Voices for the Victims
Welcome to Strewth, where we uncover Australia's most captivating tales of true crime and mysterious happenings. Yarns so extraordinary they'll make you stop and say, "Strewth!"
From the sun-scorched outback to the seedy underbelly of our biggest cities, Australia harbours some of the world's most perplexing mysteries. Stories so bizarre that even hardened detectives could only mutter that distinctly Australian expression of disbelief.
Each episode takes you deep into extraordinary cases throu
43 most recent episodes
Visit website →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 kni
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 s
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 investi
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
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.
Fo
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 betwe
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 Cla
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 hairdress
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,
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 Au
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 Cr
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 nig
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 stretc
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
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
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 th
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 off
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 an
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 unex
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 mur
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 obje
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 so
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 wearin
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,
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.
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 televi
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 tria
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 t
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 intelligenc
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 p
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 t
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 unidentif
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 conf
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 thou
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 f
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 murde
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.