Why Some Murder Cases Are Never Solved with Andrew Rule

What happens when a veteran crime journalist revisits one of Australia’s most haunting unsolved murders?

In this episode, I sit down with Andrew Rule, one of Australia’s most respected crime reporters and storytellers, to talk about the unsolved murders of Margaret and Seana Tapp. Andrew shares what first drew him to the case decades ago, the troubling missteps in the original investigation, and why this story has continued to stay with him throughout his career.

We explore the complexities of storytelling when real families, reputations, and unanswered questions are involved. Andrew reflects on the ethical responsibility of journalists and podcasters covering true crime, the difference between suspicion and proof, and how human behaviour, relationships, and risk can shape criminal investigations.

As someone who personally knew Seana and Margie, this conversation is deeply personal for me. Together, we discuss how cases can remain unsolved for decades, why witnesses sometimes only speak years later, and the emotional weight carried by families still searching for answers.

Remember; You may not be ready to die, but at least you can be prepared.

Take care,
Catherine

Listen to Andrew's episodes about the Tapp murders:

The Tapp tragedy revisited: Part 1

The Tapp tragedy revisited: Part 2

Connect With Andrew Rule

Read more about his work and life: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/journalists/andrew-rule

Listen to his podcast: Life & Crimes with Andrew Rule https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/life-and-crimes-with-andrew-rule/id1260800644

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In episode 110, we talk to Tim Booth, a paramedic and the best-selling author of You Called an Ambulance for What? and You Went to Emergency for What?  We're giving you a chance to win a copy of his new book, Post-Mortem. To enter, send us a message via Spotify or Apple fan mail on this episode, or leave a comment on our social media. Tell us what stories you'd love to hear, or send us a question you'd like us to put to a future guest. Entries close September 13.

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Transcript

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​[00:00:00] 

Andrew: the forensic laboratory had managed to get a tiny bit of DNA from a different case sort of switch stuff and mix it up, and this guy Geyser, was wrongly accused of the tap murder.

It wasn't him. It never was him. The police jumped the gun. They leaked the story that they were about to make arrest, so that one of my colleagues at the Herald Sun had the exclusive, and it was a great story for about a day, and then it died because it was wrong.

Catherine: Welcome to Don't Be Caught Dead, a podcast encouraging open conversations about dying and the death of a loved one. I'm your host, Catherine Ashton, founder of Critical Info, and I'm helping to bring your stories of death back to life because while you may not be ready to die, at least you can be prepared.

Don't be caught dead. Acknowledges the lands of the Kulin nations and [00:01:00] recognizes their connection to land, sea, and community. We pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nation peoples around the globe.

Catherine: Today, I'm speaking with Andrew Rule. Andrew Rule broke into metropolitan newspapers when he just suggested to the then editor of "The Age," the rival Herald had offered him a job. He has previously worked for , "The Times" and "The Spectator," "The Gippsland Times," and "The Maffra Spectator" in East Gippsland.

Rule went on to cover Some of the most notorious Australian stories of recent decades, and lived to tell the tale. He broke the Jennifer Tanner case, which resulted in an inquest finding being quashed and serving policeman Dennis Tanner being named as the killer by the coroner, resulting in a documentary, "A Death in the Family," going on to [00:02:00] win a Logie and was highly awarded.

Rule has written, edited, and published more than 30 true crime books, including the best-selling "Underbelly" - series with John Silvester, which inspired the television drama on Melbourne's gangland war.

He and Silvester ghosted the "Chopper" books that led to the acclaimed feature film starring - Eric Bana. Andrew is now - an associate editor of Australia's biggest daily newspaper, The Herald Sun, for which he writes features and columns. He wrote the definitive biography of businessman Kerry Stokes, published in 2015, and the award-winning biography of the world champion racehorse Winx in 2018.

He has won many national journalism awards and has been sued almost as often. His hobbies include slow racehorses and cutting firewood. Most of you will actually have listened to his podcast, "Life and Crimes," which is one of News Corp's most listened [00:03:00] to podcasts. Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Andrew.

Andrew: No worries, Catherine. I know that you are very interested in the Tapp case, the - unsolved death of Margaret Tapp and her little girl, Shauna, because you have a personal stake in the story.

Catherine: I do. I was a friend of Shauna's and I was six years of age when she was murdered with her mother, Margie when they were sleeping.

Andrew: Yeah. That was if memory serves me August of 1984 during the LA Olympics as it happens. And I, I remember that because the neighbors told me they were watching the Olympics that night when they heard their little dog barking and so on, which would've been the time of the murder, probably late that evening. 

Catherine: and tell me, what was it that drew you to this story, Andrew?

Andrew: Well, it didn't get a lot of coverage when it [00:04:00] happened, which is one of those sort of strange things. It's not that the newspapers , for which I then worked I was in fact a, a police reporter at the time. They were obviously interested in something like that, but the police really had nowhere to go and nothing to...

