It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in Spring, 1930. Mena Griffiths is 12 years old and living with her family in suburban Melbourne.

There’s a park she often visits with her friends and she asks her parents if she can go out and play. Her parents can’t know that there’s a man sitting at a local hotel bar.

He’s about 30 years old. He is known to the community as a family man, with a wife named Bernice and a baby named Joan. At 18 he had been sent to a reformatory prison for theft. Shortly after his release, he was sent back to prison for armed robbery and wounding a station master.

They can’t know that his crimes are on the verge of becoming more extreme. And that as he watches the young girls play in the nearby park, he decides to finish his drink, and approach a little girl. They can’t know that what he does will only be the beginning. He will go on to commit a series of crimes so horrific, that he will be hanged at Pentridge Prison.

CREDITS

Guest: Katherine Kovacic

Host: Jessie Stephens

Audio Producer: Ian Camilleri

Executive Producer: Gia Moylan

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The Melbourne Schoolgirl Strangler