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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon
- [00:31]
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- [00:36]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. I have something special to share with you today. If you enjoy this show then I know you'll love this special four part series I'm hosting on my other show, Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Across four episodes, I'm taking you to four different getaways where paradise turned deadly. Beaches, open water, the wild, and a bucket list trip. I have the first episode for you to listen to here for the next three episodes. Listen every Sunday on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Don't want to wait to listen to the rest of the series ad free right now. Join Crime House plus To join Crime House plus, subscribe on this show's page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or at primehouseplus.com.
- [01:28]
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- [01:33]
Vanessa Richardson
Think about the last trip you really looked forward to. Maybe somewhere warm. White sand, blue water, a drink with your name practically already on it. A place where you could finally put your phone down, stop thinking about everything waiting for you back home, and just breathe. That's the promise of paradise. We save up for it. We count down the days. We tell ourselves that for a little while at least, nothing can touch us. But paradise isn't always what it seems. And for the people in the stories you're about to hear, the getaway of their dreams became the last trip they ever took. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pavement Studios. Today we're starting a brand new four week series just in time for summer, Deadly Destinations. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show. If you're a Crime House plus subscriber, all four episodes of Deadly Destinations are available right now, completely ad free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page on Apple Podcasts. Along with early access to this series, you'll also get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early over the next four Sundays I'm taking you to some of the most beautiful places on earth. The kind of places people dream about, save up for and travel halfway around the world to see and in some cases never leave. Tropical islands, the open ocean, rugged wilderness and far flung places at the very edge of the map. Each episode visits a different kind of getaway and and the real crimes that turn someone's dream vacation into a nightmare. For our first episode, I'm starting where most of us picture paradise, the sun drenched islands and beaches of the tropics. Three cases, three places that look like heaven on a postcard. First, In Aruba, a 35 year old American woman walks onto a beach with the man she traveled with and is never seen again. Then on the Thai island of Koh Tao, two young British backpackers are found moving, murdered at dawn, and the convictions that follow are doubted around the world. And finally, in Bali, nine young Australians turn a tropical holiday into a heroin smuggling run and discover just how far a country will go to enforce its drug laws. All that and more coming up.
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Vanessa Richardson
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [06:09]
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- [06:13]
Vanessa Richardson
by the summer of 2011, Robyn Gardner's life was settling into something steady. She was 35 years old, living in Frederick County, Maryland with her boyfriend, Richard Forester. The two of them had been together for about two and a half years. They spent most nights of the week in North Bethesda, and even though they'd hit a rough patch, they were still planning a future. Buying a house, building the kind of
- [06:36]
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life you settle into for good.
- [06:38]
Vanessa Richardson
The people who knew Robyn describe her the same way over and over. She was warm, generous, full of life. The kind of person who lit up a room and who gave people the benefit of the doubt. But there was one thing about herself Robyn wasn't sharing. In late July 2011, Robin told Richard she was flying to Florida to visit family. That wasn't quite true. The day after she left, she told him something else that her parents had surprised her with a trip to Aruba, a small island off the coast of Venezuela. That wasn't true either. Robin was going to Aruba, just not with family. She was going with a man named Gary Giordano. Robin and Gary had met online about a year earlier. He was a 50 year old businessman from Maryland who ran a temporary staffing company. He was twice divorced with three sons, and the people around Robyn weren't sure what to make of him. What exactly the two of them were to each other has never been pinned down. Robyn had a serious boyfriend back home, and one of her closest friends insisted the relationship with Gary was strictly platonic. But investigators would later find explicit photos of Robin on Gary's camera, and the people close to her said Gary had a darker side. He'd reportedly sent her texts that were aggressive, even threatening. Gary also had a criminal record that included accusations of domestic violence. Multiple women he dated described stalking and surveillance behavior as and two obtained restraining orders against him. So, depending on who you asked, this was two friends on a getaway or something far more troubling. Either way, on July 31, 2011, Robin and Gary landed in Aruba for a five day vacation. They checked into a room together at a beachfront resort, and the first day looked exactly like the trip it was supposed to be. Surveillance cameras even