Background Briefing

More than 300 Australians are murdered every year, and about 40 of those homicides won't be solved.
These 'cold cases' seem to fascinate us: over 11 million Australians watch an endless array of murder and crime shows on TV every week.
But why? We talk to Helen Garner and CSI creator Anthony Zuiker.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Helen Thomas: Murder is Australia's passion. While the actual homicide rate across the country remains steady, still it seems to engulf us, lurking on every corner, real and imagined. More than 300 Australians die at the hands of another every year; about 40 of these cases go unsolved. And it's fair to say that act of murder intrigues us; more than 11-million Australians watch crime dramas on mainstream TV every week.

Woman Shouting

Helen Thomas: The most popular of these is CSI, an extraordinary juggernaut that's reshaped primetime viewing. Its creator is Anthony Zuiker.

Anthony Zuiker: I believe that we are currently in a crime wave in television. I did believe when CSI first hit the airwaves, October 6th, 2000, and reached over 21 million viewers, it really spawned the birth of the crime drama. And when you have a successful show like CSI, you suddenly find yourself with a seven day a week schedule filled with crime, hence filled with death.

Helen Thomas: And we're enthralled by it, fixated on notions of justice in all its varied forms. Which means that 'cold cases', unsolved homicides, hold special fascination.

Detective Rush: Detective Rush, Homicide.

Juanita Raphael: You do murders?

Detective Rush: I investigate murders.

Juanita Raphael: I want to tell you about one.

Detective Rush: What's your name?

Juanita Raphael: Juanita Raphael.

Detective Rush: You been smoking some pot today Juanita?

Juanita Raphael: Helps with the pain of the cancer.

Detective Rush: Sorry.

Juanita Raphael: I saw a murder. A girl was killed on a tennis court at the house where I used to work. I thought it wasn't my business.

Detective Rush: A girl dying wasn't your business? When did this happen?

Juanita Raphael: In 1976.

Detective Rush: 1976 Juanita? Twenty-seven years ago and you're just telling us now?

Juanita Raphael: I have a son. I needed to work. But now I have this cancer.

Marion Frith: Everybody can remember a disappearance and an unresolved murder that really resonates with them. I mean the Beaumonts of course, is the classic one, because how did that happen? Three little children going missing forever, without a trace. But I think we all have a personal one that marks a moment in our life if you like, I mean mine for instance is in 1984 I was waiting to have a baby in hospital, and I remember looking out the window of the labour ward and the police were scouring the grasslands and a drain in Canberra, looking for a young girl who'd gone missing that Saturday morning, Megan McQuiddie. I'd had the baby; they next day they're still searching, and they never found her. And so I know in my life whenever it's the anniversary of my child's birth, I think of that family and they had theirs taken away. And I think everybody in a particular case can find something: either you were the same age as the Beaumonts when they went, or you were a parent who had kids the same age. And the fact that there's never a solution just leads us to imagine all sorts of things really.

Helen Thomas: She's not alone in her assessment. Australian author Helen Garner agrees it's these imaginings that underpin our obsession with these events. She's clearly intrigued by this shadow that compels us.

Helen Garner: I think people have a great fear of violence, I mean a rational fear of violence, but also a fear of chaos, and by extension, a fear of the unresolved and meaninglessness, and also of the dark parts of ourselves, it's not just ourselves as fantasised victims that we're talking about here, it's ourselves as fantasised killers I think. I think this is one reason why we're so fascinated by stories of murder, because we have these very dark death drives in ourself, as Freud pointed out, that we've had to discipline and control and repress in order to be social beings. But there's an enormous anxiety I think in everybody about those dark forces and drives that we have, and so we, in a sense, need to kind of give them a run. There's a writer called Phil Motherwell I think, who used to call it 'giving the shadow a run' in a story. That's why we're so drawn to stories of violence.

Helen Thomas: Garner remembers a particularly brutal double murder in Melbourne, the slaying of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in Easey Street, Collingwood. In 1977 the two young women were stabbed 84 times as Armstrong's 16-month-old son lay in a cot in the back bedroom. Two days later, a neighbour found him unharmed, the women's bodies up the hallway. Speaking to Background Briefing from her Melbourne home, the writer admits she recalls the murders every time she drives past Easey Street.

