Crime Investigation Australia Episode Rating Graph

The horrific story of killers Allan Baker and Kevin Crump who began their murderous spree in rural NSW by killing a complete stranger for $20, a packet of cigarettes and a couple of litres of petrol. They then kidnapping Virginia Morse, a young mother of three, raped and tortured her as they drove to Queensland. Virginia's torture ended there when she was tied to a tree and shot. In the wake of their 1973 trial, the Australian public was left to ponder whether the two men were insane, or, even more chilling, whether their deeds were the result of rational minds gone astray. Shortcomings in Australian Criminal law were exposed because as Virginia Morse was killed in Queensland, New South Wales authorities could not charge the pair with her murder. Not wanting to extradite the two men, New South Wales police chose to charge them with conspiracy to murder Virginia Morse. Fortunately the New South Wales prosecutors didn't have to rely only on the Morse allegations. Their list of crimes also included the murder of Ian Lamb, the stranger, as well as wounding a policeman, as well as car theft.

In 1981, the headless and fingerless body of 19-year-old Kim Narelle Barry was found dumped in the bush at a mountain lookout near Wollongong, south of Sydney. Kim’s head and fingers were later found in bushland some distance from the lookout and damage to the skull showed she had been bludgeoned to death. Then, by chance, detectives discovered that on the night she died Kim had been in the company of a local miner, 24-year-old Graham Potter, who had suddenly disappeared. A national manhunt led to his eventual surrender. Potter was convicted of Kim Barry’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. No motive was ever established for the killing and Potter, who was released in 1996 after serving 15 years, still declares he is innocent.

On 27 November, 1987, 12-year-old Noosa school girl, Sian Kingi was grabbed off her push bike by Valmae Fay Beck and Barrie John Watts as she rode home from school. Beck and Watts gagged the innocent, terrified child. Watts then raped and bashed her. He then callously, and without remorse, cut her throat while his cowardly wife and mother of six watched on. Six days later, a fruit picker discovered Sian's mutilated body, still dressed in her Year Seven Sunshine Beach School uniform, in a creek bed. The hunt for the killers and their arrest was led by Bob Atkinson, now Queensland's police commissioner. As a result of thorough and dedicated police work by Queensland detectives, and in concert with New South Wales police, Beck and Watts were located hiding in a motel at Long Jetty on the NSW Central Coast a few weeks later. Police believe Beck and Watts are linked to the murders of Sharron Phillips, 20, in Brisbane's outer west, Stella Mary Farrugia, 19, and Louise Bell, 10, in Adelaide. In 1995, Watts was convicted of the manslaughter of 31-year-old student, Helen Mary Feeney in late 1987. Beck gave evidence against Watts, though Ms Feeney’s body has never been found. In 2008 Beck was hospitalised and underwent heart surgery, but later died in hospital.

Volume 1: The Backpacker Murders - Ivan Milat (75mins approx) (M) The Kimberley Killer - Joseph Schwab (45 mins) (M)

In 1959 the carefree culture of Perth changed forever when a plague of crime hit the city. By early 1963 the crime wave had escalated to serial murder. A couple were shot at as they sat in their car. In separate incidents two men were shot and killed at point blank range as they slept. Another was shot between the eyes as he opened his front door. A young woman was strangled to death and raped. An 18-year-old babysitter was executed as she studied and listened to music in front of the fire. All this was the work of one man: Eric Edgar Cooke.

For the 2008 launch of Crime Investigation Australia CI presents the complete and compelling story of "The Killing Fields of Truro", one of the most infamous crimes in Australia and yet another set in Adelaide. Seven young women disappeared in the 51 days between December 23, 1976 and February 12, 1977. James William Miller confessed that during this time he helped the man he loved, Christopher Robin Worrell, dispose of the bodies of the young women who Worrell had sexually assaulted and then murdered while Miller was waiting nearby. The skeletal remains of four of the victims were discovered in bush graves over a 12 month period in 1978-79 in the Truro district, 80 kilometres north-east of Adelaide.

