Mandy Matney is tired. It is late November, and she is busy finishing up the 69th episode of her podcast Murdaugh Murders, a true-crime investigation she began in 2019, and which has now evolved into a complex puzzle of unsolved deaths, insurance fraud, drugs, power and murder. The previous day, a jury in Charleston, South Carolina delivered the first guilty verdict related to the case, and Matney was of course there to cover it. “It was super exciting, and really felt like a huge sigh of relief,” she says. “It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.”
Hedley Thomas knows this feeling well. Earlier this year, he experienced a similar vindication when his 2018 podcast series The Teacher’s Pet led to the conviction of former high school PE teacher Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife, Lynette, who disappeared from the couple’s Sydney home 40 years ago. For the past year, Thomas has also been reporting on the murder of another Queensland woman, Shandee Blackburn, and the failings of a DNA laboratory, in Shandee’s Story.
When we speak, it is the morning after he has been a speaker at a Women in Media event in Brisbane, where the audience were dedicated fans of his podcasts. “They admitted that they were fangirling,” Thomas says, looking bemused, “which is a fairly novel thing for someone in my position.”
Matney and Thomas are part of a wave of true-crime podcasters who have moved the genre from historical storytelling and into a vital new form of investigative journalism, shedding light on cold cases, wrongful convictions and broader injustices. Their successes have joined those of Serial, which helped overturn the conviction of Adnan Syed, a Baltimore man who spent 23 years in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, and In the Dark, which helped free Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who was tried six times for the same crime, and also spent 23 years in jail. In California, the Your Own Backyard podcast was instrumental in reopening the investigation into the 1996 disappearance of student Kristin Smart; in October, Paul Flores was found guilty of her murder.
These podcasts have not only proved hugely popular – Matney notes that Murdaugh Murders has just gone above 45m downloads – they also offer glimmers of hope that legions of unsolved crimes, murders and disappearances could be solved given similar attention. But they also raise questions: why has it fallen to podcasters to take up the work of police investigators? And how might this new era of sleuthing affect the legal process?
From their homes in South Carolina and Brisbane, Matney and Thomas discuss the highs and lows of their podcasting experiences, and where the medium may head next.
You both have years of investigative print and online journalism under your belts – Mandy, at publications such as FITSNews and the Island Packet, Hedley at the Australian and the Courier-Mail. What made you move into podcasting and what has the medium given you that print does not?
Mandy Matney I wanted to do a podcast ever since I listened to the first episode of Serial; I was probably 25 at the time, I was young in my career. I listened to that episode and it just changed my idea of storytelling, and changed the way that I thought about journalism.
Then, for two years, I was investigating a boat crash in South Carolina that killed a young girl, and it was pretty much only followed locally; that’s the only people that cared about it. But then the kid who was accused of driving the boat was suddenly murdered, along with his mom, in June of 2021. And that got the whole world’s attention: swarms and swarms of media covered this case, and they were all getting the story wrong; they were making it look like this powerful family [of the boat driver] had to be the victims, and somebody from this boat crash was taking advantage of them.
And basically, I cared so much about getting the story straight. I realised that true-crime podcasts are super popular, and I realised that my work in print journalism was not going to reach the number of people that my competitors would, no matter what I did. I thought: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will, and they’re going to do it the wrong way.”
Hedley Thomas I too had listened to Serial, and I felt it was compelling but also frustrating at times. But I was definitely riveted by the idea of a podcast series. I decided I wanted to do something that would be harder and much more challenging than anything I’d tried before in journalism. My wife was listening to so many podcasts, she said: “Look, you love the sound of your own voice. Why don’t you have a crack?”
So then it came to working out what sort of story would be justified: what was a case that I had thought about for some time that I might be able to make a difference in? And probably just like Mandy, I don’t want to take on cases that are solved, and can be reheated, with some new bells and whistles. If you’re going to put in that much effort, you want to go for a cold case that hasn’t been solved.
This case of Lynette Dawson’s disappearance was the one that I really had been troubled by since 2001. I first reported on it as a much younger newspaper reporter. And it struck me as a likely case of murder involving a man who’d become completely obsessed, infatuated with this teenage schoolgirl whom he moved into the house to be the family’s babysitter. He disrespected his wife and family so much that he was sleeping with the babysitter in the spare room after giving his wife alcohol so she would fall asleep. And then after his wife disappears, and the babysitter moves into the family home, becomes a sex slave and a stepmother, everyone carries on as normal in this beautiful part of northern Sydney near the beach. And so the fact that case hadn’t been solved really bugged me.
I think the best podcasts probably come from a purpose that the storyteller feels. And I think listeners hear that. They hear the authenticity, the righteous indignation, of the storyteller as they’re going through it. You need to be fairly invested. And it sounds like Mandy has been really invested as well.
