At a seaside festival in regional South Australia, true crime obsession meets the grief of families whose loved ones are presumed murdered.
Max Marten is speaking from a wheelchair beside a wooden stage in Victor Harbor's splendid art deco theatre. "We are dealing in a subject that affects every single person in this room," the podcast producer says. I look around me; the theatre is two-thirds full of mostly white, middle-aged women. "You have family and friends that may not be here anymore because of what happened," Max says.
What happened is usually murder, although many of the cases being discussed at "Crime Scene Victor Harbor" — billed as Australia's first true crime festival — have never been solved. Now, buffered from the wind in a seaside town an hour's drive from Adelaide, the audience is being asked to help. "Through conversation things get solved and people get listened to," Max says, before handing the microphone to Bryan Littlely, the brains behind the festival.
Bryan, a cowboy boot-wearing former journalist, farmer and now true crime podcast host, once saw an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation about a murder at a true crime convention. In the episode, called "Merchants of Menace", a murder takes place at a convention selling "murderabilia": items that were used in crimes, once belonged to killers, or artworks they produced in prison. There have been attempts to outlaw murderabilia in the US, where opponents say it trivialises or glorifies hideous crimes and further traumatises victims' families. It exists at the grisly fringe of true crime obsession.
For Bryan, the episode seeded the idea of a true crime convention that he revisited after he began presenting his true crime podcast "Sleepers" in front of live audiences. "Making yourself available to answer questions and have the statements and the evidence challenged by the public who are ever hungry for true crime [is popular]," he tells me. "It just so happens that people want to pay to see that." Why not host a true crime festival in his hometown, he thought, and bring together writers, podcasters and citizen sleuths to discuss the crimes they've wrestled into stories?
As for why we're seeing a true crime renaissance, Bryan points to social media. "There's experts everywhere … anyone can be an investigator," including victims' families he told an Adelaide radio station ahead of the festival. "The families are speaking and there's less oversight by police, there's individual and independent investigations going on … not everyone wants to be spoken to by a police officer, and police are resource poor, they can't be looking at these cases." He promises the radio host that at Crime Scene Victor Harbor there'll be "revelations on some major cases".
Before arriving at the festival, I checked into a desolate caravan park on the edge of town. Leaving my phone on the bed, I took a shower in the cramped bathroom of a prefab cabin. When I pulled the handle of the sliding door to leave the bathroom it wouldn't budge. I tried again, willing my fingers into the space between the door and the frame, but nothing happened. I wasn't panicking — yet — but I started to wonder how long it would be before someone realised I was stuck.
I wedged open a small window. It wasn't big enough to climb out, but through a fist-sized opening I saw a single campervan and tent in an otherwise empty campground. Eventually, a woman wearing an over-sized t-shirt and pigtails tied with rainbow scrunchies appeared. I shouted, "hello, hello!", and she approached the window. She asked if the cabin door was locked. I wasn't sure. Then I could hear her inside the cabin. "There's frayed carpet under the door catching it," she said before pulling the carpet out and opening the door.
I was free. In a rush of relief, I walked out of the bathroom, smiling. Then I realised I was standing beside a bed wearing nothing but a towel face-to-face with a stranger. "Lucky it was me," the woman said before leaving. I took that to mean lucky I wasn't a man.
One theory that tries to account for true crime's popularity is that for women, the overwhelming consumers of the podcasts, TV shows and books that have proliferated over the past decade or so, it imparts useful life lessons. A sorry guide on how to escape killers and abusers and avoid becoming a victim.
But this alone doesn't explain the rise of amateur sleuths or victims' families telling their own true crime stories. We live in an age of super sleuths like "mushroom murderer" Erin Patterson — who belonged to an online community researching the crimes of Keli Lane, convicted of murdering her newborn daughter in 2010 before her own case descended into true crime mania. I've come to Victor Harbor curious to figure out what's fuelling this phenomenon.
