Professor Carolyn Evans  

I’m Carolyn Evans, Vice Chancellor and President of Griffith University. Griffith University is proud to partner with HOTA, the Home of the Arts here on the beautiful Gold Coast to present A Better Future for All, a series of in-depth conversation with some of the leading thinkers and actors in Australia. I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are situated, the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh Language region. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present and recognise their continuing connection with the lands, waters, and their extended communities throughout Southeast Queensland. Could I also acknowledge our University Chancellor the Honourable Andrew Fraser, Deputy Chancellor Miss Rebecca Frizelle OAM, and today, standing in for the CEO of HOTA, Mr. Mik Auckland, as well of course as Kerry O’Brien and Hedley Thomas, of whom more in a moment.

Tonight, we delve into the field of true crime and the power of audio storytelling with celebrated award winning investigative journalist and podcaster Hedley Thomas. Now it’s particularly suitable and appropriate that we meet here tonight on the Gold Coast, because it was at the Gold Coast bulletin in the 1980s that Hedley started his career as an enthusiastic young cadet. Since that time, he has graced Australia’s media hall of fame more than once or twice. He has indeed received seven Walkley’s, two of which were gold Walkley Awards, the highest accolade in Australian journalism. Indeed, between he and Kerry the stage should be groaning with the combined weight of their Walkley awards. Hedley and his producer Slade Gibson won the 2018 gold Walkley for their acclaimed true crime podcast, ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, a gripping listen that I wouldn’t mind betting quite a few in the audience are familiar with. It wasn’t long before ‘A Teacher’s Pet’ was a global phenomenon topping international charts and clocking up more than 50 million downloads so far. ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ and Hedley’s work more broadly contributed to the reopening of the 40-year unsolved disappearance case of Lynette Dawson, and now has led to a conviction. By looking at old cases through new lenses, Hedley’s helped to uncover fresh evidence, expose procedural failures and inconsistencies within our legal system, help trigger the re-investigation of serious unsolved crimes, and advocate for a proposal of new parole laws aimed at providing closure for grieving families. Hedley’s latest podcast investigates the unsolved murder of 23-year-old Shandee Blackburn in Mackay, recognised in the, resulted in the establishment of the State Commission Inquiry into DNA testing, a very significant inquiry. Hedley has successfully capitalised on the changing media landscape and the exponential growth of podcasting to amplify the impact and reach of investigative journalism. And without doubt, his work raises some key legal questions surrounding investigative journalism, and the tightrope that journalists sometimes find themselves traversing. While the practice of investigative journalism plays an important role in exposing both injustices and cover ups that would most likely have remained buried, the stakes are high of course when it comes to maintaining the right to a fair trial.

Griffith University prides itself on our interdisciplinary foundations. And these are all pertinent questions that will be explored tonight for aspiring and accomplished journalists, lawyers, criminologist, academics, and of course many interested citizens who are with us tonight. We’re proud to be able to present our community with opportunities to learn from influential practitioners such as Hedley Thomas. And with that in mind, I asked you to join with me in welcoming Kerry and Hedley.

Kerry O’Brien  

Hedley, thanks for volunteering to be my first podcast interview. Thank you. So, I had to learn a little more about this process, to prepare myself for the interview. I’ve listened, I’ve listened to podcasts here and there, but I’m not a podcast aficionado and particularly on true crime. So, we know that you started with ‘Teacher’s Pet’. We know you started with the Chris Dawson case and the missing, the disappearance of Lynette Dawson and so on. But you’d had a lifetime of writing for newspapers professionally. When you took the step into podcasts in 2018 with ‘Teacher’s Pet’, it was your first. So, having chosen that case, what was your hope of what you would deliver with it?

Hedley Thomas

Well, I hoped that I would change the way the authorities were dealing with an unsolved case that I believed was murder. It had been treated for the first, almost 10 years by police, as a missing person case of Lyn Dawson abandoning her husband and her two little girls in her home. At the same time as his husband, as her husband, rather, was infatuated with a schoolgirl. So, I wanted to try and effectively force the authorities to prosecute someone who had been recommended for prosecution by two coroners after separate inquests, in the early 2000s. And I didn’t really know whether we would find enough evidence to be able to do that. I, I started believing that he was likely guilty of the murder of his wife. And as it developed, as I met more witnesses, as I found new witnesses, and we uncovered more evidence, I became very, very confident that he had killed her. But again, it was always going to be a matter for a jury, if we could ever get it to that stage. We just wanted the authorities, the DPP to finally say, yes, this case should be prosecuted, it should be put before a jury and let the jurors decide.

Kerry O’Brien  

But you’ve done some legwork on on podcasting. And you must have convinced yourself that it was a potentially better vehicle for you, for that kind of investigative work. In other words, what, interaction with audience, being able to reach a wider audience than through your paper, what was it about podcasting that absolutely seized you? Because it was a risk, in a sense.

Hedley Thomas

It was. What I understood about podcasts, I had no idea about how to produce one. But I understood that it gave me the opportunity to go very deep into a story, deeper than I would ever be able to go for The Australian, even if I were writing weekend features for several weeks running. I knew that if I did 8 or 10 episodes of a minimum of 10,000 words per episode, that’s 10 hours of audio, but it’s a huge amount of detail, detail that would forensically examine the circumstances of an overwhelmingly persuasive case. So that was the attraction. I thought that once people understood the case in its detail, once they got past the lurid headlines, and went deeper, then if they became connected to the case, there would be some momentum for a decision. And it could cause people in the office of the DPP, who had just routinely said, no, we’re not prosecuting, we’re disregarding the recommendations of the coroners, that it would cause them to rethink it. So, it was a it was a belief that podcasting offered me that rare opportunity to dissect something in a, in a more forensic way than I could do in any other genre in journalism.

Kerry O’Brien  

But in papers, it’s look, good journalism anywhere is tough. But there’s something quite pure and straightforward about being a print journo, it used to be, before convergence. It was, it was you, and your sub, and your editor, really, and the photographer, to the extent that the photograph was an important aspect of what you might be doing. You were stepping into a world where it was suddenly more complex, technically, more people in the chain. Just describe to me what you walked into there, technically.

