Hanging from a mango tree, on the edge of their village in Uttar Pradesh, are the bodies of two girls. It’s May 27, 2014, and the sun is just beginning to rise in India’s north. It’s already blisteringly hot, the air thick and overbearing. A man, a member of the village, is the first to see them. The two girls who went missing last night. Lalli is 14, her lifeless body beside her 16-year-old cousin Padma. They were inseparable in life, neighbours who were more like sisters. Their parents have be...
Jun 23, 2021•45 min•Season 2Ep. 23
On today’s episode host Jessie Stephens is speaking with award-winning investigative journalists Ruby Jones and Neil Mercer, co-authors of the book Barrenjoey Road. For 43 years, the case of Trudie Jeanette Adams has intrigued people on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Trudie decided to hitch-hike home, but she was never seen again. Ruby Jones first investigated the case for ABC’s Unravel podcast. The second season, titled Barrenjoey Road, investigated the disappearance of Trudie Adams. The ABC then p...
Jun 16, 2021•41 min•Season 2Ep. 22
On today’s episode Jessie is speaking with award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker, whose podcast ‘Stolen’ & ‘Missing & Murdered’ uncovers an overlooked epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls in North America. Her ‘Finding Cleo’ series tells the story of the young Cree girl who was taken from her family by child welfare workers in Saskatchewan in the 1970s, and unearths what truly happened to her... C REDITS Guest: Carrie Walker Host: Jessie Stephens Produce...
Jun 09, 2021•39 min•Season 2Ep. 21
It’s a Wednesday morning in March 1996, and the bell sounds at Dunblane Primary School near Stirling in Scotland. Students scramble to their classrooms, their minds are caught up in homework and friendships, and the game they were just playing in the yard. A class of twenty-eight Primary 1 pupils, aged between four and six, congregate in the gymnasium, preparing for their morning PE lesson. In a nearby classroom sits an eight-year-old boy whose name is Andy. He has blue eyes and sandy coloured h...
Jun 02, 2021•27 min•Season 2Ep. 20
It’s June 15, 1998, a cool winter’s evening on Sydney’s northern beaches. The leafy, quiet and friendly suburb of Belrose is located about 19 kilometres northeast of Sydney’s CBD. For a man named Brett Boyd, it's no accident he lived there. The 27-year-old had moved away from the bustling nightlife of Kings Cross. His friends were involved heavily in the club scene - some dealing drugs like cocaine. Elements of the work had begun to scare him, and so he retreated to a suburb where he felt safe. ...
May 26, 2021•23 min•Season 2Ep. 19
It’s 4pm on the 9th of February, 1988. A 22-year-old woman named Helen McCourt, with long, dark brown hair picks up the phone. She's about to leave work at the Royal Insurance office in Liverpool, having negotiated with her boss to leave an hour early. Helen is ringing her mother, Marie. She tells her that tonight she’ll be going out with her new boyfriend, but asks that her mother have tea ready when she arrives home so she’ll have enough time to wash her hair. Marie agrees. Sitting with her da...
May 19, 2021•26 min•Season 2Ep. 18
For Desmond Butler, it began with a headache. Then diarrhoea. Nausea that felt like a hangover. He was otherwise a healthy man, not yet 30. He shared two children with his wife Yvonne Gladys Butler, a striking woman, small and doll-like. Desmond also attracted the attention of neighbours, with dark, thick floppy hair, an athletic physique and perhaps a wandering eye. It was October 1947, and the young couple lived in a small house in the then working-class suburb of Newtown in Sydney. But back t...
May 12, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 17
It was February 12, 2014, a hot summer evening, and eleven year old Luke Batty was at cricket practice on a sports oval in the Melbourne suburb of Tyabb. With blue eyes and dark blonde hair, Luke had just started Year Six. He was happy and empathetic, a best friend to his single mother Rosie. Rosie was on one end of the cricket ground, and his father, Greg Anderson was at the other. After speaking to his father, Luke ran back over to Rosie and said: “Oh mum, I haven’t seen dad for a while. He’s ...
May 05, 2021•43 min•Season 2Ep. 16
In July 2011 a man named Dennis Costas called in sick to work. He told his employer he was suffering from sciatica. For the rest of the afternoon, he drank heavily, characteristic of a man with a serious drinking problem. Speaking to Dr. Richard Taylor, he said he couldn’t remember much from that day. “My recollection is very distorted…” he said. He took a nap at some point and “After that,” he explained, “I really don’t know what happened. All I can remember is putting out the fire. My vision w...
