It was a big day for crime news when serial self-mutilator Garry David died, sadistic sex offender Ian Melrose Pattison succumbed to cancer and the man dubbed “the Ascot Vale rapist” was finally arrested.
If Greg Lynn appeals, which he almost certainly will, the wife-bashing, pet-killing, car-painting, camouflage-wearing gun crank could soon be back on the street.
For veteran crime writer Andrew Rule, unsolved cases stand out long after others fade. The horrific pack rape of two innocent girls on Melbourne Cup Day 1976 continues to haunt him.
Only dumb luck stopped innocent workers from being incinerated when a fire bomb exploded at Thornbury venue the Furlan Club. At least one of the teens arrested was raised to know much better.
Were the right dogs used in the search for missing Ballarat mum Samantha Murphy? Does Sydney have a worse gang problem than Melbourne? Seasoned crime writer Andrew Rule addresses questions on cases and colourful crims that have crossed his path.
Thirty years ago this month, savage serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed. Now, the lawyer who represented him through his final appeals has told why — and how it felt to look evil in the eye.
A flood of stolen abalone trafficked to organised crime outfits — with outlaw bikies riding shotgun — is being enabled by jittery prosecutors and politicians wary of volatile Indigenous politics.
The law is clumsy at weighing the damage done by someone in a position of trust who sexually assaults someone vulnerable — which is exactly what sleazy dentist George Koudos did.
Just days after hit man “Benji” Veniamin was shot in Carlton, Lewis Moran took a disturbing phone call as he sat at the bar of the Brunswick Club — moments later he was dead.
By the time Andrew “Benji” Veniamin confronted Mick Gatto at the back of his Carlton restaurant on this day 20 years ago, the hitman had become a liability to a growing list of enemies and anyone who had done “business” with him.
John Latorre was a friendly Epping greengrocer to those who didn’t really know him, and a capo in the mafia to those who did. But even captains have a boss, and when the big bucks stop, the buck stops with someone.
For Middle-Eastern organised crime groups embroiled in a vicious war over Melbourne’s illicit tobacco trade, revenge has become a more potent motivation than profit.
No one wants to spell out the bitter truth in cases like Samantha Murphy’s disappearance — when people vanish for more than a few days, the odds against their return grow longer with every hour.
When Roger Rogerson turned up at the dressing room door of sultry Welsh singer Shirley Bassey, for once he didn’t have a gun in his pocket. But he did have her stolen handbag.
A decade ago Rosie Batty saw her only child die in unspeakable circumstances, but through her unthinkable loss she has continued to find a way to help others.
Gary Lawrence was a crook with a moral compass whose roughcast chivalry underpins Boy Swallows Universe — it’s why the former robber with a head like a robber’s dog can be played by a male model in the hit Netflix show.
Some of the country’s biggest elite cycling names have made headlines for more than winning world championships and Olympic medals when they took a wrong turn towards drugs, violence, lies and cheating.
Graham Kinniburgh and his crew were long gone by the time a police inspector stuck his head through a hole in the safe and uttered a line that would appear on front pages across Australia: “They got the lot”.
The collection of cretins and imbeciles who kidnapped an innocent man they believed to be a paedophile called themselves the Australian Freedom Fighters, but one detective had a different title for them: “drug-f—ed white trash.”
That Peter Forni is accused of plotting to import half a tonne of Peruvian marching powder will have shocked friends, students he taught at St Kevin’s College and the homebuyers he lent money to.
War is not glorious but galloping horses are, which is why the stories of the men and horses who lived and died charging the wells of Beersheba in the Palestine desert endure more than 100 years later.
Wrongly accused of heroin trafficking, Japanese tourist Chika Honda — and five others — paid an appalling price for the presumed guilt of one. Thirty years on, the police case still reeks.
It’s all but certain one of two violent men who accompanied a crime writer to Julie Garciacelay’s North Melbourne flat murdered her. But 48 years on, we’re no closer to the truth.