They had no real suspects, so they weren't putting pressure on any particular person or aiming their investigation in a particular direction. They also had to contend with the fact that Margaret's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, people that I think you knew, were very respectable, straight-laced, old-fashioned people of a generation that's now disappeared, and that they, I think, saw no upside in know, performing for the cameras for press , media releases and all that sort of stuff.

They didn't, you know, cry for the camera. They didn't do all that dramatic stuff. And I think they thought that the [00:05:00] circumstances of their daughter's death were, you know, dark and shameful, and it worried them, and that nothing they could do, nothing they did would bring her back or their little granddaughter back.

And they were not up for doing lots of interviews or any of that sort of stuff that the media uses to do stories. So the reality of it is that if you gather together the stories that were written at the time over, you know, a week or two, there's only about five stories. They'd fit on two or three full-scape pages.

just never got a lot of traction with the public for that reason, and the police really had no particular suspect. They cast around looking at all sorts of people because, sadly, there were all sorts of people to look at. It was a bit like the Easy Street case where the police had too many suspects, too many potential suspects, and therefore effectively had [00:06:00] none at all.

Catherine: And it's interesting that you say that you know, in the context of the time when we think back to 1984 when it happened, i-if the family wasn't willing to speak, there really was no story to tell, was there?

Andrew: That's absolutely... And it's true today. If something terrible happened to you tomorrow unless your loved ones are prepared to talk about it to the media where, where do you take it after you announce a, you know-- Police would make some announcement. Police would talk about it a bit, but it stops there unless you can interview the people that are closest to it.

And so this, this particular crime, awful as it is, and in many ways it is every bit as awful in most ways as the Easy Street case, but it, it just sort of... it slipped through to the keeper because the media didn't really have a, a strong angle to push, and the family, I think, actively avoided [00:07:00] publicity. if you showed me a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Sr. or Shauna's sister and brother, I wouldn't recognize them You know, they just, they weren't part of the story in 1984, not publicly.

Catherine: And tell me, you, you mentioned a little bit about Margaret's lifestyle that they were concerned about. In reference to how we view that today, can you give that some context and go into that a little bit?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, we're not here to blacken anybody's name or, that sort of stuff, but it may well be that Margaret's parents had misgivings about her choices in life. She had married her husband, Mr. Tapp Don, I think his name was, Don Tapp, who seemed to be a, a nice, quiet, respectable fellow.

Everybody liked him. They had two children. They had a son that was older than Shauna and then Shauna,

Catherine: Yeah, Justin

Andrew: Justin, and they split up, and I think that would've either been instigated by [00:08:00] Margaret herself or as a result of Margaret's inclination to have affairs with various people. And Margaret was a nurse.

She worked at a particular hospital in the Dandenongs, most, most of the time anyway. And it was, you know, it be- it was widely known or became widely known that she conducted affairs with seven doctors and different, various other people. So, her parents may well have been aware of that tendency. The police would soon become aware of it when they were investigating her death.

And the, the problem here is that it opens up the field for suspects. You know, normally when something bad happens, you look very closely at know, husband or a boyfriend or that sort of thing someone that someone's going out with, an intimate partner is the term they use. But in her case, there were a lot of known candidates, but there were also unknown [00:09:00] candidates.

What the police would soon realize was that there were going to be other people on the horizon somewhere just out of the picture who may well uh, any one of whom could have been the guilty party, and it could be the guy that was teaching her to drive a truck.

She would-- She was a funny-- She was a-- She loved life. She liked doing stuff. She wanted to get a truck license so she could go over to South Australia and help one of her boyfriend doctor's brothers on the farm with a truck license. So, she had a truck driving instructor , she was a smart woman.

She was doing law at Monash University, and her aim, commendably, was to get a law degree and then specialize in medical law because she'd been a nurse, and a very good nurse, I think. And she had men friends from university. So i- you know, she was a, a charismatic woman, quite striking in her way.

She clearly caught men's eyes , and vice versa. [00:10:00] And she had a galvanizing effect on men. And I know this from-- I know this well because there is an ABC broadcaster, or, or a former ABC broadcaster, who tells me that her father was an anesthetist who had an affair with Margaret Tapp, and that, was a definitive trauma of her childhood, was this affair that broke up her parents' marriage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. and she said when the murder happened, it sort of happened all over again. Her father was distressed about it. So what we've got here is a situation where the police regardless of what we think of police, and they're not always as efficient as we would hope, and they're often time poor, and they have many distractions and many other jobs to do.

They had too many potential people to track down, and this included, you know, a family who lived in the same street in Ferntree Gully. There was a family there just several doors away that were a big pile of brothers who were rough and tough. I think they went to jail and did this and they were, you [00:11:00] know, naughty boys.

One of the girls was shacked up with a young man in a caravan beside their house. That guy ultimately did time, he did time in jail for rape. Now, the police had so many potential suspects. They didn't even get around to talking to them all. Lindsay is a-- You would've known Lindsay, uh, Margaret's brother.

Catherine: yeah。

Andrew: He told me before, you know, a long time before he died, that, the place. I think he worked on a local council, let's say. And he told me that, you know, he'd moved furniture into Margaret's house for her Into the death house some, you know, a year before her death or whenever it was using a truck that he borrowed from the council and a couple of council workers.

