True Crime with Kimbyr - A Short Walk Home Alone Turned Deadly | The Jill Meagher Case

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

In this Evil Mind's Deep Dive, I walk you through the night of September 21, 2012, when Jill Meagher left a bar in Melbourne's Brunswick and began the short walk home. She was one block from her apartment. She never made it inside. Her case became one of Australia's most heartbreaking and closely followed true crime stories, not because of how complicated it was, but because of how ordinary it began. A night out. A walk home. A person who seemed to want to help. We look past the headlines and into the psychology and the legal system behind what happened — the CCTV footage that became the key to the investigation, the man who appeared out of nowhere, and the detail that horrified the public. ✨ Show Your Support With MERCH! https://darklivity.com/🚧 Binge My Other True Crime Show HERE 🔎 COME FIND ME:❤️‍🔥 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimbyrleigha/📥 Sponsorship Inquiries: [e-mail]📨 Business Inquiries: [e-mail]🚨 This video is for educational purposes & documentary purposes ONLY. All info is gathered ONLINE from multiple sources, and though each case is thoroughly researched, not all info is always 100% valid. Please do your own research. ⭐️ Researching and Writing Assistant: Gemma Harris👩🏻‍🎓 ABOUT ME: I'm Kimbyrleigha; thanks in advance for reading this. I think it's important to know someone's background and education because it helps frame the way they look at situations and why they may have a particular point of view. I hold a bachelor's degree in Psychology and Sociology. I graduated from law school in 2010 and have a Juris Doctor (law degree). I'm also currently in school studying Medicolegal Investigation. COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: I do my best to ensure everything in these videos meet the legal Fair Use Standards. I never intend to violate anyone’s copyright. If you own the rights to something that was unintentionally used in this video and would like it removed, addressed, or licensed for a fee, please reach out to me first, and I will get back to you ASAP [e-mail]

It's late on a Friday night in September of 2012. The bars are full of people out celebrating the end of the work week. The last of the winter cold is still hanging in the air. The minutes are bleeding into the early hours of Saturday morning. A man named Tom Marr is asleep on the couch in his apartment that he shares with his wife, Jill. He'd been out earlier that night and Jill had gone into the city for a co-worker's birthday. Around 1.30 in the morning, Tom wakes up. The apartment is quiet.

and Jill still isn't home. At first, that isn't alarming. Jill is social. She's funny. She's outgoing. The kind of person who doesn't want the night to end. If she wasn't still in the city, then she's probably stopped somewhere closer to home

for one last drink with friends. Tom expects her to walk through the door at any moment. And then he checks his phone. He finds a message that he's slept right through. Jill, hours earlier, asked him to come meet her at a bar down the road. It's too late for that now. So he texts her back and asks, are you okay? He gets nothing.

He sends another text. This time more urgent, he says, answer me. I'm really worried. Two in the morning comes and goes. He calls. He gets her voicemail. He calls again and again and again. Still no answer.

By four o'clock in the morning, Tom is outside in the dark, walking the side streets of his own neighborhood, looking down every alley between his apartment and the board. bars that he thinks Jill could have been at. The crowds from a few hours earlier are long gone. The cafes are no longer open and there's no one out there at all. From this area of town back to their apartment, it's about a 10-minute walk, a walk that Jill had done more times than she could count. But this time, she never made it home. Hi, everyone, welcome back to my channel and if you have never been here before, I am Kimberlylaia. It's nice to finally meet you. I want to ask you a question. Do you ever get down on yourself and feel stuck like you're working really hard,

but you still feel trapped, especially if you're losing money by trying to pay down debt every single month. Well, PDS debt can help. They've been a longtime sponsor on this channel and for today's video as well. They've already helped hundreds of thousands of people caught with the O and get out of debt faster than they would have thought was possible. They've helped some of you, and actually viewers like you, have saved on average 16,600. $7. Those minimum payments you're making, they aren't designed to get you out of debt. They're actually designed to keep you stuck. And PDS debt is the way out. They have customized options that can reduce up to half of what you owe on credit cards, personal loans,

and even your medical bills. And it starts with a free 30 second assessment at PDSdebt.com slash Kimber. I've been talking about PDS debt for years on this channel because I use the same method to get debt free. And for me personally, I was in an emergency situation. Unfortunately, I had to get medical help and I had to get it fast. And it was something I wasn't expecting. So my medical bills piled up. And I didn't know what to do and kept avoiding my bills and they ended up in collections. I knew at that point I needed to get a handle on the situation. And checking your options is fast, free and it will not impact your credit. I was personally able to finally get out of debt. And I'm happy to announce that my family and I are taking our very first,

official vacation next month to London, which I never thought was possible. And I'm telling you from experience, if you are carrying a credit card balance, it's costing you more money every single day that you wait. PDS debt can help you stop juggling multiple payments and move towards one lower monthly payment. There is no minimum credit score required. PDS debt is one of the top-rated companies in the industry with thousands of five-star reviews and an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. PDS Debt uses AI and data to go beyond the numbers and personalized savings solutions for you. Your savings can start the day that you complete, your free 30-second personalized assessment. So get yours today at pdsdestead.com slash Kimber. That's PDSDept.com

slash Kimber. Thanks so much to PDS debt for making this video possible. Before we get into this case for today. I don't usually stop and talk to you about any personal things going on with me, but I do want to let you in on something because I think that's fair since you come here every week. And if there are any delays, I want to be very transparent. My husband and I are going through IVF right now. I just started my injections yesterday. I don't know how I'm going to feel. I've been through this process before. You can get side effects from your medication. So I wanted to let you know now. Thank you, first of all, for caring about me and my family. Secondly, if there are any delays,

Check my community tab. I usually put things there. If you are a member of my channel, you probably already know all the details about what I'm going to be doing. But I just thought I would let you know in case for some reason I'm not feeling well or there is a slight delay.

I try to show up no matter what. So I am recording this for you just in case I'm not feeling well. But now let's get into the case for today. I want to take you back to the early hours of Saturday, September 22nd of 2012. The setting is an up-and-coming suburb of Brunswick in Melbourne, Australia.

It's referred to as a trendy hipster area with an art district feel to at restaurants, pubs, bars, lining the street, in a small downtown area surrounded by apartments and homes. Tom Marr was awake in his apartment that he shared with his wife Jill on Lux Way. It was somewhere around half-past one in the morning at this point, and Jill is not home. And for a while, that did not mean anything because this was Jill, she was social. She would typically go out with her coworkers and friends after a workday. And if the night was going well, she saw no reason to end it early. And Friday nights in Brunswick didn't just end as much as they would kind of just thin out.

There were bars on Sydney Road just about three blocks away. And they were still serving at once. This was close by in her neighborhood. There were friends that she could run into. There's every possibility running through Tom's mind. Maybe she lost track of time. But I told you, her husband had sent her a message. after message and called her nonstop and he got no answer so he just kept waiting.

What changed wasn't just that hour. It was just the silence of it all because Jill always answered her phone. That was something about her and a lot of you might be the same. I know I get very anxious when people in my life don't answer their phone right away. This was 2012. But if she was going to be late, she would tell you. If she decided to stay at a friend's place, she would have called her husband. She would not let him lie awake and night wondering where she was.

She wasn't the type of person to just go quiet. So Tom kept calling. And over the course that night and into the morning, he called his wife's phone so many times. And every single one of those calls went to voicemail. So he did what we all usually do. He's working through the explanations. Maybe she'd fallen asleep on her friend's couch. Maybe her phone was dead.

Maybe she even twisted her ankle on the way home in her high-heel shoes. And I don't know, now she's waiting for a taxi. somewhere. Some of those held up better than others, but none of them explained why no one had heard from her. Around 4 o'clock in the morning, Tom goes out and looks for her. Now, Brunswick at 4 in the morning on a Saturday morning now into the early morning hours, this is not a busy place. The only thing around in this area are, like I said, homes and also these bars that have closed hours earlier. So those crowds are now gone. Nothing is really open anymore. Tom is walking the streets between his apartment the three blocks away to Sydney Road. And the route his wife would have taken. He's looking

down side streets and alleyways as he passed each one. And he didn't find anything. When the morning came, he started calling people. Now Tom, he didn't have a complete picture of who Jill was with that night. She was employed at the office of the national broadcaster, the radio arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation known as ABC. Jill worked as a unit coordinator. She provided administrative support to the on-air radio team and she absolutely loved her job and everyone that she worked with loved her. Tom knew that there was a birthday party in the city that night and he knew that his wife was very close to a colleague named Sky Condon. He didn't have Sky's number so it wasn't an option to just quickly call and check with her. But Tom was out of options. So around 6 o'clock in the morning,

he walked into the local police station to report his wife missing. But before I get any further into what happened next, I want you to know who Jill was because Jill was not just going to become a missing person. She was a 29-year-old woman with a life and a family and hundreds of plans for her future. And I always think that deserves more than a description on a poster. You know me, I like to go deep and really get to know the person that these cases are about. I think that's why you probably watch this channel. Jillian E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. on October 30th of 1982. She was a Halloween baby. She was born in Ireland in the town of Drahunda in Laoth. And Jill, as she was later known, was the oldest child born to her parents,

George and Edith. And around three years later, Jill's younger brother Michael arrived. The McKian family lived in a village on the outskirts of town. And as a child, Jill and her brother enjoyed traveling every summer and spending their vacation with their cousins. And in 1990, when Jill was seven years old, and Michael was just four, The family made a big move. George accepted a job in Perth, the largest city on the west coast of Australia, and the family settled in the suburb of Bull Creek, with Jill attending Bull Creek Primary School. The McCanns were a close family, and such a major relocation only brought them even closer.

From a young age, Jill was outgoing, she was bubbly. She and Michael became very close with the other children in their neighborhood. The children would spend hours playing outside in the cul-de-sac enjoying the warm weather. and Jill was always known as a happy, cute, and fearless little girl who always knew have to go after what she wanted. Jill would boldly compliment one particular neighbor on their front lawn, knowing full well that that neighbor was going to reward her with candy. So you can already kind of tell Jill's personality.

She was very extroverted, and that actually made boys from the neighborhood want to be friends with her and be closer and closer to Jill because they had their little childhood crushes on her and the voice said at one point each one of them had a crush on Jill while she was growing up. But Jill made friends easily with girls as well. And during primary school, Jill met Tanya Hallett, who shared her love for acting and singing. And the two of them performed in different plays together during school and spent many, many hours as friends. One of Jill's favorite things to do was dress up with Tanya, especially since Jill's birthday, as I said, was close to Halloween. My daughter Shiloh was born on October 28th, and we always do a costume party for her birthday,

and it's a lot of fun. So I could picture Jill very similar to this. Her love for dressing up, making people laugh. She actually was known to have a very good personality, and she didn't care about making a fool of herself. She didn't care what others thought of her. So it was no wonder that her favorite song was Make Your Own Kind of Music by Mama Cass. It fit. She had her own way of doing things.

Her mother Edith described her daughter as goofy and clumsy, with the two of them laughing over how Jill regularly would just fall over piles and piles of clothes on her bedroom floor. Sounds typical of a teenager. But that clumsiness would follow Jill into adulthood and later one of her best friends, Ifa, would say that Jill was the only person she knew who would have been proud of slipping on a banana peel. Jill was also creative. She loved fashion, especially shoes. and she had a natural effortless way of styling all of her outfits, which included sequence and sparkles, but her imaginative and artistic side wasn't just all about aesthetics. She loved writing poetry for her friends and storybooks for her cousins back in Ireland,

which were entitled The Adventures of Willie Worm, so she went all out. Jill became an Australian citizen in 1994 while attending high school, and two years later, her family returned to Ireland when Jill was 13. She was sad to be leaving so many of the close friends that she had made. But returning to Ireland meant being even closer, location-wise, to her extended family, whom she missed very much. And Jill made a promise to stay in touch with all of her Australian friends. And after graduating high school in 2000, Jill enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at University College Dublin studying sociology, English, and psychology. And by now, Jill was a striking young woman.

