Shandee’s story to grip the nation

As he did in two earlier crime podcast series, The Teacher’s Pet and The Night Driver, The Australian’s national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas, will breathe new life into an unsolved murder in a new podcast series, Shandee’s Story. It starts on Friday. Shandee Blackburn was 23 in February 2013 when she was walking home after a Friday night shift at Mackay’ s Harrup Park Country Club – a job she liked – in the central Queensland city. She was close to the central business district and within sight of the townhouse she shared with her mother. CCTV captured a figure running hard towards her and then away. Shandee had no chance of surviving the frenzied attack. The horror was felt by so many, but of course no more so than Shandee’s family.

Two suspects came to dominate police investigations – Shandee’s former boyfriend John Peros and a local criminal, William Daniel. Over the course of the series, Hedley Thomas will explore whether there was another possibility who may have gotten away with murder through a mistaken focus on the wrong men? Shandee’s family are still desperate for answers. They deserve to know what happened to Shandee and why. Her mother, Vicki, hopes the series will draw out new evidence that might lead to the identification and arrest of her daughter’s killer.

The Australian takes investigative journalism seriously and revisiting crimes, sometimes long forgotten by most, can lead to significant breakthroughs. Dan Box’s Walkley Award-winning investigation into the murders of three Indigenous children within months of each other in 1990 and 1991 at Bowraville in the NSW mid-north coast hinterland was one example but there are many others, including national crime correspondent David Murray’s investigations into former hospitality high-flyer Warren McCorriston as a person of interest in the suspected murders of Amanda Robinson, 14, and Robyn Hickie, 18, in NSW more than 40 years ago. He was arrested in January last year over separate historic sexual assaults against three women in the NSW Hunter region between 1979 and 1997 and was jailed for 8½ years.

Over the course of Hedley Thomas’s latest investigation, through the pages of The Australian, and in a spectacularly produced podcast, we hope to bring new focus to this horrific crime.

We hope to help a family not only get closure but justice. With the help of our readers, we will explore questions that have remained unanswered for too long.