Now he pointed out that those guys would have to be nominally suspects because they'd been there, they'd met Margaret, and so on and so on. One of them had a very hot Falcon ute, a red ute or something with you know, mag wheels and all this sort of stuff. It [00:12:00] turns out that one of the m- many sort of half clues to do with this case was someone saw a red ute parked in the street sometime around the time of the murder.

Now, whether that was a valid clue or not, I don't know, but the interesting thing is the police didn't really follow it up. Lindsay said he was never really followed up properly and that of the guys he worked with were followed up properly, and nobody came to them and checked their DNA later and all that.

So, the police to some extent dropped the ball. it really got off on the wrong foot. The police had too many places to go and people to see. They ultimately did not cover the case properly, and I, I know that Lindsay told me he wasn't DNA tested for, you know, two decades. And therefore, many other people weren't either.

Catherine: And what surprised me was also the link with the police officer that was allowed into the scene the the 

Andrew: yeah, [00:13:00] absolutely. Look, I've written various versions of this story over the years, and each time I've probably thrown up a, a different potential suspect. You know, my favorite idea at that, whatever year it was, and the first one was a, policeman no longer with us, a former policeman, no longer with us, called Ian Cook, and I was tipped off about Ian Cook.

In fact, the reason I wrote the first story was I got this tip-off from a fellow journalist, a, a chap I'd known in Melbourne. I was in Perth on a story, and we had a drink or something, and he said, "I want you to have a look into this tap case back there," and I vaguely remembered it. He said, "Because my brother-in-law is a policeman, and he told me," and he was a good policeman, his brother-in-law, "he told me that police-" Went cold on the whole thing or weren't trying or whatever, something.

Because a serving policeman called Ian Cooke was somehow mixed up in it, and he'd been visited the house to retri- he said to retrieve books that he'd lent to Margaret, and the, the investigating police actually let him into the [00:14:00] property, and he was able to remove books or documents or cards or letters or whatever he'd done.

Now, it turns out this Ian Cooke was possibly a slightly creepy older man. He had first met Margaret when she was a runaway teenager. She'd been a troubled teenager. She'd run away from home. Ian Cooke was the policeman who found her, you know, hiding in St. Kilda or somewhere and took her home to her parents out in the burbs, and he had known her since then, and apparently he used to as a sort of family friend situation.

He might have been a Mason along with, If you, you know what I mean by a Mason? Yeah, Freemason. Along with Mr. Nelson, and therefore the Nelsons trusted him. Possibly he wasn't worthy of that trust. My friend, the journalist in Perth said, "Have a good look at this bloke. There's something spooky about it," da, da, da.

And when I came back, this is back in the, you know, a long time ago, I did have a really good look, and that's when I wrote that first [00:15:00] story on the 20th anniversary of the murder. But since then, there's been others. There's been other potential suspects that I've looked at.

Catherine: And it's interesting that, you know, w- none of us ever live our lives thinking that we're going to end up being a murder victim. And, so it's only when you look at someone's life in

Andrew: Yeah.

Catherine: analyze how their lifestyle is and indicates to. and it's interesting that's something always strikes me when the case comes up and it's being spoken about in in the media again a new podcast, is always that analysis of, you know, Margie and her lifestyle which if we put it in probably today's context, is quite normal.

Andrew: well, more accepted. It was probably... I mean, even now, I would suggest it's probably a bit not quite normal, probably. She was at a small hospital and she'd it was established that she'd had affairs with seven doctors. That's fairly lively. So it opened up a lot of, know, a, big can of worms.[00:16:00] 

It's not what- Perhaps would be normal is, you know, bored divorcee, bored housewife forms attachment for somebody or other, you know, somebody, one person, and that person becomes the focus of the investigation or that person's, you know, brother-in-law or, or something. But there were sort of too many. The potential was big.

And one of The police had to look at all different angles, and one of the angles they looked at in my view, they were wrong, but they, they had to do it. they knew that the house had been bought by a doctor who lived up in the Dandenongs, a married doctor, who'd had a long-term affair with Margaret, and he'd bought the house and sort of rented it to her for perhaps a nominal rental.

And his wife, the doctor's wife, was aware of this, and one of the angles the police pursued was whether that woman, the doctor's wife, the angry, scorned woman, had engaged somehow a [00:17:00] third party, a man they, had in mind, to kill her. Now this is a very strange scene because essentially the murder of Margaret and her daughter was a sex crime, not hit.

They were strangled and, of course, you know, the ick factor, we have to mention this. The truth is that there was semen found on the bedclothes or the nightdress of Shauna, the little girl, not of her mother. Now, what we're looking at here is a, a sex crime. We're looking at someone, a deviant, and a deviant who felt he had to cover up his crime because he was known to both parties.

And that opens up the possibility that it was someone she'd met or knew, such as a doctor, let me say who used to visit there, perhaps on the nights he played tennis. And because as you will know from reading the stories, about the only clue that was left at the house was a footprint left on the kitchen floor or whatever, [00:18:00] I think the kitchen floor, a very clear footprint of a volley sand shoe.

