06 Lies in Lismore | Strange decisions

Parts of the police investigation seem confusing, even bizarre. Looking into how the detective work unfolded leads journalist Richard Baker to raise questions about the decisions made during the Simone Strobel case. He examines a crime scene analysis, and a strange 'quid-pro-quo' arrangement between detectives and a writer. Editorial note: An earlier version of this episode said that the West Australian Supreme Court agreed with Tobias Moran that the Virginia Peters book implied he was guilty.   What the judge actually said was that an imputation of guilt is arguably capable of being made. But he said the book must be read as a whole, and it wouldn’t be straightforward to assess if the whole book conveys an imputation that Tobias was guilty. The judge said that Tobias had an arguable – but as he assessed it, not strong – defamation case.  Credits Host and reporter: Richard BakerProducer and fact checker: Romy SherSupervising producer: Alicia BridgesSpecial thanks: Chiara Holzhaeuser; Joanne Shoebridge and everyone at ABC North CoastAdditional reporting: Cath AdamsTheme composition and additional music: Martin Peralta and Ashley CadellSound design: Tim SymondsExecutive Producers: Tim Roxburgh, Eric GeorgeHead of Audio on Demand: Jessica Radburn

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 03

  As Simone Strobel's coronial inquest played out at the Lismore courthouse, a woman named Virginia Peters sat in the public gallery, watching and listening intently.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Virginia had never met Simone or Tobias, or anyone involved in the case. It might sound unusual, but going to watch court cases was something Virginia had first done when she was only small.

