Show Notes
November 24th, 1978. Bank employees, locksmiths, vault experts and finally council workers in Murwillumbah spend nine hours trying to open a bank vault. When they finally broke through, Chief Inspector Frank Charleton looked around the empty space and said three words: "They got the lot." One point seven million dollars. Vanished. Taken by professionals who used an electromagnetic drill, a medical cystoscope, and surgical precision to crack a vault that was supposed to be impregnable. Right across from a pub. One hundred metres from the police station. Forty-six years later, it's still unsolved. Australia's perfect crime. This week on Strewth, the podcast exploring Australia's most baffling mysteries, we examine the robbery, the suspects and the enduring legend of the Murwillumbah Heist. Sources: Sydney Morning Herald, "Bank Robbers 'Got the Lot' - $1.7m Haul," November 25, 1978 Tweed Regional Museum, Murwillumbah - Permanent collection Kidd, Robert "Bertie," memoirs (2022) Bullamakanka, "Murwillumbah Bank Job" (1979) Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay Strewth Social Media Links: https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast Contact us: [email protected]
More from Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
The Unsolved Disappearance of Bevin and Brad Simmonds
What happened to Harold Holt? On a Sunday in December 1967, the Prime Minister of Australia went for a swim off a beach near Portsea and never came out. More than three hundred people searched the water for him, and no trace of his body was ever found. Fifty-eight years later, depending on who you ask, Harold Holt drowned, was killed by the CIA, ran off with his lover, or was dragged under by Chinese frogmen and carried away to Beijing in a submarine. In this episode of Strewth we work through the theories, from the frankly ridiculous to the one a coroner finally signed off on in 2005, and ask why a man who had nearly drowned off that same beach seven months earlier swam straight back out past the breakers. Subscribe now to Strewth Premium on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/StrewthPodcast Strewth social media links - https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast Contact me - [email protected] Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay Sources: National Archives of Australia. Harold Holt's disappearance, Fact sheet 144. https://www.naa.gov.au/help-your-research/fact-sheets/harold-holts-disappearance
The Murder of Maria James - Part 2 of 2 In 2013, a council electrician named Alan Hircoe opened a newspaper and saw a photograph of a priest. He recognised the face. Years earlier, he said, while working at the presbytery of St Mary's in Thornbury, he had seen that priest come in from the garden with blood on his face and hands. The priest was Father Anthony Bongiorno, and he had tried to force his way into Maria James's bookshop on the afternoon she was murdered. But he had an alibi, and police believed the DNA had cleared him.
The Murder of Maria James - Part 1 of 2 On 17 June 1980, John James rang his ex-wife, Maria, at her bookshop in Thornbury, Melbourne. She asked him to hang on. He heard voices and a small scream, and then the line went quiet. He strained to hear the muffled conversation being carried out in the shop. Then the voices became louder, more aggressive. Then she screamed again. Forty-six years and two inquests later, nobody has been charged with her murder.
The Pilliga Yowie In the spring of 2010, a mother pulled into a roadside rest stop south of Coonabarabran so the kids could swim at Hickey's Falls. The car park was silent. Another car was parked by the trail with every door open, and somewhere up the hill a child was crying. What happened next has become one of the best-known yowie encounters in the country, and it rests on the word of one woman who has never given her name. This is her account, set against the long and strange reputation of the Pilliga and the highway that runs through it.