From audience to sleuth
On Friday night Victor Harbor's main street is deserted. A warm glow seeps from a sandstone pub opposite the theatre. Inside, Sharon Ferguson and Nanette Simpson are talking intently at the festival's "hub", their heads bowed together to combat the noise in the room. The two retirees have known each other for 50 years and have bumped into each other at the event.
When I ask why they're here, they place newspaper clippings and scribbled notes on the table. Sharon has an article about Hazel Pope and Joyce Eastwood who were last seen in 1970 outside the meatworks where they worked. According to Crime Stoppers SA, they unloaded two suitcases, were picked up by a male taxi driver and never heard from again. Sharon says she knew one of the women.
She also says she used to work with a man believed to have been involved in Adelaide's horrific "family" serial killings. Since Sharon realised her connection a few years back, she's been writing down names and memories as they arise — some day one might prove useful to someone.
True crime has existed as a literary genre since the mid-1800s, but over the last 15 years it's become more participatory and immersive, as criminology professor Michael Arntfield writes: "Amateur sleuths, advocates, pundits and activists proliferate with each new feature. Podcasts beget further podcasts." Fanatics are dedicating their own time and resources trying to solve cold cases. Sometimes they make breakthroughs, sometimes fingers are pointed too hastily at innocent people. And like most things on the internet, true crime isn't immune to conspiracy theories.
The next morning, I pass a group of older women dressed in Lycra discussing the fate of the Adelaide Crows' coach as they shuffle along the foreshore. It occurs to me that football, that great unifier, shares something with true crime obsession. Both tap into a desire for community and conversation through endlessly analysed strategy. And perhaps like football, true crime affords us a universe where the heroes and villains are easy to identify. As English writer Kate Summerscale argues, true crime "can relieve our anxiety by locating badness in a single person, rather than in our society or ourselves".
At the first Crime Scene Victor Harbor event on the Saturday, Meni Caroutas is talking about the murder of Peter Falconio and the attempted kidnapping of Joanne Lees. Meni, host of the "hit podcast" The Missing Australia and an ex-TV reporter and police officer, tells the crowd that the evidence that saw Bradley John Murdoch convicted of murder is overwhelming. But, he says, there are people who believe Murdoch is innocent.
The "Peter Falconio what really happened" Facebook page, dedicated to canvassing alternate theories on the case, has 18,000 members. As I write, the most recent post says: "Let's look at the people who were in Barrow Creek and what connection do they have with motorcycle gangs." Every time Meni mentions the conspiracy theories that surround the Falconio case, one woman in the crowd nods vigorously. There's research that suggests a link between morbid curiosity and conspiracy theories. A heightened interest in learning about threats, say through binging true crime, can lead people to conspiracy theories, the study's authors argue.
Beside me, a woman with a bright face wearing a white beanie is rapidly writing notes that seem unrelated to the talk. Then she texts someone: "This may be a good spot to look." I wonder if she trying to solve a crime in real time. Later, I'll speak with her and discover a community of trauma survivors who are organising searches, supporting families of the recently disappeared, and honing their investigative skills to help research crimes privately or for true crime productions.
The 'family' murders
Debi Marshall is small but formidable. The long-time investigative crime journalist is speaking to a large audience about the "family" murders, which she calls Australia's Epstein case. She says numerous sexual assaults of boys snatched from Adelaide's streets led up to the murders of five young men between 1979 and 1983. She reads out more details about the suspected paedophile ring behind the abductions and killings — four of which remain unsolved. The woman next to me lets out a heavy sigh and crosses her arms.
Some of the victims' family members are sitting in the front row watching Debi speak. Their faces are ragged and they're running out of time to see justice done. Along with Debi, they're currently campaigning for decades-old suppression orders on the names of people who were either police witnesses, informants or suspects to be lifted.
Debi says the "family" murders are the most depraved of the many cases she's worked on — and she wrote a book on which the Snowtown film is based. As Debi talks about the mutilation of these young men's bodies, I look out the window, a stand of Norfolk Island pines is motionless. Nothing is happening outside to distract, not even a breeze.
