Maggots, blood and hope: How Meshel Laurie went from comedian to forensics insider

Long-fascinated by forensic science, comedian Meshel Laurie is now providing others with a look inside a world that can be both morbid and brilliant.

Meshel Laurie feels a familiar lump catch her throat when she remembers the emails that dropped into her inbox from Jeremy Dixon, the father of murdered Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon.

She was interviewing a variety of detectives, pathologists and victims from well-known criminal cases at the time for her latest book, CSI Told You Lies, which she did from her home in Altona, in Melbourne’s southwest, during the lengthy Covid lockdown last year.

But it was Jeremy’s emails sharing simple stories about Eurydice that Laurie says shocked and touched her “many times in beautiful ways”.

Meshel Laurie.

“I can feel a tear ball in my chest now when I think about when he told me where they got Eurydice’s name from, just the fact he shared that,” Laurie, 48, says during our Zoom chat, cursing having gone back into lockdown in July.

“I was like ‘oh, my God, you are such a beautiful man’ and to think about what’s happened to him as a man, and everything he’s lost.”

Eurydice was 22 and building her comedy career across venues in Melbourne when she was found murdered at Princes Park in June 2018, for which her killer, Jaymes Todd, was sentenced to life in prison.

It hit home for Laurie, who, after growing up in Toowoomba, moved to Melbourne to pursue comedy at a similar young age and vividly remembers meeting her comedy hero, Tim Ferguson, at a show there.

“He said to me, ‘you should stick with it because stand-up comedy will open doors for you that you could never imagine’ – and he was so right,” she says.

“That was nearly 30 years ago and look at me, I’ve written a true crime book. It’s taken me to the most amazing, crazy places, wonderful places, and it would’ve done that for her and it should’ve done that for her, and I felt this survivor’s guilt because I was like, ‘it’s so unfair that I’m living here now and she didn’t get to do any of that’.”

It was around that time in 2018 that Laurie was introduced to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), having been asked to help them produce a web series.

As a well-known comedian, radio and TV presenter for the previous two decades, true crime might seem an unexpected departure for Laurie – and it’s because of that confusion that the opening line of her book is “so, why true crime?”

But it’s a passion that’s been bubbling in the background throughout her career.

Along with her comedy ambitions growing up in Toowoomba, where her grandmother still lives, Laurie loved the non-fiction genre.

She never watched fictional dramas such as CSI and early on in her career she didn’t accept stand-up gigs on a Tuesday night because she’d be at home watching the back-to-back forensic documentaries that aired on Foxtel each week.

After early success in the Melbourne comedy circuit, her stage show The Whore Whisperer opened the floodgates in 2000 and she began her radio career co-hosting Enough Rope on Melbourne community station 3RRR.

By 2004 she was hosting ABC comedy show Stand Up! and was a regular on Rove Live.

The following year Laurie returned to Queensland to join Nova 106.9 in Brisbane as a founding breakfast presenter on Meshel, Ash, Kip and Luttsy, where she remained, also co-hosting with Tim Blackwell and Marty Sheargold, until late 2011.

It was during her time on Nova breakfast interviewing My Kitchen Rules judge Manu Feildel that she realised the limitations of only having a few minutes to interview someone.

“Every year they would go ‘OK guys, My Kitchen Rules, do you want Manu or Pete (Evans)? And every year we’d go ‘Manu’,” Laurie recalls.

Meshel Laurie at Nova. Picture: Adam Armstrong

“But I’d crack the s---s and go: ‘God, what are we going to talk to Manu about?’ I love him, but honestly, so boring. By the time everyone has a chop at Manu it’s pretty tedious.”

While driving home she heard Feildel on ABC radio in a 45-minute interview that revealed his interesting background studying as a circus performer in France.

“I was just thinking to myself: ‘This is crazy, this is what you can do when you’ve got enough time.’ So that was it. It’s all down to Manu. I’ve told him,” she laughs.

After she moved to Melbourne – where she bounced around other top-rating radio shows for a number of years – she learnt about podcasts so she could tune into Conversations with Richard Fidler, who she used to listen to every day in Brisbane.

By 2015 she launched her own interview podcast, Nitty Gritty Committee, and the following year she began the Australian True Crime podcast alongside Emily Webb.

“It’s funny because the podcast in particular to me is a natural progression, but then I think ‘oh yeah, I guess if you think of me as a comedian, of course you would (be surprised)’,” she says.

“I was passionate about both comedy and radio but they weren’t emotional. This (true crime) is a very emotional passion for me and I feel very lucky that I was successful enough at both of those things that it sort of bought me this opportunity, literally really.”

