He Broke Into a Zoo… Then Did THIS to a Turtle | Australia Crimes Ep. 3

Imagine you work at a zoo in Australia. Your job is to feed the animals every single morning, but you notice the elephants are missing bananas. The lions are missing meat scraps. The monkeys are missing fruit. A giant Galapagos turtle is missing its head. Who would steal the head of a tortoise? The These name is Malcolm Naden. Let's start at the beginning because to understand how Naden became Australia's most wanted ghost, you got to know where he came from. Malcolm John Naden was born on November 5, 1973 in Dubbo. Dubbo is a regional town in New South Wales, think dusty outback vibes. It's about 250 miles northwest of Sydney. Naden grew up in a working class family with indigenous heritage on his dad's side, and from what reports say, his childhood wasn't all sunshine. He dropped out of school early, bounced around nod jobs, found his niche as an abattoir worker. Abattoir is a fancy word for the guy that kills animals in a slaughterhouse. This means he got real comfortable with knives, blood, and breaking down animals. That skill set came in handy later in the worst ways imaginable. By his early 30s, Naden was living a quiet life in Dubbo. He was single, had no kids, and was crashing with relatives. Neighbors described him as a loner, a bit eccentric, with a fascination for the bush. No not like other dudes fascination with the bush, I'm talking about the Australian outback. He was a crack shot with a rifle, knew how to track game, and could disappear into the wilderness for days. Sounds like an innocent survivalist hobby, right? Kind of, he put those skills to work doing some pretty gnarly stuff later on. Let me stop right there for a second. Naden was the kill guy at a slaughterhouse, was single, no children, described as a loner, couch-surfed, and his favorite hobby was chilling in the jungle for days on end, and that didn't raise any red flags with anyone. Okay, I'll continue. Naden's little crime streak kicks off in May of 2004 when he was linked to the aggravated indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl. Reports say she was a family friend or relative and the attack happened there in Dubbo. Police are sniffing around and he initially slips away. Things escalate fast though. In January 2005, his 24-year-old cousin, Latisha Nolan, a mom of four young kids, vanishes without a trace. She's last seen at Naden's grandparents house where he was staying. Police connect the dots and Naden becomes the prime suspect. Her cars found abandoned, but no body. Latisha's family is left in limbo. They have no idea where she's gone and are raising her four kids without answers. But Naden's not done. No sir, just six months later in June 2005, another cousin, 24-year-old Christie Shoals, is found strangled in Naden's locked bedroom at the same grandparents hall he was staying in before. She's got ligature marks around her neck, which are signs of a brutal struggle. After Naden had killed Christie, he defiled the body. Christie was a vibrant young woman full of life and her death rocks the town of Dubbo. Police raid the house, but Naden's already ghosted by fleeing into the bush with whatever he could carry. In August 2005, the manhunt officially begins. Naden has now wanted for two murders, the graphing of the 15-year-old and whatever else they can pin on him. I wanted to talk about this story because of how insane it's about to get. He doesn't flee to another country. He doesn't catch a boat or plane over to New Zealand. He goes feral in the rugged Australian bush around Dubbo. It's all just dense forests, mountains, rivers, snakes, everything that can kill you. From 2005 to 2012, seven straight years, he survives like a one-man post-apocalyptic movie. Police throw everything they have at him, hundreds of officers, tracking dogs, helicopters with thermal imaging, infrared, the works. Rewards hit $250,000 in the tip's flood in, but he's always one step ahead. His first run in with the law was a couple months after he killed his cousin in 2005. Cops raid the grandparents house where that murder took place and they find him hiding in the ceiling cavity like the sneaky little rat that he is. And like a sneaky little rat, Naden smashes out a window, scales offense, and disappears. From there, his survival game goes nuts. He breaks into remote farmhouses, cabins, and sheds. He steals food, clothes, ammo, even Christmas decorations one time for some reason. Hey, I guess even bad guys love Christmas. He'd sometime leave the places tidy like a polite burglar, other times he trash him. He hunted kangaroos with stolen knives or rifles, butchered them perfectly, and ate them raw or cooked over him fires. He even used their skins for blankets and wasted nothing. One of the craziest chapters happened in late 2005 into early 2006. This is when he hides inside the western plain Zoo in Dubbo. Yeah, the actual open-range zoo with lions, elephants, giraffes, the whole deal. He sneaks in and basically moves into the animal enclosure at night. He's stealing bananas straight from the elephant feed. He's raiding monkeys for fruit. He's scavenging meat scraps from the carnivores and digging through rubbish bins for leftovers. The zoo keeps telling the police that the bananas are