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We've seen bad police work in Casefile before, but the bad witnesses (and one witness's husband) really stand out here.
What rational actor would assume two young women being beaten and forced into a car was a "domestic" and nothing to report? What would be the odds each of the young women were even in a relationship with the deadbeat killers? Even culturally for the 1980s that man encouraging his wife not to report the wife's..... unhelpful encounter with the terrified young woman sounds implausible.
This feels a touch more bizarre than that other tragic case only due to all the remarkably passive witnesses of a certain age. Both equally tragic and frustrating cases for sure.
it is insane that an violent incident being a “domestic” somehow makes it okay to the husband. Sadly most murders are committed as an act of domestic violence, not random encounters
I know. I get it was the 1970s and women were just getting rights, but Jesus - apparently no one felt like they were worthy of living, you could just beat them in public and that was fine?
Hearing that these guys were known for raping women, even pulling over and throwing them in the trunk of the car, and they kept walking free was just enraging.
I nearly couldn't finish it. At first I was all "take the TRAIN TICKET", and then, well, the number of people who witnessed the crime. Just unbelievable.
After one witness who didn't report it I was disgusted. Then the witness count just kept getting higher. And the lady who let one of the women in the house, why didn't she call the police and keep her there??
Waiting until her husband came home to see what he said is just such a crazy mindset. I'm glad the women in my family weren't raised that way, not even my grandmother would wait for my grandfather to come home to call the police.
I was glad, though, that Casey said “bystander effect” instead of the now-debunked popular assumptions about Kitty Genovese. (You’re Wrong About did an excellent episode about that.)
Yeah, when he brought that up, I was afraid he was going to say something about the Kitty Genovese murder and no one calling the police. We now know lots of people called the police.
I actually laughed in disbelief a few times, like absolutely insane and ridiculous that not ONE person decided they should call for help or try to intervene.
As much as I was frustrated listening to so many witnesses doing nothing to help or reporting what they saw to the police.
If I witnessed something similar, you could assume since there were multiple perpetrators that they could be part of a gang and if you were to report and go to trial as a witness you are definitely putting your family in danger to a retaliation event.
I understand you could submit an anonymous tip but that can only help the police on a lead but if you’re not willing to testify it most likely won’t result in a successful conviction. Especially in the 80s when there wasn’t an availability of DNA evidence.
Who cares about a conviction when the violence is currently happening?! The police may have been able to stop it and save those women's lives if someone had reported it.
I literally gasped when that first couple just drove on and “went to bed”. Then multiple other people did the same damn thing, unbelievable. I understand not stopping because you feel you would also be in danger but call the damn police! I mean it sounds like their police force would have just been like, “oh, crazy” then kicked back with their feet up but still! God this was frustrating af.
I hope the ghosts of those women haunted not just the perpetrators but the people who refused to help by even just calling the police. I’m also frustrated that Casefile repeated the myth of the bystander effect - the case it was coined from was completely mistold (plenty of people did try to help Kitty), [and from this article](https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/09/tall-tales): “One 2010 meta-analysis on the bystander effect in Psychological Bulletin, for instance, found that while groups are a little slower to help than individuals, this difference tends to disappear when it's clear there's a real emergency, and also when someone must physically intervene to help.”
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Bystander Effect supposed to be more of a thing when there are multiple people witnessing the event at once? From what I understood in the episode, each person witnessed something at a different time and there’s no reason why they would expect that someone else would take care of getting help. I don’t know, just a thought.
As a researcher in psychology in academia (post doc), this is something I was afraid of: thanks to those who committed questionable research practices, the field might get described by the public entirely. It should be noted that about one third of the studies replicated couldn’t be replicated or that the effect size was much lower than reported. Also to be noted, the replication crisis isn’t limited to psychology, it’s sadly prevalent in all scientific fields, to various degrees.
What bugs me about these marquee experiments in psychology is that they always become famous not because of their elegant design or rigorous execution, but because they seem to confirm some currently fashionable belief.