caught the two of them out on the sand, soaking up the sun. The then came August 2nd. That afternoon, the pair turned up at the Rum Reef Bar and Grill Near a spot on the southern tip of the island called Baby Beach. Witnesses who saw Robin there said she didn't seem right. She was unsteady and a little out of it. It was the last time anyone other than Gary would see her. From there, the afternoon gets murky. Gary would later say the two of them went snorkeling off an isolated stretch of reef. And that around six in the evening, a strong current pulled Robyn out to se sea. He said that by the time he made it back to shore, she was gone. But witnesses told investigators a very different story. They'd seen the couple walking along the reef around 4 o' clock that afternoon and that they never actually went into the water. A little while later, they reportedly got into their car and drove away. What's not in dispute is that there was a gap, well over an hour by some accounts, between the last time anyone saw Robin and the moment we were. Gary finally raised the alarm. And here's the thing that nagged at people from the very start. Baby beach isn't a wild stretch of open ocean. It's a sheltered, shallow lagoon, the kind of place families take little kids to paddle around. That's literally how it got its name. The idea that a current there could drag a grown woman out to sea while her companion made it back to shore just fine was hard for a lot of people to picture. But in those first hours and days, none of that was the focus. All anyone wanted was just to find Robyn. Back home in Maryland, her boyfriend, Richard Forrester, had already sensed something was wrong. In the days before her disappearance, Robin's messages had turned strange. An abrupt dropped phone call and a Facebook post that just said, this sucks. Then on August 2nd, a final message. Quote, don't worry. I care about you. I love you. We'll talk and sort things out when I get back. End quote. After that, nothing. When Richard learned that Robin wasn't in Florida at all, but missing on a Caribbean island with a man he barely knew, he was terrified. He didn't believe she'd simply drowned. He told FBI and the Aruban authorities that he suspected foul play. And one detail haunted him. In the days after Robin was reported reported missing, he said her email and social media accounts briefly flickered back to life. Active, then idle, then gone again. An ex girlfriend of Gary's had warned Richard that Gary was technically savvy, the kind of guy who could break into someone's account and slip into their personality, posting as if he were them. And as the search grew, the case started to echo. One the whole World remembered because Robyn Gardner wasn't the first American woman to Vanish in Aruba. Six years earlier, in 2005, an 18 year old named Natalee Holloway had disappeared on the same island on a high school graduation trip. A case that made headlines everywhere and was never truly solved. In fact, the organization founded in Natalie's name, a resource center for families of people who go missing abroad, stepped in to help Robin's family. Even Natalie's own mother reached out to her contacts in Aruba to make sure Robyn's case got attention. And the search was massive, one of the biggest the island had ever mounted. The authorities pulled in dozens of people. Police, firefighters, FBI agents, Aruban riot officers and volunteers walking the coastline. They put out missing posters and searched the water, the rocks, even an abandoned phosphate mine near the shore. As the days dragged on with no sign of her, Robyn's mother, Andrea Colson, pleaded publicly for her daughter's return. At one point, the Aruban authorities called the active search off entirely, saying they'd simply run out of leads, and then started it all over again, combing the same water and the same rocks for any trace of her. At first, Gary Giordano cooperated. He even went up in a police helicopter to point out the spot where he said he'd last seen Robin. But the longer it went on, the less his story held together. Investigators back in Maryland searched his home in the D.C. suburbs. And on August 5, three days after he'd reported Robin missing, on the day the two of them had been scheduled to fly home together, Gary was stopped at the airport and detained. The authorities said they'd found serious inconsistencies in his account. That's when this stopped looking like a tragic accident. Because investigators learned that on July 27, 2011, just a few days before the trip, Gary. Gary had taken out an insurance policy. According to the Associated Press, it was a travel insurance policy from American Express that covered both him and Robin for the journey. It carried an accidental death benefit of one and a half million dollars. And if Robin died, the person who stood to collect that money was Gary. And the timing of what he did next is hard to forget. The AP reported that on August 4, two days after he reported Robin missing, while search teams were still combing the coastline, Gary called American Express. He wanted to confirm that his paperwork had gone through, and he wanted to start collecting. He even asked whether the cost of the search itself might be covered. It wasn't the only red flag around that policy. ABC News reported that Gary contacted the insurer four separate times in the days after Robin vanished. And one insurance agent told ABC that in an entire year on the job, she had never seen anyone do what Gary did before the trip. Both mail in a hard copy of the policy and fax it, as if making absolutely certain it was locked in. In other words, just days before a vacation, Gary Giordano had gone out of his way twice over to make sure an accidental death policy on his travel companion was active and on file. Then, while she was still officially