Now, you would recall those volley sand shoes. We all had them back in those days. They had a wriggly sole, a sort of a ripple-type sole with a, very distinct herringbone pattern They were very common. Everybody who played tennis or just walked around the place used them in those days.

A lot of people wore them with, you know, casually with jeans and things. And that think it was an-- I, I forget which size, I'm gonna say a size 11, but I forget. A particular size Volley Sansha print was found in the house, and the police could never line that up with any suspect that they had. I'm saying that there was a doctor she probably knew who did play tennis Were they killed on a Tuesday night or a Wednesday night? Midweek. 

Catherine: I, 

Andrew: was one or the other. And it was, on the nights that they were killed, it was the same night that this particular doctor played tennis with a social group of tennis players at the [00:19:00] Ferny Creek tennis courts, I think it is, which were onto car.

 The red dusty stuff, as opposed to bitumen or, turf. And of course, that's gets on your shoes, and then you leave footprints. it's a very good clue. That man is still alive, and as far as I know, he's still alive, and he's but he's no longer a doctor because he Lost his, practicing certificate because he was convicted for molesting a young girl. Which makes him very, a very interesting suspect. Doesn't mean he did it, but it sort of puts him near the top of the list,

Catherine: And this is a good time to remind anyone that is listening that may know anything, there is a reward out for this particular case. but something that I also want to, sort of mention in relation to this case is during that time, and it was quite common during that period, that also you had the door unlocked as well.

It didn't work, at the back door.

Andrew: yes. The back door didn't lock well. And [00:20:00] we're all a bit casual about these things. It's not true that we didn't lock our doors in the old days. People say that. It's not true because I clearly remember there were many, many locksmiths at work, and they all installed locks, you know, even back when we were children.

And I'm-- I think Margaret's front door was locked, but there was something wrong with the... Was it a sliding door that we came the back and there was, the latch was- Broken. And those people who knew her well or knew her somewhat well, knew that. They could go around the back and get in. Again, as sort of a clue maybe, or maybe whoever it is just came to the front door and she let them in because she knew them.

know, maybe this person dropped in on Tuesday nights, and maybe the attraction was that Margaret had a little girl, had a daughter.

Catherine: And what makes you revisit this, Andrew? What makes you constantly sort of like you, you have that initial conversation with the journalist in Perth, what makes you revisit it 

Andrew: It fascinated [00:21:00] me initially for that reason that this wise old journo, Rex Hore, his name is who is the brother-in-law of a very astute police investigator that I don't really know and would never talk out of school about anything. But I knew of him by his reputation, that they believed that there was something fishy about the whole thing that a serving policeman had sort of been able to evade the net, and that got me very interested in that, aspect of it initially.

But of course, later on I realized that the old ex-policeman, Ian Cooke, now, dead, was by no means the only potential suspect at all. He could just be a, slightly creepy old bloke who used to try his luck with Margaret now and again and, and hang around. That doesn't make him a murderer. And the fact that he'd been allowed to remove papers and documents, it just meant as a favor done by other police because he said, "Look, I don't want to be called into an inquest.

You Nothing really to do with me, but I [00:22:00] don't need to be called to an inquest to be asked how I knew her," and all the rest of it. So they let him take his, letters or whatever it was he'd left there. And later on I got more intrigued by all the other possibilities, and ultimately the doctor one that I just described, I was told about him by a close friend of his children, of the doctor's children, who were estranged from the doctor because he was a monster who'd molested his own kids.

A very charming charismatic, successful man who used his position To prey. He was a sexual predator. He preyed on, you know, women, patients neighbors, and kids. He is a shocker.

Catherine: And this is the same doctor that was convicted.

Andrew: convicted of, one charge but he was guilty of many, and I personally know someone, the daughter of one of his tennis associates, who was a victim of his, although her case never came to court.

Catherine: And it's interesting that point that you make then is the fact that [00:23:00] conviction is very different to guilt where do you, and where do you see yourself sit in that, that storytelling or in that process, Andrew?

Andrew: Well, I guess, one thing about journalism is we don't have to prove cases a court, but I'm saying that, and that's true. However, in this country, in order to say anything very frank, we sort of do have to prove it because unless you are willing if you wanna accuse somebody or imply that someone is guilty of a crime, you really need watertight proof because the legal comeback is enormous.

the defamation laws are heavily weighted to the plaintiff and against the media in Australia, unlike in America, I might point out. It's easier in America to, dig up dirt and point the finger, for better or worse it is. this country, it's not so easy. I think, though, that sometimes we can rake over cases and build a story that can reveal a lot of the truth without actually nailing it down completely.

And over the years [00:24:00] I've had two or three goes at this, and each time I've re-angled it to look at a different potential suspect. I really don't know who did it. know the only time that the police have arrested anybody, they went up to s-Sale Jail, as it was in, or Fulham I'm going to say 15 years ago or something like that, and they arrested a man who was already in jail, a man called Russell Gesah, G-E-S-A-H.

