True Crime Conversations

UPDATE:  Since recording this episode, murderer and serial paedophile, Michael Guider, the man responsible for Samantha's death, has been released from jail.

When Tess Knight got home on a winter’s night in August of 1986 her nine-year-old daughter Samantha was nowhere to be found. 

It wasn’t until 14 years later in February 2001 that a man named Michael Guider pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the young Bondi school girl...

In 2014 Simon Gittany was found guilty of throwing his 30 year old fiancé Lisa Harnum from the balcony of their shared 15th floor apartment.

Simon maintained his innocence, saying that Lisa climbed over the railing of the balcony and fell to her death. 

Amy Dale was a court reporter at the time of this case and has subsequently written a book titled The Fall about Lisa’s murder...

It is speculated that Ivan Milat's days are numbered. Australia’s most notorious serial killer is. Milat is serving 7 concurrent life sentences for his horrific crimes.

In this episode we take a look at the life of Ivan, to get inside the mind of one of our country’s worst serial killers. Mark Whittaker co-authored ‘Sins Of The Brother’, the most definitive work on the life and crimes of Ivan Milat...

As the sun set over Uluru on August 17th, 1980, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain put their two month old baby Azaria to bed.  What happened next is burnt into the collective consciousness of not just Australia but the world.

This won’t be like most episodes of True Crime Conversations, mostly, because in this case there was no crime.  Instead, it was one of the most significant and devastating miscarriages of justice Australia has ever seen...

The disappearance of The Beaumont Children is burned into the collective conscious of Australia. It’s one of the longest running cases in the nation’s history and has baffled law enforcement for more than half a century.

Stuart Mullins grew up down the road from the Beaumont children in Adelaide. Over the years he has researched and co authored investigative writing into their disappearance...

Levi Bellfield has been charged and found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell, Amelie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. Women who were linked by nothing other than the man who chose to kill them. Bellfield’s murders were baffling in their lack of motive, hindering law enforcement from figuring out who was responsible...

The case of the Somerton Man is one of the most baffling cases in modern criminal history.

In 1948 the body of a man was found on Somerton Park Beach just south of Adelaide in South Australia. Despite a global effort to identify the remains, we still do not know who the man was, why he was there, and how he died.

Fiona Ellis-Jones is a reporter and producer for the ABC...

It was a warm spring day when two young boys were playing at Mandurama reserve in the Sydney suburb of Ambarvale. It was a place where families and friends could have a picnic, or cycle on bike paths.

As the boys rode their bikes, something caught their eye. It looked like a suitcase, floating near the edge of a nearby duck pond. What they discovered was the body of two-year-old Dean Shillingsworth...

Leonard Fraser was the very embodiment of a monster.

He was sentenced to life on the 7th of September 2000 for the abduction rape and murder of 9-year-old Keyra Steinhardt in the Queensland town of Rockhampton. Prior to that Fraser had spent almost two decades behind bars for the rape of other women, including his defacto partner who was terminally ill with cancer.

Fraser kept trophies from his victims...

11-year-old Gerard Ross went missing in October 1997 while on a family holiday in the WA town of Rockingham. Two weeks later a horse trainer was out exercising his horses when he discovered Gerard’s body dumped in a pine plantation 20 kms from town.

While police have always had suspects in the case, no one has ever been convicted of the 11-year-old’s abduction and murder.

Award winning investigative journalist Kristin Shorten has spent her career covering the case...