• 1:05Speaker 04

  My mother used to take me to the courts when I was a child. You know, we'd drop in on a murder case or a violent assault or something like that.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Virginia was a creative writing student. She was living in Byron Bay and working on her masters at the time of the 2007 inquest. She first heard about Simone two years earlier, before Simone's body had been found, when she saw her missing persons poster at a cafe in Byron.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  I really did identify with her in that moment when I first saw her. And then later on that day, you know, I kept seeing her face. And she just seemed to be everywhere for the following days before they found her body.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Virginia said there was something about Simone that captured her.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  It seemed like somebody had snuffed her out. And at the time, I had, I guess, I was feeling a little bit voiceless myself. There's no comparison, obviously, with what, you know, I was going through and what happened to Simone, but there's that sense of, you know, somebody took her voice away.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  When the inquest came around and she went to watch it, she became even more invested in the case. In this interview I found in the ABC archive, Virginia explained what happened next, how she made a snap decision that would change her life.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  And I just thought, I have to go to Germany and I'll have to write a book. So as bizarre as that sounds, it really was extremely impulsive.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  That day in Lismore, Virginia said she struck up a conversation with a police officer who was working on the case. They made a very unusual arrangement about the case, a deal like nothing I've seen in my 27 years as a journalist.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  And in the years that followed, Virginia would become connected to the police investigation, to the point that, according to her, one officer said she was the only hope of solving the case.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  The involvement of a budding writer in detective work isn't even the strangest thing I've found out about the police investigation into Simone Strobel's murder. There's lots of things about this investigation that are confusing, even bizarre. This episode, I look at how the investigation unfolded and then put all my questions to a detective who worked on the case. I'm Richard Baker and from Unravel, this is Lies in Lismore.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  The courthouse in Lismore is down in the town centre, right near the banks of the Wilson River. When the coronial inquest started there in 2007, the lawyers and the coroner were gathered with one goal, to establish what happened to Simone.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  A coroner's inquest is supposed to bring all of the facts together to build the most accurate picture of the truth.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  But the preparation for that inquest and what happened in its aftermath makes me wonder if the whole thing was destined to fail.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  I keep coming back to a report written by a criminal profiler. The report goes into the evidence at the crime scene and what it might say about the perpetrator. In my experience, it's pretty rare for these reports to be spoken about in open court. I decided to ask an expert about it.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  I was curious about the crime analysis report because normally they're kept secret.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Mark Kebbell is a practising psychologist and professor of forensic psychology at Griffith University. He's worked closely with police in the UK and Australia on over 70 criminal cases, mostly murder and sexual assault. He says crime scene analysis reports aren't usually revealed publicly.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  And after seeing it, you can see why people keep them secret. It's something you wouldn't want people to have a critical eye over.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  At first glance, the crime scene analysis might seem like a standard police document. It's based on information provided by detectives investigating a crime. In Simone's case, it was written by a detective sergeant from the forensic services group who specialised in criminal profiling, and it came to a series of conclusions.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  It said Simone was most likely asphyxiated because there were no other obvious injuries that explained her death, at least none that could be determined in the condition Simone's body had been found in.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  It also said she was most likely suffocated in the caravan park, possibly with a pillow or a plastic bag, by someone she knew, not outside the park, by a stranger. And although Simone's body was found naked, it found that Simone's killing didn't have a sexual motive. That was partly because it said she had no defensive wounds that would suggest sexual attack. Forensic tests had been done to find out if Simone had been sexually assaulted, but they were inconclusive.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Mark Kebbell said crime scene analysis reports were usually used by police for intelligence purposes only. They're often not admissible in court. But at the 2007 inquest, a detective inspector, Wayne Hayes, presented the conclusions in the report as a key plank of the whole police theory about how Simone had been killed.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  I thought this is nonsense. One of the reasons why these reports aren't admissible in court as expert evidence is the science isn't there.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Mark Kebbell actually first saw this report in 2008. Funnily enough, the report was given to him by that aspiring author, Virginia Peters, who decided to write a book on the case. She got some experts to review the evidence. One of them was Mark. But when he saw the report, he was worried. He thought it had one major flaw. He put it bluntly in a report he wrote for Virginia. We use Toby's old name, Tobias Silkfall, from the time.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  The crime scene analysis report shows a clear bias against Mr Silkfall. The fact that the contents are referred to at the coronal inquiry by Detective Inspector Hayes suggests this report may have had a considerable and biasing impact on the investigation.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  There was something else about the report. The profiler doesn't talk about any of the other early suspects, which makes me wonder if the profiler had any information about them at all. From what I can tell, it seems like the profiler might not have known about the other men in the area that night, Jamie Vidler, the Green brothers, or Gus Parker, or the fact that they allegedly confessed to killing Simone. The profiler then produced that report, pointing to someone known to Simone as the likely perpetrator.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  That report was heavily relied on by police to construct their theory of who killed Simone. And that theory was then accepted by the coroner. The coroner said in the absence of any other rational explanation, the profiler's version had considerable merit, and he accepted it as the most likely cause of Simone's death. He found that Simone was more likely than not killed by suffocation or smothering asphyxia, and that there was a very strong suspicion that Tobias and maybe his sister Katrin were involved. But like the profiler, the coroner mightn't have had all the relevant information either.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  As you already know, those other men were never asked to come and give evidence at the inquest.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Two of the men who allegedly confessed to killing Simone had given police false information about where they were the night she died. Jamie Vidler gave different versions of where he was and who he was with in those crucial hours. Initially, he said he never left his tent that night, except to buy cigarettes at a service station across the road from the caravan park. But the CCTV footage shows Jamie outside the Metropole Hotel in Lismore at 11:52pm that night. Remember, the Germans said Simone had walked away between 11:30 and 11:45.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  The Bocchi Courts, where Simone's body was found, was about a four-minute walk away from the Metropole and Lismore's other nightspots.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Thomas Green initially denied being in Lismore that night. He said he was in Byron Bay.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  His brother, Alan Green, also told police at first that Thomas was in Byron that night. But both brothers were seen on CCTV in the Lismore CBD, hanging around the city's nightspots, between around 12:30am and 2:00 in the morning.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  I have found one clue as to why police might have dismissed some of these potential suspects. The Green Brothers are part of the large Aboriginal community in Lismore. In 2006, one of the police officers working on the case wrote a strange statement about what he described as Aboriginal crime in the area around where Simone's body was found. It was written by Dave Mackey, the officer who'd worked on the case for almost 20 years and charged Tobias. In the statement, Dave Mackey talks about how he's investigated serious offences involving Aboriginal people in Lismore in the past.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  He says the area around the Botchy Club was a spot where Aboriginal people would gather to drink and a place where violent crimes occurred. He says the area wasn't well lit and considered unsafe after dark. And, he says, it's not uncommon for the people drinking in those areas to, quote, "wait for potential victims to wander into the area so that they can victimise them."

