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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer.
Speaker 4: The Night Stalker BTK.
Speaker 7: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 7: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 7: your host journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 6: Good Evening. Some crimes are so shocking that they change
Speaker 6: a nation forever. In revealing the lives and crimes of
Speaker 6: Australia's worst murderers, rapists and kidnappers, in all their horror, innocence,
Speaker 6: Lost answers the question we ask when we hear about
Speaker 6: lives taken so ruthlessly why Season crime writer Amanda Howard
Speaker 6: has spent eighteen years studying and interviewing killers and criminals
Speaker 6: across the globe to get answers to this question. In
Speaker 6: interviewing many of these criminals face to face in prison,
Speaker 6: she has given a rare insight into these faces of evil.
Speaker 6: The stories of serial killers such as Ivan Malott and
Speaker 6: Martin Byron are detailed, as well as double murderer Mark Valera,
Speaker 6: child murderer, Kathleen Folbig and Anita Cobby's Killers. The mysterious
Speaker 6: disappearances of Daniel Moorecombe and the Beaumont children are explored
Speaker 6: and we are given an intriguing insight into family killers
Speaker 6: Kathleen Knight, Matthew de Griccy and Seph Gonzalez. The book
Speaker 6: they were featuring this evening is Innocence Lost, The Times
Speaker 6: that Changed Australia with my special guest journalist and author
Speaker 6: Amanda Howard. Welcome back to the program and thank you
Speaker 6: very much for agreeing to this interview all the way
Speaker 6: from Australia, Amanda Howard, thank you very much.
Speaker 5: For this time, my Dan, thank you for having us again.
Speaker 5: And it's great to be back. It's good, I'm good.
Speaker 6: It's always a pleasure. It's always a pleasure. These books
Speaker 6: are incredible. Let's talk about a little bit about how
Speaker 6: you put Innocent's Loss together? What made the cut, what
Speaker 6: did you want to sort of put with us, What
Speaker 6: is really contained in Innocen's Loss?
Speaker 5: Well, this book was written as a where were you
Speaker 5: kind of books, So where were you and Daniel Morcolm disappeared?
Speaker 5: Where were you when you heard about the need to
Speaker 5: copycase where were you when Port Arthur happened? So it's
Speaker 5: those questions that Australia, it sends chills down our color
Speaker 5: ap spine, that it's cases that create fear. It's those
Speaker 5: cases that we all remember. It's cases that makes us
Speaker 5: hug our children just a bit tighter at night. So
Speaker 5: it was it was about looking at all of the
Speaker 5: sorts of cases because there is a lot more and
Speaker 5: there is a volume two and three coming, so there
Speaker 5: is a lot more cases that I will explore, but
Speaker 5: for this one that these are the cases that I
Speaker 5: felt a personal connection to, those cases that if I
Speaker 5: had to run off a list, these are those murders.
Speaker 6: You have the book in sections, so tell us some
Speaker 6: of the sections that you have this.
Speaker 5: Yep. Well, I started off with a section called the Victim,
Speaker 5: so that was actually looking at a lot of sex
Speaker 5: crimes that occurred, our worst of our worst. Then I
Speaker 5: went on to the children, and that includes a chapter
Speaker 5: on the Graham Thorne case, which I actually have a
Speaker 5: personal connection to. I went on then to the missing
Speaker 5: children because we have a lot of cold cases in
Speaker 5: this country of children, especially in Adelaide. But there's a
Speaker 5: lot of cases that raise more questions than they answer.
Speaker 5: I go on to predators, which is obviously our child
Speaker 5: sex killers. We have had some horrific cases here in
Speaker 5: this country. Then onto the family killers like Catherine Knight
Speaker 5: and Matthew Dugrucci and Seth Gonzales, so those cases where
Speaker 5: we examine how someone inside a family could take out
Speaker 5: those that they apparently love partners in crime was next,
Speaker 5: So that's looking at tandem killers. So it's a fascinating
Speaker 5: topic that I actually do a lot of work on.
Speaker 5: So looking at how two people can come together and
Speaker 5: go on a killing spree and how they build more
Speaker 5: trust than most of us would even ever try to comprehend. Obviously,
Speaker 5: then we have our serial killers. We do have a
Speaker 5: few here like Ivan Malatt and Paul Daniere. I went
Speaker 5: into a bit of historical cases because not only do
Speaker 5: we have bush rangers here, but we had several cases
Speaker 5: of baby farming that was happening here as well. That
Speaker 5: is renowned throw out the world, particularly in England. Baby killers,
Speaker 5: so we've had a fair few of those over the years.
Speaker 5: Then the rampages, which is the Port Arthur case and
Speaker 5: our Strathfield case that a man went into a shopping
Speaker 5: center and shot the place up. Our unusual cases. Now,
Speaker 5: I come from a town called Campbelltown in Sydney and
Speaker 5: we every November have a massive celebration called Fish's Ghost Festival,
Speaker 5: and that's actually based on a murder case that happened
Speaker 5: here in the nineteenth century and apparently the ghost pointed
Speaker 5: the police to his own corpse. So it's something it's
Speaker 5: an odd thing to celebrate. It's probably why I do
Speaker 5: true crime. But I had to include a local case,
Speaker 5: and then we just have some unsolved cases and cases
Speaker 5: that people don't know about that should so I sort
Speaker 5: of spread it out. There's a lot of murder, a
Speaker 5: lot of death, but it's those cases that changed laws,
Speaker 5: created a lot of dialogue, wondered why we no longer
Speaker 5: have the death penalty and things like that. So it
Speaker 5: was all those cases that I thought I can split
Speaker 5: them up and just examine how these people do what they.
Speaker 6: Do, and to start innocents last, you really do start
Speaker 6: with an incredibly disturbing case. As we mentioned in the
Speaker 6: beginning opening, Anita Cabby. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 6: about Anita Cabby before we talk about John Travers and
Speaker 6: the Murphy Boys.
Speaker 5: So Anita Cobby was a nurse who worked in Sydney.
Speaker 5: She had recently separated from her husband, though they were
Speaker 5: still together, but she had gone out for an evening.
Speaker 5: It was it was summertime here in February. It's nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty six, and she decided to catch the train home
Speaker 5: from a dinner out with a couple of her nursing friends.
Speaker 5: She arrived at Blacktown Station, which is out in Sydney's
Speaker 5: out of West. Went to ring her father to pick
Speaker 5: her up from the station, but the telephone, the public telephone,
Speaker 5: was broken, so she decided to just walk the kilometer
Speaker 5: home and from there she was grabbed and what she
Speaker 5: endured over the next five to six hours is animalistic,
Speaker 5: horrifying torture.
Speaker 6: Talk about John Raymond Travers, he lived in Blacktown as well.
Speaker 6: Tell us about his background as you write in this book.
Speaker 5: So, John Travis was a kid that was in and
Speaker 5: out of prison. He had a lot of charges of
Speaker 5: sexual misconduct. He was a calf thief. He'd done a
Speaker 5: bit of time. He was one of those bad kids
Speaker 5: who was able to create a crowd around him of
Speaker 5: other children who grew up in these lower socio economic
Speaker 5: areas to create a gang and though some of the
Speaker 5: boys that he would have in this gang were older
Speaker 5: than him, they were thirty five, he was able to
Speaker 5: create a pack mentality that whatever he said goes. And
Speaker 5: so when Travis decided that he wanted to grab a
Speaker 5: girl and they went for a drive around black Town,
Speaker 5: the others never even questioned what he wanted to do
Speaker 5: because they knew what was coming.