missing. The police think, wait a minute, there's a psycho in the woods somewhere. Could be him taking the fruit. On December 23rd 2005, they shut sections of the zoo down and run a massive search with helicopters and dozens of officers sweeping every square foot of the property. They couldn't find Naden so they figure the best next thing is to cut off his food supply, so they start locking up all the animal food. This pisses off Naden and he becomes desperate. According to the 2017 book The Contractor, which was written by a private investigator who worked the case, named decided to send a message. A vet at the zoo later recalled seeing a figure fleeing the Galapagos tortoise enclosure. When the vet checked, they found one of those massive, ancient, 440-pound tortoises with its head ripped clean off. Yeah, Naden got hungry. He had torn the endangered tortoises head off and sucked out the raw guts and organs. He was annoyed the food was gone so he turned the zoo animals into his personal pantry. That's not survival, that straight up feral horror. Old boy had become a cryptid, like El Chupacabra who sucks goats. Naden would be Chupador de Tortugas. I think that's how you would say that. Anyways, come to find out, police couldn't find him because he was hiding in the attic of the zoo manager's hut. Slippery little rat. Dude was on the property the whole time police were looking for him. He flees the zoo in an early 2006 turtle sucker siding start trickling in an area called Lightning Ridge. This place is about 200 miles from the zoo so our boy has been doing some serious hiking. And yes, I have decided he is a cryptid named turtle sucker. Now please argue in the comments about how turtles and tortoises are different and now clear it is that I was raised in the public education system of rural Alabama. Anyway, some more people see turtle sucker at a place called Willow Bend Village at the original mission. This place is about 400 miles from the last siding so again our boy is doing some serious hiking. Police launch another search with dozens of cops, dogs and helicopters. He slips away again. His relatives go on TV at this point pleading into the cameras, Malcolm, come home, it's over. He doesn't listen to this at all. He keeps walking. He's drifting north and east mostly living off whatever the Australian bush and random home break ends can give him. Dude is just a ghost for all of 2006 killing kangaroos for food and stealing people's stuff. The police are getting really tired of this guy so they put out an initial bounty of $50,000 which was later raised to $250,000. Three freaking years go by without any major incidents. The turtle sucker is out there somewhere though. Reports don't state what kind of intel it was but some intel puts him near a town called Kempsi. It was probably turtle sucking intel. Doing research and checking out Kempsi I gotta say it looks like a prime place to still people stuff. If I was a murdering turtle sucker that's definitely where I'd set up camp. He chills around there for a year then in 2010 he bounces around all over the place. From looking at a map of all the ground he's covered I'm pretty sure he didn't spend one night in the same place the entire time he was on the run. Police are kind of able to keep track of him after lifting fingerprints from his break ends but the dude just keeps slipping away. Another year goes by as 2011 now. Police think they might have him so they lock onto a remote campsite near a mountainous area called Barrington Tops. Tactical teams move in trying to box him in without spooking him. Naden, being the paranoid survival expert that he is, spots them first through the scope of a stolen rifle. He doesn't run this time though. He waits to ambush the cops. The tactical officers are getting closer to Naden. He raises the stolen 22 caliber rifle and aims it at the first enemy he sees. The police tracking dog leading the officers to him. At the last second the dog walks out of sight so he shifts his aim and fires a senior Constable Brad McFadden. The bullet tears into McFadden's shoulder from under 10 meters. The officer drops to the ground, wounded but still breathing. Officers die for cover, return fire and call for an airlift for their wounded. In the chaos Naden melts back into the bush before they can nab him. Officer McFadden goes in his surgery and thankfully survives. The next day Naden is sucking turtles near the shooting site. He hears the sound of a helicopter first. Then the faint sound of creed and clear water revivals portion his son. The last thing he remembers is being engulfed in flames as an airstrike destroyer his location and the surrounding area in the dense jungle. The trees were talking and they said they were hungry for napalm. At least I wish that would have been kind of cool. The reward stays at $250,000 but the urgency to catch this scumbag skyrockets. It's not just hide and go seek the turtle sucker anymore, it's oh crap he's actively trying to kill us. Homie manages to evade police from December 2011 to March 2012. The man hunt entered its most intense phase around this time. The Australian public was hooked on the story, equal parts terrified and in some corners weirdly impressed. It started getting to the point where some people were looking at him