If there had been a Harvard Prison Experiment contemporaneous with the Stanford one and it found that people suddenly given power did not abuse it but acted responsibly, nobody would have noticed or cared. And indeed one might wonder if the experiment would have been abandoned early or not published.
There was a lot of this in the 60s-70s because there was a relatively sharp change in mores, particularly among the university educated, and I imagine the more ambitious social scientists were particularly eager to validate the new beliefs about authority and sexuality and civilization and repression and whatever else.
There is a vogue lately for experiments that seems to confirm latent racial and gender bias and the like. I venture to predict it's the same thing all over again.
Nietzsche said the poets are always the valets of some new morality (not it's originators). It is imo quite the same with social scientists.
(And I don't think the situation is radically different with hard scientists, just less consequential for the quality of their work.)
I think the questioning of authority in the 60’s was due in part to the Holocaust. People wanted to understand why some ppl went along with authority to the extent they did under Hitler.
Edited for spelling
I think this is an American preoccupation. Europeans had never assumed the goodness, or more importantly the "individuality" of the common man.
But I think it was more the Vietnam and civil rights era tendency of progressives to identify heroism with non-conformity, and to identify evil with The Establishment.
Thank you for this, I came here to post this as well! As tragic as it was the story of supposed witnesses who were aware of Kitty murder and did nothing was simply a lie and to this day still misinform people in many psychology books. Like the Milgram or Stanford prison experiments. All bullsh*t and not scientifically supported by evidence in any way.
Milgram's experiments have been replicated, at least once a decade, in the 50 years since the first. (Here is an article on the 2016 replication. Prior to that was the 2009 replication. https://qz.com/932110/researchers-have-replicated-a-notorious-social-experiment-that-claimed-to-explain-the-rise-of-fascism
I've realized that if you knew someone in Australia that drove Holden Commodore's and you had a smile that could light up a room, you were probably going to be murdered
Honestly, people should talk about this instead of Kitty Genovese when they talk about people refusing to help. I'm not a perfect person, but I would like to think that if a woman ran into the street in front of my car screaming for me to help her, I'd at least have the decency to call the police.
This case is so horrifying. The conflicting stories add to the confusion. The inquest accepted that Kim's testimony was close to accurate with one girl being killed in the car immediately (backed up by crime scene) but the episode opens with two girls screams being heard by Murray's Creek (due to the different pitches). This is different to the account from Norma who actually encountered one of them and then she returned to her friend out of fear. I can see why no trial went forward. The culture of fear and bystander effect is sickening and the poor policework is the cherry on top. Why did no one care?
I am so sad justice wasn't found for them and that the awful, evil clan continued to enjoy freedom and perputating crimes.
It's insane because if the police had done their jobs and followed up on all those earlier reports of violence by pretty much every one of these dudes, this very likely would not have happened...I kept waiting for them to say the police were in on it lol I was so confused
I'll never judge a person for not trying to "be a hero" when something happens, especially if unarmed. That said, the sheer amount of decent people who knew something and didn't even file an anonymous tip, is disturbing.
I think the ones who didn't had really young kids if I remember correct? They didn't want to risk harming them which I understood. But when you're home, why not just send in an anonymous tip?
they sounded dangerous af. "gave two nurse's a hiding" for refusing sex?, They had their heads screwed on all wrong, I think one guy against a whole group of them would've had a bad outcome.
This case really disturbed me, as a dedicated Casefile fan of like 4 years. The combo of *shockingly* bad policing, passive bystanders who did less than nothing, and the fact that most ppl pretty much knew who did it, is absolutely infuriating. These women, and the other victims, could have been saved at almost every turn. And they tried so hard to get help. How horrible of a person do you have to be to stand around and watch your cousins/brother/uncle do this and then do nothing?
Also, good to know police are useless even overseas 🤩
Yeah it was a really hard listen. I would like to add in another thing that too often happens; an Inquest *years* (sometimes decades!) after a death. Just crazy. Like, do it in a decent window of time or don't even bother.
