You're listening to a Mother and Mia podcast. Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waterers. This podcast was recorded on It's nine AM on a Tuesday in October two thousand and one, and a Sydney nurse has just returned home after a night shift at a nearby hospital. Her eighteen year old son emerges from the house and tackles her to the ground. She manages to break free, but pretty soon her ex husband and her fifteen year old daughter join in. They drag her into the front yard,
where the two men attack her with knives. Her ex screams at her that she is satan and that she's going to die. She does in broad daylight in her front garden while horrified neighbors watch on in shock. It also horrified the first responders who were on it, and it was the final straw for one of the detectives who worked closely on the case. It was a crime so horrible, so unimaginable, that after more than a decade in the force, Luke Taylor started to think about retirement.
He credits this case as the one that started the whisper in his mind. I've had enough, I'm Jemma Bath and This is True Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. For fourteen years, Luke worked across New South Wales investigating some of the most heinous crimes you can imagine, homicide, armed robbery, drugs, under cover work, child protection and sex crimes. He's done
it all. As time went on, Luke's mental health began to suffer, until he eventually bowed out of the police force for good in two thousand and nine. Now he's a teacher, but he's found a way to combine his former career with his new profession in an experimental learning workshop called Crime Story, where he literally stages a crime
scene for his students to solve. Luke joins us, now, Luke plunk me into your reality in the early two thousands, Where were you at in your life and career at that point.
Early two thousands. I was in Cabramatta at the time, which was a very exciting place to work as a young police officer, young detective. A lot of action, a lot of drugs, a lot of violence, unfortunately, but I think that's the thing you'd drawn to initially, I know I was. It's the action you want to be working on big important cases. From there, I went a short spell at Windsor Police as a detective there and then moved to child protection sex crimes.
So you'd already been in the force and particularly in detectives for quite a while by this point. Yes, Before we get into your involvement in this case, can you tell me a bit more about the family situation of a Sydney nurse who was killed outside her home in October two thousand and one.
Yes, Well, we're aware that she had an AVO and there was a family breakdown. The young teenage daughter was still living at home with her and her strange husband, and her elder teenage son moved out, so they were living quite some distance away, and they were separated, and there were some ongoing interactions with them. Nothing that had
really caused too much alarm at that stage. However, there was an AVO and as it turned out, another officer who I was working with, it's spoken to her probably a week or two before this incident, and she actually came into the police station and she said, look, he's going to kill me one day it's going to end like that.
What can you tell us about the circumstances that led up to what happened to her, because it was quite a strange and evolving situation in the twelve hours before she died.
Yes, well, the husband and the son, they lived in Katomber at the time, and look, they were heavy potsmokers. The effects that has on schizophrenia and different things like that is just absolutely incredible. So in that time they had been smoking and consumed a lot of pot, and there was a history of devil worshiping things like that.
Somehow during the night they formed the belief that mum had died in a car accident or the ex wife had died in a car accident, and it was their responsibility to exercise the demon from her.
It's just something you don't expect, right, like in a DV case. It's just kind of taking it to that whole other level of bizarre.
We talk about, you know, once in a lifetime cases, and that's certainly one of them, and it's one that's lived with me and I know every other police officer that was involved in that particular case. It was absolutely horrendous the impact it had on them. And also, as we'll find out, the civilians who were also witnesses and involved in what actually transpired.
Let's talk about that. Because the nurse, she was thirty five thirty five year old woman living in Sydney. She came home from a night shift, you know, around eight forty five nine am in the morning. What happened to her.
So during the night the estrange husband and son had made their way down. They caught a train and it was quite a lengthy journey to get from Katoomba out to one of the northwestern suburbs, out past Windsor. They made their way down, arrived at the house and the
daughter let them into the house. They explained the situation to her and the words that were basically used was that mum has died in a car accident and when she, or her we think might be her, comes home in the morning, it's actually not her, it's the devil and we have to exercise her. So they held some sort of cultish ritual in the house. There were glasses that were filled where wine. It was purported to be like drinking blood and things like that, and so they'd convinced
her as well. So they were quite in a frenzy by this particular time. And then, like I said, about eight thirty in the morning, Mom has finished her shift at Westmeat Hospital and come home. As she's basically putting the key into the screen door or the front door to open there, they have just all three of them launched through the door, armed with kitchen knives and started
stabbing and attacking her and chasing her. She was able to ring Triple O and throughout the next couple of minutes as she was chased over the road down the street, she was relaying what was actually happening. So she's run over the road. Now at the time, there's also a couple of young schoolgirls with their mum who were waiting to catch the bus to go to school. I think
they were primary over daylight. It is, yeah, absolutely amazing, and they've run past her, run into the house over the road, tried to use the phone off the wall. They've chased her through into the backyard. They've ripped the phone off that wall in that house. They've chased her into the backyard. She's come around and ended up about another two houses down before they've eventually caught up with her.
