‘There are so many unsolved murders’: the true-crime podcasters reviving cold cases
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
