Mark Haines' family challenge the police investigation. 

When Mark Haines dies, news of the teenager's death spreads quickly through Tamworth and beyond. His family are on summer holidays in different parts of the state and rush home to be together in grief.

While the family mourns and Mark’s body is in the morgue, their town is in full party mode. The Tamworth Country Music Festival is on and Australia is celebrating 200 years of colonization. For Mark’s uncles, it feels like the death of a young Aboriginal boy is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

The police come up with a theory that Mark might’ve killed himself ... but the family aren’t buying it. In the days and weeks ahead, his uncles return repeatedly to the train tracks looking around for answers. They’re worried the police have missed vital clues and they become convinced Mark met with foul play.

In their quest to disprove the police theory, the family find an unlikely ally. The railway worker who first found Mark’s body on tracks is just as convinced the evidence out there on the tracks just doesn’t add up.

Thirty years of mystery surrounds the death of 17-year-old Mark Haines.

It’s the summer of 1988. A train hits a person early in the morning on its way out of Tamworth. Straight away, something doesn’t add up about the scene where the body is found. A rail worker notices strange inconsistencies at the scene. If this was suicide, why is there so little blood?

The boy on the tracks is Mark Haines, a Gomeroi teenager with friends on both sides of the tracks. We meet his uncle Don (Duck) Craigie, who has been tirelessly searching for answers since Mark’s death. He suspects foul play.

We trace Mark’s movements on the night before his death, as he hits the town on a big night out with a bunch of friends, dancing, drinking and having fun. Mark’s friends and girlfriend say they left him in the early hours. Just after, a nearby resident hears voices on the street, what sounds like an argument, and a car driving dangerously.

But the next few hours remain a mystery. How did Mark end up on the tracks?

Blood On The Tracks investigates the suspicious death of 17-year-old Mark Haines, whose body was found on the railway line outside Tamworth in January 1988.