Seeking Justice Elsewhere: Informal and formal justice in the true crime podcasts Trace and The Teacher’s Pet

Introduction

True crime podcasts are audio documentary productions that inform, mirror, and transform cultural attitudes toward the law. As Carol Smart has argued, feminists have reason to mistrust legal institutions and to seek justice elsewhere. She writes, ‘There are other ways of challenging popular consciousness other than through law, even though law may on occasions provide a catalyst’ (Smart, 1989: 81). Podcasts are an increasingly popular medium for true crime narratives, particularly following the success of Serial, which reached five million downloads from Apple’s iTunes’ store faster than any other podcast in history (Dredge, 2014). In the 2014 podcast, Sarah Koenig investigated the murder of schoolgirl, Hae Min Lee, in 1999 and subsequent conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who continues to proclaim his innocence. My article will examine the representation of women in Trace and The Teacher’s Pet, two recent and popular Australian true crime podcasts that followed inconclusive investigations of murders. These contemporary Australian true crime podcasts represent women in ways that—while not always feminist—use the medium, context, and adapt narrative conventions of the paperback true crime genre such as characterisation and emotive language in order to draw support from the public, inviting them to perform as makeshift jury members.

Trace (2017–2018) is a seven-episode Australian true crime podcast published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and narrated by Rachael Brown, about the 1980 murder of Maria James in her Melbourne bookshop, where she lived with her two sons. In 1982, a coroner found that she was murdered by a “person unknown.” However, the podcast reveals that her younger son, Adam, told Maria that their parish priest, Father Bongiorno, was sexually abusing him. She planned to speak with the priest on the day that she was murdered. A witness, who did not come forward in the initial investigation but spoke to Brown on the podcast, saw Father Bongiorno on the day of the murder, visibly upset and covered in blood. James’s sons were told that the priest had been ruled out as a suspect, presumably by DNA found on a pillow slip at the scene. In episode 4 of the podcast, it is revealed that the pillow slip was from another crime scene entirely, but placed with James’s evidence as a result of an embarrassing police blunder. Maria James is represented as a victim of the church’s silencing of abuse. Late in 2018, a coroner ruled to open a new inquest into James’s murder. It was reported that the podcast has been downloaded three million times (Brown, 2018b).

The Teacher’s Pet (2018), published by The Australian, is an even more popular Australian true crime podcast; reportedly, it has been downloaded over 28 million times (Cockburn and Sas, 2018). In its sixteen episodes, Hedley Thomas investigates the disappearance of Lynette Dawson from the northern beaches of Sydney in 1982, leaving behind her two daughters. Thomas explicitly accuses Dawson’s husband, former professional rugby player, Chris Dawson, of murdering her and disposing of her body. Two days after his wife’s disappearance, Dawson moved Joanne Curtis—whom he had groomed and begun to sexually exploit while he was her teacher at high school—into his home. Dawson was arrested late in 2018. The podcast also sheds light on the culture of sexual abuse at high schools in the northern beaches in the 1980s, which has led police to establish Strike Force Southward. For the duration of the court trial, the podcast has been removed from public consumption, following advice from the office of the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions.

I chose these two Australian podcasts for evaluation because they were both released during a cultural shift to true crime podcasts in the years of 2017 and 2018, when Australia felt echoes of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The commission exposed the inadequate responses to allegations of child sexual abuse in churches, schools, and other large institutions in Australia. Both podcasts were very popular and triggered the re-openings of cold cases because of audience pressure on police (Brown, 2018b; Cockburn and Sas 2018). They therefore provide ample opportunity for discussion and evaluation on the ways that true crime podcasts can act as a medium for informal justice, and how it might work in tandem with or impede the processes of formal justice.

I will evaluate these podcasts through the prism of the discipline of Law and Literature, which focuses on legal discourse in real and fictional narratives, using the techniques of both legal and literary criticism. An influential scholar in the discipline, Richard Posner (1998), writes that “Law’s techniques and imagery have permeated Western culture, popular as well as high, from its earliest days. Law has engaged the attention of imaginative writers as an object of fascination in its own right” (4). On the other hand, he highlights that the discipline suffers from “a misconception about how the study of literature can improve the law—that it can do so not only in providing jurisprudential insights, rhetorical techniques, an understanding of legal regulation of literature, and insights into social practices that law encounters, but also by humanizing lawyers. It cannot do that” (7). Rather than attempting to show how literature can improve legal processes, I will evaluate the podcasts as a medium of informal justice that works alongside, and sometimes intersects with, formal approaches. My methodology will involve a close reading of transcriptions of the two podcasts—in particular their introductions, their focuses on building communities, and the narrators’ language when discussing victims. I will also examine the ways the podcasts engage with formal justice. I argue that these contemporary Australian true crime podcasts offer women and victims of childhood sexual abuse alternatives to seek justice beyond courtrooms and inconclusive investigations, but there are limitations in informal justice.