Helen Garner: I remember it vividly. It happened in the '70s and that was smack in the middle of the period of the great flourishing of collective or communal households in Melbourne. That was the period when I lived in that sort of household, and when we read about those murders in the paper, it made our blood run cold because it could have happened to us, we thought. "When we read about those murders in the paper, it made our blood run cold because it could have happened to us." They were very innocent times in the sense that we didn't lock our doors, the key was in the front door, and people walked in and out of the houses in quite a casual way. And we were always going out to pubs and dancing the night away, and sometimes one would come home with the person one had only just met. Those are things that we did in those days. I look back on it with incredulity in a way, the sort of unguardedness of our lives. So we had a very lively interest in that story.

Helen Thomas: And I guess another thing that would have linked you to those two women who were so brutally killed was the fact they were pretty much the same age as you at that point.

Helen Garner: Yes, and one of them was a single mother, there was a child in the house; that was one of the most horrible things about it I suppose, just the horror of thinking of that child left alone in the house with the two dead bodies for two days.

Helen Thomas: That little boy is now nearly 30 and refuses to be drawn into public discussion about his mother's murder, or his sense of justice lost. 'Shit happens', Greg Armstrong told us, 'and you can quote me'. The case remains frustrating for Melbourne police. Three years ago, eight men were DNA tested in relation to this double murder; all were cleared. The first episode of a local 'true crime' TV series, 'Sensing Murder', focused on the old 'cold case'.

television promo

Soon, two psychics with exceptional ability will dare to go inside one of Australia's most notorious unsolved murder cases. Working together with experts and the victim's family and friends, this unprecedented investigation will be a compelling television experience.

Will a murderer be exposed on national television?

We have three invalid suspects.

The most unmissable experience Melbourne will ever see, 'Sensing Murder', Sunday 8.30 on Seven…

Easey Street

Marion Frith: Because invariably we find out a lot about the person, OK? So we find out that they were wearing a blue dress and they were going to the shops and they'd left the washing on the line at home. On the TV we'll have photos of the washing on the line, and we'll know everything about them. So we have this really intimate portrait of their life, and then it ends, you know. The last photo of them perhaps in the car park on closed circuit TV, and then it finishes. And that's compelling, because if it happened to them, it could happen to us, and does that mean that I'm not going to get home at 5 o'clock to bring that washing in, you know, she didn't, or he didn't. I mean that's pretty captivating really.

Helen Thomas: A world away in Los Angeles, Anthony Zuiker no doubt agrees. At this point in time, there's probably nobody in the world with more creative pull than this man. CSI's creator now oversees the lucrative franchise, and happily muses about basing a fourth version of the show in London, or maybe Sydney. Not bad for an unemployed stockbroker forced to work as a bellhop at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

Anthony Zuiker: Oh I think worse than that, I was a tram host, which I drove the little green trolley back and forth from the Mirage Hotel to Treasure Island for $8 an hour on the graveyard shift, which was 8 at night till 5 in the morning. That was about seven, eight years ago; I was fortunately blessed with a fine idea and my first TV script was 'CSI', and the rest is history.

Helen Thomas: In a rare Australian interview, Zuiker makes no bones about the central point of that 'fine idea'. He cast the dead body as a main character.

Anthony Zuiker: I think the one thing that CSI has done that's alerted the world, is really to communicate that the body is a perfect specimen, in the respect that skin and blood and hair and serology and biology, everything on the human body is designed to give clues and speak to the crime scene investigator as to what happened to the specimen of the body without it being alive to tell you. And I think that's fascinating. And I'm not sure that the world had reviewed the body in that way until 'CSI' and these type of shows came out. So I'm not necessarily certain that it's a fascination about death, I think it's a fascination really about life, and about what the human body is designed to do in case something wrongful happens to it.

Woman: Blood swirl on the wall, you thinking cult ... Manson?

