela Gollotta – has been returned home. The agony of Kathy's passing has thus been prolonged, and could continue for several more weeks until DNA tests can confirm her death. "She did not deserve this, nor did the others," said her friend Wendy Guthrie.

In the east Sydney suburbs, the mourning has begun. At a church service last week, six-year-old Eliza Salvatori had these words to say about Kathy: "Mummy's an angel on my shoulder and in my heart."