On the night of January 26, 2009, Bob Chappell disappeared from his yacht in Tasmania's Derwent Estuary. Police were alerted to trouble when the boat was seen sinking the next morning. When they examined the scene there were signs of foul play... but no sign of Bob. His partner Sue Neill-Fraser would soon become the prime suspect in Chappell's disappearance. But was her conviction sound? Crime author Robin Bowles joins Gemma this week to discuss why many of Australia's leading legal minds have s...
Jul 20, 2022•50 min•Season 3Ep. 31
In 1942, the streets of Melbourne were dim and eery. To assist with World War II efforts, the city was complying with a 'brownout' order, similar to a blackout but less severe. This low lighting was the backdrop for a series of murders committed by Edward Joseph Leonski, a 'smiling psychopath' who became known as The Brownout Strangler. THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia C REDITS Guest: Ian W. Shaw, author of Murder at Dusk Host: Gemma Bath Executive Producer : Gia Moylan Audio Producer: Rhiannon...
Jul 13, 2022•48 min•Season 3Ep. 30
In 1986, 20-year-old Sharron Phillips disappeared from the side of the road in Wacol, Brisbane. She used a payphone to make two calls to a friend after running out of petrol, but by the time he arrived she was nowhere to be found. Those calls were the last time anyone ever heard from Sharron. And her disappearance remained a mystery for 30 years until a deathbed confession changed everything. THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia C REDITS Guest: Kate Kyriakou Host: Gemma Bath Executive Producer : Gi...
Jul 06, 2022•40 min•Season 3Ep. 29
On July 7, 1960, eight-year-old Graeme Thorne went missing from the corner store near his family's Bondi home. It was five weeks after his parents, Bazil and Freda, had won a massive $100,000 in an Opera House lottery. His disappearance was the country's first well-known kidnap for ransom, and would lead to the biggest manhunt in Australia’s history. In this episode, Gemma Bath is joined by Mark Tedeschi QC to discuss how the case unfolded and why it's imprinted in the Australian psyche. THE END...
Jun 29, 2022•41 min•Season 3Ep. 28
News has come through overnight that Ghislaine Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. From 1994 to 2004, Ghislaine Maxwell conspired with her late partner Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom, and sexually assault underage girls. In this episode, Gemma Bath takes you through the early years of Ghislaine Maxwell, the power that the men in her life held, and the trial that would convict her as a criminal. THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia C REDITS Guest: Nigel Cawthorne...
Jun 29, 2022•32 min•Season 3Ep. 27
In November 2019, police conducted a welfare check on seven-year-old JJ Vallow. He hadn't been seen since September, and police will come to realise that neither had his teenage sister Tylee. They've stumbled onto a web of lies that are about to unravel. Affairs, mysterious deaths, a doomsday cult, and at the centre of it all two missing children. And a mother who isn’t trying to find them. THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia C REDITS Guest: Leah Sottile, author of When The Moon Turns To Blood And...
Jun 22, 2022•49 min•Season 3Ep. 26
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 them down. THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia C REDITS Guest: Matt Condon, the host of DIG - Sirens Are ...
Jun 15, 2022•49 min•Season 3Ep. 25
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 with his ex-wife. In this episode, investigative journalist Debi Marshall discusses how he managed to avoid p...
Jun 08, 2022•37 min•Season 3Ep. 24
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 hot demand. That’s because she’s doing a job most people would run away from. A job that has her brushing up against maggots, rats, flies ...
Jun 01, 2022•40 min•Season 3Ep. 23
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 through the early years for Ghislaine Maxwell, the power that the men in her life held and the trial that would co...
May 25, 2022•32 min•Season 3Ep. 22
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 called 20 minutes earlier complaining it was too hot…and “could they turn the air-conditioning up??” They’re the last conversati...
May 18, 2022•43 min•Season 3Ep. 21
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 away. Her dad Bill, head of a multi-million-dollar global software company, is in his city office and her mum Belinda...
May 11, 2022•42 min•Season 3Ep. 20
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 the bedroom, panicked, as a triple-zero operator guides her through chest compressions. Distressed, Natasha tell...
May 04, 2022•47 min•Season 3Ep. 19
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, her older sister, and their friends have booked a chartered yacht called Tamarack that will deliver them to the celebrations af...
Apr 27, 2022•54 min•Season 3Ep. 18
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 often went for a walk in the morning around 5am,' he told the operator. He assumed that was where she was when he woke up to an empty bed....
Apr 20, 2022•40 min•Season 3Ep. 17
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 families knew they were even an item. It was a relationship that had blossomed almost exclusively on text. Thousands of them. Sen...
Apr 13, 2022•26 min•Season 3Ep. 16
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.
Apr 12, 2022•6 min•Season 3Ep. 15
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 relationship with Rowan Baxter, a man who had become increasingly abusive. As Hannah buckled her three small children int...
Apr 06, 2022•37 min•Season 3Ep. 14
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. Kerry Whelan, a healthy and well-liked 39-year-old, was also not the kind of woman who goes missing...
Mar 30, 2022•42 min•Season 3Ep. 13
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 the horizon… but the Nocturne presses on with its voyage. As night falls the warm breeze of the day disappears, replaced by the icy c...
Mar 23, 2022•29 min•Season 3Ep. 12
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 distressed call was made to emergency services from this location… The officers try to gain access to the house. They kick t...
Mar 16, 2022•35 min•Season 3Ep. 11
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 boyfriend, a man she loved, had been murdered the week before in broad daylight. She knew the perpetrator. Everyone did. The story had made i...
Mar 09, 2022•31 min•Season 3Ep. 10
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 say his flight had been delayed. Herman was good like that, he’d text her updates so she wouldn’t worry while he was ...
Mar 02, 2022•35 min•Season 3Ep. 9
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 get home. She has work in the morning, and her train had been running 20 minutes late. Despite it being late on a Wedne...
Feb 23, 2022•32 min•Season 3Ep. 8
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 often play outside until the sun goes down. Sian Kingi is 12 years old, tall for her age with long blonde ha...
Feb 16, 2022•24 min•Season 3Ep. 7
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 the second eldest child of Shirley and Vijay Singh, who had migrated to the northern suburb of Brisbane 10 years p...
Feb 09, 2022•33 min•Season 3Ep. 6
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 Bruce Morcombe, his identical twin brother Bradley, and his older brother, Dean. A bus passes but doesn’t stop. On it, i...
Feb 02, 2022•45 min•Season 3Ep. 5
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 without Norman Bruhn, chaos still reigns on the streets of Darlinghurst. Tilly’s brothel empire is raging, and ...
Jan 26, 2022•30 min•Season 3Ep. 4
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. Norman Bruhn is one of Squizzy’s closest confidants. Well, he was. Until…he crossed him. Usually, a betrayal of the kingpin would cost...
Jan 19, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 3
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’s no more sly grog, no diamonds and fur, no more cocaine, and no more razor gangs. She was once one of the wealthiest and most powerful...
Jan 12, 2022•24 min•Season 3Ep. 2
