07 Mr Big | Through the looking glass

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It's 1999, and on the other side of the world from Melbourne, Tanya Chamberlain is hard at work at her law firm in Vancouver.

She's busy chipping away at a case, preparing for trial, when a videotape is delivered to her office.

We used to have a library and a TV with a VCR, a video recorder for anybody who didn't didn't have videos when they were young.

But yeah, we got a VC, like a videotape from the police, and the entire office went and watched it.

It's a grainy recording of a group of men lounging on couches in a hotel room.

You've got a lot of things hanging over you right now.

There's no doubt about it from what I've found out.

You're going back to jail.

Tanya knows one of the men on this tape.

It's her client, Andy Rose.

Tanya has been working on his case for over a year with her colleagues because Andy has been accused of a double murder.

On the tape, a man with a mullet wearing a vest interrogates Andy.

I need my fucking help for you.

Well, I didn't kill him.

I ain't gonna say I killed him.

You don't need my help.

Just because you're fucking.

The man in the vest seems to be the head of a crime gang.

He pushes and pushes Andy to confess to the murders.

He promises Andy that if he does, he can make his problems with the law go away.

If you're going to see lie to me and you don't want fucking help, then I can't help you.

But if I tell you I didn't do it and you don't believe I didn't do it, what am I supposed to say?

Well, I don't know what you're supposed to say.

But the evidence is all there.

Either you're with us or you're against us.

If we don't help you, no one will.

You can't rely on your lawyers.

And

if you don't tell him everything everything now,

it's going to get so much worse for you.

Tanya watches as Andy just keeps denying it.

Well, I can't say I did it if I didn't do it.

Well, I'm still not going to say I did it because I didn't.

I'm not going to change my mind saying, oh, yeah, I did it.

I will not say I did it.

Finally, after a lot of beers and hours of pressure, Andy confesses.

Well, whatever.

We'll go with I did it, okay?

Whatever, he says.

We'll go with I did it.

Andy had maintained his innocence for years.

Now, his lawyer had watched him confess to murder.

Stunned, utterly stunned, shocked.

Gobsmacked would be a word he'd use, completely unprepared for

that.

The documents delivered to Tanya with the tape explained everything.

Of course, there was no crime ring.

It was all fake.

It was a Mr.

Big sting.

The men in the gang were undercover police.

And the guy playing Mr.

Big was actually one of the inventors of the whole technique.

His name was Al Hazlitt, and Andy had fallen into his trap.

Tanya and the colleague who'd been working with her on the case were flawed.

We were angry because both of us really believed that Andy was innocent.

And so at first, I sort of think the shock turns to anger.

Undercover police had spent months slowly and deliberately drawing him into their circle.

We're in Vancouver, we're preparing for trial, we're doing other things, and we have no idea that Andy's made this new group of friends or work associates.

They'd enticed Andy to commit petty crimes.

They paid him bigger and bigger sums of cash until finally he was summoned to a meeting with the boss.

a Mr.

Big, who said he could make Andy's problems disappear.

We were all quite shocked

at the elaborate nature of the

operation,

how much the police officers looked the part, played the part well, and we were also shocked at the things that Andy admitted to.

It was a defense lawyer's worst nightmare.

Now the trial had just gotten, you know, a hundred times harder.

And on top of all that, she's starting to wonder about something else too.

Why would Andy confess to something he didn't do?

Everyone is presumed innocent in my world, but I have to say, you think to yourself, why would an innocent person say these things?

From small beginnings in British Columbia, Mr.

Bigg grew into a juggernaut.

The technique has been used at least 350 times to put some of the most notorious North American killers in jail.

And it spread to other countries, including New Zealand and Australia.

And eventually, it would be used on Glenweaven.

But critics of Mr Bigg say the technique is risky, because sometimes it can even get a confession from a person who didn't commit the crime.

I'm Alicia Bridges and this is Mr Bigg.

In this episode, the last episode in this season of Unravel.

Could Mr Bigg lock up an innocent person?

To answer that question, we have to start in Canada, where it all began.

Long before Andy Rose was caught up in a murder trial, he was working on a farm in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, near a small industrial town.

Andy was living in Chetwind working at a sod farm with a bunch of individuals and I would describe their life as kind of hardworking, hard-living.

The sod farm grew turf, the type you can put in a garden or a park.

