True Crime Conversations · Mamamia Podcasts

He Killed His Entire Family, Then Walked Free To Start Another

·57 min·5 clips

True Crime Conversations opens by laying out the split life of Clifford Bartholomew, later known to a second family as Clifford Palmer. In 1971, he murdered his wife Heather, seven children, his sister-in-law Winnes, and Winnes’s young son at a remote farmhouse 40km south of Adelaide. The show then contrasts that violence with the life he built afterward, where he was seen as a hardworking, gentle, devout man. Bath frames the case around the shock of that contradiction, and around the question of how someone so brutal stayed hidden for so long. The episode treats the massacre as both a historical crime and a family wound that never really closed. It lingers on the second family’s memory of him as Poppy Cliff, a man they believed had lived an ordinary, decent life. That memory is not mocked or brushed aside. Instead, the episode shows how complete the deception was. The narrative then shifts to the investigation itself, including the moment the case reached Bath’s desk and made her suspect there was more to find. She describes being pulled further in after speaking with Nolene, the survivor who was still full of anger, hate, fear, and nightmares tied to her uncle Barty. Bath explains that she felt an obligation to find out whether Clifford was dead, because Nolene deserved the truth. The episode also tells the painful story of how the family learned what had happened, with police arriving and the child being sent into another room while the news unfolded nearby. From there, the conversation broadens into how much easier it is now to search records and connect identities than it was decades ago. The show uses that contrast to underline how hidden a man like Clifford could once remain. It is not a puzzle-box story for its own sake. It is a story about what a murderer can take from a family even after the shootings stop. The episode keeps coming back to the human cost of not knowing. It also asks what it means to live beside a person whose past has been sealed off from everyone around him. The result is a careful reconstruction of murder, reinvention, and delayed truth. It ends with the sense that the crime did not finish in 1971, because its consequences kept moving through the people left behind. The show’s interview-led structure gives room for long answers and emotional memory without losing the timeline. Bath stays grounded in dates, places, and small domestic details that make the story feel lived in rather than abstract. The episode’s power comes from the slow reveal of how many lives one man split apart and how long the lies lasted. It leaves the listener with a stark picture of a killer who was allowed to start over and never really stopped being the center of the story.

As heard by us

A restrained true crime story about a family man whose earlier life hid a massacre.

The piece keeps its strongest idea front and center: a man remembered as a gentle husband, stepfather, and devout family figure also lived through a brutal earlier life that was hidden for years.

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Why you'd press play

Listen if you want a buried-family-secret case about a man who hid a second life and the murder of his first family.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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