True Crime Conversations

It’s the 21st of February, 2021, a summer’s day on the south coast of New South Wales. 

A small group of campers are walking along Bournda Beach, an incredible expanse of pristine sand, and clear, blue water, surrounded by national park. Along the shore, washed up, they spot a single, grey, Asics shoe. It is only when they look more closely that they realise inside it holds human remains. The group, visiting for a surfing trip, are alarmed...

It’s an unusual place to start a true crime story - at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1985. 

The director of the gallery, a man named Patrick McCaughey, purchases a single painting for $1.6 million. Due to currency fluctuations, the cost increases to $2 million, the most expensive purchase ever made by an Australian gallery. The painting is by Pablo Picasso, titled The Weeping Woman. The work represents suffering - oddly fitting for the story that was about to unfold...

A plane colliding with the South Tower at 9:59am, on September 11, 2001, would become the first terror attack watched in real-time by millions of people around the world. News anchors struggled to maintain composure. New York, and more broadly, the United States, was under attack. 

The north tower continued to burn. Images and video footage were broadcast on every news channel. For a generation, those images would become imprinted on our psyches...

It’s a clear, still Tuesday morning in New York City. The autumn sky is bright blue and the two World Trade Centres mark the highest points of the Manhattan skyline. 

At 8:30am the business district is bustling. Workers are making their way into elevators or stopping for a quick coffee. Their minds are on their morning meeting or the kids they just dropped off at school. Most don’t notice the plane flying too low, far too low, until they hear it...

It’s May 9, 2001, and the family of missing teenager, Natasha Ryan, are holding a memorial service in Bundaberg, Queensland. Today would have been her 17th birthday. 

Natasha, with dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and fair, freckled skin, had disappeared on August 31, 1998. She was 14 years old. For almost three years, there has been no trace of her. 

Her father, Robert Ryan, and mother, Jenny Ryan, have accepted that their daughter is dead...

It was December 1982, when 21-year-old Shelly Barnett, described by Vanity Fair as a willowy beauty with strawberry blonde hair, married 22-year old David Miscavige in Los Angeles.

She would become the First Lady of Scientology. 

Those who knew her described her as shy, often appearing lonely and isolated. At the same time, some witnesses say she was prone to losing her temper, much like her husband...

Mackay is a city on the Coral Sea coast of Queensland, Australia, located about 970 kilometres north of Brisbane. 

It’s known as the sugar capital of Australia, producing more than a third of the country’s cane sugar. 

In South Mackay, sits a spacious pub called Harrup Park Country Club. In February 2013, this was one of the last places Shandee Blackburn was seen alive...

It’s 1983, and a 15-year-old boy named Richard Kelvin is in a laneway in North Adelaide. He is 50 metres from his beautiful family home. 

He has spent that Sunday, June the 5th, playing footy, until the afternoon when his best friend Karl came over. They kicked the footy around. Richard called his girlfriend. And then he walked Karl to the bus stop. 

It’s 6:15pm, and the sun is disappearing...

 Rustler Park sits high in the Chiricahua Mountains in southern Arizona.

Campsites belonging to the park are scattered along a number of roads, sectioned off from the meadows to avoid damaging plants and fragile soils. Paths from these campgrounds lead into the Chiricahua Wilderness, a national forest full of ponderosa pine and swarming with wildlife. Large animals, like black bears, are often spotted there...

Between the beaches of Bondi and Tamarama in Sydney’s picturesque Eastern suburbs, lies a steep cliff face. Parks and a walking track sit above, attracting tourists from all over the world. But below is rock and the white, foamy Pacific Ocean, the water appearing black at night time. In the 1980s, there was no railing separating the track from the steep cliff. And at night, sometimes screams were heard by locals. Bloodstains were found along the walkway...