True Crime Conversations

For more than a century, Australia's infamous Pentridge Prison was an ominous presence just 30 minutes away from Melbourne’s CBD. A place of murder and mayhem, it was home to Victoria’s worst criminals. Everyone from Ned Kelly and Chopper Read, to mass murderers Julian Knight and Craig Minogue. Pentridge officially closed in 1997 after decades of controversy. Over the years, everybody in Victoria...

Over the last two years, Indigenous Affairs Reporter Douglas Smith and his team have been looking into the deaths of six Indigenous women, from three different states across Australia. Each case occurred in different jurisdictions, involving different individuals, but the investigation conducted by Doug's team uncovered a commonality that is impossible to ignore.  THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia...

In June 1987, Australia's top end lost it's innocence. The murders of five tourists across the Northern Territory and Western Australia marred the reputation of this idyllic tourist region, sparking fear in locals and visitors alike. These horrific events sparked one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history and saw today's guest, Former WA Police Inspector Bob Brown, on the front lines of the...

In 2018, Hedley Thomas’ podcast The Teacher's Pet captivated millions of listeners around the world as he unravelled the disappearance of Lynette Simms in real time, week by week. Throughout his meticulous investigation more evidence and information came to light, leading to the arrest of Lyn's former husband Chris Dawson. In 2022, Hedley found himself a witness in Dawson's high-profle murder tria...

Evaristo Salas Junior was just 16 when he was sent to an adult men’s prison convicted of the murder of Jose Arreola in 1995.  But in the nearly three decades since his conviction, the evidence has been re-examined in great detail. Cracks, lies and omissions have been uncovered by journalists and documentary makers alike, leading to Evaristo's exoneration and release in August of this year.  So how...

In October 1992, 12-year-old Rhianna Barreau disappeared.  On the day she went missing it was school holidays, and Rhianna had spent the morning wandering to the local shops to buy her American pen pal a Christmas card. When her mother got home at 4pm, expecting to find Rhianna, she was nowhere to be found.  It's one of South Australia's most enduring cold cases. Her disappearance didn’t just chan...

In September 1988 a campaign of terror was unleashed upon Perth’s Chinese community through a series of targeted firebombings that decimated a number of restaurants around the city. The motive behind the attacks was impossible to ignore, but it would take a drastic escalation of violence for WA police to start taking the firebombs seriously. Once they finally started to piece the crimes together a...

For nearly half a century, Australia was engaged in a shameful and shocking practice that would tear babies from the arms of their mothers, sometimes before they ever even laid eyes on their precious little faces. Today, Amelia Oberhart shares with us the journey of her discoveries about her mother’s life before she was born in her podcast, Secrets We Keep,  Shame, Lies and Family…and in the proce...

In Australia in the 1920s a 'murder wave' gripped the country, as the desperation of The Great Depression rippled through society. Cases like The Human Glove, The Hammer Horror, The Park Demon, The Bungendore Bones , and most famously The Pyjama Girl, were splashed across tabloid headlines. At the same time a new age of methods and technologies were being rolled out to help investigate crimes that...

Last week, 33-year-old nurse Lucy Letby was found guilty of murdering seven newborns, and attempting to kill six others who were under her care in 2015 and 2016. During her time in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwestern England, her colleagues noticed a significant rise in the number of babies dying and suffering serious collapses in the unit.  Police and medical exp...

Karen Bell met Gary Poxon in 1993. She was 17, he was 29.  By 2008, the pair were living in an isolated farmhouse in Pericoe with their three children - Maddie, Jack and Bon. Their 15 year long relationship was filled with emotional and physical abuse, with multiple AVOs taken out against Gary to protect Karen. He faced charges more than once for assaulting her, but he'd never once hurt their kids...

What little kid doesn’t want their Dad to take them to the shop and get them a kinder surprise? That’s what Ramazan Acar told his ex partner Rachelle D’Argent in November 2010, when he turned up at her Melbourne home, breaking yet another intervention order that she had taken out against him. He just wanted to take his daughter to the little shop down the road and get her a treat. But Yazmina Acar...

