Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast

The Lost Gold of the Avoca - Australian Mystery In 1877, five thousand freshly minted gold sovereigns were shipped out of Sydney, bound for Ceylon on a ship called the Avoca. When the strong box was finally opened at Galle, there was nothing inside but sawdust and iron bolts. The gold had vanished from a locked strongroom, behind seals that nobody had broken. The man behind it was the Avoca's carp...

The Bizarre Case of the Tromp Family In August 2016, an ordinary family from the hills east of Melbourne did something no one has ever fully explained. They left their phones on the kitchen bench, their passports in the drawer, the keys in the cars, and they drove. More than fifteen hundred kilometres, across two states, running from a danger no one else could see. Over six days they came apart on...

The Unsolved Disappearance of Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah - Part 2 of 2 A man and his dog vanished from an outback town of a dozen people, a few hundred metres from home. In Part Two, the rest of the world arrives to look for them. The searches. The divers. A quarter-million-dollar reward. A listening device left running in a quiet house, and a voice in the dark that the police thought might fina...

The Unsolved Disappearance of Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah - Part 1 of 2  One evening in December 2017, a man and his dog rode home from the pub in a tiny town on the Stuart Highway, a few hundred metres up the road, and were never seen again. Paddy Moriarty was a seventy-year-old Irish-born ringer, a larrikin and a creature of habit, who lived alone with his young red kelpie, Kellie, in a fading...

Allison Road - The Haunting Tale of Chrissie Venn On a February afternoon in 1921, a thirteen-year-old girl named Chrissie Venn left her home on Allison Road in North Motton, Tasmania, to collect groceries from the village. She was carrying a basket and nine shillings. She didn't come home. Nine days later, searchers found her body stuffed headfirst into a hollow tree stump, half a mile from her f...

A Lone Wolf? - The Ivan Milat Backpacker Murders - Australian True Crime Everyone knows how the number seven relates to the Ivan Milat case. Seven backpackers. Seven graves in the Belanglo State Forest. Seven life sentences handed down in a Sydney courtroom in 1996. But in August 2025, a list was tabled in the New South Wales parliament that had been sitting in police files since 1993. Fifty-eight...

Home Tonight - The Wonnangatta Unsolved Mystery  In the summer of 1917, two men vanished from an isolated cattle station deep in Victoria's high country. What followed became one of Australia's oldest and most enduring mysteries. A story whispered through pubs, shearing sheds and campfires for more than a century. This week on Strewth , we head into the Wonnangatta Valley to unravel the folklore,...

The Shark Arm Case - Australian True Crime Mystery Anzac Day, 1935. A live tiger shark in a Coogee swimming pool vomits up a human arm in front of a crowd of holiday families. And on the inside of the forearm, a tattoo that a man reading the Sunday paper over breakfast will recognise as his brother's. What follows is one of the strangest murder cases in Australian history. A bankrupt billiard hall...

Junjaree | Njimbin | Brown Jack | Little Hairy Man - Australian Cryptid Mystery It isn't the Yowie. It's smaller than that. Faster. And by some accounts, considerably more unsettling. The Junjudee has been part of this country's stories since long before records were kept. It appears in a newspaper from 1897. It appears in the testimony of soldiers on a military exercise in the Cape York rainfores...

Leanne Holland - Part 2 of 2 - Not a Scintilla - Unsolved True Crime On Christmas Eve 2009, Graham Stafford's conviction for the murder of Leanne Holland was quashed. A Court of Appeal found his trial had been fundamentally unfair. One of its judges would have acquitted him outright. The murder of Leanne Holland was officially unsolved. Then Queensland Police conducted a two-year review, declared...

Leanne Holland | Part 1: A Walk to the Shops | Unsolved True Crime On the first morning of the September school holidays in 1991, twelve-year-old Leanne Holland left her home in Goodna, Queensland, wearing a purple jumper and no shoes. She was going to the shops. She never came home. Three days later, police found her body in bushland off Redbank Plains Road. Within a week, a man was arrested. Wit...

The Unexplained Disappearance of the Patanela | Australian Mystery In November of 1988, a steel-hulled schooner called the Patanela made three radio calls from ten miles off Botany Bay and disappeared. No wreckage. No bodies. No distress signal. No explanation that holds together under examination. Just an experienced skipper asking for directions to a town he'd already passed, a silence where a v...