His job was extremely menial and low-paying.

He wasn't a person who was well educated.

He was living in a motel, going out drinking when he had time off work.

One of his neighbors was a woman named Madonna Kelly.

They would have known each other quite well, and they would have worked together and probably

socialized together.

According to Madonna, Andy showed up one night at her trailer.

She said he was drunk, literally howling at a full moon and covered in blood.

And she said he made a terrible confession.

Madonna Kelly said that Andy came to her and told her that he had had something to do with the killing of the two German tourists.

The murder of Andrea Scharp and Berndt Gericke was notorious.

So there were two young people, a couple,

who were traveling through British Columbia in the early 80s, I believe it was 1983, and they were hitchhiking around BC.

And at some point, their bodies were found shot and in a remote campsite outside of Chetwin, British Columbia.

Things like that don't really happen in British Columbia.

British Columbia is a very safe place, and yes, I would say it was very unusual and very frightening for people.

The murders went unsolved for six years until police heard that story from Madonna about Andy being covered in blood one night.

Also, near the site of the murders, a pair of bloodstained jeans had been found, and it turned out they were exactly Andy's size, so he was charged with murder.

The main witness against him was Ms.

Kelly.

It was one of those cases that was

really totally dependent on her confession.

But

the jury found him guilty despite a lot of inconsistencies.

For example,

she said that he this alleged statement occurred during a full moon and that he was sort of howling at the moon.

And the defense lawyers were always able to establish that there wasn't a full moon that night.

Despite the inconsistencies and despite Andy's denials, he was sentenced to life in prison.

And that was just the beginning of an ordeal that would swallow the next decade of Andy's life.

He appealed and he got a second trial, but he was convicted again.

Then, in 1996, While Andy was still in prison, he met his new lawyer, Tanya Chamberlain.

Do you remember your first impressions of him?

He was very hopeless.

He had lost hope.

He,

I think, was always an extremely vulnerable, fragile person.

But it was clear that before he was arrested, he drank to excess at times.

You know,

he was a marginalized person and a person without power.

He couldn't afford a lawyer.

He was funded entirely on our legal aid system.

But then out of nowhere came something that could change the whole case.

A very, very unusual thing happened.

A woman who was living in California

contacted the police in California to say that her husband had confessed to a murder in British Columbia just before his passing.

And

she eventually gave a statement where she said that her husband, who had been living and and working in British Columbia and traveling in the Chetwind area at that time, had picked up two hitchhikers and he'd killed them.

And he allegedly told her this because he was riddled with guilt when he died.

It seemed that another man had confessed to the crime.

With this confession in their back pocket as evidence, Tanya and her husband, who's also a lawyer, worked together on the case.

And they helped Andy secure yet another trial, his third.

While Andy waited to go back to court, he was led out of prison on bail to live in the community.

And on his way out, Tanya gave him some advice.

Keep the peace and be of good behavior and don't talk to anybody about your case.

Don't talk to anybody.

Typically advice that most lawyers give is, don't talk to anybody about your case except for your lawyer.

Andy didn't listen.

Four months later, undercover police posing as gangsters made contact with him.

Of course, it was a Mr.

Big sting.

And ultimately, it led to that fateful moment in the hotel room when Andy said he murdered the two backpackers.

Reluctantly, he tells Mr.

Big, whatever, we'll go with I did it, okay?

Well, whatever.

We'll go with

I did it, okay?

As Tanya watches her client on that videotape, her emotions range from shocked to worried to angry.

I was angry with him for sure.

It's kind of a pointless emotion as a lawyer to stay angry with your client

because it doesn't accomplish anything.

And then

instead, you try to turn that energy into, okay,

what are we going to do about this?

She had to get to work.

She needed to prepare a defense for a man who had admitted to murder.

Tanya had previously decided to retest the bloodstained genes that were found near the crime scene.

She knew that DNA techniques had improved and she wanted to see what these new methods might reveal about whether Andy was there.

I went up to Prince George and brought the genes back down and they were sent to California for testing.

The blood on the genes came from both victims, but there was other DNA on them too.

There was some DNA found on them and it wasn't Andy's DNA.

Andy's third trial was already underway when the DNA results were confirmed by the police.

It seems like like maybe he was never the owner of those bloodstained genes after all.

Andy had done almost 10 years in jail.

