Podcast Categories: Government

Lies in Lismore – the latest season of Unravel, the ABC’s award-winning investigative true crime podcast series.

German backpacker Simone Strobel was on a dream trip to Australia in 2005 when she disappeared from a caravan park in Lismore. Six days later her body was found covered by palm fronds. Ever since that night, questions have followed her boyfriend, Tobias Suckfuell. He’s always insisted he’s innocent. Despite decades of sleuthing and undercover work, the police investigation has been tangled in lies, and no one has been convicted of Simone’s murder. Now there are new twists in the story. Has the truth been hiding in plain sight? Or did a killer escape without scrutiny? Acclaimed investigative journalist Richard Baker investigates who killed Simone Strobel.

Previous series of Unravel cover various investigations into crimes and crime-related topics including solved and unsolved murder cases, missing persons,  forensic analysis, gangland crimes, love scammers, con-artists, drugs, terrorism, neo-nazis, and miscarriages of justice — all investigated by some of Australia’s best reporters and people who know the story best.

In Season 8, ABC Journalist Rob Burgin investigates the disappearance of 27-year-old Queenslander Jack McLennan. Jack had been relaxing, drinking beers at a picnic spot, when his mate said he looked away, and when he looked back, Jack had vanished.  Jack was fit and healthy, and even though he’d just been through a breakup, he seemed positive. But now, Jack was missing, and strange clues began to surface, hinting at his last movements. With online theories about the case spreading like wildfire, Rob sets out to investigate. Has there been a crime or not? He traces the fragments of that night through a web of small Queensland towns, where everyone knows everyone, everyone knows something, but no-one can agree on what became of Jack.

In Season 7, Blood on the Tracks, award-winning Muruwari and Gomeroi journalist Allan Clarke spends five years investigating the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of 17-year-old Gomeroi teenager, Mark Haines. In 1988, just outside of Tamworth in country New South Wales, a freight train hits Mark’s body laying across the tracks. When the rail worker stops the train and gets out, the scene doesn’t add up. The tracks divide Tamworth in two. An Aboriginal community on one side, a largely white population on the other. Some will say it was a suicide and others a murder. Despite the strange evidence found at the scene of his death, the family feel like they’re being ignored by police. An inquiry finds no answers and the mystery is left to fester, causing division and suspicion in the town. Allan’s reporting helps to spark a resurgence of interest in the case that sees the file reopened, a review launched, a reward announced. As Allan gets closer to the truth, the story ends with a revelation no-one was expecting, and the thirty-year-old mystery finally begins to unravel. Blood on the Tracks won a Walkley award for Coverage of Indigenous Affairs. This series was re-published with a bonus episode due to updates and advances in relation to the case.

In Season 6, Mr Big, journalist Alicia Bridges investigates a disturbing recording of a man admitting to a murder. She finds herself in a world of lies, gangland and subterfuge, where very few things are as they seem. Her reporting leads her deep inside an international controversy, to a world of secrets that powerful institutions don’t want revealed.

In Season 5, Firebomb, Crispian Chan investigates what really happened after his family’s restaurant went up in flames in 1988. He was just a kid when Chinese restaurants were being firebombed in the dead of night and a campaign of terror was underway in Perth. Thirty-five years on, most of us have never heard about it, even though it’s one of the few sustained and coordinated terrorism campaigns in Australia’s history. Crispian teams up with ABC reporter Alex Mann, and together they traverse the country to find answers and explore the darker forces that still lurk in our suburbs today. Firebomb won the ‘Best True Crime Podcast Award’ at the Australian Podcast Awards in 2024.

In Season 4, Snowball, Ollie Wards investigates how his brother’s whirlwind romance with a charismatic Californian woman ultimately cost his family more than a million dollars. When Greg Wards met Lezlie Manukian, a beautiful woman whose world is full of glamour, he is immediately drawn to her. They fall in love, get married and start planning the rest of their lives together – the only catch is Lezlie is a con artist. To find out who his brother’s wife really is, Ollie must track down Lezlie herself, and it soon becomes clear that his family’s story is just one piece of a bigger jigsaw. Snowball won Best True Crime at the Australian Podcast Awards in 2020, was one of Apple Podcasts’ Best Listens of 2019, and made the American Bello Collective’ top 100 list that year.

In Season 3, Last Seen Katoomba, reporter Gina McKeon digs deep into the suspicious unsolved disappearance of young mum, Belinda Peisley, who was last seen in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba, west of Sydney, in September 1998. Belinda’s life descends into chaos after her 18th birthday when she receives a large inheritance and buys her own place in town. It’s a move her family thinks will set her up for life but, instead, the house becomes a magnet for a world of drugs and a crowd of hangers-on who visit day and night.

Gina pieces together the stories and evidence around the six main persons of interest named in the inquest into Belinda’s disappearance and suspected death, and what emerges is a picture of a town and a case shrouded in secrecy.

In Season 2, Barrenjoey Road, reporter Ruby Jones tries to solve the mystery of what happened to 18-year-old Trudie Adams after she disappears while hitchhiking home on Sydney’s northern beaches in 1978. Ruby exposes the dark underbelly of the seemingly beautiful and serene “Insular Peninsula,” uncovering a world where surfers run drugs home from Bali, gangs of men prowl the beaches and predators have unchecked power. Ruby will question why the case was never solved and her investigation will lead her to a criminal monster with links to organised crime and police corruption at the highest level.

In Season 1, Blood on the Tracks, award-winning Muruwari and Gomeroi journalist Allan Clarke spends five years investigating the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of 17-year-old Gomeroi teenager, Mark Haines. In 1988, just outside of Tamworth in country New South Wales, a freight train hits Mark’s body laying across the tracks. When the rail worker stops the train and gets out, the scene doesn’t add up. The tracks divide Tamworth in two. An Aboriginal community on one side, a largely white population on the other. Some will say it was a suicide and others a murder. Despite the strange evidence found at the scene of his death, the family feel like they’re being ignored by police. An inquiry finds no answers and the mystery is left to fester, causing division and suspicion in the town. Allan’s reporting helps to spark a resurgence of interest in the case that sees the file reopened, a review launched, a reward announced. As Allan gets closer to the truth, the story ends with a revelation no-one was expecting, and the thirty-year-old mystery finally begins to unravel. Blood on the Tracks won a Walkley award for Coverage of Indigenous Affairs.