SUSPICIOUS MINDS
A wave of true-crime podcasts are fascinating Australians and helping reopen unsolved murders and mysteries while reinvigorating award-winning investigative journalism, writes Sophie Tedmanson.
A wave of true-crime podcasts are fascinating Australians and helping reopen unsolved murders while reinvigorating investigative journalism.
The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.” So said Truman Capote in an interview with the New York Times in 1966, the year his groundbreaking non-fiction novel In Cold Blood was released. In Cold Blood, about the grisly quadruple murder of the Clutter family on their farm in Kansas, broke the mould of truecrime and investigative journalism, with Capote’s extraordinary eye for detail and a narrative that took the reader inside a real-life story.
More than half a century later, true crime is still prevalent in the modern Zeitgeist (it’s fair to say we are obsessed), only this time the public’s fascination is being satiated in the form of podcasts that are unearthing new evidence and reopening cold cases, telling stories in real time and in turn becoming brilliant showcases for the nation’s top investigative journalists from all mediums – audio, print and television.
It began with This American Life’s Serial, and its gripping reinvestigation into the 1999 murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee, whose former boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted and jailed in 2000 for her kidnap and murder – which became a pop cultural phenomenon when it debuted in 2014, breaking podcast records, going on to be downloaded more than 175 million times and ultimately resulting in Syed’s trial being reopened. Serial co-producer Sarah Koenig, who herself gained a cult following, once said her podcast was “about the basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things” – all the perfect ingredients for a fascinating whodunit.
Four years later and the phenomenon has well and truly gripped Australians – and particularly Australian women – with locally produced true-crime podcasts the most downloaded in the charts (at the time of print six of the top 10 podcast downloads on iTunes were Australian-made true-crime series, beating Oprah Master Class and the financial podcast The Barefoot Investor).
The stories are real and represent people from all elements of our society: young and old, rich and poor, Caucasian and Indigenous; they are mysterious and compelling. They include the 1982 disappearance of mother of two Lyn Dawson, whose former rugby celebrity turned school-teacher husband was having an affair with a student in Sydney’s northern beaches ( The Teacher’s Pet, the Australian); the unsolved murder of Melbourne mother Maria James in 1980, which has unearthed police bungles, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and satanic cults ( Trace, ABC); the mysterious death of young indigenous teenager Mark Haines, who was found on train tracks in Tamworth, the country music capital, in 1988 ( Unravel: Blood on the Tracks, ABC); the brutal unsolved murder of Sydney rugby fan David Breckenridge in 2002 just a day after his 28th birthday ( Eight Minutes, the Daily Telegraph); the death of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk, who was found at the bottom of a garbage chute in a luxury apartment building in 2010 ( Phoebe’s Fall, Fairfax); and the unsolved 1990 to 1991 murders of three indigenous children who all lived in the same street in a northern New South Wales country town split by racial tensions ( Bowraville, the Australian).
They are also playing out in real time and are interactive: not only are they revisiting unsolved stories, often uncovering apparent police mistakes and other injustices, but as the podcasts are going to air, listeners are coming forward with new evidence, helping to shape and sometimes change the narrative of the non-fiction story and ultimately, hopefully, helping to solve a crime. In the introduction to Eight Minutes, Daily Telegraph reporter Nicole Hogan entices the listener immediately: “In this podcast we will follow the police investigation, look at what the unsolved homicide squad has done so far, what the impact has been on David’s family and friends, and appeal to you, the listener to help us catch a killer.”
The public interest has been so demanding that true-crime seminars have been held around the country – hosted by various media organisations and even the Walkley Foundation – with panels including the journalists, and in some cases people who are involved in the story, enabling the public to interact with real people featured in the true crimes they are obsessing over through their headphones.
For Hedley Thomas, respected investigative journalist and national chief correspondent for the Australian newspaper, the case of Lyn Dawson has mystified him for 17 years: a devoted mother of two allegedly walks out of her northern Sydney home one day, leaving behind two beloved daughters, and never returns, apparently having joined a cult. She has not been seen since. But the story has even darker twists, as the tagline says: ‘a star footballer, his schoolgirl lover, a wife who vanishes’; the intrigues are many. Two coronial inquests found that Lyn had in fact been murdered by her husband Chris Dawson, but he was never charged because prosecutors claimed there was not enough evidence. He currently lives in Queensland.
Thomas first covered Lyn Dawson’s disappearance in 2001 and was compelled by what he considered a “travesty of justice”, and also intrigued by coincidentally having a personal connection – he attended the same high school where Chris Dawson ended up working years after his wife’s disappearance (and after Thomas had graduated).
“I thought it was such an extraordinarily sad story, compelling in terms of the weight of circumstantial evidence. I just thought this story would be something I would one day perhaps revisit,” Thomas says. For years he kept his story notes and files in a box marked ‘Lyn Dawson’ in the roof of his carport at home in Brisbane.
“Late last year, with my son’s help, we took the box down and I opened it and just thought: ‘I’m going to try and do this podcast series’, which I hadn’t done before,” he adds. “I felt if I could track down the relevant people, members of the family and persuade them to talk to me, if I could talk to some of the cops who were involved, if I could piece it together, maybe I could tell a gripping story but maybe – and this was always my objective – maybe we could find new evidence in terms of delivering justice. Because I always found it a travesty of justice, I’ve got to be upfront about that. I’m trying to be objective and balanced, but I’m upfront in saying I agree with two coroners who found that Chris murdered his wife and got away with it.”
“I felt if I could track down the relevant people … if I could piece it together, maybe I could tell a
The Teacher’s Pet has so far broken Australian podcast records – as of July it had hit more than five million downloads, with 35 per cent of those from overseas, including listeners from the US, Canada and Europe, taking an interest in this uniquely Australian mystery.
