Elisabeth Membrey: A cold case, a new suspect, and a mother who has never given up

For more than 30 years, Joy and Roger Membrey – before he died in 2023 – have been hunting for answers over the murder of their 22-year-old daughter, Elisabeth. Elisabeth, a politics graduate who had been offered a trainee journalist position with Channel Ten, went missing from her sharehouse in 19…

The cop, the actor and the true tale of the Underbelly series

Melbourne's gangland war in the early 2000s captured the country's imagination. People like Carl and Roberta Williams became household names. Eventually, Eddie McGuire – the then Channel Nine CEO – demanded his team commissioned a television series. It became Underbelly, based on a book written by …

The real story of Melbourne’s gangland war

The gangland war has become like folklore in the tale of crime in Australia. From 1995, dozens of murders occurred in Melbourne in a wrestle over drugs and egos involving notorious underworld figures such as Carl Williams, Tony Mokbel, and the Morans. At the centre of it all was Stuart Bateson, a d…

Armed robbers and detonating bombs: Inside the elite police squad

John Taylor is one of the longest-serving and smallest (in stature) Special Operations Group members, and its longest-serving bomb disposal expert. Taylor was part of a crack team of officers who had to respond when "troubled genius" and self-taught bomb expert Glenn Saunders sparked a police stand…

He lived by the three rules of policing, before it all came undone

Tim Peck was an experienced homicide detective who worked on some of the country’s most notorious murder investigations, including the Maria Korp ‘body in the boot’ case. But the things that made him a crack detective, would also be the things that slowly brought him undone. In this special episode…

Mr Cruel, Part 2: Criminal profiler John Kelly on Australia's most notorious child kidnapper

John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac Killer, the Green River Killer (aka Gary Leon Ridgway) – name a serial killer, criminal profiler and psychotherapist John Kelly has profiled them all. Now he’s turned his attention Down Under, to notorious child snatcher Mr Cruel, and his insights are compelling. You can…

Mr Cruel, Part 1: The case of Karmein Chan and whether detectives got it right

When a third girl was kidnapped in just a few years, police suspected one offender: Mr Cruel. Before Karmein Chan, 13, in 1991, there was 10-year-old Sharon Wills in 1988 and 13-year-old Nicola Lynas in 1990. In this special two-part episode on the notorious child snatcher who terrorised Melbourne…

He was an international thief targeting wealthy Australian homes, until one slip-up

During the span of one week in July 2020, designer goods, cash and jewellery were stolen from eight homes in Melbourne’s affluent Toorak. It took a year for police to identify the pattern and the extent of the burglaries – some reaching as far as Queensland and totalling millions of dollars. The ch…

A little girl murdered, a mother vindicated: Solving the case of Bonnie Clarke

In 1982, single mother Marion Wishart, looking to make ends meet, invited a lodger to stay in her home in the suburb of Northcote in Melbourne. She could not have predicted what would happen next. What followed was one of the city’s most notorious child murders, that of her daughter, six-year-old B…

We’re back next week: Naked City season 7

Join John Silvester, Australia’s longest-serving crime reporter, as he talks to the cops and the crims in the seventh season of crime podcast Naked City. The new season will premiere on Wednesday, January 14, and new episodes will drop each Wednesday.  For the latest news and views from John Silve…