as a folk hero like Ned Kelly. You guys ever hear about Ned Kelly? We'll go down the doughnut hole real quick. Ned Kelly was also an Australian criminal who liked to hide in the bush but he did it around the 1870s. Kelly used to rob banks with homemade armor made of iron. Seriously, he looked like a walking moonshine still. Similar to Nathan, he liked to shoot at police and he killed a couple of them. I don't want to get too much in a Ned Kelly right now, we'll talk about him in a later episode of Crime is Fun. You know that podcast you should like to and subscribe to and turn on notifications to and tell your friends about even grandma unless you sold her to the US Army for IED testing. Check out episode one of Crime is Fun, People Soup. For the next few months December 2011 in March 2012 he sticks to the Gloucester area. Australians are gripped by the crazy man in the wood story so much. One pub owner said Nate and Ned put Gloucester on the map and that beer sales had increased by 20% due to all the police officers in the area and tourist interest in the case. He's just back to his silly all ways though more break ins, more stolen ammo and guns and sightings all over the place. He's cornered himself in denser bush but he's still free. Until the night of March 22nd 2012 that is, a tip leaves 20 tactical officers in their dog squad to a rundown cabin about 18 miles west of Gloucester. Around midnight they surrounded before Nathan can see them coming. He looks out the window of the rundown cabin and says "Uh oh" and classic turtle sucker fashion he bolts out of the back of the cabin trying to melt back into the dense bush. The cops weren't about to let him get away though, they had a trick up their sleeve that I like to call the "Bork Bork Nom Nom". A canine handler lets go of his lead that was holding a German shepherd known as Chuck. Chuck goes flying out of the shadows and Chuck is very, very hungry. He latches on the Nathan's leg and pins him to the ground. The other officers jump on him and quickly get him cuffed. After seven years they finally got him. Nathan, looking like a skinny caveman, looks up at the police and mutters, "Thank God it's over, I've had enough." After seven years of bush survival, turtle sucking, the millions of dollars poured into manhunts, the shootout and that final takedown by Chuck the canine, Malcolm Nathan finally faced the music and Sydney Supreme Court in 2013. The trial started exactly one year after his arrest on March 22, 2013. Nathan, looking like a far cry from the bearded bush man arrested in photos, shuffled into the court in prison greens. He was skinnier, shaved head, trimmed beard and fidgeting like a guy who'd rather be anywhere else. The court had already dealt with a quick fitness to stand trial issue back in February. Psychiatrists checked him out because of concerns about his mental state after years in isolation and being in the bush. By March his attorney told the judge, "There was an issue, but there isn't one now. I'm not sure what that means, but Nathan was declared fit so there couldn't be any insanity defense or drawn out hearings." On March 22, he stood in front of a courtroom and pleaded guilty to 32 charges. The big ones were the murders of Christy Sholes, who he strangled in June 2005 and his cousin Latee Chenolan, who he killed in January 2005, dismembered and dumped in a river. There was the aggravated indecent assault on the 15-year-old girl from 2004, shooting with intent to murder the police officer that was hunting him, and a long list of break-ins, thefts and firearm offenses from his evasion years. Guilty across the board, no contest. The families in the public gallery, Latee Chen's relatives and Christy's loved ones finally got the admission they'd waited eight years for. Sentencing didn't drag on either, prosecutors pushed hard for life, calling the crimes extraordinarily cruel and brutal. They painted Nathan as a remorseless psychopath who shone zero regret. Hell, he even told the psychiatrist the murders were his highest achievement. The defense tried to argue severe depression as an excuse for all his snarly stuff he had done, but the judge was not buying it. Sentencing day finally came on June 14, 2013, in front of Judge Derek Price. The courtroom was packed with victims, families and supporters. Judge Price spent a full hour laying it out with no punches pulled. He described the killings as cold-blooded, merciless and brutal. He rejected any real mental health excuse and hammered home the terror that Nathan inflicted. For Christy's goals murder, you know the more horrific one with post-mortem defilement, price ended down life imprisonment with no chance of parole. For Latee Chen Olin, a minimum 21-year non-parole period. The rest of the stuff, like shooting at police, assaults and thefts, he went ahead and added 40 years on top. Nathan was there twitching, playing with his beard, drumming his fingers on the bench, even brushing dust off the rail like he was bored or detached. There were no outbursts or apologies from the guy. When Judge Price finished and said Mr. Nane, you have been sentenced to life imprisonment, you will not be released on parole at any time during your life's sentence. You could hear a quiet "yes" from the gallery. One family member later