It began as a tip off from a friend. In the 1950s and 60s regional New South Wales had been home to the world's only homosexual prison.
It wasn't a lot to go on, but it was enough to pique the interest of Canberra-based documentary maker Simon Cunich and journalist Patrick Abboud.
And so off they went, digging through records trying to find some sort of evidence to support this gay prison experiment - with very little details to guide the way.
The search would eventually become the basis for the duo's new Audible podcast, The Greatest Menance - in which Abboud voices and Cunich co-produces.
"Sometimes we could spend a week looking through boxes of files, and just find nothing," Cunich said.
"We spent a lot of time trawling through archives, sometimes unsuccessfully, but then you just have the these moments of discovery that will push everything forward.
"But as the story unfolded it became clearer what we needed to look for. There was a missing document at the heart of this story and there's a lot of time looking for a missing document that we thought would hold answers to what happened inside the prison.
"And then the other side to the research was trying to find people with some living memory of this story. The podcast centres on events that took place in the 50s and 60s. Could we find a prisoner who was there became the big question."
After what felt like endless research, there it was. The piece of information that they were looking for.
An interview with someone who had been arrested for homosexual offences at the time but had avoided jail time, gave the duo their first lead as to where to look. The place they were looking for was Cooma jail.
"I was surprised that I hadn't heard about it and the town where this prison is located is somewhere I've spent quite a bit of time," Cunich said.
"It's a bit of history, you'd expect us all to know, it's such a significant part of our history that we're just totally unaware of. It's not all that long ago. But a lot of these stories just haven't been recorded in a way.
"We realised that part of the history of this prison, had been re-remembered. And in a way the story had been distorted in people's memories into something much more benign than it really was."
From there, the story - which had been largely unknown publicly until now - started to unravel, revealing why the prison had been set up and what exactly happened inside.
And it's a story that, while decades old, still reverberates today.
"You look at the debate we're having at the moment about discrimination against gay and trans students," Cunich said.
"This stuff isn't history, it continues to unfold. And what happened in this prison I think is another piece of the puzzle that led us to this.
"And when I first approached Pat about this story, for him, it was personal. He knew that this prison and legacy left had shaped his life. And that's something that we explored in the podcast."