Speaker 6: Right now, tell us a little bit about this group
Speaker 6: of people that John Travers has around him and that
Speaker 6: are convinced to do most anything for a laugh and
Speaker 6: for a thrill.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, there's the three Murphy brothers and also Michael Murdock.
Speaker 5: Now Michael Murdoch at the time of Anita's death was
Speaker 5: actually on parole for another violent crime. So it was
Speaker 5: it was one of these moments that he was able
Speaker 5: to egg John Travis on. I don't know if that's
Speaker 5: the term that you guys use, but he was able
Speaker 5: to encourage Travis to say, yeah, let's get him, let
Speaker 5: let's get her. Sorry. So these boys had, you know,
Speaker 5: long long lists of truanty car theft as well, they'd
Speaker 5: beaten up some of the local kids. They were boys
Speaker 5: and men that the police knew very very well, which
Speaker 5: is why it didn't take them very long to get
Speaker 5: them afterwards, because they were keen to tell people that
Speaker 5: they grabbed Ashilas as they said, and and had raped
Speaker 5: and killed her.
Speaker 6: About also that the background of Travers is again before
Speaker 6: these boys know anything about this, the Travers has a background,
Speaker 6: and an you rate about a an earlier attack where
Speaker 6: that woman goes to police and says something regarding each
Speaker 6: av status. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Yes, he'd actually raped a couple of guys in Perth
Speaker 5: when he was over there, which is in Western Australia.
Speaker 5: So and one of them had actually told Travers that
Speaker 5: he had HIV. So it was something that Travis would
Speaker 5: would use when he would sexually assault people. He would say,
Speaker 5: you know, well, I've probably just given you AIDS. So
Speaker 5: to this day he's still alive. So we're not sure
Speaker 5: if he ended up with HIV, but the suggestion is
Speaker 5: that he does, but he hasn't got full blown AIDS.
Speaker 6: Let's get back to to Anita's abduction and what happens
Speaker 6: her parents, Gary and Grace Lynch assume you rate to
Speaker 6: assume that she stayed at her friend's place after dinner
Speaker 6: and that's why she getn't called from the Blacktown station.
Speaker 6: These guys had looked for a place ideal like this,
Speaker 6: isolated and be able to abduct a woman. What happens
Speaker 6: to her? And meanwhile, what do the parents? What is
Speaker 6: their response?
Speaker 5: Well, Gary and Grace Lynch, they ended up actually founding
Speaker 5: a lot of victim family support groups in this country.
Speaker 5: So this is how this case changed a lot of
Speaker 5: things here. But as you said, they assumed that she'd
Speaker 5: stayed in Sydney because she was going to a restaurant afterwards.
Speaker 5: She had an early shift the next day, so Gary
Speaker 5: had been up a couple of times. He actually said
Speaker 5: that he had almost a nightmare of vision, that he
Speaker 5: saw this evilness and he would remember it for the
Speaker 5: rest of his life. Believe it was John Travis's face.
Speaker 5: But whilst they were sort of pacing a bit and
Speaker 5: wondering if she was coming home or not coming home.
Speaker 5: Of course that this is the days before cell phones,
Speaker 5: Travis and the other men grabbed Anita, dragged her into
Speaker 5: the car and she was naked pretty much straight away.
Speaker 5: They actually punched her and beat her quite quickly because
Speaker 5: she was menstruating, so they were a bit pissed off
Speaker 5: that there was blood around when they sort of hadn't
Speaker 5: done that to her. So once she was in the car,
Speaker 5: they stole her purse, held her down in the back seat,
Speaker 5: and went and got petrol first so they would have
Speaker 5: plenty of time using her cash from her purse. They
Speaker 5: then drove around Blacktown for several hours, each of them
Speaker 5: taking turns getting into the back seat with her and
Speaker 5: penetrating all of her orifices, and often two and three
Speaker 5: at once, so this is a pretty brutal attack. Finally,
Speaker 5: they turned off onto Green Road, which is a street
Speaker 5: which is right beside a highway, but if you stood
Speaker 5: where she was killed is so isolated even though there
Speaker 5: is a thousand cars driving pass. It's quite horrific in
Speaker 5: that it's isolated but very public. They dragged her through
Speaker 5: a barbed wire fence and absolutely grazed and brutalized her
Speaker 5: skin with that. They then took turns again in the
Speaker 5: field until they decided that she'd had enough, and this
Speaker 5: was five hours later, and then Travis head back to
Speaker 5: the car, decided no, no, I think she has to go,
Speaker 5: went back, stood on her back, pulled back her head
Speaker 5: and slid her throat. Now, it took him three goes
Speaker 5: to do that, and though she had very little fight
Speaker 5: left in her, she still put up her hands and
Speaker 5: he sapped her fingers as well, so we can see
Speaker 5: that she kept fighting till that very end, and they
Speaker 5: just left her in that field and she was found
Speaker 5: the next day when the farmer who lived there realized
Speaker 5: that his cows were acting strange and he went to
Speaker 5: investigate and found her very bloody, beaten, defiled corpse. And
Speaker 5: it's just a horrific case that the whole country instantly
Speaker 5: had an outrage that these animals, for want of a
Speaker 5: better word, needed to be found quickly, and you know,
Speaker 5: people were going to lynch them if they found themselves.
Speaker 5: There was screams for the death penalty to be reintroduced
Speaker 5: as we found out more and more of the brutality
Speaker 5: that she had suffered. It took them about eleven days
Speaker 5: to find the boys, and one of them, Les Murphy,
Speaker 5: did the youngest of the brothers, actually wet himself, and
Speaker 5: that ended up being front page news here that they
Speaker 5: took a photo of him in handcuffs with a great
Speaker 5: big wet patch on the front of his jeans, just
Speaker 5: to prove that he was scared but when he got arrested,
Speaker 5: because he knew that it wasn't going to be fun,
Speaker 5: and he actually suffered quite a lot in prison, actually
Speaker 5: most of them did. There's a hose and why I
Speaker 5: think that a lot of people would probably know about that.
Speaker 5: I won't go into where people were brutalized for what
Speaker 5: they've done to others. So that is something that had
Speaker 5: happened to Les, purely for what he'd done to Anita.
Speaker 6: You right, though, this again a very movieue scene about
Speaker 6: John McCaughey. Maybe the pronunciation's wrong about people that saw
Speaker 6: the woman out saw her dragged into the vehicle. And
Speaker 6: then he went home and told his brother and they
Speaker 6: decided to drive around if they were able to spot
Speaker 6: the car. And then they saw a car, but tell
Speaker 6: us about that.
Speaker 5: It was the wrong make, and being a car person,
Speaker 5: he should have known the car better. But when you're
Speaker 5: in a situation like that, you do often missing. So
Speaker 5: so he had had seen her being dragged in, he
Speaker 5: had chased the car thro a bit it got away
Speaker 5: from him. So yes, he went and go got his
Speaker 5: brother and they drove around and they actually spotted the
Speaker 5: right car near Green road, but they didn't think it
Speaker 5: was the right car because he said it was this
Speaker 5: sort of car, and it was actually a similar but
Speaker 5: different sort of car. So there was sly I've got
Speaker 5: chills now. There was an opportunity that she could have
Speaker 5: been saved, but they just missed it. So it's heartbreaking
Speaker 5: for them, and they had a lot of guilt, and
Speaker 5: they had to go to trial and explain what they'd seen,
Speaker 5: and they helped put together some of the timeline. But
Speaker 5: you know, there's always heroes out there, and it could
Speaker 5: have been a very different outcome.
