Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
Strewth is an Australian true crime and mystery podcast that delves into the country's most captivating and bizarre cases. It explores stories from the outback to urban centers, combining atmospheric storytelling with meticulous research. Each episode examines how these cases have shaped Australian society, from colonial-era crimes to modern forensic breakthroughs. The podcast releases new episodes weekly.
Episodes
King William's Town - Australian Ghost Stories
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 po
By the Light of the Moon - Australian Mystery
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 fu
Weiberg's Gold - Australian Mystery
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 carp
A Bizarre Journey - Australian Mystery
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 on
A Man and His Dog: Part 2 - Australian True Crime
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 fina
A Man and His Dog: Part 1 - Australian True Crime
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
Allison Road - Australian True Crime
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 f
A Lone Wolf? - Australian True Crime
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
Home Tonight - Australian True Crime
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, t
The Shark Arm Case - Australian True Crime
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 hal
The Junjudee - Australian Mystery
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 rainfore
Leanne Holland - Not a Scintilla - Australian True Crime
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
Leanne Holland - A Walk to the Shops - Australian True Crime
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. Wi
Message in a Bottle - Australian Mystery
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 v
The Humpty Doo Mystery - Australian Paranormal
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 fri
The 6:30 to Gippsland - Australian True Crime
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 Prah
Frederick Valentich - The Unanswered - Australian Mystery
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
Frederick Valentich - The Flight - Australian Mystery
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 fi
The Rack Man - Australian True Crime
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
The Lithgow Panther - Australian Mystery
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 b
The Old London Affair - The Curiously Overlooked - Australian True Crime
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
The Old London Affair - The Unrung Bell - Australian True Crime
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
Kaikoura Lights - New Zealand Mystery
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 b
Wanda Beach - Lingering Questions - Australian True Crime
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 d
Wanda Beach - Into the Dunes - Australian True Crime
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 b
Screams From the Darkness - Australian Mystery
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 th
Beneath the Pines - Australian True Crime
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, alread
The Missing Statement - Australian True Crime
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
The Hawkesbury River Monster - Australian Mystery
An hour north of Sydney, a drowned valley plunges forty metres into darkness. For over a century, witnesses have reported something moving through the Hawkesbury River that shouldn't exist. Long necks rising from murky water, massive shapes surfacing near boats, creatures that defy explanation. The Darug people have stories about this river that stretch back 50,000 years. Bull sharks are confirmed
An Island of Secrets - Analysing the Evidence - Australian True Crime
The official story seemed simple: Vivienne Cameron murdered Beth Barnard in jealous rage, then jumped from the San Remo Bridge. Case closed. But when forensic scientists examined the evidence, they found something impossible. A pink mohair jumper that never left a single fibre. A blood-soaked murder scene where the killer left no victim's blood in the escape vehicle. Phone calls at times that do
An Island of Secrets - The Fateful Night - Australian True Crime
The murder of Beth Barnard and disappearance of Vivienne Cameron. September 1986. A brutal murder on Phillip Island. A woman carved with the letter "A" for adulteress. Another woman vanished without trace. For forty years, Australia accepted the official story: jealous wife kills mistress, then commits suicide by jumping from a bridge. But in January 2026, plumbers digging for a septic tank foun
The Murwillumbah Heist - Australian True Crime
November 24th, 1978. Bank employees, locksmiths, vault experts and finally council workers in Murwillumbah spend nine hours trying to open a bank vault. When they finally broke through, Chief Inspector Frank Charleton looked around the empty space and said three words: "They got the lot." One point seven million dollars. Vanished. Taken by professionals who used an electromagnetic drill, a medic
Red Eyes in the Mist - Australian Mystery
On August 7-8, 1993. Kelly Cahill is driving home through Victoria's misty Dandenong Ranges when her car was surrounded by seven-foot tall beings with eyes that glowed burning red through the darkness. One hour of her life vanished. Within weeks, she discovered triangular burns on her body and was hospitalised with infections doctors couldn't explain. Then came the breakthrough that should have