And now, I think he was an islander of some sort. Maybe Torres Strait or whatever. But they said, "Oh, we've got DNA proof connecting you to the Margaret Patt murder." Well, this came as a great surprise to Mr. Russell Gesah, the prisoner, because in that year Or that month when the murders happened, it was clear that he was, you know, somewhere else.

He was in another state and provably so. His alibi was watertight. What had happened was that the police forensic laboratory, and let this be a warning to all of us, the forensic laboratory had managed to get a tiny bit of DNA from a different case sort of switch stuff and mix it up, and [00:25:00] this guy Geyser, was wrongly accused of the tap murder.

It wasn't him. It never was him. The police jumped the gun. They leaked the story that they were about to make arrest, so that one of my colleagues at the Herald Sun had the exclusive, and it was a great story for about a day, and then it died because it was wrong.

Catherine: And being someone that read that story at the time and has that personal connection to the case, I was quite shocked that that was how that unfolded. how is it when you are dealing with some people, as you mentioned, have died, they've since been convicted of crimes you know, some are still living.

When you tell these stories and you revisit these stories, how do you navigate that sensitivity in that storytelling when there is still people that are impacted?

Andrew: Well, it's hard. I mean, I, for some years, I spoke length to Margaret's sister [00:26:00] surviving sister, as well as to her brother. But they'd, fallen out. The brother was... Lindsay was... I'm not sure what the story was. I suspect he was a bit of a lost soul. I suspect he was the classic little brother who, drifted from job to job and didn't work very hard, let's say.

Something like that. And I suspect that his big sister thought that, you know, he borrowed money from his parents and didn't pay it back and then when they died and their estate was left, he complained bitterly because he didn't get, you know, half of what was left because he'd already been given his half and all, all that sort of stuff.

So I was conscious of his feelings. I was conscious of her feelings, the sister's feelings. She was quite an impressive woman Margaret's sister, and you could see in her something of what Margaret's character must have been. I'd, I'd suggest a strong character, articulate. And she wanted to know the truth another one, though.

The police rightly, no doubt, rightly discounted the fact that her then boyfriend, [00:27:00] and later husband, I think, this is the big sister, had been the ones, the one to discover the bodies. Now, he'd come around to-- His story was, he knocked on the door and said, "Where are you?" You know, "It's time to go to..."

Whatever it was. And he noticed that the newspapers were on the doorstep and had not been opened, and he noticed that the curtains were still drawn, the blinds were down. And he went around the back and came in, and I think it was he discovered the bodies, I think. and he called the neighbors and so on, and, and away it went.

Now, there for the police was another potential suspect, and they'd be very keen on him for a little while because someone close to the family who discovers the body is going to be one of the first people you want to eliminate, and they did eliminate that guy. Just as the police homicide squad, the same homicide squad, eliminated a young man after the Easy Street case.

A young Greek guy was eliminated after questioning at length shortly after the Easy Street murders back in 1977. [00:28:00] And that young man, as of now old enough to be a grandfather, as you know, was grabbed and arrested in Rome only, you know, a bit over a year ago, he is now the prime suspect for the Easy Street murders.

Which shows you that, you know, people can go from being ticked off as not a suspect, and then come back on the list later. It may be that the police in the, and I'm being very careful here, the police in the Tap case may well have skipped over various people, questioned them, said, "Oh no, it wasn't you.

Your alibi's okay," whatever. And maybe they should look again at some of them. It's, you know, hard to know. Does that answer your question? Not really. Your question was how do we navigate the sensitivities? Well, you have to say, well, the real killer here may be totally unknown. It may be none of the above.

not be the doctor. It might not be the old policeman. It might not be the guy who worked on the council. It might not be anybody that's [00:29:00] known. So therefore, we have to treat all of them cautiously because they can't all be guilty, and quite likely none of them are guilty So we have to be so careful in how we deal with these things and how we refer to people, and it's something that in this business we learn to couch things very carefully, and we learn it by doing it, and we learn it from our lawyers.

We learn to write in the paragraphs that say, "We're not suggesting so-and-so did anything, merely that the police questioned him or her about it." You know, that sort of thing.

Catherine: And what has it taught you about humans and human behavior?

Andrew: Well, the great kaleidoscope of human behavior. you know, this is not a popular viewpoint and people will frown and mutter it to themselves, but lifestyle and choices opens up potential for damage. If you are a profligate drug user and run around with people who deal in drugs and other criminal behavior, you [00:30:00] expose yourself to various forms of danger.

Initially, you know, the use of the drugs can be dangerous. The people you deal with can be dangerous. Not paying those people back when you owe them money can be very dangerous. They might kill you, as an example, or break your legs or something. Lifestyle choices do put our lives at risk. If we hop in a cage with a pit bull terrier that's foaming at the mouth because we think that, you know, we are nice, kind people that are kind to animals and this raging killer dog won't bite us because we're so nice, we put ourselves in danger.