Speaker 6: One of the unlikely heroes. And I'm losing the using
Speaker 6: the word loosely, but we still get to the same
Speaker 6: goal of justice. Travers talks about. You'd write about Travers
Speaker 6: and requesting a police Uh, well, his phone call to
Speaker 6: his aunt to bring him some cigarettes, and earlier in
Speaker 6: the book you write about some of the conversations he
Speaker 6: has with his aunt previous to this. So tell us
Speaker 6: about the rule that his aunt has in Travers's downfall.
Speaker 5: Well, she she was the person that they that he trusted.
Speaker 5: The bost now is she is his uncle's girlfriend, so
Speaker 5: they weren't even married, and she was just someone that
Speaker 5: he felt that he could confide in. So what happened
Speaker 5: was that the police knew this, and so they asked
Speaker 5: her to slowly sort of peel away the layers to
Speaker 5: see what he would tell her, and slowly, slowly, slowly,
Speaker 5: he started to explain the story. Sorry, there's a dog
Speaker 5: in the background. And it got to a point that
Speaker 5: he said to her, yes, we killed her, and they
Speaker 5: had that recorded. So those recordings actually went into trial.
Speaker 5: So when the trial occurred, he actually had to have
Speaker 5: a separate trial because he then pled guilty knowing that
Speaker 5: they had him on the case. Right, So, sorry about that.
Speaker 5: I can't help the dog.
Speaker 6: What is the media response? Though, you write about the
Speaker 6: media response, you talk about the outreach, but tell us
Speaker 6: more about what is a response from the public. What's
Speaker 6: the response from the media with this?
Speaker 5: Well, this was the case did this? This is the
Speaker 5: case that we use for every other yardstick that all
Speaker 5: other cases are compared to because of the brutalization that
Speaker 5: happened to Anita. So so what happened was that the
Speaker 5: media decided that this was the one that they would
Speaker 5: get for the reintroduction of the death penalty. People actually
Speaker 5: turned up with nooses at the trial, people turned up
Speaker 5: trying to get these these men. They you know, it
Speaker 5: was almost like a lynching. They went into the police station,
Speaker 5: the courthouse. They actually had to do a closed court
Speaker 5: purely because so many people wanted to get have these
Speaker 5: boys and destroy them.
Speaker 6: What happens in the trial in terms of sentencing and
Speaker 6: the recommendation, it's interesting compared to Canadian law, we have
Speaker 6: no provision like this, and American laves different. Tell us
Speaker 6: what the judge recommends in this case and the term
Speaker 6: we'll hear more in this book. With all of these
Speaker 6: many of these kill it.
Speaker 5: So because we don't have the death penalty and life
Speaker 5: can mean fifteen to twenty years, we actually have a
Speaker 5: sentence here could never to be released. So that means
Speaker 5: that there is no possibility of parole basically when you
Speaker 5: leave prisoners because you're in a box. And these are
Speaker 5: some of the first killers that had this sentence set.
Speaker 5: There's people from a lot that have had it since,
Speaker 5: but these were the boys that sort of made this
Speaker 5: a policy. I mean, we'll get into Crump and Baker too,
Speaker 5: and they had a similar sentence. We used to say
Speaker 5: you should never be released, and so then some of
Speaker 5: these killers were able to have a sentence determined. I'm
Speaker 5: saying that it was too vague, but now the judges
Speaker 5: are able to say you are sentenced to never be released,
Speaker 5: and that is just means that, yes, you will not
Speaker 5: get out on the shore. Inner Pine box.
Speaker 6: Well, you include two cases. And what's interesting, right after
Speaker 6: reading this first incredible case, that you have a case
Speaker 6: of Janine Boulding and right after that Sandra Wahre. And
Speaker 6: in many many ways, both of these cases after that
Speaker 6: are almost copybat copycat killings. Any comment on that before
Speaker 6: we talk about a case that you had mentioned. It's
Speaker 6: close to you, Graham Thorne.
Speaker 5: The Jenine Bolding case is one that not a lot
Speaker 5: of people know about, but when they do know about it,
Speaker 5: they instantly juxtapose it with you need a copycase. So
Speaker 5: Janine was also taken from a train station. She just
Speaker 5: left work, she was heading home. She got grabbed by
Speaker 5: a group of children. In fact, well, one of her
Speaker 5: killers was fourteen years old, and he has been sentenced
Speaker 5: to never be released from prison. And he's one of
Speaker 5: the few child killers in this country, not that we
Speaker 5: have a lot anyway, but he's one of the few
Speaker 5: that has actually been named in the press and it's
Speaker 5: quite shocking, but purely because he will never get out
Speaker 5: of prison. He's been in prison since fourteen. Now he's
Speaker 5: around my age, so he's around forty five, and he
Speaker 5: has the rest of his life and he will never
Speaker 5: see the outside of a prison.
Speaker 6: Wow. Let's talk about the case of Graham foreign And
Speaker 6: as you mentioned, why is this a particular personal interest
Speaker 6: to you or your connection to it?
Speaker 5: I should say, Well, Graham Thorne, he was kidnapped by
Speaker 5: a man who wanted to extort his parents. Now this
Speaker 5: case changed laws too because Graham's parents had actually won
Speaker 5: a lottery, one of the biggest in the country, and
Speaker 5: so they end up being front page news. People knew
Speaker 5: where they lived, their phone number, and so one man,
Speaker 5: Stephen Bradley, decided, well, I want a piece of that,
Speaker 5: and so he thought he would abduct that their son,
Speaker 5: who would often get picked up and taken to school
Speaker 5: in Sydney, and decided that he would ransom him. However,
Speaker 5: the boy died. Now there is suggestions that he might
Speaker 5: have died because he was bundled into the car and
Speaker 5: hid his head, though most believed that he was actually killed.
Speaker 5: So Stephen Bradley still tried to extort the family with
Speaker 5: no luck and ended up dumping Graham's body. But the
Speaker 5: car that Stephen Bradley had he sold almost the very
Speaker 5: next day once once everything went wrong, he decided to
Speaker 5: sell and move back to his home country of Colombo,
Speaker 5: and so whilst he was selling the car, he had
Speaker 5: dumped the body. But there was a lot of evidence
Speaker 5: and the car was actually sold to my grandparents. So
Speaker 5: that's my link to this, and it's one of those
Speaker 5: cases that I grew up hearing about purely because my
Speaker 5: greatgrand parents bought this aqua I'm going to call it
Speaker 5: a skyline but I'm probably wrong, and had to sort
Speaker 5: of hand it back to your police for quite some
Speaker 5: time because it had to be forensically tested. And it's
Speaker 5: how the case broke is because this car had dog hair,
Speaker 5: it had a blanket fibers, and it had evidence that
Speaker 5: proved that Graham had been in the boot of this
Speaker 5: car so or the trunk of the car. So there's
Speaker 5: probably another hint as to why I do this, because
Speaker 5: my grandparents had to be involved in the court case.
Speaker 6: You talk about his reasoning for the death being the
Speaker 6: police officers and their conduct when they were waiting a
Speaker 6: potential ransom call. Tell us about what the police did,
Speaker 6: what they may not have done.
Speaker 5: Oh, I don't know what you're leading to here. He
Speaker 5: had had rung the family a couple of times and
Speaker 5: he had gotten all flustered during these calls, so the
Speaker 5: police hadn't recorded a few of them, and then did
Speaker 5: record a few. But I don't know what else you want, Dan.
Speaker 6: Well, basically what it was is you said what you
Speaker 6: I wanted you to get to was being spooked by
Speaker 6: the call. He wanted to talk to the father and
Speaker 6: instead a police officer, and he's got the police.
