Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast

The Abduction of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon - Part 1 of 2

Adelaide Oval, the twenty fifth of August, 1973. Norwood versus North Adelaide, a winter crowd. Joanne Ratcliffe, eleven, took four year old Kirste Gordon to the toilets, the way she had done once already that afternoon. Ninety minutes later they were three kilometres from the ground, fighting for their lives, and they have never been seen since.

In part one of two, we thoroughly examine the events of that day. Facts that we have believed to be the truth for over 50 years might not have...

The Perth Mint Swindle - The Perfect Crime? In April 1982 somebody broke into a building in Perth, stole a pad of blank cheques, and burnt the place to the ground on the way out. Five weeks later they did it again.

Ten weeks after that, sixty-eight kilograms of gold walked out the front door of the Perth Mint in broad daylight.

Nobody was threatened. Nobody was hurt. Nobody raised their voice. The thief built the entire robbery out of honest strangers: a clerk, three armoured couriers, a temp on her first morning, and a bloke...

The Luna Park Ghost Train Disaster - Part 2 of 2

For years the most talked about aspect of the Luna Park fire was a photograph of a six year old boy standing next to a man in a horned mask, taken hours before he died. People called it the Luna Park demon.

But the material that actually mattered was being collated for over thirty four years by the artist who painted the face over the front gate. The contents of this collection inspired an ABC documentary that brought the truth to light in 2021.

In...

The Luna Park Ghost Train Disaster - Part 1 of 2

On a cold Saturday night in June 1979, a rail strike had left Sydney's Luna Park almost empty. Three passengers rode past the imitation fireplace inside the Ghost Train and saw real flames in it. Every one of them assumed it was part of the ride.

But in the two and a half minutes that followed, seven people tragically lost their lives. Six of them were children. By three o'clock the next afternoon the police had announced a cause, ruled out anything suspicious and released the site...

The Unsolved Murder of William Mullins

The fourth of July, 1913. Four men stand shin-deep in the Tyne River in the north-east of Tasmania, in snowmelt coming off the range, turning a prospector's dish.

The method is sixty years old in that valley. Gold came out of Black Horse Gully in the 1850s and every man standing in the water learnt the dish as a boy.

But today, they are not panning for gold. There is a bag of ash on the bank beside them, carried down from a hollow on a hillside two...

Wakehurst Parkway - Australia's Most Haunted Road

Fourteen kilometres of unlit road run straight through the bush through the bush on Sydney's Northern Beaches. By day it is a commuter route with a flooding problem. After dark it is the most haunted road in the city, and people have been reporting the same young woman on the verge for more than fifty years.

What is on the record is just as horrifying. Four very real killings, thirty five years apart, no connection between the people who committed them. So what brings them to the same...

The Disappearance of Kath Bergamin - Part 2 of 2

On the evening of Sunday the 18th of August 2002, a woman walking her dog in Wangaratta crossed the road to avoid a parked car with the music up. That put her four or five metres from a stranger's front door, where a man was standing on the step talking to somebody behind the flywire.

Margaret Scutt kept it to herself for five years and by the time she picked up the phone, a coroner had opened an inquest into what happened to the woman behind that door.<...

The Disappearance of Kath Bergamin - Part 1 of 2

Kath Bergamin was thirty seven. She had married at eighteen and spent nineteen years on a tobacco farm sixty kilometres up the King Valley, raising three children, working the property, and telling a small number of trusted people that her husband had said she would never get off it alive.

On the 29th of May 2002, she escaped it.

This is the story of the eleven weeks that followed, the last eleven weeks of Kath Bergamin's life.

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Australian Train Heist Mysteries

In December 1973, two men in black stopped a train in the rainforest above Cairns, took the track workers' wages off it at gunpoint and vanished down a drain into the scrub. Thirty-five years earlier and half a state away, a mine payroll was lifted out of a locked mail van on the dark run to Mount Isa, so cleanly that a full day went by before anyone knew it was gone. Two railways, two payrolls, and two impeccable railway heists.

This week on Strewth, the Phantoms of the Line.

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The Disappearance of Peter Falconio - Part 2 of 2

Bradley Murdoch was convicted of Peter Falconio's murder and died in prison still denying it. Twenty-five years on, there is still no body, and some of the evidence that put him away has never stopped being argued over. In part two of two we analyse the evidence, the doubts, the stories, and leave you holding the one question a jury, a judge and a dying man could not close.

Where is Peter Falconio?

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The Disappearance of Peter Falconio - Part 1 of 2

July 2001. A young English couple drive north into the Australian desert, and only one of them is ever seen again. Joanne Lees escapes a killer on the loneliest road in the country, hides for hours in the dark, and walks out to raise the alarm. Plenty of armchair detectives are quick to decide that she is the one with something to hide.

