Irish Examiner view: Can podcasting solve true crime?

Important to use caution and not confuse facts with entertainment

Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

As a technology, and form of content delivery, podcasts have been with us for fewer than 20 years. Last month it was calculated that there are nearly three million podcasts available in the world with 135 billion episodes. That is a lot of listening.

Amid all that choice, true crime has proven to be a hot generator of downloads, reaction, and user engagement.

We have our own example in Ireland with the West Cork series which has speculated about the murder of the 39-year-old French documentary producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996. Documentary maker Louis Theroux is credited with describing it as “possibly the best true crime podcast of all time”. 

What West Cork lacks of course, as everyone is aware, is a denouement; a final flourish; a Poirot moment. But it is not so in an antipodean example where a husband has been brought to justice almost entirely because of a podcast series and is likely to spend the rest of his life in an Australian jail.

The Teacher’s Pet podcast by journalists for The Australian, Hedley Thomas and Slade Gibson, has investigated the disappearance of mother of two Lynette Dawson from Bayview in Sydney and produced new witnesses and long-lost statements which encouraged police to reopen the 40-year-old case. 

Lynette Dawson’s body has never been found but last week her 74-year-old husband, Chris, was found guilty of murdering her by a judge sitting alone. Chris Dawson maintains that he is innocent.

The podcast has been downloaded 60m times internationally, reaching number one in the podcast charts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain.

Interestingly, the judge in the case, sitting alone because it was felt that no jury would be able to set aside the impact of the podcast (which The Australian withdrew from its platforms on the advice of the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions) had something to say about the impact of podcasting on the course of justice.

Justice Ian Harrison said it was probable, if not certain, that The Teacher’s Pet “may in whole or in part have completely deprived some evidence of its usefulness”. He said he was unable to determine with any confidence whether what one important witness said came from what she remembered or what she was told by the journalist.

Cold cases, in the absence of any direct evidence such as DNA, and with time playing tricks with memory, can clearly be fraught with difficulty and danger. Because podcasting is essentially a dramatic medium, an audience can crave a result where true crime and recent history is concerned.

For that reason, we must be cautious about confusing facts with entertainment.