only missing, he started trying to collect. To the people investigating, that was not the behavior of a grieving friend. But according to Gary's defense, all of it was being twisted. His attorney, Jose Baez, who had also represented Casey Anthony, argued that this was nothing more than ordinary travel insurance, the kind that covers medical bills, dental work, a rental car, and yes, accidental death. He said Robin had taken out her own policy. Policy, too. So here are the two stories, and they have never been reconciled. The first is Gary's a riptide, a snorkeling trip gone horribly wrong, a tragic accident that no insurance policy can explain away. The second belongs to the investigators who held him. That something far darker happened that day and that the man who stood to profit was the same man who walked out of the water alone. Here's what we can say for sure. Aruba is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and under its Dutch style legal system, prosecutors can hold a suspect for months while they build a case. They held Gary for nearly four months, winning extension after extension while they searched for something solid enough to charge him with. But Robin's body never turned up. And without it or any physical proof of how she died, or even that she died at all, prosecutors simply couldn't make a case. On November 25, 2011, an appeals court ruled there wasn't enough to keep holding him. Gary was released. He flew home to Maryland a free man, and he was never charged with anything. But the story didn't end there. The following year, Gary sued American Express for $3.5 million, claiming the company owed him the death benefit. American Express fought back hard, and in a strange twist, the insurer's own Subsidia went to court, arguing that the policy should never pay out at all because Gary and Robyn weren't married, weren't related, and weren't business partners. The case dragged on for years before it was ultimately dismissed. Gary never saw a cent of that money. He later wrote a book maintaining his innocence and sat for television interviews, including an appearance on Dr. Phil, insisting he had nothing to do with what happened. As for Robyn, as of this recording, she has yet to be found. The Aruban police presume she's dead. In the years since, the case has gone quiet, flaring back up whenever a new search is announced or a new interview airs, then fading out again. Her sister Danielle has spent more than a decade in that silence. She believes whatever happened to Robin was, in her words, very sinister and very evil. But a belief isn't a verdict. And on an island built on the promise that nothing bad can touch you, Robin Gardner walked onto a beach and simply disappeared. In this case, there was no body and no answers. But in our next destination, there was no question that a crime had happened. Two young travelers would be found dead on a beach at dawn. The question there was different. It wasn't what happened, it was whether the right men were punished for it.
- [18:46]
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- [19:53]
Vanessa Richardson
Our next stop is another paradise, this time on the other side of the world with a crime that left two young travelers dead and an entire country scrambling to explain it. A quick warning here before we go on this part of the story includes violence and sexual assault, so please listen with care. Koh Tao is a small island in the Gulf of Thailand known for its clear warm water, coral reefs and spectacular scuba diving. For young travelers working their way through Southeast Asia, it feels about as safe and easy as travel gets. In September 2014, two of those backpackers were Hannah Witheridge and David Miller, both from the UK. Hannah was 23, from the village of Hemsby in Norfolk, England, and a student at the University of Essex. David was 24, an engineering graduate from the island of Jersey. They had to traveled there together. They actually met on Koh Tao, staying near the same cluster of beachfront bungalows the way travelers do. Two young people at the easy, sociable end of a long trip. They were exactly who you picture on an island like this. Hannah was bright and warm, in the middle of her university studies Back in England. David was the steady, capable type, Fresh out of school, with an engineering degree and his whole life in front of him. Neither of them had any reason to think a dive town beach could be dangerous. Almost nobody who goes there does. In the early hours of September 15, 2014, the two of them were seen leaving a bar near the water. A few hours later, just after dawn, their bodies were found in the rocks along Sairee beach, close to the bungalows where they'd been staying. Both had been beaten, police would later say, with a garden hoe found nearby, about 35 meters from the bodies. Hannah had also been sexually assaulted. A post mortem found that she died of head wounds. David died from a combination of severe head injuries and drowning, and he had wounds on his hands, a sign that he'd fought back. This was savage and personal, and it happened in a place where tens of thousands of visitors felt completely safe. For Hannah and David's families, the horror was doubled by the distance. Two sets of parents suddenly trying to understand what had happened to their children on a beach 6,000 miles away in a country where they didn't speak the language and couldn't see the evidence for themselves. And almost immediately, this case became about something bigger than two victims. Thailand sells itself to the world as the land of smiles. Tourism is enormous, generating billions of dollars a year. And in 2014, the country was especially anxious about it. Just months earlier, in May, the military had seized power in a coup, and visitor numbers were already shaky. Now two photogenic young