Hedley Thomas

I wish I knew; I still don’t understand the technology. It was very daunting, Kerry. I remember going and buying this recommended recording device, that I was told was you know, the bee’s knees of, of podcasting. And I took it to the to the first interview I needed to do in the country town of Dalby, Western Toowoomba, and I was interviewing a former student of Chris Dawson, in that, in that town, she lived there with her husband and children. And she had agreed to meet me, to talk to me about her experiences, her anecdotes, her recollections of Mr. Dawson. And I thought that would be pretty straightforward to set up this device because I previously used a little cassette recorder for interviews. But this is new technology, and I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t turn it on. And I was quickly losing confidence, and the interviewee was, I’m sure thinking, oh my gosh, you know, this guy’s wanting my information for a podcast, and he can’t actually operate the machine. But we got through that. Thanks to her she actually took it over. She said, I think it just needs to be re-formatted properly.

Kerry O’Brien  

What a good thing you weren’t interviewing a villain.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah. Yeah. So, like a lot of it was, I was winging it, you know, and, and I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for interviews. I, I was across the evidence I, I burrowed into the evidence as much as possible. And I have a golden rule, I want to capture as many documents as possible. 1000s and 1000s of pages of transcript witness statements, all of the inquest material. And I read it and reread it, and I make notes and tab things. That’s my preparation. And it’s more than, you know, I would do you know, in newspapers, because I wanted to be across that. But in terms of the equipment, I was out of my depth, and I still am.

Kerry O’Brien  

And then, but then, so there was the recording, there was the gathering of the interviews and so on. But then you had to put it together, and you had to work with someone else to be producing it. So, you had this little kind of studio, I guess, out in Ashgrove, at the foothills of the.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, that’s right. My, my, my now very good friend, Slade Gibson, who is an audio engineer, but he’d never done a podcast either. And he said that he would happily partner with me on this as the, as the guy who would put it all together. And I said, so you’re going to cut up my audio. And when I write a script, you’ll, you’ll sort of paste it into your file. And it’ll all,

Kerry O’Brien

You’re not using very technical jargon here.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah. No. And he said, mate something like that. And he said, I’ll do a mix. And I was thinking ahh yeah, sounds like, you know, musical lingo. He’s the former guitarist for Savage Garden. So, you know, he knows his music. And he wrote some of the most beautiful tunes. And, and they were, just became emblematic in the podcast. But we, I think, because we’re both new to it, because we didn’t have anyone telling us, you know, these are the rules, we could just do what came instinctively and the instinct, the journalism was instinctive, that’s what I understood. I knew how to conduct the interviews; I knew how to how to frame the story. Slade could put it together through trial and error. What I was letting him down a little bit on was the quality of the audio. So, I would, because I was in such a rush, I would often have the device on the dashboard of my car, which is, you know, a pretty noisy Audi with this sort of, you know, grumbly engine and, and you can hear this, this, this noise reverberating through a lot of the recordings. You can hear floorboards squeaking in my house, you can hear my daughter stacking the dishwasher, and I’m madly waving. I’m trying to interview someone, it’s a really important interview. So, all of that’s coming through the audio. But people have since said to me, when I’ve been a bit defensive about it, they’ve said, well, that’s that was actually part of the appeal because it wasn’t overproduced, it was barely produced at all it was, was pretty raw.

Kerry O’Brien  

What I’m fascinated by you would have had to make a decision right at the start. A, you had to kind of take a stab at how many episodes you were going to be able to sustain, you wouldn’t have known exactly where you were going to get to at the end of it until you’d written it and one interview might lead to another and so on. But you would have had to decide, do I, do I play it safe and wait until we’ve finished the whole thing before we start running it? Or do we, or do we put a few episodes down, start running it and then run like buggery and try and stay ahead of it as we go. What did you decide?

Hedley Thomas

I took the big risk and ran like buggery. Yeah, so the sensible option, and which is by just about 99% of podcasters would do, would be to, pre produced a package, eight or 10 or 12 episodes, have them all carefully listened to, you’d have, you know, effectively a committee of editors, finessing it and getting in there and changing things. And then it’s really slick. And you can go on holidays while it’s releasing and happy days. But I wrote three and a half episodes. And I thought God, I’ve only done three and a half, there’s at least another five episodes. It ended up being double that, 16. But I thought at that time that writing another five episodes would be so boring. I just wanted to start, you know, airing what I’d already written because I was getting, I think, just enthused by the story. I really wanted the story to start reaching people and I had more words than I’d ever written before in terms of one story just sitting on my laptop, and it felt like they were going stale. So, I said I’m, I’m going to release these, one, one each week. And then I rang the editor-in-chief and he said, oh, are you sure? Like how are you going to,

Kerry O’Brien  

So, you’re doing this under the umbrella of the Australian. That’s right. But it’s really your little kind of sell.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, I was pretty, pretty autonomous. And, and he said are you, are you, yeah, you sure that’s okay, like you’ll be able to manage? I said, Yeah, because I’ve done, I’ve done three and a half episodes. So, while everyone’s listening to episode one, I’ll be working on like the end of episode three, and then episode four. So, I’ve got a head start. But you very quickly run out of. You know where this is going. Oh my god, it turned into the biggest nightmare. Because what I didn’t appreciate was that people listening to episode one immediately contacted me with information that I’d never heard of that was so vital, I had to put it into episode two, which meant I had to rip stuff out of episode two and work out where that might go. And so, I would just sort of put it somewhere at the back end as a key, as a placeholder. And then I had to do the same thing with episode three. And so, all the time I should have been spending writing episodes four or five, six and seven were taken up just, just changing the early episodes. And then I ran out of, I ran out of runway. And Slade Gibson likens it like, you know, he said that he’d never done anything so difficult. He said, it was like, being the guy on the railway track, building the track, as the trains’ bearing down.

Kerry O’Brien  

So how close did the train get?

