As the nights draw in and the weather gets cold and you might find yourself heading to bed early, pulling the covers over your head, and searching for some new podcasts. But then, of course, this is the international edition of the podcasts review on Crimereads, so we’re aware that you might be enjoying a cold beer in a Singapore hawker court, grabbing lunch in a Malaysian kopitam, or hitting the beach in Australia, but perhaps still in need of a good listen. And so our semi-annual round up of the best international (non-USA) true crime podcasts in English…
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England
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Bad Women: Blackout Ripper
(Pushkin Industries)
A big-name podcast from Malcom Gladwell’s podcast company, Pushkin. Presented by historian Hallie Rubenhold (who had massive success with her 2019 book The Five, about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper) and criminologist Alice Fiennes, this second series of their podcast explores the case of the so-called Blackout Ripper, the man who attacked many women in London during the 1942 Blitz and blackout of the city. A great archive-based podcast that recreates the wartime city with London’s glamorous theatreland still open, Soho’s dingy nightclubs, and the battered lodging houses of the bombed city that were the Blackout Ripper’s lair.
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North Korea
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The Lazarus Heist
(BBC)
The BBC got there first with this one – there are at least two books and a major Hollywood studio documentary in the works right now too on the same robbery. Was this perhaps the most perfect heist ever? The Lazarus hacking ring that attempted (and pretty much did) steal a billion dollars from the Bank of Bangladesh in 2016. FBI investigators blame North Korea and the Pyongyang-trained and sponsored Lazarus hackers (who brought you the infamous Sony hack). The BBC’s Geoff White and Jean Lee, veteran foreign correspondent and expert on North Korea for Associated Press, take you from Pyongyang to Dhaka, via Macao, Beijing and Manila looking for the money and the perpetrators.
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Malta
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Who Killed Daphne?
(Wondery)
The mysterious death of the Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia was big news across Europe and is still being investigated by officials and journalists five years later. Daphne was killed by a car bomb outside her house in Malta in 2017, an otherwise invariably pretty peaceful island. Investigative journalist Stephen Grey, and Daphne’s son, look for her killers and the reason why she was considered so dangerous to someone. Galizia was a prominent anti-corruption activist. Two brothers charged with the car-bomb assassination have been jailed by Valletta’s central court, but who ordered the attack? Prior to her murder Galizia was said to be investigating corruption among some of the island’s richest businesspeople and politicians. They were known to not be happy about her digging around their private business.
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New Zealand
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The Commune – Sex, Drugs and a Guru Called Bert
(Stuff Podcasts)
A 12-part documentary podcast about the notorious free-love commune, Centrepoint. Located in New Zealand’s calm and quiet suburbs at Albany on the outskirts of Auckland’s North Shore, the commune was devoted in equal measure to sex, group therapy, and all run by its guru, the rather boringly named Bert Potter. What could possibly go wrong in this largely middle-class idyll in 70s New Zealand? Multiple allegations of child abuse ensued, yet there are some who still defend the commune and Guru Potter vociferously. By the time the commune finally ground to a halt in 2000, Potter and some of his acolytes had been sent to prison for child sex offences, drug crimes, or perjury.
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England
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Man in a Bag
(Audible Originals)
The bizarre and unsolved death of the British Intelligence employee Gareth Williams was a major headline story for months in the UK but is perhaps not so well-known abroad. Williams, a maths genius, and code breaker, who worked at Britain’s secretive monitoring station GCHQ in Cheltenham, was found naked and padlocked inside a canvas sports bag in his London flat. He had been dead for some time, the place was immaculate, his wiped cell phones neatly placed on the coffee table and the heating left turned up high in summer. This podcast from journalists Jonathan Maitland and Vanessa Bowles investigates the various theories as to what happened to Williams – a sex fetish gone horribly wrong or was he assassinated by the Russian secret services?
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South Korea
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Korean True Crime
(Mimi Mizicko)
A popular podcast hosted by Mimi Mizicko that explores a range of notorious South Korean crimes – serial killers, murders, unsolved mysteries. There’s an accent on the weird and bizarre. What was behind the Daegu subway arson attack? American expatriate Carolyn Abel murdered in Seoul in 1988, the Bizarre Rabbit case involving the murder of two women and the attempted murder of another, and the horrible ‘harvester’ case when the dead bodies of children started appearing in the countryside, minus their livers.
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Scotland
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Bible John: Creation of a Serial Killer
(BBC)
No unsolved case in Scotland has led to as many documentaries, investigations, films, novels, and podcasts as the so-called Bible John case in Glasgow and the West of Scotland. This podcast is yet another deep dive into the case, this time by the BBC’s Audrey Gillan. The Bible John case began in February 1968, when a young woman was murdered after a night dancing at the East End of Glasgow’s famous Barrowland Ballroom. Two more victims followed, all snatched from local ballrooms by a man, never identified but apparently called John, in a smart suit, and who quoted Bible scripture. The Bible John case continues to fascinate, in part, because so many of the murdered women’s families and children are still alive and looking for answers.
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Australia
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Who Killed Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler
(Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
The case of the deaths of Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler in the Australian city of Sydney after a New Year’s Eve party in 1963. For decades the deaths, were thought to be murder. The couple were both married – to other people – and supposedly in open marriages. Jealousy was thought a motive but then Bogle worked on various top-secret projects in Australia – was this a Cold War assassination? The bodies were found by a river and a popular picnic spot, partially clothed, some of their belongings were missing and there were no signs of violence – poisoning was assumed. This podcast, hosted by Peter Butt, is different to many other true crime podcasts in that it posits an alternative and new theory, that the two deaths may have been caused by accidental hydrogen sulphide poisoning. This podcast is a really deep dive, highly forensic, and requiring close listening. Who Killed Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler is perhaps the definitive podcast on a case that has been notorious in Sydney and New South Wales for over half a century now.
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Ireland
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Obscene: The Dublin Scandal
(BBC)
Just as the Bogle and Chandler case has obsessed Sydney for decades and Bible John likewise in Glasgow, the double murders of a nurse sunbathing in the city’s Phoenix Park and a farmer that occurred in the Irish capital in 1982 shocked the city at the time and continue to reverberate. So seemingly random and violent did the murders seem that the political fall out went as high as the then Irish Taoiseach Charlie Haughey. A political scandal as Dublin high society figure Malcolm MacArthur, the man accused of the double killings, was eventually found by the Gardaí hiding in the home of Patrick Connolly, Ireland’s Attorney General, a revelation that shocked the entire nation and almost toppled Haughey’s government. MacArthur served a 30-year sentence and was released from prison in 2012 at 74 years of age. Those recalling the events of 1982 include the novelist Colm Toibín, journalist Fintan O’Toole and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary. Oh, and the podcast is narrated by DCI Hastings himself, Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar.
