Crime Investigation Australia

CI delves into the twisted mind of one of Australia's most prolific serial murderers. John Wayne Glover, The Granny Killer, was truly an evil man. Glover's terrifying random attacks, targeting defenceless elderly women on Sydney's lower North Shore, would leave an indelible stain on the city. Hear the compelling story surrounding the hunt for the Granny Killer and his eventual arrest and trial.

CI examines two notorious abduction cases. The first case is the Graeme Thorne ransom kidnapping at Bondi in 1960. Thorne, aged eight was the son of winners of the Sydney Opera House Lottery. The second case is the recent Daniel Morecombe Queensland case that still remains unsolved. Crime Investigation Australia has secured exclusive interviews that shed new light on both of these infamous cases that stunned the nation.

CI examines the Dr Victor Chang extortion murder as well as the horrific Jane Doe Case where a girl is found lying on the side of the road of an inner Sydney suburb wrapped in two plastic garbage bags.

The backpacker murder case in the Belanglo State Forest, south west of Sydney, has entered Australian criminal folklore. The brutal murders of seven young people, most of them overseas tourists hitchhiking around Australia, attracted international media attention. The remains of their bodies were uncovered in 1992. The arrest and conviction of Ivan Milat would catapult him to Australia's worst individual serial killer. It is believed that Milat was involved in several other killings and there is strong evidence that he didn't act alone.

Crime Investigation Australia has conducted a major investigation which reveals the inside story of the Megan Kalajzich murder and the extraordinary Police investigation which will rock the Harbour City's elite to the core. We also detail the true horror of one of Australia's most ghastly crimes, the heartbreak and anguish faced by investigators and interviews with several of the last people to ever see Anna Kemp and her daughter Gracie alive.

We investigate the story of David and Catherine Birnie, Australia's most sadistic husband and wife killing team who tortured, raped and murdered four women in 1986. We also look into the murder of Call Girl Roslyn Watson which had remained unsolved for more than 15 years and would have stayed that way if it wasn't for the tenacious efforts of a bright young Western Australian Police Detective.

Sometime on the evening of October 19, 1990, the flamboyantly gay Sydney socialite Ludwig Gertsch was strangled with an elastic strap in the bedroom of his lover, Mr Vincent Esposito. His body was found, wrapped in a doona, in Blue Mountains scrub on November 11, 1990. In September 1994 a Sydney Coroner found that Ludwig Gertsch was strangled "by a person or persons unknown". But that's where the murder trail ends - his killer has never been brought to justice. The murder of Allen Hall at Warnervale, where he lived with Christine Hicks, the estranged wife of boxing mentor and horse trainer Cec Waters, presented a curious public with a cruel and twisted story. Water’s eldest son, Dean, eventually was charged with Hall’s murder. However, it would be revealed later that Dean had succumbed to his father’s demands. Cec Waters was depicted as a bullying, obsessive father, who was determined to make his three sons become boxing champions but slaves to his evil will.

In February 1986, nurse Anita Cobby, a former entrant in the Miss Australia quest, is walking home from Blacktown station in Sydney's outer-western suburbs. A Holden sedan pulls up and Anita is dragged into the vehicle. She is taken to a lonely spot where five young men take turns to bash and rape her. Finally her throat is cut, almost severing her head, and her body is left in a paddock. The five men are later caught and convicted of these despicable crimes and sent to jail for life, their papers are marked "never to be released". But something positive will come out of this appalling and deeply disturbing story, as Anita's grieving parents begin a support group for the families of murder victims, offering comfort and mutual help for more than 1000 loved ones of homicide victims.

In 1999, eight bodies are found in six barrels filled with acid in a former bank vault in rural Snowtown, 50 kilometres north of Adelaide. Their investigation was to lead police to discover another four victims, in and around Adelaide. Four men were charged with murder and other offences. Eventually it was proven that 11 were murdered and another woman severely dismembered. The horrific murders that occurred over a 7-year period involve torture, dismemberment, even cannibalism.