This episode revisits Adelaide’s notorious Adelaide Family Murders case, where six young Adelaide men were murdered during the 1970’s and 80’s. The victims were found in random locations throughout the state, their bodies neatly cut into pieces. Although each attack and mutilation appeared different, police investigators soon began to link the horrific murders to one another. Media frenzy ripped through Australia when the similarities to each killing became public knowledge. Media speculated that the murders involved a group of high profile Adelaide men including politicians, religious leaders and judges who allegedly paid young men for sex and then drugged and used them for pleasure. The media dubbed the group The Family and from then on the case was referred to as the Adelaide Family Murders.

Hosted by Steve Liebmann, The Body In The Sports Bag explores the disappearance and brutal murder of Sydney teenager, Lyndsay Van Blanken. This chilling episode features detailed re-enactments, interviews with key homicide detectives and heartbreaking accounts from Lyndsay's family and friends. The gripping special also features an exclusive emotional interview with Brandon Leonard, Lyndsay's American fiancé.

In 1999, eight bodies are found in six barrels filled with acid in a former bank vault in rural Snowtown, 50 kilometres north of Adelaide. Their investigation was to lead police to discover another four victims, in and around Adelaide. Four men were charged with murder and other offences. Eventually it was proven that 11 were murdered and another woman severely dismembered. The horrific murders that occurred over a 7-year period involve torture, dismemberment, even cannibalism.

In February 1986, nurse Anita Cobby, a former entrant in the Miss Australia quest, is walking home from Blacktown station in Sydney's outer-western suburbs. A Holden sedan pulls up and Anita is dragged into the vehicle. She is taken to a lonely spot where five young men take turns to bash and rape her. Finally her throat is cut, almost severing her head, and her body is left in a paddock. The five men are later caught and convicted of these despicable crimes and sent to jail for life, their papers are marked "never to be released". But something positive will come out of this appalling and deeply disturbing story, as Anita's grieving parents begin a support group for the families of murder victims, offering comfort and mutual help for more than 1000 loved ones of homicide victims.

The backpacker murder case in the Belanglo State Forest, south west of Sydney, has entered Australian criminal folklore. The brutal murders of seven young people, most of them overseas tourists hitchhiking around Australia, attracted international media attention. The remains of their bodies were uncovered in 1992. The arrest and conviction of Ivan Milat would catapult him to Australia's worst individual serial killer. It is believed that Milat was involved in several other killings and there is strong evidence that he didn't act alone.

On the night of May 4, 1982, 13-year-old Terry Ryan rushed into his family home in Marsden, a suburb of Brisbane, and told his mother an astonishing story. Terry said that he had been forced by two men to participate in the sexual assault and prolonged torture and murder of his best friend, 13 year old Peter Aston. He said he had buried Aston in a shallow grave in scrubland about 60 kilometres south, over the New South Wales border, near the seaside hamlet of Kingscliff. Belita Ryan immediately rang the police. Terry retold his story to Detectives of the Queensland Criminal Investigation Branch. At approximately 4:45 on the morning of May 5th, the detectives drove Terry and his mother over the border into New South Wales. Terry led his mother and the detectives along the sandy track into the scrub. After about 200 meters, the track opened onto a roughly cleared area and the tire tracks disappeared into bush land on the other side of it. "There ... in there," Terry Ryan said as he pointed into the foliage. "It's in there.". The detectives led the way, and as they entered the track, they came across a grave-sized mound of earth off to the north-east. It was covered with small tree branches and twigs obviously broken from the nearby trees. Terry stepped back into his mother's arms and began to cry as the police officers approached the ominous mound and examined the freshly turned earth. In the dawn light, they saw spots of blood in the sand and a large, wet, blood-soaked section in the centre of the raised soil. Lying in the sand at the head of the bush grave was a dark sock and a knife in a sheaf. What the police officers found beneath the mound almost defied their comprehension.

Sometime on the evening of October 19, 1990, the flamboyantly gay Sydney socialite Ludwig Gertsch was strangled with an elastic strap in the bedroom of his lover, Mr Vincent Esposito. His body was found, wrapped in a doona, in Blue Mountains scrub on November 11, 1990. In September 1994 a Sydney Coroner found that Ludwig Gertsch was strangled "by a person or persons unknown". But that's where the murder trail ends - his killer has never been brought to justice. The murder of Allen Hall at Warnervale, where he lived with Christine Hicks, the estranged wife of boxing mentor and horse trainer Cec Waters, presented a curious public with a cruel and twisted story. Water’s eldest son, Dean, eventually was charged with Hall’s murder. However, it would be revealed later that Dean had succumbed to his father’s demands. Cec Waters was depicted as a bullying, obsessive father, who was determined to make his three sons become boxing champions but slaves to his evil will.