She had dark, long flowing hair, big brown eyes and a really bright pretty smile. But it truly was her big personality that made her stand out. She was one of those people who were shameless, but in the best way, and she was also kind and generous. On Jill's very first day at university, she was outside in the smoking area and she met some fellow students, Julie Cohen and Rebecca Walls. These three young women would become best friends and soon they were inseparable. One of Julie's favorite pictures from when they were at college is of her Jill and Rebecca with Jill captioning the photo if it wasn't for the smoking section. A bad habit, but something good came out of it.

Julie always found Jill to be generous to a fault. If a stranger asked for something like even as small as just a cigarette, Jill would not just give them one, she would give them two and anything else they might need. She was ambitious. She wanted to travel and write and make other people's lives. better. And during her studies, she continued performing in plays, writing poetry and short stories, and she started reading famed Irish writer James Joyce's novel Ulysses, but she hadn't finished yet, but she vowed that someday she would. Jill worked behind the student union bar to help put herself

through college. And by now she was dating someone that she met through a mutual friend back in November of 2001, Tom Marr. He was also a student at UCD and two years older than Jill. Now, their first meeting didn't go very smooth. They couldn't even shake hands because at the time, Jill's hand was bandaged up because she got injured the day before due to her clumsiness. But the couples soon were inseparable. Tom liked David Bowie, Seinfeld, and reading just as much as Jill did, and soon he fell hard, mostly for Jill's adventurous spirit, her impulsiveness, her strength, and what he

called her infectious personality. Jill felt like she had found her person, and she would later joke to friends that falling in love with Tom so young had ruined her plans of having these exotic love affairs in other countries, but deep down, Jill wouldn't have it any other way. After graduating from university, Jill obtained a higher diploma in accounting and finance at Dublin Business School in 2004. After her diligent studying, it was finally time for Jill to have some fun with Tom. So they went traveling the world. They headed to Australia to visit Jill's parents who had returned to live there in 2004. Her dad, George, had taken another job as a financial advisor, and Jill and Tom eventually returned to Ireland, where they lived on the city's south side.

And after seeing everything the world had to offer, Jill wanted to take some time finding her footing career-wise. So she took a retail job at a department store in Dublin. And one day during one of her shifts, Jill was super excited that she got to meet Australian pop music icon Kylie Minogue. I remember the 90s and the 2000s. She was so super popular, so I can just feel that excitement. And she later joked to her friends that she was pleased she finally met someone who's shorter than she was and she was only 5 foot 1. And usually the shortest person in the group of her friends can relate.

If you are a fellow shorty, let me know I'm about 4'11. But if there was one thing Jill liked to be, it was busy. Tom almost couldn't believe that his girlfriend had over 20 jobs in a 17-month period. But that was just part of her desire to experience new things and try everything that she was interested in. While working, Jill completed another degree, this time in PR and event management. And at the same time, Tom was working as a billing administrator for an Irish energy company. when Jill saw a position advertised for an executive operations assistant at the Irish National Broadcaster, she quickly applied and got the job. And that was when she was finally on her way

to achieving her dream of working in media. In 2008, Tom and Jill made it official. They got married on July 28th, had our lady of the Wayside Church in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. It was absolutely breathtaking. 25-year-old Jill looks stunning and her strapped gown with her hair up, a gemstone headband, and a couple loose curls in the front framing her face as she carried a bouquet of red and white roses. She was finally marrying the love of her life, and their happiness was obvious, and there were many wedding pictures taken that day. Jill's friend Anne Gayer and Tom's sister Katrina served as her bridesmaids, and some of Jill's friends traveled from Australia for these celebrations. Jill's vows included the lines,

I promise I'm yours. I promise to always be there for you. I promise to laugh with you until the end. For you have brought me happiness that I could not have imagined. You are my life. Thank you ever so much for taking me as your wife. It had been a perfect day and the perfect start to the couple's life as husband and wife. Jill had been an Australian citizen since she was 11. And even after she moved back to Ireland, Australia never stopped feeling like the right place for her. She had spent six years of her childhood there. She missed the weather, the space, the way people lived, she talked about going back. And after the wedding, two things happened that made that decision for her. The first was that her parents were already living there.

George and Edith had moved back to Perth in 2004. And the second was that not long after Jill and Tom's wedding, George unfortunately got very sick. And Jill wanted to be closer to her family. So in October of 2009, a little over a year, after they got married. Jill and Tom moved to Australia. They didn't move to Perth, though. They moved to Melbourne, which is the complete opposite side of the country, about 2,000 miles away. It's roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Chicago. Jill knew Australia, but she didn't know this part of Australia. In 2012, it was home to about 4 million people, making it the second

largest city in the country. 2011, they were living in an apartment on Luckes, way in Brunswick. Now, Brunswick is where the story happens. So I do want to spend just a minute on it. Brunswick sits about three miles north of downtown Melbourne. Historically, it's a working class and industrial area with factories, warehouses, and some housing. But by the time Jill and Tom had gotten there, it was changing. Students and young couples were moving in because it was so close to the city and it was still affordable. What you got was a neighborhood, but to what I would call personalities at once, the old industrial bones and the newer creative crowd layered on top. Bars and pubs, thrift stores, restaurants, record stores, secondhand bookshops, cafes,

running straight through the middle of it, north to the south, is Sydney Road. Now, Sydney Road is the spine of Brunswick. It's a major route, four lanes of traffic with Route 19 running right through the center with its tram going through. And it's lined end-to-end with shops and restaurants. And on a Friday night, it's busy, it's well lit, it's full of people everywhere, and it's the place to be for fun. Between Brunswick and the western edge of the suburb runs the upfield train line. I hope I'm pronouncing that right, but you have to cross it to get to the residential streets on the other side. Jill's apartment was on that other side. Now, if you're watching, I always map this out. To get home from Sydney Road, she would turn west

on Hope Street, walked down past the alleys, crossed the train line, and there she was. Half a mile, give her a take, and it's about 10 minutes, and she loved it here. She found it was the kind of neighborhood she always wanted to live in. By this point, her husband Tom was picking up DJ work in the city on the weekends. And Jill was going out with friends, going to bars, seeing bands. She kept a diary. She left little notes to herself all over the apartment, to do lists, little drawings, scraps of things that she was thinking about.

Tom would find them in bags and notebooks. She would dance around the apartment or pajamas. She even spilled red wine on the floor doing it one day. She cried at sitcom theme songs. She got a tattoo and then regretted her tattoo and told everyone about it. So this was Jill. She was happy. She was excited about her life and her future.

And then her dream came true. She found the job that she had been waiting for. In January of 2012, Jill started at 774 ABC Radio Melbourne at ABC's South Bank Studios as a unit coordinator. The ABC is Australia's national public broadcaster. The closest American corporation is probably NPR and PBS combined into one organization. Government funded covering the whole country. 774 was the local station. and Jill's job was to keep everything running.

She was the administrative and business point of contact for all the local radio stations across the state of Victoria, which meant she was the person everything was routed through. You had to be really organized, and Jill was really good at her job. Her colleagues talked about how hardworking she was, how patient she was with people. She was always the one who also remembered everything. She would remember everyone's birthday

and organize the cupcakes too. I briefly mentioned she was close to a co-worker named Skye Condon, who, like most of the office, was very impressed by Jill's clothing and a little bit amazed by the size of Jill's shoe collection. But Sky also knew Jill wasn't planning to stop in the position that she was in. Jill told her her dream was to actually write for television. She wanted to write comedy, and the two of them started a little ritual. they would go out for drinks after work on a regular basis.

Jill was 29 years old at the time, and I want to tell you what she was doing in the weeks before she went missing. In August, Jill and Tom flew back to Ireland for a friend's wedding. They stayed with Jill's family. She spent time with her grandmother. She sat with her three closest cousins, and they talked about what life was like in Australia, about the friends that she had made there, about Tom,

and what their plans for the future were. There's a picture from that trip, and it looks like she's having a great time. But sadly, Jill would have to cut her trip to Australia short because on September 1st, her brother Michael called to say their father, George, had a stroke and was currently in the hospital. Jill jumped on a plane, anxious for news of her father's recovery, and she stayed by his bedside for a week. And at some point during that week, she made him promise her something.

She told him he had to hold on. He had to survive because she wanted her future children to have a granddad. She needed him. So she could have someone who would get down on the floor with those kids and run around with them. And George promised. Now, Jill flew back home on the 14th of September and she went back to work. Tom, who had stayed in Ireland, got home two days later. And if you're wondering why he hadn't come back with her, I was too.

And soon you will have additional context. But what is important is that Jill was glad to have her husband there for her. Between their trip, George's sudden illness, it had been a very stressful few weeks. And Jill was looking forward to things settling back down. For her and Tom to just get back into the groove of daily life, doing things like sleeping in on Sundays and having breakfast at 2 p.m., sharing a few drinks in the afternoon and sunshine, and making plans together. Those were the things they love, the simple.

things. And a week later, on Friday the 21st of September, Jill went to work as usual. She was looking forward to one of her colleagues, Courtney Carthio Neal's birthday party that night. Now, Tom is standing with detectives, and Sergeant Steve Bull of Victoria Police was assigned to this case. And his first task was the one that every detective first task is in a situation like this. He interviewed the husband. They need to know everything that Tom knew about his wife's day to catch them up to speed. Tom took him through the day before. He explained that him and Jill were both home that morning, getting ready for work. Jill liked her shower, scolding hot, and Tom said he remembered how pink her skin was when she came out of the bathroom. She was pale, and when she came out of that

shower, he said, it looked like she had been boiled. She had a towel wrapped around her head so tightly, it pulled at the corners of her eyes. Tom lost the apartment at 10 to 8, and as he walked away, he said he could still hear his wife inside singing to herself, and the sound of it getting softer as he walked further down the street. He had a picture with him that day. It was a picture of Jill dressed as a clown for a costume party in full clown makeup, and what he was doing was planning to get it printed and framed as a surprise. Out of all the photographs he had of his wife, that was the one he picked.

I'm not sure what the occasion was, but her 30th birthday was only about a month away. But he explained that that picture represented everything that he loved about Jill. Tom explained that after work, he and a few coworkers went out for a few drinks, and then he returned to the apartment where he fell asleep on the couch. And he missed a text from Jill at 9.47 p.m. She was asking him to meet her at the Brunswick Green. It's a small place with a beer garden, and on a Friday night, it was full of people. The Brunswick Green closes at 1.

and Tom told the detective he woke up around 1.30, and that's also when he said he saw the missed text, but there were no other missed calls or messages from Jill after that. And then the detective did what he was required to do, which was to treat Tom as a possible suspect. When a woman disappears, the overwhelming statistical likelihood is that the man responsible is someone that she knows, a partner, an ex, someone that would have a key to her apartment, so to speak. And that instinct, it isn't being cruel, it isn't being lazy. It's statistics. It tells a story and it's usually the truth.

They look at Tom's phone and they can see that at 1.37 a.m. Tom texted Jill and said, are you okay? Then 10 minutes later, with no response, he sends another message saying, answer me. I'm really worried. Then the call log showed. The Tom called Jill's phone at least 80 times and all of those calls went to voice. smell. And sure, it tracks. If you're worried, if you're a husband looking for your wife, you may panic dial again and again. But it could also be something else, an attempt to maybe

make it appear as though he was looking for his wife. Even his 4 a.m. walk, it's just two hours of calling before he gets up and finally goes out to look for her. So police go through the couple's apartment. They begin their search there. They even bag up items, take them out the front door, with everyone looking and Tom standing there and watching. Then they seized the couple's car for forensic testing. Tom looked like he was in disbelief. But he didn't just stand around. He actually went on Facebook and he located the profile for Sky Condon.

And at 9.51 a.m. He sends her a DM saying, Do you have any idea what happened to Jill last night? She never came home. Sky responded that she didn't know where Jill was. she had last seen her at a bar in the South Bank before Jill had off to that birthday party in the city. What Sky relayed was that just after 5 o'clock,

Jill comes over to her desk and asks if she wants to go out for a drink before Jill had to head into the city for that birthday party. And Sky said yes. They left the office together minutes later. Jill was wearing a black dress with a black coat over it, black pattern tights and flats. But she did have a black purse with her and a tote bag.

And inside, she had to have a black purse with her and a tote bag. And inside, she had a pair of light-colored heels that she was planning to change into later that night. Sky said that the two of them found seats at the Ludlow. And they had a couple of ciders together. And they watched people go past and made comments about what they were wearing. Just typical people watching. And about 20 past eight, Jill left to walk into the city and Sky went on her way. In talking to everyone that Jill was with that night, here is how they retraced her path on the way to that party.