When we played this triple O call back. So this was going live and obviously the calls went over police radio. So we've head out there and when we played the tape back, I remember my boss at the time basically said, lock it away in the evidence cabinet. No one is to hear that tape again. It was just too intense, too intense, and obviously police, even though we're dealing with the trauma and horrible events, there is that curiosity as well, and there's a lot of people they said I'd like
to hear that for whatever reason. And it's not morbid, it's not black. It's more the fact that I think it's the way we're wide. We're investigators. There's an unknown element and there is that fascination and it might be hard for listeners to understand that, but it's about understanding the processes. But our boss just said, not lock it away, that will be too traumatic for people to listen to.
Well, you were one of the first on the scene, won't you.
Yeah. It was interesting because I'd had an operation just recently and most of my office was actually at a district court matter for a previous matter over at Penrith, and not only just arrived at the station, and I just had the foot operations. I was sitting around with my foot in the moonboot. So the uniform guys were first off, and I've jumped in one of the cars and gone out there. When we've turned up, I remember the uniform guys when girls were there, they'd spray them
with capsicum spray. They were standing around the body and they were chanting and words about Mephistopheles and biel Zabar Bobbi's devil references. They wouldn't leave her, and so they basically got sprayed and then chucked in the back of the paddy wagon. And even in the back of the paddy wagon and I've got that you could still hear them carrying on with this cultish devil stuff that they were sprouting.
The outpouring of grief from her death. Can you describe that and what that was like to witness.
Yeah, that was massive, and that's for me one of the big things that hit me. Because our coroner is at Westmead as Coiren is the aison officer, and the fact that I was on restricted duty had just made sense that I would go down for the autopsy, and because that was in the same hospital where she worked her colleagues and friends. They were gathered around and I've never felt anything like it. I have never to this day felt anything like it. And that outpouring of emotion.
And then there was a service in the chapel at the hospital as well. They said, look, we're going to have a few minutes of service if you want to come up for that, and it was it was next level.
This case is obviously horrible, but as a detective you were pretty used to horrible by this stage. What was it about this particular case that ultimately made you want to leave? Started that process for you of wanting to leave the job.
A lot of it I actually put down to a communication barrier that in some ways I had built up. Like working in Cabramatta with Vietnamese populations, there was always a language barrier. Whilst you could see and feel grief and things, it never really had that same impact. Now I've never had anything with a family like this one right, which also played into it. But there was definitely some things where I was at a point even where I'm thinking, am I that cold? That I'm not actually feeling a
lot of the stuff. I was almost robotic, And this is the cases before the cases before that, and also as coinnes Liason obviously meant oversighting, deceased murders, suicides, accidental deaths, natural deaths, overdoses, and maintaining that it was like well over one hundred a year, not all murders, and there is that coldness to it where you're putting on your hat and AKA, there's a process and you go through that, and I think that's what a lot of us do
for survival. There's also a lot of gangland stuff that was going on, so there's a lot of retribution. It was all over the drugs. It was the heroin capital of basically the southern the hemisphere of the world at that stage, and there's a lot of gangland violence and didn't have that same emotional impact as when you have that family unit and kids involved, kids witnessing it, and this was just like a little suburban place where we all grow up from there.
Once you'd had that big emotional reaction, did you find it harder to emotionally detach once you'd experienced that.
I look back now and realize that for me, that was the start of basically the end. I started questioning myself, questioning life and purpose, and things like that and just not knowing. So yeah, I look back now, I can definitely say that was a turning point.
This was a few years later that you actually ended up leaving, but you checked yourself into a mental health facility after retiring. Yeah, tell me about that decision.