said it felt like a wait finally lifting. Nothing just nodded and got let away, there's no drum at all, and Judge Price made it crystal clear. Life outside of prison is not an option for you. He's been rotting in Goldburn Supermax ever since, which some say as Australia's toughest prison. As of now, he's 52 years old and still locked up for life. Latee's family got a bit more closure though in 2020 when bone fragments from the river were finally DNA confirmed as hers, but of course the scars don't heal easily. The thing that I kept thinking about through this whole ordeal is why did he keep running? He even said to himself when he was caught, thank god it's over. I mean no one wants to go to prison, but he seemed genuinely relieved when he was caught. Course psychiatrist noted low grade depression and the personality disorder, but nothing severe enough for an insanity defense. Again, Nane did tell them the murders were his highest achievement, which is a pretty chilling sign of disassociation and lack of remorse. In interviews after capturing things like "Once you kill somebody, you can do it again. You just don't care." That mindset probably fueled the evasion. There's no guilt to drive him back and no internal breaks. He wasn't tormented by conscience, he just was existing. I guess the paranoia of being hunted like an animal for so many years while eating raw kangaroo meat and sucking turtles finally took its toll. Malcolm Naden spent seven years out there in the bush turning himself into a one-man horror show, eating zoo animals, and bushing cops, living like he was the king of the outback. He finally got dragged down by a dog and locked away for life. You think that's as dark as the Australian wilderness gets? But the outback has a way of hiding the worst things and just one guy gone feral. While Naden was running from the law, another monster was already using the same forest to hunt people who were a little bit too trusting. This next story isn't about a man surviving off kangaroos and stolen bananas, it's about a man who turned a beautiful stretch of bush into a graveyard for young travelers who just wanted to ride. His name was Ivan Millet and what he did to these backpackers makes Naden look like a survivalist with bad manners. Imagine you're a young traveler, 20-something years old. You're backpacking around Australia with your best mate. You're hitchhiking along the Hume Highway south of Sydney because that's where everyone did it in the early 90s. A friendly looking guy in a four wheel drive pulls over, big smile, he offers you a ride, he seems normal, he's pretty chatty, cool guy. He says he knows a shortcut through the forest so you hop in. Well, that same decision and scenario ended up costing seven people their lives. Well, seven or more, we'll talk about that in a second. Ivan Robert Marco Millet was born in 1944 into a big Yugoslav immigrant family in Sydney. On the outside, his parents seem like great people, they sent him in his 13 other siblings to nice Catholic schools. Ivan's dad though was an alcoholic with a temper and even as a teenager Ivan was shown some pretty troubling behavior like attacking animals with machetes. Between 17 and 22 years old, he was in and out of correctional facilities for breaking and entering, theft, assault, and stealing cars. The dude just couldn't stop being a criminal. In 1970, at the age of 25, Millen had just gotten out of prison for theft. Five months after being released, he bumped into 18-year-old girls hitchhiking at a train station. They didn't really want to hang out with them, but he had a trick up his sleeve, forced him to hang out with them with a knife. He ended up assaulting one of the young ladies until they were able to escape at a gas station. Police were pretty quick to find him though, he was arrested and charged with grape and armed robbery. While the waiting trial, he decided to do a couple more robberies with his brothers and then fake his own suicide before fleeing to New Zealand and living there for two years. Yet his brothers were great people too. Mill had eventually returned to Australia after his mother suffered a heart attack. Police caught wind of him being back in town so he was arrested again. Somehow, the kidnapping and grape trial was thrown out thanks to his family attorney. 1989 and 1993. a minute murdered at least seven young backpackers. Most of them were international travelers, British, German, Australian, all in their late teens or 20s. He'd picked them up hitchhiking, drive them deep into the forest, tie them up using their own belts, which became as in a mo, then spend hours stabbing and shooting them. Some victims were decapitated, others were posed. The bodies were found years apart, scattered across the same remote section of forest. The first pair turned up in 1992. These were two British girls who had disappeared in '89. One of the girls Joanne Walters had been stabbed 15 times and her friend Carolyn Clark was shot 10 times in the head. It was later determined that Millet had used the last girl for a target practice in the woods before putting them both in a shallow grave. The third and fourth victims were a young couple, both 19 years old. Their bones were found in a remote section of the Blinglow State Forest while the other victims