Speaker 5: Yep, yeah, I mean that that's propretty standard operating procedure.
Speaker 5: It Bradley had not thought this out. It was almost
Speaker 5: a off chance thinged to do. He had a bit
Speaker 5: of issues, he had his family. They all didn't feel
Speaker 5: comfort bull in Sydney. It was a second country to him.
Speaker 5: He just didn't want to be here. And I think
Speaker 5: that cash was more about the escape. So he sold up, car,
Speaker 5: sold everything, put the family on a boat the day
Speaker 5: before the abduction, and then he thought this was going
Speaker 5: to happen, that they would pay up to give to
Speaker 5: get their son. And he was still going to give
Speaker 5: them a dead body anyway. But everything went wrong. Every
Speaker 5: single part of this went wrong. And yes he knew
Speaker 5: that he was talking to a police officer. He wanted
Speaker 5: to talk to Graham's mother more so because he'd actually
Speaker 5: spoken to her. He'd actually turned up at their house
Speaker 5: just to make sure that he had the right house
Speaker 5: and the right boy. So, as I said, it was
Speaker 5: a very quick turnover of what he did, but he
Speaker 5: had done a little bit of reconnaissance to make sure
Speaker 5: he was going to take the right boy.
Speaker 6: It's interesting too for an eighteen sixty you talk about
Speaker 6: that they really were trying to solve this case and
Speaker 6: were able to with the aid of forensics. You talk
Speaker 6: about dog hairs and a couple other things that were
Speaker 6: important in this search.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's for its time. It's absolutely incredible. Now
Speaker 5: with this case, Stephen Bradley had a Pecanese dog, and
Speaker 5: the hairs from this dog, I'm so sorry that this
Speaker 5: is the dog next door. The Pecanese had left long
Speaker 5: hairs everywhere, including on the blanket that Graham was found
Speaker 5: wrapped in. So so they had these long hairs and
Speaker 5: they knew they weren't human and they realized that they
Speaker 5: were dog's hairs, so they had this blanket, they had
Speaker 5: dog hairs, and they also found some conifer leaves, pine
Speaker 5: cone things on the on on this blanket as well,
Speaker 5: so they knew they had these three things. Then on
Speaker 5: top of that, they found pink mortar which was in
Speaker 5: Graham's hair, so they knew that he had been left
Speaker 5: and stored for some time in a place with pink cement.
Speaker 5: So with the conifer, the dog, and the blanket and
Speaker 5: the cement, police actually drove around North Sydney trying to
Speaker 5: find a house that matched all of these sorts of things.
Speaker 5: So they found a house that had conifers and pink cement,
Speaker 5: and then they found that the owners who used to
Speaker 5: live there once they sort of asked us the people
Speaker 5: next door had a Pecanese dog. And then whilst they
Speaker 5: were digging in the garden, they found some film roles
Speaker 5: that they developed, and on those film roles was actually
Speaker 5: the blanket that Graham was found wrapped in. So it
Speaker 5: was one of those you know, putting all of these
Speaker 5: pieces together purely by driving around trying to find the
Speaker 5: house that matched these things, I mean surely that there
Speaker 5: was others as well, but to then add the Pekanese
Speaker 5: dog and at this specific mohair blanket. It was. It
Speaker 5: was just a perfect example of great police work getting
Speaker 5: the person who was responsible.
Speaker 6: And he was well on his way to freedom and
Speaker 6: the police intercepted them.
Speaker 5: I actually my parents were on a cruise recently and
Speaker 5: went to Colombo and I made them go and take
Speaker 5: photos of their porch there because Stephen Bradley, as he
Speaker 5: stepped off the boat in Colombo was arrested by Australian
Speaker 5: police and instantly brought back to Sydney. So they had
Speaker 5: telephoned a head to the police over there and they
Speaker 5: had to sort of wait and make sure that if
Speaker 5: he got off the boat before that they arrived, that
Speaker 5: they would arrest him as well. So it was international,
Speaker 5: huge case for us in this country. Most of the
Speaker 5: world doesn't know about it, but it changed privacy laws.
Speaker 5: We were able to use early forensics for here, we
Speaker 5: were able to use the international police. There was all
Speaker 5: these interception going on. It was one of our very
Speaker 5: few ransom cases that we've had. So it was probably
Speaker 5: exciting prepper it's time and it's certainly changed the country.
Speaker 6: Certainly, it really did let's use this as an opportunity
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Speaker 6: com slash murder now, and he was given the life sentence.
Speaker 6: We talked about the life sentence for Bradley, and you
Speaker 6: talk about the heart attack in nineteen sixty eight and
Speaker 6: he died in prison. Let's talk about just briefly before
Speaker 6: we get to a couple of cases that you had mentioned.
Speaker 6: But you do write about Michael George Lawrence in this
Speaker 6: Can you talk a little bit about the story that's
Speaker 6: featured featuring Michael Lawrence.
Speaker 5: Now, Michael Lawrence was a convicted pedophile who lived out
Speaker 5: west in a New South Wales. This is one of
Speaker 5: those cases that as a child, because I was around
Speaker 5: the same age as these boys, it sort of spooked
Speaker 5: to me a bit. Now, Lawrence had picked up two
Speaker 5: boys and had decided that he would play games with
Speaker 5: them in his house. He took them home and he
Speaker 5: sexually abused both of the boys and then he drowned
Speaker 5: them in the bathtub. Now, at the time, no one
Speaker 5: knew much about this case. It was two young kids
Speaker 5: that had been in a bit of trouble that they'd
Speaker 5: been at a fair and people assumed that the boys
Speaker 5: had just read run away, so not much was done.
Speaker 5: And one of the boys was Aboriginal as well, so
Speaker 5: there was just sort of that stigma about the first
Speaker 5: two kids. But then he took a third boy, John Pertwee,
Speaker 5: who was at a local soccer game and AFL game,
Speaker 5: and he was in the toilets when Lawrence abducted him.
Speaker 5: And this was massive news that this boy had been
Speaker 5: abducted from the sports field, that a lot of parents
Speaker 5: didn't feel safe about their children, that you think that
Speaker 5: you can send them to the toilets to get changed
Speaker 5: and come back out. It had happened so quickly, his
Speaker 5: face was all over the news, and then people were
Speaker 5: linking the other two to the case, and so instantly
Speaker 5: there was this big publicity that three boys had disappeared
Speaker 5: and their bodies were later found. It's the most thing
Speaker 5: I can still see them, like as if it was
Speaker 5: yesterday from the files. And Lawrence had raped and killed
Speaker 5: John as well. And so here is a guy and
Speaker 5: he'd actually collected a whole lot of crime new newspaper cuttings.
Speaker 5: He had done a lot on like Anita Cobby and
Speaker 5: cases like that as well. So he was he was
Speaker 5: one of these weird guys who tried to get himself
Speaker 5: involved in the case as as he could to see
Speaker 5: what the police were doing. He would turn up to
Speaker 5: help search and finally Hay was captured for the case.
Speaker 5: Now he was also sentenced to never to be released,
Speaker 5: but he didn't spend too much time in.
Speaker 6: Prison, So a lot how that happens you talk about
Speaker 6: a redetermination, How does that happen, How does that law
Speaker 6: get enacted? Tell us a little bit about that legislation.
Speaker 5: Well, with some people because the never to be released
Speaker 5: law was just sort of a knee jerker reaction. You know,
Speaker 5: this is going to make the public happy that these
Speaker 5: people are going to go to prison and we're just
Speaker 5: going to close it down. But legally that that can't happen. Now,
Speaker 5: what it's now called is truth in sentencing laws. So
Speaker 5: if you're sentenced to never to be released, it means that.