True crime podcasts

True crime publication is increasingly moving from paperback to podcast. Podcasts—named by combining “iPod” and “broadcast”—are a technology developed in 2004 that allow listeners to download audio files, and sometimes video, to a computer or portable device. Their flexible functionality allows a podcast listener to “time-shift and place-shift content, meaning a user can tune in to the podcasts they choose, whenever, and wherever she wants” (McClung and Johnson, 2010: 83). The comprehensive 2018 Reuters Institute Digital News Report demonstrates that thirty-three percent of Australian respondents had listened to a podcast in the previous month, placing Australia and USA as the equal eighth highest countries to consume podcasts (Newman, 2018: 30). Further, iTunes analytics from late 2017 show that audiences typically listened to ninety percent of a podcast (ibid). It is therefore probable that podcasts are a significant cultural product in Australia, and were so at the time Trace and The Teacher’s Pet were released.

The broadcasting of criminal investigations and trials is not a new phenomenon. Trials have been previously broadcast on radio, such as the Nuremberg trials following World War Two, which were broadcast by the BBC (Pâquet, 2018: 75). Podcasting true crime has some distinct advantages over live broadcast. One of the advantages is that listeners can time-shift; that is, tune into the podcasts at any time. Time-shifting allows audiences to multi-task, such as listening during work commutes (Markman and Sawyer, 2014: 20; McClung and Johnson, 2010: 91). The authors of the 2018 Digital News Report mention that countries such as Australia and the US are high in podcast usage compared to Scandinavian countries because those listeners spend more time in their cars (Newman, 2018: 30). Podcasts are easily accessible, as the use of a native app on many smartphones transforms the phone into “a personalised radio. . . in your pocket” (Riordan, 2018: 68). Further, contemporary true crime podcasts are often released as episodes, following the example of Serial, which returned to the serialised instalments of bygone pulp stories in order to engage with a single story, thus “allowing the reporting to reach outlandish depths while keeping listeners enthralled” (Stahl, 2017). This structure and portability allows listeners to follow an in-depth narrative in the order of an investigation over the course of weeks or months or, if they prefer, to binge the podcasts over a short period of time.

The democratic function of the media has been long discussed, and as James Curran explains, “the first democratic function of the media is to monitor the state, and shield citizens from the tyrannical abuse of its power” (Curran, 2014: 30). This democratising role of the media may appear to have found an outlet in true crime podcasts narrated by investigative journalists who expose police blunders in cases of violence against women. As Thalia Anthony explains, true crime podcasts provide “increased accountability on our justice system and police” (qtd. in Cockburn and Sas, 2018). Further, the Digital News Report finds that of the media companies operating in Australia, the ABC (who publish Trace) is the most trusted news source, and The Australian (who publish The Teacher’s Pet) is the fourth most trusted (Newman, 2018: 127).

On the other hand, the democratic function of mass media is complex and contradictory. Graeme Turner (2010: 98) argues that talk back radio may appear to represent ordinary voices most aggressively of all media and that it combines news with entertainment. At the same time, by focusing on interactivity and the agency of consumers, scholars risk diverting attention from underlying power structures and capitalist motivations that govern radio and other public broadcasting (Turner, 2010: 120). The true crime podcasts evaluated below incorporate listener feedback and use community tips, but also function less obviously in the democratic turn of media such as talk back radio. Further, questions persist on whether mass media fulfils its democratic role. As Sheila Allison argues, “despite the advantages of the digital age and the increasingly high literacy rates in most countries, there is not as much democratic progress around the world as the opportunities afforded by digital communications would seem to warrant” (2018: 27). Feminist theorists have long identified how technology can offer new modes of emancipation but can also reproduce power dynamics of the outside world in online spaces (Powell, 2015: 579). The slow pace of change in women’s representation through mass media, even online, “reflects and legitimizes the gender biases within other democratic institutions such as the criminal justice system, in which cultural mythologies around gender and sexuality have proven to be particularly durable, blunting the impacts of feminist-inspired law reform” (Salter, 2013: 226-7). While Michael Salter (2013: 227) praises the alternative modes of media used to advocate for feminist reform, such as community radio and self-published zines, these “counter-publics” do not offer the reach and distribution channels of mass media. Also, online networks have the ability to connect many-to-many rather than one-to-many (Salter, 2013: 228), which can allow podcast listeners the means of communicating with each other and exchanging ideas rather than passively listening to the narrator. As I have written elsewhere (Pâquet, 2018: 90-91), true crime podcasts and television series are orbited by an online ecosystem of conjecture and further community investigation by Internet detectives.

True crime podcasts are popular with female audiences. Studies have demonstrated that the true crime genre in paperback is largely read by women (Browder, 2006; Vicary and Fraley, 2010). Laura Browder (2006: 929) found that between two-thirds to three-quarters of true crime readers are female. While The Digital News Report found that more men listened to podcasts than women, the “contemporary life” category (which included crime as its main genre) was almost evenly split (Newman, 2018: 55; Riordan, 2018: 68), indicating that a larger proportion of the female podcast listeners were tuning in to crime podcasts than the proportion of overall male listeners. An ABC survey likewise indicated that true crime podcasts were largely consumed by women (Cunningham, 2018). Another survey, with results published in Journal of Radio and Audio Media, reports that 73% of true crime podcast audiences are female (Boling and Hull, 2018). While it is not within the purview of this article to demonstrate why women in particular appear drawn to true crime podcasts, there have been some relevant findings about the genre.

