Father, Teacher, Child Killer

February 8, 2026·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

Author Michael Madigan suggests Dieter Fennig could be connected to every unsolved child murder in South Australia.

The warning comes first. Accounts of child sexual assault sit at the front of this story, and the episode treats them with weight instead of turning them into spectacle. Dita Fenig denies the Michael Black conviction in a police interview. At the time, he was serving time for the abduction and murder of Michael Black and the abduction and rape of another child. Police suspected there was more. Their questions turned to Louise Bell, a 10-year-old whose disappearance and murder would later become part of Fenig's convictions. Michael Madigan brings the long view. His book, Father, Teacher, Child Killer, follows the crimes, the investigations, and the possible links to other notorious and unsolved crimes against children. The host keeps the frame steady. The horror is there, but the sharper point is how a system can wound a family twice. Prisoner evidence becomes the hinge. Madigan describes a conviction built on statements from people whose reliability was always in question. Then one witness confessed he lied. A detective met him at the Adelaide markets, and the case against the wrongly convicted man began to fall apart on appeal. It was a terrible reversal. The community had believed there was some kind of answer, though the hosts avoid calling it closure. The Bell family were sent back to the beginning. Police were shaken too, with one officer still shaking his head last year. The case keeps widening. Madigan and the host move from the failed conviction to Fenig, to Louise Bell's January 1983 disappearance, and then to Michael Black in January 1989. The ending is plain and careful. It rests on the hard responsibility of knowing who is working with children in ordinary places.

As heard by us

A grim Australian true crime episode about child murder, wrongful conviction, and the damage left by unreliable testimony.

Australian True Crime keeps this brutal South Australian case focused on the damage done twice over: first by the crimes themselves, then by a conviction that did not hold.

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