At the time, the Australian’s editor-in-chief Paul Whittaker told his own paper: “Podcasts allow newspapers to amplify big and complex stories by giving voice to victims and their families in a way that our journalism has never been able to.”
The Australian already has an award-winning podcast, with the extraordinary Bowraville winning two Walkley awards in 2016 – the first award for a podcast since it was added to the ‘radio/audio documentary’ category. Last year, however, on the back of the boon in podcasts, the award was transformed into ‘innovation’ and was won by the ABC podcast Trace. Journalist Rachael Brown, who created Trace, says the case of the murder of Maria James “chose me, in a sense”.
“I felt a podcast would be the perfect intimate medium to first explore this multilayered case,” she says of Trace, which remains number two in the podcast download charts after a year, and has since developed into a book – Trace: Who Killed Maria James? – released this month.
“True-crime coverage often treats tragedies like spectator sports, so my early caveat was getting the blessing of the James brothers and former detective Ron Iddles. I wanted Trace to be both a forensic investigation and respectful of all those caught up in this case. The intimacy of the podcast medium allowed the James brothers’ story to resonate powerfully, it gave Adam James the space he needed to speak publicly for the first time, it offered anonymity to church abuse victims, and the immersive sound design helped listeners feel they were walking alongside me through the investigation.
“Another strength of the medium is that it allows the public to play a role. I wanted listeners to be participants, not just consumers, able to meaningfully contribute with leads and information. The emotional investment this approach fostered was phenomenal. Three hundred emails quickly poured into Trace’s account with fresh leads, allowing Trace to evolve as it went to air.”
Thomas has had the same response to The Teacher’s Pet: “This medium is a juggernaut. I’ve been pleasantly stunned at the scale of engagement,” he says. “We’ve got phenomenal emails – hundreds, I can’t keep up – and that doesn’t happen with stories I do in print or digitally. This has shown me that this medium for long-form journalism is so brilliant and so promising. It’s a great medium because people respond to the voices they’re hearing, and when you do it in collaboration with the paper, they are genuinely interesting news stories.”
“I do believe that journalists who do thorough cold-case investigations may well be more effective than traditional policing, because what we’re finding in this is people who have never talked to the cops are coming to me, they’re going onto The Teacher’s Pet website and wanting to share stuff that despite numerous appeals from the police they’ve never shared with the police.”
Those coming forward include family members such as Shanelle Dawson, the daughter of Lyn and Chris Dawson, who had never spoken in public until she granted Thomas an interview for his podcast.
In episode nine of The Teacher’s Pet, Dreamworld, Shanelle describes what the podcast has given her: “I feel really excited because I’d kind of given up hope, it seemed like there were no other leads on anything that might lead to an answer as to what happen to my mum, so I’m hopeful this might just keep the hope alive, and maybe somebody who hasn’t seen the articles might hear this [podcast] or, I mean I’m nervous, but I definitely want to honour my mother and this is a great opportunity to do that …”
In July, News Corp Australia (publisher of Vogue Australia) also launched True Crime Australia (TCA), a website dedicated to ‘the nation’s most compelling crime stories’, utilising the company’s large national network of crime reporters with in-depth articles and, of course, podcasts. Other media organisations including the ABC and Fairfax have similar true-crime sites with associated podcasts.
According to News Corp Australia’s News360 executive editor Kathy Lipari, who oversaw the TCA launch: “Our writers have been behind the scenes and at the heart of the most infamous, mysterious and chilling crimes in Australia. At the same time we have been witnessing recently a surge in public interest in the area of true crime both in the fictional world and in real-life events.”
Lipari says podcasts are part of the evolution of the modern newsroom tapping into a huge appetite for a good crime story. “The core of what we do has not changed – publishing fantastic content – it is still all about good storytelling, but what that looks like has evolved and now has to include video and image-rich reports, and yes, podcasts,” she says.
“A good read can put you in the picture, but a podcast places you at the scene, almost makes you a character as you can hear the words spoken that often are unspeakable.
“In our time-poor lives as well, particularly in commuter cities, it’s easier to listen to a good read on a podcast while you are stuck in traffic, or on a train or bus or just on the couch with your headphones plugged in. In some ways podcasts are a rebirth of the old wireless serials people used to tune in for.
“True-crime podcasts have become so popular because they allow this type of chilling, gripping story to be told in a way that they haven’t been before. The details of so many cold-case stories contain such unbelievable stories of human tragedy but also heroic and extraordinary human deeds from those who step in to help, to find, bring to justice and try to help resolve.”
Like any good story does with any good journalist, the exhaustive investigations, continually following up new leads, and trying to find justice for the victims becomes all-consuming for these podcast creators. Thomas jokes he hasn’t been able to play golf with his mates for months; while Brown would mull over evidence on her morning runs along the Yarra River in Melbourne to gain a clearer understanding of the facts.
Like Serial, which has resulted in Adnan Syed being granted a retrial, the Australian podcasts are changing the course of justice. Following The Teacher’s Pet, new witnesses have emerged and detectives are investigating past student-teacher relationships at Sydney’s northern beaches high schools. And thanks to new evidence revealed in Trace, there is fresh hope in the search for the killer of Maria James.
“The James family and I are now waiting on the coroner to decide whether she’ll hold a fresh inquest,” says Brown. “The rusty gears of justice mightn’t turn quickly, but they are turning.”
For more on The Teacher’s Pet, go to www.theaustralian.com.au/the-teacherspet. The book Trace: Who Killed Maria James (Scribe) by Rachael Brown is out now.
gripping story but maybe … maybe we could find new evidence in terms of delivering justice”