Mother's Guilt

A young woman murdered in an Australian country town. People too afraid to speak for decades are finally breaking their silence.  What happened in 23-year-old Rachelle Childs' final nine hours?  

Now, 24 years since Rachelle was murdered, an unstoppable cold case team has assembled to drive this live investigation.

Tips from the public are pouring in - could you hold the missing piece that cracks the case?

Dear Rachelle is hosted and investigated by journalist Ashlea Hansen, who teams up with retired detective and renowned cold case specialist Damian Loone.

Listen to this preview episode and search for Dear Rachelle in your podcast app and hit "follow" to have new episodes delivered to your feed. Eligible News Corp Australia subscribers receive new episodes early at dearrachelle.com.au and enjoy access to videos, articles, interactive evidence and more.

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A killer is on the loose in an Australian country town.

Excited for the June long weekend, bubbly 23-year-old Rachelle Childs leaves work, calls her sister, and is dead within hours. Her burning, partially naked body is found nine hours later in bushland on a lonely coastal road. Her killer has never been caught.

Now innocent people, once too afraid to speak, are breaking their silence.

If you’re looking for your next true crime podcast obsession, search out Dear Rachelle.

An unstoppable cold case team is reinvestigating and uncovering damning new evidence. Could this finally be the break the family needs?

Dear Rachelle is hosted and investigated by journalist Ashlea Hansen, who teams up with retired detective and renowned cold case specialist Damian Loone.

The first episode of Dear Rachelle is now available on all podcast platforms. If you’re looking for your next true crime podcast binge and you want to be first to hear what’s next, visit dearrachelle.com.au - your News Corp Australia subscription grants you access to podcast episodes three weeks before everyone else, as well as exclusive access to videos, interactive evidence, behind-the-scenes content, and more.

Dear Rachelle is a podcast from True Crime Australia.

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. In this bonus episode, journalists Jane Hansen and Dan Box sit down to discuss the extraordinary series of events that saw Kathleen Folbigg walk free from prison today after 20 years behind bars. The pair talk about how we got to this point, and what happens from here. 

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. Tom Bathurst KC vents his frustration with the last-minute revelation of 500+ hours of police-recorded listening device audio from Kathleen Folbigg’s home.

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. The inquiry has turned its attention to the diaries that helped to convict Kathleen Folbigg for the murder of her four children more than 20 years ago. But experts are reluctant to say definitively if Folbigg’s own reflections are evidence of her guilt – or if a rare genetic mutation could be to blame. In this case, you’ve got to get comfortable in the grey.

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. Cutting-edge science raises questions over the 20-year-old conviction of Kathleen Folbigg for killing four of her own children. As the inquiry chair accepts another explanation may be plausible, even critics of this new scientific evidence concede there is a possibility the law got it wrong. 

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. Did the police and prosecution pursuing Kathleen Folbigg for murder rely on a pseudo-scientific theory to explain her children’s deaths - and did that lead them to overlook other possible explanations? A second woman with a story that is eerily similar to Folbigg’s also shares her devastation at being denied access to her daughter after being labeled a child-killer due to the same, now-discredited theory.

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. In the first week of the new Kathleen Folbigg inquiry explosive fresh evidence from Danish professors has not only forced the adjournment of the much anticipated inquiry but strengthened the belief that a new genetic mutation is responsible for the deaths of two of the four Folbigg children. Jane talks to the experts themselves and Kathleen's friends who have travelled from around the country to be there, but the inquiry takes an unexpected turn. 

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. One of the main reasons Kathleen Folbigg was found guilty for the deaths of her four children, was her diary entries. Kathleen kept diaries over the decade of her children dying, and the entries were used as circumstantial evidence in the 2003 trial. And, some of them are harrowing. But - were they taken out of context? We hear Kathleen Folbigg answer questions about what she really meant in these entries. We also meet a linguistic expert who has worked for the CIA and FBI who has developed a computer program, to analyse texts for evidence of guilt, authenticity, hidden motives and lies. What does the program tell us about Kathleen’s diaries? We find out.

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Subscribe to Crime X+ today. In this special episode of Mother’s Guilt Jane talks to Legal expert Dr Robert Moles who specialises in miscarriages of justice. He looks at the latest evidence and talks through the legal implications of the Folbigg case, and argues the case cannot stand under the current legal framework. He also says the Folbigg case is bigger than the Lindy Chamberlain case in terms of injustice, and he would know. He was one of the people responsible for clearing Lindy Chamberlain's name.

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