Hedley Thomas

Incredibly close, like, we were, we were writing, I was writing 1000s of words a day, from very early in the morning until I dropped. And then I’d have to get them all narrated and then Slade had to chop it all up and, and get it all mixed and built, and then legal-ed and edited. And starting from scratch, which is what we were from about episode five. So, starting on a Friday morning, because episode four, or the previous episode comes out on Thursday night, and you’ve got a blank screen. You’ve got, you’ve done the interviews, you know, what roughly can go there. And you’ve got an idea in your mind about the framework, but then having to sort of put it all down and make it interesting. It was, it was incredibly taxing. By the time we got to Episode 14, I said to Slade, that we we’ve only got a few more to go. And he said, no, no, we don’t. And his wife said that he’d been hiding under the bed in anticipation of me coming over to his studio. And he said, now we’re just going to have to take a break, I can’t, like we were both shattered. I’ve never done anything so difficult. But while it was grueling and, and a high wire act, like you know, if it had gone badly, if we had made a big error, it would have been very difficult to overcome the problem. It also,

Kerry O’Brien

Did you ever feel at any point, unease of putting something to air that you hadn’t quite had the time to read it, particularly if you’re dealing stuff, with stuff that was still coming in, as you’re putting it together. That that you were on the edge of whether you had enough time to actually properly check and think through what you were doing.

Hedley Thomas

Kerry, I should have been uneasy about it. But but I think because I was so immersed in the detail of the story, it was all I could think about. When I would go to sleep, I would, I would go to sleep, considering the angles that I’d been developing that day, and that I wanted to develop the next day, I would wake up and have my first coffee, you know, with, with ideas buzzing in my head. So, because, and I’ve never had this much of a, of a sort of a locked on sense with a story. Because I was so into it, I didn’t, I was confident that I wouldn’t make the errors. And we didn’t, we didn’t make any, any mistakes. That’s the amazing thing. In all of those episodes, you know that there’ll be people who will say, well, the tone that you had in that episode in terms of, you know, the emphasis on one thing or the other, you know, people will differ on that. But in terms of factual mistakes, it’s very clean. So, it was a huge risk, but we got through.

Kerry O’Brien

Okay, so you’ve said somewhere along the line that your overriding aim with these podcasts is to solve crimes. Now, that’s a, that’s a big goal. And we know that police work, you’re certainly not perfect. We know that the judicial system is not perfect. But nonetheless, there are some very skilled people in police investigation and in the legal and judicial system. Where did your confidence come from? That you would be able to do what they could not do.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah. I’ve long held the view that there are indeed brilliant lawyers, defence lawyers and some, you know, really good prosecutors and obviously great judges. But police, unfortunately, have so much crime to investigate. They’re, they’re under enormous pressure. And things fall through the cracks. And I’ve, I’ve discovered time and again, that it doesn’t matter how exhaustively a case might have been investigated for potential prosecution, you can always discover new facts, new witnesses and new evidence. And I’ve also seen how fallible the system, the legal, the criminal justice system is, particularly in Queensland, which is, I mean, I’m not singling out Queensland as being any worse than any other jurisdiction. But that’s the state that, you know, I practice my journalism in. Um, some colossal, colossal failures in the, in the system, not just by police. But, but by prosecuting authorities, in not properly, in not having either all the information in front of them or having the information and making the wrong call. And I don’t think that citizens, and particularly journalists, should ever accept that because they are very senior people who are running our criminal justice system, they know best, we should just leave it to them, that we should then back off. No, I actually believe that so many travesties of justice remain travesties, because journalists haven’t picked apart some of the problems. They haven’t gone deep into the detail.

Kerry O’Brien

Now why haven’t, look, if the journalists are doing their job in the first place, why is it a case that they are never given the time to properly investigate? I mean, well. I think that I think it’s very rare. You’d have to say we’re a part of the problem as well, if that is a problem in the justice system. That’s our job, too, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s right. We don’t even have all that many specialist crime reporters anymore. We don’t have a lot of reporters who are automatically assigned to the beat of the court anymore, do we?

Hedley Thomas

That’s a big problem. And, you know, the autonomy, the privilege that I got, to spend more than six months investigating Lynn Dawson’s disappearance, before we produced the first episode, about eight, nine months on Shandee’s Story, which is a current podcast that I’ve been working on. That’s highly unusual. And it is, I think, a reflection of the pressures and challenges that, that all of us in the media have been under. I mean, I did my cadetship with the Gold Coast Bulletin. This place used to be the council chambers, I used to come here as a cadet reporter to cover council. And Murray Rix who’s been taking photographs today was in the, in the, in the, he was a photographer at The Bulletin, one of about 20 photographers, when I was there. I think there’s one photographer, or maybe two now. So, it’s, it’s a lot tougher, but when we get the opportunity, we should go hard. And I’m hoping that as a result of these podcasts, and people seeing that results are possible, really significant change can be made, that, that newspaper and, and other media owners and operators will invest much more in this kind of journalism, because it’s much more important than so much of the clickbait you know, minute by minute rubbish that is being served up now. I mean, I don’t understand how we’ve got to a stage where a staple of journalism is, has become what someone has put on their Facebook page, and someone else has commented on. You know, that seems to be the norm now. You know, what someone’s put up on Instagram is, is then taking off and being, you know, a national topic.

Kerry O’Brien

Well, you’re being critical of your own news organisation now, apart from others, aren’t you, yeah. I won’t, I won’t push you too hard on that one tonight.

Hedley Thomas

That’s alright. All media, sadly.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah. But let’s cut to the heart of what you delivered in Teacher’s Pet. What, what was it that you’re able to highlight tonight, that convinces you, that it was your work that brought a fresh trial and ultimately the conviction of Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife Lynette, whose body has still not been found?