That actually came a bit late. So after that, I went to child protection and working with sex crimes, and again that was I got to the point where I'm looking around at so many people harming each other again, gangland, drugs, things like that, and I'm thinking, what purpose am I serving? Who am I helping? And I thought I looked around
and I thought this would be cool. I went into it with such a little idea, and I remember when I went for the interview for Child Protection and the superintendent she said, what do you know about our unit? Basically said, I you investigate, you deal with kids. Do you know anymore? Nope, there's only the fact that I had a little bit of experience as a detective. And they said, okay, come on in. And I fell in love with it, particularly working with teenagers. It just loved it.
I had a couple of step kids the same age, and I was just attracted to that helping these kids that you get kids who perhaps no one believes them they're victims in their home, different things and actually see you would and feel you're actually doing something, And that was good for a while. I had my daughter around
about that time as well. And then you have those obvious implications where you're raising a kid and you're going to work and you're seeing abused kids and then the same age as your little girl when you're going home. So and that just kept building, I suppose, and then you reached a point where you just wake up one morning and you just can't do it.
Was it taboo for you to go to a mental health facility as a detective?
I think I was on the crossover when we went to child protection. We used to have quarterly psych appointments, and I was showing signs and I got to the point where I was talking very openly to the psychologist or counselor that we were sent to, showing a lot of signs. I raised this with the police Medical Officer of the PMO. Unfortunately, I still don't think they treated it as well as they perhaps do now and understand that, and they sent me back in the field. They said, nah,
you're good. It's good to be angry and let you and act the way you are, and here's your gun off. You go go back to work and I think, oh, yeah, I knew something was wrong, and I had a couple of times. I took a bit of time off work, I went back a little bit more time, and in the end, it just absolutely cracked and basically couldn't even leave the house. And that took years. I think in the end, I'd had to retell my story to about
eighteen different shrinks, such as the process. It's not an easy process, and that's a difficult thing, and you're constantly being put under under examination, not just by medicos but every party who's involved, and it's like they're testing you to see if you can come back or you can't come back. There's a lot of harassment as well that
went on. They didn't handle it really well, and my own doctor had to basically send him a letter saying, listen, you've got to give this guy some space, just back off everything. It was probably about a month to two year process to actually get out of the police, and in that time, constantly revisiting and going through weekly, sometimes twice weekly, appointments, medication, and then I was out of
the police. So once I was officially out, but it was in a couple of years later I realized there was so much stuff that I hadn't properly dealt with. Even though I'd been so studious and hard working with my sic and going through stuff, there was still some stuff that just came back, and that bit me on the backside harder what I thought, because here I'm thinking, okay,
I've put that side apart, and of all things. It was a few years later I got a phone call from headquarters in town saying, I'm going through your file here. You're an ex police. I said, yep, and we've got like your ten or fifteen year service medal that we have to present to you, but as a mark on your file it says don't ever contact because of PTSD and it's triggering. I said, okay, yep, And they said, do you want to come to a ceremony and receive it? And I said, stick it in the mail.
It really sounds like they didn't treat you. Because you can't be the only police officer or detective that experiences mental health struggles in this job. It is one of the hardest jobs that a person can do, and to hear what you had to do to actually get support is insane.
It is. Yeah, And I don't want to bag the police. I absolutely love the police and I could see myself doing nothing else but the police from when I joined and I'm at a stage now I've come full circle and I can appreciate it. I just think that we're constantly learning and evolving. And I'm also a big believer that every single job, every single walk of life has its own pressure points. I've got a brother who's a subcontractor in the construction industry. When a job finishes, he
doesn't know where his next job. Now, that's pressure as opposed to all weekly paycheck. I see mums with pressures of having a baby, holding a house together, doing things like everything has their own pressure points. As a society, we're still learning and we're going to be learning forever with this. And my old adage is, if you've got a broken leg, you go to a doctor. I've got a broken brain, I go to a doctor. It's the same thing. To look at that now, But no, we
weren't good at handling it. We were coming out of the dark ages. We'd had the nineteen ninety four Royal Commission into corruption, things were changing in the police that they were realizing there were so many hardships that weren't dealt with. A lot of that was following up on a lot of the military investigations and the military research
that had been done with post traumatic stress. I think for a long time, civilian peacekeeping like police was overlooked because it doesn't have perhaps it doesn't seem to have the same horrors as standing on a battlefield that the soldiers have. But what we've learned in the reality is that the police are actually in that position every day, and there's also the fear of it. Again, we talk about domestic violence a lot because to me, that's like terrorism.
