How Dear Rachelle podcast helped revive interest in a cold case
Several women, including his estranged daughter, came forward to detail how this prime murder suspect terrified them. He might be dead now, but the search to find a killer isn’t over.
Dear Rachelle
Don't miss out on the headlines from Dear Rachelle. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The 2001 killing of Rachelle Childs grew to become a cold case which defied multiple police investigations and a coronial inquest.
It looked unlikely to be solved – until earlier this year, 24 years on, when the Dear Rachelle podcast freshly examined the people and the events that led up to Rachelle’s death.
Her body was found on fire nine hours after she left work at Camden Holden, southwest of Sydney.
Rachelle was 23 and winning of nature. Everyone liked her.
Her parents, Graham and Anne, and her sister Kristy, were numbed by the inexplicability of Rachelle’s loss. With grace and dignity, they have campaigned for answers ever since.
Graham regularly checked in with police investigators, a role which Kristy inherited after his death in 2021.
She asked police to request raising the reward and re-open the investigation. Each year, on the anniversary of her older sister’s death, she gave media interviews.
In late 2023, Kristy met Ashlea Hansen, a journalist who had covered many crime stories.
Kristy’s story appealed to Hansen’s instincts.
She was impressed by Kristy’s innate decency.
Kristy had always trusted in the system but had, understandably, grown frustrated by the absence of answers.
Here was a compelling story which needed to be understood. Here was a grave injustice which might be righted.
A multimedia investigation and podcast – which would come to be named Dear Rachelle – seemed like one final chance to shine belated light on Rachelle’s case.
Listen to the Dear Rachelle podcast below:
Many years earlier, both police investigators and the inquest had condensed the available evidence so that only one person of interest remained.
He was Kevin Steven Correll, who was 45 at the time of Rachelle’s death, a chameleon character who appeared to like women, but who also almost certainly liked to hurt women.
Correll, who died in Thailand on Friday, could project charm and creepiness at the same time. He stood apart in a black trench coat and gloves.
Friends of Rachelle, and colleagues, believed that Correll was obsessed with Rachelle. Their working relationship, which initially featured exchanges of cards, soured.
For the past 24 years, Correll was free to get on with his life. He worked in car dealerships on the south coast and landed, in what would be his last job, as an RSA officer at a Central Coast club.
He hired Rachelle as a used car saleswoman in late 2000. Why he may have wanted to hurt her remains one of the many overlapping mysteries of the case.
In March this year, Hansen’s Dear Rachelle podcast, a joint enterprise of News Corp and True Crime Australia, began.
By June, it has been downloaded more than three million times.
Drawing on police investigators and the tips of the ever expanding audience, the podcast yielded almost immediate results.
Women in Correll’s past were terrified of him. Some of them braved those fears to share their stories. They recited a familiar pattern – of being lavished in gifts and gestures before the relationship darkened.
One girlfriend told the podcast about the night she feared he would hurt her, and the threats – to both her and her child – after she ended the relationship.
A rape victim told of the moment when the man she identified as Correll held a knife to her throat – in her own home – and threatened to hurt her young children.
“It was just like he’d done it before,” she said. “Do this. Do that. Get in the shower.”
Another woman, also contacted through newspaper classifieds in the early 1980s, recounted how her quick wits thwarted what was almost certainly going to be a sexual attack.
Correll’s second wife told the podcast about the time he threatened to kill her and dismember her body.
“It’s like he’s got a dark passenger or something living inside him and the switch clicks and the dark passenger takes over,” she said.
His daughter described a father who could seem kind and cruel in the same instant. She spoke of the moment when another of her father’s lies convinced her that Correll had killed Rachelle.
The initial police investigation was botched. Much evidence was irretrievably lost.
Correll had provided an oddly detailed alibi for the hours after Rachelle went missing. But authorities could never verify and disprove any aspect of the alibi.
Dear Rachelle presented Australia’s pre-eminent phone data expert, Dr Matthew Sorell, who applied state-of-the-art technology to show that Correll could not have been where he said he had been in the hour after he left work on June 7, 2001.
Correll’s death at 69, announced on Sunday, will inspire few tears to fall.
He could be a doting grandfather. He once sought to impress women with his attentiveness.
But Correll was defined by his reptilian impulses. “It was an act,” one of his partners once said. “It was always an act.”
On Sunday, Correll’s daughter felt sad for his victims. Kristy, with accustomed grace, offered sympathy for his family.
Correll’s loss will lighten the fear he instilled in so many people.
He can’t hurt anyone anymore.
But there are unanswered questions. The search for justice may have ended, at least insofar as the prime suspect in Rachelle’s death cannot be sentenced to prison.
But perhaps others were involved in Rachelle’s killing.
And the search for the truth – Rachelle’s truth – is ongoing. Dear Rachelle’s commitment to those answers remains undimmed.
Perhaps those people who know something about Rachelle’s death have been freed by Correll’s departure. Certainly, they no longer need to navigate the perils of Correll’s wrath.
For more information about our investigation, visit dearachelle.com.au
If you have any tips or confidential information, please contact investigative journalist Ashlea Hansen at dearrachelle@news.com.au.
You can also join our Dear Rachelle podcast Facebook group.
More Coverage
Originally published as How Dear Rachelle podcast helped revive interest in a cold case
Mystery woman seen with Rachelle Childs’ suspect before death
The prime suspect in the cold case murder of Rachelle Childs went to a bar with an unidentified woman, before he was found dead in his three-star hotel room in Thailand. See hotel photos.
Shock way Rachelle Childs’ family found out prime suspect was dead
Despite the decades-long investigation to find Rachelle Childs’ killer, her family was not contacted by the police to say the chief suspect in her murder had died in a hotel room in Thailand.