One lesson female listeners may learn from true crime narratives is that criminal justice institutions will not save them from violence. Lisa Kort-Butler and Kelley Hartshorn (2011: 51) find that true crime television viewers are less supportive of the criminal justice system, while Browder (2006) claims that they “question the culture that leaves women vulnerable to victimization from the men who are supposed to protect them” (929) and that “legislation cannot remove the source of the problem” (932). Thus, fears gained by female audiences of true crime can shape public opinion on policy around criminal justice (Kort-Butler and Hartshorn, 2011: 41). Often, the narratives within contemporary true crime attempt to appeal to audiences who are disenchanted with justice institutions (Pâquet, 2018: 77). Both podcasts discussed herein explicitly question police institutions. For example, Mark and Adam James reveal in Trace that Adam was not questioned by police, and therefore the motive of killing their mother to cover up his sexual abuse by a priest was not discovered by detectives at the time. The recent rise of podcasted true crime about women parallels other fourth-wave feminisms gaining traction through social media since 2012 that use new networks of communication to disseminate their messages (Cunningham, 2018).

Seeking justice through a jurified audience

Informal justice encompasses everything that seeks justice, reparation, or amends for crime outside of the formal justice system led by the police, courts, and legislation. It includes a gamut of possible procedures such as Indigenous, religious, and traditional justice, through to vigilantism and slacktivism. Here I deploy the idea of informal justice as an approach through podcasts by creators, victim-survivors, and audiences, to seek reparation for crimes that were left unsolved by formal justice systems. While podcasts can act as informal justice, they are also a form of media entertainment. They use narration, style, and emotional appeals in order to keep listeners entertained and engaged over a series.

As evaluated further below, the audience undergo a process of “jurification.” Stella Bruzzi (2016) defines the term as a process that occurs in newer true crime productions (podcasts and documentaries) in which audiences are asked, “what it is like to have to reach a decision on muddy and frequently conflicting evidence. . .[and] a vital ingredient in the new true crime genre recipe is what we the audience/jurors/people on the street think about the facts and narrative presented for us” (274). This process invites audiences to “adopt the juror perspective in relation to the evidence” (ibid). As shown below, the two Australian podcasts invite listeners into a process of jurification to make informal justice decisions on the cold cases of murdered women.

Both Trace and The Teacher’s Pet follow the murders of working mothers, Lynette Dawson and Maria James. Both podcasts underscore how the women were dedicated to their children, and that this dedication provided motivations for their murders. When Rachael Brown first introduces Maria James in Trace, she sets the scene of the family home with a background track of tram bells, which an Australian audience associates with Melbourne. She narrates:

Thornbury’s a little north of Melbourne’s city centre, about half an hour by tram. Before its wine bars and eateries came along in the late nineties, it was a relentlessly and unromantically working-class suburb, with rising unemployment amongst a generation of displaced manufacturing workers. Maria James runs the bookstore on the high street, living out the back of the shop with her two boys. Adam is eleven; he has cerebral palsy and Tourette’s and has a bit of trouble communicating. Mark’s the eldest, and at thirteen Maria expects him to look out for his younger brother too. Maria is the daughter of Italian immigrants. She loves to cook. She loves her boys. It’s a winter morning in June and she’s cooking them their favourite breakfast before school: scrambled eggs . . . She gets on with her day; there’s things to organise for the boys, the bookstore to look after. Around eleven-thirty she phones her ex-husband . . . they’re on good terms. (Brown, 2017a)

James is described as a single mother who is time-poor; working in the bookstore and the home. She fulfils an “everywoman” role and has no apparent problems in her close relationships, and lives in a working-class suburb that would be familiar to many listeners.

In The Teachers Pet, Hedley Thomas also describes a suburb in Australia’s other big urban centre, Sydney, to invite listeners into the scene, although his description is more sensationalist:

There is a hilltop of rugged beauty above Sydney’s sunny northern beaches; a place of dense bush and rocky outcrops and long driveways snaking across acreage properties to comfortable family homes. It is noisy here at Bayview in summer. Male cicadas crawl out of the soil and violently deform their bodies to pull off a complex vibration and an ear-splitting buzzing. Nature’s summer soundtrack can be deafening; maddening. The secretive cicadas are desperate to find a female for a frenzy of mating. It will ultimately be fatal. (Thomas, 2018a)

His description is backed by the familiar sounds of cicadas during an Australian summer, but the sound cuts suddenly as his description turns bleak with its links to violence, sex, and death. He then introduces Lynette Dawson as “a devoted wife and mother of two” whose husband had “a schoolgirl lover.” Both podcasts open in present tense narration, despite their investigations of cases from the 1980s. The present tense introductions invite listeners to place themselves in the scenes and apply a sense of urgency that may otherwise be missing from the cold cases.