She runs into a friend named Ken near the corner of Swanson Street and Flinders Lane. He was unlocking his bike at the time. They talked for a minute or two. And then he watched her to keep walking up Swanson Street. Around 8 p.m., Jill got to the gallery, and this is on Corrie's Lane in Chinatown. Now, the birthday party that was going on was for a man named Courtney, by the way, because that's usually a girl's name, but in this case, it was a male. Now, he had invited her to a dinner beforehand, but Jill, turned him down and the way she turned him down was to tell him that dinner was for suckers.

She was kidding and just giving him hard time. But she was there now for the birthday party. Now everyone that was there that night said she was in good spirits. She wasn't drunk and she appeared to be herself. At about half past nine, a group of them decided to move to another bar. Jill and three colleagues, Tom Wright, Joel Church and Mark Veer got in a taxi and then they went north, back to Brunswick, to the Brunswick Green on Sydney Road. And while still there at 947, that's when Jill texted her husband, Tom, to say, hey, come Mimi at the pub. Jill also texted her friend, Eiffa, who lived and worked in Brunswick to let her know that she was in her neighborhood. Eva was asleep, too, and she did not get the text message until she woke up the

next morning. Since Jill didn't hear back from either of them, she just stayed where she was. Around midnight, Joel and Mark called in night. So that left Jill and her colleague Tom Wright by themselves in the establishment. And since the Brunswick closed at 1 a.m., the two of them decided to have one more drink and then walk a short way up Sydney Road to a bar called the Bar Etiquette. Now Tom Wright had something to celebrate because him and his wife were expecting their second child. He was a producer at Triple J, which is another ABC station. He and Jill sat. They talked about work. and he noted that Jill told him she wasn't sure about where she was going at the moment in her career, but like I told you that she told Sky, she really wanted to write comedy for TV.

At half past one in the morning, Barr etiquette closed. So Tom Wright tells investigators that Jill said she was going to walk home. I want to show you how far this was. Not far at all. Like I said, half a mile north of Sydney Road, then, left on Hope Street over the train line, and she would be on Luck's Way where her apartment was. Probably a 10-minute walk, a routine that she did all the time. Now, her colleague offered to walk her home, but she said no, that was not necessary.

He also offered to drop her at her apartment in the taxi that he was getting, and she said no to that too. It was a Friday night. There were a ton of people around, and Jill felt safe. Tom said he saw Jill cross the road and head north towards her apartment. that was all Jill's friends and coworkers knew about her night. So that's where these officers are picking up in the investigation. They're walking Jill's route home. And what they found wasn't encouraging. Sure, this area is populated on a Friday night and lots of people come there for drinks and food.

But Hope Street is where Brunswick stops being cafes and little stores and it becomes something else. It's industrial back there. The lighting is bad. Brick walls are covered with graffiti and the people who create it are out there after dark wandering around. There's vacant lots that sit fenced off behind wire and some of the windows have bars on them. Now, it isn't necessarily a dangerous street. It's just a street that nobody's on unless they're going somewhere else. They're just walking through.

Two minutes. That's how far it is. From a street full of people to a place where no one can really see you. and that is where they found something in an alley off the left side of Hope Street, close to Sydney Road. A crime scene examiner collected a pencil that had the ABC logo on it. Something that specific, they thought had to belong to Jill.

It's where she worked. They also found two cigarette butts on the ground nearby and then at the rear where the alley opened into a patch of gravel and grass behind Sydney. road, a section of flattened grass that looked out of place and could be connected to these items they just found that they think are connected to Jill. Something had happened on the ground there that they could tell, but they don't know what. Now meanwhile in Perth, Jill's brother Michael got a hold of the police and he said he actually talked to his sister. She called him around 143 a.m.

And that call lasted about two minutes. He said they talked about their father. who was still recovering from his stroke. But the connection had been really bad, and Jill ended the call. But Michael mentioned one more thing. He said that he heard a male's voice in the background. When the detectives asked him, he said that Jill did not sound frightened. She just sounded sad. He tried to call her back a few minutes later, but she didn't pick up.

And word was moving fast now. Jill's face went up on shop windows and telephone poles along Sydney Road on posters, carrying her husband Tom's number and the number to Detective Bull as well. Her co-workers at ABC set up a Facebook page called Help Us Find Jill Marr. Victoria Police were out in the public, appealing to anyone who could have information that they needed. And on the morning of Monday, September 24th, this investigation was reclassified. It was no longer a missing person's case. They classified it as a homicide.

So what changed? At 6.30 a.m. that morning, someone walking past an alley between Hope Street and Evan Street noticed a woman's purse sitting on the ground. It was black. They looked inside. And that's when they found the photo ID badge on a lanyard. And the name and the face on that badge along to Jill Marr. The police come out. They photograph it. And everything you expect was in that purse except for Jill's phone. But that wasn't what alarmed them. officers had already searched this whole alley. They photographed it.

They could go back and look and see that this purse was not there. On the day that Jill was reported missing, there was no purse there. There was no possibility that they just walked past this purse, which matched the one that Jill had been wearing when she was last seen as it was just sitting out there in the open. I'm showing you it right now. This was not hidden. It was right there.

sitting out in the open place there not dropped not thrown not with all of its contents just scattered around like if you were in a fight or a struggle and it fell it was like it was just set down on the ground so that made them know something someone had taken that purse away from the scene at one point and someone had brought it right back now i'm going to resolve this one for you right now because it does get resolved. And because the answer is pretty sad. A local shopkeeper had found the purse in the alley on Saturday morning. He picked it up and then for reasons that only he knows, he kept the purse. Days go by. And when his daughter saw the coverage of Jill's disappearance and realized what her father was holding on to, she told him, you better call the police immediately.

But he wouldn't. He was afraid that if he walked into a police station holding the purse, of a missing woman, they would think he had done something to her. Now, we hear that a lot. And we usually hear it from the person that was guilty, right? Oh, I didn't call because I thought you would think I was guilty, but then they end up being guilty. So instead of calling, this man took it back to where he found in the proximity it was found, and he put it down on the ground and walked away. I wanted to mention this before we keep moving, but notice it. Because here's a man who had information about what may have happened to, Jill. And he basically did the math on how he would be treated if he came forward.

And he decided the risk wasn't worth it. So hold on to that because we're going to come back to it in a way that you're probably not expecting, but it will be important. At this time on social media, the case was becoming something else entirely. The comment sections were filled with theories. I mean, that kind of happens even today, even though this was years ago. A very large number of people were publicly pointing straight. I guess who? Jill's husband Tom. And for Tom, it was unbearable. His wife was gone. He didn't know where she was, what had happened to her, and there he was reading strangers' comments on the

internet. And he was reading these strangers explaining to one another how he killed his wife. So I'm just going to take this off the table right now because I'm not going to make you sit here and wonder about it. Tom had nothing to do with what has. happened to jail. Police were going to establish that within days completely and beyond any doubt. And I'll tell you how they did that. He wasn't involved. So now that, he was never involved. That week was a living hell for him. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to him while all of these people on the internet are sitting there accusing him of causing it and they hadn't even found his wife. I'm not going to recreate that in this video for the sake of a little tension.

the reason that Tom may have been looked at as suspicious is because it had actually been a very hard year for this couple. It happens. That spring and March, he and Jill had separated. And there were a few reasons for that. He was unhappy at work. She was restless in her own career. She wanted to move into writing. And they were having disagreements about whether they wanted children. At first, Jill wasn't sure she wanted children. They had been arguing more and more. And eventually, they stopped. stopped living together. But within just a few weeks, they were seeing each other once again, casually at first, and then a couple months after that, they had a harder conversation about what they actually wanted and what they wanted was one another. And by June, Tom had moved back

in. By September, they were talking about buying a new house. Jill had told her brother about the rough patch while it was actually happening. She confided in him. But she also told him afterward, that the separation had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to them as a couple. And I told you that as soon as her father got sick, Jill told him to hold on for her because she wanted her children to have a granddad. So Jill's thoughts had changed. Tom willingly gave investigators his phone. He gave them his car. He let them into his home. And he stood there in the hallway while these officers carried him and Jill's belongings out their door and bags. He sat down numerous times, went back through the worst days of his life over and over again,

and the detectives went day by day, line by line, professionally, treating his answers as claims to be tested, and they all held up. His phone had never left Brunswick from the time he got home until the moment he walked out the door at 4 a.m. to look for his wife. There was nothing in the apartment in the car, nothing that showed foul play with Tom involved. So he was eliminated completely. There are going to be much harder questions in this case than who done it. And we're going to get to it. Detectives, meanwhile, had a lot of work to do. They spent Monday walking Sydney Road end to end, building the most tedious and most important list in the entire case, which businesses were open at 1.30 in the morning? And which were closed? And which important. And which important

employees had been finishing their shifts, what buildings had cameras mounted on them, and which one of those cameras had actually been recording? Those are very important questions when you're trying to retrace someone's path. The last question was about to change everything in this case. While the canvas was underway, witnesses started coming forward. And what's striking about all of them is how completely ordinary their accounts were. This person named Dino was driving north on Sydney Road with his 14-year-old son. He noticed a young woman in very high heels that he said look like she was having some trouble walking. He thought about pulling over to offer her a ride.

But his son looks over and goes, no. Because what if the woman took it the wrong way, he said? It would be embarrassing for everyone, so they just drove on. Minutes later, Jill stopped three people that were walking in the other direction towards her. Jill asked if anyone had a cigarette and she didn't know these people, but one of the women named Catherine gave her a cigarette. Jill actually hugged her to say thank you and kept walking. A second woman in that group named Cassandra thought that Jill might have looked a little unsteady on her heels, but nothing beyond that. It didn't look like she was distressed or scared.

Nothing worth a second look, just a friendly stranger going by. Now, I'm giving you those encounters together for a reason because every person who crossed past with Jill and what should have taken a 10-minute walk home on Sydney Road saw exactly what there was to. to see a woman walking home and maybe an impractical pair of shoes that night. And every one of those people were right about what they saw because there was nothing happening. There was no big warning sign that they were missing because nothing was visible yet. Because the thing that was about to happen hadn't even started. And the man it was going to happen through was to every person's eyes on those streets, just another guy walking home or walking around after a night out.

But actually, that's what's horrifying about this case. How ordinary this man was or looked. Then the CCTV footage started coming in. Investigators watched Jill and her co-worker Tom Wright crossed from the Brunswick Green to Bar Etiquette. They watched them come out around 1.30 a.m. and then part ways. And then they watched Jill walk north alone. Past a phone repair shop, past the Brunswick Medical Center, past a fabric store.

People were still standing out front of places like a kebab shop until it was emptied. It looked like any other Friday night in Brunswick. At 1.34 a.m., she passed a chemist warehouse where she stopped those three strangers and asked for a cigarette as they described it. Two minutes later, she went past a pizza place, and detectives watched and noticed the same thing about the way she was moving. She was walking briskly with a purpose. Her head was up. She was looking around, aware of her surroundings. She went past a cake shop, a beauty salon, two art supply stores.

No one stopped her. No one was following her. 30 seconds after she passed a real estate agency, a man in a blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans came into the frame behind her. He was jogging. That could be normal, a night exercise, but it could also appear as though he was trying to close the gap and get closer to Jill. She kept walking past the Brunswick Baptist Church, past the asylum seeker welcome center, and every frame they recovered put her closer to her apartment. In every frame made the whole thing less clear, not more clear.

Now acting detective senior sergeant Dave Butler was now looking at the version of this case that he least one and two. Because privately, Detective Butler had already made a conclusion. He believed that Jill was dead. Now, he did not say that to Tom and he didn't tell her family because there was still a little bit of hope that he could be wrong. And you don't take hope away on just a maybe. So he kept quiet and he kept working. But Butler had also worked out something more urgent than that. If Jill had been taken and she was taken by a stranger and everything on that footage said stranger,

then whoever did this was still out there. and there was no reason to think that he would stop. And this town felt it before anyone told them. Women were closing up shops on Sydney Road and they started leaving in pairs. Male co-workers started walking the female co-workers out to their cars. They were scared. And then on the afternoon of September 25th, the owner of a store on Sydney called Duchess Fashion Boutique called the police.