If we hang around with bikies because, you know, " He's my friend, he wouldn't hurt me," we put ourselves in danger. I'm a little old guy, if I walk down the wrong street at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning, I put myself in danger. It's all very well talking about reclaim the night and we've all got the right to be, you know, walk around unmolested and all that good stuff.

It's true we have the right, but the reality is [00:31:00] some things are dangerous and some behaviors are more dangerous than others. And to an extent, Margaret Tapp lived a riskier life than, you know, most of her neighbors. That's the truth, and that'll be one of the reasons probably why her parents didn't really wanna pursue publicity, because where's the upside for them?

She's dead, their granddaughter's dead, and all they're gonna get- They think is, you know, stories that will fill them with sadness and shame and horror and all the rest of it. So, you could see in retrospect why they would sort of steer clear of it. Where, where's the upside?

Catherine: And where have you seen it in your career where there has been an upside to telling a story and letting the journalists in?

Andrew: think it can interest... It's funny how situations change. Police canvas door knock, and they look for witnesses. " Did you see this? Did you see that?" There's often somebody who's got half an idea about something. There's often someone who thinks, "Gee, it's funny, my [00:32:00] big brother," you know, "or my brother-in-law or my dad or somebody, somebody, or the neighbor, I saw him coming in at 1:00 in the morning.

He said he'd been walking the dog." You know, whatever. But they're not gonna tell the police that, but it might stick in their mind. And years later, when a journalist comes knocking at the door and they say, "Well, funny you should ask. My brother-in-law, who I-- my ex-brother-in-law, who I now really hate because he stole my car he belted my sister and gave her a black eye.

I don't like him anymore, and I'm gonna tell you the truth about that night. He came in at 1:00 in the morning looking flustered with a scratch on his cheek. He told me he'd fallen over when he was walking his dog. But looking back on it, I reckon he was telling a lie, and I reckon he ought to be a suspect in, you know, X, Y, or Z."

Alibis can crumble over the years, and journalists can do what police would do if they had time, and that is go and talk to people and see if they know something that [00:33:00] years later they feel they should mention. the doctor I've talked about, a lot of people must have known he was a creepy doctor.

But it was only years later, after he'd been convicted, after he'd lost all his sort of clout and all his contacts and all his power, his social sort of capital, it was only then that one of his children's friends spoke to me and told me about it, because he had nothing to fear from that doctor anymore.

And that can happen and does happen a lot. That's not the only case. I, was alerted to the shooting of a woman in the western suburbs. Way back in 1981, a woman was shot dead in what police at the time thought was a burglary gone wrong. Why they'd say that, I have no idea, because she was shot twice with a heavy caliber handgun.

It was clearly a hit Nothing was stolen, nothing was broken. You know, it was clearly a hit. It was written off as a unsolved burglary gone wrong, and a former homicide [00:34:00] detective grabbed me at a social function 30 years later and said, " and look at this. It was the first homicide I ever worked on.

The ex-husband is as guilty as hell. He's organized it. We can never prove it, and our people sort of wrote it off and dropped the ball. Go and do it." Now, this ex-copper never forgot that case, and he encouraged me to look into it. And I did actually write a story, and then another story which pointed to the identity of the hitman, who is a known hitman.

I was able to find a witness who, in Adelaide of all places, who was able to tell me the true story of what happened, and I put the police in touch with that witness, and they now know the, the real story, but they're unable to prove it, although the suspect in that case is in jail on other, other charges.

Catherine: And, and what's interesting again is that difference between what is something that you can convict on and what is something that is know, guilty behavior.

Andrew: [00:35:00] Well, convictions are, you know... Beyond reasonable doubt is a very tough call. All a defense has to do, properly, is raise any doubt about a prosecution. Any doubt will It's enough for a jury to acquit, and probably so it should be. The net effect of that, of course, is that now and again, guilty people, well, quite often guilty people slip through the net because it's hard to nail down a case where there are no loopholes, no other possibilities.

And y- you remember the Jayden Leskie case in Maui, the little boy?

Catherine: Very, well, actually. Again, another connection.

towns, what can you say? 

Andrew: Well, you know as well as I do that the person charged for it is, and acquitted of it, was very much the, hot favorite for very good reasons. But he had a very good defense counsel who raised the wonderful story a true story That that person, the charged person, Greg [00:36:00] Domasevich, had local enemies in the town, local louts where he's-- didn't like him, and they had, in fact, on the night that little child disappeared and, you know, died accidentally or, was killed, whatever it was. The night that little boy disappeared, these other guys, it so happened, had thrown a pig's head through Greg Domasevich's window, the window of his house, and that, said his defense counsel, raised the potential for those bad guys doing something bad to that little boy and getting his client into a lot of trouble.

Now, it was faintly preposterous. It was a faintly preposterous proposition, but it was enough that a jury was in- I think instructed told that basically there was enough doubt that they couldn't convict, and indeed they did not convict. And a young reporter grabbed Greg Domasevich's barrister outside, a very experienced criminal barrister called Colin Lovett QC, and said, "Mr.