• 12:41Speaker 03

  But then he contradicts himself and makes an even stranger statement. He says, quote, "It is my opinion that the death of Simone Strobel is not consistent with Aboriginal crime in the area." Weirdly, the statement doesn't say why he thinks the crime isn't consistent with these broad stereotypes around, quote, "Aboriginal crime." The whole thing's odd.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Needless to say, these broad generalisations don't seem to me to be a very good reason to rule anyone in or out.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  But this statement by Dave Mackey was sent to German investigators, presumably to help explain to them why he didn't think the brothers were involved. Neither Dave Mackey or New South Wales Police answered any of the questions I sent them about this statement.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Even if the statement is a clue around the police thinking about the Green Brothers, it still doesn't make much sense. Regardless of their reasoning, by the time of the inquest, police had narrowed down their persons of interest to Toby and his sister.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  But as the inquest wrapped up, they still didn't have enough evidence to charge anyone. Then, a police officer saw an opportunity to try something that police wouldn't usually do. When a creative writing student walked up to him and said she was going to write a book.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  When I turned up that day and said, "Look, I'm going to go to Germany", and I think that's really what did it for the officer in charge. He thought, you know, he would like to be going to Germany. But I guess, you know, they saw the opportunity for me to perhaps shift things a little bit by going over there.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  This is a recording of Virginia Peters speaking at a writers' festival event in Byron Bay in 2014. It's the launch of her book, Have You Seen Simone? She's talking about a conversation she had with police officer Shane Deam years earlier in 2007, not long after the inquest finished. He was the officer in charge at the time.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  They met at a café in Lismore, where she said they struck up a deal that was highly unconventional, something I've never seen a police officer do.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  According to Virginia, Shane Deam said he'd help her with her book by giving her access to police case file information. But it would be a two-way street. In return, if she found anything out, she should tell him as well. Virginia described it as a quid pro quo arrangement. She would share what she learned in Germany, and police would give her access to their files.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wasn't really very surprised. And I did apply to the coroner also for access to the evidence. And the police did that through their own channels as well, so it was all clear. But, you know, I couldn't quite believe the access I got.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  I can't quite believe it either. It's basically unheard of for a journalist or writer to get access to a police file during an active murder investigation. But according to Virginia, that's just what happened.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  When I was originally going through the evidence at the police station, I just couldn't believe how much there was. It was like 10 lever arch folders and hundreds and hundreds of pages. And I really had no idea what I was doing. And it was just basically putting the time and methodically going through. And eventually things start to make sense.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Virginia said she was given access to the case file and left unattended at Lismore Police Station to look over the paperwork. She remembered there were crime scene photographs showing Simone's body and statements from suspects and police officers. She said she was also given an office to work from and was able to access recordings of the police interview videos of Tobias.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Virginia didn't want to be interviewed for this podcast, so I can only tell you the story from what she's said and written about it.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  I didn't have to be, you know, whizz-bang at what I was doing. I was allowed myself to be a greenhorn. You know, I wasn't being, you know, the crime writer. I was being sort of the novice, you know. And I gave myself permission to be that. And once I did that, I found it was, you know, I took the pressure off and it was just easier.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  This sharing of the case file gave Virginia access to extensive information about what suspects and witnesses had said to police. I thought this was extraordinary, but I wanted to ask someone else with experience in this area whether they thought it was strange too.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  From an investigative perspective, that's certainly unusual, given it's still an active case. An unsolved homicide brief contains highly sensitive material.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Graham Simpfendorfer is a former detective with Victoria Police who's investigated his share of homicides and serious crimes in a career spanning almost three decades.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  I guess the question is not necessarily, is it wasn't lawful? But I guess, is it operationally prudent? Is it in the best interest of the case? And it's just hard to wrap my head around that. It's certainly an unusual set of circumstances to afford that access to a student whilst that murder investigation remains both, I guess, domestically and internationally unsolved.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  What are some of the potential impacts of providing that type of access on an ongoing case?

