Whether you’re travelling alone or driving with others on your holiday-season road trip, nothing makes the kilometres go faster than a good true crime case or two. Here are five podcasts about real crimes that’ll have you hooked the whole drive.
1. Ghost Story
Ghost Story Host Tristan Redman is a seasoned journalist who doesn’t believe in ghosts. But weird things happened in his bedroom as a teenager. He discovers years later that subsequent occupants of the same house have been visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. It just so happens that right next door, his wife’s great-grandmother was killed by two gunshots to the face.
2. Crime Insiders: In Focus
Crime Insiders: In Focus tells true crime stories from people closest to some of Australia’s most compelling cases. In one six-part series, investigative reporter Adam Shand unpacks the disappearance of 20-year-old Miss Tasmania hopeful, Lucille Butterworth, from a bus stop in Hobart in 1969. Police believed she was a runaway who would eventually return, and subsequently failed to search for her for weeks after her disappearance. Eventually, a suspect is identified.
3. Mortal Sin
Mortal Sin, a new Dateline series, will make your trip fly by. Dawn and Nick Hacheney are the perfect couple: spiritual, loving, and devoted to the church where Nick is a pastor. When Dawn is killed in a house fire the day after Christmas, the pastor and his flock are devastated. What few knew at the time was the dark prophecy that foretold it.
4. The Sunshine Place
The Sunshine Place podcast tells the true-story of Synanon – a 1960s social experiment and rehab centre in California that turned into one of the most dangerous and violent cults, told by the people who lived it. What started in a house on the beach soon spread to compounds across the country. Hear how the man in charge led followers down a path of destruction.
5. Wolves Among Us
Wolves Among Us tells the story of Larry Lavin, who on the surface lived in a quiet neighbourhood with his family, drove a Volvo, and practised dentistry in Philadelphia. But, from 1978 to 1984, Dr. Lavin moonlighted as one of the largest cocaine kingpins on the Eastern Seaboard. This podcast tells tells the story of Lavin’s dual life through the voices and perspectives of law enforcement, drug runners, friends, business associates and Larry Lavin himself.
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