Man: Somebody left a message, I need to see the rest of it. Female Caucasian, appears to be one stab wound to the throat.

Man: Transection of left and right carotid arteries with major haemorrhage.

Man: No defence marks. Cursory opinion?

Man: She was killed in her sleep.

Man: Do you feel this?

Woman: I can still feel her soul in the room. Man: But there's something else.

Helen Thomas: And why is that? Just its sense of completeness?

Anthony Zuiker: It was the one that worked on all cylinders. It was really the first and only episode in my recollection that really just signified what 'CSI' was, which was a procedural, weighty, guttural, drama with great visuals, a lot of twists and turns that really captured the human spirit. And when Sarah Sidel says that famous quote, 'I can still feel her soul in the room', talking about the dead mother, you just can't beat that.

Helen Thomas: The appeal of 'CSI' and its two spin-offs, sparks great discussion among media analysts. Sue Turnbull, a senior lecturer in media studies at Melbourne's La Trobe University, believes our engagement is complicated.

Sue Turnbull: One of the reasons why it's so successful is it's actually a return to an earlier format of television. The original kind of crime series on television were a problem a week, a crime a week which was solved. And then in the '70s and '80s we began to get more and more of the kind of life story, romances, emotional melodrama of the cops solving the crime. And the focus kind of switched to this soap opera. I think if you look at 'Hill Street Blues' in the 1980s, that was kind of that whole movement to try and capitalise on audiences wanting to pay attention to ongoing stories. So I think one of the reasons why 'CSI' was so successful was that it actually changed the formula back again, putting much, much less emphasis on the continuing relationships of the character, and got him back to a very simple Plot A, and Plot B strategy.

Helen Thomas: Then again, not quite that simple. Turnbull says 'CSI's' use of computer-generated images, and various graphic replays, is another way it's reinvented an old 'wheel' of storytelling.

Sue Turnbull: It's almost as if your television turns into a computer screen and you're actually having a multimedia event, in that you could click on the bullet wound and go into it, as you could in a multimedia thing. "'CSI' as moving closer to a kind of notion of television as computer-game, as multimedia event…" And that's what I think is one of the appeals of the show, because what it actually is doing is for people whose understanding of science, like my own, is extremely limited, it's visualising the knowledge that you need, it's actually showing you things, and I do see 'CSI' as moving closer to a kind of notion of television as computer-game, as multimedia event in terms of its stylistics.

Helen Thomas: But it's the differently-styled American series 'Cold Case' that intrigues her, a show that focuses on a small team of detectives looking into unsolved murders. It was created by Meredith Stiehm, a young veteran who cut her teeth writing for Emmy Award-winning dramas like 'NYPD Blue' and 'ER'. She's now one of Hollywood's new hotshots, successfully twisting an old genre into contemporary shape. Taking time out from browsing in a bookshop in Santa Monica, the writer says she wanted to fill a television void.

Meredith Stiehm: One thing I wanted to do was create a show that had a female lead character, because at least here in America, there is a real void. There, there are lots of male detectives who have female partners, but it was never a lead female. So that was the first idea, and then when I was thinking about the detective and cop genre, I wanted to think of a new way to present it, a twist on the usual.

Helen Thomas: At the time, Meredith Steihm was following the Michael Skakel trial, an ugly 'cold case' that had long dogged America's Kennedy clan.

Meredith Stiehm: It took place in 1976 when he was a 15-year-old boy accused of murdering a neighbour girl, and this was in Connecticut and he was a Kennedy cousin, so it was very high profile, and at the time, just a few years ago, he suddenly was brought to trial again, at age 42, and so I was very taken with the images Michael Skakel, the 42-year-old man, being brought to justice for something he'd done as a 15-year-old boy. And just seeing the photos of him as a 14-year-old next to him as a 42-year-old, really captured my imagination about how time changes people and how even if you're 42 and you don't even know that kid who was 15 at the time, you're still responsible for his actions.

Helen Thomas: This real-life saga became a foundation for the fictionalised plot of the show's first episode.

Woman: Todd, I know that you were with Melanie that night.

Todd: Excuse me?

