Police Tape Crime X

“No matter how big the gang that we might be facing, we’re a bigger gang.” NSW detective superintendent Deborah Wallace is referred to as the gangbuster, having taken on T5 in Cabramatta, Middle Eastern crime gangs and the bikies, but it was a shocking crime at the start of her career that became a defining moment. Just 24, she walked in the footsteps of murder victim Anita Cobby for a police re-enactment and was chilled by the terror the Sydney nurse must have felt.
 

Inspector Jodie Pearson had seen the damage an explosion could do to a human body and felt prepared for what she might face on any callout. The murder of a top cop in a targeted car bombing, with the killer still at large, changed that. “I was terrified,” she says of approaching the scene, vision restricted by her heavy bomb suit. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, they’ve already targeted a former policeman. Are they targeting me?’” Then she found a second body.
 

Now Queensland Deputy Commissioner Tracy Linford’s world was literally blown apart when as a junior constable a bomb went off outside the Russell St police HQ where she was stationed in Melbourne. Since then she’s worked to bring paedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell to justice, helped develop police tactics to end the Melbourne gangland killings and been involved in counter terrorism in two states. At times she’s been harassed and faced chilling death threats, but perhaps most bizarre of all were the actions of a love-struck crim.
 

Just how Sara Morse ended up spending Christmas Day with Carl Williams – the gangland killer having been snuck out of prison – is a tale from the darkest days of Melbourne’s underbelly. But for Morse’s mum the biggest concern was that Williams shouldn’t get a taste of her homemade Christmas pud. It’s a light-hearted twist in a career dominated by murder and sexual violence – “if you focus on it too much, you would never leave your house” – but the now detective senior sergeant wouldn’t do anything else.  
 

She trained at the FBI Academy featured in Silence of the Lambs, but when it comes to depicting the work of criminal profilers, Kris Illingsworth says TV’s Mindhunter does it best – though real life is still nowhere near as glamorous. Instead it’s hours on end of studying the minute detail of a crime that has fuelled her insights into cases such as the Sydney Granny Killer, the Snowtown murders and the Norfolk Island killing of Janelle Patton. “You only get called to the cases that they can’t solve or that are particularly hard for some reason,” she says. “You never get the easy cases … which I like.” WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
 

Have you ever found yourself in a situation, you swear you never could have predicted? A situation so far from the ordinary that even remembering it feels surreal? Season 2 of I Swear I Never is publishing now, you'll hear from Peter, an ex homicide detective haunted by his past, Tina, a mum who hit rock bottom after a prescription drug addiction and Amber, a pregnant woman who went out to dinner during a pandemic and got more than what she ordered. Search I Swear I Never wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.