It's the fear of what can happen next. Policing is a lot like that military conflicts. Some people may do a career in the military not actually go to a hot zone. So we started to become a little bit more aware of that and deal with it and put those things into place, and again we're continuing to grow. Now. I know the police stations and patrols now are actually getting to the point where they're assigning a station counselor or psychologist who you can actually go to. That's great.
We've got to keep putting those things, but it's going to be time before each individual can say I'm not afraid to walk through that door and have people see me do that, because that matter about the nurse that we're talking about. After that incident, the police response was we better do a welfare check and send out a counselor everyone involved. There may have been twenty or thirty
police involved, basically everyone on that day. They turn around and say, are we're doing it about midday on Saturday? Once we're not working that day. We're not paying you to come in. It's voluntary, so it's minimal staffing on that Saturday. Anyway, everyone came in. We sat in this big room. Council sits in the middle. Now we've got
like the toughest thirty year veterans sitting there. Everyone's got their arms crossed, you know, assuming this pose, and this lovely council sits in the middle and says, must have been traumatic. You'd like to share their feelings?
Oh gosh, in a room full of your colleagues.
And there's everyone there from a first year constable to a thirty year veteran, and you've still got that vibe that I'll deal with it myself and I'm not going to blurt out in front of everyone how I actually feel. It was just.
So awkward, So they meant, well, they just weren't doing it in the right way.
Yeah, and a lot of those measures, there's massive gaps in it, Like the quarterly appointments that I used to go to for when I was in child protection. There was one day I remember basically on my knees and I'm crying talking to this counselor, and I say, this is about the fifth appointment in a row that I've told you how I'm feeling and what's going on. I said, are they listening?
Timing wise, we're talking about the mid to late two thousands, So I would hope that in twenty twenty four the processes look a bit better. I know that you haven't been in the cops for a while, but from what you've seen, is it improving?
Yeah? Well, I still keep in contact with a number of colleagues, and I say, that's where I heard that they are trying to put in if they haven't already counselors or health professionals at a station basis, and that would be.
Greatly one on one, not in a group.
Not in a group. But again it's that stigma of like it would be almost be putting an office in the middle of the police station with this big red door. You go into that and people are all gonna be going, oh, what's wrong with him? What's wrong with her? They got head noises? That was always expression. Now you've got head noises, and you hear people talk about our billy blogs. I don't think you'll ever be back. And then someone would return from long term sick and I remember thinking it
was like a disease. It was a mystery, and it was really hard, and people were awkward around them as well. It's just yeah, it was treated like we don't want to catch that. You just had to put up this absolute bullshit mucho defense. Whether you're a female or a male. It was just the machismo that had to be there, push it down.
Is there anything you miss about being a detective?
The intellectual engagement, the critical thinking. Very few cases, though, are as interesting as the ones we see on TV. Most of them are cut and dried, but still it's the challenge of cover all of your bases with time and money. Of course, everything is investigated to a budget.
Your Alimi evidence, your other witness are just putting that type brief of evidence together, and particularly what I found in child protection, you want to put together the most perfect brief of evidence because when you first present and serve your brief of evidence on the defense, you want them to look at it and go, Okay, that's tight. You want to do everything to avoid that child going
to court to give evidence. Even though it's done remotely through video through camera, they're not in the same room. There's still a massive intimidation and you don't want to put the family through that. So you don't want any gaps in your evidence. You want it's so tight that they look at and gay, yeah, we can't beat this, will plead guilty. And for me, probably ninety nine percent of my briefs ended that way. You just spend that
little bit more time make sure it's airtight. I love that challenge of.
It because there is that part of your job where you can do everything possible as the detective in the case, but then there's a point where you have to pass it over to the legal system and for them to actually find the conviction or the answer or the jail time is that hard watching that process. If it doesn't go the way you wanted it to go, it.
Can be hard completely. And one of the things that I teach in the workshops that I do, and we talk about ethics, morality, law, where they all come together at the end of the day. Like the DPP who prosecute our matters, there is a public interest that they have to serve. And I often talk about a murder that we investigated and he was charged with murder, willing to plead guilty to manslaughter with interfere with a corpse, and the DPP had to weigh that up and they think, Okay,
we know what his defense is. He's going to say it was self defense because that's what he told us in an interview. He killed a guy. But they're saying, Okay, if he pleads guilty to these we'll get eight years if we take on the murder. If he gets acquitted, if one of the jurors believes his story of self defense, then we could have spent two or three million dollars on a lengthy trial of taxpayer money and get nothing.
