The Veil

In 1790, the mutineers of HMS Bounty burned their ship in a hidden bay and vanished onto a mis-charted Pacific rock, sealing themselves off from the world. Two centuries later, that isolation had a price. When a visiting British officer, sent merely to train the local constable, was quietly told that a girl had been raped, she pulled a thread that unravelled generations of abuse on Pitcairn — and...

On Queen's Birthday weekend, 1975, eighteen-year-old Mona Blades set out hitchhiking from Hamilton to Hastings, carrying a birthday gift of plastic cups for her baby nephew. She reached Taupō — and vanished. A truck driver's sighting of her in an orange Datsun launched one of New Zealand's largest manhunts: more than 500 cars, thousands of hours, not a single trace found. Fifty years on, her body...

He was a successful Florida businessman with a waterfront house, fast cars, and a camera — and a name that surfaced, twenty years earlier, among the suspects at Wanda Beach. In early 1984, Christopher Wilder began to kill. Over six weeks and sixteen states, the Australian-born "Beauty Queen Killer" lured young women with the promise of a modelling shoot, abducting at least twelve and murdering eig...

On a windy Monday in January 1965, two fifteen-year-old best friends, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, took four young children to Cronulla. When the little ones tired, the girls walked on into the sandhills behind Wanda Beach and never returned. Their bodies were found the next morning, stabbed and partially buried, a thirty-four-metre drag mark telling the story of one friend's desperate...

In the summer of 1483, two boys vanished behind the walls of the Tower of London. Edward the Fifth, twelve years old and uncrowned, and his nine-year-old brother Richard were last seen at the windows, growing fainter, until they appeared no more. Their uncle took the throne as Richard the Third. For five centuries the blame has shifted — Richard, Buckingham, Henry Tudor — while pretenders claimed...

Between 1968 and 1969, three women — Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock — were each murdered after a night at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom. All three were beaten and strangled, their handbags taken, their bodies left near home. The press named the unknown killer "Bible John," after the scripture-quoting stranger who shared a taxi with Helen and her sister Jean — the one witness w...

On the night of 23 December 1996, French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was beaten to death outside her isolated holiday cottage in West Cork, Ireland — chased down her own lane and killed with a rock and a concrete block. Fifty injuries; a body left exposed so long the time of death was never fixed; a bloodstained gate that vanished from police custody. A local journalist, Ian Bailey, be...

On a January night in 1931, an insurance agent named William Wallace was lured across Liverpool by a phone call from a stranger — "Qualtrough" — to an address that didn't exist. While he searched, his wife Julia was beaten to death in their own parlour. Yet his suit was spotless, the weapon vanished, and the timing was almost impossible. Convicted of her murder, Wallace became the first person in...

On the last night of February 2000, in the small Hunter Valley town of Aberdeen, a miner named John Price was stabbed to death in his own home — a death he had predicted aloud to his workmates the day before. But the murder was only the beginning. Over the hours that followed, Katherine Knight, a skilled abattoir worker, used the trade she'd spent thirty years perfecting to do the unthinkable to h...

In the final chapter of Murder in the Pacific , The Veil leaves the islands for the mountains of Papua New Guinea — and the Black Cat Track. In September 2013, a guided trekking party was ambushed at a remote jungle camp. The story made headlines as an attack on eight foreign hikers, but the truth lay with the men carrying their bags. Three porters died; others were maimed for life. Ryan Wolf exam...

On Easter Sunday 2002, Janelle Patton — a 29-year-old Sydney woman seeking a fresh start — was found brutally murdered on Norfolk Island, a tiny, idyllic community of fewer than 2,000 people. With 64 injuries and no clear motive, the case sent shockwaves through a place that hadn't seen a murder in over a century. Investigators faced a closed, tight-knit community reluctant to talk, and a tangle o...

In June 2016, a Russian couple — Yuri Shipulin and Nataliya Gerasimova — drove away from their farm in the Fijian highlands and never came back. Two days later their Landcruiser was found at Natadola Beach. A week after that, the first remains began washing up on the sand. This is the first of a three-part Murder in the Pacific series for The Veil — three cases set in the places we usually think o...