In part one of two: the crime, the manhunt, and the survivor who was put on trial by everyone except the law.

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Up the Back - The Disappearance of Garry Conwell

On a winter morning in 2024, Garry Conwell told his partner he was heading up the back to check the cattle. He went out in a dressing gown and work boots, because he wasn't going far.

His quad bike was found by a creek about fifteen minutes' walk from his own kitchen. Not bogged. Not damaged. Nobody on it.

What followed was the biggest search that district has ever seen. Helicopters, drones, sonar, police rescue, SES, cadaver dogs. On 265 acres, they found two things.

While it is now an affluent Melbourne suburb, Williamstown, or King William's Town as it was originally known has had quite the chequered past. In this episode of Strewth, we tell some good old fashioned ghost stories and explore the truth behind the tales. You'll hear about a ruined opera singer who lost his voice and permanently took a room above a pub. An eighteen year old barmaid, dead of a poison the Government analyst swore couldn't have killed her, and the man who bemoans her death still.

Then a Strewth listener, Matt tells us what he...

Cattle Mutilations in Australia and Beyond

On a tucked-away cattle station north-west of Mackay, Mick and Judy Cook keep finding their beasts dead in the grass. An udder gone. A tongue. An ear, cut clean. No blood, no tracks, and nothing in the bush will come near the carcass.

They are not the first. Seventy years earlier, on the dairy country behind Lismore, farmers walked their fences on the full moon with the shotguns loaded, watching for a killer the papers called the moonlight sadist. He was never caught.

This week on Strewth...

The Lost Gold of the Avoca - Australian Mystery

In 1877, five thousand freshly minted gold sovereigns were shipped out of Sydney, bound for Ceylon on a ship called the Avoca. When the strong box was finally opened at Galle, there was nothing inside but sawdust and iron bolts. The gold had vanished from a locked strongroom, behind seals that nobody had broken.

The man behind it was the Avoca's carpenter, a quiet Norwegian named Martin Weiberg, who understood the bones of a ship better than anyone aboard and used this knowledge to pull off one...

The Bizarre Case of the Tromp Family

In August 2016, an ordinary family from the hills east of Melbourne did something no one has ever fully explained. They left their phones on the kitchen bench, their passports in the drawer, the keys in the cars, and they drove. More than fifteen hundred kilometres, across two states, running from a danger no one else could see. Over six days they came apart one at a time, until a stranger driving to a doctor's appointment felt a kick from the floor of his ute and turned around.

No...

The Unsolved Disappearance of Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah - Part 2 of 2

A man and his dog vanished from an outback town of a dozen people, a few hundred metres from home. In Part Two, the rest of the world arrives to look for them.

The searches. The divers. A quarter-million-dollar reward. A listening device left running in a quiet house, and a voice in the dark that the police thought might finally be the break they'd been waiting for. An inquest, a coroner who stood up and said the word out loud, and then, years...

The Unsolved Disappearance of Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah - Part 1 of 2 One evening in December 2017, a man and his dog rode home from the pub in a tiny town on the Stuart Highway, a few hundred metres up the road, and were never seen again.

Paddy Moriarty was a seventy-year-old Irish-born ringer, a larrikin and a creature of habit, who lived alone with his young red kelpie, Kellie, in a fading outback settlement of barely a dozen people. When he vanished, he left a half-made dinner on the table, both his hats by the door, and a...

Allison Road - The Haunting Tale of Chrissie Venn

On a February afternoon in 1921, a thirteen-year-old girl named Chrissie Venn left her home on Allison Road in North Motton, Tasmania, to collect groceries from the village. She was carrying a basket and nine shillings. She didn't come home.

Nine days later, searchers found her body stuffed headfirst into a hollow tree stump, half a mile from her front door.

More than a hundred years later, the question of who killed Chrissie Venn has never been answered. But the road where she died hasn't...

A Lone Wolf? - The Ivan Milat Backpacker Murders - Australian True Crime

Everyone knows how the number seven relates to the Ivan Milat case. Seven backpackers. Seven graves in the Belanglo State Forest. Seven life sentences handed down in a Sydney courtroom in 1996.

But in August 2025, a list was tabled in the New South Wales parliament that had been sitting in police files since 1993. Fifty-eight names. Fifty-eight missing or murdered young people that detectives from the task force that caught Ivan Milat had identified as potentially connected to him. Every state and territory in...

Home Tonight - The Wonnangatta Unsolved Mystery 

In the summer of 1917, two men vanished from an isolated cattle station deep in Victoria's high country. What followed became one of Australia's oldest and most enduring mysteries. A story whispered through pubs, shearing sheds and campfires for more than a century.