Which civilians won't really understand when they watch it from the outside.
And I watched it as they explained to the mother of this victim, and it's a bitter pill to swallow. It's like, but why, Yeah, It's a reality that can really wear you down. So I think the way to survive is to treat it like a horrible game. It really is, and you have this belief that, okay, there will be justice at some stage, something will come around where you believe in karma or things like that, but you've just got to be happy knowing that you have done everything that you can.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me Jimmy Bath. I'm speaking with Luke Taylor about his time as a detective. Up next, tells us about what he did after he made the decision to leave policing behind. The techniques that you used as a detective, are there any I guess that listeners would be surprised by. We're used to watching TV and seeing the different techniques on the surface, But I've heard you mentioned cabbage before, the old.
Luminol where they come into a crime scene and they spray luminol on the wall. They turn the lights off and it looks like a blood bath. And the beauty of that is it's a presumptive test for organic matter, so something that was once living. So as a crime scene fellow, he's tried to hey once, he said, can't rub a cabbage on the wall. He said, turn the lights off and spray. You'll get the same effect. Really, it's a presumptive test. So it's the first step we
know we've got something organic. Then that will be sent away for DNA. And the other great thing that people hate to hear is that when you send a sample away, the screen doesn't split into a montage of color and a Who song play and then after ten seconds it flashes up suspect identified. A bit harder than that, and a lot longer. Yeah, bulk crime could take months, if not years for results to come back, and it's a numbers game.
What's more important do you think DNA or fingerprints in a crime scene?
Great question. I think everything is important. Well, that's a good political Everything is important in a crime scene. Obviously DNA you could have identical twins, but then so that's another point of elimination, whereas fingerprints are individual can be hard to get fingerprints at times as well, and even DNA. We've made a lot of advances in that stuff, but it's still not infallible and DNA, like I had a job years ago where a body was cut up and
we had a head. Pulled the head out of the river and an only been in the water for about thirty six hours, but we could not get a DNA sample out of an entire head really, so we set the sample to London, of all places back then, which are a little bit more advanced to get mitochondrial DNA so we could show us the lineage of the mother. But now we've gone so far as well that even touching this table it's in front of us, is that
you could pull maybe ten samples and they cross contaminated. Yeah, and it's finding that balance, but then you've got the elimination. Also fingerprints too, And one of the things I get people to do also with their mobile phone is I'd like to test with them saying would your fingerprint or DNA if you only had one shot at it, what would you do? And everyone obviously says it, well, fingerprints, and say I hold your phone up, so grab your phone?
Now is holding my phone?
This is great for the list. You can do it all yourself. Pick up your phone, have look at the points of contact.
Yeah.
Now are you getting a full fingerprint?
No, not a single one. Even my son which is on the side of my phone is slightly raised.
Excellent. And do you have a thumb identification?
No, because nowadays you do the little click. I've got an iPhone, so I do a little click on the side.
Excellent. I've got a Samsung. And if I doesn't do face recognition, I can put my thumb print. But then what's the first thing I do once I open an app? I swipe?
You're contaminating it.
Yes, So there's so many things. So when you get an object like that, you've got to look at the physiology. How is the object held, how is it used? Do you put the phone to your ear or do you speak into the speakerphone?
And that's going to be a different kind of DNA fingerprint.
We don't like to admit it, but we do spit a fair bit when we talk straight into the microphone.
I've heard quite a few form of detectives people we've had on the show talk about the fact that nowadays it's a lot harder to get away with, say murder, because of all of the technology that we've got. Would you agree with that?
The era of ubiquitous computing, it is all around us, all those little RFIDs and things. You can track people anywhere you walk down your street now with your phone on, and civilians have the capability. But that would be picked up by so many different sources, every building, every life, I said, r if I do all that radio frequency identification things, it sends signals everywhere. Everyone has a phone, everyone records stuff. We have dash cams, we have phones.
It's the era of constant surveillance, and it is we can basically pinpoint. Nobody can go cold, nobody can go off the grid. They think they can, and fortunately for us, most crimes are crimes of passion and there's not that much forethought that goes into it.