were also located. The male half of that 19-year-old couple, Mr. James Gibson, his skeleton was found in the fetal position and he had been stabbed eight times. His girlfriend, Debra Everis, skull was beat in, her jaw was broken and she had knife marks on her forehead and back. Victim five, six and seven were found in similar fashion in the same state forest. They were all stabbed, brutally beaten and are shot. One of the German hitchhikers, one of the seven victims, head was never found. By 1993, police realized they had a serial killer on the hands who was specifically targeting backpackers. A reward was put out for $500,000. Investigators reporting every resource in a trying to catch this new serial killer, but the big break came from a guy who lived to tell the tale. A British backpacker named Paul Onions called police and said, hey, I know that guy you're looking for. Turns out Paul was hitchhiking in 1990 when a man named Bill picked him up. Paul said things got weird fast when Bill pulled a gun and tried to tie him up. Yeah, I'd say that's not normal behavior. Paul fought back, jumped out of the moving car and Bill chased him down while shooting at him with a revolver. You can probably guess who Bill is. Paul then managed to flag down another driver who helped him escape. Years later when police showed Paul a photo line up, he pointed straight at Ivan Millet and said, that's the man who tried to kill me. That one survivor's memory cracked the case wide open. In 1994 they raided Millet's house and found a mountain of evidence. They found guns, knives, camping gear belonging to the victims and even clothing taken as trophies. Police ended up raiding the homes of five of his brothers and even his mother where they found two dozen more guns and several more items belonging to the victims. The trial in 1996 was massive. Ivan sat there in court looking bored like it was all a big misunderstanding. The jury didn't buy it. He was convicted on seven counts of murder and sentenced to seven life sentences when no possibility of parole. We've got Ivan Millet locked up for seven murders which are the ones the courts could prove that seven young backpackers buried in shallow graves in the Belongos State Forest. Case closed, right? Well, not so fast. Even after the trial, even after the evidence piled up investigators kept digging. Seven just felt too clean, too small. They felt that the pattern was bigger, older, and uglier than what made it to court. See Millet wasn't some late bloomer killer who suddenly snapped in '89. He had a rap sheet going back to his teens, break ins, car theft, armed robbery, assaults. By the time he was in his 20s, he was already forcing hitchhikers off the road at knife point. Police knew he's been over 25 years as a road laborer driving highways for work. He practically lived on long stretches of empty road with plenty of hitchhikers. So when they started digging in unsolved cases, the list grew fast. Task Force Air, the team that finally nailed him in '94, reviewed 58 unsolved murders and disappearances across New South Wales and beyond. These cases from the 1970s, right up through the '90s, fit his ammo like a glove. They were young people, often hitchhiking, vanishing along major routes, bodies dumped in remote forests or plantations. Not all of them were backpackers, some were locals, some were just kids in the wrong place, but the signature was still there. Stab wounds, shooting, sometimes decapitation, and bodies left in shallow graves are not found at all. Some investigators put the suspect at total as high as 20, maybe 30 more. A few have gone even further, claiming Millet could be linked to 60 to 80 unsolved cases over his adult life. That's based on the sheer number of hitchhiker disappearances in NSW during those decades, Millet's mobility, his history of violence, and the fact he never confessed to anything. In 2025, NSW politician Jeremy Buckingham even pushed for a parliamentary inquiry into cold cases from '65 to 2010, specifically calling out Millet as a possible suspect and some of them, including the 1965 one to beach murders of two teenage girls. In that case, the sketch of the suspect looked enough like him that people still talk about it. The brutal truth is though, we'll probably never know the real number. Millet died denying everything. There were no deathbed confessions and no hidden map to more graves. The forest is big, the highways are long and time erases evidence. Millet spent the rest of his life behind bars claiming he was innocent, even writing letters and giving interviews saying his family set him up. He died of cancer in prison in 2019 at the age of 74, still insisting that he didn't do it. Some people still believe him, but most of Australia knows better. The Blongo forest is gorgeous, tall trees, hiking trails, the kind of place you'd take a photo for Instagram, but for seven young travelers, it became a death trap. Millet didn't need to chase them, he just offered a ride. He weaponized that casual trust we all have when we're young and far from home. The backpacker murders changed how people hitchhike in Australia and changed how police investigate missing persons. So we've got turtle sucker Malcolm Naden rotting away in supermax her life and the backpack killer rotting in