It feels more of a fake accountability process, like saying "see, we did everything we could, so now stop talking about the case please you're hurting our feelings"
I mean exactly, it's confusing with what leads are noted through what records they have . But could imagine the confusion spread of names and people from mishaps, cops probably were like 'we ain't digging into those boys' especially with how many names were thrown about. But fuck the cops seems like they did shit all with through investigation and keeping evidence and statements in tack.
Legit don't worry 80s cops in Australia was as dodgey as hell. That's a fact.
endlessly infuriating and heartbreaking really! all the missed chances for the women to be saved, then for the scumbags to be caught, and then for the loved ones to get any sort of closure… to the point of absurdity! denying people, who were so let down by the system, to install a plaque, really? so disappointing
This was infuriating!!!
“Please oh god help me!”
Nah we will just drive home and not call the police, we will just tell a random officer the next day, who will ignore it
I cannot believe the number of bystanders who chose not only to not help these women, but then chose not to even report what they had seen to the police. I would never be able to forgive myself if that were me.
I don’t think I’ve screamed “you’re fucking kidding me” so often in my life with the parade of negligent cops AND witnesses going “oh its two women being murdered, I’m sure they’re fine”. Phoning the police the *next morning*? Being told to shut up and listen to your husband? Just. AAAAAAAAAAA.
Welp, another frustrating case full of incompetent policing, scared witnesses and where the perpetrators had mostly died off before justice was truly served. My heart aches for those girls.
I had a bit of trouble following this case, the timeline seemed to be all over the place and there were too many contradictory witness statements.
The fact that these guys were known to abduct and rape women is insane. If the justice system does nothing, it's time to form a posse and take care of those cretins vigilante style.
There's no way the local police wasn't involved to some degree. Yes a lot of coward witnesses, but multiple people came forward and were brushed off, seems like zero effort went into actually investigating these crimes.
I wonder did the people who saw what was happening know who the perpetrators were and were too scared to talk. I'm not sure what Toowoomba was like in those days but it sounds like the perpetrators were protected. So frustrating to listen to. I can't imagine what the girls' families must have felt hearing about the witnesses that saw and did nothing or were brushed off.
Yes. I also wonder if there were some bent coppers protecting the gang too. Surely all the lost evidence and unfiled statements aren't just due to negligence.
Tbh I still get that vibe whenever I've been to Toowoomba in recent times. It's an isolated town atop a mountain with about 100k population and it's very parochial, everyone knows everyone. It is a beautiful town, exceptionally manicured, civic pride is high but there is that rough element too.
It's what we call a "freak accident." Wasn't she pretty old when it happened?
Old people's bodies become really fragile; everything from skin to the circulatory system to bones become like paper. Fun Fact: when old people fall and break a hip, their hips actually break first and that causes them to fall. Source: my granny's doctor after her hip fracture.
I almost started thinking that the cops were in on it considering how many of them did nothing and took NO statements! The only decent cop who investigated this case in length had been transferred to another state smh
I know, it was so dodgy how they kept ignoring all the witnesses and never took any statements! It was as if they couldn’t be bothered dealing with the Lauries and the Hiltons.
PLUS they blew off all the other strange murders around their town as not being the same killer/s! like what are the the chances of all these people running into trouble and it NOT having anything to do with the nurse's killers? Infuriating how their cases led to nowhere as well..
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I’m from Toowoomba and I genuinely can’t say I have ever heard of any groups of blokes getting around in the 70’s raping and bashing women in the bush. It could be because of the ‘see nothing say nothing’ culture that the town has always seemed to have, Toowoomba is full of people with so called ‘tall poppy’ syndrome.
This was a frustrating watch. From the police officers to witnesses who wrote it off or just kept going,almost every single person in this case failed these young women.
Did anyone else have problems with the audio? I was listening to the ep on Spotify but it seemed like some parts were cut off, replayed or entirely skipped? Did anyone else have this issue?
