A slight tangential deviation from my usual Crime and the City column which, as regular readers will know concentrates on international locations. So here are a few international true crime podcasts worth listening to wherever you are….
Blood Territory (Audible Original)
Aussie journo Mark Whittaker heads to the remote Northern Territory of Australia and the suburbs of the country’s most northerly city, Darwin. In 2006 24-year-old Northern Territory man Jimmy O’Connell, a slightly troubled bloke, was found in the bush presumed murdered. His corpse was mummified, mutilated and missing clothes in a dry creek bed. Then his best mate, 33-year-old Aboriginal man Philip Mather, admitted his guilt to a judge and was convicted for his death. Mather served eleven years. Yet O’Connell’s family have always believed Philip innocent and Mather (now out and back living in Darwin) now claims he didn’t do it. Whittaker re-examines the case and the twists and contradictions soon pile up.
The Doorstep Murder (BBC Scotland)
In November 2004 Alistair Wilson was fatally shot three times on the doorstep of his home in Nairn in the Highlands of Scotland. It remains one of Scotland’s most baffling unsolved cases and especially violent in the largely gun crime free north of Scotland. Fiona Walker, from the BBC’s Investigations Unit, looks back into the case and asks why did a regular family evening in a Scottish town end in gunshots?
My Lost Family (Audible Original)
Documentary maker Danny Ben-Moshe’s mum Lillian grew up in a poor Yiddish-speaking home in 1950s London. Then, at just 15, she met a charming, and wealthy, Iranian guy called Raymond at a dance. They had two children but soon separated. One day Raymond took the kids to the local park as arranged. But they never come back. Lillian was distraught, but could do nothing in the culture and legal norms of the time. Forty years later, the children and Raymond suddenly reappear in Lillian’s life and Danny (Lillian’s son from a second marriage) helps her search for the truth of what happened back in 1950.
Death in Ice Valley (BBC World Service)
In 1970 a woman’s badly burnt body was found in a remote spot, Ice Valley, near Bergen in Norway. Labels had been cut off her clothes and distinctive marks removed from her belongings. Norwegian police uncover coded messages, disguises and fake identities but the mystery was never solved. Why was the woman in Bergen, seemingly alone, and unprepared for a freezing night in the wilderness? Why did she have multiple identities? Was she a spy? If so, who was she working for? This BBC investigation from 2018 has not only had over five million downloads, but listeners have since helped the BBC discover more than was previously known in what is now—via BBC radio and Facebook groups—once more a very “Live” investigation.
West Cork (Audible Originals)
Reporters Sam Bungey and documentarian Jennifer Forde became obsessed with the violent murder just before Christmas in 1996 of French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier at her holiday home in West Cork, a serene, but remote, region on Ireland’s idyllic southern coast that had never seen a murder before. Alongside the local community are the “blow ins,” those from all over the world drawn for different reasons (not all good) to the most westerly edge of Europe. Many of those who arrived in West Cork in the late twentieth century had secrets and reasons why they didn’t or couldn’t fit into their home communities. West Cork was shocked at who some of these people were. The pretty West Cork town of Schull was, in many ways, an idyll – until Sophie’s killing.
Murderabilia (Audible Originals)
Poppy Damon and Alice Fiennes were at turns fascinated, revolted and intrigued when they discovered that around the world people are collecting, trading and profiting from serial killer memorabilia—art work and former possessions as well as hair, nail clippings and handwriting. Damon and Fiennes talk to colectos and dealers in the US of Charles Manson’s and Ed Gein’s clothing, soil collected outside John Wayne Gacy’s house ($250) and Ted Bundy’s high school yearbook ($1,000). But it’s an international business and the reporters also look at those collecting ‘souvenirs’ of the English serial killer Fred West and a whole museum dedicated to Murderabilia in the otherwise quiet Sussex seaside town of Hastings.
Shedunnit
Caroline Crampton’s brilliant Shedunnit podcast has been running for some time now and even broadcast from crime festivals in Dublin and Birmingham. Crampton looks at the real life crimes that inspired the (mostly UK, but a few other) writers of the “Golden Age”—from the inspirations behind Sherlock Holmes to Christie, Buchan, Greene, Highsmith and Graham Greene. There’s also interviews with true crime including Susannah Stapleton of the recently published Maud West: Lady Detective.