The podcast medium allows true crime listeners to be told a story persuasively. The recorded voices of the journalists places them in the role of private investigators who chronicle evidence on their tape-recorder. As Ian Marsh and Gaynor Melville (2009: 131) note, the police detective and the journalist have similar roles. In the podcasts, the narrators take the place of the lawyer, as well as the investigator. With no accompanying visuals, they vocally persuade listeners to perceive the cold cases in certain ways. Their journalistic objectivity is not evident in the genre, which follows a creative non-fiction imperative to tell a good story, albeit a true one. As Elizabeth Yardley, David Wilson, and Morag Kennedy (2017) found in their evaluation of how audiences reacted to Serial, “As infotainment, slippage between the factual and the fictional was somewhat inevitable and it soon became clear through an observation of newer media spaces that many were consuming Serial as a crime drama” (474). As creative non-fiction stories, the podcasts are about real events and people, but use the style and techniques common in fiction storytelling to heighten the drama. The narrators’ use of these fiction techniques increases the slippage between the factual elements of the podcasts and their entertainment value. Indeed, Jenny Valentish discovered about her interview with Rachael Brown: “On the phone, Brown’s voice sounds markedly different to her narration of Trace. She had experimented with tones and settled on speaking softly, close to the mic; it’s the voice she uses to read bedtime stories to her nephew” (Valentish, 2018). This narrative voice is used to persuade in a different way to a journalistic voice that listeners might associate with objectivity and fact. It is used to persuade someone to an ideological belief, much as a lawyer uses his or her rhetorical skill to persuade jurors to acquit or convict. In these two cases, listeners are clearly being asked to convict, most explicitly in The Teacher’s Pet.

Audio podcasts like Trace and The Teacher’s Pet rely on sound rather than image to tell their stories, building imagery through creative non-fiction techniques such as scene setting, style, dialogue, and characterisation. Photographs are important to true crime paperbacks, showing grisly scenes to heighten emotion and reality (Browder, 2006: 930). Much the same has been found in relation to media stories about women’s deaths in Australia. In podcasts, the visual element is transformed into an audio effect, although the bodies of the murder victims are not described in lurid detail. As Valentish writes about Trace, “It’s a testament to Brown’s sense of duty of care that Maria James is portrayed as a human being rather than a murder victim. Public appetite for true-crime stories about dead women hasn’t waned since True Detective magazine launched in 1924, but Brown bristles at the notion that Trace could be seen as entertainment” (Valentish, 2018). On the other hand, podcast creator Madeleine Baran claims that podcasts create “a unique intimacy with listeners” (Stahl, 2017) in a more conversational way than a video recording, and they ask listeners to use their imaginations to conjure up images, which can be more frightening and “visceral” than true crime on screen. For example, without a body to describe in The Teacher’s Pet, Thomas’s opening scene of cicadas emerging from the ground around Lynette Dawson’s former home in Bayview is used to evoke the image of a body buried beneath the surface.

A convention of the crime fiction genre that is seen to have particular importance is the structure that promises to bring order out of chaos; that is, the violent crime that begins an investigation leads to a resolution, with the criminal being discovered and sent to their punishment (Franks, 2014: 122; Zunshine, 2006: 122). Browder (2006: 938) argues that this drive toward punishment is replicated in the true crime genre; however, contemporary true crime podcasts do not follow this convention of resolution in the same way. The very nature of these texts is to re-examine cold cases that provide no resolution, within the formal justice system or through the informal justice of podcasting. The podcasts are an unfinished artifact: “not a polished, off-the-shelf media product but a continuing process, perpetually in construction—very much characteristic of contemporary trends in media culture” (Yardleyet al., 2017: 469). These new open-ended structures are potentially more addictive for listeners, even though they do not provide the court’s promise of closure through prosecution. Despite the scholarship arguing that true crime reinstates criminal justice order at the conclusion, Elizabeth Yardley et al. (2019) find that podcasts are “neither celebratory of the criminal justice system nor conclusive” (511). As Bruzzi suggests, “part of this genre’s dynamism is that it remains resistant to closure, seeking instead to keep its cases alive and open” (2016: 278). This open-ended nature of the podcasts along with the sense of urgency described above invites listeners to make judgments about the cold cases as a jury would. As these podcasts are narrated by journalists and published by major news organisations, the impetus for these longer works would be for readers to continue communicating about them, and to build interest and downloads. For podcasts such as The Teacher’s Pet, which is published by The Australian, a commercial news publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, open-endedness ultimately generates more money for the organisations. The Teacher’s Pet organises pre-roll advertising through Whooshkaa, and Australian listeners hear advertisements for furniture store Harvey Norman, while US audiences are advertised Audible subscriptions (Scott, n.d).