A Murderer Takes Tea - Australian True Crime
The Florence Broadhurst Mystery October 15, 1977. Two police officers discover the body of Florence Broadhurst, a 78-year-old wallpaper designer whose patterns hung in palaces and penthouses around the world, beaten to death in her Paddington studio. The crime scene tells multiple stories and the investigation has spanned decades producing a mix of theories and suspects as eclectic as Florence's
Fisher's Ghost - Australian Mystery
On June 17, 1826, Frederick Fisher, a convict-turned-successful farmer, vanished from his Campbelltown property. His neighbour George Worrall claimed Fisher had sailed back to England, but there was a problem. Fisher was still a convict, bound to the colony. Returning to England would mean hanging. Three months later, Worrall sat in gaol, arrested on suspicion of murder. But without a body, he c
Highway of Death Part 2: One Killer, or Many? - Australian True Crime
This is Part Two of our Highway of Death investigation. After hearing the victims' stories in Part 1, we now examine the hunt for justice, or rather, the spectacular failures of justice. The confessions that led nowhere. The corruption exposed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry that destroyed investigations and let killers walk free. The suspects who died before facing trial. The families who've waited fi
Highway of Death Part 1: The Disappeared - Australian True Crime
Between 1970 and 2017, at least ten people were murdered or vanished along the Flinders Highway, a 776-kilometer stretch of isolated Queensland outback. This episode tells their stories: two schoolgirls who walked to the bus stop and never came home. Hitchhiking art students one found with bullets in her head, one still missing. An 18-year-old who made a terrified phone call to her mother. Three
Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler - Australian True Crime
New Year's Day, 1963. Two bodies are discovered on the banks of Sydney's Lane Cove River. Dr. Gilbert Stanley Bogle, a brilliant physicist. Margaret Chandler, a young mother of two. Both dead. Both half-dressed. No detectable poison in their systems. The FBI is consulted. Scotland Yard investigates. Over a thousand theories tested. The wronged husband. The jealous mistress. Soviet spies. LSD ex
Three Witnesses: A Strewth Christmas Special - Australian Mysteries
This Christmas, we're doing something different on Strewth. The Victorian English had a tradition of telling ghost stories around the fire on Christmas night, long before it became all tinsel and shopping, it was a time for sharing tales of the unexplained. We're reviving that tradition with three spooky Australian accounts that never made it into our regular episodes. Over the past year, I've
The Jenny Dixon Beach Hauntings - Australian Mystery
Two ghosts haunt the same stretch of Australia's Central Coast. For fifty years, drivers on Wilfred Barrett Drive have reported picking up a young woman in white who vanishes from their back seat near Norah Head Cemetery. The legend says she was murdered by five men in the 1970s, and that all five died mysteriously afterward. It's one of Australia's most famous ghost stories. A second ghost see
Nullarbor Nightmare - Australian Mystery
It's 4 AM on the most isolated highway in Australia. The Knowles family are driving toward a fresh start when they see a light on the road ahead. Within minutes, they're fleeing at speeds approaching 200 kilometres per hour, but the glowing object matches them effortlessly. Then something lands on their car roof with a heavy metallic thud. Faye Knowles reaches up to touch it and what she f
The Pyjama Girl Mystery: Part 2 - The Confession - Australian True Crime
In February 1944, after ten years floating in a bath of formalin, the Pyjama Girl finally got a name. Two teeth fillings mysteriously appeared at the bottom of her preservation bath, just as Police Commissioner William MacKay desperately needed to solve his department's most embarrassing cold case. Within weeks, Antonio Agostini, a recently released wartime internee working as a waiter, confessed
The Pyjama Girl Mystery: Part 1 - The Lady in Silk - Australian True Crime
September 1, 1934. A farmer walking his prize bull along a country road outside Albury catches the smell of kerosene. In a concrete culvert, he discovers a woman's body, shot, beaten with eight savage blows to the skull, and burned. What she's wearing shocks Depression-era Australia as much the violence. Silk pyjamas embroidered with a Chinese dragon. For ten years, her body floats in a bath of
The Pilliga Princess - Australian Mystery
On March 20, 1993, a homeless woman named Clare Wibson was struck and killed by a truck on the Newell Highway through Australia's largest forest. The driver's official statement described her final moments in chilling detail: "She turned towards me, arms outstretched in a hugging-like gesture, and ran towards the truck. The last thing I saw was the white hair flaring out around her wild-eyed face
Disappearance at the Cuckoo: Part 2 The Suspects - Australian True Crime
When Willi Koeppen's blue Kombi was found abandoned with keys in the ignition, police initially dismissed it as a man running from his problems. By the time they realised it was murder, crucial evidence had vanished into the dense Dandenong Ranges. Part 2 follows the investigation that spanned five decades: the underworld confessions that couldn't be proven, the jealous lovers and mistaken ident
