Shortcut: The Hunt for Killer Father and Son Fugitives The Stoccos *Re-Issue*

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Australian True Crime
Episode: Shortcut: The Hunt for Killer Father and Son Fugitives The Stoccos Re-Issue
Host/Moderator: Michelle Laurie (with producer Matthew Tankard and guest journalist Nino Bucci)
Date: April 5, 2026
Theme:
This episode revisits the extraordinary and disturbing true-crime case of Gino and Mark Stocco—a father-son duo whose eight-year crime spree traversed multiple Australian states and ended with their dramatic 2015 capture. The show features insights from journalist and author Nino Bucci, who has written extensively about the Stoccos. The discussion focuses on the escalation of their crimes, the psychology behind their actions, their ultimate downfall, and the remarkable manhunt that gripped Australia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Stoccos: Origins and Early Crimes

• Early Offending (2006–2007)

  • “To explain the iteration of the Stockos, as they came to be sort of known in 2015, you’ve got to go all the way back to 2006. That was when they were arrested down in Apollo Bay [...] They got arrested on this yacht that Gino Stocko had bought as part of the property settlement with his wife, Mark’s mum. And they were basically sailing around doing [...] similar sort of offending as they became known for later on.”—Nino Bucci [01:45]
  • Initial offenses included theft, identity fraud, and itinerant small crimes.
  • Their reputation as reliable, hard-working farm laborers allowed them to blend into rural areas.

• Transition to Violence (2011–2015)

  • “From sort of 2011 on to when they were caught in October 2015, things really escalated. And it’s very hard to know why, but that’s when they committed these acts which Mark described as vengeful acts.” —Nino Bucci [04:38]
  • Crimes intensified: property destruction, arson (“four big fires”), armed offenses, and ultimately, murder.

Psychological Dynamics & Motivation

• Social Outcasts & Volatile Tendencies
  • “They’d basically been complete recluses, cut off not only from family and friends but from society as a whole. [...] They were kind of almost like swagmen ...” —Nino Bucci [01:45]
  • Unpredictable tempers: minor disputes would fester until they erupted in extreme violence or destructive acts.
  • They sought only basic needs (food, accommodation), but retaliated harshly when dissatisfied or feeling slighted.

Major Crimes and Murder of Rosario Simone

• Murder Context and Execution
  • “Gino basically walks out and shoots him twice just on the dirt outside the property.” —Nino Bucci [09:31]
  • The murder resulted from escalating tensions with Rosario Simone, a man with peripheral connections to organized crime.
  • The Stoccos believed Simone’s lack of close ties would allow them to get away with the killing.

The Manhunt and Police Pursuit

• The 2015 Chase (Timestamps 11:24 – 14:04)

  • “They basically did these huge sort of loops [...] in this fairly vast section of southeastern Australia.” —Nino Bucci [11:35]
  • Their expertise in rural work gave them a formidable knowledge of back roads, forests, and rural properties.
  • The pair evaded capture for two weeks, despite national attention and a massive police response (“the biggest manhunt that the state had ever seen”).

• Close Calls and Tactical Policing

  • Notably, the Stoccos once disguised themselves as roadwork employees and managed to outwit police during a routine stop, even disabling a police vehicle to escape [12:12].
  • Persistent, escalating danger: “We knew they were armed, they were tired, they were desperate.” —Michelle Laurie [13:14]

Victim Fear and the Last Stand

• Widespread Fear

  • “They had dozens of victims out there, and every single one of those people must have been absolutely beside themselves that they were going to come past [...] you must have just been petrified that, you know, you were going to hear the gravel crunching outside your window one night and it was going to be them.” —Nino Bucci [13:20]

• The Capture

  • The pair’s undoing came from returning to Pinevale—the site of their most serious crime.
  • A park ranger spotted them, alerted police, leading to a 16-hour surveillance and their arrest [14:04–16:00].

The Unique Father-Son Relationship

• Speculation and Reality
  • Police questioned the nature of their intense bond; Mark denied any relationship beyond familial, and Gino expressed indignation: “Everybody’s, you know, very jealous of the special relationship I have with my son, so who knows what that actually meant.” —Nino Bucci [15:44]
  • Early guilty pleas were interpreted by detectives as a strategy to remain together in custody.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “They were kind of almost like swagmen ... everybody sort of had a little bit of a gasp and were a little bit shocked when they were actually caught. And it turned out that they had committed a murder.” —Nino Bucci [01:45]
• “That was when they committed these acts which they. Which Mark described as vengeful acts. [...] There’s these four big fires that they lit ...” —Nino Bucci [04:38]
• “Gino basically walks out and shoots him twice just on the dirt outside the property.” —Nino Bucci [09:31]
• “They managed to back into the police car to like perfectly so that the police car’s disabled and then take off.” —Nino Bucci [12:12]
• “They had dozens of victims out there, and every single one of those people must have been absolutely beside themselves that they were going to come past ... you must have just been petrified” —Nino Bucci [13:20]
• “Everybody’s, you know, very jealous of the special relationship I have with my son, so who knows what that actually meant.” —Gino Stocco (related by Nino Bucci) [15:44]