This woman said that she had footage from her CCTV camera of a woman who looked like Jill. She said the woman was standing right outside her shop just after 1.40 a.m. talking to a man. So Detective Paul Rowe went down to watch this footage. The camera was positioned to record the view out of the shop's front windows, and the view of the street was partially blocked by mannequins in the display. Now, six different people were seen walking by, but at 142 a.m., Jill Maher walks into frame. And so did a blonde man in a blue-hitted sweatshirt. and jeans and white sneakers.

Remember I told you about a man in a blue sweatshirt that jogged up behind her? Well, they stood there together, and they were talking for about a minute. And then the man walked north, and he was out of view. Jill is then seen looking down like she's checking her phone. And then she turned and looked back down Sydney Road the way she had come in the same direction the man had just gone.

That's the footage. That's the piece of video that they had, and it was immediately shared with the public. Here's that press conference now so you can watch what they told everyone. The footage depicts Gillian walking north on Sydney Road at a location not far south of Hope Street. The footage also depicts six other people at varying times in that small time of the footage walking along Sydney Road and we're appealing for anyone that was there on that evening, to contact crime stoppers.

We're interested in talking to anyone that was in the Sydney Road area in the early hours of Saturday morning that may have seen Gillian or indeed anyone that knows who the people in the footage are. We're particularly interested in talking to a man in a blue top

that's depicted in the footage who appears to be talking to Gillian. If anyone knows anything or they think they're going to, They can assist in this investigation. We urge them to contact crime stoppers. So I do want to go over this footage real quick. Now, the man in the blue sweatshirt appears on the right side of frame.

And if you look closely, you can already see that he's talking to Jill. She's stopped. And then she keeps walking as the man appears to continue their conversation. Jill stops right in the front of the store. You can see her high heels, her black jacket, her bag on her arm, phone in her hand. And on the left of the screen, almost out of frame, there's the man in the blue sweatshirt, as Jill looks like she's on her phone. Now, since there is no audio, no one has any idea what they were saying to one another.

This is genuinely one of the most recognizable pieces of CCTV footage in Australian history. And I want to slow all the way down here because there is something in that recording that almost nobody talks about. Detective Rowe watched it again. And on the second pass, that's when he caught it. At 1.39 a.m., the man in the blue hoodie walks north past the Duchess boutique alone. And at 141 a.m., he walks south past the Duchess boutique alone. And at 142 a.m., he's standing next to Jill on the right side of that video.

Three minutes. A pass, a turnaround, and an approach. But I want to be careful with this. because I am not going to tell you what was in that man's head. How could I know? But what I can tell you is what his feet were doing. His feet walked north past her, stopped, reversed, and then came back. And for more than a decade, this footage has been described as the moment a woman ran into a stranger on her way home.

And in the most literal sense, that's true. They were strangers and they did meet. But a chance encounter doesn't have someone turning around in it. Do you see what I'm saying? She didn't just bump into him as he was walking the opposite way. That's not what happened. It's clear. What that camera recorded wasn't the beginning of something.

It was the end of something. It was the last 30 seconds of a decision that had already been made somewhere back down Sydney Road out of frame in the dark. And the only reason we have any of that at all is that this boutique owner in Brunswick happened to point her camera at her own window display. And the police actually did risk a lot by releasing this footage. To put it out there, you raise the odds of someone naming this man or for him walking into a police station himself. But if you put it out there, you also tell him directly that you're looking for him,

which means you're giving him time to run, time to hide or destroy anything he might want to. They ran the calculation, though, and they released the footage that afternoon, along with an appeal for six other people. that were captured walking past between 139 and 143 to please come forward. And remember the driver Dino who almost offered Jill a ride? Well, he saw that footage and he called the police back. He said, I saw that man. I saw that man in the blue hoodie.

He was talking to her. So that's just more confirmation. We have it on video, but it's even better to have an eyewitness. We know that Jill called her brother at 143, and that lasted two minutes to 145, just after that footage ends. So was the man that he heard in the background, that man in the blue sweatshirt? Could be. But still, by Wednesday, September 26, Jill was still missing. There was no crime scene, so investigators had to go with phone data.

Jill's actual phone was missing. but her GPS put it in Brunswick after the call to her brother Michael. And it sat there for nearly three hours. So think about that. We know the phone is in her hand when she's walking down that road. The phone is still in that area for three hours. And then at 4.24 a.m., the phone starts moving, but it's not at a walking speed like it was before.

You can tell the difference. It moves the way a phone moves when it's in a car. it's north along the city-linked hallway. It's pinging at Moreland Road onto the Calder Freeway, out through Sunbury at 5am. And an hour later, it pings in Gisburn. This is 31 miles northwest of the city, out past the suburbs where they stop.

And that's where the phone stops. And it never moves again. Detective Butler understood what he's looking at this point. Somewhere in that stream of vehicles, there was a car that took Jill, and the person who was driving it was in that car as well. And so was Jill's phone. So Detective Jason Wallace and Shane O'Connell were handed one of those tasks that sounded impossible at the time. Every single vehicle that passed north through Moreland Road toll point between 415 and 4.45 a.m. on September 22nd,

they had to run every single registration. They had to research every single owner, pull. every owner's phone records for that night and find out whether anyone else's handset, so their actual device, had taken the same road at the same time as Jill's. It was 286 vehicles to look into. And finally, a white 2003 Holden Astra, a phone belonging to a 41-year-old man had pinged at the same towers at the same times. All the way out of Melbourne at this point, And then just before 7 a.m., that phone comes back into the city to an address in the northern suburb of Coburg. But Jill's phone didn't come back at all.

And the registration was in the name of a man named Adrian Bailey. So Detective Wallace pulls up the driver's license photo, and he said that the hair on the back of his neck stood up. He got the chills. The man he was looking at was the same man from the CCTV footage with Jill. the man in the blue hoodie. And then he pulls up Adrian's file. Adrian Bailey, he's a laborer. He digs holes for pipe work.

And he had $12,500 in unpaid parking and speeding tickets. Not only that, he had a criminal record for violence against women that was long enough and specific enough. The Detective Wallace understood what he was holding before even finished getting through it. was a dangerous person. I'm not going to go ahead and walk you through this entire record yet, partially because at the time, a court was about to make it illegal to publish said record. And the Australian public wouldn't be allowed to know what was in it

for another eight months. But we're going to get there, and I'm going to tell you all of it. But I want you to take one thing from this moment forward. And I want you to try to keep it in the back of your mind for the rest of this episode. Everything Detective Wallace needed to know about Adrian Bailey had been sitting in a government file for wait for it.

22 years. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't sealed. It wasn't lost. It was literally a matter of public legal record held by the state available to the people whose job it is to actually look at it. So the question underneath this case that I told you, you know, there's going to be a bigger question than who done it,

was underneath the manhunt and the footage and the phone time. was why couldn't they find this man's record? Why didn't anyone read it? And why didn't anyone do anything to stop him? At this point, detectives kept his name to themselves. And they just put him under surveillance immediately. By now, the CCTV footage had been seen by millions of people, millions of times. Undercover officers started to watch Adrian Bailey in the early hours of September 22nd.

They learned he was renting what's known as a granny flat. For us, it would be a mother-in-law suite here in the U.S. It was in Coburg. And he shared it with his girlfriend, a radiographer that we're going to refer to as Rachel for privacy reasons. They learned that he was a regular at massage parlors. And from ATM footage taken in the days before Jill's disappearance, they learned that he owned a blue hooded sweatshirt.

But here's what happened. Somehow, some way. and I don't, I mean, it doesn't come as a surprise to me, but wires got crossed between different agencies, and Adrian Bailey was tipped off that he became a suspect in Jill's disappearance. The moment homicide realized the operation was completely blown, the clock started ticking.

They didn't have much to go on at this point. They were going to wait. Jill hadn't been found. There was no real crime scene, no weapon, barely any witnesses and a man who now knows that they are looking for him that could possibly have evidence in his house that he can destroy. So they had to move fast. At 2.30 p.m. that afternoon,

detectives were knocking on his door. And they did arrest him. I want to describe his demeanor pretty carefully because it's the first real look that we get at this guy. He's relaxed. And by every account, by the officers that were right there, he was confident, genuinely confident. He told him, I have no idea why you want to talk to me. And he was more than happy to come down to the police station. When they advised him that a search warrant was being executed on his home and both of his vehicles, he told them to go their hardest. He even volunteered his DNA. He said, do what you need to do. And I want you to think about that. Because most people hear that as behavior of an innocent person, right? Not always, because it's also the behavior of an experienced

criminal. To be calm and willing and just provide everything. Adrian Bailey had been arrested before. He had been interviewed many, many times before police stations. He knew from direct personal experience that refusing a DNA sample doesn't protect you, it just makes you look like you're trying to hide something. Offering it costs nothing, and it buys you the appearance at least of a man that doesn't have anything to hide. This was not, as they say, his first rodeo. This wasn't the first time in the back of a police car and it showed.

So they take him to the St. Kilda Road police complex, where Detective Paul Rowe was already waiting. This was the same officer who had sat at the boutique and watched all that footage before the public did. And Rowe knew in his gut watching it that the man in that blue hoodie talking to Jill had done something to her. He just knew.

Call it experience, call it intuition, he knew. And for days, he was preparing for this exact conversation under the guidance of one of the most experienced homicide detectives in Victoria, who is Detective Sergeant Ron Iddles. Idols listened in by phone from South Australia. He was actually on vacation, but he wants to be involved in this case. Detective Butler and other detectives are watching on a monitor from another room.

Roe sitting down across from Adrian. There's no table between them, nothing to hide behind in either direction. And Adrian Bailey, he's right there. Easily denying everything. Says he has nothing to do with anything, doesn't know anything. about Jill, didn't know what happened to her, Detective Rowe asked him to walk through his Friday night. And he did in detail. He said him and his girlfriend, who were calling Rachel, had gone to an Irish pub in Flemington called The Quiet Man around 7.30 p.m. And his boss had put $1,000 on the bar

for his employees to celebrate the end of their football tipping contest for that year. And around 11 p.m. Adrian said they had gone into the city to a lounge bar on Swanson Street, where he and his girlfriend argued about where they wanted to sit and she walked out on him. When he realized she actually wasn't coming back, he said he left two. And that was around half past 12. That's when he said he went home. And when he got there, he noticed his girlfriend wasn't there either. So he drove back into the city and spent what he said was about 90 minutes looking for her and he couldn't find her.

So he drove home. And then he said something to Detective Rowe that was unprompted. He said he was concerned about women walking alone late at night. This is why he's looking for his girlfriend. He's driving up and down the streets. He's thinking, I got to find her. She's walking all alone. It's not safe.

What Adrian didn't know was at that same moment in a different room, Detective Jennifer Booth was actually interviewing his girlfriend, Rachel. Now, she confirms the first half of the night, the quiet man bar, the lounge, but her version of their argument and what it was about was different. She said it was about Adrian being jealous. and possessive. She was sick of it and she told him she was going to the restroom, but instead she walked out and she got a taxi home. Rachel said that he called her and he texted her repeatedly, but she didn't answer. And when she did get home, she went in and she slept in a different room

of the house so that he wouldn't be able to find her. Her landlady saw her come in alone and Rachel tells this older woman, I'm hiding from my boyfriend. She said he actually didn't even come back until 7 o'clock in the morning. And once he did, they slept in until the afternoon. And then she walked the officers through the rest of their day. They took her car to Flemington to pick up his car. They stopped for kebabs on the way. They rented some movies. And they saw the news about a missing woman in Brunswick. Rachel told Detective Booth her boyfriend gave her some advice. He told her, don't walk home alone after dark. He said it wasn't safe.

And he also told her that the husband was probably responsible for whatever happened to jail. Then Rachel told Detective Booth about the SIM card. Now this was interesting. She said that when she was up that morning of the 27th, she was doing some laundry.