Speaker 5: But way back when, in the eighties and before the copycase,
Speaker 5: what would happen is that you would be sentenced to
Speaker 5: never be released, but then you would be able to
Speaker 5: apply for a sentencing. So they would say, well, you
Speaker 5: can't be released for twenty years, you can't apply for
Speaker 5: parole until twenty five years and thing like that. So
Speaker 5: these sorts of redeterminings what would actually happen with a
Speaker 5: lot of cases, and Crump and Baker is one that
Speaker 5: to this day they're still trying to fight because they
Speaker 5: had been sentenced before them never to be released truth
Speaker 5: and sentencing laws that happened. So they're still trying to
Speaker 5: fight to this day, even though they killed Virginia Mors
Speaker 5: in the seventies to actually have a sentence set and
Speaker 5: though they're quite elderly now, it's possible that they could
Speaker 5: still get out of prison.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's incredible. And you also say too that from
Speaker 6: his once he did start talking, he confessed and molesting
Speaker 6: hundreds of boys, and he said it gave me a
Speaker 6: thrill watching them die. I got an erection watching them
Speaker 6: drown in the bathtub. And you say, you raise the
Speaker 6: public call for this man's blood.
Speaker 1: M hm.
Speaker 5: I mean we see it across the world that when
Speaker 5: these sorts of cases happen, there's an outcry that demands
Speaker 5: their death penalty. You know, people say, put me in
Speaker 5: a room with this guy, you know, for five seconds,
Speaker 5: that's all I'm going to need. And Lawrence was just
Speaker 5: so cool and calm. He he ended up actually taking
Speaker 5: his own life. But he was almost like Dharma in
Speaker 5: that nothing upset him during the trial. He would just
Speaker 5: sit there calmly as if they were talking for what
Speaker 5: they're going to eat for lunch. But he handed it
Speaker 5: all over. He had diaries here, he had these, He
Speaker 5: had these scrap books of all of these crimes and
Speaker 5: he would draw pictures on it and take inspiration from
Speaker 5: a lot of other cases, trying to make his own
Speaker 5: crimes better and more exciting. So he would, you know,
Speaker 5: continue to get erections that he would continue to to
Speaker 5: be able to enjoy what he was doing. Right.
Speaker 6: Incredible. You include the case we mentioned Daniel Morcolna disappearance
Speaker 6: and also the Beaumont Children. How bigger stories were these
Speaker 6: and reaction from the public, and tell us briefly about
Speaker 6: cases and their effect.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the Beaumont Children is literally the one, the case
Speaker 5: that is called the case that changed to nation. Three
Speaker 5: children went to the beach. The oldest was about ten,
Speaker 5: the youngest was three. They caught a bust to the
Speaker 5: beach back in a time when Australia's innocence was still good.
Speaker 5: They caught the bust to the beach. They were seen
Speaker 5: at the beach playing with people, including a male who's
Speaker 5: never been identified, and they did disappeared, never to be
Speaker 5: seen again to this day now. That was sixty three
Speaker 5: and to this day we have never found the children.
Speaker 5: Even last year police actually dug up a factory flaw
Speaker 5: because they had evidence to suggest that they might be there.
Speaker 5: They found a cow, but they didn't find the children
Speaker 5: and so it was big news. And even today there
Speaker 5: is some court cases going on with people suggesting that
Speaker 5: parents and friends of parents who were convicted pedophiles have
Speaker 5: actually no more than they've ever let on. So there's
Speaker 5: still people being questioned about the Beaumont case and Daniel
Speaker 5: Morecambe until very recently with the William Terrell case. To
Speaker 5: Daniel Morecambe's disappearance was one of the biggest cases ever
Speaker 5: in Australian history and it took actually eight years for
Speaker 5: them to find his killer. I've actually done an update
Speaker 5: on the case now. But the way they caught his
Speaker 5: killer because he refused to confess, they kind of knew
Speaker 5: it was him, but it wasn't. They weren't sure. They
Speaker 5: ended up the police ended up creating a fake crime
Speaker 5: gang and said to Brett Cowen, Daniel's killer. Look, we've
Speaker 5: heard rumors that you're involved in this case. If you are,
Speaker 5: it could be too hot. We need to know because
Speaker 5: what we need to know if we need to clean
Speaker 5: anything up before you can join our crime gang. And
Speaker 5: they got it on tape. Brett Cowen just said, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I did it. This is what happened, this is where
Speaker 5: I took him, this is what I did to him,
Speaker 5: and they got it all on tape. And this police
Speaker 5: officer acting as a crime boss acts so calmly and
Speaker 5: so chilled, and you can just imagine his heart was
Speaker 5: in his throat as he goes, yeah, I killed Daniel Morcombe.
Speaker 5: And it's a moment. I'm actually doing it on the
Speaker 5: podcast this week because it's the fifteenth anniversary of Daniel's
Speaker 5: death this week. And it was able to break that
Speaker 5: down and see how that the police sting. It took
Speaker 5: them eight years to get him to confess, and it
Speaker 5: was a lot of work. And then in the end,
Speaker 5: all Brett wanted to do was impress his crime boss
Speaker 5: so he can be part of their gang. And that's
Speaker 5: all it took. And the end, which you know, it's
Speaker 5: not all it took. It was a lot of work.
Speaker 5: But the way the police officer just sort of like
Speaker 5: talks over him and tells him, you know, hang on
Speaker 5: a second, I have to do this, and you know,
Speaker 5: while he is trying to make fit for this confession,
Speaker 5: it makes it sound like that the crime boss didn't care,
Speaker 5: but in fact he was just trying to play it down.
Speaker 5: So then it looked like, oh, we're not going to
Speaker 5: wait for this one second failure to say this and
Speaker 5: then arrest you. It kept going for quite some time
Speaker 5: after he had said it, just having chats and Okay,
Speaker 5: well we'll go and clean up that and I'll call
Speaker 5: my guys in they can go and find his body.
Speaker 5: In all of this and it's very well done.
Speaker 6: Incredible, incredible sting operation. It's so very much like the
Speaker 6: mister Big operations that were done and conducted in Canada
Speaker 6: and now have been outlawed in Canada.
Speaker 5: Oh really, Okay, did they consider it entrapment?
Speaker 6: Yes? Yeah, despite successful they've successful of operations with utilizing it.
Speaker 6: So that's the.
Speaker 5: State of it.
Speaker 6: Yes, you include a case of and it's almost like
Speaker 6: you this book, it goes from worse to much worse
Speaker 6: in terms of the criminals in this book. It's fascinating
Speaker 6: the level of depravity and these criminals, these killers in Australia,
Speaker 6: it is really shocking. I have to say. You talk
Speaker 6: about Lindsay Beckett and Leslie Camillary, when you talk about
Speaker 6: the partners in crime, tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: this crime and this couple.
Speaker 5: So these two guys are actually cousins and they had
Speaker 5: attacked several girls, so very similar to the needed copy
Speaker 5: case and the Ginine boarding case. They were driving through
Speaker 5: a Bega, which is a country town here in Australia,
Speaker 5: and they spotted two girls who were actually at a
Speaker 5: school camp but decided to go for a walk away
Speaker 5: from the camp and the cousins grabbed the girls. And
Speaker 5: now these are fifteen year old girls, so very young,
Speaker 5: and they took them to a dam where they repeatedly
Speaker 5: sexually assaulted them and then made the girls actually go
Speaker 5: into the water and clean themselves. Believing that they could
Speaker 5: prevent any sort of DNA evidence being found, they had
Speaker 5: to dump a TV on the side of the road
Speaker 5: to fit the girls in to the car, which was
Speaker 5: evidence that they were able to prove linked the two
Speaker 5: killers too to the girls. They ended up strangling one
Speaker 5: and drowning the other and Lauren and Nicole were there
Speaker 5: was a photo of them that they had done at school.