British backpackers were dead on one of Thailand's most beautiful beaches. And the story was everywhere. Koh Tao itself is tiny. A few square miles of jungle and beach you can cross in minutes. It runs almost entirely on tourism. Dive shops, beach bars, cheap bungalows, and a workforce of Thai and Burmese laborers who keep the whole thing humming. A double murder didn't just shock the island, it threatened its only industry. And you could feel that pressure all the way at the top. On September 17, two days after Hannah and David's bodies were found, the head of the military government was asked about tourist safety. He suggested that visitors assume Thailand was so beautiful and so safe that they could do whatever they wanted. Then he asked whether tourists could really be safe wearing bikinis, quote, unless they are not beautiful. The implication was ugly, that the victims had somehow brought it on themselves. The backlash, especially in Britain, was so fierce and that. He apologized the next day, saying he'd spoken too harshly. But the remark gave away the game. The unspoken message to the police was make this go away fast. And with that kind of pressure, it's no surprise the investigation became its own scandal. According to a detailed BBC analysis, the crime scene was never properly sealed off. Tourists and potential suspects were allowed to leave the island before they could be ruled out. At first, suspicion bounced from one group to the next. Police questioned a string of people who'd crossed paths with the victims. Among them two British brothers from David's home island of Jersey who'd spent time with him and Hanna on Koh Tao. The brothers were stopped at the Bangkok airport, held as possible suspects, and then cleared. After that, investigators reviewed footage from all 366 of the island's security camera and pushed out a grainy image of a man, quote, of Asian appearance, seen running near the beach, calling him their prime suspect. But the footage was so low quality, it was almost useless on its own. And critics would later argue it did less to identify a killer than to nudge the investigation toward the group the police would eventually charge. Because the focus then shifted onto the island's community of migrant workers from neighboring Myanmar, also known as Burma, it's worth understanding who those workers are. Many are in Thailand without secure legal status, doing the low paid jobs that keep resort islands running. They have few protections, little money for lawyers, and a long history of being blamed first when something goes wrong. Some of the migrants who were rounded up for questioning said they were roughed up. A few even claimed they were scalded with boiling water, which the police denied. So when the investigation turned toward them, human rights groups grew uneasy. It wasn't that migrant workers can't commit crimes. Anyone can. It was that this particular group, in this particular country made for the easiest possible suspects. About two weeks after the murders, the police announced they had their men. Two Burmese bar workers named Za Lin and Wei Pyo. Both were around 22 years old, with no criminal records. Police said the two had confessed and that DNA tied them to the crime. To seal the impression, they staged a televised reenactment on the beach, walking the handcuffed suspects through the killing in front of a swarm of cameras. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it was the beginning of years of doubt. The two men retracted their confessions almost as soon as they'd given them. They said they'd been beaten and threatened into admitting to a crime they didn't commit. That as poor migrant workers with no power and no protection, they were simply the easiest people on the island to pin it on. As before, the police denied any abuse. But this wasn't only the defendants talking. Thailand's own National Human Rights Commission later said it had found evidence that both men had been physically mistreated in custody. There was also the problem of language. The defendants were native Burmese speakers trying to follow a Thai police interrogation and later a Thai courtroom. Their supporters argued they'd never had anything close to adequate translation when they supposedly confessed. When the trial opened in July 2015, the defense went straight at the evidence. They argued the DNA work was unreliable and, crucially, that the key samples couldn't be independently retested to check the police's findings. Findings. One of Thailand's most respected forensic scientists even publicly criticized the way the crime scene had been handled. The DNA was the spine of the prosecution's case. Take it away and what's left is two confessions the men said had been beaten out of them. So everything came down to how a Thai court would weigh it there. In serious criminal cases, a panel of career judges hears the evidence and decides both guilt and sentence. The standard on paper is the same one used in American courtrooms, proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But here, there were no 12 jurors to persuade, only the judges on the bench. The defense was betting that the doubts about the DNA and the confessions were enough to clear that bar. The prosecution was betting they weren't. On December 24, 2015, Christmas Eve, the court delivered its answer. Both men were found guilty. Both were sentenced to death. On one side, David Miller's family said they accepted the verdict and believed the right men had been convicted. That the court had done its job. Hannah Witheridge's family said, far less in public, grieving, mostly out of view. On the other side, Human Rights Watch and other observers called the verdict deeply troubling, pointing to the confessions the men said were beaten out of them and to the serious questions about the forensic