He'd been faced with not one, not two, but three trials.

Now, thanks to an advance in DNA technology and that deathbed confession, police finally dropped the charges.

To this day, the question remains, if Andy Rose was innocent, why would he confess?

I called and spoke to Andy a few times, but he wouldn't do an interview.

I did talk to his sister, Anne Collett, and she had pretty strong feelings about why Andy told undercover police he'd committed the murder.

Naturally, he needed money, and boy, did he have money.

And he had more beard than he ever saw in his life, I'd say,

once the undercover cops got a hold of him.

They had him convinced that they could make this go away, but all he had to to do was tell this Mr.

Big

that he did it.

He didn't kill anybody.

He told him that dozens of times.

We told Andy right from day one and the liar told Andy right from day one, do not trust anybody.

Do not talk to anybody.

But Andy did.

Why do you think he did?

Because he wanted it to go away.

And said, even after the case was finally dropped, almost 12 years after he was first charged, Andy's life didn't improve that much.

Three trials and the grand deception of a Mr.

Big Sting had completely destroyed his ability to trust other people.

When it was over, he thought my house was bogged, he thought my cabin was bogged, and he thought everybody was looking at him.

You know, when he go anywhere,

he's a murderer.

I mean,

he went and moved away where nobody knew him, and he went through some rough times.

I don't think we even know half of it.

How I feel about it.

It shouldn't be allowed.

And

that's what ruined my brother's life.

Andy's lawyer, Tanya, feels the same way.

I'm totally opposed to this technique.

I think this is a terrible technique.

I think that the police should be entitled to interview people, but I think there should be rules and people should know

they're speaking to the police.

And I think what people need to realize as well is that

the power of the state is huge when you are charged or suspected of a criminal offense.

They have unlimited resources.

And certainly in Andy Rose's case, when he's a person who has no means, the power of the state was huge.

But in every case, that's the truth.

But the question is, is what about the people like Andy where

they had the wrong person.

He didn't do it.

And

had it not been for the DNA and had it not been for the man who, for whatever reason, decided to confess on his deathbed,

he'd be in jail probably doing life.

I asked Tanya if she thought the technique could lead to a wrongful conviction in Australia.

I would think it would be likely, yes.

I would be worried about it.

Andy's case was not the only time the technique caused controversy in Canada.

In the early 90s, a man named Kyle Unger confessed to murder in a Mr.

Big Sting and spent 14 years in jail, but he was acquitted in 2009 after retesting of evidence found no trace of his DNA.

Later, he sued police and other officials for $14 million and got an undisclosed payout.

He said he'd just made the confession up because he was young, naive and desperate for money.

But Canadian police continued to use Mr Big stings and concern was mounting in the legal community.

My name is Marie Hennan and I am a litigator in Toronto, Canada.

Marie Hennan was one of those lawyers worried about the technique.

When she started working on a Mr Big case, it seemed to her the method was completely different to normal undercover policing.

In the 1998 film The Truman Show, the main character played by Jim Kerry is completely unaware that he's living in a fake world.

The premise is that his whole life is being recorded as part of a bizarre reality TV show.

He's the only one who doesn't realize that a director is controlling everything that happens in his life.

Marie felt uncomfortable that the Canadian police seemed to be doing something similar, creating a fake world around a suspect who was susceptible to lies.

This technique doesn't really work well with everybody.

It works well with a very particular demographic and it's most successful with people who are quite marginalised, who may be mentally compromised, who are impoverished, who are desperate.

It works with the most vulnerable sector of society.

Marie, like a lot of lawyers, felt like the courts hadn't quite caught up with this innovative new technique.

This was a bit of a

lawless area, if you will.

Nobody really knew how to deal with this.

A lot of people had concerns about the technique and there had been a lot of commentary about it, but the Supreme Court hadn't dealt with it head-on.

In 2014, 13 years after Andy Rose's ordeal ended, Marie and her team worked on a Mr Big case that went all the way to the highest court in Canada.

We knew that it was the first time that the Supreme Court was going to wrestle with this issue, and for that reason, it was important.

And they won.

The case set a groundbreaking precedent.

It would change the way Canada dealt with Mr.

Big cases forever.

I think our court

looked at the totality of

this approach and this technique and saw the dangers of it and said, look, we got to be able to analyze this and we got to be able to gatekeep properly.

