The Veil

On a windy Monday in January 1965, two fifteen-year-old best friends, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, took four young children to Cronulla. When the little ones tired, the girls walked on into the sandhills behind Wanda Beach and never returned. Their bodies were found the next morning, stabbed and partially buried, a thirty-four-metre drag mark telling the story of one friend's desperate, failed escape. Sixteen thousand people were interviewed. Three men were named and never charged. A weak DNA profile survives; a crucial sample was lost. Sixty years on, it remains New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicide.Sources usedWikipedia — "Wanda Beach murders" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Beach_murders): primary backbone for timeline, crime-scene reconstruction, autopsy findings, drag mark, weapons, reward, investigation scale, suspect summaries, 2012 DNA, 2014 lost sample, Kruger/Dowlingkoa linked cases.Illawarra Mercury — "Blood spot offers new Wanda murders clue" (2012) and "Australian serial killer Christopher Wilder linked to the Wanda Beach murders" (2018): corroborates the knife-wipe blood mark / weak male DNA profile; Wilder named as official police suspect, Det Insp Ian Waterson "number one suspect," family not told, ~9-month delay before seeking to interview Wilder.that's life! — "Hans Schmidt breaks silence over his heartache": corroborates 2007 cold-case reopening, 2012 DNA, 2014 lost semen sample, mother died 2009; Hans's belief that someone still knows.Alchetron (mirror) and en-academic (Wikipedia mirror): corroborating detail on autopsy, alcohol/food findings, suspect profiles, reopening.NZ Herald — "Derek Percy believed to be Australia's worst child serial killer": Percy family Sydney holiday Jan 1965 / Ryde; story found in Percy's belongings with "striking similarity" to Wanda; map marked at Ryde.serialkillercalendar.com (Percy & Wilder pages): Percy's "I could have done it but I can't remember" reported remark; underwear-slashing at Mount Beauty late 1964; Wilder biography and US spree.Penguin Books AU (Australia's Least Wanted promo): senior-police confidence in Wilder; "lost crucial evidence."A&E — "Elusive 'Beauty Queen Killer'": Wilder profile match, proximity, delay before interview.murdersheposted (Substack) — "Death on the Sandhills": Bassett conviction (Carolyn Orphin, near Cronulla), painting, no physical link; Percy could not be physically placed at scene; right-to-silence detail.crimeimmemorial.com: corroborates semen present / hymens intact / attempted-rape inference; body positions.NFSA (Nine News / Ten News archive descriptions): investigation scale (7,000 by 1966; >16,000 and ~5,000 suspects by 1981); Wilder named 2018.Goodreads / "Lambs to the Slaughter" (Percy biography listing): Yvonne Tuohy murder July 1969, NGRI, held indefinitely; Wanda among suspected cases.

In the summer of 1483, two boys vanished behind the walls of the Tower of London. Edward the Fifth, twelve years old and uncrowned, and his nine-year-old brother Richard were last seen at the windows, growing fainter, until they appeared no more. Their uncle took the throne as Richard the Third. For five centuries the blame has shifted — Richard, Buckingham, Henry Tudor — while pretenders claimed to be the lost princes and bones turned up beneath a staircase. Today a sealed urn in Westminster Abbey may hold the answer, untested by choice. Ryan Wolf looks through history's coldest veil.

Between 1968 and 1969, three women — Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock — were each murdered after a night at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom. All three were beaten and strangled, their handbags taken, their bodies left near home. The press named the unknown killer "Bible John," after the scripture-quoting stranger who shared a taxi with Helen and her sister Jean — the one witness who ever truly saw him. Despite Scotland's largest manhunt, fifty thousand statements and a face built from memory, he was never caught. In this final episode, Ryan Wolf looks through the thinnest, cruellest veil of all.

On the night of 23 December 1996, French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was beaten to death outside her isolated holiday cottage in West Cork, Ireland — chased down her own lane and killed with a rock and a concrete block. Fifty injuries; a body left exposed so long the time of death was never fixed; a bloodstained gate that vanished from police custody. A local journalist, Ian Bailey, became the prime suspect and was convicted in France in his absence — but never charged in Ireland, where he denied it until his death. Decades on, new DNA testing offers fresh hope.

On a January night in 1931, an insurance agent named William Wallace was lured across Liverpool by a phone call from a stranger — "Qualtrough" — to an address that didn't exist. While he searched, his wife Julia was beaten to death in their own parlour. Yet his suit was spotless, the weapon vanished, and the timing was almost impossible. Convicted of her murder, Wallace became the first person in English history freed on appeal because the evidence simply couldn't support the verdict. No one else was ever charged. Every clue points two ways at once — the case crime writers still call unsolvable.

On the last night of February 2000, in the small Hunter Valley town of Aberdeen, a miner named John Price was stabbed to death in his own home — a death he had predicted aloud to his workmates the day before. But the murder was only the beginning. Over the hours that followed, Katherine Knight, a skilled abattoir worker, used the trade she'd spent thirty years perfecting to do the unthinkable to his body. This episode traces the forensic evidence, the warnings everyone missed, and the historic sentence that followed — and asks what it means when horror hides in plain sight.