Murder in the Land of Oz

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On April 20, 2012, Gerard Baden-Clay phoned the police. His wife hadn’t come home from her morning walk, you see, and it wasn’t like her to be late. She had a big day ahead, and he didn’t want to cause a fuss, but he was getting worried. When the police arrived at the Baden-Clay household in Brookfield in Brisbane’s west, Gerard greeted the officers, gesturing apologetically at his face. “Cut myself shaving,” he said. He needn’t have pointed it out. Officers immediately noticed the long, ragged scratches on the side of Gerard’s face.And they knew they weren’t from shaving.The investigation into Allison’s disappearance would become one of the largest in Brisbane’s history, in man hours and in media coverage. The people demanded to know what happened to Allison, a much-loved mother, friend, and member of the community. People who had never met her joined a crowd of hundreds at the Brookfield Showgrounds to volunteer their time to search for Allison. Her husband Gerard was n...

In Part Two of our investigation into the murder of Allison Baden-Clay, ya girls discuss the absolute gall of a man who so obviously killed his wife to appeal that decision in the first place, the absolute legend that is Bevan Slattery, and we get a little serious to discuss domestic violence and the impact this case has had on Australia’s slow but steady change in the way we understand domestic and family violence.Gerard Baden-Clay was found guilty of Allison’s murder, but you know what they say: you can never keep a good Scout down. Or a very, very bad one.People were horrified when Gerard successfully appealed his murder conviction. Manslaughter didn’t seem to really apply to a guy who hid his wife’s body in a creek bed and then lied about it for two years. The people weren’t satisfied with the resolution, and they let their voiced be heard. Thousands gathered for a protest in Allison’s honour, a petition garnered tens of thousands of signatures, and the message went all th...

A corrupt police force. A violent murder staged to look like a suicide. A wrongful conviction. And a suicide in custody. It’s not a Netflix series, it’s the new episode of Murder in the Land of Oz, and this week your girls are solving a mystery. Reg Brown was convicted for the 1947 murder of his typist, Bronia Armstrong. But was he really guilty, or were the notoriously corrupt Queensland Police feeling lazy that day and just decided to arrest the first bloke on the scene? For sixty years the conviction was unquestioned until Reg’s granddaughters decided to dig a little deeper and find out what really happened to the grandfather they never knew.In this episode, we blow a little dust off the photo album and take a look back into Brisbane’s past, from the post-war era right up to the seedy underbelly of the Fitzgerald Inquiry years. A lot has changed in this big country town, and an awful lot has stayed the same.Bronia Armstrong was nineteen years old when she was found murdered i...

Something a little different this week, friends.Your girls do like to talk about murders, but we are not excited when they happen. Twenty-two year old aspiring comedian Eurydice Dixon was brutally raped and murdered by a stranger walking home from a comedy gig in Melbourne in June 2018. Her death has sparked outrage nationwide, particularly after police superintendent David Clayton advised women to "take responsibility" for their own safety.We are tired of hearing about the deaths of so many wonderful women and even more tired of women being blamed when a man decides to cut their life short.This week we share our thoughts, our sadness and our anger in a little bonus episode. We will release a full-length episode on the tragically short life of Eurydice Dixon after the trial.You can read about Eurydice’s impact here https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/19/eurydice-dixon-death-male-rage-australia-women-men-attitudesYou can learn more about Destroy the Joint’s Counting...

Some towns become synonymous with the crimes that happen in them - Salem. Waco. Snowtown.In Queensland, we have Gatton. When the bodies of Michael, Ellen, and Norah Murphy were discovered in a field the day after Boxing Day, 1898, the little agricultural town would become forever linked to one of the most famous unsolved crimes in Australian history.For years the murders were considered by police to be a crime of opportunity - the act of a desperate man from out of town, wanting to rob the well-off siblings. Or perhaps some madman, killing for a thrill. But was the crime actually perpetrated by a member of the Murphy family? Or worse, was it committed by a conspiracy of townspeople, determined to get revenge upon the alleged seducer Michael Murphy?This week your hosts saddle up the horses and set out west to investigate this murder most foul. On this treacherous journey, we encounter suspicious swagmen, incompetent police work, the horrors of a 19th-century autopsy, and some good ol...

Betty Shanks was twenty-two years old and walking home from work when she was attacked, beaten and left for dead. Could be the first line of any article in the Courier Mail today, unfortunately, but this attack happened in 1952, and her killer was never found.This week your girls talk exhaustively about Jess’s childhood, just how dirty motorbikes are, and just how unbelievably shitty it is to be a woman sometimes, regardless of what decade we’re in.In 1952, a young woman named Betty Shanks was walking home from work when she was attacked, beaten, and left to die on the side of the road.I have now told you literally everything there is to know about this case.There are no suspects, really, despite the fact that every couple of years someone pops out of the woodwork claiming they know who did it.There isn’t much information to be found out there about this case, due to the age and the unsolved nature of the crime. No one was ever brought to trial or even charged with ending the lif...

Anyone who has roots in Brissie could probably ask ten different people what they know about the Mayne family and they’d get ten different answers. They’ve been called the Mad Maynes and the Murderous Maynes – but are they really as black as they’re painted? Does the family who helped establish most of Brisbane have literal skeletons in their closet?This week your girls jump into the time machine for one last whirl as they try to tackle a question that has haunted Brisbane for over a hundred years – was Patrick Mayne really a murderer? Or was he just a weird rich guy?Patrick Mayne was a rich businessman and city alderman in Brisbane in the mid nineteenth century. On his deathbed, he allegedly confessed to murdering a man named Robert Cox twenty years prior, stealing a sum of £300 and using the money to purchase a butcher’s shop on Queen Street. From this shop, Mayne amassed a great fortune, high status in society, and a reputation that has followed him throughout the centurie...

Tracey Wigginton was convicted of murdering Edward Baldock and trying to drink his blood. Tracey wasn’t just a regular old murderer, you see. She was a vampire, a night stalker, one of the Devil’s children, who needed to feed on the sweet nectar of life to sustain herself.At least, that’s what her vampire coven believed. And they believed in her enough to help her take another human life.On this episode of Murder in the Land of Oz, your girls talk about mind control, why men don’t think women can murder, and of course, our shameful teenage vampire phases. We renounce Twilight, but Buffy is still cool.On October 20, 1989, Edward Baldock was violently murdered. It was a tragedy, but the media had an absolute field day when it was discovered that his killers were a coven of wannabe vampire lesbians. Readers couldn’t get enough of the Lesbian Vampire Killers, and the story made international news. Some people were titillated, others were terrified. Were cults of lesbian vampires co...

Seven backpackers disappeared hitchhiking off the Hume Highway in New South Wales from 1989 to 1992. For years, Australia was gripped by the mystery – was it the work of a serial killer, or just some more inexperienced tourists bested by the Australian outback?In the first episode of Season Two and our first case in New South Wales, your girls discuss the initial disappearances of the seven backpackers, Jess's fear of the outdoors, and how much Sydney sucks. Fuck you, Sydney.James Gibson, Deborah Everist, Joanne Walters, Caroline Clarke, Simone Schmidl, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied were the seven victims of the Backpacker Murderer. They were picked up by a mystery bloke, driven into the Belangalo State Forest, and viciously murdered. The police were baffled – what kind of a person would murder seven people so horrifically for their own sick pleasure?The Backpacker Murders are without a doubt the most famous serial killing case in Australian history. Even if you’ve never he...