Despite any financial boon, the podcasts privilege victim’s stories, whereas formal justice through investigations and trials in Australia have often proved ineffectual when it comes to violent crimes against women and children. For example, according to Clare McGlynn and Nicole Westmarland, in sexual assault cases a conviction is equated with justice and “the person defining justice is rarely (if ever) the victim-survivor of the harm or abuse” (2019: 180-181). This notion of justice is rarely achieved in Australia. Domestic violence responses in Australian law have been limited and slow to change (Easteal et al., 2018: 204). Further, there is ample evidence that female voices are lost in trials about their victimisation, such as rape trials (Cotterill, 2003: 140; Matoesian, 1993; Quilter, 2016: 231; Russell, 2016: 273), perhaps more so than through informal justice in podcasts. There is a “justice gap” between the prevalence of sexual violence, and the relatively meagre criminal justice response’ (Russell, 2016: 276). Scholars such as Bianca Fileborn (2017: 1483-1484) and Anastasia Powell have argued that women are faced with low conviction rates for offenders and possible re-traumatization through Australian criminal justice, and that perhaps “a more victim-centred approach is needed in conceptualizations of justice including restorative justice approaches and, perhaps radically, forms of community or informal justice outside of the state” (Powell 2015: 573 original emphasis). Fileborn (2017: 1484-5) describes the typology of justice needs of female victim/survivors as encompassing real participation, an active voice, vindication for their victimization, and an outcome of accountability from the offender.

Podcasts have begun to emerge as a media format for true crime that can potentially provide disenfranchised victims of crime with these outcomes. If the justice gap prevents women or victims of childhood sexual abuse from finding an acceptable outcome for crime against them, they may find alternative counter-publics to seek their own justice (Powell, 2015: 577, 581; Salter, 2013: 229; Vitis and Gilmour, 2017: 339). One such counter-public space is the Internet, which can act as a “counter-cultural public sphere . . . where victim/survivors’ justice needs can to some extent be met” (Fileborn, 2017: 1483). These online spaces allow communication to be multidirectional, rather than solely replicating the one-to-one direction of many old media technologies, which have ‘been criticised for perpetuating the “monopoly of speech” enjoyed by social elites at the expense of genuine democratic deliberation’ (Salter 2013: 226). Further, Browder’s surveys of female readers of true crime discovered that many read the genre in order to “cope” with their experiences of male violence, past and future (Browder, 2006: 928). It has been argued that true crime podcasts such as The Teacher’s Pet “have become a way of giving justice to the voiceless” (Cockburn and Sas, 2018)” (Valentish, 2018) in order to give a voice to the overlooked female victims and to adults who were abused as children. The Teacher’s Pet, in particular, has a strong Reddit community that are continuing to follow Dawson’s court trial now that the podcast has been removed from public consumption (The Teacher’s Pet Podcast, 2018). Both podcasts were the subject of countless newspaper articles as well, perhaps because of their publication through two news outlets, the ABC and The Australian. By jurifying the listeners and encouraging the proliferation of online ecosystems of conjecture and research, as well as inviting feedback that can change the direction of the podcast investigation, the narrators are providing a mass media version of these women-centred counter-publics. They invite listeners to look back at the historical justice gap from the 1980s and rectify it informally, socially, and through online ecosystems.

The imperative for audiences to involve themselves as makeshift jury members relies on them caring about the victims. This is often achieved through the podcasts appealing to listeners’ emotions, particularly fear. In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed analyses how fear, among other emotions, can align writers and audiences through their responses. In this way, her book explains the outcomes that podcasts may attempt to achieve as informal justice. Audiences are not physically connected to another’s pain through literature, leading Ahmed to ask, “Because we don’t inhabit her body, does that mean that her pain has nothing to do with us?“ (2014: 29). Ahmed finds that literature can connect audiences to another’s pain through the narration’s evocation of the emotion of fear. She writes that fear works particularly on women’s bodies; by inducing fear of future violence, women shrink into their bodies and into domestic, private spaces (70). However, this physical response to the emotion of fear can align audiences with victims of violence in stories, as, “the language of fear involves the intensification of threats, which works to create a distinction between those who are “under threat” and those who threaten. Fear is an effect of this process rather than its origin . . . Through the generation of “the threat”, fear works to align bodies with and against others“ (72).

Having a connection to podcast audiences could also be important to victim-survivors in feeling a sense of justice has been achieved. In their conception of “kaleidoscopic justice, ” McGlynn and Westmarland argue that “connectedness” is important. Their definition of kaleidoscopic justice is “justice as a constantly shifting pattern, justice constantly refracted through new experiences or understandings, an ever-evolving, lived experience” (2019: 180). Like informal justice through podcasts, it should be adapted to suit the specific needs of victim-survivors and secondary victims. To respond to victim-survivors in a way that enhances their feelings that justice has been served, audiences will connect emotionally to the stories and treat the victim-survivors as members of their community who have been wronged. McGlynn and Westmarland define connectedness as, “justice beyond individual interactions or perpetrator consequences. It is about society’s material expression of empathy, support and dignity, with the aim of enabling a victim-survivor to regain a sense of belonging and connection with society and feel a sense of justice” (194). It is important to victim-survivors because it allows them to tell their story and to have it heard and validated by society, which means that they feel belonging as citizens of that society (195).

