Slaycation: True Crimes, Murders, and Twisted Vacations · Kim Davis, Adam "Tex" Davis, Jerry Kolber; True Crime Podcast

Cheating Death in the Australian Bush

·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

Pack food, fuel, water, and a backup plan for your backup plan - because nature does not accept Apple Pay.

The episode opens with the hosts joking, trading riffs, and settling into their familiar loose-table banter before the case takes over. They talk about travel, risk, and the kind of headline nobody wants waiting for them. Then the story moves into a remote campsite area. A man asks for the best campsite, and a witness sends him to Buck's Camp near a station. That detail later makes it seem like someone may have been checking for that exact spot two days before Russell and Carol arrived. On March 20, 2020, an older man in a white Toyota Land Cruiser is seen speeding down the track. In the witness's memory, he seems grumpy and sad, like someone on a mission. He is later identified as Russell Hill from news reports. Later that day, around 4:30 p.m., a drone flies low and loud over the river line and campsites. The witness waves, and the operator appears to tilt the wings in response. Investigators later treat that drone sighting as aerial surveillance during the critical window when everything went wrong. From there, the hosts work through the practical nightmare of the investigation. There are only a few phone towers, and only a few cameras on the road, so reconstructing movement is hard. The campsite is burnt, but there are no bodies, no body parts, and no blood. That absence hangs over everything. The hosts keep circling the question of whether the fire looks accidental or deliberately staged, but the episode leaves that uncertainty in place. They settle into the tension between a scene that might be nothing and a scene that might be a cleanup job that was never fully finished. The conversation stays conversational and messy, but the case logic remains easy enough to follow. They let the witnesses and the physical details do most of the work. The episode keeps its dark humor, but it never loses sight of the missing people at the center of it. As the timeline tightens, the jokes get sharper and the unease gets louder. The result is a story about a remote place, a narrow window of time, and the kind of evidence that only becomes clear after everyone has already gone home. It is not a neat mystery. It is a slow, ugly one.

As heard by us

A campsite mystery with enough banter to keep the tension from going stale.

A remote campsite, a drone overhead, and a burnt scene with no clean explanation give the episode its hook. The hosts keep the investigation moving, and the strongest passages are the ones where the timeline tightens and the unease stays just under the jokes.

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Why you'd press play

You want a bush mystery with a drone, a campsite, and a lot of side-eye.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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