The Old London Affair - The Curiously Overlooked - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery PodcastShow Notes
Australian True Crime - The Portland Murders
The Old London Affair - Part 2 - The Curiously Overlooked In 2013, a cold case detective named Tom Hogan sat down with eleven hundred reports and began reading. The investigation into the murders of Claire Acocks and Margaret Penny had been running, in various forms, for more than twenty years. Five thousand people had been interviewed. Detectives had worked in every Australian state. No one had been charged. By the time Hogan was deep enough into the file to form a picture, something was bothering him. Not one thing. A shape in the negative space. A figure the investigation had looked at briefly, decided didn't fit, and moved past. He would later describe Robert Penny, Margaret's husband, as "curiously overlooked." In part two of The Old London Affair, we go inside the investigation: the suspects who died before they could be cleared, the fugitive from a separate Adelaide family massacre who turned up in Portland one month after the murders, the phone intercept that caught an elderly man discussing a theory he had no good reason to have, and the DNA result that arrived on day two of the committal hearing and changed everything.
Subscribe now to Strewth Premium on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/StrewthPodcast Strewth social media links - https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast Contact us - [email protected] Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay Sources The Standard, Warrnambool. "Portland's salon killings still chill 20 years on." 2011.
Wallace, L. (2012). Horrible Man: Sinister Secrets and Truths Untold — The Portland Hair Salon Murders. Fontaine Press.
The Standard, Warrnambool. "Husband Robert Penny charged over cold case murders at Portland hair salon." April 13, 2015.
The Standard, Warrnambool. "Families left in the dark." June 30, 2017.
Wright, T. "Portland hairdresser murder mystery persists after all these years." The Age, October 2, 2017.
3AW. "Man charged over Portland hairdressing murders dies while on bail." March 2016.
Coroner Jacqui Hawkins, findings of inquest, June 30, 2017. Cited via The Standard and The Age.
Presswire. Statement from Aphra Williams regarding film project, June 29, 2017.
News. "Renewed search for SA murder fugitive." October 2, 2016.
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.