Australian Crime Stories

In the years before Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Siara Glennon vanish from Claremont, three other women are attacked across Perth. One wakes in her own bedroom. One is targeted at work. One is taken after a night out. At first, the cases appear separate. Decades later, they will begin to connect. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In mid-1990s Perth, Claremont was a familiar nightlife strip where young people moved between venues and waited for taxis home. But when three women vanish after nights out there, a place of routine turns into one of Australia’s most infamous crime scenes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1990, three Aboriginal children vanish from the same small community in Bowraville within five months. What follows is a story of fear, suspicion, failed investigations, and families left carrying the search for justice themselves. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1980, nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from a campsite at Airs Rock. Her mother claims a dingo had taken her. Two years later, the question of what happened was tested in court. Told through the witnesses and evidence presented at trial, this episode follows how the infamous case unfolded before a jury. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On a Monday morning in December 2014, customers sit down for coffee in Martin Place. Minutes later, a shotgun is produced and the doors are locked. For the next seventeen hours, a group of hostages move when instructed, speak when permitted, and wait while police negotiate from outside. As hours pass and daylight fades, the siege narrows toward a final break. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Sydney, December 1988. Twenty-seven-year-old American mathematician Scott Johnson is found dead at the base of cliffs at North Head. He had moved to Australia to build a life with his partner, splitting his time between Canberra and Sydney while completing his PhD. His clothes are discovered folded near the cliff edge, and within months his death is ruled a suicide — but over the decades that foll...

Sydney, July 1960. Eight-year-old Graeme Thorne disappears while waiting for a lift to school in Bondi. His family are ordinary — a travelling salesman, his wife, and their two children, living in a rented duplex. Three weeks earlier, however, Bazil Thorne had won £100,000 in the Opera House Lottery — and the media published their names and home address. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

Police have unearthed a total of seven bodies when they conclude their search at Belanglo State Forest. Attention now turns away from the forest and toward finding who is responsible. Thanks to Paul Onions, a survivor of an earlier attack in the same forest, Task Force Air gets its breakthrough. On the 5th of May 1994, police fly Paul to Australia and show him a series of images. He identifie...

Police have just uncovered a fifth body in Belanglo State Forest. The victims span years of disappearances but a pattern is appearing; they all vanished while hitchhiking along the hume highway. Task Force Air has been formed to coordinate the investigation, bringing together missing-persons cases, forensic evidence, and search operations. What remains unclear is whether the forest has revealed ev...

For decades, the road between Sydney and Melbourne has been a trusted passage — a route taken by families, freight drivers, and young travellers chasing work or experience. In the late 1980s, hitchhiking along this corridor is common and unremarkable. But when multiple travellers vanish without witnesses, a forest just off the highway begins to emerge as something more than a place on the map. Hos...

In Kings Cross during the summer of 1975, the Savoy Hotel is one of many old boarding houses offering cheap beds to those with nowhere else to go. But on Christmas morning, neighbours look up to see residents trapped behind windows and smoke pouring from the stairwell. What first appears to be a tragic accident will soon expose a far darker origin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...

In 1977 Collingwood was a dense, close-quartered neighbourhood in Melbourne's inner-north. Its narrow terraces lived in by factory workers, students, artists and independent women carving out their own lives in the inner city. On Easey Street, two such women share a small terrace, but in January the home sits unusually still for days, with only the faint cries of a child breaking the silence. What...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of child murder.  In 1892, Sydney was a city balancing progress and poverty. Thanks to social stigma and economic hardship, unwanted pregnancies were growing and as a result “baby farming” began to quietly thrive in backstreets and rented terraces. When workmen uncovered the tiny remains of infants buried beneath a particular house in Macdonaldtown, the...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of child sexual assault and murder.  Mr Cruel has been keeping Melbourne’s North-East suburbs in a tight grip of fear. This is now his third confirmed home invasion and second kidnaping, with no sign of his attacks slowing. His awareness of forensics makes the police investigation near impossible, but with building pressure from the public, Victoria Poli...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of child sexual assault.  Between 1987 and the early 1990s, Melbourne’s suburbs experienced a series of highly organised and disturbing home invasions. The intruder would tie up the parents, cut the phone lines, and demand money, but at the centre of each attack was the sexual assault of a young daughter. Police investigations quickly linked the crimes t...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of violence against women. In 1942, wartime Melbourne lived under the dim, uneasy glow of the brownout; a city cloaked in half-darkness to hide from Japanese bombers. By day it bustled with soldiers, trams, and factory workers, but by night the familiar streets turned dark and silent. Within the shadows, crime escalated with one predator in particular. T...

In April 1935, a tiger shark at Sydney’s Coogee Aquarium regurgitated a human arm, setting in motion one of Australia’s most bizarre crimes. The case quickly grew into a tangled investigation, involving a crime underworld, a high-speed chase and the murder of a key witness. The story often feels stranger than fiction, yet it endures as a landmark case in Sydney’s history. Hosted on Acast. See acas...

Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence, child murder and domestic violence In March 2004, Anna Kemp and her toddler daughter, Gracie, vanished from their home in Mornington, Victoria. The case began as a simple missing persons report assigned to Detective Narelle Fraser but would quickly became her most haunting case. Over the weeks that followed, the search revealed a tra...

The Argyle Diamond Mine - located in the remote East Kimberley region of Western Australia - was producing more than a third of the world’s diamonds by volume. The majority of these diamonds were small and brown-toned, but Argyle’s global reputation was built on its rare pink diamonds; so when they began surfacing in places they were never meant to be, it became Richard Corfield’s responsibility t...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, drug use, torture and mutilation. Only meters from his home, 15 year old Richard Kelvin is hastily abducted by several people. Being the son of a local news presenter, the media is quickly overrun by the story, and with it, police are pressured to make serious progress with their investigation. They close in on an o...

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, drug use, torture and mutilation. The murders in Adelaide didn’t stop with Alan Barnes and Neil Muir. Two more boys - 14 year old Peter Stogneff and 18 year old Mark Langley — would vanish under eerily familiar circumstances. As the investigation unfolds, it starts to become alarmingly clear; these crimes weren’t co...

Warning: This episode contains themes of pedophilia, sexual assault and mutilation. In Adelaide, following the notorious murder of criminal lawyer Derrance Stevenson, dubbed “body in the freezer”, a series of even more horrific murders would occur. This time the victims were young boys and men - drugged, abused, killed, mutilated and discarded. A trail left behind by an underground world of sadism...

In June 1979, the quiet suburb of Parkside was rocked by a chilling discovery—a prominent barrister found dead, concealed inside a freezer in his own home. The case that followed gripped South Australia, weaving together a tangled web of secrets, complex relationships, and shadowy figures. What seemed at first like a straightforward murder quickly unraveled into a mystery filled with unanswered qu...

On a cool spring night in September 2012, a young woman named Jill Meagher vanished from the streets of Brunswick, just minutes from her home. In a city known for its safety and vibrant culture, her disappearance struck a nerve. As days passed with no sign of her, the public watched in growing horror. What began as a missing persons case soon spiralled into a national reckoning—exposing deep failu...

In April 2002, a well-known Melbourne couple vanished without a trace after a quiet family dinner in the affluent suburb of Glen Iris. Their disappearance would spark a major police investigation, drawing in detectives, media, and a stunned public. What began as a missing persons case soon quickly revealed itself to be a double homicide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.