Red and blue lights of a police car.
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System Failure

Hedley Thomas on True Crime

BY
 Amal Awad

The NFSA's Amal Awad speaks to The Australian journalist Hedley Thomas about true crime investigation.

 

Without a map 

Seasoned journalist and podcaster Hedley Thomas cannot tell you where his true crime investigations will inevitably land. Still, he knows one outcome for certain: people of significance will emerge during a podcast’s run to share information or leads. It shifts the coordinates of a live investigation, sometimes doubling or even trebling the number of episodes initially plotted.  

Artwork for a podcast called Bronwyn featuring a photo of a young woman smiling.
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Podcast artwork for The Australian's podcast, Bronwyn.

Take, for example, Thomas’ latest podcast for The Australian, cold case investigation Bronwyn (2024). In this series, Thomas revives the case of Northern Rivers mother Bronwyn Winfield, whose disappearance and suspected murder 16 years ago remains unsolved. When we speak, Thomas is en route to wrap up episode 10, the final instalment for season one, which was initially slated to have a six- to eight-episode run. ‘I'll be coming back with at least another six episodes after everybody has had a chance to catch up and I've caught my breath,’ he says. ‘There's been a lot to unpack and try to communicate. And a lot of leads are still coming in.’ Episode seven, for example, delivered a new witness, retired nurse Judy Singh, who came forward with valuable information previously ignored by the police – twice. 

 

Why can’t we get enough? 

While fiction is fuelled by imaginary serial killers, dense murder mysteries, dark thrillers and tortured detectives, true crime is real life despite often terrible twists and turns of fate. Psychological theories abound about its allure, one of the most popular being that there is safety in observing tragedy or confronting horrors committed against others from a distance.  

But Thomas offers an additional explanation: with a majority-female listenership – he thinks at least 70-80 per cent are female across a broad demographic – true crime investigations are educational and potentially lifesaving. ‘They consistently tell me how they believe at a conscious and subconscious level that they're becoming better educated and more resilient in identifying potential threats to their safety and ways to avoid a situation. Or how to protect themselves from a predator, from a potential killer,’ Thomas says. ‘Women are clearly the people who are mostly targeted in these kinds of homicide cases.’ 

His concerns perhaps speak to more than his motivation. Listeners, like Thomas, want justice. But while he can’t comfortably call it ‘entertainment’, he says podcast investigations must be compelling to achieve such an outcome. ‘I'm doing the podcasts to try to get a result that's been denied the families of the victims and others for a very long time.’  

And Thomas is ‘absolutely guilty’ of trying to make his podcasts as interesting and listenable as possible to extend his reach. ‘I know the more people listen, the more they'll share it with other people, and the more chance I have of witnesses like Judy Singh coming forward and giving me important fresh new evidence.’ 

 

Upper body shot of journalist Hedley Thomas
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‘I'm doing the podcasts to try to get a result that's been denied the families of the victims and others for a very long time.’

Hedley Thomas

 

Under pressure 

Thomas’ podcast The Teacher’s Pet is a prime example of how a cold case investigation can marshal the public to act. A global success, it was so influential that community pressure saw the case of Lynnette Simms (married name Dawson) reopened. 

podcast cover image
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Artwork for The Australian's podcast The Teacher's Pet.

Her husband, Chris Dawson, was finally tried and found guilty of her murder in 2022, nearly four decades after Simms’ disappearance.

Thomas says the prosecuting agency let the victim down over many years. Even with thorough police investigations and a coroner’s recommendation that a known person be prosecuted, the inquest was terminated and referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions. It went cold because there was no body. ‘That, in my view, was a failure of judgement. And it should have been dealt with earlier and reversed, but it wasn't,’ Thomas says. The decision to not prosecute was finally reversed in 2018, but it took an enormous public outcry, a renewed police investigation, and the podcasts.  

Thomas argues that a lack of transparency with justice system agencies works against victims and their families. We don’t see what happens behind closed doors, and the decision-making process is elusive. ‘So if they have made a mistake, it remains buried. It's a secret.’ 

 

Excavating the past 

This is the justice gap that podcasters like Thomas are managing to fill, taking journalistic skills and applying them to a case of public interest to tell a story in forensic detail. ‘A lot of my journalism and the stories that I've broken and been involved in over the years before I started podcasting in 2018 have dealt with failures of systems,’ he says. 

Podcasting and social media have removed barriers to entry on reporting about these failures. ‘[True crime] journalists would traditionally report on the work being done by detectives and by highly skilled people with a huge amount of power; power to tap telephones and mount surveillance operations and so on,’ he notes. But nowadays, true crime podcasters are doing these investigations themselves.  

‘People like myself have realised that there's this great opportunity, particularly when we can marshal the help of the public engaged in true crime podcasts, to take a cold case and turn it over in a way that probably hasn't been turned over before and try to make a difference.’ 

Despite some professional police investigations, Thomas says ‘there are some absolute horror shows’ that missed so much they can’t accurately be described as investigations. ‘And they have let down victims of crime. They've let down their families. They've let down the community. And when you rip some of the covers off the investigations, how much more potentially can be done with a focused true crime podcast investigation?’ 

A great deal, it seems, but there are considerable limitations. Thomas does not have the power to intercept telephones or conduct covert surveillance like law enforcement agencies do with appropriate warrants. But he does have a public following – and their insatiable appetite for ostensibly open-and-shut cases of foul play to be solved. 

‘Where a lot of people will never contact the police, they might try Crime Stoppers, but they'll contact me because they've got a serious concern or know something they haven't previously shared.’ 

Thomas is like a ‘security blanket’, he says. ‘Some of them say they feel they have a relationship with the podcast and the storyteller because they've had him or her in their ears in what seems like a close connection for often hours of audio over multiple episodes.’ 

 

Cold case fundamentals 

Thomas is, not surprisingly, inundated with requests. ‘The reality is that 48 out of 50 of my replies will be disappointing for the people who receive them. These cases take the best part of a year from the start of reading into them and investigation and then the writing, production, roll-out of episodes, and the follow-up.’ 

Thomas applies a pragmatic set of criteria to potential cases: the victim’s family and loved ones will cooperate fully. ‘They must all be prepared to help and share even if they have internal disagreements.’ 

As a starting point, there needs to be a good body of material, such as an inquest. ‘With an inquest, you've got a police brief of evidence into the presumed death of somebody. You have witness statements in that brief of evidence and transcripts of the inquest proceedings. You have a finding at the end of the inquest.’ You also have witness statements and, through those, initial leads. ‘You start to spread the net.’ 

It's helpful if there is film or audio of the victim, a way to hear the victim’s voice. ‘You want to personalise these cases.’ 

Thomas needs to feel connected to a case that will take over his life for months. However, the most crucial element is the question he must ask after exploring a case’s scope. Can the case potentially be solved? ‘Is it so old that any witnesses who might have come forward are dead or are in no capacity because they're so elderly?’ 

Thomas says it’s a gamble. ‘But you just play the averages. You look at it and ask, how strong does this case look? Should a person have been prosecuted earlier? Was this possibly another failure of the prosecuting agency or the police? And if so, then we could make a difference.’