sleepers

This episode contains references to child exploitation, grooming, sexual abuse and trauma. Listener discretion is advised. What if some of the most important witnesses to South Australia's darkest mysteries were never suspects, police officers or investigators? What if they were simply there? In this episode, Bryan Littlely sits down with Jade, a witness whose teenage years were spent navigating a...

This episode contains references to child exploitation, grooming, drugging allegations, sexual abuse, trauma, and strong language. Listener discretion is advised. This interview audio has been altered at the request of the Interviewee. In this episode, investigative journalist Brian Littlely speaks with a person who moved through Adelaide’s hidden social world during the 1970s and 1980s. What begi...

This episode contains references to child exploitation, grooming, drugging allegations, sexual abuse, trauma, and strong language. Listener discretion is advised. This interview audio has been altered at the request of the Interviewee. Sleepers begins a new investigative line into The Family and the wider stories, allegations, witnesses, and unanswered questions surrounding Adelaide in the late 19...

This episode contains confronting material, including references to abuse, trauma, and distressing personal experiences. Listener discretion is advised. What happens when memory doesn’t come back clean? In this episode of  Sleepers , we hear from the grand nephew of the monster STAN HART, in an interview that is as fragmented as it is confronting. What unfolds is not a neat narrative, but som...

In this episode of SLEEPERS , two separate accounts, decades apart, begin to flesh out the pattern. The first comes from a man recalling an experience as a six-year-old boy living directly behind Stanley Arthur Hart's property in Yatina, Regional South Australia. He describes a room called a playroom, a space he was taken into and not allowed to leave. The second account comes from an adult witnes...

In this episiode Bryan Littlely speaks to a woman who knew Stan Hart inside the ordinary spaces of community life. Stamp meetings, tennis courts, and coffee with family. What she describes is not the public persona. It is a locked room... A dying wife living in dim light. A warning whispered: ‘Please don’t come back… it’s bad here for you.’ And a man capable of charm in public and force in private...

Sleepers returns after a few weeks away, and it doesn’t ease back in. In Family Ties , brothers Mark and Stephen Marshall confront memories that have followed them since childhood. One recalls being lifted onto his brother’s shoulders and told to look inside what was called Poppa’s Jail . The other, decades later, faces that memory . Interviewed by Bryan Littlely, their accounts are raw, fragmente...

In this final episode of 2025, Sleepers brings you one of the most significant witness accounts ever shared publicly about the disappearance of the Beaumont children. For nearly sixty years, she held her silence. She was a young mother on holiday at Glenelg on Australia Day 1966, sitting on the grass with her children, when a little boy played with her son on their picnic blanket. His name was Gra...

In Episode 10, we mentioned Hannah, a survivor whose childhood memories may hold a crucial piece of the Beaumont investigations. In this episode, you hear her voice for the first time. Hannah takes us inside the threats, the fear, and the world of Les Davis as she lived it from the age of six. She speaks about photographs, a white dress, digging in underground tanks, and the moments that shaped th...

In this milestone episode, Sleepers uncovers the most confronting revelations yet about Les Davis , a man whose name has sat on the edge of South Australia’s darkest stories for sixty years. Through the voice of Kane Davis, Les’s own grand-nephew, we hear the first-ever family account of a figure long hidden from the public record. His movements, his crimes, his aliases, and his presence at Glenel...

Sleepers: The Adelaide Oval Abductions #9 In 1973, seven-year-old Donna was at the Adelaide Oval the day Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon disappeared. She played with two little girls outside the toilets. Then they were gone. Police interviewed Donna soon after, took her statement, and promised to follow up on the matter. They never did. For fifty years, her memories sat alone until now. In this...

Episode 8 of Sleepers takes listeners back to Yatina , the remote mid-north town in South Australia, where truth and terror share the same ground. In conversations with journalist  Bryan Littlely , the survivor of the 1966 assault that ultimately led to the only prison time that Stanley Arthur Hart ever served, they recall growing up in Stan Hart's orbit, a man they would both quickly realise...

Warrior Women, #1 In this episode of SLEEPERS, the silence is broken by voices that can no longer be ignored. Three Warrior Women, survivors, witnesses, and sisters, step forward to reveal what they saw, what they lived through, and what was covered up. Their accounts point deeper into the shadows of Stanley Arthur Hart and expose the cracks in systems that failed to protect the innocent. What the...

In this episode of Sleepers , survivor Paul Cornelius speaks publicly for the first time about his abuse at the hands of disgraced magistrate Peter Liddy . His story shines a light on the hidden networks of power that thrived in South Australia through the 1970s and ’80s, linking surf clubs, politics, and the dark underbelly of Adelaide’s so-called establishment. Cornelius’s testimony doesn’t just...

In our first-ever Sleepers forum episode, the public steps forward, and the ripple effect is undeniable. From firsthand memories of the Adelaide parklands to lost police reports, overlooked sightings, and new connections to persons of interest, this is the episode where long-held silence begins to crack. You’ll hear directly from listeners, ordinary people with extraordinary insight, who may hold...

For over 50 years, Alex Bone’s name was absent from the record, omitted from the inquest, ignored in official files, and unknown even to Joanne Ratcliffe’s own sister. But Alex was there. He went to the football with the Ratcliffes. He searched for Jo and Kirste that afternoon. And, in this episode, he finally tells his story. This is not just a recollection, it’s a revelation that challenges ever...

In this powerful episode of SLEEPERS , we bring you the harrowing story of Alfredo Paglia, known to all as FRED. A survivor who has spent more than a decade trying to make his voice heard. Fred's experience is not just personal; it’s deeply connected to the broader investigation into the Adelaide Oval abduction of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon. He names names, maps connections, and details an...

We had planned for this episode to focus on what is known about our prime suspect, Stan Hart. But two days after Sleepers Episode 1 dropped, everything changed. Out of nowhere came an extraordinary interview with Anthony Kilmartin, the then 13-year-old boy who stood just metres away from the man who abducted Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon from Adelaide Oval in 1973. Anthony isn’t just a witnes...

The Adelaide Oval Abduction - how it started... On August 25, 1973, 11-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe and 4-year-old Kirste Gordon left their seats during a football match at Adelaide Oval… and never came back. Despite thousands of witnesses, multiple sightings, and decades of investigation, their disappearance remains one of South Australia’s darkest mysteries. In this opening episode of s leepers , i...