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–01:45: Introduction to the episode and case, background on guest.
• 01:45–04:38: Early crimes, first arrests, and lifestyle.
• 04:38–05:48: Escalation to violent crimes.
• 05:48–09:31: The lead up to Rosario Simone’s murder and its aftermath.
• 09:31–11:24: Police begin the manhunt; shooting at police and initial escapes.
• 11:24–13:14: Details on the chase and the fugitives' tactics for evasion.
• 13:14–14:04: The psychological impact on victims and communities.
• 14:04–16:00: The final capture, police tactics, and the Stoccos’ relationship dynamics.

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Summary & Takeaways

This chilling re-examination of the Stoccos’ case, with first-hand accounts and behind-the-scenes insights from journalist Nino Bucci, reveals how two seemingly ordinary men became some of Australia’s most infamous fugitives. Their story is as much about rural isolation and family pathology as it is about crime—emphasizing how even the most familiar landscapes can harbor extraordinary danger. With a blend of expert storytelling and psychological analysis, the episode draws listeners deep into the cat-and-mouse game that gripped a nation, ending only when the fugitives made a fateful return to the scene of their darkest crime.

Transcript

[Nino Bucci]

Are you able to confirm about Stockholm father and son? I believe they've been caught out near Danny. Do the hunt. And the final showdown with the Stockos was spearheaded by the tactical operations unit. The police that were involved in this investigation, they've done an outstanding job. Ned Kelly's story, why is that? Well, yeah, he's criminal. We had a very lawless time. Almost like outlaws, weren't they when it came to that murder? The worst crime the two ever committed together. Gino just wanted to tie the guy up. You know, Mark's the one who said just shoot him.

[Matthew Tankard]

This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. I'm not Michelle Laurie. I'm Matthew Tankard, the producer of Australian True Crime. And today we're re releasing episode 53 about father and son fugitives Geno and Mark Stocco. In 2007, the Stockos began what would be an eight year crime spree across multiple states before their eventual capture in 2015. Gino and Mark were ultimately charged with 34 crimes including the murder of 68 year old Rosario Simone. Our guest on today's episode is Nino Bucci, author of the Stockos. Like father, like son. And there's a link to get your copy in the show notes of this episode.

[Michelle Laurie]

This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created. The Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. When did you first get involved? Intrigued, Smitten by the Stockos, Nino?

[Nino Bucci]

So October 2015 was pretty much the first time anybody had heard about them. Yeah, they shot at pretty police sort of around Wagga Wagga and that sort of started this almost two week manhunt. They had basically been complete recluses, cut off not only from family and friends but from society as a whole. Given they didn't have any sort of electronic means of banking or you know, phones for any long period of time. You know, they weren't into social media. They were kind of almost like swagmen, you know, of the type that had been around Australia. Everybody sort of had a little bit of a gasp and were a little bit shocked when they were actually caught. And it turned out that they had committed a murder because up until that point we knew they were bad guys. I mean they'd shot at police and had burnt down farms and all this stuff was coming out about the stuff they'd done but nobody necessarily suspected them of murder. And all the kind of memes and everything that had been going around when they were on the run sort of took a bit of a darker turn probably. To explain the iteration of the Stockos, as they came to be sort of known in 2015. You've got to go all the way back to 2006. That was when they were arrested down in Apollo Bay on sort of the southwest coast of Victoria. They'd robbed a yacht club a little bit further west at Port Fairy. They got arrested on this yacht that Gino Stocko had bought as part of the property settlement with his wife, Mark's mum. And they were basically sailing around doing kind of a bit of a different version, but similar sort of offending as they became known for later on. You know, getting a little bit of work here and there, pilfering things wherever they could. They stole some identities of people, that sort of thing. When they were charged for that crime, those crimes that they got caught for in 2006, they both spent a little bit of time in prison, but were Both out by 2007, sold the yacht, started basically this kind of life of traveling around, doing sort of itinerant farm work. And their work was fantastic. They were renowned as just these really skilled and hard working blokes who would turn their hand to anything, could sort of, you know, do the work of basically 10 men and didn't really care about not getting paid for it. You know, they just wanted sort of somewhere to stay, maybe a bit of food. But they also had this incredibly bizarre streak of just losing it at the slightest sort of hint of something they were disappointed about, but not necessarily in a way that you and I would consider losing it. You know, it's not as if someone would say something to them. They'd immediately sort of storm off and shout and that would be the end of it. There'd be the dispute and it would be clear they were unhappy, but there'd be nothing that would indicate sort of the level of anger that was sort of burning inside them. And sure enough, that sort of spewed forth in terms of gross acts of vandalism and know, slashing and burning everything on certain properties, you know, stealing anything they could find. But after that they sold the yacht. They started this kind of process of finding work on places, spending as much time there as they could until they either sort of fell out with the owner or just decided to move on. But it didn't really get super bad until 2011. You know, 2007 to 2011, they were still committing, you know, relatively serious offenses, but it was, you know, it was the minor property damage, the stealing, the sort of, some of the sort of the lesser stuff, I guess, compared to what they'd go on to do. But from sort of 2011 on to when they were caught in October 2015, things really escalated. And it's very hard to know why, but that's when they committed these acts which they. Which Mark described as vengeful acts. You know, there's these four big fires that they lit that Mark would describe later on as the ones that were particularly sort of vengeful. And they all sort of occurred in that period. Obviously a murder occurred in that period. The shooting at police occurred in that period.