• 18:44Speaker 06

  You risk the opportunity for other avenues of inquiry as an investigator. If the information is then in the public domain, you know, for argument's sake, if you've got one of these people that have come forward and said, "Oh, I did kill her", well, you want to know information from that person that only the killer could know. But if someone's gone through the entire case file and has then put it in the public domain or into a paper that's for everyone to see, you lose that opportunity to test their version of events or test a witness, whether it be a suspect or a witness, as to the validity of their evidence. So it just complicates things and it may rule key pieces of evidence or key witness testimony ruled out.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  I contacted Shane Deam to ask why he decided to share the case information from an open murder investigation with someone who wasn't a police officer. He's not with the police anymore. Shane left the force 14 years ago. He'd been caught using cocaine and lying to the Police Integrity Commission. The incident wasn't related to this case. Shane said he'd like to help me, but he couldn't go back to that time in his life, so he didn't want to be interviewed about the Simone Strobel case.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  In the years after the inquest, Virginia kept researching the case and continued to share information with the police.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  I didn't really see myself as the, you know, writer, inverted commas, you know, when I was going through it. I just saw myself as almost a housewife, really, that had landed in the middle of something that perhaps I shouldn't have, you know.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Virginia's written about how she went to Germany and met with Simone's parents. She shared details with them of what the coroner's inquest heard about what happened to Simone. This was after the inquest hearings, but before the coroner had made his official findings. In her book, Virginia said the Strobels were in the dark about Simone's probable cause of death. So she told them what she heard at the inquest, that Simone may have been suffocated with a pillow or a plastic bag. She told them she had questions for Tobias.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  It wasn't until years later that Virginia convinced Toby to do an interview with her.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  She told him it was for her creative writing PhD and her book, and it wouldn't be shared with the media.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Virginia writes in her book that she called the New South Wales Police detective Wayne Hayes before she went to do the interview. She said she wanted to let him know where she was for her own safety.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Then, after the interview was over, she called Detective Hayes back. She said he wanted the recording. In her book, she writes about reasoning with herself over whether it was ethical to give the recording to him.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  In the past, she'd had that quid pro quo arrangement with a different officer, but this was specifically an interview for her research, and Toby hadn't been asked if the recording could be shared with police.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Ultimately, she said she decided it was a murder investigation and Toby was the prime suspect. So she handed it over.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  She kept working on her book, but just before she was about to release it in 2014, Toby took legal action in an attempt to stop the book going to the printer.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Toby failed in his bid to have the publication stopped, partly because the judge said the media had already reported widely on the suspicions around him. So it was too late to stop the damage to his reputation.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  After the book was published, Toby sued Virginia for defamation. The case was settled and Toby was ordered to pay costs to Virginia.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  After all that, the book stayed on the shelves. It all came back to that inquest. With the finding that Toby was the most likely murderer, it was difficult for him to argue that people shouldn't report on the suspicions surrounding him.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  The ripple of consequences from that inquest make me all the more concerned about how it went down. Remember, the coroner didn't even hear from any other potential persons of interest. The police ruled them all out before the inquest got underway. I want to ask the police why they did that. And I want to ask them about all the other decisions that I don't understand as well. Why did they get someone to do a crime scene analysis, but apparently not tell them about all the other potential suspects? Why did they rely so heavily on that crime scene analysis at the inquest?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Why did they allow an aspiring author access to all that information from the police file? And why did they arrest Toby when they didn't have any compelling new evidence? New South Wales Police declined to answer any of my questions. But there's one retired officer who was involved at the very beginning, who's willing to answer some tough questions about the case.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Wayne Hayes, I'm a retired detective inspector from the New South Wales Police Force.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Wayne Hayes comes across as a gentle-mannered, friendly guy who's efficient with his words. But not far below the surface is a steely determination that comes from years of dealing with hardened criminals.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  You first heard from him in episode one, when he talked about being part of the homicide squad investigating Simone's death in 2005.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  I spoke to him across two interviews as I tried to find answers about what happened in this case.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Officially, he moved off it in late 2006, when he went to a different police unit. But he was still liaising with the German police on this case for years afterwards. He was at the 2007 inquest, and he told the coroner directly he thought Toby was Simone's killer.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  By that point, all the other men had been ruled out.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  They were either eliminated by one way or the other, and you came back to basically, from what I understand, at that time, that Tobias was the prime person of interest because of the relationship, because of the lies being told.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  But how were they eliminated? I know police said they were just bignoting themselves. And it makes sense to me that they didn't have enough evidence to charge them. What's not clear is why they so quickly discounted their alleged confessions. We run through the suspects individually, starting with Alan and Thomas Green.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  The Greens, for example, I think it was all secondhand. The Greens never said to anybody that we could find, "I did it." It's all somebody said that they were told.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Wayne also had his doubts about Gus Parker.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  The guy that said, "Oh, you know, her body will be found near the Devil's Rocks or something."