This week on Strewth, we head into the Wonnangatta Valley to unravel the folklore, the rumours, and the unanswered questions behind the story the high country never let go of.

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The Shark Arm Case - Australian True Crime Mystery

Anzac Day, 1935. A live tiger shark in a Coogee swimming pool vomits up a human arm in front of a crowd of holiday families. And on the inside of the forearm, a tattoo that a man reading the Sunday paper over breakfast will recognise as his brother's.

What follows is one of the strangest murder cases in Australian history. A bankrupt billiard hall manager. A respectable boatbuilder running cocaine through Sydney Heads. A four-hour police chase around the harbour. And a body found in a car...

Junjaree | Njimbin | Brown Jack | Little Hairy Man - Australian Cryptid Mystery

It isn't the Yowie. It's smaller than that. Faster. And by some accounts, considerably more unsettling.

The Junjudee has been part of this country's stories since long before records were kept. It appears in a newspaper from 1897. It appears in the testimony of soldiers on a military exercise in the Cape York rainforest. It appears to a horsewoman in the Northern Rivers, in open daylight, in open pasture and then vanishes into a stand of trees the size of a lounge room.

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Leanne Holland - Part 2 of 2 - Not a Scintilla - Unsolved True Crime On Christmas Eve 2009, Graham Stafford's conviction for the murder of Leanne Holland was quashed. A Court of Appeal found his trial had been fundamentally unfair. One of its judges would have acquitted him outright.

The murder of Leanne Holland was officially unsolved.

Then Queensland Police conducted a two-year review, declared there was not a scintilla of evidence against anyone other than Stafford, and locked the report away for a decade.

In Part 2, we ask the question nobody in authority has...

Leanne Holland | Part 1: A Walk to the Shops | Unsolved True Crime

On the first morning of the September school holidays in 1991, twelve-year-old Leanne Holland left her home in Goodna, Queensland, wearing a purple jumper and no shoes. She was going to the shops. She never came home.

Three days later, police found her body in bushland off Redbank Plains Road. Within a week, a man was arrested. Within months, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

He has always said he didn't do it.

This is Part 1 of a...

The Unexplained Disappearance of the Patanela | Australian Mystery

In November of 1988, a steel-hulled schooner called the Patanela made three radio calls from ten miles off Botany Bay and disappeared.

No wreckage. No bodies. No distress signal. No explanation that holds together under examination.

Just an experienced skipper asking for directions to a town he'd already passed, a silence where a voice used to be, and one barnacled lifebuoy that turned up six months later and raised more questions than it answered.

Four people were aboard.

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The Humpty Doo Poltergeist - Unsolved Paranormal Mystery

In early 1998, a rented weatherboard house forty kilometres outside Darwin became the most talked-about address in Australia.

Over three months, the residents of 90 McMinns Drive reported knives hurling themselves across rooms, gravel falling through an intact ceiling, and messages spelled out in driveway stones, including the name of a friend who had died weeks earlier in a fire. Three priests of three different denominations came to help. None of them left with a simple explanation. Then the cameras arrived.

This is the Humpty Doo poltergeist...

The 6:30 to Gippsland - Australian Unsolved Mystery

On the evening of Saturday, 7 June 1919, a fireman named Frederick Mills climbed the coal pile in his tender as a steam train approached Korumburra station in South Gippsland. In the light of the signal box, he saw a body on the carriage roof. It was still warm.

The deceased was Alexander Gordon Eastman, a twenty-one-year-old butcher from Prahran, who had boarded the 6:30 to Gippsland a few hours earlier with his aunt. He had stepped away at Dandenong to find a friend. The friend was never traced.

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The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich - The Unanswered - Australian Unsolved Mystery The search covered more than a thousand square miles of Bass Strait. Five days. An RAAF Orion, eight civilian aircraft, ocean-going vessels. The official investigation took nearly four years.

In Part Two of Strewth's investigation into the disappearance of Frederick Valentich, we go looking for answers and we find, instead, a case that resists every explanation applied to it. The spatial disorientation theory that most aviation experts accept, and why the man who was actually there that night doesn't buy it. The ground witnesses, the...

The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich - The Flight - Australian Unsolved Mystery On the evening of Saturday, October 21, 1978, a twenty-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin Airport in Melbourne. He crossed the coast at Cape Otway at seven o'clock, right on schedule. Six minutes later, he radioed Melbourne Flight Service to ask if there was any known traffic below five thousand feet.

There wasn't.

What followed was a six-minute radio exchange that has never been satisfactorily explained. Frederick described something above him, a long shape, metallic, shiny, with a green light, hovering, orbiting...

The Rack Man - Australian True Crime - Unsolved Mystery

In August 1994, a squid fisherman trawling the lower Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, pulled a steel crucifix from nine metres below the surface. Strapped to it were the remains of a man.