This connectedness is further complicated in true crime podcasts by the power imbalance between narrator and victim-survivor. Another element of kaleidoscopic justice is that victim-survivors must have active participation through voice (McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019: 192), which has links to criminology scholar Tanya Serisier’s research on anti-rape politics and the idea of “speaking out.” She writes that feminist discursive activism focuses on the social attitudes and representations of rape rather than only on outcomes in law and policy. The media is particularly important in changing these attitudes, as the person narrating the story of rape shapes its representation (Serisier, 2018: 54). Often, the media treats first-person narrative of survivors as “the raw material of experience” that is then subject to dissemination through other critics and experts (56). In the podcasts examined in this article, the narrators have power over the narratives and the ideas of justice achieved. The informal justice may or may not have occurred from the victim-survivor’s perspective. When informal justice through podcasts is attempted, victim-survivors may also lose power over how audiences respond emotionally. For example, in Serial, “it was ultimately the presenter who spoke the words of the victim. This raised interesting questions . . . as to ownership and control of the emotional narrative, as private tragedy becomes open for public consumption” (Yardley et al., 2019: 514). In cases where the victim has been murdered, such as the mothers of Trace and The Teacher’s Pet, there are often secondary victims such as family members. These victims also risk losing “ownership of their loss” (Yardley et al., 2017: 472). In the two case study podcasts, some secondary victims are also primary victim-survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and play a dual role that problematizes their treatment by narrators.

On the other hand, the podcasts can also lead to changes in formal justice approaches to the cold cases. By positioning the listeners in a similar role to jury members, the podcasts complete a process of jurification (Bruzzi, 2016), but through an informal justice medium that questions how police handled these investigations. And yet, ‘At the same time, these texts may reaffirm community engagement with rhetorical discourse and legal procedure by “jurifying” audiences, who may then go on to serve as jurors in trials. Creators of true crime series thus . . . [legitimize the justice system] by asking audiences to take active “jurified” roles’ (Pâquet, 2018: 85). While the jurified audiences are only acting in a performative role, it may lead to their own online investigations and perhaps more questioning of what “justice” means and how it is experienced by victim-survivors. It becomes clear that justice is not always achieved through formal systems. As former Cromer High School students tell Thomas, “Our expectations [of the police] are really low and they’re going to have to do something impressive to win back the confidence of the people” (Thomas, 2018d). Similarly, Mark James tells Brown that he believes he would not have been told by police about their DNA “bungle-up” in his mother’s murder investigation if not for the attention the podcast had received (Brown, 2017b). The podcasts create an online community of listeners who can use public platforms to create change in the investigations and court trials of these crimes. They potentially allow victim-survivors and secondary victims to feel that informal justice has been served through connectedness, and then the audience members may use informal justice to enact change within the processes of formal justice by pushing for the reopening of closed investigations.

Evidence suggests that the popularity of Trace and The Teacher’s Pet have reinforced the community role in solving crime. Renee Sims, the niece of Lynette Dawson, has claimed that she pushed her parents to allow Thomas to produce The Teacher’s Pet because the case was not getting enough “oxygen” with the police (Cockburn and Sas, 2018). Thomas’s claims of widespread sexual abuse of teenagers in three high schools in Sydney’s northern beaches—Cromer, Forest and Beacon Hill—while Chris Dawson was a teacher there led police to establish Strike Force Southwood (McKibbin, 2018). The podcasts could also potentially encourage other victims to come forward. Further, anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers have almost doubled in recent years, thanks to the popularity of true crime podcasts in Australia. The Queensland general manager of Crime Stoppers specifically mentions podcasts such as The Teacher’s Pet and Trace as the reason for the surge in tips (McCosker, 2018).

Podcasts are increasingly being viewed as a platform to aid police in solving cold cases. Brown has stated that she is investigating another cold case for the next season of Trace, and that she wants to work in tandem with police by providing them access to “community grapevines” (Valentish, 2018). Ron Iddles, the former Detective on the Maria James case, agrees that podcasting could be a way to solve cold cases (Brown, 2018b). In the final episode of the podcast, Brown explains, “In Australia, podcasts have inspired police to review parts of cases, but they’ve never sparked fresh ones, so for Trace to prompt an official police review and now also a new coronial investigation and inquest is really something quite remarkable” (Brown, 2018a). Mark James is taped stating that the podcast gave his mother and his younger brother “a voice.” Perhaps then, true crime podcasts can give victims a sense of justice, where formal justice through police investigations and courts have turned stale. There thus seems a place for true crime podcasts at the boundary of informal and formal justice processes.