When she began spending time with the forensic pathologists at VIFM in 2018, Laurie was surprised, not only about the work they did – how you can’t decipher time of death by studying maggots on a body as CSI would lead us to believe – but the sensitivity of the pathologists.

She spoke about their work in her circle of friends so much in the following year that when she also mentioned it to her literary agent, he told her to write a book, and she signed the deal for CSI Told You Lies in November 2019.

Meshel Laurie’s book CSI told you lies.

“I did not expect the emotional engagement that they had. I was taken aback by that,” Laurie says.

“They are not desensitised at all and I wanted people to know that in case you ever have a loved one who ends up in the mortuary, I wanted everyone to know how sensitively it’s treated.”

She had already published four books by that time – memoir The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny in 2013 and three books on Buddhism – but this project was a new challenge.

CSI Told You Lies is a behind-the-scenes account of the work of the forensic scientists on the frontline of Australia’s major crime and disaster investigations. Others touched by the investigations are drawn into the story. Laurie initially reached out to the friends and contacts – pathologists, former homicide detectives, criminals and victims’ families – she knew through her podcast.

And then she began apprehensively to reach out to people she didn’t know, those connected to other crimes that she wanted to write about.

With the global pandemic locking down Melbourne in early 2020, she conducted interviews via Zoom and began the tedious writing process, all while schooling her 11-year-old twins – son Louis and daughter Dali – in their home, which is filled to the brim with 10 cats and two dogs.

When she left radio in 2018 to spend more time with her twins, she promised them they could foster kittens and the family was simply unable to part with the litter of abandoned newborns they cared for.

“It was challenging to write with the kids at home; it was hard, really hard, just to get that concentration because to me it was really important for a lot of reasons to be telling stories of victims,” Laurie says, pausing our interview to chase a cat named Crystal off the piano for a second time.

“To have so many distractions was hard. There were times when I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Her work still revolves around being a mother, squeezing in writing between supervising activities such as painting in the lounge room while they watch TV each night and making the 10-minute trip to their school for drop-off and pick-up each day.

Her mother, Mary Therese Laurie, lives nearby and helps when she needs it.

Laurie wanted each chapter of her book to highlight a different issue, from the problematic sentencing of sex offenders in her conversation with Melbourne serial killer Peter Dupas to the impact of early childhood on young men like Todd, Dixon’s killer, whose predilection for homicidal rape fantasies went undetected in his dysfunctional home.

But the overarching motivation is for the reader to consider the people involved – the first responders we don’t hear about until the trial but who are pulled from their families when bodies are discovered, day or night, to meticulously examine a corpse and determining crucial information for the investigation, and prosecution, to come.

“In every chapter it’s to think about who does these things for us as a community; who goes and identifies people after bushfires, who does that for us? Someone does that,” Laurie says emphatically.

The answer to that question is VIFM odontologist (or forensic dentist) Dr Richard Bassed, also her good friend, who recounts dropping his children at their mum’s house before spending months identifying bodies during both the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.

The chapter with Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris, who lost their three children when the Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight was shot down in 2014, was the most challenging for Laurie. She hadn’t met them before she reached out through the foundation they set up in their children’s honour.

The couple are proud custodians of their children’s story and they wanted to work on the chapter with Laurie, who would send excerpts every few months and nervously await their feedback.

“To know they’ve got it, they are reading it, it would take them a while to get back to me, so wondering ‘have I hurt them?’ That was really hard, waiting to hear back, but ultimately incredibly rewarding,” she says.

Forensic Odontologist Dr Richard Bassed with a tooth.

“That’s always the way isn’t it? The most rewarding things are the hardest, so I’m really proud of it.

“I really like this book ... I love all the people in it … so I feel like I’ve done a good job for them. It’s a love letter for all the people.”

With the book hitting shelves, her podcast production company, Smart Fella, is also gaining momentum.

She has employed four people in the past six months to keep up with their expanding portfolio.

Meanwhile, Laurie is considering her next book, resolute about continuing in the true crime genre she is so passionate about.

“Just yesterday I had a really interesting true crime person pop up who wants help telling their story, so that’s exciting. I love being a hustler,” the broadcasting star smiles, contemplating the unimaginable doors her comedy career will open for her next.

“To be able to have people come to me and say ‘will you help me tell the story?’ is so incredibly rewarding.”

And for these people to put their trust in her to share personal details of their lives, such as Jeremy Dixon, Eurydice’s father.

In yet another parallel with Laurie, he told her Eurydice was named after a radio presenter her mother Karen liked.

“I also liked the name and there we were,” he wrote in one his emails to Laurie.

CSI Told You Lies, by Meshel Laurie, Penguin, $35