Dubbed ‘Mr. Sin’, and ‘the Boss of the Cross’, Abe Saffron ruled his family with an iron fist. A tireless womaniser, he even had his son, Alan, committed to the infamous Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital, and denied him access to his own children. Saffron’s alleged criminal activities included illegal alcohol sales, dealing in stolen goods, illegal gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, bribery, extortion and murder. Most charges laid against him involved minor firearms or liquor licensing offences but late in his life he finally served seventeen months in jail for tax evasion. He died in 2006, aged 86.

The quick mind of a country telephone exchange supervisor led to a horrific discovery at a NSW country homestead in 1978. The supervisor had been checking complaints that the phone line to “Summerfield” station, near the southern town of Jerilderie, was out of order. Living at the old homestead was a celebrated “gun” shearer Mick Lewis, his wife Sue and their two small children. After trying the line off and on for several hours it was finally answered by a tiny girl who said her mother and father were sleeping. When asked to wake her mother the child replied in a faltering voice: “I don’t like Mummy anymore ‘cause Mummy’s turning black”.

CI investigates into two of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in Australian criminal history are examined in The Wanda Beach Murders and The Beaumont Children Mystery.In 1965, when Australian teenage culture was centred on sun, sand, and surf, the nation was shocked by the brutal bashing, rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls in the sand hills at Sydney's Wanda Beach. A massive police hunt failed to find the killer but now, more than 40 years later, there is growing evidence that he could be a known psychotic murderer. A year later, on an Australia Day outing to a beach in Adelaide, three small children, Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont, disappeared suddenly and without a trace. Were they abducted by the man seen playing with them at the beach, or were they buried in an accident, as claimed by a world-famous clairvoyant who was flown to Adelaide from Europe by the media and concerned local citizens? Are they still alive?

We investigate the story of David and Catherine Birnie, Australia's most sadistic husband and wife killing team who tortured, raped and murdered four women in 1986. We also look into the murder of Call Girl Roslyn Watson which had remained unsolved for more than 15 years and would have stayed that way if it wasn't for the tenacious efforts of a bright young Western Australian Police Detective.

For the first time the complete story of one of Australia's most horrific serial murderers is finally revealed. Almost twenty years ago in June 1987 a crazed gunman begins a journey which will take him thousands of kilometres across the vast Australian outback. The killer's journey will result in the murders of five innocent tourists, spark one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history and end in a bloody last stand shootout with police at a remote outpost deep in the rugged Kimberly ranges of Australia's north. Before it is over, thousands of residents living in communities scattered across the country's Top End will be terrorised.

A small group of local criminals, with mafia connections, were making vast fortunes in the famous NSW Riverina irrigation district from marijuana plantations. Corrupt police and a vast bribery network had kept the drug barons immune from prosecution until Donald Mackay's campaign finally led to raids by the State drug squad and several local marijuana growers were arrested and fined. During their trial the police informant was named publicly as Donald Mackay. Infuriated by the loss of more than $40 million, the leaders of the Griffith mafia, including the notorious Robert Aussie Bob Trimbole, put out a contract for Mackay's murder. Trimbole was shot in the car park of a Griffith hotel on a Friday night in July, 1977. The murder scene was awash with his blood and evidence showed he was shot a number of times from behind and his body then dumped into a car boot and driven away. Intensive investigations by police and even a Royal Commission have failed to locate it.

On a September night in 1986, two police officers climbed through a barbed-wire fence beside the F4 freeway at Minchinbury in Sydney’s west. They were accompanied by two teenage boys who guided them to the edge of a shallow dam where the beams from torches outlined the body of a young woman lying in the mud. She was later identified as nineteen-year-old Sydney bank clerk, Janine Balding. She had been abducted, raped, beaten and drowned. The shock was compounded when police arrested the gang responsible and found their youngest member was just 14 years old. The others present were a boy and girl both aged 15, a 16-year-old boy, and their leader, 21-year old Stephen “Shorty” Jamieson, who despite his physical maturity had the mental age of 10. It appears the gang was seeking to impress each other with their toughness when they set out to rape a woman. They selected Janine at random.