the ground. So let's move on to something else. Since we're still talking about Australia, we can't skip the one that launched 1,000 memes. You ever heard a Dingo ate my baby? That punchline was used in classics like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and even Family Guy. A joke didn't come out a thin air one day, though. It's from a real case. It's from the tragic case of a nine-week-old girl taken from her tent in Uluru National Park, a mother screaming the truth to everyone and a system that refused to believe her for decades. Lindy and Michael Chamberlain Robal means your average middle-class Australian family. Michael is a preacher for the seventh day Adventist church and his wife is a stay-at-home mom. On August 17th, 1980, the two set out to have a nice little family camping trip with their kids, something that they've done more than a few times. They've taken six-year-old Aiden and four-year-old Reagan out to rough it in the bush before, but this time they have a new addition to the family fun. Nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain. Their campanier massive sandstone rock formation named Uluru, that is smack dab right in the middle of Australia. This rock formation is 1100 feet tall and around five or six miles around, a perfect place for all sorts of wildlife to hang out. On that warm August night at around 8 p.m., the Chamberlain family is settling in to enjoy the great outdoors with each other. Lindy hears baby Azaria let out a cry from the tent. She's probably just hungry, Lindy thought. I mean, after all, Azaria is just two months old. Lindy walks over to the tent and sees a dingo slinking out of it and running away. She peeks into the tent and finds a horrific sight. The baby is gone, there's blood on the ground, and dingo tracks are leading away from the camp. Lindy screams the iconic "a dingo's got my baby!" Wasn't that in Austin Powers too? Anyways, witnesses here and everyone in the nearby area starts searching. Hours go by with Azaria not being found. Real quick, if you've never seen a dingo, just think of it like an Australian coyote, just a little bit cuter. It's basically a medium-sized wild dog that hunts small prey, like rabbits, or babies. Even more people including police and rescue join in for several days after the initial incident. Volunteers did note that the campsite area was heavily trafficked by dingo's. Seven days into the search, someone found a baby's blood stain jumpsuit, singlet, booties, and nappy all confirmed to be Azaria's. Still no body though. Soon after, for police investigators, sat at a nearby motel having a couple beers while discussing the whole thing. One investigator named Michael Gilroy told his colleagues, "Yeah, it seems very likely that mom's telling the truth given that there's been a series of recent dingo attacks on children at the same park." Investigator John Lincoln, on the other hand, quote, "Scoffs at the possibility that a dog could lug a 10-pound baby hundreds of yards." To prove his point, he fills a bucket with 10 pounds of sand and shows the other detectives that he can only hold it in his mouth for one minute. He then challenges the other investigators to see if they could do it better. I honestly didn't make that part up. I wish I did. For one detective Lincoln, I wish you guys had Google back then because a dingo can easily carry 20 pounds or more over distances. And two, you're not a fucking dingo. Anyways, the first corner in quest was opened December of 1980. An inquest is just a simple investigation. a figure out who, when, and how someone died. By now, this whole case had exploded in popularity. It was all over magazines, newspapers, and even television. In February of 1981, the court proceedings of the coroner's findings was televised. Coroner said, "Yep, it was most likely a dingo attack, but he added something kind of odd to his ending statement." He stated, "Asari's body had been taken from the possession of the dingo and disposed of by an unknown method by a person or person's name unknown." Personally, I've no idea how the hell he came to that conclusion, but that's what it says in the reports. The police aren't very happy with the results of the coroner's findings, so they continue the investigation. The public wasn't very happy either. People watching the broadcast said, "Lindy seemed to calm." Rumors started that because of her religious background, the baby might have been used as a human sacrifice. You know, like blood, for the blood gods. Summary stated that the Chamberlain's were somehow linked to the Jones sound mass sewer slide two years earlier. That was the one where Jim Jones convinced hundreds of people to move to Guyana, South America, and the U.S. Congressmen went to investigate so they shot him, then they all took poison, killing 900 people, including 300 children, and back to the dingo. Three and a half months after the first coroner's results, one of the world's leading forensic teams at the London Hospital Medical College took a look at the baby clothes that were found during the search. After some thorough research, including ultraviolet photography, the investigation took quite a turn. Forensic professionals said the baby's throat was cut in the imprint of a small adult hand was found on the