Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in True Crime

The Mushroom Tapes brings together three renowned writers of true crime: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson’s preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum...

Teacher and former rugby league player Chris Dawson appeared to have it all - a loving family and a beautiful home in Sydney's Northern Beaches. But in the summer of 1982 his wife Lynette disappeared and not long afterwards Dawson married a much younger woman, a former student. Less than a decade later this young woman escaped the marriage and went to the police to record her suspicions that Dawson had been involved in Lynette's disappearance. A homicide investigation followed but got nowhere until 1998, when Detective Sergeant Damian Loone was handed Lynette's file.

CSI Told You Lies is a surprisingly moving account of the real forensic pathologists at the frontline of Australia's major crime and disaster investigations. These are the men and women whose post-mortem examinations help the dead to speak. Along with the pathologists, Meshel Laurie, host of the Australian True Crime podcast, also speaks to the homicide detectives, defence barristers and victims' families in this groundbreaking study of the ripple effect of violent crime and largescale natural disaster.

Jay Malkoun isn't the type of man who lets a little thing like being blown up slow him down. In March 2019, a car bomb outside a gym in Athens detonated the Mercedes Jay's his children had been riding in less than an hour earlier. It was an explosion heard around the world, as global media, law...

'The only way to comprehend this tragic story of mine is to write it.' On the 10th of February 2017, there was a sentencing hearing for murder in the Victorian Supreme Court. The young woman in the dock, who sat quietly with her hands in her lap, had perfect skin and light-brown hair tied back...

The Arsonist takes readers inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made...

In this definitive expose, Walkley-award winning journalist Debi Marshall turns her investigative blowtorch to the shocking Adelaide Family murders and to secrets long hidden in the City of Corpses. This chilling account begins with the liberalisation of South Australia under the premiership of Don Dunstan and demands answers to decades-old questions. Who were the Family killers? Why are suppression orders still protecting suspects four decades later? Why do some of these serial killings remain unsolved? Only one suspect, Bevan Spencer Von Einem, has been charged and convicted.

The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

A true crime story cannot often be believed, at least at the beginning. In Bowraville, all three of the victims were Aboriginal. All three were killed within five months, between 1990 and 1991. The same white man was linked to each, but nobody was convicted. More than two decades later, homicide...

We all know Sydney is full of corruption and crime, but none of us expected to read about a Sydney businessman being shot in the back of his head, in his driveway, in front of his nine-year-old son, in Cremorne. Nor that the order would come from a Point Piper millionaire. Kate McClymont is Australia's best-known investigative journalist. Kate and McGurk received intel that he was going to be 'hit'. Before the two could meet, McGurk was murdered.

This is the story of Christopher Wilder: the surf-loving son of a decorated naval war hero born in the suburbs of Sydney, who became the most wanted man in America - a psychopathic serial killer who slaughtered more than sixteen young women in the USA and is the prime suspect in the infamous...

Careers in the cocaine-trafficking business are usually short. It's not only a dangerous profession, fraught with the possibility of capture and long jail sentences, but it can be deadly if the cartels get to you first. Not for Luis Antonio Navia. For 25 years the Cuban American smuggled hundreds of tons of white powder for the biggest cartels in Colombia and Mexico, including Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel.

Part biography, part forensic jigsaw puzzle, part cold-case detective investigation, The Eagle in the Mirror is the astonishing untold story of an Australian-born intelligence officer accused by some espionage experts of being the traitor of the century: Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis. The longest serving spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Ellis helped set up the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), now known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS).

Dubai is feted internationally as a beacon of modernity: glittering skyscrapers, a cultural melting pot, even a new player in the space race. The city's ruled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, an all-powerful multi-billionaire who counts the Queen and Donald Trump as friends. His...

British mother Rosie Ayliffe thought her 21-year-old daughter, Mia, would be safe travelling around Australia on a gap year. But Mia wanted to extend her visa and in order to do that needed to find 88 days of work on a farm - a requirement that would lead to catastrophic events. Four short days...

This was Nina Young's shocking realisation in her mid-20s, when she found out from online court records that her estranged father, Allan Ladd, had strangled a woman to death decades before. In prison he'd met Denise, Nina's mother, who was his tutor. Although Denise didn't know the extent of Allan's crime when she fell in love with him, by the time she found out, she was in too deep. She had to flee from him before Nina turned two. A decade after reading the court records, Nina, now a journalist, decided to release a podcast to tackle the questions she'd been asking herself ever since.

Paul Verhoeven's ex-cop dad, John, spent years embroiled in some of the seediest, scariest intrigue and escapades imaginable. One day John offered Paul the chance of a lifetime: he'd spill his guts on tape. What unfolded in Loose Units was a goldmine of true-crime stories, showcasing John's...

It should've been the happiest time of Lee Barnett's life. She was married to a man she loved and trusted, Harris Todd, and she was pregnant with her first child. But things quickly turned from dream to nightmare when Harris demanded a divorce. Rich, powerful and well-connected in their hometown of Charleston, USA, he was able to spin the court proceedings in his favour, leaving Lee emotionally and financially devastated. And then came the final blow: she lost custody of her beautiful daughter, Savanna, who was only 11 months old.

He was a murderer, swindler, bigamist and suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings. Frederick Deeming was also the most hated man in the world. Claiming to be haunted by the ghost of his dead mother, Deeming had spent years roaming the planet under various aliases, preying on the innocent, the...

For forty years David Meagher harboured a secret. Then in mid 2018 a text message from an old school friend forced him to confront his past and finally deal with it. Secrets and Lies is a story about child sexual abuse. The culture that enabled it. How the perpetrator groomed his victims. How it finally came to an end. And how four decades after the crimes were committed his victims embarked on a successful two-year journey to bring the offender to justice. David Meagher delivers an intimate account of the lasting impact of child sexual abuse on survivors.