True Crime

On the evening of 14 November 1984, the body of young mother and housewife Jennifer Tanner was found by her husband Laurie slumped on a sofa in their farmhouse at Bonnie Doon, a tiny hamlet near Mansfield, in Victoria’s high country. It looked as if she had shot herself: there was a gunshot wound in her forehead and a bolt-action .22 rifle between her legs. One of her hands was partly around the barrel. Uniformed police on the scene declared it a suicide, detectives were not called in, no photographs were taken, no forensic tests were done, the place was cleaned up next day – and that was that.

The Great Mint Swindle was one of the most outrageous frauds in the history of Australian crime. On 22 June 1982, the closely guarded Perth Mint handed over, without a murmur, $650,000 worth of gold bars, which were never to be seen again. Not a shot was fired, not a person threatened. It was all done with three fake building society cheques, which the Mint accepted without question. The mastermind behind the ingenious swindle never showed his face.