Lovett, Mr. Lovett, [00:37:00] what's it like to have your client found innocent?" And he turned around and looked at her with a frown, and he said, "My dear, my client has not been found innocent. My client has been found not guilty, which is a very different thing." Which is a very telling comment, isn't it?

Catherine: It really is. And so with the rise that we're seeing in true crime and, storytelling, especially with podcasts, you have certainly led the way certainly in Australia in relation to that. are your words of wisdom for people who try and navigate that space, try and storytell in that area?

What are their due diligence that you think is required?

Andrew: Don't go with lunatic theories. You can mention them, but separate yourself from them. You know, so and so thinks, you know, the Martians did it. Well, I don't think the Martians did it myself, but, you know, I mention it here because the neighbor thinks [00:38:00] so. These other people think the pig's head gang did it.

Well, it's possible, it's conceivable, but there are many other possibilities and, you know, always separate yourself. Don't push a particular case yourself or a particular prosecutorial case unless you are very sure of your ground. Stay cool, stay calm. Do what lawyers do. They, present essentially most of them, they particularly prosecutors, they're not playing to the gallery really of prosecution.

They present a sequence of events and facts in order to build a case, and they try to-- they do it to persuade people of a scenario, but they should not do it unfairly or by leaving out salient points. I think a good podcaster needs to take a leaf from their book. And if you look at, you know, quality journalism and quality lawyers know, defense barristers and prosecutors, probably that's the standard you have to try and [00:39:00] meet, otherwise you end up talking about martians. know, you go down the, route of, conspiracy theories. and large, most people are killed by someone they know. Often that person is an intimate partner or, you know, it's often it's, if it's not jealousy, it's rage, and if it's not rage, it's greed. large, that's mostly what happen.

It's rarely stranger, a stranger out of the blue, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it is. You need to keep an open mind, and so often in the old days, police would make up their mind about something, and they'd go all out to push a case and build a case against Person A, only to find out years later that Person B did it.

Now, this happened in the Madelene Haywood case, the big double murder at Shepparton, 1966. The police, in their wisdom belted and bashed the dead girl's s-so-called boyfriend for a long time, trying to get him to admit to a murder that he ha- a double murder that he had not done. And he had enough strength of character not to give [00:40:00] in and start crying and saying, "I'll sign your bit of paper if you'll only leave me alone," which some people might have done, 'cause they used to belt people until they did sign confessions.

He did not do that. And it turned out 19 years later that the real killer was Raymond Edmunds, Mr. Stinky, and that was proven by scientific evidence, by fingerprints, et cetera. And that is when the real good policing took over from the old-fashioned bash 'em harder policing. So, we can learn from...

Experience does teach us these things. A lot of these cases should be used, the ones I've mentioned, should be used at detective training school, I think To point out where police in the old days went wrong or where they nearly went wrong or where they went wrong for a while or where they got diverted and how they were, wore blinkers when they should not have.

The good podcaster and the good journalist need to know all those things and try and be at least as good as a diligent detective. And I, why shouldn't you be as good as a diligent detective? Of course you [00:41:00] can be, although we haven't got the advantage of being able to get, you know, fingerprints or phone taps and all the rest of it.

Police do have a lot of, a lot of stuff at their disposal. They can bug cars. They can put tracking devices on things. They really do they can get hold of data about people much more easily than any of us. And so you'd hope that they would out investigate us 90% of the time. And if, probably they do, but not every time.

Catherine: And tell me, Andrew, you've seen some of and spoken to some of the less desirable members of our society. Who are the people that you admire?

Andrew: In, well, good police, good lawyers, good journalists. by and large, I mean, I've known a lot of dishonest people, and there are some fields where dishonesty is part of the currency. You know, crooks are dishonest, obviously. there's, a, strong streak of corruption that runs through, has run through Australian [00:42:00] society at different levels, local government, police different bure- bureaucracies, some politicians.

Some judicial people, particularly in Sydney especially in the past, have been suspect. They've been compromised. They've been blackmailed. By and large, leaving aside a small cohort of racing journalists, I'll leave them out of it. By and large, I think journos are pretty honest. They can be deluded.

They can be dutched by other interests. They can be conned. They can, all that stuff. But by and large, I can't think of many that have accept, would accept money to do the wrong thing. And I leave aside, you know, some people no longer with us in racing who were mixed up with SP bookies and that sort of stuff.

different thing. But that's a gambling thing. But in, you know, political reporting, police reporting, I can't offhand think of Journalists who would knowingly do the wrong thing or accept [00:43:00] bribes to do the wrong thing. I think basically they're pretty honest. They can be wrong, they can be pig-headed, they can be scatty but mostly...

And there's a couple of-- There's, there's some exceptions. Some are ruthless in the pursuit of a story and are cynical. I can think of crime writers who are cynical, who pursue angles that they know probably don't hold water because they know it's a better angle, more saleable angle. I can think of one amateur, I'll call this person an amateur author, who's not really a journalist at all, who does that, and where there's one, there's others.

And I can think of a, a professional journalist who's worked in print and television and probably radio, who I think is cynical and, is willing to bend the truth in with the aim of, you know, making it a more saleable story, a splashier story, when they know deep down it may not be the truth.