So it was this morning, before she comes in the police station, she's doing a load of Adrian's laundry. And when she pulled his clothes out of the washing machine, there was a broken SIM card sitting at the bottom of the drum. She had no idea where it came from. She's hanging up her boyfriend's close to dry. She puts the card in the laundry basket and she just makes a mental note that she's going to ask him about it

when he gets one from work. Well, she never got that chance because police picked her up first. A call went straight from that interview room to the officers that were still searching Adrian's house. They had already seized a great deal of evidence or potential evidence, the clothes that he wore on Friday night, a shovel, fragments of what looked like a smashed phone, a blue hooded sweatshirt, and now they had something very specific to look for, a damage red and white SIM card, and they found it in the bedroom in one of Adrian's

shirt pockets. So had to have gotten there somehow, meaning he found it at some point and essentially hit it. And as the interview continued, Rachel told Detective Booth something else. The Adrian had been violent with her during the relationship. And the most recent event had just been two weeks before Jill disappeared. She said that he sexually assaulted her and strangled her. She wanted to report it. For some reason, she just couldn't get the courage to do it.

Then Detective Booth put some still shots from the CCTV footage in front of Rachel of Jill and the man in the blue. hoodie. And she audibly gassed. She's like, oh my God, that's him, that's my boyfriend. In the other room, Detective Rowe was being told during a break about the SIM card and how it was found. There was actually an intelligence officer that was working to find out whether it belonged to Jill. They suspected it did. Roe knew exactly how much was riding on that information. And then there was a knock on the door. Roe goes out there and they let him know that it was Jills. So once Roe goes back into that room and he's facing Adrian Bailey,

he's laying everything out piece by piece. He showed him the CCTV footage. But Adrian agreed, okay, I look like the man. I look a lot like him. But it wasn't me. He was showed a photograph of his own vehicle on the freeway at 4.30 in the morning and they're like, explain this. Adrian said he couldn't. The detective then asked Adrian, why was your phone traveling the exact same route at the exact same time as Jill's. And Adrian said he couldn't explain that either. And this is when Adrian changes. Because whatever he expected when he walked into that station hadn't included any of this. He somehow didn't know about toll cameras. He didn't know about the cell phone sites and the data. And he got so angry that a second officer had to come in

just in case there was a physical altercation. So what does that tell you? That's a violent side. If they already know that from his record, we're going to get there. Detective Rowe told him they had a SIM card placed at his house. How do you explain how it got there? And that's when Adrian said something. I don't want to explain that.

Did you catch that? It's different because Detective Rowe caught it. For the entire interview, every answer had been, I can't explain that. I can't, meaning there is no explanation. meaning it's all a coincidence, and I'm as baffled by everything as you are. But now, this one word in the same sentence it changes. It becomes, I don't want to.

I can't means I have nothing. I don't want to means I do have something and I don't want you to know about it. And that is the exact moment on the record when Adrian Bailey stopped denying and started deciding. Roe leaves the room to talk to other detectives, and they want to give Adrian some space to just sit and think. Remember when we watch Jody Arias do this? They just give them all the time in the world to do something weird. Iddles guided the next move they made.

Goes back in, tells him, you already know you took her, and we know it too. And what he tries to do is he tries to give Adrian kind of a way out, that he was driven by an urge that got away from him, kind of sympathizing with him, man to man, trying to give him a version that he might feel comfortable admitting to. He tells him, we just want to understand what led to this. But unfortunately, that tactic did not work with Adrian.

There was just no connection there, no rapport built. And Detective Rowe left the room again to rethink his entire approach. And that's when the interview room buzzer went off. And Adrian wanted Rowe to come back in the room. So he goes back in, Adrian looks at him, he takes a breath, and he said, Don't you want me to tell you? Of course they did. But there was a catch.

Before he said another word, he wanted to see his girlfriend. And what he wanted was to sign his two vehicles into her name. Don't ask me why that was important, but I think it's pretty revealing. He's in the middle of an interrogation for a major crime, and he's starting to possibly confess. And the thing on his mind is that he needs to do some paperwork for his cars. This is not a man that seems overwhelmed by what he has done because he did do it. This is a man that's doing admin work. And obviously the detective's like, no, I'm sorry, we're not going to be going there.

Right now we need to find this woman. And then he finally talked. He said that he first saw Jill on Sydney, rode around 1.30 in the morning and she'd been on her phone. and he thought she looked upset and lost. He said he offered to help her and that she started telling him about her father being unwell and that made me so sad.

But it also showed her vulnerability. He said he never intended to hurt her, but then he said that at some point in his words, she flipped him off, that she rejected his offer to help and that this made him so angry. And then he said this, I don't deal with hurt very well.

I hope I never get out because then no one else has to be hurt because someone hurts me. Sounds a little convoluted, so I kind of want to take that sentence apart. Because it's doing something pretty remarkable and it's doing it fast enough that you might actually miss it. On the surface, it sounds like accountability. It sounds like a man asking to be locked away forever for the safety of other people, but I promise you, some people in the audience of this case heard it exactly that way, but I want you to look at what it actually says. It says that someone hurt him. In that sentence, Adrian, minutes before confessing to killing a woman, he's the injured party,

that the originating harm, the thing that this entire chain of events supposedly flows from, is something that was done to Adrian. The Jill hurt his feelings on a sidewalk of 140 in the morning, and everything after that gets described like it was something he was caught in, rather than something he chose to do. He is not the perpetrator of that sentence. He is the sympathetic figure in that sentence. And notice that even the request to be locked up

is framed as a gift to the public. Even at the very bottom, he's the one making the sacrifice. He kept going. He got there eventually. He's crying. He's telling Detective Rowe that he strangled Jill with his bare hands. And he also said he had been planning to turn himself in, but no one in that building believed that.

Nothing in his behavior over the previous five days supported that he was going to do that. All of this, the appearance of being devastated and overwhelmed. It was a show. It wasn't remorse. It was self-pity. It was a man crying about what was now going to happen to him because he got caught. He admitted that he had raped and killed Jill, then drove her body out of the city and buried it. He admitted to smashing her phone in his own driveway.

And then he offered Detective Rowe one more thing, almost. helpfully. He told him that police should already have his DNA on file. Oh, thanks for that. And what his DNA is connected to is going to be worse than you think. But right now, the most important question was where was Jill? At 10 p.m. the night, nearly eight hours after his arrest, Adrian Bailey gets into a police car and he's leading detectives out of town and they drive northwest out to where the streetlights stop, way outside of the suburbs. And here's the first thing that doesn't fit. He has no connection to this place. None. He hadn't grown up out there. He hadn't worked out there. There was nobody he knew in this location. Adrian Bailey had lived his entire life in and around

Melbourne. In this stretch of country road, 30 miles northwest of the city meant nothing to this man, which is exactly why it took two hours to find Jill. Because they drive up and down those roads in the dark, for hours because he can't remember where he put her. Think about that. Five nights earlier, this man had driven out there with Jill in the trunk of his car, stopped somewhere random, got out, dug, buried her, and drove home. And the next day he's having kebabs with his girlfriend. And now the detectives are out there. Why I'm emphasizing all that is to tell you it meant nothing to him. He driven away from somewhere, not to somewhere, because for him, the only requirement that it had to satisfy was that it was a field with no one around, and it wasn't in

Brunswick. He drove until the house is stopped in a place where no one would find her. It was just a point where he decided, I'd gone far enough. That's it. It's cold. Eventually on Black Hill Road, he said, this is it. And then he refuses to get out of the car. He just directs them from inside the car in the dark, go down there on this country unlit road. And here are these officers trying to locate her body on his instructions while he's pointing from the back of a car.

This is a man who could commit a murder but could not make himself stand next to the result of what he had done. And I just offered that as evident. of self-management. He keeps his own discomfort at arm's length because he doesn't want to be hurt. He doesn't want to be inconvenience by getting out of a car after what he had done. They do find Jill's remains about 13 feet off of a dirt road under a tree. Two trees, actually, in the middle of two trees.

The nearest house was more than 500 yards away. There was nothing out there. And speaking of nothing, this couldn't even be really called a grave. It was shallow, just over a foot deep. And Joel was 5'1 and the hole that he dug, if you even want to call it that, was barely long enough to fit her inside. He even brought a shovel. And that's important because after killing her, he didn't just drive out there. He went home.

He changed his clothes. He got his car, took a shovel with him, which means at some point in those hours he sat down, he thought about what he was going to need. It was calculated. And then he goes and uses that shovel to dig, I don't know, not even a 12-inch grave. Just like, that'll do. It's colder and colder when you break it down like that. That's pretty much how he did everything, just half-ass. Enough forethought to bring the tool, but not enough follow-through and commitment to actually use it properly.

And he didn't even clean up. He left her person in the alley. He took her phone, the single most traceable object that a human can be carrying, the object that would eventually lead the police to his front door, and he brings it home with him. He's a lazy idiot, and that's good because that's how we got caught. He was merely completing a task that he wanted to be done with, and once it fulfilled his purpose, he didn't care anymore.

Her clothing had been thrown on top of her, not put back on her body, not arranged, just discarded along with everything else that he no longer had a use for. Officers returned to Melbourne, and they charged him with Jill's rape and murder. He was facing life imprisonment in 25 years extra. When the news broke of Adrian's arrest

and the discovery of Jill's body, a man named Dale Watkins contacted the police, and he told them that just before 6 o'clock in the morning on September 22nd, he actually picked up someone that resembled Adrian's appearance near the Calder Highway. The man said,

that he was on his way home, he ran out of gas, and Dale actually gave this man a ride to the nearest gas station where he filled up a gas tank. And Gail drove him back to his vehicle. When detectives got the CCTV footage from that gas station, it confirmed the story, and that was Adrian Bailey. Can you imagine he also ran out of gas? Because I just feel like this person is just,

he has a one-track mind in the most evil way. The following day on September 28th, pathologist Dr. Matt Matthew Lynch conducted the autopsy examination. Now I'm going to give you these findings in full because they're a part of this record. They're the truth as hard as they are to hear. Every one of these injuries is something that Adrian did with his hands to a woman who was awake, alive, and fighting him. She had patecule hemorrhaging, those small, ruptured little blood vessels that appear when blood cannot leave your head because your neck is being compressed. There was bruising to the of her skull just behind her ear. And on the left, there was bruising to her left side of her jaw.

And on the inside of her lower lip, there was a laceration caused by blunt force. It's the injury you would get from someone punching you in the mouth. Your soft tissue is going to bleed when your teeth hit against it. There was bruising across the front of her neck, extending on both sides, and the bruises were circular. They were from fingerprints. Her hyoid bone was actually still intact, but she had been. sustained muscular hemorrhaging on all four of her strap muscles in her neck on both sides. This was deep bleeding inside the muscles which actually takes a real sustained pressure to produce. The cartilage of her larynx was fractured on the right side and every bruise on Jill's body

was sustained before she died. Meaning she was conscious. She was struggling. It means those injuries were inflicted on a woman who was aware of what was going on and she was fighting to get away. The cause of death was compression of the nexus strangulation, which is not fast. It's not a flash of a temper. It requires sustained force applied continuously over a period of time by someone who's making a choice to keep their hands there. Every second of that is a second that that person doing it can stop themselves if they wanted to. That's the point I'm trying to make

here. I'm not belaboring it for nothing. He was a man who also worked out, excessively, he was taking steroids and he was well aware how strong he was. Adrian Bailey would eventually give an account his version to a forensic psychologist. And in his version, he put his arms around her to quiet her down, and then she fell and hit her head. How many times have we heard a story like this? In cases that I have done, we've heard, oh, yeah, it was all, you know, it happened so fast, she fell and hit her head. And he said that at that moment, he realized she was severely hurt. hurt. And that's when he decided to hold on to the lower part of her neck. And the way he makes

it sound, I held on to the lower part of her. No, you strangled her for minutes. I'm telling you all this because I want you to hold on to the actual findings in the autopsy. Because when we get his full version, I want you to already know what this doctor found that contradicts it. But as Australians are waking up on Friday, September 28th, they hear all of this at once. A man, charged, a body found a woman who'd been missing for six days now confirmed dead in an empty field outside of town. And the public's reaction to it to Jill's murder was actually unlike anything Victoria had seen in decades. Social media was exploding. The public was outraged. And they not only wanted to expose Jill's killer, accused killer, alleged killer at the time,

but they wanted to seek retribution. Within hours, there were actually calls for the death penalty to be reintroduced because quick side note, this comes up every time a case like this breaks in Australia, there's no death penalty in any Australian jurisdiction. And there hasn't been for a long time. The last person that was executed in Australia was Ronald Ryan and he was put to death by the state of Victoria in 1967. Victoria abolished capital punishment in 1975. But that didn't slow anything down because on Facebook, there were groups appearing with names like publicly hang Adrian Ernest Bailey. One of them had over 7,000 members. You can just see what the outrage was like within a day. And in 24 hours, Jill's name appeared on roughly 12 million

Twitter timelines. And then among all that, there was a smaller and uglier current running the other way, because there were a handful of people, probably more, actually defending this man and blaming Jill, claiming she was drunk. She probably led him on. And then she changed her mind and that made him angry. I'm just thinking, what? First of all, where do people even get this information? Because nothing showed that Jill did anything like that. And for the record, even if she did, let's say she thought he was cute, she led him on in whatever way that is and that means. And then she decides, wait a minute, no, I rather not. That's still no. And it's still murder. So it's still murder. So it It doesn't change anything.

