Real Crime with Adam Shand

When Doug Morgan first sat down with Adam Shand, the plan was simple: get both twins on the record, tell the full story of Victoria's After Dark Bandits, and move on. Nearly a year later, Adam is back with Doug for one final conversation — and this time, it's personal.

More than fifty years on from the bank and betting shop robberies that defined their notoriety, Doug Morgan is done looking back. He's running youth workshops,...

More than a century separates them, but the cases of Harry "Breaker" Morant and Ben Roberts-Smith share a troubling echo — Australian soldiers prosecuted for killings carried out in the fog of war, on foreign soil, in conflicts already morally compromised by the powers that sent them there.

Adam Shand sits down with Sydney lawyer Tony Taouk of Magna Carta Lawyers, whose essay in Lawyers Weekly drew a compelling parallel betwe...

Victorian police officer Stuart Grimley has seen it all — three years as a Kalgoorlie copper rubbing shoulders with the Gypsy Jokers, stints in Major Drugs and Crime Command and two years working sexual offences cases that left images he'll never unsee. Then, in 2018, he did something most cops never do: he got elected to State Parliament under Derryn Hinch's Justice Party banner.

He lost his seat in 2022 and went back to Vic...

Melbourne is burning. A mystery cartel is laying siege to the city's hospitality industry — firebombings, drive-by shootings, bashings at family homes — and nobody knows exactly who's behind it, or why.

Herald Sun crime reporter Seb Costello has been on the frontline of the story, breaking exclusive after exclusive using old-fashioned shoe leather. Adam and Seb unpack what's known, what's rumoured, and what keeps not ad...

Australia's illicit tobacco war has a new front — and it's more dangerous than ever.

When tobacco kingpin Kaz Hamad was captured in Iraq earlier this year, many hoped it would signal the beginning of the end for the country's booming black market cigarette trade. Instead, his disappearance has thrown the market into chaos, and the firebombings, shootings and targeted attacks are back.

Adam Shand sits down with Walkley Award-w...

Ron Isherwood was born into Melbourne's underworld — son of Big Ron, a feared enforcer in the notorious Painters and Dockers Union. By 16, he'd fired his first shot. By 17, he was facing attempted murder charges. By 19, his mother was dead and heroin had taken over everything.

In this episode, Adam speaks with Little Ron — now 71 — about growing up in the shadow of a violent, domineering father, his front-row seat...

Sam Jones did hard time, faced drug and weapons charges, and by his own admission had a very twisted idea of what it meant to be a man. At 37, he's something else entirely — a trauma counsellor using breathwork and lived experience to help others find their way out.

In this episode, Adam speaks with Sam about the childhood wounds that set him on a path of crime and addiction, the fake brotherhood he found and the six months i...

He is Australia's most decorated living soldier — a Victoria Cross recipient charged with the alleged murder of five unarmed Afghan detainees. But does losing a civil defamation case make Ben Roberts-Smith a convicted war criminal? Adam Shand thinks not, and he's found one of the country's most experienced criminal defence barristers to explain why.

Philip Dunn KC has spent a career in the criminal courts defending the highes...

Peter Morgan was one half of Australia's most audacious crime duo — identical twins who pulled off a string of armed robberies and became the country's most wanted.

In Part Two of Adam's conversation with Peter, the story picks up in the aftermath of the 1979 Heathcote bank robbery, in which Senior Constable Ray Koch was shot.

Peter recounts the desperate hours after the shooting — hiding from roadblocks, hitching into ...

He spent two years terrorising country banks and TABs across Victoria. He shot a police officer. He robbed the same bank three times. And he did it all as one half of Australia's most audacious criminal duo — the After Dark Bandits.

Peter Morgan is the lesser-heard voice of the infamous Morgan twins. While his brother Doug has told his side of the story, Peter has stayed largely silent — until now.

In this first of a tw...

When two Victoria Police officers were murdered by sex offender Dezi Freeman, it shone a harsh light on what frontline policing really costs. Adam Shand sits down with recently retired Victorian officer Jason Doyle — whose raw column in The Age sparked national conversation, to talk about a career lived entirely on the road.

From welfare checks that turned deadly, to serving in the aftermath of Black Saturday and losing ...

In 2016, Adam Shand covered the disappearance of Rigby Fielding in a single radio segment — and then moved on. Ten years later, Rigby's family is still waiting.

Rigby Fielding was 53 years old when he vanished on August 15, 2015, after calling his mother to say he was on his way home from Perth to Rockingham. He never arrived. Now his sister Stephenie joins Adam to walk through a decade of unanswered questions, police indiffe...

Adam Shand had a front-row seat to exactly the kind of incident his latest guest spends every day managing. After stepping in when a drunk man harassed women on a Melbourne train — only to watch Victoria Police's Protective Services Officers handle it with quiet, professional authority — Adam sat down with Acting Superintendent Sean Halley from the Transit Safety Division to unpack what's really happening on the network...

When three armed intruders broke into  "Michael"'s Melbourne home in the dead of night, they weren't expecting a fight. Armed with machetes and a gun, the men ransacked his home demanding money. What they got instead was a man who refused to back down.

Bloodied but unbeaten, "Michael" held his ground using nothing but a decades-old ornamental sword and the muscle memory of martial arts training he hadn't used in 20 years. No o...

In 2008, Melbourne man Fred Boyle was convicted of murdering his wife Edwina in October 1983 — then keeping her body sealed inside a 44-gallon drum for 23 years, moving it with him from house to house as he raised their two daughters.

Tracey Franze knew Edwina through a shared love of horses in the late 1970s. She watched Fred's cruelty up close — towards animals, towards the truth and ultimately towards the woman who d...

In June 1980, Maria James was stabbed 68 times in her Thornbury bookstore. Her killer was never charged. For years, investigators and a high-profile podcast pointed the finger at local parish priest Father Anthony Bonjourno — but Phil Cleary has always believed the real killer was someone else entirely.

Phil Cleary is no stranger to violent crime. In 1987, his sister Vicki was murdered by her ex-partner Peter Raymond Keogh. A...

Kay Docherty was 15 years old when she vanished on July 1979. She'd told her mum she was going to babysit at a friend's place. Her twin brother Kevin was supposed to pick her up at nine. He never got the chance.

Forty-six years later, her twin brother Kevin Docherty, is still searching for answers — and still fighting to be heard. Adam talks to Kevin Docherty about the night Kay disappeared, the letters that were never proper...

****Content Warning:****

This episode contains discussion of the abduction, sexual assault and murder of children. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

In August 1973, two girls vanished from Adelaide Oval at a Saturday afternoon football match. Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, and Kirsty Gordon, 4, walked to the toilet at 3:45pm and were never seen again.

For decades, the prime suspect was Errol Ra...

Mark "Hammer" Dixon spent years on the road with Roger Rogerson and Mark "Chopper" Reed — working security, collecting debts and sharing hotel rooms in outback Queensland. And in that time, Rogerson said things he probably shouldn't have.

He told Dixon the two men convicted of the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing — which killed 15 people — were innocent. That he'd written them up. He hinted that Donald McKay's bo...