The Humpty Doo Poltergeist - Unsolved Paranormal Mystery In early 1998, a rented weatherboard house forty kilometres outside Darwin became the most talked-about address in Australia. Over three months, the residents of 90 McMinns Drive reported knives hurling themselves across rooms, gravel falling through an intact ceiling, and messages spelled out in driveway stones, including the name of a frie...

The 6:30 to Gippsland - Australian Unsolved Mystery On the evening of Saturday, 7 June 1919, a fireman named Frederick Mills climbed the coal pile in his tender as a steam train approached Korumburra station in South Gippsland. In the light of the signal box, he saw a body on the carriage roof. It was still warm. The deceased was Alexander Gordon Eastman, a twenty-one-year-old butcher from Prahran...

The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich - The Unanswered - Australian Unsolved Mystery The search covered more than a thousand square miles of Bass Strait. Five days. An RAAF Orion, eight civilian aircraft, ocean-going vessels. The official investigation took nearly four years. In Part Two of Strewth's investigation into the disappearance of Frederick Valentich, we go looking for answers and we f...

The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich - The Flight - Australian Unsolved Mystery On the evening of Saturday, October 21, 1978, a twenty-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin Airport in Melbourne. He crossed the coast at Cape Otway at seven o'clock, right on schedule. Six minutes later, he radioed Melbourne Flight Service to ask if there was any known traffic below fiv...

The Rack Man - Australian True Crime - Unsolved Mystery In August 1994, a squid fisherman trawling the lower Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, pulled a steel crucifix from nine metres below the surface. Strapped to it were the remains of a man. For twenty-four years, the man had no name. An open coronial verdict. A hundred thousand dollar reward nobody claimed. A forensic reconstruction of a face...

The Lithgow Panther - Unsolved Australian Mystery For over a century, something large and black has been moving through the sandstone gorges and eucalyptus forest west of Sydney. Farmers have found their sheep with broken necks and grass still between their teeth killed instantly, mid-graze. Carcasses have been discovered wedged in the forks of trees, well above the ground. A seventeen-year-old bo...

Australian True Crime - The Portland Murders The Old London Affair - Part 2 - The Curiously Overlooked  In 2013, a cold case detective named Tom Hogan sat down with eleven hundred reports and began reading. The investigation into the murders of Claire Acocks and Margaret Penny had been running, in various forms, for more than twenty years. Five thousand people had been interviewed. Detectives had...

Australian True Crime - Part 1 of 2  On April 17, 1991, a stranger walked in off the street and stood behind the hairdresser without making a sound. The door had a bell. It hadn't rung. He watched her in the mirror, told her he didn't like hairdressers, and said he'd be back. Claire Acocks locked up and went home early. She told her friends she had never, in her life, been so frightened. On May 3,...

December, 1978, senior Wellington air traffic controller John Cordy watched five unidentified radar targets appear over the Kaikoura coast. Solid returns. No flight plans. No radio contact. One of them sat on his screen for three hours. Days later, an Australian television crew who had heard about these strange lights boarded a routine cargo flight along the same stretch of coastline, hoping for b...

WANDA BEACH: PART TWO - LINGERING QUESTIONS The bodies of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were found on 12 January 1965. By April 1966, approximately 7,000 people had been interviewed in what was then the largest criminal investigation in Australian history. By 1981, that figure had risen to more than 16,000. The case file exceeded 10,000 pages.  Three suspects have emerged across the deca...

WANDA BEACH: PART ONE — INTO THE DUNES On the morning of Monday 11 January 1965, fifteen-year-old best friends Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock caught the train south from West Ryde with Marianne's four younger siblings for a summer day at Cronulla.  At around 1pm, after walking north along the beach, the group stopped and Marianne told the younger children she and Christine were going back...

Somewhere in the Outer Barcoo, on a remote cattle station in central-western Queensland, there is a waterhole that terrified a district for sixty years. Station hands abandoned a hut they would never return to. Shearers fled in the middle of the night, leaving their swags behind. Two men went out armed with rifles to settle the matter once and for all. They came back without answers, and with thei...

On the night of Friday 26 February 1971, twenty-year-old dental nurse Keren Ellen Rowland attended the Royal Canberra Show. She bought a silver bracelet as a gift for a friend, left the showgrounds, and ran out of petrol on Parkes Way, a quiet stretch of road through the parkland beside Lake Burley Griffin. A witness saw her walking toward a dark-coloured sedan with New South Wales plates, already...