[Michelle Laurie]

Terrifying.

[Nino Bucci]

So the murder occurred in the context of basically Gino getting named as part of this operation called Operation Rome. The AFP do it every year. They get nominations from the state police forces about the most wanted people. You know, there's usually some really sort of heavy hitters in there. This particular year, by coincidence, it was Queensland's year to sort of coordinate it. So they were able to have a bit more input. And Gino was one of the people that were nominated. All of a sudden his photo was out there, you know, and there was a bit more sort of known about, you know, the level of offending he'd done. What that meant was that even though they'd been traveling around with false names, they'd, you know, typically sort of not given any bank details or anything like that that allowed them to be tracked. But it meant that people knew what his face was and that he committed lots of offences against farmers before. So it sort of drove him underground.

[Michelle Laurie]

That's really stressful if you're that dedicated

[Nino Bucci]

to being underground and to sort of really sort of hammer that home. At that exact point that list came out, they were living in this property right on the edge of southwestern Sydney. So, you know, literally the. The edge of the city boundary, this beautiful place just sort of outside of Wedderburn. And they'd been there a couple of times over sort of a two year period. The owners loved them, they loved the work they did. They had a really great relationship with Mark. The woman there was kind of like had a really sort of maternal relationship with Mark and they'd sort of helped them renovate their property, clean up the place. They'd sort of. This couple had sort of taken a bit of a tree change and Mark and Gino had basically helped them do all the building. But then when this list came out, they had to. They couldn't have them there anymore, so they kicked them Out. Gino and Mark had met a guy working on that same property a few months earlier. And he was a bricklayer. Had links in with Italian organized crime, but not serious links, more sort of peripheral and familial. And links that just happened to know people that were involved in the client. Calabrian mafia. This guy offered Mark and Gino to stay at his property after the list came out. They soon crossed paths with another bloke who also had sort of mafia links called Rosario Simone. There was gonna. That sort of group, that kind of old hands of kind of Mafia link. People were in the process of setting up a property in western New South Wales to grow marijuana. And they'll say they were in the process of setting up another house right at the very time that Mark and Gino.

[Michelle Laurie]

Goodness.

[Nino Bucci]

Went into that orbit. And so they thought, well, these are two blokes that can do pretty much anything that need to lay low and that, you know, basically don't have a choice other than to say, yes, let's invite them out to this property. So anyway, they get to this property, Pine Vale, out in. Near Dunnydoo in western New South Wales, and almost immediately the arguments kind of start. They're about things like the way that Rosario drove the tractor. Gino thought that he was buggering up the gears. They were about the tanks. And the fact that Gino didn't felt he was getting enough credit for the way they were installed. They were about everything and anything. Eventually, Rosario basically got. He sort of started to threaten to go back to Sydney and talk to the people that had set up the house to kick them off. So he's packed his bags, he's got in his car. He's head down the sort of dirt road to leave the house. He hairs back down, you know, away from the house to go to the gate and finds it locked. And so he has to come back to the house to get the key off Mark and Gino. And that's when Mark and Gino go back inside the house, ostensibly to look for the key, but they're actually discussing killing him. And basically they come back out. They had a shotgun from under the bed that they'd stolen from a farmer in western Queensland sort of months earlier. And Gino basically walks out and shoots him twice just on the dirt outside the property. They, I think, were just so desperate, Mark and Gino. And they talk about it at some length in the sort of interviews that they gave after the murder, that they just felt the wall sort of closing in. And to them, they thought this Guy's an old bloke who's got no family and is growing marijuana in the middle of nowhere. We're not going to, we're going to be able to get away with this. So this nine day period is just fascinating to me because there's nine days from where they. Between where they kill Rosario Simone and where they're basically located on driving through a town called Henty in New South Wales and just unlucky in the sense that a police car is going past them with one of those automatic number plate recognition systems. You know, they scan number plates in like a fraction of a second. They find that, you know, that ute that just drove past them has actually got plates and not belonging to like a hatchback sedan, knows it's not right, flicks on the sirens, does a ue and it's on from that point. You know, the stockos basically get pursued for a few K's then they shoot at police, then they shoot at police again and you know, by that night they're national fugitives.