Limitations of true crime podcasts

True crime podcasts are subject to certain limitations. One particular issue to be qualified is how language is used to describe the victims, particularly using The Teacher’s Pet as an example. The more sensationalized and conservative narration of The Teacher’s Pet may be partially due to its audience through The Australian, a newspaper founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1964 that has been criticized for its conservative, right-wing agenda (Muller, 2017; Buckell, 2015), with fewer readers of high news literacy compared to Trace’s publisher, the ABC (Park et al., 2018: 47). The more melodramatic style of The Teacher’s Pet would be aimed at the audiences of The Australian, which may account for many of the differing approaches of the two podcasts. While Lynette Dawson is described by Thomas with respectful language, Chris Dawson’s other victim is not afforded the same respect, linking to my earlier discussion of the differences in power relations between victim-survivors and podcast narrators. Joanne Curtis, a teenage victim of sexual exploitation, was only sixteen when Dawson groomed her and began to have sex with her. Throughout the entirety of the podcast this exploitation is named an “intense relationship” and she is the titular “teacher’s pet.” Gemma McKibbin (2018) points out that Thomas’s language about Joanne Curtis is harmful, incorrect, and “harks back to a pre-Royal Commission culture.” She argues that although sixteen was the legal age of consent at the time, Section 73 of the NSW Crimes Act meant that teachers could be jailed for fourteen years if they had sexual relationships with girls under seventeen years of age, and that, “rather than having an ‘intense sexual relationship,’ Chris Dawson sexually abused Joanne and then continued to exploit her vulnerability by offering a roof over her head in exchange for sex” (ibid). McKibbin’s point about Thomas’s language also raises the issue of polarised and objectified female representation within these true crime podcasts.

The kinds of stories that are given airtime in true crime podcasts are often controlled by the narrators as well. In particular, certain victims are given a higher status than others. There are questions over whether all victims can access informal justice, or if it depends on elements such as their relationship with their attacker, race, and class (Serisier 2018).

According to Yardley et al.,

It has been argued that true crime victimization is dominated by the murders of white middle class women by white men, the cases solved largely by heroes and experts who also happen to be male. This is said to reinforce misogynistic discourses in which all women are in danger and vulnerable to men’s violence but in which men are also their saviours and protectors as the law enforcement heroes who crack the cases. (2019: 507)

On the other hand, they found in their own evaluation of contemporary true crime podcasts that there was an acknowledgment of male vulnerability to violence, which “challenged the conceptualization of the popular criminology of true crime as misogynistic and patriarchal” (Yardley et al., 2019: 510-11). Some contemporary true crime podcasts also focus on the murder of and failed justice for indigenous victims, such as Missing and Murdered (Walker, 2016–2019) in the USA or Bowraville (Box, 2018) in Australia.

If one woman is positioned as the victim because of her characterisation as innocent, another might be vilified because she does not meet the criteria of innocence, which in The Teacher’s Pet is a sexual relationship within the confines of marriage, motherhood and middle-class whiteness. In Thomas’s description of Lynette Dawson in the opening episode of The Teacher’s Pet, he says, “Lyn was a nurse who worked part-time at a childcare centre. She was dedicated to her family . . . Her maternal instincts were powerful” (Thomas, 2018a). Soon afterwards he describes the intervention of Joanne Curtis on that family:

As a besotted sixteen-year-old, Joanne was in a secret relationship with her year eleven sports teacher, Mr Dawson, at Cromer High School. Joanne came to know Lyn and her little girls well. Chris introduced his young lover to the family home as the babysitter. His relationship with Joanne was intense and two days after Lyn disappeared, Joanne moved into the house at Gilwinga Drive, Bayview, into Lyn’s bed. Lyn’s two girls would start calling Joanne ‘Mum’ as memories of their own mother faded, and as their father and his former student made plans to be wed. (ibid)

The intervention is described from Joanne’s perspective, giving her a purposeful and influential role; she was in a relationship, she knew Lynette and the girls, and she moved into the family home. The second episode of the podcast describes how Chris Dawson chose Curtis and purposefully groomed her: “Joanne was in year eleven in 1980 and she was singled out by Chris at Cromer High School. He had noticed her in year 10, and he changed class to ensure she would be in his group” (Thomas, 2018b). This description details an abuse of power, grooming of a minor, and a culture of exploitation that could not be called an equal relationship.

Thomas emphasises the binary roles of Joanne and Lynette for narrative purposes, often in hurtful and unethical ways. Later episodes of The Teacher’s Pet incorporate taped interviews between a detective and Curtis in which she says about her later marriage to Dawson: “He urged me to stay in the confines of the property, and not go out and see people, so I didn’t have any associations until our daughter was two and I took her to playgroup, and I found out how other women had marriages. I thought ours was just normal, in that he made all the decisions and I just followed them” (Thomas, 2018c). Much of Curtis’s actions suggest that her youth and naivety were exploited by Dawson; however, Thomas’s narration often suggests that she consented to her treatment or had agency in events happening around her. The issue of consent becomes murky when the teenager was so much younger and more vulnerable than her teacher. By narrating Joanne Curtis’s story for her, without her input, Thomas replicates the power imbalances that have plagued victim-survivors in the formal justice system.