Hedley Thomas

I’ll qualify that by saying, I’ve never said that The Teacher’s Pet produced a fresh trial. Because I don’t know what the decision-making process was in the office of the DPP. What I know for a fact is that the DPP had rejected the idea of a prosecution on at least four previous occasions, before the podcast. And what the podcast did was it drew from, from parts of Sydney, people who had not spoken up before about things they knew, in relation to Chris Dawson, and Lyn, and things that Chris had said or done, and things that they had seen. And those, those facts were, became part of the podcast. For example, a babysitter in the house, a babysitter who was there before the babysitter, who ultimately became Lynn’s daughter’s stepmother and Chris, the second wife, she talked, she came out of the woodwork and talked to me. And in a very tearful interview, about the domestic violence that she witnessed in the house between Chris and Lyn. Chris, she said was capable of just exploding without much, without any provocation, he would just lose his temper and, and several times she witnessed this, and Lyn being harmed as a result, nobody had previously seen or talked about to the police. Bear in mind, I had all the witness statements. I had the product of the two inquests, so I knew what the police case essentially was. And nobody had talked about any domestic violence. And that was a significant thing. And a man came forward, not to me, but to the police. He used to play football with Chris and the Newtown Jets. And he talked about how Chris had approached him to get a hitman to kill Lyn. And that approach by that man, Robert Silkmen, I think would have been a very significant factor in the DPP going forward. There were a number of other people who came forward, but the ultimate decision to to take it, for the for the DPP to say to the police, who had always been at least for the last 20 years, wanted to prosecute, the police were absolutely convinced that there was a winnable case of murder.

Kerry O’Brien

And then as you say, there were the two coronial hearings, recommending that charges, be, that the prosecution occur. Yeah. Can you understand why the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions kept rejecting?

Hedley Thomas

No, I can’t. No, I think they made repeated errors. I think they misunderstood parts of the evidence. And we will never know.

Kerry O’Brien

That’s a big statement to make. Yeah, about the people, skilled people, charged with the responsibility of determining when a case could be successfully prosecuted and deserved to be prosecuted or not.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, I know, it’s a big call. And it sounds very arrogant. I’m not a lawyer. And I wasn’t privy to the internal workings of that office when they were making those decisions. But I’ve interviewed a number of senior lawyers about the evidence in the case. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen other cases that were prosecuted by that same office on arguably thinner evidence than was presented in Lyn Dawson’s case. And I think that the, the evidence speaks for itself. They got, they ended up presenting a brief of evidence at the end of 2018, to the DPP, which had said, yes, we will go forward. So, I think that goes to the fallibility of, of people. Of any system. From time to time, you know, and, you know, I want to just add, Kerry, the DPP, when it finally prosecuted this case, did an amazing job. I mean, they did an incredible prosecution in front of a judge alone. And it culminated in the guilty verdict a couple of months ago.

Kerry O’Brien

40 years, after the event. What, what obligation do you have to be fair to all parties in these podcasts, and I’m talking specifically about the Dawson case as the illustration. What, what ethical obligation did you have to Chris Dawson, even if you were utterly convinced, he was guilty.

Hedley Thomas

I had ethical obligations to give him absolute right of reply, to offer him the opportunity to speak in the podcast. And,

Kerry O’Brien

But if you’re convinced of his guilt before you start, I wonder how fair a crack you’re going to give him.

Hedley Thomas

I wasn’t convinced. I was, I thought it was likely, and as it went on, I became convinced. And I think what you’ve highlighted there goes to a really important issue in journalism. My job is to try and be as balanced as possible. But it’s, for me anyway, and I think for most journalists, absurd to believe that we don’t, as a result of our own values, our upbringing, our education, relationships, experiences in life, it’s absurd to believe we don’t approach stories and interviews with a view, a private view about a person’s about, about the angles about, you know, what might have happened. We can’t just approach stories with, with a 50-50 mindset. Having said that, you know, I think most journalists do an amazing job in being balanced and delivering a balanced story. The Teacher’s Pet, I will accept, you know, was not, was not balanced insofar as it was 50-50, did he, do it? Did he not? It was not a who done it. It was he done it, you know, and, and that, and that’s a bit unusual. But the weight of the evidence made it that way. There were no other suspects. There was, the findings of two coroner’s who had heard all the evidence who said, he should be prosecuted for murder. And

Kerry O’Brien

Being prosecuted is one thing. Being proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt is another. Just, before the actual case proceeded, Dawson’s defence counsel pushed very hard to have the whole thing stood aside on the basis that he couldn’t possibly have a fair trial. And what you had done was a part of his argument. And, and Justice, this was heard by Justice Elizabeth Fullerton in the New South Wales Supreme Court, she was very critical, when ruling, and I’m sure you’ve read this a dozen times, when ruling on the defence claim that it would be impossible to have a fair trial, that the presumption of innocence had been blown. Quote, this is what she said: No one who listened to the podcast would be left in any doubt as to Mr. Thomas’s views as the presenter and the views of those he interviewed with varying degrees of emphasis that the applicant, that is, Dawson, both physically and emotionally abused Lynette Dawson before killing her. Now, although she dismissed, and you’ve pretty much agreed in what you’ve just said. And although she dismissed the defense’s claim, she did say, I am in no doubt that the adverse publicity in this case, or more accurately, the unrestrained and uncensored public commentary about the applicant’s guilt is the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process, which this Court has had to consider, in deciding whether to take the extraordinary step of permanently staying a criminal prosecution. I’m left in no doubt that Mr. Thomas intended to apply pressure on the ODPP to prosecute the applicant. Now, she’s saying, that it was entirely possible that she might have ruled that it was impossible to have a fair trial on the very thing that you were setting out to do, which was to bring this man to justice, could have been subverted by your own work.

Hedley Thomas

Well, it was a tough, it was a very tough judgement. And, and Justice Fullerton delivered that judgement after a lengthy stay proceeding, which we couldn’t report on at the time, it was all done behind closed doors, because of the concern that more publicity would make it even harder for him to get a fair trial. I gave evidence over three, three days in that in that proceeding, and at the end of it, and after reading the judgement, I was very thankful that we have a jury system, rather than a judge alone.

Kerry O’Brien

Why did you find that? Well, I though. So, it was judge alone in this case, to remove the possibility of, of the jury having been biased by what had been in the public eye.