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Devil's Stones, like a landmark sort of near the box.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, well, yeah. Really, what does that mean? Yes, certainly go, "Yeah, well, wait a minute, how does he know that?" But, you know, also this man was, as I remember correctly, was had psychiatric issues as well, I think, from memory. So again, it doesn't take you very far. It's all very nice, and it certainly goes ding in your head, saying, "Well, wait a minute, how does he know that information?" But on the other hand, you know, the Devil's Stones or the Boxer Court is round figures, what, 100 metres from the caravan park, which he went missing from.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  We continue to Jamie Vidler. Vidler saying, "I never left the caravan park." And then he's on CCTV outside a pub at 10 to 12, 10 to midnight on that night.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  What, is that a lie? Is that, you know?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Is it a mistake or is it a lie?

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's my point. I'm just saying, you know, so we can read into things.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Look, my view is, at the time of the inquest, nobody could be, in my view, and it was obvious the case, because we didn't, nobody was chargeable.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  I still don't understand why they would take these suspects out of the equation completely, to the point that the coroner didn't hear from any of the witnesses who said they heard these men confess. I tried to push Wayne to answer questions about why none of these men were asked to appear at the inquest in 2007.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  The bulk of information about those men and their alleged involvement or link or possible was known by the time of the 2007 inquest. But they weren't even, none of it was put on the table. Was that a mistake?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  What did be put on the table?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Considered. Well, nothing was went into about, no, none of the people that they allegedly confessed to or said involvement to were, it was, it was just said that there were other suspects, other persons of interest, and they've been eliminated via various means of elimination.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  That's up to the counsel assistant, the coroner, who he or she calls.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Wayne's right. While police compile a brief of evidence for the coroner, it's the job of counsel assisting, the senior lawyer tasked with directing the course of the inquest, to call witnesses. That said, counsel assisting is operating off the information they're provided by the police. I can't see how any of those guys could have been said to have been positively eliminated, because they still can't, can't rule, can't rule out.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Not to the same extent as I understand it.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  How though? What's the difference?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Tobias is an intimate partner, and we do know from statistics and experience, an intimate partner, the surviving intimate partner, I can use that term, in many cases is the offender. Okay, now that's as far as you can take it with Tobias. Now, you're trying to eliminate Tobias. Unfortunately, he cannot be eliminated. On the other hand, also, he cannot be confirmed as the offender. There's, in my view, from what I know, not enough evidence to amount to convict him. These other people, they go past that stage. They do have people saying, "I was there at the time," or, "Yes, you know, he was there," or with the Green Brothers. I think, for example, the confessions, but it's always second or third party.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  That's true. Jamie Vidler, Gus Parker, and the Green Brothers didn't make any admissions directly to the police. But they were all known to police before this. And Jamie Vidler and the Green Brothers did have violent backgrounds. Shouldn't they have at least stayed in the picture as possible suspects to be investigated further, like Toby?

