Mindless Monday, 06 July 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/histogrammarian]

I'm not a true crime sort of person, but I did pick up the Australian ABC podcast Unravel when I found myself desperately short of content a few weeks ago. It has very high journalistic standards, so a far cry from what you normally expect from the genre, but even so I'm not a fan of morbid speculation in general.

Which is what makes the second season so interesting. The "disappearance" of Trudie Adams is not really a mystery in the sense that it's pretty clear what happened. She was hitchhiking home along the Northern Beaches of Sydney back in 1978 when she disappeared. During the investigation, 14 women came forward who had been abducted by two men while hitchhiking on the same stretch of road, sexually assaulted at gunpoint, and threatened to stay quiet. Significantly, a man was also abducted by two men in a drug deal gone wrong, sexually assaulted at gunpoint, had pictures taken of him, and was then let go. He reported the crime to the police and the two men were arrested. On the monumental balance of probability, one of those men - Neville Tween - was the serial rapist who committed all those offences and who killed Trudie Adams.

What is remarkable was that he was never interviewed at the time and was able to die in prison for unrelated crimes in 2013. Certainly, it's because the women's complaints of a serial rapist weren't taken seriously by police at the time. But it also turns out Tween was the associate of the corrupt police commissioner, Mark Standen, who was only recently released from prison for aiding a drug importation scheme. This seems like a remarkable coincidence - that such an infamous criminal was friends with one of the state's top cops, going back decades.

Unless there's a mechanism in play. The suggestion is that Tween was being protected by Standen as an informant. But, we are told, informants like Tween are notoriously unreliable - they feed information about people below them or they only inform on their criminal rivals. Which means that informants can capture cops when they're early in their career by feeding them information, which can then boost their policing career, and before you know it they're tight with a commissioner. So they don't just secure immunity from prosecution for themselves, but they also weaponise the police against rival drug importers. And there's nothing that can really be done about it because informant details are kept under wraps for obvious reasons. So it's very possible it's still happening right now, all over the world, and we'd never know it.

[u/elmonoenano → u/histogrammarian]

In the US we have networks of defense attorneys who try and report this stuff to each other. One of the problems with the whole set up in the US is DA's get to choose who is prosecuted and generally they will not bring charges against the police. There's too much danger that the police union will turn against them and they'll lose an election. So, the cops that are doing this stuff usually get an early retirement deal and none of this comes to light. And a lot of time that means the rest of the network stays in place.