After this case, the technique would face new hurdles.

Prosecutors would have to prove that a Mr.

Big confession wasn't the result of a vulnerable innocent person caving under pressure or chasing a reward.

And if they couldn't, the confession might not be allowed into the courtroom for the jury to hear.

The Crown had to bear the burden of proof to get it admitted.

But most importantly for me, the court dealt head-on with the real concerns that arise out of confessions obtained through this technique.

Marie says the new guardrails the court imposed are essential, and they haven't stopped the police using the technique.

No one's arguing against a method like this.

What we're arguing for is a critical analysis of it.

The question is not

Should bad people go to jail.

No one's debating that bad people who've committed crimes should go to jail.

Everybody agrees with that, including defense lawyers.

By the time Canada brought in these new guardrails, Glenn Weaven had already been in prison for years.

But Glenn's mum says her son isn't one of those bad people who should be behind bars.

Did you ever think that maybe Glenn did do it?

No, no, no, no.

He would have no reason to.

God, he...

He couldn't hurt a person, he couldn't hurt a female, he couldn't hurt anyone.

When we went rabbiting, I don't think he ever learnt how to dress a rabbit or anything like that.

Although he could fix a fish, he could do all that, but not

something warm.

No.

But I never have asked him if he actually did anything wrong.

Never.

And

we've never spoken about it.

Sometimes I've asked him, who do you think is behind all this?

And he just says, I don't know.

Glenn Weaven says he's an innocent man, tricked into confessing to a murder.

The way he talks about his case, it seems that he thinks he's sort of like an Australian Andy Rose.

But there are differences.

In Andy's confession tape, he denies the crime basically until he's blue in the face, before eventually saying he did it.

In Glenn's confession tape, he doesn't push back as much.

He did give three different stories about what happened, but as the judge pointed out, in every one of those stories, he implicates himself in some way.

Despite all that and the other evidence like the knife, Glenn says he only confessed because he caved under pressure.

I've never hit anyone in my life.

I've never assaulted anyone.

I've never been in a confrontation like that.

I don't like confrontations.

I don't like being pressured.

In all honesty, it didn't happen at all.

I knew that I couldn't keep going on.

So I was just really just telling him anything just to get out.

He said he was vulnerable and felt trapped.

I wasn't working at the time.

I wasn't seeing my daughter.

My whole world was crashed.

It was dead.

I hadn't seen my daughter for many months.

So

it really didn't matter if I went to jail or not.

But even if all this was true, even if Glenn Weaven was vulnerable, even if the inducements to confess were lavish, even if the fear Glenn felt was real, we're not in Canada.

And our courts here in Australia don't have to take all that into account.

At least not to the same extent.

Because when lawyers in Australia tried to challenge Mr.

Bigg in our highest court, they got a very different decision.

It was 17 years ago, I think, that we lost.

It's a long time.

Paul Holdenson still seems a bit haunted by the case.

I met him at his office in central Melbourne.

The walls are lined with law books, and they're not just for show.

He's read them all.

I've been a barrister here in Melbourne for some 35 years.

When Paul first heard about Mr.

Bigstings, he was immediately intrigued.

Whoever it was who dreamt up the Canadian model

has done a very, very good job of

working out a way for police officers to conduct interviews with suspects, not comply with any of the requirements that are ordinarily imposed by the law.

That's why the Canadian model is so very, very clever.

It's truly an ingenious model.

Paul explains to me that in a normal police interview, the cops can't do something like offer cash to a suspect or get them drunk before an interview.

Our law recognises that people in authority, like police officers, have a lot of power over suspects, and so they have to follow strict rules.

Mr Bigg also has a lot of power over a suspect, but Mr.

Bigg doesn't have to follow the same rules.

To Paul, that seems questionable.

It doesn't seem to me to make much difference, and certainly no material difference.

that Mr Bigg was wearing jeans as distinct from a police uniform.

He was a person who was understood by all to be a person who could control the outcome of an investigation and hence whether or not there would ever be a given criminal prosecution.

Sounds to me like what we used to call a person in authority.

In 2007, Paul argued in the High Court that Mr.

Bigg was a person in authority.

and so extra rules should apply to him too.

The court disagreed and Paul's team lost the case.

Our highest court had decided not to impose the kind of guardrails on Mr.