jumpsuit. The family's car was then seized and calmed through by forensics. Authorities said they found traces of human fetal hemoglobin on some areas. A pair of scissors were also found which were said to have been used to cut the baby's throat. Michael and Lindy Chamberlain were arrested for the murder of Azaria. The prosecution had a heck of a story. According to them, Lindy had taken the baby to the family car, slid her throat with the pair of scissors in the front seat, and then hid the body in a large camera case. They said she then fed her son a can of baked beans by the campfire before going to the tent and yelling, "A dingo ate my baby." Then while everyone was searching for the poor baby, Lindy disposed of the body. There were a couple of witnesses who took the stand during the trial, one being a fellow tourist of the same camp. Miss Sally Low said Lindy walked away from the barbecue for six to ten minutes before returning. She also stated that she heard a quite serious cry from the baby shortly before Lindy went back to the tent. Miss Low then went on the state that earlier she had been forced to shoe off a dingo that had grabbed her twelve-year-old daughter by the arm and pulled. Yes, the witness saw a dingo attack her twelve-year-old. Another witness they brought to the stand was a hitchhiker the Chamberlain had picked up in '79. Turns out he was injured and had bled inside of their car. Crazy. Two dozen witnesses and a dozen forensic experts took the stand and testified. Some were defending Lindy and some were pointing in the direction of Lindy cutting her newborns throat and cold blood and hiding the body. On October 29th at 8.37pm, the foreman of the Chamberlain jury announced the verdict. The jury found Lindy guilty of murder and Michael guilty of being an accessory after the fact. The judge gave Lindy life in prison at suspended Michael's sentence. Lindy went to dream of prison where she gave birth to Michael's fourth child a month into her sentence. Yeah, this couple must hate babies. By this time, the free Lindy movement had started. There were still thousands of people out there that believed that dingo had actually eaten her baby. About a year into prison, new reports came out that the blood found in the family car was actually paint of motion. Despite the new findings, a poll was released around the time, saying 52% of Australians still believed that she had slimed the baby. Fast forward three years in 1986, an English hiker named David Brett was screwing around on Olura, that massive sandstone monolith that the Chamberlains were capping near a couple years prior. David fell off of Olura and unfortunately died from the fall. A week later, his body was found and police started scouring the nearby dingo dens for hiker David bones that dingo might have carried off. What do you think the police found? The missing white jacket belonging to the little baby Azaria. Lindy was immediately released from prison in 1992 and her family was awarded $1.3 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Story is no re-eth, though. 32 years after that terrible night at Yoluru, the story of Azaria Chamberlains still hadn't found peace. Lindy had been convicted and prisoned released and exonerated in 88 when the jacket finally turned up near a dingo layer. The convictions were quashed, she walked free and the family tried to rebuild, but the official death certificate still listed the calls as "undetermined." For decades, the Chamberlains lived with that lingering shadow, a document that refused to say what everyone who followed the case closely now believed a dingo took her baby. In late 2011, the Northern Territory Corner decided it was time to finish what had been started so long ago. Corner Elizabeth Moris announced a fourth inquest. This wasn't about reopening old wounds for the drama, it was about giving Azaria the dignity of a truthful record in letting her family finally close the chapter. The hearings opened in February 2012 in Darwin for the first time in decades, the focus shifted back to the evidence without the media circus that had poisoned everything in the 1980s. Moris listened to everything again, the original dingo tracks to blood in the tent, the clothing found near the boulders. She reviewed decades of new information about dingoes like how they behave, how they hunt, how when they live near tourist areas they lose their fear of people. She looked at fatal attacks that had happened since 1980, including the 2001 death of nine-year-old Clinton Gage-owned Cagara, Frazier Island, where dingoes mauled and killed a child in front of his family. That case alone showed what skeptics in 1980 had dismissed, that dingoes were capable of taking and carrying away a small baby. Which, of course, dude tried to disprove by putting a bucket of sand in his mouth. I guess they were short on detectives at that department or something. That's the guy who's making grilled cheese at night to handle that case. Anyways, no new witnesses were needed to relitigate the murder theory. The old forensic claims like the fetal hemoglobin in the car, the scissors that disposes arterial spray had already been dismantled years earlier. The Royal Commission in the late 1980s had exposed how much of that evidence was unreliable and misinterpreted. What