Speaker 5: That becomes sort of an image of our innocence being
Speaker 5: lost in the fact that these two girls just thought
Speaker 5: they'd go for a walk at a camp and got
Speaker 5: picked up by two guys who pretended faked being polite
Speaker 5: and nice to them and then took to them in
Speaker 5: several hours of horror before they were killed. It actually
Speaker 5: took a while to find the girl's bodies, and since
Speaker 5: that time, Cavalry's actually been charged with a third murder,
Speaker 5: and then he also killed his cousin in jail, so
Speaker 5: he ended up going for four killing, so he will
Speaker 5: never get out of prison.
Speaker 6: It's interesting when you write too that part of the
Speaker 6: reason they were arrested is that someone's suspicion and they
Speaker 6: had a car that they had gotten from this aj Smarter,
Speaker 6: stolen from their friend, this Andrew Smart. And then when
Speaker 6: it went and cashed his forty four dollars check and
Speaker 6: insignificant check, that pub manager he said, you know that
Speaker 6: this is something suspicious about these guys, and he took
Speaker 6: down their license number and the description of the other
Speaker 6: man in the front seat.
Speaker 5: So yeah, just as good that people to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and that's where where the TV come into it too,
Speaker 5: because it was Andrew's TV or someone that he knew,
Speaker 5: and they had the serial number for it, so that they
Speaker 5: could prove that that sort of chain of evidence that
Speaker 5: was happening that they were leaving behind them.
Speaker 6: What you talk about the reaction of the public with
Speaker 6: this innocence lost you till you write extensively about how
Speaker 6: the girl one one of the girl was going to
Speaker 6: just walk alone. I think it was Nicole worrying about
Speaker 6: her boyfriend, so very very teen issues for these very
Speaker 6: typical and then Lauren thought, well, I should join her.
Speaker 6: So Nicole and Lauren were together for this, whereas one
Speaker 6: would have just been probably because they would have come
Speaker 6: upon the one person, but instead it was two and yeah.
Speaker 5: So it's sort of like doubled the pain. There was
Speaker 5: so many many people that were outraged, and again this
Speaker 5: was one of those cases that the public descended on
Speaker 5: the courthouse, that the public was there making sure that
Speaker 5: that these these two men, we're going to jail forever
Speaker 5: for doing this to two young girls. I mean not
Speaker 5: to say it's worse than an adult nurse being taken
Speaker 5: because it certainly isn't. But the fact that these were
Speaker 5: two young teenage girls who were just going for a
Speaker 5: warp because one was having dramas with a boyfriend and
Speaker 5: all of that sort of stuff, it shouldn't have created
Speaker 5: like a worse frenzy, but it somehow did. And it's
Speaker 5: it's just quite surprising that we go to our basic
Speaker 5: level of hatred and we want to be able to
Speaker 5: create place where things where where our children are safe,
Speaker 5: and we think that the death penalty will will fix this,
Speaker 5: and it's it's still surprising every time one of these
Speaker 5: cases comes up, the instantly they go, oh my god,
Speaker 5: we have to have the death penalty. We have to
Speaker 5: hang these people. And it's just it's it's just, I
Speaker 5: don't know. I find it's a rising that we do that,
Speaker 5: and that we don't want to just lock these people
Speaker 5: up and hope they go away. People literally want to
Speaker 5: lynch them.
Speaker 6: One especially exceptionally horrific story in this book is about
Speaker 6: Barry Watts and Valmy Beck and with the killing of
Speaker 6: c and KINGI yeh talk about this. You have got
Speaker 6: so much access to this information because of Vealma Beck
Speaker 6: eventually confessing tell us about this incredibly sordid tale.
Speaker 5: So Seana Kingy. She was a teenage schoolgirl in Queensland,
Speaker 5: and val May and Barry Watts, who have actually spent
Speaker 5: the last couple of years talking to, decided to up
Speaker 5: their sexual exploration that they would go and abduct a
Speaker 5: schoolgirl because that was the fantasy of Barry's and they
Speaker 5: ended up seeing Seannee she she was actually riding her
Speaker 5: bike through a park. They did the usual tact of
Speaker 5: you know, can you help help me find my dog?
Speaker 5: They May took her back to the car, they abducted
Speaker 5: her and in the back of the car Barry had
Speaker 5: his way with her for quite some time before they
Speaker 5: ended up killing her and dumping her. Barry to this
Speaker 5: day denies it, but val May actually admitted to it
Speaker 5: or claiming that she needed to absolve herself, that she
Speaker 5: had only done it to help with Watts's fantasies, and
Speaker 5: that she was kind of a pawn in all of this.
Speaker 5: But we know that once she was in prison she
Speaker 5: was a pretty mean, horrible person as well. I mean,
Speaker 5: she obviously was beforehand as well, but she was able
Speaker 5: to sort of swing people to think of her as
Speaker 5: a victim, whereas in fact, she was very much the
Speaker 5: perpetrator and was very much part of this. She could
Speaker 5: have stopped this at any time. She could have have
Speaker 5: said no, I'm not going to help help you, doctor girl.
Speaker 5: But yeah, she was able to confess to everything suggested.
Speaker 5: There was other victims which has never been proven. Yes
Speaker 5: or no, so we don't know. And what's what won't talk?
Speaker 5: Now he's actually up for parole and he claims in
Speaker 5: letters that the only reason he's not out yet is
Speaker 5: because he has to find a halfway house that he
Speaker 5: can go to and no one will will take him
Speaker 5: in because of the high profile case. But I really
Speaker 5: don't think he's ever going to get out of prison.
Speaker 5: It's one of Queensland's biggest cases.
Speaker 6: You talk about again in this book. I haven't read
Speaker 6: about this technique of vengeance, but something about the barbed
Speaker 6: wire and then sodomy obviously, and this guy has a
Speaker 6: clastomy bag is that true? Now?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so this is the hose and barbed wire thing,
Speaker 5: so I thought it was worldwide, but obviously not to
Speaker 5: go into some gruesome details. They put a hose up
Speaker 5: the rectum and then they put the barbed wire up
Speaker 5: and then they take the hose out, then they take
Speaker 5: the barbed wire out, so as you can imagine, it
Speaker 5: leaves some pretty gruesome injuries. That it also happened to
Speaker 5: Les Murphy who was one of the needed copy killers.
Speaker 5: He actually had to stand up in court. He couldn't
Speaker 5: sit down because of the injuries. But it seems to
Speaker 5: be a bit of prison justice that does happen. There
Speaker 5: is other things they do, but yes, the hose and
Speaker 5: barbed wire is one of those revenge attacks that that happens.
Speaker 5: Brett Cowen, Daniel's killer was also severely burnt. That that
Speaker 5: seems to be the more recent way that we attack
Speaker 5: our child killers in prison is that they scold them.
Speaker 5: So obviously they can't get the bubb wired these days,
Speaker 5: so they scold them instead. Wow wow yep.
Speaker 6: You mentioned Kevin Crump and Alan Baker. And also that
Speaker 6: this file has never been for it's forever sealed to
Speaker 6: prevent public from ever finding out the true abuse that
Speaker 6: Virginia endured in Virginia Morse so tell us about this.