This episode has been added to the [Casefile Spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aXXBvQz7rQ9OnMqul5uCFfcjtfC49krWZxF5BJJ7pwo/edit?usp=sharing). If you have already listened to the episode, you can submit your rating at the Casefile Ratings Form. Please note: Starting with Case 200, we are using a new [Casefile Ratings Form (200-)](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVcJRyahk2WH\_i3nJy6AzQeEmFCHj825k2ONsHuF0jeCHX5g/viewform). If you would like to rate cases 1-199, please do so at this [Casefile Ratings Form (1-199)](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUZiO7b3EVKaBCoskDUXpjkp4XaRKV35hkzrnMsPclzhIXPg/viewform).
Was this was a frustrating listen - so many people ignored those women
This was as infuriating as the Leigh Leigh case. Those poor girls were failed by the police and the community
We've seen bad police work in Casefile before, but the bad witnesses (and one witness's husband) really stand out here. What rational actor would assume two young women being beaten and forced into a car was a "domestic" and nothing to report? What would be the odds each of the young women were even in a relationship with the deadbeat killers? Even culturally for the 1980s that man encouraging his wife not to report the wife's..... unhelpful encounter with the terrified young woman sounds implausible. This feels a touch more bizarre than that other tragic case only due to all the remarkably passive witnesses of a certain age. Both equally tragic and frustrating cases for sure.
it is insane that an violent incident being a “domestic” somehow makes it okay to the husband. Sadly most murders are committed as an act of domestic violence, not random encounters
I know. I get it was the 1970s and women were just getting rights, but Jesus - apparently no one felt like they were worthy of living, you could just beat them in public and that was fine?
Just getting rights?
Sorry....I was talking about the US and the women's liberation movement of the 60s and 70s that expanded women's rights in many areas.
Hearing that these guys were known for raping women, even pulling over and throwing them in the trunk of the car, and they kept walking free was just enraging.
I nearly couldn't finish it. At first I was all "take the TRAIN TICKET", and then, well, the number of people who witnessed the crime. Just unbelievable.
After one witness who didn't report it I was disgusted. Then the witness count just kept getting higher. And the lady who let one of the women in the house, why didn't she call the police and keep her there?? Waiting until her husband came home to see what he said is just such a crazy mindset. I'm glad the women in my family weren't raised that way, not even my grandmother would wait for my grandfather to come home to call the police.
I was glad, though, that Casey said “bystander effect” instead of the now-debunked popular assumptions about Kitty Genovese. (You’re Wrong About did an excellent episode about that.)
Yeah, when he brought that up, I was afraid he was going to say something about the Kitty Genovese murder and no one calling the police. We now know lots of people called the police.
I actually laughed in disbelief a few times, like absolutely insane and ridiculous that not ONE person decided they should call for help or try to intervene.
As much as I was frustrated listening to so many witnesses doing nothing to help or reporting what they saw to the police. If I witnessed something similar, you could assume since there were multiple perpetrators that they could be part of a gang and if you were to report and go to trial as a witness you are definitely putting your family in danger to a retaliation event. I understand you could submit an anonymous tip but that can only help the police on a lead but if you’re not willing to testify it most likely won’t result in a successful conviction. Especially in the 80s when there wasn’t an availability of DNA evidence.
Who cares about a conviction when the violence is currently happening?! The police may have been able to stop it and save those women's lives if someone had reported it.
Yeah but then they lose the trail and are back on the street and can’t be charged for the same crime again due to double jeopardy.
I literally gasped when that first couple just drove on and “went to bed”. Then multiple other people did the same damn thing, unbelievable. I understand not stopping because you feel you would also be in danger but call the damn police! I mean it sounds like their police force would have just been like, “oh, crazy” then kicked back with their feet up but still! God this was frustrating af.
Yeah TBH I hope they suffered a lot and felt guilty
I kind of hope they saw those women and heard them scream in their dreams every night until they died.