This chilling CIA episode details the long and difficult investigation which began with the disappearance of 18-year-old secretary Sarah Spiers from a night club in the up-market Perth suburb of Claremont on Australia Day, 1996. The new information has been kept secret by police until now for fear its release could jeopardise the investigation. Now, for the first time, it's being shown to the public and viewers will be asked to look closely and to call Crimestoppers if they believe they can help.

The bloodied, semi-naked body of 30-year-old Donna Wheeler is discovered by her estranged husband Keith Bond and 12-year-old son. Donna had been brutally beaten and stabbed and when police investigate they discover that Donna’s estranged husband is a suspect but evidence also points to Keith’s brother Colin. Which brother really killed Donna Wheeler?

Sallie-Anne Huckstepp and Juanita Nielsen were iconic figures in the shadowy King’s Cross scene of the 1970s and 1980s. They lived dangerous lives – challenging the status quo of the period and met with mysterious and violent deaths. Neither murder has been solved officially, but many decades later, the intrigue of both cases still scratches at the heart and psyche of the Harbour City. Can a credible witness with new information, may finally help solve one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries.

In the late 1980s and early 1990’s a series of violent murders took place near Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach. Three innocent men were attacked and thrown to their deaths from a cliff top. The murders were part of a much wider wave of violent hate crimes as gangs of youths roamed Sydney’s inner suburbs randomly bashing and killing gay men for sport. Among the victims at Bondi was Wollongong television newsreader, Ross Warren, a gay man who disappeared while visiting friends in Sydney in 1989. Ross Warren’s case was dismissed by police as a “probable accident”. But his mother conducted a long campaign to have her son’s disappearance finalised. Then, some ten years after he was first reported missing, Ross’s police file finally came to the desk of one courageous investigator who started to dig a little deeper. Detective Sergeant Stephen Page quickly realised that there was more to the Ross Warren case than was uncovered in the original investigation. The file contained a great many unanswered questions. As he read the file Detective Page began to uncover similarities with other murders and slowly the shocking pattern of violence and death began to emerge. Another murder victim was Bondi resident John Russell, a gay man who had inherited some money and was about to leave for the country to start a new life when his body was found at the foot of the Bondi cliffs.

Hosted by Steve Liebmann, this episode of Crime Investigation Australia features detailed re-enactments and interviews with key figures, including the head of the police investigation, local Norfolk Island residents as well as intimate interviews with Janelle Patton’s mother and father. 29-year-old Patton had been stabbed to death in a frenzied attack that had left more than 60 wounds from her head to her feet. She had multiple bruises and broken bones and it was clear she had bravely fought back against a sustained attack. What followed were years of difficult investigations plagued by numerous false leads based mainly on gossip and innuendo. By the time the coroner’s inquiry opened two years later no less than 16 persons of interest had been investigated by the man in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Bob Peters. The naming of the 16 caused a furore of resentment and distress among the islanders. Eventually a 28-year-old chef named Glenn McNeill who had left the island a few months after the murder to return to his native New Zealand was arrested. But forensic investigators said Janelle’s injuries did not match McNeill’s story. He was later convicted and sentenced to 24 years in prison. The crime was also touted as the subject of a potential telemovie.

The notorious baby-faced underworld figure who police believe killed 10 people pleaded guilty to the murders of Mark Malia (August 2003), Jason Moran (June 2003) and Lewis Moran (March 2004). He was killed in April 19, 2010 with extreme violence by a prison inmate whilst serving 35 years in a maximum security prison for these murders. He had previously been found guilty of the murder of Michael Marshall, who was shot dead outside his Toorak home in October 2003. The murders occurred at the height of Melbourne's notorious gangland war that raged between 1998 and 2006, leaving 27 dead. Williams mother, Barbara, publicly defended her son after his jailing and berated the trial judge. The Moran family had dominated Melbourne's criminal world for more than a decade when Williams vowed to wipe them out. In November 2007, Carl’s father, George, was jailed for a minimum of 20 months for a massive drug trafficking operation which he carried out with his son. Over two and half years Carl made about $500,000 selling methamphetamine. George, now 63, lives in suburban Broadmeadows, Melbourne, and suffers from chronic heart disease, diabetes, anxiety and depression. Barbara committed suicide at her Essendon home in December 2008, and their other son Shane died of a heroin overdose aged 31.