work. A British police team had even traveled out to Thailand to observe the investigation. And the doubts never really went away. As of this recording, Za Lin and Wei Pyo still maintain they are innocent. And on Ko Tao itself, plenty of people never accepted the official story at all. Theories swirled that the real killers were local. Suspicions that only deepened after a Scottish friend of David's fled the island, saying his life had been threatened. The police insisted they weren't scapegoating anyone and stood by their evidence. But to this day, no one outside that courtroom can say for certain what really happened on Sairee Beach. Since their convictions, Za Lin and Wei Pho have unsuccessfully appealed their convictions all the way up to the country's Supreme Court. Although their death sentences were eventually commuted to life in prison under a clemency decree issued in the name of Thailand's king, they didn't have to admit guilt to receive it. And they didn't. So today the two men are alive, serving life in a Thai prison for a crime they swear they had nothing to do with. They were spared the firing squad, but if they're telling the truth, that isn't mercy. It's just a slower version of the Saint. Same mistake on Koh Tao Two men may be paying for a crime some people believe they didn't commit. In our Final Destination, there was no doubt about guilt at all. Nine young people broke the law, and they knew exactly what they were doing. The question there wasn't whether they did it, it was how far a punishment should go and whether a person can ever truly change.
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Vanessa Richardson
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Lindsey Graham
of April 19, 1775, a ragged band of colonial militiamen took up arms against the powerful British army in an astonishing act of defiance. The shots fired that day in Lexington and Concord would echo around the world, marking the beginning of an extraordinary struggle for liberty, the American Revolution. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Historytellers. We take you to the events, times and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles and our dreams. In our latest series, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we'll go beyond the familiar tale of powdered wigs and patriotic glory into the messy, complicated story of what it actually took to build a new nation. As patriot leaders endured brutal defeats and forged unlikely alliances, ordinary citizens would be left to ask themselves what freedom was really worth. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of American Historytellers ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.
- [33:42]
Vanessa Richardson
Our last stop is the island. A lot of people picture first when they imagine paradise, Bali in Indonesia. And this case is different from the other two, because here, guilt was never really the question. In April 2005, nine young Australians flew to Bali. On the surface, it looked like the same trip thousands of their countrymen take every year. Sun, surf and cheap beer. But this group wasn't there for a holiday. They were there to smuggle heroin, more than 8 kilograms of it, worth around 4 million Australian dollars. Packed up and bound for the streets of their home country. Most of them were young and short on money. Several had worked together for the same catering company back in Sydney. And they were pulled into the scheme with the promise of a free trip and a payday. One of them, Scott rush, was just 19 years old. The plan was for the couriers to fly home with the heroine strapped to their bodies under their clothes. Staged out of a hotel in the beach town of Kuta. There's no denying it. This was a serious crime. Heroin destroys lives. And these nine were trying to move a small mountain of it into Australian cities. But what makes their story so wrenching isn't that they were innocent. It's what happened to them after. Here's the first twist, and it's one that still stirs up real anger in Australia. The Bali nine didn't get caught by bad luck. They got caught because the Australian federal police tipped off the Indonesian authorities about the plot. And at the center of that is a father. Before the group left, Scott Rush's dad, Lee, became worried his son was about to get mixed up in something terrible overseas. So he reached out to the Australian Federal Police, hoping they would stop his son before he could do anything. The family came away believing Scott would be warned or kept from boarding his flight. Instead, the AFP passed its information to the Indonesian police. And on April 17, 2005, the group was arrested. Four of the couriers and one of the ringleaders, 21 year old Andrew Chan, were stopped at the airport with heroin taped to their bodies. About to fly home. 24 year old Mayuran Sukumaran, were picked up at a hotel in Kuta. Now, the AFP has always disputed the Rush family's version of events. Years later, a deputy commissioner said no officer ever promised that Scott would be stopped and that he was already on a watch list because of earlier links to a drug syndicate. But you can understand why the story had such a profound effect. A father tried to save his son, and instead his son ended up in a country where smuggling drugs can get you killed. Indonesia has the death penalty for drug trafficking. And Australia, a country that abolished capital punishment decades ago, had effectively handed nine of its own young citizens to a system that could sentence some of them to die. For Australians, that was the gut punch at the center of this whole case. This wasn't a foreign government reaching out and snatching their citizens. This was their own police force making a choice that put nine young Australians in front of an Indonesian firing squad. Critics