matter now was whether the remaining facts pointed clearly to one conclusion. On June 12, 2012, Corner Moris delivered her findings in a calm 13-page ruling. She stated that the evidence was sufficient and clear and exact enough to exclude every other reasonable possibility. Azaria, Chantal, Lauren Chamberlain had died at Yulura on August 17, 1980. The calls of death was being attacked and taken by a dingo. She even noted that shortly after Lindy placed the baby in the tent that night, a dingo or dingoes entered took his area and carried her tractor away. The words were simple but they carried the weight of 32 years. The death certificate was finally amended. The official record now matched what Lindy has said from the very first moment a dingo had taken her baby. Lindy had spent years in prison, given birth behind bars, faced death threats and watched her name become a punchline. Michael stood by her through all of it though. Their surviving children grew up under the shadow of headlines that painted their parents as monsters. The 2012 inquest didn't erase any of that pain but it did give Azaria's memory the dignity that it deserved. And that's the story of a dingo ate my baby. Hey, they actually made a movie about it, storing Meryl Streep called A Cry in the Dark. Lindy Chamberlain even wrote a book about her ordeal called Through My Eyes. Alright, we've had our turtle sucking fugitive in the dingo that really did take a baby, but Australia's Outback has one more animal crime story that's too weird to skip. This one's from 1935 and still unsolved. Let's imagine you're a fisherman off the coast of Sydney. It's a beautiful freaking day. You're just vibing and suddenly one of your poles nearly snapped from something huge getting hooked. Now you're fighting for your life to reel in whatever it is. After a couple of minutes of absolute battle, you finally see it. A giant tiger shark. Hell yeah. This tiger shark is such a fine specimen you take it to the kooky aquarium so they can put it on display for everyone to see. A week later on April 25, 1935, the shark starts rashing around in its tank like it's got a tummy ache or something. People at the aquarium watch it vomit up a rat, some other junk, and then a human arm. Wait a minute, how'd that get there? It's a man's left arm tattooed with two boxers fighting, still wearing a rope around the wrist like it was tied to something. The aquarium staff understandably freaks out and calls the police, or at least I think they called. This was 1935 so they probably stuck a handwritten note into the pouch of a delivery kangaroo as was common practice. The arm is pulled from the tank and suddenly Cindy's got a murder mystery on its hands. Detectives figure the shark must have eaten the rest of the bodies somewhere out in the ocean. But how did a whole person end up as shark food? They plastered the tattoo across every newspaper in the country, and within hours a woman named Ethel Williams recognizes it. She says a blancer husband, James Jimmy Smith, a 40-year-old ex-boxer and small-time crook, who gone missing two weeks earlier. Jimmy had been arguing with a man named Patrick Brady, a known forger and ex-sailor. Police saw Brady in and he claims innocence. He said as Jimmy owed him money and then vanished. But they also find bloodstains in Brady's boat shed, a missing rope that matches the one on the arm, and witnesses who saw Brady and Jimmy together the night he disappeared. Huh, wild, that's what we call substantial evidence. Just like Dingo's eating babies, the case explodes, headlines scream, "Shark Arm Murder." That's the name of my next metal band. The public is obsessed, but here's where it falls apart. The arm is the only body part ever discovered. No torso, no legs, no head, no murder weapons, and no confession. Forensic science in 1935 wasn't what it is today. They didn't have that fancy DNA testing stuff. Or a national fingerprint database. The arm had been in Shark's stomach acid for who knows how long, so evidence was limited. Police said screw it and charge Brady with murder anyway, but at his hearing, the magistrate throws it out. The magistrate says there's not enough to go to trial, no body, and no proof that Jimmy was even dead. "That's 1935 logic, I guess." The defense argued the arm could have come from a suicide, or even an accident they let Brady walk free. With Brady not a suspect anymore, the case just goes cold. Jimmy Smith's arm is still the only piece of him ever found. Theories float around like a gang hit over money, or a revenge from his criminal past, or even insurance fraud gone wrong. Don't say the shark swallowed the arm after Jimmy was dumped at sea, others think he was chopped up in Brady's shed and fed the shark to dispose of evidence. But we'll never know. Man, doing all this Australian talk made me want to watch quickly down under. It's a great classic western movie where Professor Snape hires a cowboy sniper to kill Dingo, but the Dingo turned out to be people. And then Professor Snape gets really mad at Tom Sellick. Hey, thanks for hanging out on Episode 3 of Crime is Fun. If you laughed and said a cry, hit that subscribe button, leave a review, tell a friend, and follow me on YouTube or any of your favorite podcast streaming services. Don't let it out.