Woman: Which doesn't add up with you saying you were with Eric, so I figured that you just said that to protect him.

Todd: Hey, let's say I was with Melanie that night. You can understand why I wouldn't want the entire world knowing that, right?

Woman: Right. So why not just say that you were sleeping? Why give Eric and alibi?

Todd: You should drop this.

Woman: Eric did it, that's why you can sleep at night and have a normal life, and he' a mess.

Todd: You should just watch it.

Woman: When did the hard drinking start? After he killed her?

Todd: I can make your life very difficult.

Woman: Eric killed Jill, you clean up after him. You’re your brother's keeper, is that it?

Todd: Tell me something, Lily, what is the point of all of this? After so many years?

Woman: People shouldn't be forgotten, even if they are my kind of people. They don't have a lot of money, they don't have lawyers, but they matter. They should get justice too.

Todd: I see. You're a crusader.

Woman: I guess I am.

Todd: Good luck.

Helen Thomas: And of course, like 'CSI' it has a number of little things that it uses, for instance at the end of each story when there is a resolution, when justice is brought, the main character, Lily Rush, always sees the victim as he or she was when they were killed 10, 20, 60 years ago.

Sue Turnbull: I love that moment. I love that moment of kind of taking you back to the past, and allowing you to set the past at rights, to make peace with the past. That is a very appealing factor for audiences, because we all know that injustices have occurred in the past, and the idea that you can actually go back, find the truth, and get some kind of closure, I think is a fantasy and a dream that many people tap into when they watch that show.

Helen Thomas: Turnbull also makes the point that by making the main detective a woman, 'Cold Case' locks into a ready-made audience.

Todd: Hey, where's my wife?

Lily Rush: Safe.

Todd: You bitch, you tell me where she is.

Lily Rush: Is this how you handle anything you can't control? This supposed to scare me?

Todd: It's supposed to make you think.

Lily Rush: I'm not like the girls you're used to, Todd. You can't try to charm me then when that doesn't work, talk down to me. Then when that doesn't work, get aggressive. I'm not Jill, or Melanie. I'm the police and we're at the police headquarters, you moron.

Todd: You're going to talk to me real good.

Lily Rush: What are you going to do? Kill me in the parking lot of police Central? You think you'll get away with it again?

Meredith Stiehm: I always thought that it would be people like me who are 30-something women who would like to see themselves reflected in the main character on a TV show. But the demographics tell us that our average viewers are much older than that. They are women. I know our average viewer is a 58-year-old female.

Helen Thomas: A 58-year-old female?

Meredith Stiehm: Yes.

Helen Thomas: Does that surprise you?

Meredith Stiehm: It did surprise me. I mean I don't have any expertise in analysing who watches what, but I know that my parents and all their friends really like it, and maybe there's a certain segment of the population that likes a good mystery and likes a female detective.

Helen Thomas: I'm wondering why you think it is that at this point in time, not just in America but here in Australia and I guess in England too, shows like 'Cold Case' are so popular. What is it about the stories we want told over and over again?

Meredith Stiehm: Well I think everybody's got ghosts and mysteries in their lives that they would like solved, even if it's not a victim's family, even if it's not in their immediate family, but you lost somebody and you don't know what happened, people want answers. People enjoy mysteries and I think they feel a little bit uneasy without answers. And nothing's more visceral than a homicide.

Helen Thomas: You're listening to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, and this week, we're locked into unsolved murders, real and fictional. And sometimes these realities collide. Jude McCulloch, one of Australia's leading criminologists, says 'CSI' and 'Cold Case' are responsible for prompting a new generation of female students to study forensic science and criminology. On a hot autumn morning at her home in Footscray, the 40-something Monash University lecturer is disarmingly open about the impact of these shows' female characters in academic life.

Jude McCulloch: In the course that I teach called Criminal Justice and Criminology, we certainly have a very high proportion of women in that course, more than 50%. And they want to take up positions in the criminal justice system, a lot of them. And I think that's partly a reflection of what we see on TV, and that's women wanting to express a sense of agency, being in control and power through what is seen as strong roles. But also nurturing roles I guess, whether they are in reality is another thing, but certainly the way they're depicted on the shows are women in control, but also taking a role in nurturing, bringing closure and healing to people.