But by and large [00:44:00] think 97% of them are pretty good. And your task as a responsible podcaster is to be with the 97%.

Catherine: And tell me, when you look back at that young jockey that you once 

Andrew: I'm a jockey like you're an astronaut. I I, 

Catherine: you, now have to go and explain that one,

Andrew: I was a kid from the bush in East Gippsland in Victoria. I grew up on farms with horses and cattle and sheep and And, you know, when I-- W-where I lived, right out in the middle of the bush, apart from reading books, about the only thing you could do was ride horses and shoot.

I did a bit of both. I had relatives who were very fine horsemen trainers and jockeys and all the rest of it. And I at one time I boarded with them for three years while I went to high school, and I got involved in riding a bit of racehorses exercise a, a little bit, and I rode in a few amateur [00:45:00] races, what they call the picnic races, in East Gippsland way back in the '70s when it was pretty lax and pretty loose.

I rode at probably half a dozen meetings over two summers with no great success. In fact, I'd suggest that I was beaten a couple of times when I should not have been, ' cause I wasn't that good at it I was also pretty heavy. I wasn't, I used to have to starve myself to make the weight, and I was only 14, so.

I never had any future at it.

Catherine: And so what is it that attracts you though? 'Cause you've, written the book about Winx So what is it that you, like about horses and horse racing?

Andrew: Well, I've written another book too called "Chance," which is about skullduggery and, you know, scoundrels in horse racing. It's very Runyonesque, as in the, the great American sports and crime writer Damon Runyon, who was a wonderful figure back in the old days. It's a bit like his stuff. I take characters in racing.

Well, I mean, racehorses [00:46:00] can't talk. They- they're nice animals, but they're just horses and they, they don't have a lot of brains or a lot of personality or some people will argue with that. But really the interesting thing about racing are the people who race the horses, the people associated with them.

And these are people by and large who take a chance. They're physically often courageous. They're mentally agile. And they're re- a friend of mine says they're never boring. And They're a good subject ' cause they're people who take chances to try and for what? For glory, for, for profit. And sometimes they bend the rules.

Many of them do. And the- racing is sort of where, in a little way, and they won't-- no one who runs racing will want to hear this, but it's sort of where the, the bad guys meet the good guys at the track. You know, they all rub shoulders at the track. Judges, surgeons, the great and the good, and the captains of industry are in there rubbing shoulders in the betting ring with all [00:47:00] sorts of people who you know, in the old days used to rob banks.

Catherine: And where do you see yourself fit in, that? Like, was there anything that you would change in your life, you know, from the path that you've led?

Andrew: No, I don't think so. No, I used to think I would've liked to have been a foreign correspondent at one stage. I actually turned-- should've offered a particular job and wasn't, and then I was offered to go to New York as a correspondent, and I was enmeshed in writing the Stokes book, so I didn't go.

But I don't really regret that because I've had a very good career on home ground. I have been sent overseas On different occasions for, you know, Bali bombing, the Christchurch earthquake. I've been to... I went to Afghanistan to cover the war there for a month. I've done various things overseas for the papers.

I, you know, followed Bill Clinton around Australia [00:48:00] when he-- with 500 other journalists when he did a, a visit back in the day. And the Pope and all sorts of things like that. So it's been a, an interesting career one I don't think I could have done it much differently. a wise man that was my mentor pointed out to me once that the best part of journalism was actually writing stories and getting them published, and I think that's true.

I did have a brief time as a, sort of a minor executive. I was a deputy editor of a newspaper and I, I have edited newspapers on different occasions. But not particularly good at it, I think. It's a sort of a managerial role where you have to worry about what 50 people are doing, and I think really my strength was in going out and playing my own game, you know?

Not looking after everybody else's game. So really the best thing in journalism is to write a good story and see it come off the presses. The old-fashioned, you know, print story. It's wonderful. I still love it. You see a good [00:49:00] story beautifully headed and nice photographs and good captions and when it rolls off the presses and it's, you can smell the ink, it's still good. It was good in 1975 when I started, and it still is.

Catherine: And tell me, given the fact that you have spent most of your career reporting on crime, which a, a lot of it's associated with death, have you done anything to prepare for your own death, Andrew?

Andrew: No, not yet. I'm not sure what-- I haven't built a coffin. haven't. No, I haven't. I think not, not yet. I've made a will.

Catherine: That's a good start. very good start.

Andrew: But, you know, I've got three kids and seven grandkids, so probably I should. I haven't, but I don't anticipate going anytime soon, but you never know. I could walk outside today and bang.

This is, this could be the last interview.

Catherine: It could be. Here's hoping it's not, though. I can't thank you enough for your time today, Andrew. [00:50:00] You've been very generous.

Andrew: Catherine, thank you. I know you have a personal stake in this story, as we said at the start, and I hope we've- add some of the things around it that explain it to people it's been so hard to solve and why it remains unsolved, and why, sadly, it probably will remain unsolved. Thank you.

Catherine: Thanks, Andrew. 

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