In June 1970, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe vanished from their quiet farmhouse in Pukekawa, New Zealand. Five days later, their infant daughter was found alive in her cot, weak but still breathing. Weeks later, their bodies surfaced downstream in the Waikato River — bound, weighted, and shot. What followed became one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in New Zealand’s history.

Police arrested neighbour and farmer Arthur Allan Thomas, claiming his rifle had fired the fatal shots. He was convicted twice and spent nine years behind bars before a Royal Commission revealed the truth: key evidence had been fabricated by detectives. Thomas was pardoned, compensated, and freed — but the real killer was never found.

Fifty years later, the Crewe murders remain unsolved. Theories persist about family rifts, mysterious visitors, and hidden hands inside the investigation itself. The evidence that remains — blood, bullets, wire, and silence — tells a story of ambition, corruption, and the fragility of truth.

In this season of The Veil, investigative journalist Ryan Wolf revisits the case that shattered public trust and forced a nation to look at itself. Because behind every official story, behind every file stamped closed, there are darker truths waiting to be seen.

When you pull back the veil, what you find isn’t always evil — sometimes it’s something far more dangerous: ordinary people, making extraordinary mistakes.

While some dramatic license is taken during the retelling of these stories, but you can be sure that these true crime stories are all based 100% on real events and facts.

If you would like to suggest a case, you can message us via our website at www.brevityplus.com

Subscribers get ad free listening to The Veil and all of our podcasts. Please consider subscribing to support our work.

This podcast is researched, and written by the Brevity Studios team using AI tools, and is narrated in its entirety by - Ryan Wolf.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the late 1990s, the quiet South Australian town of Snowtown became the unlikely epicentre of Australia’s most infamous serial murder case. Behind the doors of an abandoned bank, police uncovered six plastic barrels. Inside were the acid-preserved remains of eight people — men and women who had been strangled, tortured, mocked, and discarded by John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and their small circle of accomplices.

Over seven years, twelve lives were taken. Victims included neighbours, friends, even family. Some were killed for their sexuality, some for their disability, some simply for being inconvenient. At trial, jurors were confronted with not only photographs and forensic evidence, but also tapes — audio recordings of victims being humiliated and begging for mercy while their killers laughed.

The Veil pulls listeners inside the full story: Bunting’s twisted rise from a childhood of cruelty to self-styled leader; the spider’s web chart that mapped out his hatred; the growing group of followers who became entangled in his violence; and the police operation that finally exposed what lay hidden in the barrels.

But Snowtown is more than a catalogue of murders. It is about betrayal, complicity, and the fragility of trust in the most ordinary of places. It is about how prejudice can mask cruelty, and how silence can allow horror to thrive.

Behind every closed door is another veil. In Snowtown, when it was torn open, the truth was almost too grotesque to comprehend.

While some dramatic license is taken during the retelling of these stories, but you can be sure that these true crime stories are all based 100% on real events and facts.

If you would like to suggest a case, you can message us via our website at www.brevityplus.com

Subscribers get ad free listening to The Veil and all of our podcasts. Please consider subscribing to support our work.

This podcast is researched, and written by the Brevity Studios team using AI tools, and is narrated in its entirety by - Ryan Wolf.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Year’s Eve, 1997. Hundreds of revelers pack into Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds, celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of another. But by dawn, two young friends — Ben Smart and Olivia Hope — have vanished. What follows is one of New Zealand’s most infamous and enduring mysteries.

The Veil takes you back to that night and deep into the investigation that gripped a nation. At the centre of it all is Scott Watson, a young yacht owner whose steel-hulled boat, Blade, becomes the focus of police suspicion.

The Crown’s case builds on circumstantial evidence, witness identifications, and forensic claims — most controversially, two strands of blonde hair said to belong to Olivia. Wiretap recordings and the words of jailhouse informants are presented as glimpses of guilt, while Watson’s repainting of his yacht is framed as concealment. But holes appear: no bodies, no weapon, no direct evidence linking Ben and Olivia to Blade. Witnesses describe a mysterious ketch police insist never existed, and questions of contamination, tunnel vision, and confirmation bias cloud the trial.

Decades later, Watson remains behind bars, proclaiming his innocence. Appeals, media investigations, and public doubt have kept the case alive, dividing opinion between those convinced the jury was right and those certain justice miscarried.

This is more than a murder mystery — it’s the story of how memory, science, and suspicion collide, and how the search for truth can become tangled in shadows that may never lift.

While some dramatic license is taken during the retelling of these stories, but you can be sure that these true crime stories are all based 100% on real events and facts.

If you would like to suggest a case, you can message us via our website at www.brevityplus.com

Subscribers get ad free listening to The Veil and all of our podcasts. Please consider subscribing to support our work.

This podcast is researched, and written by the Brevity Studios team using AI tools, and is narrated in its entirety by - Ryan Wolf.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.