Hedley Thomas

I disagreed with some key parts of her judgement. Of course, I did, because it was so critical of the podcast, and my approach. But Kerry, this was a case in which when I started it, there had been no prosecution, despite an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence, and the findings of those two coroners who said there should be a prosecution. For 36 years, it was, Lyn’s family would have died without justice, if we hadn’t taken the approach that was taken. So yes, it was a, it was a rugged, front footed, very robust approach. But that was the only way it was going to,

Kerry O’Brien

And did you understand the risk you were taking in that process? Well. As reflected in what she had to say.

Hedley Thomas

Well, what I understood was that if we didn’t take an approach like that, there would never be the prospect of a prosecution. What I thought was that if we did take that approach, and there was a prosecution, it would sort of be conducted without this potential challenge. I thought that it would be able to proceed to a jury, and what the jury determined was a matter for the jury. It would just need to go forward.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah. So, you’ve also said that, that you have to be, this is a quote, you have to be a little bit obsessed as a journalist to do justice to a story. Now, can a journalist be both professional and obsessed?

Hedley Thomas

I, absolutely. I mean, I think obsession is really another word for deep commitment. You know, it doesn’t mean sort of google-eyed crazy, you know, it just means absolutely locked on and putting aside your own hobbies and, and parties and going to the track, whatever, for weeks, months at a time, while you’re getting this job done.

Kerry O’Brien

Heaven forbids you couldn’t go to the track.

Hedley Thomas

Well, luckily, we’ve got those apps on the phone.

Kerry O’Brien

So, podcasts, I think, never having done one, but it strikes me, but I’ve listened to them. Podcasts are different to most mainstream journalism formats, I think. More intimate, more personal, maybe even more persuasive if skillfully produced. People clearly become more engaged, get carried along by the narrative. I mean, if they’re not, the podcast doesn’t succeed at all. And you’ve got to be, you’ve got a lot more invested in it yourself, haven’t you? I mean, your kind of, you’re more sort of nakedly exposed there out there, aren’t you now, than you might have been as Hedley Thomas’ byline in a newspaper?

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, you certainly are. And your listeners form a relationship with you, they’ve never met you. But because they’re hearing the voice, and they’re hearing it for hours and hours, because the series can go for as long as many as 20-24 hours. They become very invested in it. And I think that it’s the, the, the intimacy that develops because of the voice, and the voices of the people in the podcast, and the different tones and, and tambor that people are hearing that makes such a powerful difference. Now Kerry, your voice is so distinctive to me. If I heard your voice across a crowded room,

Kerry O’Brien

You would automatically believe what was being said?

Hedley Thomas

Well, I’d love to use your voice in a podcast, like as one of my voice actors, but people listen to voices and, and they can trust. Familiarity. Its familiarity. Yeah, yeah, and they develop a relationship of trust. And that’s what’s been happening thankfully, with these podcasts.

Kerry O’Brien

Which is a high mark for you to keep meeting every time. Your, your next podcast series was called Night Driver. You give them all these really catchy titles, obviously Night Driver in 2020, which I think you found both tantalising and frustrating and I’ll come back to that. Because I want to jump the order a bit and go to the next one you did, now, which you called Shandee’s Story. And that’s still in train in a way. And that was set in Mackay in Queensland, can you give a quick recap of Shandee Blackburn’s murder in 23, in 2013, the subsequent court case in which her ex-boyfriend John Peros was acquitted of her murder in 2017. And so often, even when somebody is charged, it can take a long time between the charge and the and the jury verdict. And what decided you to take that case?

Hedley Thomas

I read the coroner’s findings, and they were so striking. The coroner described a 23-year-old girl who was walking home from her job in a coffee shop in a big sports club in Mackay. It was late at night, and she was just turning the corner to go to her mother’s place. She was probably 70 metres from home when a figure from across the road starts running towards her. And Shandee is cut down, there was more than 20 knife blows, many of them directed at her face and head. She …

Kerry O’Brien

Suggesting a personal anger.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, that’s right. And she lay dying, bleeding in the gutter as the figure ran back across the same road and disappeared. Now how do we know a figure ran across the road? There were no witnesses to the running. But there was CCTV footage taken from a house nearby that just shows this outline crouching in bushes and then running across. When I read the coroner’s findings about, and his findings were delivered in 2020, it went through the whole case, the whole police investigation, and the fact that the case had gone to trial with Shandee’s ex-boyfriend, John Peros, being accused of murder, and a jury returning in less than two hours. And at the end of his findings. Finding him not guilty. Yeah, finding him not guilty. He was acquitted. But the coroner who had access to more evidence and sat for longer and had more witnesses appearing before him, determined that Shandee Blackburn was, in fact, killed by John Peros. And where does this leave us? This man,

Kerry O’Brien

Because of double jeopardy.

Hedley Thomas

Is yeah, he’s he’s walking free. And he’s been acquitted. And that’s the rule of law.

Kerry O’Brien

And he can’t be retried for the same offence. That’s right, unless there is genuinely fresh evidence.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, that’s right. So, it was such a compelling case just on the papers that I read. And it was about a 60- or 70-page judgement. And then I wanted to delve into it. I contacted Shandee’s family and asked them if they would approve of that, would they cooperate, and they were so happy that that we would do that, and it went from there. And it started in, you know,

Kerry O’Brien

So, you had to find fresh evidence to get anywhere.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah. And I was incredibly lucky. Because early in the piece, while I was reading the trial transcripts and realising that DNA was nowhere to be found, the police had expected that there would be a lot of DNA in the suspect’s vehicle, and that there would be DNA of the killer under Shandee’s fingernails at the crime scene and so on. But there was hardly any DNA to be found. And I was perplexed about another aspect of the DNA because the defence team for the accused suggested that an Aboriginal criminal in Mackay was the real killer, that he’d got away with it and that there was partial DNA from him left at the crime scene. So, I contacted a forensic biologist called Dr. Kirsty Wright. And she grew up on the Gold Coast too. But I didn’t know her, I just have to admit I used Google to find her. And she was only too happy to help, and I had access to all of the documents, or many of the documents from the case relating to DNA. Kirsty started examining these documents, and within a short period of time, she was incredibly alarmed at not just the handling of the DNA by the Queensland Forensic Centre, which tests all of the samples collected by police from crime scenes. She was horrified at the, what she believed were systemic issues in that lab. And within just a few months of us first meeting, Kirsty who’s an uncontroversial scientist, who has done amazing work around the world and in Australia, was making a public complaint to their anti-corruption commission in Queensland, and also publicly calling for the government’s lab to be closed, to be shut down, because it was getting everything so badly wrong. And, and, you know, she was actually spot on.

