HIDDEN TRUTH
Journalist Hedley Thomas is on the case for the Sky News doco Shandee’sStory:TheSearchForJustice, writes Siobhan Duck
THE emails arrive for Hedley Thomas almost every week. While each tells a different heartbreaking story, they all come with the same desperate request: please help us to get justice.
Ever since he and his producer Slade Gibson made their awardwinning podcast The Teacher’s
Pet to spotlight the 1982 disappearance of Sydney mother Lynette Dawson, Thomas has been inundated with pleas to investigate other cold cases.
“It’s frustrating that I can’t get to all these cases,” the double Gold Walkley Award-winning journalist says.
“I write back to everybody saying, ‘Look, I’m interested [in helping]. I have a fi le of these cases that I’m hoping to revisit but for the time being, I can’t.’”
It was among those requests that Thomas first came across the story of Shandee Blackburn, “a really funny, lively 23-year- old who just wanted to fi nd love”, he recalls.
But the Queensland woman was murdered not far from her own home in February 2013.
“I was immediately staggered by what had happened to this poor woman, by the frenzied attack that had taken place.”
Thomas adds: “She was stabbed more than 20 times, including in her face and head... while she was walking home from her shift in a coffee shop, just after she texted her boyfriend to wish him a good night. And suddenly, she’s set upon almost certainly from behind by the assailant in the most cowardly way, and he keeps plunging the knife in until he’s interrupted by a passing taxi. Then he runs away, and Shandee is left lying in the gutter, dying.”
Blackburn’s former boyfriend, John Peros, stood trial for her murder but was acquitted in
2017. The coroner later found Peros responsible for her death but said there was no evidence for him to be recharged.
After six months of research, Thomas launched Shandee’s Story, a serial podcast for The Australian that has already chalked up four million downloads. Now he is telling her saga through the compelling Sky News documentary Shandee’s Story:
The Search For Justice.
“It will reach a different and new audience,” he says of the one-hour doco. “[And] for listeners who wanted to know more... they can hopefully have some of their questions answered, and we’ll be unpacking more information as well as more revelations in the documentary.”
For Thomas, the time constraints of documentarymaking presented a different challenge since, for the podcast, he could examine the minutiae of the case over 18 episodes.
“I was recently writing a note to producers saying, ‘Do you think we need to make this a two-parter?’” he says of trying to condense his research into one hour. “Fortunately, I work with really professional documentarymakers at Sky News, and they strive to highlight the most important angles and revelations, so I’m in good hands.”
While he can’t find answers for every family, Thomas takes comfort in knowing that truecrime podcasts, documentaries and even drama series create awareness. These stories are also reframing the narrative for Blackburn and Janine Vaughan (whose disappearance Thomas investigated in his podcast
The Night Driver) so these women become the centre of their own stories and not just anonymous victims.
He also wishes more journalists would follow his lead with coldcase investigations. “With this long-form [reporting], I know the material and the witnesses and the experts who come out of the woodwork and shed light on things that they’ve heard in these episodes can make an enormous difference,” he says. “And I’m really hopeful that in Shandee’s Story, we will crack the case.”
SHANDEE’S STORY: THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE TUESDAY, 7.30PM, SKY NEWS