For twenty-four years, the man had no name. An open coronial verdict. A hundred thousand dollar reward nobody claimed. A forensic reconstruction of a face that matched no one in any database.

This episode covers the discovery, the forensic investigation, the long cold-case years, and the theories that have surrounded this...

The Lithgow Panther - Unsolved Australian Mystery

For over a century, something large and black has been moving through the sandstone gorges and eucalyptus forest west of Sydney. Farmers have found their sheep with broken necks and grass still between their teeth killed instantly, mid-graze. Carcasses have been discovered wedged in the forks of trees, well above the ground. A seventeen-year-old boy came home one night covered in blood. More than five hundred and sixty people have formally reported seeing it since 1998 alone.

Four NSW government inquiries have been commissioned. Two concluded its existence was...

Australian True Crime - The Portland Murders

The Old London Affair - Part 2 - The Curiously Overlooked 

In 2013, a cold case detective named Tom Hogan sat down with eleven hundred reports and began reading. The investigation into the murders of Claire Acocks and Margaret Penny had been running, in various forms, for more than twenty years. Five thousand people had been interviewed. Detectives had worked in every Australian state. No one had been charged.

By the time Hogan was deep enough into the file to form a picture, something was bothering him. Not o...

Australian True Crime - Part 1 of 2 

On April 17, 1991, a stranger walked in off the street and stood behind the hairdresser without making a sound. The door had a bell. It hadn't rung. He watched her in the mirror, told her he didn't like hairdressers, and said he'd be back.

Claire Acocks locked up and went home early. She told her friends she had never, in her life, been so frightened.

On May 3, tragedy struck Claire and a customer in that very salon.

In part one of The Old London Affair, we t...

December, 1978, senior Wellington air traffic controller John Cordy watched five unidentified radar targets appear over the Kaikoura coast. Solid returns. No flight plans. No radio contact. One of them sat on his screen for three hours.

Days later, an Australian television crew who had heard about these strange lights boarded a routine cargo flight along the same stretch of coastline, hoping for background footage to help to tell this fascinating story.

What they found in the skies over New Zealand was something else entirely.

Objects paced the plane for fifteen minutes, moving at...

WANDA BEACH: PART TWO - LINGERING QUESTIONS The bodies of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were found on 12 January 1965. By April 1966, approximately 7,000 people had been interviewed in what was then the largest criminal investigation in Australian history. By 1981, that figure had risen to more than 16,000. The case file exceeded 10,000 pages.

Three suspects have emerged across the decades. Derek Percy, Australia's longest-serving prisoner, whose grandmother lived on the same street as both victims. Christopher Wilder, who was living on the Northern Beaches at the time of the murders and had a 1963 conviction for another serious offence at a...

WANDA BEACH: PART ONE — INTO THE DUNES

On the morning of Monday 11 January 1965, fifteen-year-old best friends Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock caught the train south from West Ryde with Marianne's four younger siblings for a summer day at Cronulla. 

At around 1pm, after walking north along the beach, the group stopped and Marianne told the younger children she and Christine were going back south to collect the bags. Instead, both girls turned north, deeper into the dunes. When ten-year-old Peter called out that they were going the wrong way, Marianne laughed and kept walking.

...

Somewhere in the Outer Barcoo, on a remote cattle station in central-western Queensland, there is a waterhole that terrified a district for sixty years.

Station hands abandoned a hut they would never return to. Shearers fled in the middle of the night, leaving their swags behind. Two men went out armed with rifles to settle the matter once and for all. They came back without answers, and with their weapons discharged.

The sounds they heard were described consistently, across multiple independent accounts spanning six decades. Wailing, screaming, something that built from silence until it filled...

On the night of Friday 26 February 1971, twenty-year-old dental nurse Keren Ellen Rowland attended the Royal Canberra Show. She bought a silver bracelet as a gift for a friend, left the showgrounds, and ran out of petrol on Parkes Way, a quiet stretch of road through the parkland beside Lake Burley Griffin. A witness saw her walking toward a dark-coloured sedan with New South Wales plates, already parked on the verge ahead of her.

She was reported missing by midnight. Her remains were found eighty days later in the Fairbairn Pine Plantation, near the Air Disaster Memorial on...

The Florence Broadhurst Mystery

In October 1977, nineteen-year-old Constable Tony Russell responded to a welfare check on his first day at Paddington Police Station. What he found in Florence Broadhurst's wallpaper factory would haunt him for nearly fifty years.

This special follow-up to our "A Murderer Takes Tea" episode tells the story that couldn't be told in our original Florence Broadhurst investigation, because at the time, the first officer on the scene was never allowed to tell it.

Tony Russell saw critical evidence that morning but within hours of finding the body, Tony was...