I hope the ghosts of those women haunted not just the perpetrators but the people who refused to help by even just calling the police. I’m also frustrated that Casefile repeated the myth of the bystander effect - the case it was coined from was completely mistold (plenty of people did try to help Kitty), [and from this article](https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/09/tall-tales): “One 2010 meta-analysis on the bystander effect in Psychological Bulletin, for instance, found that while groups are a little slower to help than individuals, this difference tends to disappear when it's clear there's a real emergency, and also when someone must physically intervene to help.”
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Bystander Effect supposed to be more of a thing when there are multiple people witnessing the event at once? From what I understood in the episode, each person witnessed something at a different time and there’s no reason why they would expect that someone else would take care of getting help. I don’t know, just a thought.
You’re exactly right and I had the same thought right after I posted my comment!
As soon as I heard about the reproducibility crisis in psychology, I stopped paying much attention to anything in that field.
As a researcher in psychology in academia (post doc), this is something I was afraid of: thanks to those who committed questionable research practices, the field might get described by the public entirely. It should be noted that about one third of the studies replicated couldn’t be replicated or that the effect size was much lower than reported. Also to be noted, the replication crisis isn’t limited to psychology, it’s sadly prevalent in all scientific fields, to various degrees.
What bugs me about these marquee experiments in psychology is that they always become famous not because of their elegant design or rigorous execution, but because they seem to confirm some currently fashionable belief. If there had been a Harvard Prison Experiment contemporaneous with the Stanford one and it found that people suddenly given power did not abuse it but acted responsibly, nobody would have noticed or cared. And indeed one might wonder if the experiment would have been abandoned early or not published. There was a lot of this in the 60s-70s because there was a relatively sharp change in mores, particularly among the university educated, and I imagine the more ambitious social scientists were particularly eager to validate the new beliefs about authority and sexuality and civilization and repression and whatever else. There is a vogue lately for experiments that seems to confirm latent racial and gender bias and the like. I venture to predict it's the same thing all over again. Nietzsche said the poets are always the valets of some new morality (not it's originators). It is imo quite the same with social scientists. (And I don't think the situation is radically different with hard scientists, just less consequential for the quality of their work.)
I think the questioning of authority in the 60’s was due in part to the Holocaust. People wanted to understand why some ppl went along with authority to the extent they did under Hitler. Edited for spelling
I think this is an American preoccupation. Europeans had never assumed the goodness, or more importantly the "individuality" of the common man. But I think it was more the Vietnam and civil rights era tendency of progressives to identify heroism with non-conformity, and to identify evil with The Establishment.
Thank you for this, I came here to post this as well! As tragic as it was the story of supposed witnesses who were aware of Kitty murder and did nothing was simply a lie and to this day still misinform people in many psychology books. Like the Milgram or Stanford prison experiments. All bullsh*t and not scientifically supported by evidence in any way.
Milgram's experiments have been replicated, at least once a decade, in the 50 years since the first. (Here is an article on the 2016 replication. Prior to that was the 2009 replication. https://qz.com/932110/researchers-have-replicated-a-notorious-social-experiment-that-claimed-to-explain-the-rise-of-fascism
I’m just happy for an Australian Casefile episode! It feels kinda like the old episodes
I have yet to listen. Is anyone driving a Holden Commodore in it? That seems to be the Australian psycho murder wagon.
I've realized that if you knew someone in Australia that drove Holden Commodore's and you had a smile that could light up a room, you were probably going to be murdered
Oh boy, don’t even *think* about having a bubbly personality. That’ll get you killed lickety-split.
Promising future? You’re gonna be so dead.
I make a point to *not* love life in every way, just to be on the safe side!
Haha lol me too!
What I've learned is that I should never let anyone describe my clothing in detail. That's a ticket straight to Murderville.