For the first time the complete story of one of Australia's most horrific serial murderers is finally revealed. Almost twenty years ago in June 1987 a crazed gunman begins a journey which will take him thousands of kilometres across the vast Australian outback. The killer's journey will result in the murders of five innocent tourists, spark one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history and end in a bloody last stand shootout with police at a remote outpost deep in the rugged Kimberly ranges of Australia's north. Before it is over, thousands of residents living in communities scattered across the country's Top End will be terrorised.

CI investigates into two of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in Australian criminal history are examined in The Wanda Beach Murders and The Beaumont Children Mystery.In 1965, when Australian teenage culture was centred on sun, sand, and surf, the nation was shocked by the brutal bashing, rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls in the sand hills at Sydney's Wanda Beach. A massive police hunt failed to find the killer but now, more than 40 years later, there is growing evidence that he could be a known psychotic murderer. A year later, on an Australia Day outing to a beach in Adelaide, three small children, Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont, disappeared suddenly and without a trace. Were they abducted by the man seen playing with them at the beach, or were they buried in an accident, as claimed by a world-famous clairvoyant who was flown to Adelaide from Europe by the media and concerned local citizens? Are they still alive?

The small hamlet of Greenough, near Geraldton, in Western Australia, some 400 kilometres north of Perth, will forever be associated with one the most horrific murders in Australian criminal history. In 1993, Karen MacKenzie and her three small children were violently murdered at their isolated house. The brutal and random nature of the attack was eerily similar to "In Cold Blood", Truman Capote's world-famous study of a family murder in an isolated house in America.When the Greenough killer was finally tracked down, charged and convicted, much of the evidence was too horrific to be made public.

A small group of local criminals, with mafia connections, were making vast fortunes in the famous NSW Riverina irrigation district from marijuana plantations. Corrupt police and a vast bribery network had kept the drug barons immune from prosecution until Donald Mackay's campaign finally led to raids by the State drug squad and several local marijuana growers were arrested and fined. During their trial the police informant was named publicly as Donald Mackay. Infuriated by the loss of more than $40 million, the leaders of the Griffith mafia, including the notorious Robert Aussie Bob Trimbole, put out a contract for Mackay's murder. Trimbole was shot in the car park of a Griffith hotel on a Friday night in July, 1977. The murder scene was awash with his blood and evidence showed he was shot a number of times from behind and his body then dumped into a car boot and driven away. Intensive investigations by police and even a Royal Commission have failed to locate it.

Hosted by Steve Liebmann, The Body In The Sports Bag explores the disappearance and brutal murder of Sydney teenager, Lyndsay Van Blanken. This chilling episode features detailed re-enactments, interviews with key homicide detectives and heartbreaking accounts from Lyndsay's family and friends. The gripping special also features an exclusive emotional interview with Brandon Leonard, Lyndsay's American fiancé.

John Paul Newman was a member of the New South Wales state parliament and Member of the seat of Cabramatta. He was the first politician to be assassinated in Australia. For many years Newman had been waging a campaign to break up the Asian crime gangs and corruption that had plagued the area. He had been the target of numerous death threats from such gangs but did not seek police protection. During the night of September 5, 1994 while outside his Woods Avenue home, he was shot and killed. His fiancée, Lucy Wang, was with him at the time but saw little of what happened because of the swiftness of the murder. A local nightclub owner, Phuong Ngo, who had previously attempted to secure Labor Party pre-selection for the seat, was convicted of the killing in 2001. Two of Ngo's associates escaped convictions. In 2003, an appeal by Ngo against the conviction failed.

This episode revisits Adelaide’s notorious Adelaide Family Murders case, where six young Adelaide men were murdered during the 1970’s and 80’s. The victims were found in random locations throughout the state, their bodies neatly cut into pieces. Although each attack and mutilation appeared different, police investigators soon began to link the horrific murders to one another. Media frenzy ripped through Australia when the similarities to each killing became public knowledge. Media speculated that the murders involved a group of high profile Adelaide men including politicians, religious leaders and judges who allegedly paid young men for sex and then drugged and used them for pleasure. The media dubbed the group The Family and from then on the case was referred to as the Adelaide Family Murders.