True Crime Conversations

From the late 1950s through to the late 80s, the streets of Queensland were dominated by a trio of crooked cops known as The Rat Pack. They ran a complex system of bribery and extortion as they pocketed the profits of local sex workers for decades. In this episode, Gemma Bath is joined by investigative journalist Matt Condon to discuss their operation and the women who had the courage to bring the...

Want to hear more about the Family Court Bomber? Find our extra True Crime Conversations episode here.  From 1980 to 1985 Sydney was ravaged by a domestic terror crime spree that became known across Australia as The Family Court Murders. All of the attacks - including four murders, two shootings, and five bombings - were carried out by a man who was motivated by a drawn-out custody battle wit...

Lee Iordanidis gets a phone call. “Hi Darlin, how are you? How you feeling?” She asks the person on the other end of the line. It’s compassion first, always, and then she gets down to business. She’s been flown to New Zealand, Germany, England. Not to mention right across Australia. There’s only four individuals with her expertise in this country and she’s in ho...

The name Ghislaine Maxwell is synonymous with one of the most notorious child trafficking crimes the world has ever known.  From 1994 to 2004, Ghislaine Maxwell conspired with her late partner Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and sexually assault underage girls.  But how did the favourite child of 10 grow up to be someone the world knows as a monster? Join Gemma Bath as she takes you th...

It’s 4:45am on the 5th of November 1991 and English media mogul Robert Maxwell is aboard his $35 million dollar yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, cruising through water off the Canary Islands in Spain. He’s on the phone with a crew member. "The temperature is now too cold. Turn the air-conditioning off," he says gruffly down the line from his luxurious master suite.  He’d only call...

It’s about 2pm on a crisp Wednesday afternoon in August 2011, and 18-year-old Madeleine Pulver is in her family’s three-story waterfront mansion in the glitzy Sydney suburb of Mosman. She’s studying for her HSC trials, the practice run before the final exams for Year 12s in the state of NSW. The house is quiet today. Her two younger brothers are at school and her older brother is...

It’s just after 2am on an icy, winter morning in 2017. Frost glistens on the paddocks of Pandora, a sprawling property in country NSW owned by local grazier Mathew Dunbar. The old homestead on the outskirts of the town of Walcha, five hours drive north of Sydney, sits on 1200 acres on Thunderbolts Way. On this Wednesday morning, Mathew’s girlfriend Natasha Darcy is leaning over him in...

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1997, and   17-year-old Olivia Hope is getting ready for a party at Furneaux Lodge, a beautiful old residence that sits at the head of one of the bays and coves that make up The Marlborough Sounds. A picturesque holiday spot on the northern end of New Zealand’s south island where the bush meets the sea. The lodge is only accessible by boat, so Olivia, he...

It’s the early hours of Friday, April 20, 2012, and police are knocking on the door of a blue weatherboard home in Brisbane’s west, after reports a mother of three young girls has gone missing.  Her husband, Gerard Baden-Clay, answers. He’d called triple zero at 7:15am that morning to tell them he hadn’t seen his wife, Allison, since the night before.  'Allison of...

Six days after the death of her boyfriend Conrad Roy in 2014, Michelle Carter sent a text to her friend. “I just had it all planned out. Now I have to do something different, maybe something better, I just don't think that that's possible. He was my person you know?” she wrote.  Except in Michelle and Conrad’s reality, their relationship was so private neither of their...

Introducing the new host of True Crime Conversations, Gemma Bath. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was a summer morning in Camp Hill, an eastern suburb of Brisbane, when 31 year old Hannah Clarke helped her three children, six year old Aaliyah, four year old Laianah, and three year old Trey, get ready for the day ahead.  It was Wednesday, February 19, 2020, and the morning was characteristically chaotic.  Hannah was staying with her parents, following the breakdown of her relations...

Women like Dorothy Davis, a 74-year-old widow, rarely go missing. She lived in the seaside suburb of Lurline Bay in south-east Sydney. She had friends, children, and grandchildren. Her life was peaceful. She was financially comfortable. The people who loved her knew where she would be on any given day. She had a lot to live for. But in May 1995, Dorothy went to visit a friend, and never came home....