Every person who had been with Jill that night said the same thing. She was in good spirits and she was not heavily intoxicated to a point of being incapacitated. And I'm no expert, but I watch the CCTV footage. And to me, it just shows a woman walking with high-heel shoes on, on a route that she knew, by heart, with a man who eventually kills her, walking past, turning around, and then coming back. She talked to her brother moments before Adrienne attacked her. But notice the accusation. She provoked him.

It's the same structure as a sentence that this man, this killer, gave to Detective Rowe in that interview room. Someone hurt me, and then things escalated. The moment that these defenders reached for an explanation, they reached for his explanation, that something had to have set this man off a man that they don't even know. They didn't even know his history at this point. That's why I always tell people, just wait, just wait.

I know cases break all the time. There's all this information online, but I'm always like, there's going to be more. And Jill's family, they had to read these things while they are burying their loved one. Overwhelmingly, though, the public was actually standing with Tom and Jill's family. It was, of course, a mixture of heartbreak, anger, guilt, because this wasn't supposed to happen in a place like this. It never does, right? It hits close to home. Brunswick were where people were moving. It had the cute cafes and the stores and the murals on the wall and the Friday nights where people got together with their friends smiling and say, I'll see you later. You don't think that someone's going to be killed right there. A woman had been taken off of that street 10 minutes from her front door. And Jill's friend, Eva, she had a balcony that looked over Hope Street and the alley where Jill had been killed. And she had to have. to live above that. And eventually she had to leave this area altogether. And there was one thought

that she could not stop thinking about. If she had just seen Jill's text that night, she would have come out. She said that. I would have come out. But she was sleeping. And she wonders if she would have gone out there with Jill. She would have walked the same way home. Could she have saved Jill's life or would she have become a victim instead? That's a lot to live with, but no one is to blame except the monster who did this. I feel like a broken record. So now we can answer the question how. We know the alley where our purse had been found. I told you it's two minutes off Sydney Road and that nothing can be seen from that street. So no one saw what was going on. No one came forward and said they did or even heard what was going on. But we don't know how Jill ended up there.

Here's what could be built from the physical evidence, though. The timing, Adrian's own admissions, and what they could piece together. As Jill finished her call with her brother and walked north, she was followed by Adrian. And for a moment, they continued to walk side by side together down Sydney Road. Then she turned left onto Hope Street. And somewhere in the first stretch of that road, Adrian overpowered her and forced her in set alley where he raped her. And afterward, Jill was angry. I think you could define it as more than angry. And she told him she was going to the police. And that was when he strangled her with his hands. He left her body right there. He took her phone. He left her purse. And then he got a cab back to his house. He changed his clothes. He got his car.

He found a shovel. And at 422, he drove. back to Brunswick into that alley where Jill was lying in the open, 180 yards from the main road for roughly two and a half hours. Anyone could have walked down Hope Street in that time. Anyone could have decided to take a shortcut. Anyone that was closing their shop? Anyone at all? They didn't. She just laid there. He had no way of knowing whether she'd even been found, but he drove back there, put her in the trunk, and drove her out of the city. But his version of what happened in that alley is very different. I'm going to give you all the details a little later, but I wanted you to know one thing at least.

He said nothing was forced. They were walking on the street together. They were like kind of flirting, talking. And that's when he decided to kiss her and she hit him. And he lost his temper. Yeah. I don't think so. Two days after he killed Jill, Adrian took his car to get new tires on it.

And his mechanic noticed he had a really big gash on the bridge of his nose. Adrian told him he was in a fight over the weekend. And his mechanic joked that he needed to learn how to duck. So here he was laughing when he knew what actually happened. Just brushing it off. More evidence. I witness that he was injured in that attack. jail was 5'1 and 120 pounds and in heels that she could barely walk in that night.

And she still managed to put a mark on that man's face. On September 28th, ABC Radio Melvin's morning host, John Fane went on air and struggled to even get through his message. He spoke about the empty desk in their office that morning and how far the ripples of what had happened to jail were spreading throughout their entire community. At ABC South Bank Studios, the Australian flag and the ABC flag were at half. The broadcaster released a statement calling Jill a much-loved member of the local radio family. She was witty, intelligent, great company, and saying her friends and colleagues would miss her enormously. They also thank the police, and they thank the public for a week of kindness.

And I do want to be very transparent in these videos. There's something here that shaped the size of the story. Jill's case received saturation coverage because, in part, Jill worked in the media. It is what it is. Her colleagues were the people who made the news. ABC had a genuinely difficult job. How do you cover a murder without letting your own staff's grief be at the top of every single bulletin? It was personal. And those stories, they're going to go further when you have a lot of people involved who are running them. But here's what I would also like to say. The reason this case became as big as it was is not the reason it matter.

It matters because Jill was a woman who left a bar with friends and walked home. And that's what millions of women do every single weekend. Every woman in Australia who has ever made a walk like that looked at that CCTV footage and they recognized themselves in it because it's ordinary. It's relatable. And that's what's scary. And that's what makes a story go viral. But with a viral story comes something else, a problem.

because all the hatred that was now aimed at the alleged murderer came on so fast and escalated so quickly that now the investigators were scared that he wasn't going to receive a fair trial. And I'm like, oh, poor him. Not sorry. But this concern isn't about sympathy, by the way. It's actually the opposite. A trial that's going to collapse on a prejudice argument because he's not going to be able to get a fair trial, it can happen. And that means they might not have a trial at all.

So the angriest people on the internet, without meaning to, were actually building this man in appeal. So the chief of police actually had to go on platforms directly, Facebook in particular, and he had to go after them for hosting pages that could jeopardize their proceedings. That's a serious matter. Victoria Police even used their own platform to remind the public of the legal consequences if they started to keep this hatred going online. And because Australia's defamation laws are dramatically stricter than what we have here in the U.S.,

there was a real prospect of Adrian Bailey actually taking legal action. Facebook refused to even remove these pages, which I'm not surprised about, which is how it came to be that eight days after his wife was murdered, Tom, Tom himself, had to stand up in public and beg people to stop helping he was humbled by the support of the Australian public but at the same time all these people that were putting all these messages out there he was saying please be mindful of your negative comments because right now this might hurt the case so this poor grieving husband had to resort to doing crowd control because he wanted justice for jail i'm briefly going to mention this because i think

it relates a lot to what happens nowadays there was this poor guy named Andrew Bailey had nothing to do with Adrian Bailey, had nothing to do with Jill's murder. And he was also getting death threats and harassing phone calls from everywhere, even across the country, because people thought he was Adrian Bailey. They were stopping at his own house. He was docs and everything. And this same thing happens in social media right now. Innocent people get caught up and get terrorized just because of a similar last name. But alongside all of that noise, something else was happening on Sydney Road. On the night of September 28th, a week after Joe was killed, more than 100 people gathered

outside the Brunswick Baptist Church for a candlelight vigil. Flowers had been accumulating there all week long. The outside of the windows of the Duchess boutique had candles and bouquets and cards and even small Irish flags. And on the other side of the world in Ireland, thousands of people came to a memorial for Jill at her old school. And then there was this photographer, Philip Warner, who decided he needed to do something. He printed posters. He put them all around town inviting people to walk down Sydney Road on September 30th in Jill's honor. And this man did not expect how many people were going to come out. 30,000 people. I can't even imagine that, but I don't have to. because we have photos.

They filled Sydney Road at noon. They walked it end to end, and people carried handmade signs. And some read, respect women, cash rate, repeat rapist. Some read enough is enough. And one even read, parole and court toughen up. And want you to hold on to that last one.

Because 30,000 people marching had already worked out, the thing that this episode is really about. And they worked it out before the public was even allowed to know a single fact about Adrian Bailey's history. But they knew it. They knew that a man like this does not just appear out of nowhere. Jill's mother, Edith, came to Sydney Road to see the tributes herself outside the shops and the messages that people had written on chalk on the sidewalk.

She thanked the thousands of strangers who came out for her daughter. The march ended at Princess Park in North Carlton with a minute of silence. And by that evening, in Hosier Lane, an unknown artist had spray painted a daisy with the words, Rest in Peace, Jill, across 65 feet of wall. And there was also an unofficial memorial on Hope Street right next to the alley where Jill took her last breath. A heart was made on a fence with Jill's name in the middle and flowers around it. And my friend Gemma, who none of you have heard about yet, she helps me research cases like this. and a number of others on this channel and on Dark Liberty.

And I want to personally thank her because the only photos online of this beautiful memorial was from Google Maps and it was not the best quality, but she lives about 15 minutes from Brunswick. So she went there in person. Not only did she make the walk from that bar where Jill was last seen to this alley, Gemma also gave me her perspective.

This area was so close to Jill getting home. It was a walk that doesn't seem unsafe and Gemma said she does walks like this all the time, she wouldn't have thought twice about doing it herself late at night. And that alley is right out of view of this red brick building that I'm showing you on screen. So that just puts it in perspective. And Gemma took these photos of the memorial and I'm so thankful that we're able to see them. But it's also very sad because we know what that stands for.

On October 2nd, Edith posted a message to Jill on Facebook. She wrote about how hard it was to be apart, that each night, when the world goes quiet, Jill's smile and the moments that they've shared would come into her mind and make her miss her even more. That they couldn't be together now and she would be in her thoughts. She talked about a time where she would look back going on vacations and she ended it with looking ahead to a time when they could be all together again and play Frisbee. She signed it from dad, mom, and Mike. Now the locals out in that field on Black Hill Road had also gathered and made a memorial there, leaving flowers. And then a local stone mason named Joe Travolta actually installed and made a 110-pound stone. It was a plaque.

And it said in loving memory of Jill Marr. September 2012, loved by family friends and many Australians whose hearts have been touched, rest and peace. October 4th, both families along with Jill's closest friends, her colleagues from ABC, and the detectives who had worked on this case, gathered at Faulkner Memorial Park, and many of them were brightly colored shoes in her honor. George gave the eulogy for his daughter, and he read from a letter that she had written to her parents that it was hard to be apart because she cared for them so deeply. Michael read from his sister's journal from a story that she had been writing about an

Irish girl named Josephine, who moved to Australia and had enormous hair, bad skin, and braces. Tom said goodbye, my beautiful, funny girl. I will love you forever. He finished with an Irish phrase meaning safe home, my friend. And her friend, Ifa, read the Martin Luther King line about how darkness cannot drive out darkness, and only light can do that. And hate cannot drive out hate. They played Mama Cass. They played Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. And Ifa got everyone in that room to dance to under pressure by Queen and David Bowie. Because that was chill.

Because sitting still would have been the wrong way to say goodbye to her. But then one by one, the memorial started to come down. On October 26th, they removed the one from Black Hill Road. They cited that the traffic was disturbed, that residents were upset by the number of people coming out there to look at that which is really sad. And then in early November, other street artists painted over the mural on Hozier Lane. But this story isn't over yet.

