Highway of Death Part 2: One Killer, or Many? - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
Release Date: 01/07/2026
The Murwillumbah Heist
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 medical cystoscope, and surgical precision to crack a vault that was supposed to be impregnable. Right across from a pub. One hundred metres from the police station. Forty-six years later, it's still...
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Red Eyes in the Mist - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 changed everything. This was the holy grail of UFO cases. Multiple independent witnesses. Physical evidence on multiple bodies. Medical documentation. Everything needed to be definitive. But there...
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A Murderer Takes Tea - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 celebrated wallpaper designs. This week on Strewth, we analyse the crime, the suspects and celebrate the amazing life of Australia's wallpaper queen, Florence Broadhurst. Sources: Thomson, Katherine: Unfolding Florence: The...
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Fisher's Ghost - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 couldn't be charged. Then, in October 1826, a farmer named John Farley reported seeing Frederick Fisher's ghost. The apparition sat on a fence rail, blood streaming from its head, pointing toward a...
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Highway of Death Part 2: One Killer, or Many? - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 fifty years for answers. And at the center of it all, one haunting question. Were these ten murders the work of a single serial killer who stalked the Flinders Highway for decades? Or multiple...
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Highway of Death Part 1: The Disappeared - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 motorcycle adventurers found executed in the spinifex grass. A young man who called home and then disappeared so completely his case changed how Australia handles missing persons. Ten names across...
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Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 experiments. All dead ends. For forty years, Australia's most baffling mystery remains unsolved. Then a documentary filmmaker asks a question nobody thought to ask. What he discovers is an...
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Three Witnesses: A Strewth Christmas Special - Australian Mysteries
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 collected dozens of firsthand testimonies while researching cases, witness statements and personal experiences that didn't quite fit into the main episodes, but are no less fascinating for it....
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The Jenny Dixon Beach Hauntings - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 seems to be from an earlier period, a time when shipwrecks were common along these treacherous shores. There is also real tragedy at Jenny Dixon Beach. In 1950, two sisters, Grace and Kathleen Holmes...
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Nullarbor Nightmare - Australian Mystery
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
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 feels defies description. Black ash fills the cabin. Their voices distort impossibly. The dogs go into a frenzy. And then the car lifts off the road. Six days before Australia's Bicentennial,...
info_outlineThis 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 fifty years for answers.
And at the center of it all, one haunting question. Were these ten murders the work of a single serial killer who stalked the Flinders Highway for decades? Or multiple predators who independently discovered that isolation makes the perfect hunting ground?
After fifty years, over $1.25 million in rewards, and hundreds of thousands of investigative hours, these cases remain unsolved.
Content Warning: This episode discusses police corruption, systemic failures of justice, and the ongoing impact on families of unsolved murders.
Sources:
- Fitzgerald Inquiry Report (1987-1989): "Report of a Commission of Inquiry Pursuant to Orders in Council"
- "The Hunters" - Channel 7 documentary (March 2025)
- Fisher, Ian (Coroner). (2002, February). Inquest into the disappearance of Anthony "Tony" Jones. Queensland Coroner's Court.
- Wilson, Nerida (Coroner). (2021). Inquest into the death of Jayden Penno-Tompsett. Queensland Coroner's Court.
- R v Arthur Stanley Brown (1999). Queensland Supreme Court. Trial transcript, October 1999.
Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay
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