Australian Crime

Oxford 1863: young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. He wants nothing more than a morsel of food in his belly and a warm place to sleep off the streets. What he receives is a sentence of seven years' servitude, to be served half a world away in the penal colony of Fremantle, Western Australia.

Four years ago Eliza Dacey was brutally murdered. Within hours, her killer was caught. Wasn't he? So reads the opening titles of Jack Quick's new true-crime documentary. A skilled producer, Jack knows that the bigger the conspiracy, the higher the ratings. Curtis Wade, convicted of Eliza's murder on circumstantial evidence and victim of a biased police force, is the perfect subject. Millions of viewers agree. Just before the finale, Jack uncovers a minor detail that may prove Curtis guilty after all.

When Mark McKenna set out to write a history of the centre of Australia, he had no idea what he would discover. One event in 1934 - the shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokunnuna by white policeman Bill McKinnon, and subsequent Commonwealth inquiry - stood out as a mirror of racial politics in the Northern Territory at the time. But then, through speaking with the families of both killer and victim, McKenna unearthed new evidence that transformed the historical record and the meaning of the event for today.

The rollicking adventures of a real-life mobster turned actor who helped make The Godfather a reality.

This was Nina Young's shocking realisation in her mid-20s, when she found out from online court records that her estranged father, Allan Ladd, had strangled a woman to death decades before. In prison he'd met Denise, Nina's mother, who was his tutor. Although Denise didn't know the extent of Allan's crime when she fell in love with him, by the time she found out, she was in too deep. She had to flee from him before Nina turned two. A decade after reading the court records, Nina, now a journalist, decided to release a podcast to tackle the questions she'd been asking herself ever since.

Ex-Boston homicide detective Billy Robinson has retreated to a quiet life on the New England coast. Struggling to cope following the death of his beloved wife, he must now run the inn that Siobhan took care of so well. The inn's quirky residents help keep Billy on solid ground as he grieves, and the group soon become an unconventional family. But this small town is in the grips of a growing opioid epidemic, and when a young resident gets hooked into the crisis, Billy knows he must act to save the people in the inn that he has grown to care so much about.

Except one is now deadly still - a body hanging from its huge white blade. Detective Sergeants Belinda Burney and Will Lovell are shocked to discover the dead man is Geordie Pritchard, a rich local philanthropist and owner of the wind energy farm.

Eleanor Jones isn't looking for trouble. But someone is starting fires in Cooinda - and the first one looks like a murder. Eleanor is determined not to get involved, but when she receives a note warning her to 'keep quiet' she can't help but work out who sent it.

The police force can be a tough place for a woman, but Detective Superintendent Deborah Wallace rose to the top with grace, humour and an iconic sense of style. In her incredible 36-year career with NSW Police, Wallace took on murderers and drug suppliers and dismantled the state's most nefarious gangs. Tenacious, perceptive and sharp, Wallace commanded a range of police crime squads, bringing order to the Wild West of 1990s Cabramatta and busting criminal bikie gangs with Strike Force Raptor until her retirement in late 2019.

The most feared and notorious of all the Mexican cartel leaders, Joaquín Guzmán was the ultimate narco. His nickname of ‘El Chapo’ or Shorty belied his deadly power as ‘El Jefe’, the boss of the Sinaloa drug cartel. His fearless climb to power, his brutality, charm, taste for luxury, penchant for disguises, his dramatic prison escapes, his unlikely encounter with Sean Penn and his portrayal in the hit Netflix series Narcos, all burnished the image of the world’s most infamous outlaw.

On his 11th birthday, Jacob's father gives him a diary. To write about things that happen. About what he and his father do on their farm. About the sheep, the crop, the fox and the dam. But Jacob knows some things should not be written down. Some things should not be remembered. The only things he knows for sure are what his father has taught him. Sheltered, protected, isolated. But who is his father protecting him from? And how far will his father go to keep the world at bay?

Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992—the summer the Van Apfel sisters disappeared. Hannah, beautiful Cordelia and Ruth vanished during the night of the school's Showstopper concert at the amphitheater by the river, surrounded by encroaching bushland. Now, years later, Tikka has returned home to try and make sense of the summer that shaped her, and the girls that she never forgot. Blackly comic, sharply observed and wonderfully endearing, this is a haunting coming-of-age story with a shimmering, unexplained mystery at its heart.

It's funny how quick it happens and without you really noticing. Anton said once that it's like walking out into the sea, and you think everything's fine and the water's warm, but when you turn back you're suddenly miles from shore. I've never been much of a swimmer, but I get what he means. Like being caught in a current or something. A rip.

Sidney Allen is a Fed. Part of the Australian Federal Police's K block, a unit doing whatever it takes in order to stop terrorist attacks on home soil. But when young Muslim men on the Terror Watchlist start turning up dead, Sid and his partner, Haifa, have to work out what's going on. Sectarian war? Drugs? Retribution? For Sid, there's nothing unclear about a bullet to the head and a severed hand. Someone is sending a message....

A finely tuned comic depiction of Melbourne's ethnically diverse northern suburbs and the dark underbelly of city life. Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he's desperately in love with a much younger Greek waitress, and to make matters worse his mother has come to stay with him. Then a dead body turns up. He and his best mate, Dave, will have to do something about it, and fast....

Lina and Cain are doing their best to stay afloat. Money has been tight since Cain returned from active duty, and starting a family is proving harder than they thought. Putting Lina's inherited lake house up for rent at weekends seems like the solution to at least one of their problems. The secluded house is more of a burden than a retreat, anyway, and fixing up the old place makes Cain feel useful for once.

It’s 1988. Just outside of Tamworth in country New South Wales, a freight train hits someone lying on the tracks. But when a rail worker looks at the body, the scene doesn’t seem to make sense. There is a towel under the head and hardly any blood. Why are the shoes on the body so clean when there is mud all around?

Kate Webb still grieves over the loss of her young son. Ten years on, she spends her weekends hungover, attending open houses on Sydney's wealthy north shore and imagining the lives of the people who live there. Then Kate visits the Harding house - the perfect house with, it seems, the perfect family. A photograph captures a kind-looking man, a beautiful woman she knew at university, and a boy - a boy that for one heartbreaking moment she believes is her own son.