• 29:54Speaker 03

  There were alleged confessions or a lot of information coming through from these guys with serious criminal records for violence and assault. It just seems to be an oversight. Or was it, is it more than that? Because if you, from Tobias's view, and those who would support him, would say that that is evidence of tunnel vision early on.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  It's not evidence at all. That's what I'm trying to say. Certainly, it certainly are indicators, okay? As I've said before, alcohol and et cetera, lies are indicators. I, I, it was information that was known at the time. And as I've said to you, the coroner's court is run by the counsel assisting, who calls whatever it is he or she wants, and they have access to the police brief.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  I contacted the counsel assisting the coroner. She said, ultimately, it's up to the coroner to decide who gets asked to appear.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  I also tried to contact the coroner, but he didn't respond in time for my deadline.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Whoever made the decisions about the witness list for the first inquest, the focus was firmly on Tobias.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  I know what you're saying, that Tobias remains the prime suspect or person of interest, is what you're saying, right? More than the other people.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, he was charged, yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Well, he was charged, but he was also then withdrawn. So the system worked, if I can use that term.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  But is the system working if the state charges someone without reasonable cause, like the court found? Could that all have been avoided? Wayne felt there wasn't enough evidence to charge Toby after the 2007 inquest. So I'm curious to know what his reaction was when Toby was charged 15 years later in 2022. How did you find out that news?

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Newspaper.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  What did you think?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Shit.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  It came as a shock to me. Because bear in mind that I hadn't been involved in it at all. But I half expected when I read it to thought, "Oh, maybe they should have," I thought someone might have phoned me up and said, you know, that we're going to an arrest phase, or we have arrested or something like that, right? That was the first thing, and I thought, "Oh, shit, the evidence, there's got, yeah, there must be evidence here for this."

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, what sort of things would you go through in your mind? Like, would it be like, "Oh, there's, there's a DNA that's like..."

• 32:16Speaker 00

  DNA was what I was thinking, yeah. DNA was what I was thinking. Must be DNA.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  And what about when the charges were dropped? What did he think then?

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Shit again, yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Does that happen often in a home?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  No.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Normally, my personal view, and I think it's probably a reasonably common view among homicide investigators, and bear in mind, the law changed during my time there, I think from memory, you don't charge somebody until you're in conflict with winning. You don't want, you don't like to lose these cases. So you don't charge until you can win.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  I told Wayne about the press conference when New South Wales Police Superintendent Scott Tanner announced Toby's arrest. The press conference, where he said the charges had already been run past the state's prosecutors, and they believed there was sufficient evidence to charge Toby. I was curious about that, because I've confirmed that the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions hadn't been consulted. Wayne said that isn't normal.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  From my experience, normally, you would submit the brief to the DPP. You don't want to prosecute and have the chance of being withdrawn, because the effect on the family is quite extreme, that you might have charged somebody and then had to withdraw it. So I'm not sure what superintendent, I think it was Tanner, was talking to about the time where it's been put to the DPP, whether he's got it wrong, I don't know.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  But he clearly says it was put to the DPP.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  I asked Wayne about the access arrangement with Virginia Peters. He said he was aware of it. Is it unusual? Well, I'm going to say it. I'm in my role as a journalist, I've been journalist nearly 27 years, to give a person doing an academic course or writing good inside access to an open murder case like that?