It’s the 23rd of September, 1979, and a cabin cruiser, known as the Nocturne, is cruising through deep blue waters just off the far north coast of NSW.  It’s a near-perfect day for the five passengers on board. A light nor-easter is blowing and the sun is glistening off the boat’s sleek, white hull. But as the day wears on conditions begin to change… clouds form on th...

It’s the 20th of June 1994, and the residents of Andersons Bay, in Dunedin, are waking up to a crisp, dark morning. Ice frosts the roads and despite it being after 7 o’clock the sun is still yet to appear in the sky.  Three police officers stand alert on the doorstep of 65 Every Street, a ramshackle house home to the six members of the Bain Family. Eleven minutes earlier, a distre...

It’s 1981 and Sallie-Anne Huckstepp sits across from Ray Martin on 60 Minutes, one of Australia’s most-watched current affair programs.  She speaks clearly and emphatically. With a piercing blue stare, and a cigarette hanging from her right hand, she tells a story that Australia is not yet ready to hear.  Every word of it, we now know, is true.  Sallie-Anne’s boyfr...

It’s the 21st of January, 2010, and Vicky Rockefeller is in her house in the affluent suburb of East Malvern - roughly 8 kilometres southeast of Melbourne's CBD. Her two children are out. And she’s expecting her husband, Herman, any minute now.  Herman has been away on a business trip, a regular practice for his line of work as a property developer, and had messaged her earlier to...

Kananook railway station is located on the Frankston line in Victoria, about 50 minutes from Melbourne’s CBD.  At approximately 10:20pm, on the 11th of July, 1990, a 23-year-old woman named Sarah MacDiarmid can be seen alighting from the train and walking in the direction of the poorly lit car park, where she parked her red Honda Civic that morning.  She is no doubt in a hurry to g...

It’s 1987 and a coastal town named Noosa Heads in Queensland is about as idyllic as it gets. On the Sunshine Coast, Noosa Heads isn't yet the popular and developed tourist destination that it is today. It is surrounded by rivers, lookouts, bays, national park and of course expansive coastline. Families feel proud to bring their kids up in such a beautiful and safe coastal town, where they of...

It was a Tuesday in April 2003, when an emergency phone call was made from a visitor at 20 Grass Tree Close, Bridgeman Downs in Brisbane's north.  The phone call was made by a 33-year-old man named Massimo Sica, known to most as Max. The purpose for his visit, according to his testimony, was to see his on and off again girlfriend, 24-year-old flight attendant Neelma Singh.  Neelma was th...

Daniel Morcombe, a 13-year-old boy with bright blue eyes and dark brown hair, stands at a bus stop beneath an overpass. Today, he is wearing a bright red t-shirt.  It’s Sunday, the 7th of December 2003, at 2:10pm. He’s waiting for a bus to take him to the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre so he can get a haircut and buy some Christmas presents. At home, are his parents, Denise and Br...

It’s the 7th May, 1929. Nearly two years since gangster Norman Bruhn was gunned down in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. The man who’d tried to interfere with the stronghold Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh had on East Sydney had failed, and paid with his life in the process. But two years on from his death, the streets are still dripping with the blood of razor victims. With or...

It’s 1926, and Sydney’s underworld is held tightly in the hands of Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine. But down in Melbourne? They’ve got a fella called Joseph Theodore Leslie Taylor running the show, or ‘Squizzy’ as he was better known. Squizzy Taylor is a bonafide gangster in every sense, backed up by a handful of savage henchmen and crooks, known as The Fitzroy Gang. Norm...

 It’s the 4th of February 1964. Once dubbed ‘The Worst Woman in Sydney,’ Kate Leigh lies unresponsive in a hospital bed at St Vincent's in Darlinghurst. She suffered a severe stroke just a few days earlier, and she’s about to take her final breath. But the twilight years of Kate Leigh’s life have not been marked by the debauchery and violence of her heyday. There...

The year is 1927.  Sydney is in a post-war party that’s been raging on for almost a decade. The suburb of Darlinghurst is the beating heart of it all, and the surrounding areas of Kings Cross, Potts Point, Woolloomoloo and Surry Hills are slums of debauchery, crime and vices. It’s an underworld run by two rival crime queens. Kate Leigh and Tilly Divine.  In an effort to stamp...