HEAR SOME EVIL
Check out these audio series that offer new evidence in some of the most chilling real-life crimes so you can play detective – with details of how to find them
46 THE TEACHER’S PET
Chris Dawson had everything he wanted. Blond and muscular, the former pro rugby star and popular PE teacher lived in an exclusive suburb of Sydney on Australia’s beautiful east coast with a doting wife and two small daughters. But Dawson was sexually obsessed with a 16-year-old former pupil, Joanne Curtis. He had groomed the insecure teenager and moved her into his home – telling his trusting wife Lynette that Joanne was to be their live-in babysitter.
That was 1982. When Lynette finally started to question her husband’s behaviour, she disappeared... and has been missing for the past 38 years.
The cold case was dramatically revived by Australian investigative journalist Hedley Thomas, with an investigation that has enthralled armchair detectives all over the world and generated nearly 30 million downloads. Earlier this year it achieved an equally dramatic result, when Dawson was brought to court on a charge of murder. He pleaded not guilty, and the trial is expected to go ahead later this year.
After an investigation in the early 1980s, police concluded that Lynette had vanished of her own accord. Chris Dawson claimed he had spoken to her on the phone, and that apparently was all the evidence police needed to close the case.
For decades, friends and family pleaded for the file to be re-examined. The authorities refused. Many suspected that the last thing Sydney’s police and politicians wished to see was a probe into a case with implications of rampant sex abuse in the city’s high schools.
Numerous former pupils, boys as well as girls, from Cromer High came forward to tell the podcast they were sexually abused by a ring of male and female teachers. This practice extended to other schools and involved adults from far beyond the education system.
What Chris Dawson was doing with Joanne was only the tip of a scandal – and over the years many people had helped him to cover it up. This jawdropping podcast tears the scandal wide open. Eighteen episodes.
47 HOLLYWOOD & CRIME
The killing of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short in 1947, whose corpse was found mutilated and posed on LA wasteland, came to be known as the Black Dahlia murder and was immortalised in film (above). Tracy Pattin investigates the case and also focuses on less wellknown crimes in the city of movies. Thirty-two episodes.
48 22 HOURS: AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
In 2015 a man driving through a wealthy area of Washington DC saw smoke billowing from a house. When firemen arrived they found four bodies – but they had not burned alive: they’d been bound, stabbed and beaten. Twelve episodes.
49 WHO KILLED ELSIE FROST?
This moving account of the murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1965 begins with a crime that baffled police half a century ago and is still difficult to comprehend today – a murderer ambushed Elsie (right) as she walked home from her sailing club around 4pm. Ten episodes.
50 BELIEVED
There’s no mystery about the identity of the criminal here. Former doctor to the USA’s national gymnastics team Larry
Nassar has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for sexually molesting young girls. The podcast explores how he was able to do this over two decades. Nine episodes.
51 BEAR BROOK
For lovers of the traditional murder investigation, this can’t be bettered. It begins in the 1980s with the discovery of two bodies in a barrel in remote woodland in
New Hampshire. Seven episodes.
52 FAKE HEIRESS
Anna Delvey posed as a German heiress and fooled New York society – and her story is fascinating. Six episodes.