[Michelle Laurie]

So tell us what happened in the two weeks. So police chase, shooting at police, you know, could very nearly have murdered police as well, but luckily didn't. What happened in those two weeks?

[Nino Bucci]

They basically did these huge sort of loops from. I sort of peered, I guess from like the Yarra Valley in Melbourne and then south and east as far as like Bansdale and then back north again around like the Snowies and like past Aubrey slash Wangaratta, all the rest of it and back down again. Like it looks like they're basically doing this huge kind of like loops, ovals in this fairly vast section of I guess southeastern Australia. They spent a lot of time, it appears, kind of on tracks around the mountains because they obviously knew that that was more isolated, more hilly, more tree cover. I mean another one of the things that was amazing that happened is there was at one point they just randomly kind of got pulled over kind of even closer to like Cali country around sort of Glenrowan way by the police. But they didn't think it was them. You know, they'd made some slight sort of modifications to the ute, putting like one of those little like flashing lights on that, you know, know roadworks people had. They were in high vis, the number plate was different. So police have pulled them over thinking, oh, you know, we'll just have a chat to these people. They managed to back into the police car to like perfectly so that the police car's disabled and then take off. I mean police in Victoria now sort of Looking back on it, say that, you know, we did everything we could. There was a huge amount of resources. We wouldn't necessarily change anything. And we feel that it was effective because that pressure was building on them. And that was part of the whole focus of the operation. I mean, it was the biggest manhunt that the state had ever seen. You know, in terms of sheer sort of numbers of resources, there was definitely

[Michelle Laurie]

a sense, I remember that they could still kill someone because we knew they were armed, they were tired, they were desperate.

[Nino Bucci]

Yeah. And I think what wasn't completely appreciated then, and something I only sort of came to realize later on, was that they had dozens of victims out there, and every single one of those people must have been absolutely beside themselves that they were going to come past, because they just had this incredible memory about all the properties they'd worked on. I mean, hence their fantastic knowledge of the landscape that helped them sort of evade the police. But you must have just been petrified that, you know, you were going to hear the gravel crunching outside your window one night and it was going to be them. And sure enough, what they did do was go back to a property that they'd been at before, Pinevale, and that's. That was their undoing.

[Michelle Laurie]

What happened?

[Nino Bucci]

Well, so they went. They decided that the best place for them to go, the place where they knew there was food, they knew there was fuel, they knew it was isolated, was Pinevale, you know, where they'd killed Rosario, you know, a couple of weeks earlier, and where they were hoping they'd be safe. And so they started sort of making their way up there. And they didn't just sort of drive, you know, straight up the driveway and lock the gate behind them and hope for the best. They basically started camping in the forest behind it for a little bit, the Goonur Forest. And they were camping there, you know, doing the stuff they normally did to sort of evade detection. Hessian bags on the roof so it couldn't be seen from the air. Flip the tailgate down so you couldn't see the number plate. And a park ranger came past and sort of saw them and thought these guys look familiar, but was also unarmed, out of mobile range, didn't have a radio, and so basically just took off out of there as quickly as he could. And as soon as he got into rage, called the police. They came back in and saw the Stocko sort of packing up the fire, was gone out, but saw enough to sort of think this probably was them, given that the closest property to them at that point was Pinevale. And so they basically, you know, the police sort of moved in. They watched that house for about 16 hours before they sort of saw the Stockos. You know, when one of the officers, who was a great help to me, a detective in Ingham, who spent, you know, a lot of time trying to catch them, basically because they were, you know, locals, even though they'd sort of traveled a lot since then, he sort of took it as a bit of a personal affront, I guess, that they were from his patch and were causing so much havoc and. And after they got arrested and were in prison in New South Wales, sort of awaiting trial, not trial, but awaiting the finalization of the murder charge, he went down and interviewed them and he put it to them, you know, were you guys in a relationship? You know, was there more sort of going on to this? And Mark flatly denied it and Gino got really upset and basically said, you know, everybody's, you know, very jealous of the special relationship I have with my son, so who knows what that actually meant. But, you know, they did plead guilty very early on. Another detective I spoke to's theory about that is that they wanted to be able to have their court process finished as quickly as possible. Because once that's finished, you can share a cell with a co accused.

[Michelle Laurie]

If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org AU. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13yarn.org A.

[Nino Bucci]

The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.