A punitive tobacco tax hasn’t stopped people smoking, it’s driven previously law-abiding smokers to a booming black market and left dead bodies and a string of arson attacks across Melbourne in its wake.
Rory Jack Thompson, a MIT graduate who worked for the CSIRO, hacked his wife’s body into 91 pieces and flushed them down the toilet in one of the nation’s most gruesome crimes.
The strangest of many strange things in the murder of Salvatore Rotiroti — found beaten to death in his Geelong driveway — is that only one of the dead man’s extended family seems willing to find the killer.
Aussie Rules attracts people from every level of society, so it’s hardly surprising that among the hundreds of players at the top level there have been some serious rogues.
The morning after Chris Glasl and his SOG crew shot a crook, they were losing the adrenaline buzz of the kill — so he racked up a line of cocaine to fill the void.
Will a triple murderer go free some day because the Andrews government “did a Bolte” and used a killer as a political pawn?
Twenty years ago, homicide detective Rowland Legg arrived at a blood-spattered van in an Essendon park and one of the most horrific murder scenes in his 30 years on the job.
A City of Dandenong health inspector has accused council staff of being manipulative and corrupt, alleging they cooked up a scheme to shut down a family business by planting a slug.
It’s July 22, 1991 and a crook pinned to the roof of a bank by bulletproof shutters is slowly dying — it’s the day that symbolises the end of bank robbery’s golden era.
Soaring meat prices have made livestock theft one of the most profitable crimes, but little is being done to stop it in Victoria — a far cry from when it was a hanging offence.
Exactly one year ago, Christos Pittas put down his sudoku puzzle, kissed his wife and set off for a walk in rough country near the Dinner Plain village. He was never seen again.
Despite tough gun laws, criminals seem to be more armed and more dangerous than ever. And too often it’s blameless civilians who pay the ultimate price.
Only a few former cops are old enough to have known Brian “The Skull” Murphy in his prime, but right up until his death — on Anzac Day — he divided opinion.
History is littered with outrageous miscarriages of justice — but whether it’s stuff-up or conspiracy, for those convicted on dodgy evidence, the results are harrowing.
A career crook caught up in a massive drug bust implicating the Calabrian mafia ’Ndrangheta has walked free after a suspiciously short stint in jail.
A small fire lit on a hot day in a national park quickly turned to disaster. Here a former AFP officer uncovers the laziness and blunders that led to catastrophe.
Neighbours actor Madeleine West has detailed how childhood sex abuse changed her as an adult. Listen to the podcast. Warning: GRAPHIC.
It seems no one loves imposing laws quite as much as the lawless — and when it comes to bikie gangs, these rules are enforced with an iron fist.
When the wife of Victoria’s chief secretary died outside her grand Kew house, the investigation raised suspicions of political tampering that still loom a lifetime later.
Katherine Knight decapitated her partner and cooked his head in a pot with vegetables and gravy. Was it nature or nurture that made her such a monster?
Among the few sorry possessions Colleen South left with her abandoned car was her journal. On the last page, she had scrawled “Help me please.” In the end, no one did.
In the months before he vanished, Mark Jansen was a degenerate gambler betting black money for a “syndicate” run by a disbarred lawyer. His sisters are still trying to piece together the dangerous maze his life had become.
Could the tragic tale of a sex worker found down a mineshaft begin in an act of brutality at a police station in the sleaziest sex-and-drugs scene between King’s Cross and Antarctica?
The VFL in the 70s was the aggro stepfather of the AFL, where rank amateurism and brutal professionalism combined in king hits that would get you jailed if they were thrown off-field.
He’s a hothead bikie, who reputedly sprayed bullets around Melbourne, but he’d be sweating them now after his clubmate was nabbed in Europe.
It took 28 years, a million-dollar undercover budget and the most covert sting in police history to finally nail notorious mafia boss Domenic Perre.
Phoenix Cooper was the victim of toxic gender politics tinged with class snobbery when he was forced to stand trial for a rape that never happened.
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