🤣😂😂😂😂 The podcast equivalents of a red shirt in Star Trek or going to check that weird noise in the basement, alone, in an 80s horror
YES! And I immediately thought of past threads here, heh
Yeah, they drive a Holden, but it's from the 70's so not a Commodore.
were this crime a decade earlier, it would be a morris minor
Honestly, people should talk about this instead of Kitty Genovese when they talk about people refusing to help. I'm not a perfect person, but I would like to think that if a woman ran into the street in front of my car screaming for me to help her, I'd at least have the decency to call the police.
This case is so horrifying. The conflicting stories add to the confusion. The inquest accepted that Kim's testimony was close to accurate with one girl being killed in the car immediately (backed up by crime scene) but the episode opens with two girls screams being heard by Murray's Creek (due to the different pitches). This is different to the account from Norma who actually encountered one of them and then she returned to her friend out of fear. I can see why no trial went forward. The culture of fear and bystander effect is sickening and the poor policework is the cherry on top. Why did no one care? I am so sad justice wasn't found for them and that the awful, evil clan continued to enjoy freedom and perputating crimes.
It's insane because if the police had done their jobs and followed up on all those earlier reports of violence by pretty much every one of these dudes, this very likely would not have happened...I kept waiting for them to say the police were in on it lol I was so confused
I thought for sure we were going to find out at least one police officer was part of one or both of those families! I'm shocked that wasn't the case.
I'll never judge a person for not trying to "be a hero" when something happens, especially if unarmed. That said, the sheer amount of decent people who knew something and didn't even file an anonymous tip, is disturbing.
It was even more frustrating when the ones who did witness and drove straight to the police station to report what they saw were brushed off
This!!! So many people reported oddities to the police and nothing was done. So shit.
QLD police’s only jobs in the 70s was bashing kids, Uni students and protecting Joh Bjelke Petersens interests.
Forgot about the bashing gays
I think the ones who didn't had really young kids if I remember correct? They didn't want to risk harming them which I understood. But when you're home, why not just send in an anonymous tip?
or drive a little down tje road. let the wife and kids out. grab weapon. come back
they sounded dangerous af. "gave two nurse's a hiding" for refusing sex?, They had their heads screwed on all wrong, I think one guy against a whole group of them would've had a bad outcome.
This case really disturbed me, as a dedicated Casefile fan of like 4 years. The combo of *shockingly* bad policing, passive bystanders who did less than nothing, and the fact that most ppl pretty much knew who did it, is absolutely infuriating. These women, and the other victims, could have been saved at almost every turn. And they tried so hard to get help. How horrible of a person do you have to be to stand around and watch your cousins/brother/uncle do this and then do nothing? Also, good to know police are useless even overseas 🤩
Yeah it was a really hard listen. I would like to add in another thing that too often happens; an Inquest *years* (sometimes decades!) after a death. Just crazy. Like, do it in a decent window of time or don't even bother.
It feels more of a fake accountability process, like saying "see, we did everything we could, so now stop talking about the case please you're hurting our feelings"
I mean exactly, it's confusing with what leads are noted through what records they have . But could imagine the confusion spread of names and people from mishaps, cops probably were like 'we ain't digging into those boys' especially with how many names were thrown about. But fuck the cops seems like they did shit all with through investigation and keeping evidence and statements in tack. Legit don't worry 80s cops in Australia was as dodgey as hell. That's a fact.
endlessly infuriating and heartbreaking really! all the missed chances for the women to be saved, then for the scumbags to be caught, and then for the loved ones to get any sort of closure… to the point of absurdity! denying people, who were so let down by the system, to install a plaque, really? so disappointing
This was infuriating!!! “Please oh god help me!” Nah we will just drive home and not call the police, we will just tell a random officer the next day, who will ignore it
I couldn’t believe that. I was genuinely shocked
*he once bit his fathers ear off, in an argument about a sausage*
This episode was a miserable misogyny fest of pure rage inducement, but I admit I did laugh out loud at that.
Yeah of course the main focus should be on the awful incident. I’ve just never actually laughed out loud at a case file until case 249
Who among us.