• 34:12Speaker 00

  No. Shouldn't have that access.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Coroner McMahon agreed to let her inspect the file, see the file. Officer in charge was okay with that, too.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  At that time.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, at that time, yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Would I have done it? No.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  He says that was for similar reasons to what the expert, Graeme Simpfendorf, had described, because it could put information out there that only the killer would know.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I wonder if now, all these years later, Wayne feels differently about whether Toby was involved. Does he stand by what he said in the coroner's court in 2007? If you asked your opinion again, would you say he's the killer?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  No, I won't give you my opinion again, because I don't have the protection of the courts or my former occupation. And Tobias, unfortunately, is quite litigious.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  I tell Wayne that Toby thinks the police focus on him has got in the way of finding Simone's real killer. I think he accepts that there should have always been a focus on him, but the extent of it was overwhelming, and to the detriment of not enough been evidence, not enough work or evidence going into other possibilities. From where he stands, is that a valid criticism?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  I would say yes, because, as I said, he's in that no man's land, not enough to confirm or eliminate. There has been, from what I know at the time, and from what I read from the, in the coroner's finding, there's been enormous amount of work done on this. So it's just a problematic inquiry, you know, you don't have, as I've said, good timelines, you don't have good witnesses.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  If you were, if devil's advocate here, or in Tobias's shoes, with the way things have panned out, do you think he's got a valid criticism that there has been a case of tunnel vision on him here to the detriment of other viable suspects who were within a couple of hundred metres of that area at that time on that night?

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Well, again, all persons of interest, there were more than one person of interest. Tobias is not the only person of interest.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  But he's the only one that the police have really gone after for any length of time?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well, the other, the other person of interest, the bulk of them have been more or less eliminated. You might not be sat, they may not be satisfactory eliminations from what I read or know, but they are still eliminations.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  What's clear to me about everyone I've mentioned in this episode is that they seem to be trying to do the right thing. The police want answers for Simone's family, they want the case solved. Virginia Peters seems committed to uncovering information while being respectful to a family living with immense grief.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Although Virginia didn't want to be interviewed for the podcast, she did send a statement in response to questions. She said, quote, "As a private citizen, I have had to carry personal and legal risk for the past 20 years, unlike police and journalists who do similar work under the protection of large corporations and government bodies." Virginia said she believes information from the police case files was released to her because the progress of the case had stalled in Germany and Australia.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  She said Detective Wayne Hayes had been supportive of her work, and that her research and interviews had contributed new evidence to the case. She said he was the officer who said she could be the only hope for solving the case, although Wayne Hayes told me he doesn't remember saying that. Virginia said she does not regret the access she was given. The fact remains, it's a very unusual decision for police to share the case file information with an author. And that's not the only unusual decision they made.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  I'm still confused about why they completely ruled out other people who were seen nearby that night so early in the investigation, and why those people weren't under scrutiny at the inquest in 2007 like Toby was.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  And here's where it gets stranger. After ruling them out, years later, the police quietly started to do something interesting. They took DNA samples from some of these men who'd allegedly made confessions. They tested Jamie Vidler's DNA in 2012, and Gus Parker's in 2024. If these men had been eliminated from the investigation, why were they suddenly back in the picture so many years later?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  And then, in 2024, almost two decades after Simone had been killed, there was a huge development in this case. The New South Wales coroner announced a fresh inquest, a second inquest, and everything was back on the table. All of those other potential suspects, along with witnesses who said they'd heard them confess, would finally be asked to appear. That's next, on Lies in Lismore.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  An earlier version of this episode said that the West Australian Supreme Court agreed with Tobias Moran that the Virginia Peters book implied he was guilty. What the judge actually said was that an imputation of guilt is arguably capable of being made, but he said the book must be read as a whole, and it wouldn't be straightforward to assess if the whole book conveys an imputation that Tobias was guilty. The judge said that Tobias had an arguable, but as he assessed it, not strong defamation case.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  This season of Unravel is intended to be listened to as a whole. If you haven't heard all the episodes, you shouldn't draw any conclusions, because you haven't heard all the sides of the story yet. If you saw anything that night in Lismore, or if you know someone else who did, get in touch. Unravel true crime at abc.net.au, or you can call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 00.

• 41:25Speaker 03

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