asked why the AFP didn't simply wait and arrest the group when they landed back home, where they'd face prison, not death. The AFP's answer was that they couldn't be certain the drugs would even make it to Australia, and that breaking up an international heroin pipeline meant working with the Indonesians on the ground. By 2006, all nine had been convicted. The two ringleaders, Andrew Chan and Mayuran Sukumaran, were sentenced to death. The other seven were sentenced to life in prison. All except the only woman in the group, Renee Lawrence, who'd cooperated with investigators and laid out the role each member played. In exchange, her sentence was cut to 20 years. Lawrence has since said she only took part at all only because Andrew Chan had threatened her life if she refused. And then something happened that almost no one saw coming. The two condemned men did not spend the next decade the way you might imagine. Inside Karab Bukan prison, Mayuran Sukumaran picked up a paintbrush under the mentorship of the well known Australian artist Ben Quilty. He became a serious painter, eventually earning an art qualification from behind bars and pouring himself into canvas after canvas. Andrew Chan went a different way. He found religion, became an ordained Christian pastor, and spent his time leading church services and counseling other inmates. Together, the two men set up classes inside Karabuka. Art, English, computers, cooking that helped scores of their fellow prisoners. Their transformation became the heart of a national campaign in Australia to spare their lives. Artists, church leaders, ordinary people, and eventually the Australian government itself pleaded for mercy. There were candlelight vigils and front page appeals. For weeks, the whole country seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to see whether two of its citizens would live or die. It didn't work. Indonesia had a new president who'd come to power, promising to get tough on the country's drug crisis and who refused to grant clemency to any of a whole group of condemned traffickers scheduled to die together that spring. They came from all over the world. Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines and Indonesia itself. Andrew Chan and Mayuran Sukumaran were simply two names on that list. Their final days were almost unbearably human. In his last hours, Andrew Chan got married. Wedding his Indonesian fiance Febianti, a pastor who'd visited him in prison in a small ceremony the day before he was due to die. Meanwhile, Mirin Sukumara kept painting almost to the end, producing a final furious burst of work that would later hang in galleries back in Australia. On April 29, 2015, after a 72 hour notice and a last round of visits from their families, they were taken out and executed by firing squad alongside the six other prisoners from around the world. The reaction in Australia was immediate and furious. The government recalled its ambassador from Indonesia in protest, the first time it had ever done so, over the execution of its own citizens. Then Prime Minister Tony Abbott called it a dark moment in the relationship between the two countries. For the rest of the Bali Nine, the story stretched on for years. In June 2018, one of the group died of cancer in prison. Later that same year, Renee Lawrence, her sentence reduced again and again for good behavior, walked free after 13 years, the first of the group to be released. And the final chapter came just recently. In December 2024, the five remaining members were sent home to Australia after 19 years behind bars under a deal struck between the Australian and Indonesian governments. There were no pardons. In the eyes of the law, they are still convicted traffickers. But their life sentences ended the moment they touched down on Australian soil and they walked back into the world as free men for the first time since some of them were teenagers. They'd flown to Bali chasing easy money. They came home middle aged, having handed over their entire adult lives for a single catastrophic decision. So that's where we end. Three trips to paradise. Three completely different endings. In Aruba, Robin Gardner's family got no justice at all. No body, no charges, just a man who walked off a beach and a question that won't go away. On Koh Tao, two men were convicted and sentenced, and much of the world still isn't sure the right people. People were punished, and in Bali, justice was absolute and final. Two young men spent a decade becoming something better than they had been. And in the end, it didn't change what was waiting for them on that island. We think of these places as escapes. We picture white sand and blue water a few days where the rest of the world can't reach us. But the postcard is only ever part of the picture. For Robin Gardner, for Hannah Witheridge and David Miller, for Andre Chan and Mayuran Soko Maran, a single plane ticket changed everything. They went looking for paradise. And for the people who loved them, those trips never really ended. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Be sure to come back next Sunday for the next stop on Deadly Destinations, Episode 2 Death on the High Seas, where we leave dry land behind for the open ocean, the cruise ships and sailboats where passengers stepped on board and were never seen again. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your conspiracy theories, culture and crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Nicolette Tavolaro, Kaylee Pine and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening. For the next three episodes, listen every
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Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are two teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon
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