Apr 28, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 15
It’s August 23, 2016, in a sleepy Queensland town named Home Hill, south of Townsville. Shelley’s Backpackers is a modest hostel in the small regional town, where backpackers on working holiday visas stay while completing their mandatory farm work. The days are long. And hot. They see snakes and operate heavy machinery without any training. Aren’t those brown snakes meant to be deadly, they think to themselves. At night, they sleep in dormitories, some sharing rooms with strangers. On the evenin...
Apr 21, 2021•24 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Los Angeles is known as the city of dreams. The most populous city in California, Los Angeles is surrounded by mountain ranges, forests, beautiful beaches belonging to the Pacific Ocean and desert. It is the home of countless celebrities - and even more who hope to become celebrities. It is the land of hope. But Los Angeles is also one of the largest sites of human sex trafficking in the United States. If you were to drive down Figueroa Street at night, you’d see women on the sidewalks in bikini...
Apr 14, 2021•23 min•Season 2Ep. 13
A man calls a phone number in Manhattan. His name is Johnny. And he has a confession. The phone line connects him to Mr Apology. A man whose real name is Allan Bridge, an artist performing a long-form social experiment. There are posters up all around New York City, inviting “amateurs, professionals, criminals…” who have “wronged people.” It continues: “It is to people that you must apologise, not to the state, not to God, get your misdeeds off your chest.” The instructions read, “describe in de...
Apr 07, 2021•22 min•Season 2Ep. 12
It’s a cold winter’s night at Sydney’s Luna Park, nestled in the northern shore of Sydney Harbour. It’s June 9, 1979, and swarms of people ride the roller coaster and play inside Coney Island. The Tagline for the amusement park is “just for fun” - and it’s arguably one of the biggest attractions in Sydney. But one of the most popular rides is The Ghost Train, which runs along 180 metres of electric track, most of it in total darkness. Dancing skeletons and dragons heads and an imitation fire mak...
Mar 31, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 11
True Crime Conversations explores the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. This month we’re focusing on Australia’s most notorious crimes... It’s lunchtime, on a cool Sunday in April, and the Port Arthur historic site is buzzing with visitors. Located at the southern tip of the Tasman Peninsula, Port Arthur is located about 100 kilometres south-east of Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The quaint village was once a penal settlement and a main drawc...
Mar 24, 2021•24 min•Season 2Ep. 10
True Crime Conversations explores the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. This month we’re focusing on Australia’s most notorious crimes... It’s the 20th of May, 1999, an autumn day in South Australia. For 12 months, there has been an inquiry into the disappearance of a woman named Elizabeth Haydon, a 37-year-old mother of eight. But it isn’t just her. Two other people from a similar area have been reported missing. And there has been no trace of...
Mar 17, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 9
True Crime Conversations explores the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. This month we’re focusing in on Australia’s most notorious crimes... It’s a Saturday night in the middle of July, 2001, when Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees travel down the Stuart Highway in their orange Kombi van. Peter is 28, and in the driver’s seat. His girlfriend, 27-year-old Joanne, is in the passenger seat. They’ve been in Australia for a little over five months, firs...
Mar 10, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 8
True Crime Conversations explores the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. This month we’re focusing in on Australia’s most notorious crimes... It’s the morning of February 6, 1986. Australia as a nation, but more specifically New South Wales, is in a state of shock. Two days prior, the body of 26 year old nurse Anita Cobby had been found in a paddock in Prospect, 32 kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD. The news had broken that Anita had been murdered...
Mar 03, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 7
True Crime Conversations explores the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. This March we’re focusing on Australia’s most notorious crimes...from Anita Cobby to Snowtown. Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Become a Mamamia sub...
Mar 03, 2021•2 min
It’s May 30, 1985, in Burbank, California. Spring is turning to summer, and the wide streets in the San Fernando Valley are lined with their signature palm trees. A 42 year old woman named Carol Kyle is at home with her 11 year old son. She doesn’t know yet that there is a man in her neighbourhood, driving a stolen car. At some stage during the night, in the shadow of darkness, this man enters her home. At gunpoint, he binds Carol’s son with handcuffs and ransacks their house, demanding she tell...
Feb 24, 2021•25 min•Season 2Ep. 6
It’s February 5, 1907, and a short, dark haired man in his late thirties named Corporal O’Halloran is on the doorstep of a house on Edward Street in the city of Perth. He has been called there by the owner, a woman named Alice Mitchell. Alice Mitchell is known to care for babies. Specifically, babies belonging to single parents, who have no choice but to return to work and earn a living. She has cared for dozens over the last six or so years. But she’s called Corporal O’Halloran there because sh...