Helen Thomas: So who do you think your students think you are? I mean are you one of these characters, are you an extension of, say, Lily Rush from 'Cold Case'?

Jude McCulloch: Well, I do think that that's interesting, and I certainly don't know how the students perceive me, but certainly when they come to the Open Days, they're looking for courses that reflect what they see on television. And I think in teaching that you do have to start where the students are at, and we give them ways of reflecting on that by teaching courses about the media. But I don't know who they think the characters are, but certainly I do think you see people in professional roles and that includes in academic, taking on the roles they see on the television and in the movies.

Helen Thomas: And what does that involve actually? Dressing like these characters? I mean are you dressing like Lily Rush? You're not today.

Jude McCulloch: I'm not, but I am aware of how those characters on TV dress, and that when you dress, if you're tapping in to how those characters dress, that would certainly have an impact on the students. The student groups are between say, 19 and 25, and they're at an age where their identity is very fluid and they're very conscious of what they look like, and what they're representing through their clothing. So I don't think as lecturers we can ignore that, or be unaware that they're reading us as characters or identities.

Helen Thomas: Criminologist, Jude McCulloch, in Melbourne.

Of course justice sometimes doesn't come for victims, or their friends and families. So what pressure does that bring, psychologically and emotionally? Lester Walton, one of Australia's leading forensic psychiatrists, has witnessed the impact of unresolved 'cold cases'. In his office in Melbourne's Little Collins Street, Walton says that despite all we hear about 'closure', the trauma a victim's loved ones go through is often too overwhelming for them to get over. Even if their case is eventually solved.

Lester Walton: I think when families have to deal with, say, an absent body, and they can't go through a normal bereavement process in terms of a funeral and so on, that's particularly difficult. The mere fact that the crime is not solved is difficult. But I guess what I would emphasise is that often these relatives of victims, if you like, are certainly victims themselves in a meaningful sense, seem to be assured by some in my profession, that if the facts become known, that they will achieve a good deal of psychological resolution than in my experience actually occurs. So that they're left, once a cold case is solved, still markedly distressed permanently, emotionally scarred, to their surprise. I think it's only fair that they're disabused in that way.

Helen Thomas: And is that because the nature of the crime was so horrific, a life has been taken, that it's not a natural response to 'get over it'?

Lester Walton: Yes, I think so. It can be horrific circumstances initially, often of course the protracted period of time that they've lived with the uncertainty, and by the time that the new information becomes available, it's simply not enough to provide comprehensive healing.

Helen Thomas: And what about the perpetrators of these crimes, the murderers themselves? As time passes and they're not caught, do they suffer psychologically?

Lester Walton: I think it varies enormously. Some we probably never ever hear about who have no conscience about it at all. And never confess, seem to cope quite adequately despite living with the awful knowledge I suppose.

Helen Thomas: Is it an awful knowledge to them, or are they the sort of person that I guess we learn from TV, may enjoy that, re-living that experience?

Lester Walton: That would be a very extreme example, some of them actually got positive pleasure out of re-living the memory of it, if you like, that would be very rare indeed. "That would be a very extreme example, some of them actually got positive pleasure out of re-living the memory of it." More likely, someone would thrust it out of their conscious awareness and not actually dwell on it at all, just excise it from their memory bank, if you like. It would intrude, possibly, from time to time, for example if there was publicity about it being reinvestigated, that sort of thing, they'd be obviously aware of it then.

Helen Thomas: But surely they must worry about new forensic techniques testing that tiny piece of evidence they fear they left behind?

Lester Walton: It could well be, of course it's a reality with DNA these days. Sometimes, and I'm not suggesting that this is inappropriate, police will confront people with the fact that they have material which they can test, not that they've actually done it and therefore know, and that might prompt a confession.

Helen Thomas: There is a stereotypical viewpoint that most people want to confess. Is there a truth to that?