Thomas relies on stereotypes about women to heighten the drama of his podcast. Myths around rape associate women who are “closed”—that is, chaste and silenced, and enclosed within the domestic sphere through physical immobility—with a status of innocence, while women who are visible in the public sphere are cast as unchaste and sexually promiscuous. Thus, as Julia Quilter argues:

[T]he ‘chaste’ woman was defined as the wife or daughter who stayed at home or ventured into the public only under the protection of a father/husband. Subsequently, a woman who complained of rape was in a catch 22: by the ‘logic’ of this system, being ‘raped’ meant she was in the ‘public’, so placing herself outside the logic of the ‘chaste’ woman – in turn, putting her allegation on a ‘suspect’ footing. (2016: 256)

Lynette Dawson is often described by her domestic role as wife and mother, and her immobility; she could not drive. These are two of the main reasons Thomas gives for her innocence and probable murder. For these reasons, it is portrayed as unlikely that she would have willingly left her family (as her remains have never been discovered). Curtis’s role as mother to Lynette Dawson’s two daughters following her disappearance is also discussed in great detail throughout the podcast, with Curtis—a teenager trapped in a sexually exploitative relationship with a man twice her age and no support system—cast as a bad mother, a “lover” breaking up the nuclear family home, and therefore a bad woman. Joanne is described early on as an “open” woman, seen by the neighbour topless in the pool at Bayview (Thomas, 2018a), and her evidence in the taped interview demonstrates Dawson’s attempts to confine her into a domestic role.

Further, the inclusion of the taped interviews between Curtis and detectives can be considered potentially damaging to her as a survivor of sexual exploitation. This tension between moral rights of victims and publication rights of authors is often raised as an ethical dilemma of creative non-fiction genres such as true crime. Katherine Biber writes that criminal evidence is strictly controlled during an investigation and subsequent trial; however, once the trial is over and the evidence enters archives, it has a cultural afterlife that is “subject to no rules nor standards” (2013: 1033). Likewise, writing about the publication of distressing photographs following Melbourne woman Jill Meagher’s murder, Kate Rossmanith argues that “With increasing developments in technology, thoughtful reflection by scholars, cultural users, and stakeholders in the justice system concerning access to, and use of, criminal evidence has never been so important” (2014: 111). While it is unclear whether Curtis gave consent for her police interviews to be used by Thomas in his podcast, it is certainly pertinent to note that she refused to be recorded in the podcast and ended a friendship with a woman who spoke to Thomas. Broadcasting the interviews without her consent replicates an abusive relationship, this time through the media institution, and raises ethical questions around the intersection of law and media.

Another limitation of podcasting cold cases was highlighted by concerns about The Teacher’s Pet resulting in a prejudiced jury in Chris Dawson’s trial. Although, beginning in April 2019, the podcast has been made temporarily unavailable for public download following advice from the Office of the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions, it was widely consumed before its removal. Hannah Marshall (2018) points out that much of the evidence Thomas gives against Dawson would not meet the requirements of a court, as it is speculative and prejudicial. Trials where jurors are exposed to prejudicial media may “result in juries being discharged and trials abandoned, or appeals launched and verdicts overturned” (Hews and Suzor, 2017: 1610). While these are important concerns, arguments that Dawson’s trial may be tainted by the podcast ignore that without the podcast, there would likely be no trial. Further, the furore around contemporary true crime cases is not unprecedented nor specific to those disseminated as podcasts, and the criminal justice system has mechanisms in place to handle trials with considerable media attention (Flood, 2009: 433). Further, Kevin Drakulich and Eileen Kirk (2016) raise doubts over whether public opinion is so strongly affected by the media, writing that “simple summaries of public opinion hide the system of forces and tensions and the diverse meanings those opinions may represent among different segments of the public” (172). Journalists can be found guilty of sub judice contempt if the offending material is published while a trial is in court; however, both Trace and The Teacher’s Pet were published and concluded before the coroners reopened the investigations, and The Australian have voluntarily removed The Teacher’s Pet from public consumption while the trial is in process.

Conclusion

Creators, audiences, and victims or their surviving family members can use podcasts to pursue their own ideas of justice, when conventional routes have failed them. Trace and The Teacher’s Pet are important true crime podcasts in the current climate of broadcasting silenced stories of sexual abuse in Australia. The podcast format can aid the broadcasting of victims’ voices. Both podcasts are narrated by investigative journalists who present open-ended cases for jurified listeners. These listeners may find that institutional responses have failed the victims, particularly since studies have shown that true crime audiences are less trusting of the criminal justice system. By giving the victims a jurified audience, both podcasts have also led to the re-opening of investigations, furthering their function as informal justice where institutions have closed the cases unsuccessfully, and at times, negligently. For these reasons, Australian true crime podcasts can function as a particularly compelling medium for women to seek alternative justice. However, there are limitations in the podcast format as a site of alternative justice. In particular, the podcasts are controlled by the narrator and may be subject, like other mass media, to a culture of masculinist bias. There are certain problems with The Teacher’s Pet due to its language use when discussing Joanne Curtis, a minor who was groomed and exploited by her teacher, and in the use of interview material, possibly without her consent. However, these podcasts broadcast stories to large audiences of jurified listeners, who may then breathe new life into the cases and investigations using community grapevines. If the victim-survivors are given opportunities to speak for themselves and feel connected to a community, they may feel a sense of justice has been achieved.

In future, there is a capacity for podcasts to be used by police to aid investigations, providing a bridge between informal and formal modes of justice. Current audiences appear to have an appetite for vindication for those who have been silenced by the courts and the police. The jurified audience judge those who have escaped criminal trials, and socially punish them for their crimes outside of the institutions that sheltered them. They may also aid victim-survivors by helping them feel they have been reconnected with their community. There is a cultural change happening, even if the legal one is only slowly catching up.