Half the Truth
July 1977 — Griffith, New South Wales.
A winter night, a locked van behind the local hotel, three spent .22 shells on the bitumen, and a man who never made it home.
Businessman and Liberal Party candidate Donald McKay had spent years exposing the Riverina’s drug trade. That evening, he vanished.
Within hours, Griffith became the centre of a national story. The headlines asked who pulled the trigger — and who ordered it? Behind the noise, investigators found drag marks, blood, and silence.
Through conflicting police reports, media contradictions, and fragments of the Woodward Royal Commission, this first episode unravels the night McKay disappeared — and the moment Australia’s criminal underworld collided with its corridors of power.
“Because anything found out which casts a slur upon the administration of the state is accepted without question as a slur on the state itself.” — Justice Philip Woodward
Featuring archival sound, reconstructed detail, and narration by Stephen Johns, Half the Truth opens Season 1 – The Vanishing: the story of one man’s stand against a criminal empire, the price he paid, and the shadows that still haunt a nation.
Written & produced by Stephen Johns.
Sound design and editing by Stephen Johns.
© Compromised Podcast Series.
Justice Philip Woodward audio in part: Crime Investigation Australia: Conviction in Donald Mackay case. 2007. Foxtel
Al Grassby comments: ABC News archives Australia
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