Missing Australian women dismissed as ‘runaways’ could be victims of murder
Teachers Pet podcast host Hedley Thomas reveals why he thinks missing Australian women dismissed as “runaways” could be victims of murder to Gary Jubelin. Listen to the podcast.
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Missing Australian women who have been dismissed as “runaways” could in fact be victims of murder, the creator of The Teachers’ Pet podcast said.
Hedley Thomas gained a worldwide following after his award-winning investigation and blockbuster podcast into the death of Lyn Dawson, who was killed by her husband Chris Dawson.
The podcast exposed failings in the initial investigation into Mrs Dawson’s disappearance - and Thomas said there could well be similar cases.
He told former New South Wales homicide Detective Gary Jubelin in the I Catch Killers podcast police had failed to properly investigate domestic murders in the past.
“Very violent husbands like Chris Dawson have got away with many murders”, Thomas said.
Thomas said flaws in the police inquiries meant it was left to desperate family members to push police and spark media interest in an attempt to get justice and solve the mystery of what happened to their loved ones.
“Unless the family [of murder victims] are pushing or the media have got interested in it, invariably it just sits there,” Thomas said.
Mr Jubelin said cases could be overlooked.
“Often missing persons can just fall through the cracks and it‘s not followed up,” he said.
Thomas told Jubelin with homicide detectives overworked, cases where there is no body, forensic evidence or a witness would often go cold.
It’s human nature to work on cases that are “more likely to be solved”, with the harder cases “going to the bottom of the pile”, he said.
Thomas shared for the first time in his memoir ‘The Teacher‘s Pet’, his own struggles with the unsolved disappearance of his grandmother in 1956, fuelling his personal interest in the Dawson case.
“I was invested in it because my grandmother disappeared.
“When someone just disappears, that black hole, that mystery and always that little bit of hope that maybe the person will reappear,” he said.
“This is what happened in Lyn‘s family… they all for at least the first eight years, clung to this hope that Lyn would come back”, he said.
Listen to the new episode on the I Catch Killers podcast here.
Originally published as Missing Australian women dismissed as ‘runaways’ could be victims of murder
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