Last Drinks

May 9, 2018·30 min·2 clips

Barry Burke, 76, reveals he is selling Larrimah's pub because he has prostate cancer and 'isn't going to get any better'—the real reason the town's final gathering place is closing.

A tenth disappears. The episode opens with brutal town math: twelve residents, ten permanent, and Paddy Moriarty's absence cutting Larrimah by that old meaning of decimation. One man is gone, and somehow the whole place feels thinner. From there, the story drifts away from the case itself and into the fragile everyday machinery around it: the pub, the tea house, and the few remaining reasons anyone stops at all. The fuel station is already gone. After it burned down in 2008, Larrimah became easier to pass through than visit, because without fuel there is almost no practical reason to pull over. That leaves the Pink Panther and Fran's Tea House doing a lot of work. Barry's pub is not just beer and rooms. It is tourist traffic, casual encounters, gossip, and one of the last bits of public life in a place running short on people. If it shuts, the town does not just lose a business. It loses a doorway. The hosts make that feel both funny and bleak: fewer visitors, fewer stops, and the outback waiting patiently around the edges. The sale still carries a little hope. In a town full of grudges, almost everyone can agree that new blood would help, and even Fran can imagine crossing over for a gin and squash. The pitch is bone-dry: a half-million dollars for an old pub, three crocodiles, hundreds of birds, wallabies, snakes, squirrel gliders, sunny heritage charm, and a market so niche it sounds like a dare. It lands because the list is absurdly specific, but the worry underneath is plain. Would anyone choose this life badly enough to buy it? Paddy's case stays open. The closing appeal returns to December 16, 2017, asking travelers or anyone with information about his life or disappearance to contact Crimestoppers. No neat answer arrives. Just a town trying to hold on a little longer, while the disappearance that shrank it still sits at the edge of every plan.

As heard by us

A missing-person story that tracks a town's decline through a burned fuel station, a pub for sale, and the space between certainty and loss.

The piece works best when it stays close to the missing-person case and lets the town do the talking. The pull is not in procedural momentum so much as in the way certainty drains away, then momentum, then a community's sense of itself.

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Why you'd press play

You want a true crime story where a pub sale feels like the town's last chance in outback Laramar.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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