Kerry O’Brien

So, you’ve now got this government inquiry into precisely the operations of the lab, and the ramifications of that are huge, aren’t they?

Hedley Thomas

Massive, and what that inquiry, which is being run by a former Court of Appeal Judge, Walter Sofronoff, Court of Appeal President in Queensland. What the inquiry has already established is that 1000s of statements that are produced by scientists from that lab for courts contain information which is untrue. The lab has, for years, been adopting a very shoddy testing process that allowed DNA that was existing in the crime scene samples to go undetected by the lab. And then, then the lab would report to the police, there’s no DNA there, so there’s nothing to see. And the police sometimes will be saying, look, it’s a, it’s a shirt covered in blood. You know, there’s underwear with obvious semen stain. How can there not be DNA? We’re talking, obviously, about murders and rapes. But that was the feedback from the lab that the DNA wasn’t being detected. The reason was the process the lab had adopted, had and had persuaded the police would be good for them, meant that this DNA was just not showing up. It was not going to be presenting to the scientists. It was always there and if the scientists had only, had the lab management had only told the scientists to do what would have been standard in most labs, which was test the samples thoroughly, fully. It would have been apparent, but they didn’t do that. So, you can imagine Kerry, there are 1000s of crime scene samples from 1000s of cases going back, who knows how many years, that have been compromised.

Kerry O’Brien

So potentially there could be an awful lot of cases that might be reopened? Yes. So, have you been able to establish in Shandee’s case, whether the DNA material that had been collected at any point has actually been held? Can it be revisited?

Hedley Thomas

Yes. All the DNA in Shandee’s case is being retested. All the sorry, all the samples are being retested, including dozens of samples from the accused’s car. And samples from the crime scene samples that were taken from Shandee’s body and her clothes. And another lab is doing that retesting. We expect,

Kerry O’Brien

If there is a different story that emerges from that reappraisal is that, would that constitute potentially, the fresh evidence that might cause, that might lead to another trial?

Hedley Thomas

Yes, potentially. And this is where it’ll become a great contest between lawyers. You know, I think most people here as a matter of common sense would agree that if you find DNA in a case where an accused was already acquitted, but you years later find DNA that should have been used in a prosecution, potentially to persuade the jury to a conviction, then that should be something that is relied upon in a new prosecution, overcoming what’s known as double jeopardy. However, the argument against that will be it has to be compelling and fresh evidence. And defence lawyers, I’m sure will say it’s not fresh. There was a little echo there. They’ll say it’s not fresh. It was always there. It was the incompetence of the lab, that failed to detect it. Now look, this is all hypothetical. John Peros has always said he didn’t do it, so. In fact, he’s suing you at the moment. He is suing us for defamation, yeah, so. With that example I’m not suggesting.

Kerry O’Brien

I’m glad you’ve stressed that at this stage he’s said he is still innocent. Yeah. Okay. So, in fact, as you would write, you were just telling me before we came on tonight, that it was almost like hold the front page again, because you’ve got Shandee still running, or running again. And you suddenly hit on something that would cause you to redo or add to your next episode, right?

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, that’s right. So, the 26th episode of Shandee’s Story is due out tomorrow. We did 20 episodes originally, and then we’re now into the episodes that are covering the Commission of Inquiry’s hearings. And I realised that at about four o’clock that that there was a really significant piece of tomorrow’s episode that we’d, we’d overlooked, we should do it. And so, I got on the phone to two of my colleagues, we had a, we had a Google meet hook up, I used my iPhone to record my end of the conversation. And tonight,

Kerry O’Brien

You didn’t have it on the dashboard again, did you?

Hedley Thomas

No, on my sister’s coffee table. And we’re going to crunch it all together to make a new chapter for that episode, in time for tomorrow’s release.

Kerry O’Brien

Okay, so you heard that here first. I’m going to go to that third podcast series. In fact, it was the second but it’s one of three. And that’s the Night Driver, as you called it, although this one actually, it followed The Teacher’s Pet in 2020, Shandee you started doing in 21. Can you briefly recap and very briefly, because we only got about 10 minutes left. On the case of Janine Vaughan, who disappeared off a Bathurst Street 19 years ago, why you decided it was worth a podcast and why you called it The Night Driver?

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, so Janine Vaughan was working in retail. She was the manager of a men’s wear store. She’d been out with friends at a local pub. It was a Thursday night. And then she wandered off. After they left the pub, there was an idea they’d go for last drinks and another one. It was a rainy night. She walked ahead of her friends. They were having a little lover’s tiff. She got to the corner; a car pulls up. They see her getting in this car, and no one ever sees Janine again. That was,

Kerry O’Brien

So like Lyn Dawson, body never found. Never found. But in that case, no strong suspect.