Speaker 5: So the boys that actually worked for the Morse family
Speaker 5: on their farm, and so one day they decided to
Speaker 5: go back to had a farm. They were going to
Speaker 5: rob it only if Virginia was home, so that Crump
Speaker 5: and Baker decided to take Virginia. Now this was in Queensland,
Speaker 5: and they drove across so Melbourne, and they drove across
Speaker 5: state lines, which made this an international case. In the
Speaker 5: state case because we then have to extradite and everything.
Speaker 5: That's a difficult part of this case. Her files have
Speaker 5: been sealed because of what they did to her, but
Speaker 5: we know that towards the end they basically said that
Speaker 5: she had stopped crying because she had just endured so
Speaker 5: much that there was nothing left in her, and they
Speaker 5: ended up staking her down under a tree and shot
Speaker 5: her dead. It is oh my god, that dog. I'm
Speaker 5: so sorry. It's one of those cases that we know
Speaker 5: a bit about what they did. They had actually shot
Speaker 5: someone else on the road, they had a gun battle
Speaker 5: with the police, and we know that they had repeatedly
Speaker 5: raped Virginia. We know that they had beaten her and
Speaker 5: sodomized her. But to the true extent, well, we'll never
Speaker 5: actually know what they did. And considering that we know
Speaker 5: exactly what happened over the hours that need a copy
Speaker 5: was brutalized, it makes the mind going to some very
Speaker 5: dark places to think what worse could have actually happened
Speaker 5: to her to have this case sealed, and a couple
Speaker 5: of us have tried to have it unsealed, but they
Speaker 5: will not release the case now because these boys had
Speaker 5: gone across state lines. They're actually in jail for the
Speaker 5: abduction and the rapes and the shooting of the other guy,
Speaker 5: but they actually haven't faced murder charges yet, so because
Speaker 5: they had taken her across cross state line, So though
Speaker 5: there've been sentenced never to be released, they actually don't
Speaker 5: fall under the truth and sentencing laws, So they're actually
Speaker 5: still trying to apply for a sentence to be set,
Speaker 5: and it looks like it's kind of coming up. But
Speaker 5: we also know that as soon as if well if
Speaker 5: they are released, they will both then face their charges
Speaker 5: of killing. So they've only been sentenced never to be
Speaker 5: released for conspiracy to murder, but not actually to the
Speaker 5: capital charges.
Speaker 6: Yet you write it this is another case that's included
Speaker 6: in this book about these guys being sexual partners and
Speaker 6: then being placed in the same prison and even being
Speaker 6: cell mets. Is that part of the oltread from the
Speaker 6: public as well?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, I mean it's it's happened a few times,
Speaker 5: like like the biggest schoolgirl killers will also put in
Speaker 5: prison together, the the Murphy brothers that they killed and
Speaker 5: needed copies who killed and needed in prison together, or
Speaker 5: there was there's another recent case too where the killers
Speaker 5: will put in prison together. We have enough prisons to
Speaker 5: split these people up. Granted, where we don't have the
Speaker 5: high maximum supermax everywhere, we only have one supermax. But
Speaker 5: these killers have been putting together, even the Snowtown killers
Speaker 5: that there was three or four guys there that like
Speaker 5: to me, there's a suggestion that they can still collude
Speaker 5: and and they can continue to live off these fantasies
Speaker 5: of what they've done. So there is our outrage when
Speaker 5: people find out that these people are in prisons together
Speaker 5: and they did have a sexual relationship together, so they
Speaker 5: they're able to continue that fantasy and keep these ideas
Speaker 5: going saying, oh do you when we did this, and
Speaker 5: how we enjoyed doing that, And it's quite surprising that
Speaker 5: we don't split them up and send them all over
Speaker 5: the country. Yes, there's state laws and things like that,
Speaker 5: but the fact that we put them in cells together,
Speaker 5: it's outrageous.
Speaker 6: Yes, certainly, certainly we have time for one more story
Speaker 6: from this incredible collection. You discuss a story that while
Speaker 6: all these cases were big in Australia, and in fact that,
Speaker 6: like you say, change the country forever, we'll talk about
Speaker 6: the Trual murders April seventeens.
Speaker 5: So this is yes, So this is six girls. I
Speaker 5: think I'd never get my numbers right in South Australia. Now,
Speaker 5: these killers, Christopher Worrell and James Mmella, they had actually
Speaker 5: met in prison. Now James was a lot older, James
Speaker 5: was in his forties as Chris was in his early twenties,
Speaker 5: and they met in prison, and there is some suggestions
Speaker 5: that there was a sexual relationship, but it was more
Speaker 5: that Chris allowed James to have sex with him because
Speaker 5: it meant that James was under his control. But Chris
Speaker 5: claimed that he was also heterosexual. So the two of
Speaker 5: them would go out fine girls around Adelaide, which is
Speaker 5: Adelaide's a small city. It's very much like England, but
Speaker 5: it's very much like London, but it's almost like a
Speaker 5: three block top kind of town. I love Adelaide. But
Speaker 5: they would go and pick up these girls at nightclubs
Speaker 5: and just on the streets, and they were taken out
Speaker 5: to Trurou, which is way out of Adelaide, into the
Speaker 5: bush where James claimed that he would sit in the
Speaker 5: car or go for a walk and Chris would rape
Speaker 5: and kill these girls. Now, James was the only one
Speaker 5: to face trial, and he wasn't he was in charged
Speaker 5: with with the first killing because the police believed that
Speaker 5: he didn't know this is what Christopher's plans were. But
Speaker 5: the whole reason that this case came together is because
Speaker 5: Christopher had died in a car accident and James had
Speaker 5: been talking to Christopher's girlfriend and said, you know all
Speaker 5: of those girls that have disappeared, well, we were killing them.
Speaker 5: And so that's how the case actually came tick together
Speaker 5: is because the girlfriend went to the police and told
Speaker 5: them what James had told her, and he was then
Speaker 5: able to take them out to where all of these
Speaker 5: girls were, very partially around Truro. And so Christopher has
Speaker 5: never obviously been charged because he had died. So we
Speaker 5: only have one side of the story. It could be
Speaker 5: very that the actual story could be very, very different,
Speaker 5: but we will never know because we only have his side,
Speaker 5: and he sort of confessed as soon as Christoph had died.
Speaker 6: You talked about in this about David and Catherine Bernie,
Speaker 6: and you said you knew You're right, that you knew
Speaker 6: David Bernie for a number of years before he committed suicide,
Speaker 6: and it was hard to believe that he was one
Speaker 6: of Australia's worst murderers. Tell us about this correspondence with
Speaker 6: David Bernie.
Speaker 5: Well, I've been talking to David Bernie for about fifteen years,
Speaker 5: and until the very night that he actually talked to
Speaker 5: his own life. And people always assume assume these killers
Speaker 5: to be bigger than life, that you know that they're big,
Speaker 5: hulking people that have all this strength and everything. In
Speaker 5: David Bernie are like, I'm five foot four and he
Speaker 5: is shorter than I am, and he was this tiny,
Speaker 5: little meek man. And it's sort of changed my whole
Speaker 5: whole perception of who these killers are, because we know
Speaker 5: that a lot of them these massive personalities, but it's
Speaker 5: often to outweigh their physical attributes, which are quite insignificant
Speaker 5: and and and I think they sort of do this
Speaker 5: this bigger personality to try and and and compensate. But
Speaker 5: I've been talking to David for a long time, and
Speaker 5: he's very different to a lot of the killers I
Speaker 5: speak to purely because he he is one of those
Speaker 5: that that confess straight up. As soon as his last
Speaker 5: victim was going to be his fifth victim was found
Speaker 5: because she escaped, they him and his common law wife
Speaker 5: Catherine actually said to the police, yes, you've got us.
