Australian Crime Stories

In the years before Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Siara Glennon vanish from Claremont, three other women are attacked across Perth. One wakes in her own bedroom. One is targeted at work. One is taken after a night out. At first, the cases appear separate. Decades later, they will begin to connect.

In mid-1990s Perth, Claremont was a familiar nightlife strip where young people moved between venues and waited for taxis home. But when three women vanish after nights out there, a place of routine turns into one of Australia’s most infamous crime scenes.

In 1990, three Aboriginal children vanish from the same small community in Bowraville within five months. What follows is a story of fear, suspicion, failed investigations, and families left carrying the search for justice themselves.

On a Monday morning in December 2014, customers sit down for coffee in Martin Place. Minutes later, a shotgun is produced and the doors are locked. For the next seventeen hours, a group of hostages move when instructed, speak when permitted, and wait while police negotiate from outside. As hours pass and daylight fades, the siege narrows toward a final break.

Sydney, December 1988. Twenty-seven-year-old American mathematician Scott Johnson is found dead at the base of cliffs at North Head. He had moved to Australia to build a life with his partner, splitting his time between Canberra and Sydney while completing his PhD. His clothes are discovered folded near the cliff edge, and within months his death is ruled a suicide — but over the decades that follow, questions about that conclusion refuse to settle.

Sydney, July 1960. Eight-year-old Graeme Thorne disappears while waiting for a lift to school in Bondi. His family are ordinary — a travelling salesman, his wife, and their two children, living in a rented duplex. Three weeks earlier, however, Bazil Thorne had won £100,000 in the Opera House Lottery — and the media published their names and home address.

Police have unearthed a total of seven bodies when they conclude their search at Belanglo State Forest. Attention now turns away from the forest and toward finding who is responsible. Thanks to Paul Onions, a survivor of an earlier attack in the same forest, Task Force Air gets its breakthrough. On the 5th of May 1994, police fly Paul to Australia and show him a series of images. He identifies the man he says attacked him. His name is Ivan Milat.

Police have just uncovered a fifth body in Belanglo State Forest. The victims span years of disappearances but a pattern is appearing; they all vanished while hitchhiking along the hume highway. Task Force Air has been formed to coordinate the investigation, bringing together missing-persons cases, forensic evidence, and search operations. What remains unclear is whether the forest has revealed everything it contains.