Hedley Thomas

No, that’s right. But what happened unusually in The Night Driver was, or sorry, in this, in this, in Janine Vaughan’s case was that town very quickly turned on a detective who had been and at that time was the deputy mayor as well as the head of the C.I.B. He was the leading detective in the town. He was a man who was very popular with some of the townsfolk, and he had a number of girlfriends, but a lot of people had it in for him. And they decided through, I think, rumour and innuendo, and we’re talking about a town that was, I think, reeling from the disappearance of this very popular young woman, that it was the copper who did it and other coppers were closing ranks around him trying to protect him. And I think when I was attracted to the story, I thought, that is an amazing case, you know, a police officer suspected of the murder, he’s got away with it according to the townsfolk. Let’s investigate this and find out whether we can discover what really happened, where Janine is. And as I went deeper into it, I realised through just, again, forensic examination of as much evidence as possible that this police officer had been stitched up and really was run out of town so unfairly, his life ruined, through just vicious rumour and innuendo, when there was really nothing at all that could be used in a provocative way to suggest he had anything to do with it. We came up with about four serious suspects in that case. And there’s unfortunately, no resolution. However,

Kerry O’Brien

But with those four, quote unquote, serious suspects. May maybe that was the police judgement, I don’t know. But it became your judgement, I guess, how comfortable were you in putting a spotlight on possible quote on quote, persons of interest around circumstantial evidence, considering the capacity of the almost inevitable gossip and innuendo in a relatively small community like Bathurst, the potentially unfair implications for innocent people?

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a balancing act. And I think that in The Night Driver, the tone and the approach to it was very different to The Teacher’s Pet, such that if you were one of those persons of interest, you were, I think, already used to the fact that you had been named, and in some media shamed, for having been a person of interest, that in the podcast series, you’re actually being permitted to tell your side of the story, to present your case. I mean, and can I just quickly talk about that in relation to Chris Dawson. Chris was offered, as were his brothers, unedited interviews, every opportunity to participate, unedited, so they could have talked to me for an hour, and I would have run the whole thing as a special episode. But with The Night Driver, yeah, we did focus on four persons of interest. But we’ve, we never elevated to the, this person probably did it or anything like that. It was, these were the persons described by the police and coroners as the persons of interest. And this is what they say about their position.

Kerry O’Brien

Having, having had if I can call it the success, enormous success, 50 million hits and so on. But, but having had that success with Teacher’s Pet, how did you feel walking away from Night Driver with no real outcome?

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, really deflated. And I felt that I had disappointed the family of Janine, that they had invested a lot of hope in there being a result. And, unfortunately, that couldn’t be delivered. But, and I don’t want to raise expectations too high. But I have just in the last couple of weeks, got a really interesting lead on it. And I’m planning to drive to Bathurst in the next few weeks, and properly check it out. And it is, I think, one of the more promising ones that has come up since that series launched.

Kerry O’Brien

So so having had that experience of Night Driver, thus far. It’s entirely possible that when you, when you get through a podcast process and you end up with a result like Night Driver, it’s never going to leave you, really, is it. No, there’s always the possibility that you’ll dig back into it. Yeah. Memory is part of what really intrigues me here because we all know about false memory, we know about faulty memory, we know about how we can convince ourselves. I wrote a memoir a few years ago, and reassured, I was reassured that that the majority, significantly majority of events that I had remembered reasonably accurately, but there are a few where I was completely blindsided, where I was absolutely convinced about something and discovered it could not possibly have happened like that. Now, it’s not just that part of faulty memory, particularly when something has happened a long time ago. But when you hear other people giving their memories of something, and, and and you suddenly feel that your memory has been triggered by that, that can be a very tricky road to walk down can’t it. And there are cases littered with illustrations of how memory has failed, really in the end. Failed the test.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, and in Chris Dawson’s murder trial, the judge Ian Harrison had to weigh a lot of memory issues from witnesses, some of whom hadn’t come forward to police initially. So there wasn’t a document, which the judge could look at to say, well, this was dated in 1990 and it seems to be pretty consistent with what the witness is telling me now, a lot of witnesses hadn’t come forward until 2018 when The Teacher’s Pet was rolling. But, you know, its,

Kerry O’Brien

Cos then there are the people of course, who fabricate stories, or fabricate evidence, or fabricate memories to become part of the story. Have you struck them? Oh, yes. Yeah, how easily are you able to weed them out? I mean, some of them, some of them probably stand out, like the proverbial, but. Yeah, I think. But some not necessarily.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah I think you get a bit of an instinct, after a while, Kerry, you no doubt, weeded plenty out as well, you realise, who are the people who just are in love with the idea of themselves appearing.

Kerry O’Brien

There are some who can be very, very convincing, and it takes a lot of time and effort.

Hedley Thomas

I almost got sucked in very badly during The Teacher’s Pet with one witness who well, alleged witness, who came up with a completely fanciful story. But I didn’t know it was fanciful until after I had written it, narrated it, I had all of her audio. It was, it was actually in the, in the episode and, that Slade had built, and it was about half an hour from release. And I made one further call, and it just started to crumble slightly, and I just thought, oh, no, I need to pull this out and work on this a bit longer. I thought I’d rigorously tested it. But there was that one further call where I got a slightly different take on the same set of facts, and that just convinced me that there was something a bit off, and it got ripped out. And thank goodness it did, because,

Kerry O’Brien

And under pressure you might not have made that call.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah, yeah. But it was, it was all completely wrong. I don’t think she was a fantasist. I think she really believed in what she was saying. But it couldn’t be true.

Kerry O’Brien

Well they would be the worst ones to try and weed out. So what have you learned since you began the podcast. It’s caused you to change the way you do them. Any lessons learned?

Hedley Thomas

I’ve learned that I should be, and can, achieve a higher quality of audio. So, better microphones, I’d definitely use a better mic. I’ve,

Kerry O’Brien

Do you think you’re a better journalist and a better investigator, than you were?

Hedley Thomas

Yes, yeah, I think I have become sharper and more focused. And some of it is just a gut feeling when you read a statement and you think that witness is really important, even though the police might not have taken the witness too, too seriously. But yeah of course, practice is only going to make you better. And I’ve been blessed to have the support of colleagues who have also wanted to help and be involved in the podcast. And they’ve taught me so many things too. So, you know, I, one of the things I really enjoy about doing Shandee’s Legacy, which is the follow on from, from the 20-episode series we did, is that I’m working with Claire Harvey, David Murray, Matthew Condon, and we’re collaborating. We did a similar collaboration for the podcast series called The Teacher’s Trial, 20 episodes, one a week for five months, covering the trial, the trial didn’t last for five months. But Claire had this idea that when the judge had gone out to consider his verdict, and, that she thought the judge might only be out for a couple of weeks, and that we would fill that space with material that we’d been husbanding. And then we’d, we’d have this sort of continuous seamless series. Well, the judge was out for about five or six weeks, and we were running out of material and we were exhausted.