Bigstings that Canada's courts did, and 17 years later, nothing has changed.

The case still seems to weigh on Paul Holdenson today.

As we talk about it, I notice that he's tearing up.

When you

work as hard as you have on a case

and you commit yourself,

You think about it.

All that legal wrangling boils down to one thing.

Australia copied the Mr.

Big Sting from Canada.

But we never copied the new legal guardrails they use to keep it in check.

And Marie Hennan says that's dangerous.

The risk is that you're going to get false confessions, and this technique is particularly, particularly vulnerable to that.

So I think the problem here is what the situation is in Australia is it's a free-for-all.

It's not quite a free-for-all here.

There are some restrictions.

For example, in Australia, undercover police can't simulate violence, which they can do in Canada, to make the target think that's a normal part of gang life.

But even so, Marie says in Australia, there aren't clear enough rules to keep unreliable confessions out of the courtroom.

You can use the Mr.

Big technique, no problem, no issue, do whatever you want.

We won't look at vulnerability, we won't look at the end result, we won't look at how you got there.

We're not even going to be too concerned about reliability, actually, and it's all going to go in.

In Glenn's case, his vulnerability was actually discussed.

Glenn's lawyers pointed to it and tried to get the confession thrown out, but they failed.

The judge allowed the jury to hear the confession.

And as you know, the jury found him guilty.

Then, Glenn's lawyers appealed.

Again, they argued that Glenn was vulnerable and that his confession was unreliable.

They even tried pointing to those new rules in Canada.

The judge said, As interesting as the Canadian rules are, they're not the law in Australia.

And he rejected the appeal.

The secrecy around Mr Big Sting means that Australians don't really even know how much we're spending on them.

But for the first time, we can reveal what it costs to run a Mr Big Sting.

And it's not cheap.

Our team sent freedom of information requests to every state and territory in Australia.

Most were rejected.

But we did find out about a sting in the Northern Territory that cost over $430,000 and one in Tasmania that cost almost $240,000.

So that's just two cases.

Those figures don't even seem to include salaries, but it gives you a sense of the money involved and that it's not unusual for a sting to cost up to half a million dollars.

I wanted to find out as much as I could about the MrBig method.

So I also wanted to talk to Mr Big, or to be more precise, I wanted to talk to someone who'd played Mr Big.

Our team spoke to some people who'd done the job, but they didn't want to talk publicly.

I even spoke to Al Hazlitt, the guy in Canada who invented the whole technique, the guy who played Mr Big in the Andy Rose case.

He didn't want to do an interview.

We also asked every single police force in Australia for an interview.

Not one said yes.

I tried a lot of police officers too.

None of them would talk to me either.

Except Except one.

Hey, Alicia.

Hi, Charlie.

How was your morning?

Yeah, it's been good.

Yeah, I did.

I was on Today this morning.

Charlie Bazzina was an officer in Victoria Police for 38 years, including about 17 years in the homicide squad.

He strongly supports the Mr.

Big technique and says without it, we'd be letting families down.

I go to the family and say, look, I could have used this system, but the court has now ruled that we can't use it anymore.

And without that, we have tried every other lawful method to get a confession or prove a case and the families then carry that with them for the rest of their life and say, well, we know who the person is.

They're gone scot-free only because of the whole constraints that investigators have.

Charlie never worked on a Mr.

Big case, but he worked with officers who did and he saw how it could bring closure for families.

He says it's difficult and painstaking police work.

And the police do it carefully because they know that everything they do will be raked over in the courtroom.

The jury looks at it and says, well, yeah, everything was done fairly.

The confession was made by this person.

And that's what it's judged upon.

That's how a system is scrutinised.

The scrutiny is there, which makes, you know, makes sure it wasn't corrupt, it wasn't illegal.

It's there.

And we've got to use everything in our power, legal power, to give these families answers.

He thinks the justice system already swings too far in favour of the suspect.

You know, you get sick and tired of the poor old victim being whacked between

pillar to post, and I sat with deceased families in the Supreme Court and I say to them, the most important person in this court is the accused person standing in that dock.

When we sent written questions to police forces across Australia, most didn't respond.

Only Victoria and Queensland provided statements.

Victoria Police said they're careful to protect the suspect's human rights.

They also seem to emphasise emphasise the need for continued secrecy around the technique.