Lester Walton: Most people do confess. I mean cold cases are rare, proportionately, fortunately. The vast majority of murderers confess very promptly, often the person responsible for informing the police. So we're talking about a tiny percentage of cases. Now to talk about stereotypes within that small group is a bit difficult, but certainly in my experience, there are some people who are agonised about it, almost on a daily basis, over the years and especially if they come forward spontaneously, they finally decide they just can't take it any more, that certainly does happen.

Helen Thomas: Do they feel better once it's out in the open?

Lester Walton: Yes. Again you have limited experience of these cases because they're so few, but in my experience there is an enormous sense of relief, regardless of what the ultimate outcome is.

Helen Thomas: Australia's police have different approaches to the cold cases on their files. Often thwarted by lack of staff and funding for these investigations, teams of detectives dedicated to historic cases are usually seen as a luxury, with more immediate matters taking precedence. But there have been recent breakthroughs. Earlier this year, New South Wales detectives arrested a man in Melbourne over the murder of a young Sydney woman 21 years ago. And just last week, a 39-year-old man was indicted for the murder of one of three children who disappeared from the Bowraville Aboriginal community 14 years ago. In Sydney, Homicide Squad Commander Paul Jones runs the Unsolved Homicide Team, the first of its kind in the country and just 12 months old. At Police Headquarters in Parramatta, Jones says there are nine detectives dedicated to New South Wales' 400 cold cases that date back to 1970.

Paul Jones: We will look at some cases earlier than 1970 if we decide there's value in doing that, but much earlier than 1970 we start to run out of witnesses still being alive and evidence and stuff possibly being found. There's been a whole variety of filing systems, some very good, some less than good, and the case file will of course involve the usual sort of things you'd expect: statements from witnesses, perhaps some physical exhibits. Probably more interestingly is the comments and the views of the detectives in their running sheets, those detectives that led the investigations back when they occurred; gives you a bit of a feel about it. And one of the rules we have is that the person doing the review from the Unsolved team, can't have had any involvement in the investigation previously.

Helen Thomas: And why is that?

Paul Jones: Well, one of the reasons is we don't want them to go in with a bias or with a view already, we want to start with some fresh eyes to have another look at it, see whether for some reasons, detectives got diverted down one track and excluded some others, now there's the chance to make sure we don't make the same mistake again, if that happened. Or more importantly, you look now to the possibilities of advances in technology, so DNA, new ballistics technologies, improvements in fingerprints. Is there something that a new technology brings to the investigation that you can employ now that we couldn't have employed back then?

Helen Thomas: In Queensland, Mike Condon is the officer in charge of homicide, and he approaches historic inquiries with a slightly different perspective. He believes in old eyes as well as fresh ones, and cites the analysis of retired Assistant Commissioner Alan (Abe) Duncan, as a classic example. Fifty-three years ago, as a young police officer, Duncan took part in the investigation into the murder of Betty Shanks, a university student on her way home from a lecture when she was killed. Abe Duncan is now 90.

Abe Duncan: It was always one of the unsolved murders that intrigued me, and I always felt that at some stage of my lifetime I hoped that we would come to a solution; even though it might well have meant something unusual, it's more than likely that the offender was a person who knew Betty prior to the night of her death.

Helen Thomas: The last time Betty Shanks was seen alive was when she was getting off a tram at Wilston.

Helen Thomas: What could have prompted such anger, what could have prompted that sort of violence?

Abe Duncan: Well, there was a theory, there was a possible link with a doctor who was allegedly associated, or tried to form an association with Betty, before the murder, and she repulsed his advances and he could well have been upset because of this, but let me say that that theory was never ever followed out to the extent that I believe it should have been followed out.

Helen Thomas: A $50,000 reward still stands for information leading to an arrest and conviction in this murder, believed to be Australia's oldest cold case. But as Queensland's homicide chief knows, time can play a major role in cold case inquiries.

Inspector Mike Condon: The older the case the more archaic the systems were at the time in recording the information. But could I say this, that if you don't have that information recorded in some form, you need to go to those investigators, because I've learned over the years that detectives have a habit of keeping things in their head and not writing it down, and we need to extract that information from the detectives, whether it be a gut theory or something that they did and didn't record for whatever reasons. And then the fresh eyes can assess as to whether it's relevant for the current cold case review.