Feb 17, 2021•23 min•Season 2Ep. 5
It’s August 16, 2002, when a man named Shane Chartres-Abbott meets a client at South Yarra’s Hotel Saville. The 27-year-old is a male prostitute, who specialises in sadomasochistic sex. With him, he carries a black bag full of sex toys, including a whip, ropes, condoms and handcuffs. The woman he is meeting, 30-year-old Penny, is not a stranger. She too works in the sex industry. They’ve met for his services before, but have started to get to know each other, with Penny being one of Shane’s only...
Feb 10, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 4
It’s the first day of Autumn, 1989, in an affluent Sydney suburb. Mosman is on the lower north shore and known for being comfortable and safe, a short distance from Taronga Zoo and Balmoral Beach. An 82 year old woman named Gwendoline Mitchell Hill is walking down military Rd towards her apartment in the late afternoon. She doesn’t know a man has spotted her, concocting a plan of what to do next. She won’t make it inside. And she will be the first known victim of a vicious predator who will rava...
Feb 03, 2021•40 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The small town of Mylor, buried in the Adelaide Hills, has a population of just over one thousand people. Properties sit on sprawling bushland, between the mountainous terrain, and today people visit to camp or see the native animals. It was October 1966 when eight year old Wendy Jane Pfeiffer, petite with short hair and rosy cheeks, decided to walk the family dog on a quiet Sunday afternoon. She took Bonnie, a brown and white farm dog, down a dirt track, which has barely changed in 55 years. We...
Jan 27, 2021•27 min•Season 2Ep. 2
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in Spring, 1930. Mena Griffiths is 12 years old and living with her family in suburban Melbourne. There’s a park she often visits with her friends and she asks her parents if she can go out and play. Her parents can’t know that there’s a man sitting at a local hotel bar. He’s about 30 years old. He is known to the community as a family man, with a wife named Bernice and a baby named Joan. At 18 he had been sent to a reformatory prison for theft. Shortly after his ...
Jan 26, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 1
In the 1980s, a brochure was printed across the world, for an idyllic holiday resort called Arous. It was a diving resort on the Red Sea, in the Sudanese desert. The brochure featured pictures of chalets on a bright beach, the sea almost the same colour as the sky But what guests of the resort didn’t know was that Arous wasn’t really a holiday resort. At least not primarily. And the staff weren’t really managers, or diving instructors, or waitresses. Once the sun went down, those who worked at t...
Jan 13, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 79
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be aware that this episode contains the names of people who have passed away. In 1988 the death of Mark Haines just outside of Tamworth in regional NSW was barely investigated by local police. The 17-year-old’s body was found on train tracks outside of town, but law enforcement treated his death as less than suspicious. You have only to pull on the threads of the case to find that the truth could be very far from that. Allan Clarke is a Muruwa...
Jan 06, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 78
It’s July 2018 when Detective Gary Jubelin stands in front of microphones and news cameras and says the words: “I suggest you come to us before we come to you.” He is addressing the person who knows what happened to three-year-old William Tyrrell on September 12, 2014. Little did Gary know that this case would be the one to cost him his job, but as he tells host Jessie Stephens on the latest episode of True Crime Conversations, he has no regrets. Gary Jubelin is one of Australia’s most notable h...
Dec 30, 2020•45 min•Season 1Ep. 77
It’s August, 2005, and Nicola Gobbo’s life is about to go in a direction she never anticipated. Nicola is a successful defence barrister, best known for defending Melbourne’s most prolific organised crime figures, from Carl Williams to Tony Mokbel. But things have become very messy. She wants to get what she calls the ‘Mokbel monkey’ off her back. She’s become too involved in ways she says she never intended. She’ll later say she’s tired of being stood over by criminals who are manipulating the ...
Dec 23, 2020•45 min•Season 1Ep. 76
Phillip Island lies just off Australia’s southern coast, about two hours from the city of Melbourne. In 1986, the Cameron family were well known on the island. Fergus Cameron was a founding shareholder of the Phillip Island Grand Prix, but day to day worked on the family farm. He was married to Vivienne Cameron, and the pair had two small children. One night in September, the body of a 23-year-old woman was found inside her home in what has been described as one of the most horrific crime scenes...
Dec 16, 2020•31 min•Season 1Ep. 75
It’s Australia Day 1963, in the middle of a hot summer in Perth. A couple are sitting in a car, kissing and talking, in the beachside suburb of Cottesloe. They feel safe. It’s a safe neighbourhood in a safe city, and the night is still and empty. That is until the female notices, at around 2:40am, something outside the car window. It’s a man. Watching them. She alerts her male companion to the figure … who they realise is holding a rifle. They spring to action, trying to drive away as fast as th...
Dec 09, 2020•38 min•Season 1Ep. 74