So it's almost like your phone could be the thing that is your undoing. Really, like, could you solve a crime just by tapping into someone's phone?
That's always the thing in any interview and things like that. We won't talk about methodology, but yeah, there are so many ways. I mean, everyone knows about cell towers, triangulation, they're the basic things, and that still works. So your phone's constantly searching for three points in cell towers. So when you do triangulation, you put a trace you out to keep trying to find that phone until it narrows and narrows down. And that can be like a ten
square meter spot. So you narrow that down, it might be back out here on Williams Street somewhere like that. And then you'll pick up the other surveillance cameras you see how many people were driving in the time. It may be a traffic cam that might pick something up. The traffic cam might actually pick up a car and that car'll have a redger and you say, hey, have you got a dash cam in there? Yes? I have? If you come from this street, yes, can we check
your dash cam? Businesses with surveillance ATMs that constantly take photos of the people at the ATM but also the people who are walking behind them. You go to Cole's Now. The other day, I'm putting a credit card in at the Coles tap and go section because they don't have enough staff to serve me, and it's taking photos of me. My photo comes up on the screen.
There's a little video.
Yeah, I do my hair, make sure it's all looking good, but it's.
Everywhere after the police force. I mean, you've already alluded to it. But you did become an educator. You went and restudied. Tell me about how you landed on that as your next career, and particularly in creating this workshop, these crime stories.
Yeah, I became a teacher by accident. So a few years out I just had to re engage my brain. I'd done a lot of reading and research, and so one thing I loved was literature. And then it was years later I thought, why am I trying to fit myself into someone else's box. Just do it I love, And so I'd picked up a couple of subjects. I'm literally just eighteenth century English poetry, Shakespeare and things like that.
And for two years I was just doing subjects. I thought, I'm going to be a writer or a journo.
Ah, there you go.
Yeah, I thought I'm going to be an alcoholic journalist.
There's a stereotype for it.
I know. It's been like the alcoholic police, isn't it the same thing, same stereotype. Yeah, And I started doing those subjects. Did my pregnant After about two weeks of observation, I got to stand up nervously in front of these year ten kids because they're not judgmental.
I love that you're nervous about year ten kids when you have come from the world of crime.
I tried to say to them. Look at twenty one, I'm run around a gun on my hip, I said. And then mid thirties. Here I'm shaking like a leaf in front of these year ten kids. But it just came out of me. I started talking about literary techniques and things, and I said, now, oh, I'm not even working. This is just amazing, and I get to share my enthusiasm and just watch people respond to that, and I absolutely loved it. It was basically just glorified babysitting in
a particular school. I got to work there. I signed on this school I'd never been to before, and I went and locked myself into toilets. I was soaking wet. I'm pulling handtaels off the walls, sticking them down my shirt. And it was a make or break moment. I thought, I just want to run home. I'm in tears, I'm sweating, I can't move. I was just paralyzed again. Yeah, that moment I went out. I did a lesson and luckily that was that got me through. But yeah, and you
still get days like that. You still have days like that. Everything is a challenge. But I know I'm not going to die. Yeah, that's a big thing. And I know for most cases, I'm not putting myself in that position that it was that the police are doing every day. Now my heart goes out to them for they're still doing it.
Well, eventually you found a way to kind of combine your two loves detective work and teaching. If I was to walk into one of your workshops crime story workshops, what would I find or what would be presented to me?
Well, you wouldn't solve it. I don't think you're good enough.
What I could do it? Right? Is this what the kids will say?
Ah, they pick up the first piece of evidence and they're doing I got this, I've got this, And it is so convoluted and twisting and turning with exculpatry and culpatory evidence or red herrings as people like to call them in the literary world. It messes with their minds.
So they literally walk into a crime scene that you set up.
So we set them up, so we have these digitally printed backdrops. They're six meters long two and a half meters tall, big aluminium frame and they go over the
top of that. We have one on each end of the room, so there's two crime scenes in front of that, and they're based on real crimes that I've investigated, So we've put components together of that, and all the exhibits are laid out to evidence markers, and there's about eight evidence most there's hundreds of exhibits and they've got to work their way through that, and then they'll cross over
at the midway point and do the other investigation. And then if you're doing a full day one, maybe we're doing legal studies, or for the corporate workshops, we'll do conversation management. They actually get to interview a couple of witnesses. I get to play Gary the Garbo and I play hardball. What do they learn.