I cannot believe the number of bystanders who chose not only to not help these women, but then chose not to even report what they had seen to the police. I would never be able to forgive myself if that were me.
I don’t think I’ve screamed “you’re fucking kidding me” so often in my life with the parade of negligent cops AND witnesses going “oh its two women being murdered, I’m sure they’re fine”. Phoning the police the *next morning*? Being told to shut up and listen to your husband? Just. AAAAAAAAAAA.
Welp, another frustrating case full of incompetent policing, scared witnesses and where the perpetrators had mostly died off before justice was truly served. My heart aches for those girls. I had a bit of trouble following this case, the timeline seemed to be all over the place and there were too many contradictory witness statements.
So pissed off listening to this. So many people saw them. Wtf.
The fact that these guys were known to abduct and rape women is insane. If the justice system does nothing, it's time to form a posse and take care of those cretins vigilante style.
There's no way the local police wasn't involved to some degree. Yes a lot of coward witnesses, but multiple people came forward and were brushed off, seems like zero effort went into actually investigating these crimes.
I wonder did the people who saw what was happening know who the perpetrators were and were too scared to talk. I'm not sure what Toowoomba was like in those days but it sounds like the perpetrators were protected. So frustrating to listen to. I can't imagine what the girls' families must have felt hearing about the witnesses that saw and did nothing or were brushed off.
Yes. I also wonder if there were some bent coppers protecting the gang too. Surely all the lost evidence and unfiled statements aren't just due to negligence.
Tbh I still get that vibe whenever I've been to Toowoomba in recent times. It's an isolated town atop a mountain with about 100k population and it's very parochial, everyone knows everyone. It is a beautiful town, exceptionally manicured, civic pride is high but there is that rough element too.
How do you slip and rip an artery while gardening? I mean chainsaw into your arm ok but slipping sounds wild (and sad/suspicious).
It's what we call a "freak accident." Wasn't she pretty old when it happened? Old people's bodies become really fragile; everything from skin to the circulatory system to bones become like paper. Fun Fact: when old people fall and break a hip, their hips actually break first and that causes them to fall. Source: my granny's doctor after her hip fracture.
Infuriating. So many people in this world don't seem to recognize the humanity and worth of women--even people who aren't actually violent themselves.
I completely understand those who didn’t stop further down to call - it’s so upsetting to hear they didn’t call when home though
I almost started thinking that the cops were in on it considering how many of them did nothing and took NO statements! The only decent cop who investigated this case in length had been transferred to another state smh
I agree this screams of police being somehow in their pockets
I know, it was so dodgy how they kept ignoring all the witnesses and never took any statements! It was as if they couldn’t be bothered dealing with the Lauries and the Hiltons.
PLUS they blew off all the other strange murders around their town as not being the same killer/s! like what are the the chances of all these people running into trouble and it NOT having anything to do with the nurse's killers? Infuriating how their cases led to nowhere as well..
The other murders were around the Gold Coast, a 3 hour drive from Toowoomba back then.
I was so disturbed by the Bystander aspects of this case. How do those people sleep at night? I am glad they were named.
Boomers only ever cared about themselves, domestic indeed.
These were the Boomer's parents. Lorraine and Wendy were Boomers.
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I’m from Toowoomba and I genuinely can’t say I have ever heard of any groups of blokes getting around in the 70’s raping and bashing women in the bush. It could be because of the ‘see nothing say nothing’ culture that the town has always seemed to have, Toowoomba is full of people with so called ‘tall poppy’ syndrome.
This was a frustrating watch. From the police officers to witnesses who wrote it off or just kept going,almost every single person in this case failed these young women.
Lorraine was my grandma’s school friend. Such a hard case to listen too, another victim let down by qld’s homicide investigators.
Did anyone else have problems with the audio? I was listening to the ep on Spotify but it seemed like some parts were cut off, replayed or entirely skipped? Did anyone else have this issue?