Strange Investigations with Charlie Bezzina

February 15, 2026·42 min·3 clips

An elderly woman found dead with no underwear and a towel on her face leads to a bizarre discovery of buried house keys.

The interview starts with method. Charlie talks about crime scenes and postmortems as work that needs routine: photographs, washing, swabs, examination. Those steps keep the investigator from drifting. Michelle gives him space, mostly, and that suits the material. He credits the pathologists and team members who sit behind the lead detective, away from the public face of a case. Then the conversation moves into the street. Charlie worries about what police and communities lose when neighbourhood knowledge becomes too restricted to share. He would rather know who is nearby, even when that knowledge is uncomfortable. A local break-in brings him to the darker point: danger can live next door. The examples are grim. He mentions Denya, a woman disembowelled by a next-door neighbour, and sisters aged thirteen and fifteen who killed a woman next door. Michelle reacts without turning it into theatre. The result is a sober conversation about proximity, sentencing, and whether returning offenders to ordinary streets leaves people guessing. The final case is stranger. Charlie describes a death that looked enough like suicide to close, until tiny choices suggested otherwise. That small detail matters. He says an offender would not usually stage something so minutely, which is why specialist investigators matter. The episode leaves uncertainty where it belongs. Police work here is procedural, instinctive, communal, and dependent on the people behind the lead detective. No tidy comfort, just Charlie's belief that odd details, local knowledge, and specialist experience can change what a death means.

As heard by us

A blunt, investigator-led conversation about strange deaths, close neighbours, and the details that decide a case.

Australian True Crime brings Charlie Bezzina back for a candid run through some of the stranger, less predictable investigations from his years with Victoria Police.

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