Disappearance at the Cuckoo: Part 1 The Night in Question - Australian True Crime
On a cold February night in 1976, Australia's first celebrity chef vanished from his Bavarian restaurant in the misty Dandenong Ranges. Wilhelm "Willi" Koeppen, the man who brought smorgasbord dining to Australia and hosted the country's first televised cooking show, left behind a blue Volkswagen Kombi with keys in the ignition and the door wide open. Part 1 reconstructs the final hours: a viole
The Gatton Murders - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Episode 11 - The Gatton Murders On Boxing Day night 1898, Michael Murphy and his sisters Norah and Ellen were brutally murdered while returning from a cancelled dance near Gatton, Queensland. Their bodies were discovered arranged in a triangle, feet carefully positioned pointing west, a detail never repeated in Australian criminal history. What followed was one of the most incompetent po
The Guyra Poltergeist - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Episode 10 - The Guyra Poltergeist On a freezing April night in 1921, something began attacking the Bowen family cottage on the edge of Guyra. Tremendous thumps shook the walls. Stones rained from nowhere. Windows exploded inward. And at the center of it all was twelve-year-old Minnie Bowen, with her dark, unsettling eyes. What started as a family's nightmare became a town's obsession. E
The Min Min Lights - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast For over 130 years, mysterious glowing orbs have haunted Australia's remote Channel Country, following travelers for kilometres, splitting into multiple lights, and moving with apparent intelligence. First Nations peoples knew about them for millennia before Europeans arrived. Scientists have studied them. Thousands have witnessed them. Yet the
The Button Man - Australian Mystery
A wildlife photographer wakes up at home, downloads his photos, and finds something impossible: a picture of himself sleeping in his tent, taken at midnight with his own camera. Someone entered while he slept, stood inches away in the darkness, and photographed him. Then they vanished into the Victorian High Country without a trace. Between 2008 and 2020, six people disappeared from Victoria's Alp
The Beaumont Children: Part Two - The Suspects - Australian True Crime
The Beaumont Children - Australian True Crime February 2025. Excavators dig three meters into the former Castalloy factory site in North Plympton, Adelaide. They're searching for three children who vanished sixty years ago, based on testimony from the factory owner's son who claims he saw them enter his father's property and never leave, and two brothers who say they were paid to dig a grave-size
The Beaumont Children: Part One - The Disappearance - Australian True Crime
The Beaumont Children - Australian True Crime On Australia Day 1966, three children boarded a bus to Glenelg Beach in Adelaide and never came home. Jane (9), Arnna (7), and Grant (4) Beaumont were seen by multiple witnesses playing with an unidentified man at the beach, laughing, comfortable, clearly trusting him. They were seen buying food with a one pound note their mother hadn't given them. T
Somerton Man - The Next Chapter - Australian True Crime
In 2022, scientists announced they'd finally solved Australia's greatest cold case. After 74 years, the Somerton Man had a name: Carl Webb. Case closed, right? If only it were that simple. Three years later, South Australian Police still won't confirm the identification. Webb's entire family somehow failed to recognize their missing brother when his face was plastered across Australian newspapers.
Kalkajaka - The Mountain Keeps Its Dead - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian Mystery Podcast - Series 1, Episode 4 Deep in Far North Queensland rises a dark anomaly that has claimed lives for over 150 years. The Kuku Yalanji people call it Kalkajaka "the place of the spear" and have warned for forty thousand years that the mountain keeps its dead. When Charles Grayner vanished while tracking his horse into the granite boulder maze in 1872, it began
The Westall UFO Incident
April 6, 1966. 11 AM. A suburban Melbourne school. Over 200 students and teachers witness a silver disc hovering above their playground, then shooting away at impossible speed. Within hours, men in suits arrive. Students are told to stay silent. TV footage mysteriously vanishes from network archives. Nearly 60 years later, the Australian government still blocks access to thousands of files about t
Stranger than Fiction
STREWTH - Episode 2: Stranger than Fiction A True Australian Mystery Podcast In 1930, struggling novelist Arthur Upfield sat around a campfire in the remote Western Australian outback, discussing with fellow workers how to commit the perfect murder, purely as a plot device for his detective novel. When three men subsequently disappeared and their remains were found burned according to the exact m
The Lady of the Swamp - Australian True Crime
STREWTH - Episode 1: The Lady of the Swamp A True Australian Mystery Podcast Before South Gippsland became infamous for a recent mushroom poisoning that made international headlines, this picturesque Victorian region harbored an even darker secret. In 1952, an elderly heiress known as "The Lady of the Swamp" vanished without a trace from her crumbling mansion, leaving behind one of Australia's mos
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