Tearing off a piece of paper from the teleprinter, my jaw fell open. ‘How much? I gasped. ‘How old?’
As a young news reporter in 1978, I was fascinated by the story of two American retirees, Vera Todd Hays, then 59, and Florice Bessire, 61, who had been arrested for smuggling 1.9 tonnes of drugs into Australia stashed in a campervan.
They’d been caught in the largest drug bust in Australian history, but they seemed unlikely suspects.
Intrigued, I wrote to the women, better known as Toddie and Beezie, in jail, requesting a