While investigators were building the evidence for trial, three women contacted the police, separately, independently, not knowing each other. All three had seen that CCTV footage from outside that boutique, and all three of them recognized the man in the blue hoodie. Not because he was a relative for her friend or someone from the neighborhood that they knew, because he had done this to them as well. And I want to tell you about these women. Because when you put their accounts next to each other

and next to what happened to Jill, you can see the method. And you can see exactly how he chose his victims. The first woman I'm going to call Georgia. In November of 2000, Georgia was 18 years old. And for reasons that are hers and hers alone, her life led her down a path of doing occasional sex work to survive. And one afternoon, she went to a healthcare service facility and while there,

she actually picked up a brochure and ironically, it was entitled, Safety Advice for Women Working the Street. She was walking along Gray Street when a red mini pulled up beside her and the man that was driving had long red, spiky hair and blue jeans on. Georgia's description of him was that he looked like an everyday guy. He asked her if she wanted to make some money. She said yes and she got in his car and they drove around five minutes when Georgia started reading that brochure in her lap. She said something out loud, something about how bad men could be out there. Look at all these attacks, she said. And without warning, he punched her in the side of the face and said, you know what?

I'm one of those bad men. Wow. After that, he took her to an alleyway, and he parked with the passenger's door against a fence. She wasn't able to open it. He had essentially converted that car into a room that she could not escape. And there was only one exit and he was sitting in it. He attacked her. He degraded her verbally throughout the entire thing, calling her a slut before he took his hand and forced it inside of her.

He then opened his glove compartment and Georgia saw a bunch of condoms fall out. And she thought that was really strange. This man dragged her into the backseat. She begs him to let her go. He doesn't. he forces himself on her. She pleads for her life. Georgia was horrified in agony.

And when another vehicle drove into the alley, she attempted to smash the rear window. This man at that point stuck his fingers down her throat. He threatened to kill her if she didn't stop screaming and if she didn't stop trying to break the window. And he said to her, see you as the power? Make it easy on yourself.

Don't fight back. Don't struggle. I will fucking kill you. Remember the line about the power, we're going to come back to it. And this went on for about a half an hour. And at some point, he took her driver's license out of her purse. And now he had her real name and where she lived. And he kept driving. And he drove further and further out of the city. She was finally able to get out. I don't have the full account of how. But she ran until a woman stopped and picked her up.

And that woman wanted to take her straight to the police station. But Georgia said, no. You know why? she said because of the work that she did, the police would not believe her. She knew what it looked like from the outside. And I don't blame you if you're thinking what a lot of people would in this moment that she put herself in that position because of the work that she was doing and where she was at the time. But let's not be too judgmental here. Instead, she met her boyfriend. And when she told him what happened, she was looking for comfort in that moment.

he actually punched her in the face. Several days after this, she went back to that health services and she told them what happened to her, and they urged her to report it to the police. They also asked her to write down a description of this man in the car because other women had to be warned. And then there was the second woman. She was 25, and she was also a sex worker. Around 2.30 in the morning on April 5th of 2012, so this is five months before Jill was killed. I'm going to call her Bethany.

she got into a car under the understanding that this man that stopped was going to pay her for her time. This was Adrian Bailey. He drove her to a dead end road, parked with the passenger side against a fence. Sound familiar? Twelve years after Georgia, different car, same configuration. He took off his shirt. He was chatty with her talking about going to the gym, taking steroids, how he trained really hard. and Bethany noticed a tattoo of a woman's name on his underarm.

She also noticed that she couldn't get out of the car at this point. And then without warning, he was on top of her. I know what you might be thinking, but this is not how things usually worked. She started to scream. She told him to stop. She even yelled things like fire, which is what women are told to do because if a person is doing this, other strangers might respond to something like fire more than they would respond to something else.

He reclined her seat flat and he was far stronger than she was and she couldn't move him. He forced himself on her without using protection even though she begged him to please use it and he told her to shut up. She would go on to tell the police later on when she finally came forward that this was the worst moment of her entire life. During this attack, he was actually in a way trying to lecture her. He called her silly and stupid and that she should have had someone like a pimp looking out for her. Bethany actually broke his windshield with her feet. And two weeks after this, she actually tried to report it. She went to the police station, but because she was intoxicated

and kind of out of her mind at that point because she had been holding onto so much trauma, she did not look like the type of sophisticated person that could give a proper statement. And because she had a history of drug use and some mental health problems, she was actually taken to a facility before she could even give a statement.

It was almost as though she was disqualified from making a statement. Nothing happened because of the type of woman she was, not because of the type of monster she was trying to report. Five months later, Adrian Bailey approached a woman on Sydney Road, the third woman that we're going to call Caroline, the same area where he would approach Jill. Caroline was 27. She was a Dutch backpacker, and she was living in a hostel nearby with 17 other. travelers and on the night of July 14th of 2012 two months before Jill was killed Caroline went out with two of her friends to a hotel bar she had a couple glasses of wine and then she left around 2.30 that morning she left to walk home and she

described herself as being a bit tipsy when she was on Carlisle Street which was about 65 feet away from the hostel she was staying at a car pulled out and stopped in front of her the passenger side door opened and a man in the driver's seat started talking to her. And here is what he said. He pointed at another car ahead and he told this woman, you should be careful. I'm concerned for your safety because that car has been following you. And he said, let me give you a ride home. That's chilling. He manufactured a threat. He acted like a hero and unfortunately she fell for it. She noticed that the car had this new car smell. The seats were black. I mean, these were little details this woman is noticing after a very traumatic event

is going to occur to her. She also remembered looking at a clock with a blue screen with dark numbers on it on the console. The man drove from Carlyar Street onto Westbury Street and instead of just dropping her off, he parks. Caroline stated that all of a sudden this man jumped at her. He began aggressively kissing her, forcing his tongue into her mouth. Caroline was completely shocked. She was actually, in her word, flabbergasted at how fast everything happened and she was struggling and she was screaming at this man to let her go. She tried to open the door, but he grabbed her hands, held them down before hitting her in the face. Caroline tells the police that she was yelling and screaming and the man was placing his hands over her mouth. He grabbed her by the throat and he told her that no one could hear her screams and that she wasn't going to be able to get out.

Caroline had her passport in her bra, but the man grabbed it and he slid it down between the seats where she could not reach it. And then he lifted up her top, unbuttoned her jeans. Caroline said she fought to push this man off of her, but that he actually grabbed her hand and placed it on his generals and then forced her to pleasure him. After a few seconds, he told her to remove her right leg from her jeans. And then he pulled her underwear down and proceeded to assault her for five or so minutes, she said. She was terrified. But Caroline did something a little different. She pretended that she was enjoying herself because she got an idea. She told him, you know what, I live close by. Why don't we go somewhere a little more comfortable? This is not a

good place for us to do this. And you know what happened? Adrian Bailey actually stopped what he was doing at this point. In this case, he fell for it. He drove to where she was living. at the time, and allowed her to put her clothes back on, got out of the car with her, grabbed her hand as though they were walking up as a couple. But as soon as Carolyn opened the door, she dropped his hand, ran inside, screamed, and hid in the bathroom. The people that were living with her saw this man come in. The man called out for her to come back, but people could see that she was in distress. You know what he did? He ran. And afterward, she gave a description to police. Clean short blonde hair, spiky with gel, about 35 years old, medium build, 5-5 to 5-6 in height,

dark jacket. And two days later, she gave even more details. She said that he had acne scarring on his cheeks and blue jeans on. In February of 2013, she was actually shown a photo board of 12 men and she picked out Adrian Bailey and she said she was about 80% sure that was him. And Georgia, 12 years after her attack, saw a photograph of Adrian Bailey on Facebook after his arrest and a blue t-shirt with an armband tattoo, and she called crime stoppers. She never forgot what he looked like. She gave a statement on October 29 saying she knew 100% that that was the man that attacked her. I want to tell you what these women had in common. Georgia was 18 years old. She was a sex worker. She knew by her own experience, the police wouldn't

believe her. Bethany was also a sex worker with a documented history of drug use and mental illness who tried to report and was actually hospitalized before anyone took a statement. And Caroline was a foreign backpacker who had been drinking, walking home alone at 3 o'clock in the morning, with no permanent address in this country and a plane ticket home. Every one of them, if it ever came to a courtroom, could be picked apart by a competent defense lawyer. And every one of them knew it. Remember the shopkeeper? Because there was a reason I told you about him. The man on Siddy Road who found Jill's purse in that alley and picked it up and kept

it and who couldn't bring himself to walk into a police station. Why? Because he was afraid of what they might think of him. He was a witness. He was not a suspect. He had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to have to explain, nothing to lose, but maybe an uncomfortable afternoon. And he still put that purse back on the ground and walked away.

Think about what that looks like when you're 18. You're working the streets. You're bleeding from the face. These women were not silent because they were weak. They were silent because they had correctly assessed how they would be treated. And here's the thing. So at the monster. Meaning he had assessed them.

He had picked them according to the risk. He was practiced. And his name was not Adrian Bailey when he started. It was Adrian Ernest Edwards. He was born on July 14th of 1971 to his parents, Ernest and Christine, and he was the oldest of five children. He grew up in Melbourne, Australia, so he was a local. And in his late teenage years, he began dating a girl around his own age, and she got pregnant

and they married April 21st of 1990. He was 18 years old at the time. And less than two months later in June of 1990, with his wife three or four months pregnant at the time with her first child, he raped a 16-year-old girl in the bedroom of his own home. She was a friend of his younger sister. He was charged and he was released on bail. And for reasons that belonged to her alone, his wife actually stayed with him. On August 30th, while he was on bail for that charge, he attacked a 17-year-old girl walking

home from a bus stop. He attempted to rape her and threatened to kill her. He touched her inappropriately, tried to force himself on her. And during the attack, he said something that I want you to hold on to because it's the earliest record of evidence of how this man's mind works. He said, you must think I'm stupid. I'm not going to do anything that will be evidence for you to go to the police with. He was 19. That's not a boy that lost control. That is a monster in the making amid assault explaining to his victim that he's thought about the evidentiary standard that's going to be used. He's telling her he understands

what will and will not be provable. He's essentially saying he already knows how this ends. with her word against his, and he thinks he will win, and he wouldn't take a chance on it. But this time she identified him anyway. He was charged with attempted rape, and he was released on bail. In October, he became a father, and in December, two months after the birth of his first child, still on bail for two separate sets of charges,

he picked up a 16-year-old girl. She was hitchhiking, and he takes a different route. And when she tries to get out, he covered her face and covered her mouth and pulls her towards him by the hair. She escaped. She reported it. She described him. Three victims six months apart all while on bail.

He was arrested and he denied it all. He even produced a diary that he falsified to give himself an alibi. Look at the sequence because you're going to see it again and again. Deny? Get confronted with proof. Admit everything. Express remorse. That's a pattern.

19 years old and it's fully formed. And when police asked him about the first girl, his sister's friend in his own bedroom while his wife was pregnant, you know what he said? He said, I don't believe his rape. I went there because I wasn't getting sex at home. What? Make that make sense because it doesn't. But I'm not finished. On June 7th, 1991, he was convicted.

He had six convictions, three victims, all of them basically teenagers or younger. and he was sentenced to five years with a non-prol period of three. The judge could make no sense of his motivation and noted on the record that the guilty pleas looked a great deal more like a man reducing his sentence than having remorse. Exactly. The court heard that he had been suffering from depression and anxiety. That was more about what was going to happen to him than what he had done. Even in 1991, from the bench the judge could see.

But it didn't change anything. he was released in April of 1993 more than a year early. He completed the sex offender program behind bars. But he admitted later on that he had just gone through the motions, that he did not participate in the program to actually change. He just did it so that he could get out of prison sooner. When he got out, he built an ordinary life. He completed an apprenticeship.

He qualified as a pastry cook. He separated from his wife in 1995 while she was pregnant with her second child, who was born in 1996. And then he moved almost immediately. into another relationship and had a third child in 1998. And it was in the year 2000 in July that he legally changed his name from Adrian Edwards to Adrian Bailey. And in September, just months later, the attacks began. Between September 2000 and March 2001, a series of violent sexual assaults were reported.

The victims were mainly sex workers. And those reports, of course, didn't get the response they should have. I just want you to know that in 2000 and Victoria's sex work was legal, but only inside a licensed brothel. If you were street-based, that was not legal. So the women that Adrian Bailey was selecting were not simply women that he assumed wouldn't be believed. They were women who, in order to report what had happened to them, they would have to disclose that they were doing something illegal. He found a loophole. He found women that seemed like society had forgotten about. He would do this routine where he would finish work at the pastry kitchen.