They said that while the media has reported on Mr Bigg's stings in the past, further reporting would not be good for any stings they might be doing now or in the future, and the details of how this technique is applied in practice haven't been made public.

The Queensland Police Service, which was responsible for the Daniel Morcombe case, also said the details of Mr Bigg need to stay secret to be effective.

You can read their full statements in the show notes.

Charlie Bazzina agrees with the police services.

He doesn't think that we should even be talking about how the technique works because suspects might hear about it and cotton on.

What's to be gained why judges do not suppress the methodologies beyond me and which they can quite easily.

But don't you think the public has a right to know how the police are using these kinds of techniques, particularly when they have led to wrongful convictions overseas?

Well, I'll throw it up.

Why do the public have a right to know?

Why?

Why have they got a right to know how we go about getting a confession?

For accountability.

Well, we've got the accountability through the whole process of how we present our cases.

The accountability

is to the courts, through the DPP.

It's not just the fact that we as police officers create a case and charge someone and we're not scrutinised at all.

That doesn't happen at all.

We're scrutinised from the very time we charge somebody right through because we know full well any case we put together has got to go to the high court and they can argue the point.

The scrutiny is always there.

But then to go out and get your little soapbox on the corner of Burke and Russell Street and say, this is how we start, this is how we're trapping people and getting confessions, et cetera, et cetera.

Why do they need to know that?

The silence about the Mr.

Big technique in Australia isn't the norm in other places.

I worked in Canada as a journalist for years, and Mr Big stings have been widely reported on and scrutinised in that country.

I even made a podcast about a case where it was used.

The details of how police do it have not stayed a secret, and yet the technique still works.

But when I came back to Australia to live during the pandemic, I was shocked by how little scrutiny there was about the technique here.

Most people didn't even seem to know about it.

It wasn't just me who thought the technique should be open to scrutiny.

Even judges overseeing these cases said we should be able to report on them.

In Glenn Weaven's case, the police asked the judge to slap a ban on reporting the details because they were running another Mr Big operation at the same time.

But the judge was reluctant to grant a suppression order, even for a month.

He said, the media have a right to report on what's happening in the courtroom.

In Canada, the Mr.

Big technique is still used successfully, despite all the reporting on it in that country and despite the new guardrails they've put in place.

Marie says it's still working.

What has happened is that police now know what the parameters are, the prosecution knows, and we now have a lens through which to assess these types of confessions.

But we're doing just fine.

The world has not crumbled and there aren't murderers out on the streets marauding and killing people because we have a principled approach to the admissibility of this type of evidence.

I think members of the police force and the prosecution, the government, have an obligation to the citizens to explain this, to demonstrate that they've thought about these concerns, and to ensure members of the public that it's being used properly.

I think it's important that the public can hear about the potential dangers of this technique, but it's also important to understand the good it can do.

For Mary Cook's family, the Mr.

Big technique brought them justice.

I didn't think it was wrong for what the cops did.

I think they did their job to

put someone dangerous away

so that he couldn't do it to another person.

This is Kayla Cook, Mary's eldest daughter.

She was 17 years old when Mary was murdered.

We didn't speak for long, but she agreed to let me record this interview so she could make sure people knew that she thinks police did exactly the right thing.

So

I don't think they did it wrong.

They had to get answers.

And they wanted my mum to be at peace and they said that.

They did all this

so she was at peace.

Kayla says no amount of jail time would ever be enough to punish Glenn.

He destroyed my life.

My kids don't have a grandmother.

Yeah, it's taken

literally everything away from me.

What did you think when you heard how many years Glenn had got?

He deserves more than that.

He deserves not to come out.

He deserves to rot.

He lies and out of his teeth.

He just, yeah, it's just,

I reckon he should be in there until the day he dies.

We don't have a mum, but he has his parents here.

He has his

like his whole family.

He still has his daughter.

He's got everything still.

I will never ever forget him what he has done.

I will never move past what he's done.

Like, I don't care what anything happens to him.

What he did was disgusting.

Kayla's younger sister, Christine, was just one day off her 14th birthday when her mother was killed.

Just being with her, she was pretty much my best friend.

I was with her a lot of my time.

When I lost her, everything crumbled.

She was very, very quiet.

She was a very shy person.

Once you got to know her, though, you know, she smiled, she had a dance, you know, mucked around, being silly.

What did she dance to?

