Show Notes
The Lithgow Panther - Unsolved Australian Mystery
For over a century, something large and black has been moving through the sandstone gorges and eucalyptus forest west of Sydney. Farmers have found their sheep with broken necks and grass still between their teeth killed instantly, mid-graze. Carcasses have been discovered wedged in the forks of trees, well above the ground. A seventeen-year-old boy came home one night covered in blood. More than five hundred and sixty people have formally reported seeing it since 1998 alone. Four NSW government inquiries have been commissioned. Two concluded its existence was more likely than not. One of those reports was edited before public release, its finding quietly removed, its author instructed not to speak publicly on the subject. No body has ever been found. No DNA confirmed. No camera trap has ever captured a frame. In this episode of Strewth, we go deep into the Blue Mountains to follow the evidence and the cover-up behind Australia's most enduring predator mystery. 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: NSW Department of Primary Industries, Large Free-Ranging Felines in New South Wales: A Review, John Parkes (2013)
Dr Johannes Bauer, ecological assessment commissioned by NSW Agriculture (1999)
Michael Williams & Rebecca Lang, Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers (2010)
Kevin Sheridan correspondence, released under Freedom of Information
Hills Shire Times, March 2003 (Luke Walker attack)
Hawkesbury Gazette, December 2013 (Peter Russel encounter)
Lithgow Mercury, March 2018 (Sam Maher encounter)
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.