He would drive home and on his way back, he would go looking for those type of women. He would negotiate a price. He would drive his victim to an isolated area. He would park with the passenger side against the door and not let them out and attack them. Remember the two women who end up coming forward later on, Georgia and Bethany? Same method over and over for a decade. And when he was attacking women, he would say things like this. I could dump you in a fucking alley and no one would give a shit.

Did that fucking hurt? Lucas got the power. I can do whatever I want. Now put that beside what he said to Georgia. So you as the power? Make it easy on yourself. He said this to two different women, the same words. Because that's the thing.

It was a script. He had to say that part out loud. He had to have these women hear it. He wanted them to believe they would not be believed. if they went to try to turn him in. And they also had DNA from the scenes of these crimes. And when he finally would get caught, he would do the same thing. Deny, get confronted with proof, admit everything,

and get a reduced sentence. He was 29 years old, and it was the second time in his life that he got the same sentence with parole. And his explanation was the same as well. He wasn't getting intimacy at home. He couldn't do the things he was doing with his women with his own girlfriend. Like, what, hurt them? He was sick.

Like, it makes any difference that you're not getting something at home so you're going on doing this to women. Despite facing 43 charges, he was still granted bail. Yeah. And when he went into prison in 2002, his DNA was put into a police database. This is a man who understood exactly what a woman's word was worth, and he shopped accordingly. And in March of 2010, at 38,000, years old, Adrian Bailey was released on parole. And while he had been in prison, Victoria had introduced a sex offenders registry in 2004. But the problem was it didn't apply to offenders

whose crimes happened before. Makes no sense. So he wasn't on it. And he reoffended almost immediately. But this time, it was in 2011 drunk one night. He followed a 21-year-old man home and punched him in the face without any provocation at all and he broke his jaw. In February of 2012, he was sentenced and he only got three months. And instead of having his parole revoked, which was what should have happened, the moment he got arrested, he was granted bail pending that appeal that he made. Why? It all comes down to the parole board being understaffed. And it wasn't a sex offense this time. And so this man serving parole on a 16 counts of rape committed. this violent act unprovoked and he slips right through the cracks. When Adrian Bailey approached

Jill on Sydney Road, he was on parole, but he should have been in a jail cell. In March of 2012, he moved to Coburg and with his current girlfriend, who I've been referring to as Rachel. He had been seeing her since the previous October. She said he was obsessed with steroids, obsessed with his looks, worked out all the time, constantly in the gym. And to the people around him, he was He was completely unremarkable. He was ordinary. Even his landlord called him cooperative, courteous, respectful. This was a man who would tell his friends how much women should be respected, which is just

pretty pathetic when you think about who he really is. And we could think about, okay, wait, he's probably someone who has a mask on, that there's a real man hiding underneath and he's just fooling them with the performance. But I don't think that's what's happening here. I think the truth is actually worse. I don't really think Adrian was performing when he would tell his friends that women should be respected. I think he meant it in that shallow way. Kind of like when someone walks past you and you go like, hi, how you doing?

How's your day? And it's robotic? Like, you don't really expect them to actually stop and tell you how their day was. It's just a greeting. It's the same thing for Adrian. It was something true for other men somewhere else. It was never a mirror. He never once turned it around and held that up to himself.

He didn't believe that women should be respected, but it's just kind of something you say in passing. Jill's family never got a trial. On April 5th of 2013, Adrian Bailey pleaded guilty to raping and murdering her. The relief for her family was there. They wouldn't have to sit in a courtroom and listen to everything that happened to her. But how would you read that guilty plea? Because we've seen this before. We've seen it.

Deny, get confronted with proof, admit everything so you can get a lesser. sentence. And it did get him something. Without that plea deal, he would have gotten life with no parole. But pleading guilty gave him a chance of being paroled. He was given a life imprisonment with a 35-year non-parole period. So after he served 35 years, he could get out. I also want to tell you something that was going on here because this is a big part of this case. At the time that the plea was entered, the judge had decided there was going to be a suppression order. And what that meant was the public was not going to become aware of Adrian's history. They were going to be told about the plea, but that was it. And you know what this does? It was because he had three trials ahead of him still.

Remember, Georgia, Bethany, and Caroline, right? And if a jury in those cases had been able to know all about his history, then he could have appealed, right? So remember, we want convictions to stick. But that suppression order was not protecting Adrian Bailey. But the effect was that for eight months, Everyone, the whole public, was looking at this man that appeared to come out of nowhere. It's just like a man walking down the street. You know how the theories and the questions because everything was sealed until one man broke it. Darren Hinch. He was one of the most recognizable broadcasters in the country.

He was actually nicknamed the Human Headline. He spent his entire career actually treating these suppression orders as an obstacle rather than an instruction he had to follow. And by the time this plea agreement came down in the suppression order, a Hinch had already published a piece about Jill's murder. He dug up all the records and announced that Adrian Bailey's own parents had gone to police with concerns about their son, that he would offend again, that his mother had raised concerns about the potential for violence in his relationship. And this article also said that Victoria Police had gone to the adult parole board twice

and asked for Adrian Bailey's parole to be revoked twice. and that he had still been out on those streets. And this reporter didn't take it down. He was fully prepared to go to prison over it. But I want to stop for a second. Because underneath all of this, there's a story. And it tends to kind of get buried by the noise of this reporter himself going through all this stuff. But look at the list of people who knew.

His own mother and father went to police. The Victoria Police went to the parole board twice and asked for him to be taken off the street. He would say it himself that he should have never been released. But the people with the authority to act didn't. This was a documented institutional failure that had led to a woman losing her life. And in May of 2013, as part of the defense's sentencing submission, Adrian Bailey sat down, like I said, with that forensic psychologist, and he told him the story that he had given to Detective Rowe.

The drinking, the argument with Rachel, her leaving, him going home and coming back for his car, but he added a new detail that he was so drunk a taxi driver threw him out onto Sydney Road. He was worried that he would throw up in his cab, and then he decided to jog home. Now he had already pleaded guilty at this point there was nothing left to protect, so he went further. But to me, it's not the truth. It's not the total truth. But he said that after they spoke, he walked off and that Jill, called him back over, that I don't believe, that they walked together down Hope Street, and this would be right where that memorial is now, so close to her apartment. He said they're around that alley,

he tried to kiss her, and he touched her, and that's when she slapped him across the face. Now, I do believe that could have happened, but he said, I lost it. In his words, quote, I always had trouble when someone put their hands on me. I fight, end quote. He didn't described pulling her towards him, turning her around, pushing her onto the hood of a car and raping her right there. He said that when he finished, he pulled up his pants and Jill got aggressive. She lunged at him, hit him with her phone, and told him she wasn't going to let him get away with it. At that point, he said, he put his hands around her throat to quiet her down, and she fell backwards, hit her head on the ground, and you could feel blood coming out of the wound. Yeah, I doubt that's how it happened.

But he said when he realized what happened and that she was extremely injured, he held her down by the lower part of her neck and pressed until she stopped moving. He estimated it took no more than a minute, which I also don't believe. And he chillingly added that he should have known better than to apply that much pressure, given how strong he is. That's disgusting. Then he said that when he realized she wasn't breathing, he panicked and he cried, but wait.

I told you to remember Dr. Lynch's autopsy findings, and it was for this exact moment. So let's take apart his version because we have the evidence to do that. She called me back. That's what he said. He's placing the decision to walk down Hope Street with Jill on her. She slapped me. He's placing the first act of violence with Jill. She lunged towards me.

He's placing the escalation with Jill. I put much. arms around her to quiet her down. A phrase chosen to sound like a restraint, like calming someone, like a hug. Every single sentence in his account transfers the initiation to a woman who can't contradict him because she's dead. Her words don't live on. Only his does. Now hold all of that against what we know the autopsy findings were, bruising across the front of her neck, extending on both sides in circular in places like fingerprints, deep bleeding on the four muscles of the neck on both sides,

a fractured larynx, that is not a hand resting on the lower part of the neck. This is sustained, deliberate force with two hands applied by a man who trained obsessively, took steroids and knew exactly how strong he was. Every injury on her body was inflicted while she was still fighting. His account has one purpose. It's not a confession. already did that. His account exists to make the last thing he ever did to Jill Marr sound like it's an accident that happened during an argument that she started. Well, the judge doesn't buy the jogging

story. He doesn't buy any of this. And of course, there are mitigating factors that I'm not going to go into. If you want to look up this case and you can probably Google it, he had all of these reasons why he became this way from inappropriate things being done to him as a child. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you have to also understand why he's adding that to his case. It was for mitigation. So you kind of can't separate those two things, right? And many people have those terrible things happen in their childhood, and they don't go on to become a monster like this. Finally, on June 11th, the judge did lift the suppression order. And here was the public now, who spent eight months looking at this man who they thought came out of nowhere, and they find out there was a paper trail of

22 years. And in the middle of all that, the DNA, remember the DNA? In the interview, Adrian Bailey was like, oh, you know, you already have my DNA in file. Well, guess what? They did take it in 2001, but it was destroyed. Following his conviction in 2002, the sample was destroyed. It was a requirement at the time. So by September 2012, there was no sample of Adrian's DNA in any database in the country. He attacked. Georgia in 2000, Bethany in 2012, and Carolina in 2012 just months apart. If his DNA had been on file, there is a real possibility that he would have been identified before Jill ever walked down Sydney Road. On June 19th of 2013, Jill's family gave their impact statements. Some of them spoke,

some were read for them. Tom described what he had gone through. A lifetime of fear, insomnia, panic attacks, anger, firsthand knowledge of how evil a human being can be. He said he was constantly confused, disoriented, unfocused. He wrote about the pain of not being able to tell Jill that he loved her in her final moments or knowing those moments were terrifying and painful and knowing that on her last walk she had crossed paths with someone evil. He said he thought about her every second of every day and it was a waste of a brilliant mind and a beautiful soul. He's done a number of public interviews addressing how the justice system had failed his wife. And then Adrian Bailey addressed the court himself. He read out an

apology talking about how his actions had destroyed a precious life and that he did not ask for forgiveness. Before I go any further, I just want to put something together for you because everything in this episode has been building towards it and this is the moment it comes into focus. For 22, years, Adrian Bailey chose women the system and already decided not to believe. And it worked every single time. He was caught, he served a fraction of his time, he even said the same thing about not getting it at home, and they let him out three times. And on the third occasion, they let him stay out until he broke a stranger's jaw.

And while his parents were warning the police about him and the police were asking the parole war twice not to put him back on the street, he was let free. He built an entire strategy on one assumption that the women he chose would not be believed. And then on 142 in the morning, on the 22nd of September in 2012, on a sidewalk outside of a boutique in Brunswick, he turned around and walked back towards a woman who had a husband, a job at a national broadcaster, and a phone in her hand. When Jill told him she was going to the police, he had every reason to believe she would. because she was exactly the kind of victim the system does take seriously, and he had spent 22 years building his freedom on the certainty that his victims were not going to be believed.

She died because she would have been believed. Everything that was done and came out of this case after Jill died could have been done before she died. None of it required new technology or new science or a discovery about human behavior that nobody had made yet. It required somebody to read a file and to take the women in that file seriously enough to put their pages in an actual order. Before I go, I want to talk about something because I know it's coming. There are people who will watch this and they will go looking for what Jill did wrong. We don't want to think that these kind of things could happen to just anybody. It has to be that it's someone who is negligent.

And we would have done things differently and I don't blame you for thinking that if you do. I've heard it before. Things like she had been drinking. She was out late. She was walking alone at half past one in the morning. She wasn't with her husband. She turned down a taxi from a colleague who offered twice to get her home. She was in heels that she could barely walk in stumbling around, talking to a stranger.

Every single one of those things is a thing that millions of women do every weekend and they come home from it. But here's the part that actually settles it. It isn't an opinion. It's a record. Adrian Bailey had already raped at least 17 women before he ever laid eyes on jail. There's no behavior common to all of those women. There's no dress, no hour of the night, no amount of alcohol, no specific route, no decision that connects them.

They were all doing different things in different years and different places. The only thing they had in common was him. The monster is to blame. Jill was the point at which somebody finally stopped him. It's just sad that he wasn't stopped before this. I want to thank you so much for being here for Jill's story and everyone else that was a victim in this case as well. I will see you in my very next video.

Bye.