By basically playing detective?
Like?
How does that help them?
Mine originally was based on writing. So I went to got to Master's of writing, and while I'm sitting in class, I'm watching these kids struggle with the concepts of writing. The school I went who was big on project based learning, and we were taught to do that and I took some kids who were really low literacy, actually said to them, you want to come and make a video game, so let's make Grand Theft Auto. And what I did I used these objects this experiential learning, so we basically described
our observations and what we were doing. I parked the car and the bush left the doors open. We got to it and said, right, the offenders had gone, which way did they go? And we would record our observation. So I had the course of a week, these guys put together a brilliant piece of writing for guys who could hardly write. So I then looked into experiential learning and thought, right, if we do this properly, there are better ways to teach these kids.
So I'm imagining and like for someone to help them with English. It's like by sitting there and having to describe pieces of evidence, that's going to help them with the way they use their words in their writing completely.
So I start the workshop with one of my stories. I then get them to become detectives. I say, okay, I was the star of the show. Now you're the star of the show. What you need to be as a writer is you need to then transfer that power to the reader. So I'm saying to them, give the power to the reader. Let them solve it. It's not about you telling him your inferences and what you think you've solved. The power of simply just recording their observations
at a crime scene and leaving it. You then have the power of the reader going, oh, I think this has happened or that's happened. You don't solve it, you build it gradually. The human nature we all want to solve things. We all want to be right, and we all want to solve things. And the ability is not to tell them. You guide them. So by using your observations, even in a short piece of writing, it's powerful and engages.
What has surprise the kids about the experience. What is the feedback you've been getting.
Even the most hard headed teenage boy who wants to kick his football at your head and say this is lame. I don't want to do this. They come into it at the end of the workshop. They've got this book of all is writing all these observations and paragraphs, and they go, how did you get me to write? You tricked me? That's the thing. They get so immersed in this knowing that it's a true crime, and they con solve it and they're the clues that they start acting
the way they always do. And that's when we can work with and work with their strengths and say, right, this is your natural ability, let's move this, let's work with that. It's a real eye happened. They just yeah, they don't know what they're actually doing and how much they're achieving. And we reflect back on that throughout the day.
Do you ever hold a session with these kids and think, oh, that kid could be a detective?
Oh? Yes, I'm amazed. Particularly girls, they are obsessed with true crime. They know more than me. They are amazing. The things that they tell me. I just go, wow, it's scary, but and I love it. It's the way they think. And I've got to say that eighty percent of the kids in school who can really get their teeth into that, they are females. They're amazing. We're at
a school the other day at Lucas Heights. So were fantastic and the boys were really good as well, but they were all high performing kids and these guys were fantastic. But generally it's the girls and it's the way they think. They just go deep into it. As a lot, the boys can be quite shallow. I was one of them, still am, but I've grown up a bit and surface level, whereas these girls go what if, what if? What if? And they just go deeper and deeper and it's fantastic.
So does it give you confidence? Obviously we do have amazing people in the police force now, but for the future of the police force, and you're hopeful that when these kids that you're teaching maybe one day become detectives, that they are going to have that support and be in that career for decades and decades and decades and be able to kind of continue that job.
That would be amazing because I think the average career is down about three years now. Really it was about seven when I got out.
Three years.
Yeah, And it's a similar thing to teaching what I'm seeing obviously having been in both industries. So when I joined, you had people you could have a trade or you'd have an HSC to get into the police. Then once we got out, we had to do like a Constable's Development program, which is basically to get you an advanced diploma. My detective's course was an advanced diploma and then it's now a degree level, and I think that they're going to have five six careers. They've done a lot of careers,
work in skills. They're going to have five or six careers.
That's a shame with police because seniority is important.
It's amazing. Yes, that accumulating knowledge. You can't just buy that. You cannot read a book to get that. You've got to earn that and it takes time, and it scares me that that knowledge can just disappear.
Well, hopefully all those smart girls and boys that you're teaching, well one day get there.
Yeah, And it's that critical thinking. And again it's what they also realized and we try to help them realize, which may not be good for the police, is it's they're transferable skills. They can use that anywhere. That's the essence train at anything. But if you've got communication, literacy and those transferable skills and that empathy and understanding, you could be trained to do anything.
Thanks to Luke for telling us his story. True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by me Jamma Bath with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Crystal Cornielsen, thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.