In January 2009, Darcey Freeman’s father, Arthur Freeman, was driving her to her first day of school when he acted out of revenge. He threw his four-year-old daughter off Melbourne’s 58-metre-high West Gate Bridge. Darcey’s mother, Peta Barnes never got the chance to say goodbye to her only daughter. Today, we are joined by Megan Norris, the author of Look What You Made Me Do: Fathers Who Kill, to...

You can listen to our first-hand interview with Michelle Steck here . In 1993, Michelle Steck lost her daughter Kelly at the hands of her former partner Kevin East. It was an horrific act classified as retaliatory filicide, when domestic violence perpetrators use their children to get back at their partners who dare to leave them.  Today we're joined by Megan Norris, the author of Look What You Ma...

When Bevin and Brad Simmons went missing off the coast of the Cape York Peninsula in 2003, a massive air, land and sea search was launched to find the pair. The operation covered a huge area but in the days and weeks that followed, no evidence was found. Not their boat, not a body, not even a piece of fishing gear that may have floated away if they'd capsized. To this day, the final resting place...

The notorious Whisky Au Go Go nightclub fire in Brisbane in 1973 left behind questions that remain unanswered to this day. Who was really behind it, who was there that night, why did 15 people have to die and did it go beyond just criminal activity to include corrupt police too? But the deaths of 15 people that night wouldn’t be the only ones linked to the blaze. When the McCulkins, 34 year old Ba...

The Whisky Au Go Go Fire is just as much a mystery today as it was in the hours after the tragedy that took the lives of 15 people in Fortitude Valley on March 8th 1973. Police would start a major investigation that would drag in some of Brisbane’s most well known criminals, gangsters, bosses and violent offenders who had spent time together in jails over decades, creating networks and ties that s...

In 1992, career criminal Peter Gibb met prison guard Heather Parker while serving a 12-year sentence at the Melbourne Remand Centre. Heather claimed she didn’t notice Peter at first, but she quickly became smitten and their relationship developed from flirtatious to physical. When their affair was exposed Heather was immediately transferred, with communication between the two forbidden. But they c...

You can listen to our interview with a second victim or Dr Reeves here. In the later months of 1995, 28-year-old Jayne Mansfield found herself in need of an obstetrician. She was pregnant with her first baby and, as most first-time mums do, she put her trust in the medical professional her GP had referred her to - a doctor named Graeme Reeves at The Hills Hospital in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills. Throu...

Listen to our interview with a survivor of the Butcher Of Bega here . In 2011 gynaecologist Graeme Stephen Reeves was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm on one of his patients. A case that was just one of many allegations of heinous offences against his female patients, that dated back nearly two decades.  Claims of assaults, molestation and mutil...

Pentecostalism has been practised in Australia since the 1920s. But it wasn’t until husband and wife team Brian and Bobby Houston launched Hillsong church in 1983 that Pentecostal Christianity really began to surge in popularity.   From its humble beginnings in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills, by 2018 Hillsong had 80 branches in 21 countries. But after a spectacular and meteoric rise to international popu...

Earlier this week, in an historic decision, the NSW attorney general made the extraordinary announcement that Kathleen Folbigg had been granted a pardon after 20 years in prison. In 2003, Kathleen was sentenced to thirty years for the murders of three of her children and the manslaughter of a fourth. And while she always maintained her innocence, it wasn’t until a second inquiry into Kathleen's co...

After 20 years behind bars, Kathleen Folbigg has been pardoned, and released from prison. A landmark inquiry saw NSW’s top prosecutor accept there was reasonable doubt about her convictions over the deaths of her four children. If you’re not aware or Kathleen’s story, you’re about to hear our episode with investigative journalist Jane Hansen who unpacked the forensic evidence that was to be examin...

In November, 1994, 16-year-old Gordana Kotevski was abducted while walking home from a local shopping centre in the Newcastle suburb of Charlestown. Gordana was just moments from her aunt's front door when she was dragged into a white Toyota Hilux by two men, and never seen again.  Her loved ones have spent years since her kidnapping in an unrelenting search for answers. But despite wide scale pol...

Listen to part two of this conversation with Nino, here.  In the mid 90s, the Stoccos seemed like any other Aussie family. A mum and dad, Connie and Gino, and their two teenage kids, Mark and Christina. But in 1997, the breakdown of this seemingly happy family marked the beginning of a dark new chapter for Gino of crime and violence. It was a path he wouldn’t walk alone though, as little by little...