Helen Thomas: A number of unofficial groups also look into cold cases here, and around the world. In the US especially, this is a growing trend. The Doe Network, for instance, is an online database for missing persons and unidentified murder victims across America and around the world. It's listed on the website of the National Centre for Cold Cases, a site restricted to '… law enforcement agencies and recognised criminal justice and victims' rights associations'. Todd Matthews works for the voluntary group from his home in Livingstone, Tennessee.

Todd Matthews: So many people, now that I work in this type of business now, think that I have a fascination with death, and it's not a fascination or a morbid love of death, "I feel like death has cheated us, and I'd like to cheat it back if possible." I hate death actually; death has taken many mysteries with it, and some of these people, the mystery of their true identity has been taken. I feel like death has cheated us, and I'd like to cheat it back if possible, and take back the one thing that was taken from them that we can possibly get back, and that's to identify them.

Helen Thomas: Todd, there are something like 3900 cases up on your website. Does that translate with the number of cold cases there are right across the States, or are we looking at a much higher figure than that?

Todd Matthews: There's a lot more. In the NCIC, the National Crime Information Centre, that's a division of the FBI here in the States, and we're talking about the North American area, maybe not Mexico, but there are 102,728 missing persons listed in their database. That means there are 5,797 unidentified bodies listed in their database. Not all of these cases are reported to the FBI and NCIC, sometimes they're just reported to the local agency. We found these numbers as high as they are, are sometimes only 10 to 50 per cent of the actual numbers, and then you translate that to the world, there are literally thousands of unidentified bodies and thousands and thousands of missing persons throughout the world.

Helen Thomas: Matthews says police and forensic investigators across the US are more inclined to welcome his group's involvement now.

Todd Matthews: Ten years ago, it was different, it was a totally different world, and the internet was new to most of these people and I don't think they could see the powerful tool that it was going to become. But now we find that most of the time, law enforcement were willing to work with and sometimes greatly embrace this type of work. We do have a forensic art project, called Project EDAN (Everybody Deserves A Name), and we do provide free forensic art, because a lot of the cases that I've tried to pull on to the Doe Network, didn't have a face. It's very difficult to get a positive identification.

Helen Thomas: So when you say forensic art, Todd, you're talking about actually drawing a picture of the face of the dead person?

Todd Matthews: Yes. From the actual autopsies. Initially we would try to do the sketches, maybe unsolicited. We would say somebody needed the work, or just a bad image that just needed tweaking, you know, others say clarification. Now we've evolved to the point, even today, I've consulted with medical examiners directly in their office that are having a lack of funding that cannot get these images done otherwise, that are willing to confidentially give us these images so that we can create something that we can present to the public, or they can, it's up to them.

Helen Thomas: Of course, this work is not for the faint-hearted. Investigating cold cases anywhere requires expertise, dedication and a particular psychological make-up. Even Queensland's chief homicide officer admits that sometimes the facts, no matter how cold, do affect investigating officers. He cites the relationship between his detectives and the family of Lorraine Wilson, one of two women murdered 31 years ago, their bodies dumped at Murphy's Creek, near the Toowoomba Ranges.

Mike Condon: We only in the last few months have spoken to the Wilson parents. They obviously had grave concerns about the whereabouts of their daughter when she didn't report on the 6th October, 1974 of course when the skeletal remains were located at Murphy's Creek in 1976, their worst nightmares were revealed. Now, they've lived with that nightmare some 30 years down the track, and you can't help but feel for the people and perhaps reflect on how lucky your own life has been when you look at their age, and in some cases these people just hang on, waiting through horrendous health problems, waiting for that knock at the door when the police can say 'We've identified who's responsible for murdering your son or daughter'. And having been down that road with myself and my team-mate for a number of years, it gives you great pleasure to be able to give those people an answer at the later stages of their life.

Helen Thomas: It sounds like an enormous responsibility.