MM Yes, definitely. This case is my very weird baby that I don’t know if I like sometimes but I care about it so much. But on the other side of that, what I was told in journalism school was: “Rule number one: stay out of the story.” So it’s confusing, when you really do care. I’ve developed friendships and real relationships with a lot of the victims.
The other thing with podcasting that’s been so overwhelmingly positive is just the reach that you can get with in-depth journalism. I mean, I worked in newspapers before but I have never seen this reach, or people that pay such serious attention to every detail of a one-hour podcast. People really do care about this, and they’ll get behind you and root for you.
So it’s been hard, but I’m glad that I tugged at the strings years ago, not knowing that they would expose this giant spider web of crimes.
As true-crime podcasts such as yours have helped bring about exposure, convictions and, in some cases, the overturning of convictions, they’ve also drawn criticism from some quarters, including the suggestion that they can pervert the course of justice. Do you think that’s fair?
HT Chris Dawson was arrested and charged with murder at the start of December 2018, as we were bringing out what was going to be the final episode of The Teacher’s Pet. Police had been following up a number of witnesses who talked to me in the podcast series and obtaining their evidence and statements.
[When Dawson went to trial] the director of public prosecutions wrote to our editor-in-chief, and we agreed to remove the podcast series in Australia – in the same way that a book could be withdrawn if its publication coincided with someone’s trial and the book was all about the accused. But it continued to play around the world and has done, uninterrupted.
Chris Dawson fought tooth and nail to avoid going to trial. His argument was that he couldn’t get a fair trial because everybody who listened to the podcast believed that he was guilty. We were put under enormous scrutiny. All of my audio recordings, text messages, WhatsApp messages, Facebook Messenger, everything ended up being the subject of a subpoena. We were handing over huge amounts of material and then submitting to be cross-examined by Chris Dawson’s silk in a supreme court proceeding.
Along the way, the judges who represented the institution of criminal justice in Australia would give me or the podcast a whack, not arguing that we made any mistakes, but that this man and his alleged crime had been unpacked in such detail that it was, as one judge said, “The most egregious interference in the criminal justice system that the court had seen.”
It just shows me how out of touch some people in the system still are in relation to the terrible trauma, pain, frustration suffered by victims of crime. The institutions had utterly failed for almost 40 years: larger organisations, police, prosecutors and courts have been found wanting or have utterly and hopelessly and egregiously failed to do their jobs properly. But, you know, let’s give journalism a bit of a kicking on the way through.
MM I can’t believe your podcast was pulled! You’re reminding me that there are some good things in the United States – granted, some states have better laws for journalists than others. But for the most part, that would never happen in the United States. And I think you hit the nail on the head: all these people should have done their jobs years ago. That’s where I’m at, too. I’ve uncovered crimes that should have been uncovered a decade ago.
It will be interesting to see what the legal system across the world does with this. In the United States, the laws are really designed around the internet not existing. With this murder trial coming up, there’s no place in South Carolina that you’re going to get a jury that hasn’t heard of this, but you could get a jury of people that will be able to look at the facts and be able to make an unbiased decision. I do think laws need to catch up with the times – and nobody saw podcasts coming.
A lot of your listeners are, in fact, strikingly well informed, and invested in your cases. What do you think the appeal is for them, and particularly for female listeners, who make up a large proportion of the true-crime podcast listenership?
MM In the last year and a half of really being in the universe of true crime, I’ve noticed that it’s almost like a sport for women – or not a sport, because they do express empathy for the victims and are able to do this all in a respectful way. But when we have YouTube broadcast a few of the court proceedings live, we have noticed that it’s mostly women [watching] and it’s like they want to root for their team, and talk to the other fans about the inner workings. I’m sure with your case, Hedley, you’ve seen Facebook groups and Reddit threads break out, with all these people getting to know each other because they’re all obsessed with the same thing. And I think that people really love that human connection – it makes you a part of a community.
HT The three major cold case murder investigations I’ve done have all revolved round women who were missing, almost certainly murdered, and one very brutally murdered. And it’s undoubtedly true that most of the listeners are women. The theory that I have, and it’s been informed by women talking to me about what they get out of podcasts, is that a lot of them are doing it out of a sense of self-preservation. My wife said to me: “You’ll never know what it’s like to be leaving work at night and holding your keys between your fingers like a weapon, in case you are assaulted.” And that is something that women have had to learn to do. So they are wanting to better understand the drivers for homicide, whether it’s partner homicide or stranger homicide. They are wanting to better understand the red flags that tell of a narcissistic or sociopathic, predatory male. From these very long series they are being counselled, educated, given so much information where they would not necessarily have got it from the other forms of media, at least not in the same powerful way.
MM Another thing that I found in all of this is you get emails all the time: “I need help here. Please come here and investigate this … ” There’s a huge need for deep-dive investigative journalism around the world because the police aren’t doing their jobs. The government in general isn’t doing its job. And, oh my gosh, there are so many unsolved murders around the world.