She tells the audience that investigating such crimes has taken a toll on her. Later she tells me she used to be too afraid to let her teenage daughter walk to school. And her work visited her in nightmares. "My specialty, for want of a different way of putting it, is serial killers," she says. "So, when you're chasing serial killers, you need to be careful they don't start chasing you. But they do start chasing you in your dreams. And sometimes they catch you, which is awful."
Debi raises this toll when people on social media accuse her of "doing this for the money". She has little time for those who she says peddle in true crime on social media for attention and revenue: "It's like the Salem witch hunts, this hysterical mob, each ramping the other up higher and higher into putting out this nonsense about what's happened in their opinion and then calling it fact … when the work involved in separating fact from rumour is so intense and time consuming."
After Debi's presentation I get talking with the woman next to me. Deb Phali says she grew up in Western Sydney near where Anita Cobby was brutally killed in 1982. Deb remembers "driving past the area with my family and seeing all the cops everywhere" and she wonders if that sparked her interest in true crime. She says the fascination is really a desire to figure out human behaviour: "It's about trying to understand what makes people do this. You just hope that maybe you can listen to something and find some answers to help people. Not that I've got any."
Deb's ex-husband also had a relative who went missing in 1982 and she says it's given her a particular interest in missing person's cases. Of 10-year-old Bradford's disappearance, she says it destroyed his family and that the case wasn't investigated properly by police. He was a Koori and had been in foster care, "so they didn't give a rats", she says.
I wonder out loud how everyone in the crowd can stomach sitting through story after story of violence and tragedy. "Talking about it brings some support and some light to the darkness of it all," Deb says. "To know that people do care and are out there trying to do the right thing and you've got investigative people out there trying to help people, that's the positive I take out of it."
The Lady Vanishes
When Sally Leydon is asked to say something about her mother Marion Barter on stage at the festival, she smacks her lips together creating a loud pop. Sally says her mother used to kiss her on her ears, so that a kiss would be something heard as well as felt. For a moment, Marion, who hasn't been heard from since 1997, comes into focus. In 2024, a NSW Coroner said Marion was dead, but that she could not make a finding about where or how she died.
The inquest into Marion's disappearance was announced the year after Sally launched The Lady Vanishes, a podcast which has captivated millions of listeners. Created with Seven News, Sally says it was unusual at the time for a family member to be involved in the production. "Me being involved and speaking on the podcast and working in real time with the journalists made the difference in how people connected with the podcast," Sally tells me later. "Journalists can't bring that lived experience." But it complicated her relationship with the police working on her mother's case. "If you speak your truth, police might not help you and not want to work with you, it's a fine line," she says.
Sally says her podcast isn't entertainment. But having millions of people download it is comforting, she says, and gives her hope. And it has helped. Armchair sleuths who listened to the podcast helped identify the man of interest in her mother's case. It's also given Sally a platform from which to advocate for the families of missing people, and she's started The Green Seat Project to raise awareness about missing persons cases and the trauma their families experience. "I can't change what's happened to me, or my mum or the impact it had on my brother [who died by suicide after their mother's disappearance], but I can certainly talk about it to make a change to make it better for the next family," Sally says.
At the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Unsolved Murders and Long-Term Missing Persons Cases, Sally called for police to have greater sensitivity when they talk to and work with families of missing persons or murder victims. She also pushed for reforms around death in absentia and death certificate processes, the establishment of a voluntary disappearance register and improvements to how NSW Police process unidentified human remains.
On stage Sally is relaxed and commanding. It's easy to see why she's drawn so many people to her mother's case. I'd count her as one of the growing number of women who as Caroline Fraser writes in the New York Review of Books is changing true crime from a "soiled brand" and "dismantling the age-old Master Detective myths—that women are responsible for what's done to them, that policing necessarily makes us safer, that cops are good at catching killers".
It's dark when the crowd leaves the theatre and steps onto Victor Harbor's main street. Festival