Mike Condon: Yes, I believe it is. It's certainly something that I instil in my people, that it's an enormous responsibility, and people put great trust and belief in us, even 30 years down the track. The Wilsons still believe to this very day that we will identify those persons who took their daughter away from them.

Helen Thomas: And do you?

Mike Condon: Absolutely.

Helen Thomas: Inspector Mike Condon, in Brisbane. But is justice what we really want in these cases, individually and as a community? 'CSI's' creator, Anthony Zuiker, believes so.

Anthony Zuiker: I believe it's justice. I believe that when you watch the show and you see the bad guy taken down from a family of hard-working scientists who know what to look for and are using their minds to nail down somebody that did something bad and put them away, there's something very satisfying in having a sense of justice, and I think everybody who has been violated or knows the victim of a crime or knows somebody who's the victim of a crime, and I think we all know what that feels like, so when we see our heroes week to week, executing justice and putting the bad person away, it feels very satisfying.

Helen Thomas: But author Helen Garner isn't so sure.

Helen Garner: I think justice, in a sense, is a rather elevated and intellectual form of that desire for resolution. It's very deep in people, it's almost unbearable to see a miscarriage of justice or what we think to be a miscarriage of justice. It causes great disturbance in people. I think that's why you have people shouting for the return of the death penalty, it's a kind of awful, brutal thing to see people shouting for that, or crying out for vengeance, but it's horrible and with our intellect, many of us reject that. But there's a very deep need in people to have punishment done and seen to be done, and I think especially these days when people talk about the principles of sentencing, rehabilitation is right up the top of the list, and retribution, as it's called, or punishment is way further down the list, and I think this is a cause for anxiety for people.

Helen Thomas: Perhaps an even more complex response kicks in. Or something darker.

Sydney journalist, Marion Firth.

Marion Firth: I think there's invariably, and I'm not belittling the solution to a crime, that there's a sense of anticlimax, don't you think? They find the person that did this thing that frightened us for so long. I think the passing of time can make the sort of notion of evil grow, if you like; 'My God, not only did this person do this thing, but they're so clever, they've not been caught' - you know, they must be a very bad force, that all these forces of good can't find them. And I think there's a sense of anticlimax, because often when they find the person in a homicide or a child murder, or a sexual assault and murder, it's a rather pathetic character. I mean it's not stranger-danger like we've imagined, it's usually someone that had some acquaintance with the victim, like a caretaker or a gardener or someone who'd seen them, if not a relative. And there's this sense of 'Oh my God, is that who it was, is that what we've been scared of for 30 years, that funny old bloke over there with the torn shirt?' And I think that's even more confusing, because we've been fearful of something that at the end of the day was so ordinary. So I think the longer we have to want to get this bastard, if you like, 30, 40 years, and then they get him and there he is, he's invariably a let-down, we're not catching him in his youth, you know, perhaps like Ivan Milat or someone, who still looks like a scary bastard, and there's a sense of relief I think, but I think there's often a sense of let-down.

Helen Garner: In a sense what we're talking about here, is not about the person himself, but it's about what's been called the renting of social fabric that's been caused by a horrible crime. That we need to have that rent repaired, and the only way we've got to do it is the legal system, and we have to turn to that again and again, and even if when the criminals or the accused person is found, it's just some pathetic creep. "What we're talking about here is not about the person - it's about the renting of the social fabric that's been caused by a horrible crime." Still, it has to be dealt with. It doesn't mean you have to necessarily hang the person or fling him into jail for the rest of their life, but it has to be brought out in the open, he has to be brought to face the consequences of what he did, and to account for himself.

Helen Thomas: Background Briefing's team-behind-the-scenes this week includes Production Co-ordinator, Linda McGuinness; Technical Producer, Angus Kingston, and Webmaster, Paul Bolger. Our Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett.

Further Information

The DOE Network
The International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons.
http://doenetwork.org

The Australian Institute of Criminology
Australia's pre-eminent national crime and criminal justice research agency.
http://www.aic.gov.au/

COLD CASE CENTERlt;sup>(TM)
http://coldcasecenter.com