Speaker 5: This is where they are, this is what we did,
Speaker 5: here's the whole case. They pled guilty at the first
Speaker 5: opportunity and they were sentenced to never to be released too. However,
Speaker 5: up until this week, actually Western Australia didn't have the
Speaker 5: Church truth and Sentencing laws, but they do now. So
Speaker 5: Catherine Berney, who is still in prison though she was
Speaker 5: applying for parole, has this week been told that the
Speaker 5: laws now state if you have been marched never to
Speaker 5: be released, you were never getting out of prison. So
Speaker 5: it took actually their last victim, Kate Moore, to actually
Speaker 5: fight that to have trick truth and sentencing laws in
Speaker 5: Perth as well. But these were two killers who had
Speaker 5: come together multiple times throughout their life. They were a
Speaker 5: case that almost star crossed. You know that they had
Speaker 5: met as children, they had met as teenagers, and then
Speaker 5: that they'd both gone their separate ways. They both had
Speaker 5: children with other people Catherine married, you know, her employee's
Speaker 5: son had lots of children with him. And then they
Speaker 5: come together for this final time and there was this
Speaker 5: instant murderous attraction that led to a very sexually explicit
Speaker 5: relationship that escalated very very quickly. And so they were
Speaker 5: together for a while, but not a great deal of
Speaker 5: time like Fred and Rose Western England or anything like that.
Speaker 5: But they were together for long enough to escalate to
Speaker 5: abducting young girls. And there is suggestions that though they
Speaker 5: confessed to four cases, there is suggestions so that there
Speaker 5: could be more, at least two more from what sort
Speaker 5: of David had alluded to several times. But together they
Speaker 5: had taken these girls back to their house and had
Speaker 5: repeatedly raped them and tortured them for days before Catherine
Speaker 5: would say, yeah, that that's it. I don't want you
Speaker 5: to get an attraction to this girl. She has to go.
Speaker 5: And this is how they would end up killing them.
Speaker 5: And they weren't very successful at killing, like several of
Speaker 5: them fought back and one of them almost escaped, and
Speaker 5: one of them was actually buried they think alive, because
Speaker 5: they were sorting her lungs purely because they had made
Speaker 5: a mess of it. So, yeah, it's a brutal case.
Speaker 5: But I had spent so much time talking to David,
Speaker 5: and though I talked to a lot of killers and
Speaker 5: lots of them profess their innocence or talk about their appeals,
Speaker 5: he was one who goes, yeah, I did it. This
Speaker 5: is what happens. I'm laying it out there. So it
Speaker 5: was a very different sort of correspondence.
Speaker 6: It's incredible to the details in this one where Denise
Speaker 6: is has a wits about her to keep some cigarettes
Speaker 6: under the bed and her purse so that she could
Speaker 6: prove in case she got away. And then later when
Speaker 6: they're trying to kill her, they had you write it
Speaker 6: so movie as she comes up from the grave, she's
Speaker 6: trying to bury her and she sets up in the grave,
Speaker 6: and that's of course this genuinely just in genuinely. Ah.
Speaker 6: The woman says that, well, that's was the last straw.
Speaker 6: Catherine says, that was the last straw for me. There
Speaker 6: was there, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think it changed her. I think she
Speaker 5: had been enjoying it to a point. But then when
Speaker 5: when Denise had fought back so so hard, even you know,
Speaker 5: gasping at the end, who riffic what happened to her.
Speaker 5: I think Catherine sort of had like an internal conflict.
Speaker 5: You know, we we think that these people don't care
Speaker 5: and don't feel like we do. But she was sickened
Speaker 5: by that, and and she was repulsed by what had
Speaker 5: happened that you know, she kind of said, hey, what
Speaker 5: the hell are we doing? And it's it's it's rare
Speaker 5: to get that insight, but it's definitely what had happened
Speaker 5: here is that, you know, it was so brutal and
Speaker 5: they had to kill her several times that you know,
Speaker 5: Catherine's like, yeah, I don't get while we're doing this,
Speaker 5: this isn't enjoyable.
Speaker 6: The other thing that adds even more horror to it,
Speaker 6: the niece knew these people. They were friends of sorts.
Speaker 5: Yep, Yeah, so yeah, vaguely friends, but yeah, and I
Speaker 5: mean even their first victim. She had actually met David
Speaker 5: Bernie several times, and she'd only come to the house
Speaker 5: because he said, I'll do you a deal on some
Speaker 5: tires and some car parts. So you know, they were
Speaker 5: like that. They were very trusting and people. You know,
Speaker 5: if you met David Bernie didn't know that he was
Speaker 5: a serial killer. You know, people think, oh yeah, look
Speaker 5: at their eyes and look at these and looks. He
Speaker 5: looked like a very normal person, and that's how they
Speaker 5: get a lot lot of their victims. If they were
Speaker 5: scary and if they were sort of in your face,
Speaker 5: people would back off, but they they're charming, and he
Speaker 5: was always very charming, you know, would tell jokes, and
Speaker 5: we'll talk about lots of different topics, and you have
Speaker 5: to always think about hang on a second, he's, you know, spider,
Speaker 5: try to fly. He's trying to rail you in the
Speaker 5: whole time, trying to make you like him, because that's
Speaker 5: what they do that they get you with honey. So's
Speaker 5: it's an interesting part of all of my studies.
Speaker 6: Absolutely absolutely, very very charming. That's why they can do
Speaker 6: things that seemingly other people can't achieve. I mean, when
Speaker 6: that's your goal to deceive and be deceptive, they achieve
Speaker 6: that and people and they do it very really yeah,
Speaker 6: and people really can't plan on safeguarding themselves of this
Speaker 6: kind of sudden attack after knowing these people in a
Speaker 6: different context, So very very again, horrifying. I want to
Speaker 6: thank you very much for coming on and talking about innocence.
Speaker 6: Last the crimes have changed Australia. Amanda, do you have
Speaker 6: a Facebook page or a website that people might take
Speaker 6: a look at the twelve or more books that you
Speaker 6: have and thet I've got more than that now how many? Now?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well I'm up to twenty six?
Speaker 6: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: So I've got twenty six from probably the back of
Speaker 5: that book. So I've written a few since then. So
Speaker 5: they can find me on Facebook just Amanda Howard author
Speaker 5: and I'm on Twitter at Amanda Howard's seventy three So
Speaker 5: and also Monsters who Murder dot com is my website.
Speaker 6: Tell us just about the podcast again and the how
Speaker 6: they might find.
Speaker 5: That, so you can find us on Facebook as well.
Speaker 5: MWM Confession so it's Monsters Who Murder cans serial Killer
Speaker 5: Confessions and Monsters who Murder serial Killer Confessions. Each week
Speaker 5: we do a case study. This week we're doing Daniel
Speaker 5: Morcombe's Appearance and Murder and we use a lot of
Speaker 5: police files, we use recorded confessions, and we use my
Speaker 5: research and words from the killers themselves. So we've been
Speaker 5: going with the podcast since May and it's doing really well.
Speaker 6: It's a fascinating podcast. Fantastic books that you have Innocence
Speaker 6: Last is just one of them. Thank you very much
Speaker 6: Amanda Howard for coming on and talking about Innocence Last
Speaker 6: the crimes that changed Australia. You have a great evening.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 5: Thanks Dan, good night. Thank you