On a winter night in 2001, an orange Kombi pulled over on the Stuart Highway. By morning, Peter Falconio was missing, his girlfriend Joanne Lees was hiding in the scrub, and Australia had its most enduring outback mystery. This episode traces what happened that night, the manhunt that followed, the DNA evidence that convicted Bradley Murdoch, and the death — in July 2025 — that took the location o...

On a Sunday night in August 1980, a baby disappeared from a tent at the base of Uluru. Her mother said a dingo took her. The country called it a lie. Lindy Chamberlain spent three and a half years in a Darwin prison for a murder that never happened — convicted on forensic evidence that turned out to be sound deadener from a Holden Torana, by a public that decided early she didn't grieve correctly....

On the morning of 20 June 1994, in a weatherboard house in Andersons Bay, Dunedin, five members of the Bain family were shot dead. One survived: 22-year-old David Bain, who had come home from his paper round and called 111. Convicted in 1995. Acquitted at retrial in 2009 after the Privy Council quashed the original verdict. Two stories, told for thirty years, about one morning. The rifle prints, t...

On the morning of 8 April 1994, an electrician named Gary Smith climbed the stairs to a greenhouse above a Seattle garage and discovered the body of Kurt Cobain. The ruling was suicide. It held for thirty years — through a Seattle Police review, through documentaries, through one private investigator who never accepted it. Then in November 2025, an international forensic team published a peer-revi...

On a cold Saturday afternoon in August 1973, eleven-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe took four-year-old Kirste Gordon to the toilet at the Adelaide Oval, and the two of them never came back. Thirteen thousand people were at the football. Three witnesses, in three different parts of the city, watched a middle-aged man carry the smaller girl through the parkland while the older one fought him for the entir...

The episode examines the Aramoana massacre, one of New Zealand’s deadliest mass shootings. Over 36 hours in November 1990, gunman David Gray killed 13 people in the small coastal settlement of Aramoana. The story traces how an isolated dispute escalated into extreme violence, the fear that gripped the community, and the police response that ultimately ended the siege. It also explores the lasting...

The death of Hollywood star Natalie Wood remains one of the industry’s most enduring mysteries. In November 1981, Wood vanished from a yacht off Catalina Island during a weekend trip with her husband, Robert Wagner, and actor Christopher Walken. Hours later, her body was found floating in dark, cold waters. Officially ruled an accidental drowning at the time, the case has since been reopened amid...

Byron Bay is paradise. It is also, by NSW Police's count, one of the places where 67 women vanished or were killed between 1977 and 2009. In the final part of our Byron Bay series, Ryan Wolf walks the coast between Newcastle and the Queensland border — ten names, five decades, and one question the region has been asking for nearly fifty years. Théo Hayez. Jackson Stacker. And all the others still...

Jackson Stacker’s death in Byron Bay raised more questions than answers. What initially appeared routine quickly unravelled into a case marked by inconsistencies, missing details, and uneasy silence. This episode examines the known facts, the gaps in the narrative, and why Stacker’s final hours continue to provoke suspicion and scrutiny. While some dramatic license is taken during the retelling of...

This is Part One of Three of our Special Series Byron Bay Vanishings In May 2019, 18-year-old Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez vanished after a night out in Byron Bay, Australia. He was last seen leaving the Cheeky Monkey's bar in the early hours of May 31st. Despite an extensive search involving police, volunteers, and his family who flew from Belgium, Theo was never found. His phone data showed he...

In October 1941, a struggling West Coast farmer named Stanley Graham shot four police officers on his remote Koiterangi property, then vanished into the New Zealand bush. What followed was the largest manhunt in New Zealand history — hundreds of police, soldiers, and Home Guardsmen, aircraft overhead, a tank in the valley — all hunting one wounded man for thirteen days. By the time it ended, seven...

In April 1943, four boys trespassing in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire, discovered a human skull inside a hollow wych elm. Police found an almost complete female skeleton, folded into the narrow trunk while the body was still warm. She was approximately thirty-five years old, five feet tall, and carried a cheap wedding ring. Nobody reported her missing. No suspect was ever charged. Then, in 1944, gra...

On a clear June morning in 1984, Shelley Morgan left her Bristol home with a camera, a commission, and a day full of plans. She never came back. Her body was found four months later in a rural Somerset copse, eight miles from where she was last seen. Fourteen stab wounds. Every belonging removed. No arrest in forty years. This is the story of a woman, a blue van, and a question that has never been...