Mainly her favourite song was Gloria.

That's a good song.

Yeah, dirty dancing, time of my life.

When Glenn was arrested, Christine was shocked.

Detective rang me and told me they've arrested him.

Which was very, very mixed emotion.

Yeah, why was it mixed?

Just because I've known him since I was four.

Yeah, someone that's been in your life for such a long time.

Very long time.

Yeah.

So, you know, it was very

happy, but at the same time, you know, I'm devastated.

And then obviously the angry side kicks in.

Christine says over the years, she's thought about going to the jail to confront him to try to find some closure.

What do you think you would say?

Why'd you do it?

What made, you know,

what made you do that?

She was the nicest person.

She would give you her last $10, even if that meant if she starved like I just don't understand

why take all of that away why not just walk away ultimately like her siblings Christine is glad police use the Mr.

Big technique on Glenn I'm with the police with what they've done I think they had to do what they had to do because he was very um

he didn't have any remorse they had to go to undercover that's what they had to do i honestly think the benefit outweighs the risk.

Not too many people are going to sit there and confess to something that they haven't done.

And I personally think you know he got what he deserved.

I feel you know, he deserves what my mother got, but I can't take justice into my own hands.

I've got kids of my own, and I would not go to jail just you know

to ease myself because I've got them to raise.

Glenn is eligible for parole next year, but if he wanted to try to clear his name or get the conviction overturned, he'd have to have what the law calls fresh or compelling evidence.

That's what Michelle Reuters from the Bridge of Hope Innocence Project has been looking for.

But after countless hours of poring over the case material, her team hasn't seen anything that could get Glenn back in court to fight his conviction.

And I haven't seen any evidence that would prove Glenn's innocence either.

Which brings me back to the tape that started this whole investigation for me.

I want a piece of the pie.

Okay.

And

I can assure you that I wouldn't let you down in any way.

I'm not that type of person.

Okay, so what happened?

What went wrong?

At the end of the day, I suppose I did kill her at the end of the day, and because I paid to give it.

It might sound strange to say this, but when I first heard the tape of Glenweaven confessing to killing Mary Cook, it was not a question of his guilt or innocence that got me so interested in this story.

And it's still not.

My question, the question at the heart of this whole series is this.

Does the way we use this technique in Australia strike the right balance between its risks and its benefits?

Of course, it's important to find answers for families and protect the community from dangerous people responsible for horrific crimes.

The system has to walk a fine line to deliver justice, but it also has to protect the rights of the accused to make sure the system is fair.

That's why police have to read people their rights and make video recordings of their interviews.

so there's a record of what happened and to make sure we don't put the wrong people behind bars.

Are we okay with a technique that bypasses those safeguards, potentially removing some of them completely, if it solves a crime in the end?

What are the risks we are willing to take as Australians to catch a killer?

What are we comfortable with?

Would you be comfortable seeing an innocent person go to jail one day if it meant we could put 10 killers behind bars or 50 killers or 100?

I don't have the answers to those questions, but I think we should all be allowed to make up our own minds.

And as a society, we can't make a judgment about how to strike that balance if we don't know what's going on.

Thanks for listening to Mr Big, the latest season from the ABC's Unraveled True Crime Team.

This is our final episode, but look out for our bonus interview.

My fellow true crime podcast host, Rachel Brown, is going to ask me all her burning questions about this series.

It'll be in your feed soon.

In the meantime, if you want to hear more compelling true crime investigations, go back and listen to earlier award-winning seasons of Unravel.

There's five seasons waiting for you to hear right now.

And keep a lookout for a new season of Unravel coming later in the year.

Rachel Brown is back with a story you won't want to miss.

If you liked this season of Unravel, make sure you follow the Unravel podcast to be the first to get new episodes and leave us a review.

They can actually make a big difference in helping people find us.

This season of Unravel is hosted and reported by me, Alicia Bridges.

We've been making this story on Gadigal Land and Wojak Noongarland.

This story was developed in collaboration with the ABC's investigations team.

Our supervising producer is Yasmin Parry.

Producer and researcher is Ayla Darling.

Theme by Martin Peralta and Ashley Cadell.

Additional music music by Ashley Cadell.

Sound design and additional music by Hamish Camilleri.

Monique Bowley is our manager of podcasts and our executive producer is Kim Roxbrough.

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