Kerry O’Brien

But you would have had to walk a very fine line there, you’d actually been a witness, in the case you’d been criticised by the judge before the trial. That’s a very fine ethical balance there too, isn’t it. I mean, you weren’t participating on the audio in the actual podcast, but you can’t have been completely detached from it.

Hedley Thomas

I was detached from the early episodes until I gave my evidence. And so I didn’t, I was literally quarantined from what they were doing in all the episodes leading up to when I became a witness in the murder trial. And then after that, I was all in and it was fine. The other difference with this murder trial was that it was judge alone. So with no jurors, we were, we had, I think, space and liberties, to talk about the evidence that we wouldn’t have been able to take if it had been with a jury, with jurors, because the judge, he wasn’t listening to the podcast. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have been influenced by it.

Kerry O’Brien

Now very heady to get 50 million downloads. No other journalist in this country could possibly claim to have had an audience of 50 million people. Would it be human, if you didn’t feel the urge to chase the ratings and to try to replicate that extraordinary level of success. How do you counter that? How do you maintain your balance, your professional balance?

Hedley Thomas

Well, I’ve got some wonderful, close family support. And they keep me pretty down to earth.

Kerry O’Brien

I know what that’s like, yeah.

Hedley Thomas

Yeah. My wife, she, she’s amazing. And an emergency department nurse, former journalist, and she is very, very good at ensuring I don’t get too big headed. I have wonderful family, extended family, and great friends, some of whom are here tonight. And, you know, I don’t think I’ve changed through through all this. In terms of chasing subjects or or murder cases that might be ratings pullers, I don’t, I don’t think so, I want to, I have to feel that I can give my very best to a murder investigation, before I commit to it. And the test for me is, am I, am I really interested in this? Does this really grab me? Can I become a bit obsessed for month after month of research and slog and interview, so that I can do this justice? And, you know, I don’t tell people that when I don’t take up their case that, you know, it just didn’t grab me. It’s not, you can’t say that, you know, but I, I know when it does, and because because you can’t stop reading, you’ll stay up till 2am ploughing through the files. And that’s when I know. And it wouldn’t matter what kind of case it was, if I get that, that that sense, that’s the one I want to go after.

Kerry O’Brien

Well, this is the first time in a while we’ve gone over. So I hope that means that I’m not just indulging myself as another journalist, I think, I think we’ve all been really caught up in this fascinating journey tonight. Hedley, thank you very much for sharing it with us. Thank you, Kerry.

Kerry and Hedley, thank you very much again. Another round of applause for an absolutely compelling, compelling evening. It’s my great, great pleasure to get to sum up a little bit of what we’ve heard. And I’ll try and do that quickly. Because Kerry, we have run over. It was great to to understand that podcasts actually allow the journalist to go a lot deeper into the story than might be available to them if they’re sitting in a newspaper room. But Hedley, you explained that with that comes far more extensive preparation than perhaps for that written article. Refreshing for me to hear that technical know-how is not a prerequisite for for delivering a 50 million plus podcast series. But extraordinary also to hear how how frantic you were, and manipulating those episodes, two, three and four, as new information came in, and I can only imagine the adrenaline rush, that that came with that and indeed, the adrenaline completion or the adrenaline depletion rather, when the final episode was aired, it must have been quite the letdown. It would seem that journalism is a lot tougher now. And it’s harder for journalists to find that time and that space to go deeper into those stories. And I was just wondering if perhaps that might also be the case for law enforcement, and for the people at the frontline of law enforcement and whether they don’t have the time to fully pursue the stories. You talked a little bit about the ethical obligations and trying to remain balanced. But every individual will approach a story or an interview with their own private views. And the skill there is remaining balanced, even though you did say that this was always for you a ‘he’d done it’ rather than a who done it. You have to be a little bit obsessed and crazy and deeply committed to do justice to a story of this nature. And Kerry, you posited that podcasts as a form of journalism are perhaps more intimate, and potentially, therefore more persuasive than the other formats. And Hedley, you responded by saying you think the listeners form a more intense relationship with a journalist, become more invested, and perhaps attached in a different way to to how they would if you’re a journalist in print alone. It’s very intriguing to hear especially in the case of Shandee’s Story, how that one investigation led to potentially a much bigger investigation with far reaching ramifications for for many unsolved crimes across the state of Queensland. And it did sound like you’ve mastered the technology as you rush tonight to, to re-edit episode 26 of that story. And I think we all got a glimpse tonight of the emotional investment you make as a journalist, when you investigate those unsolved crimes, and where the expectations of those people close to the victims who are just literally searching for closure. So hopefully, I’ve done justice to the conversation. It was absolutely compelling. I was stuck from moment to end just listening and wishing it could go on. But again, thanks again for a wonderful evening.

Coming up next, Kerry will be joined in the big house by two outstanding leaders in the field of mental health, education and treatment, Hugh van Cuylenburg and Professor Patrick McGorry AO. Hugh’s work with the Resilience Project brings into focus decades of active campaigning to educate young people and their parents about positive mental health strategies. His work with schools, sporting clubs, community groups, and corporations has enabled him to not only reach hundreds of thousands of people, but also to refine both his thinking and his practice around mental health education. Professor McGorry AO is a psychiatrist known worldwide for his development of scaling up early intervention and youth mental health services and for mental health innovation, advocacy and reform. He is Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, founding editor of the journal, Early Intervention in Psychiatry, and the first psychiatrist to become a fellow of the Academy of Science. And if that wasn’t enough, in 2010, he was selected as Australian of the Year and became an Officer of the Order of Australia. Professor McGorry and Hugh will join Kerry here at HOTA on the 22nd of November, so little under three weeks time, for the final edition of a better future for all for 2022. Thank you very much.