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Mandy Matney’s Murdaugh Murders and Hedley Thomas’s The Teacher’s Pet have recently seen the subjects of their investigations jailed. But why are podcasts doing the work of police, and can the legal system keep up?Mandy Matney is tired. It is late November, and she is busy finishing up the 69th episode of her podcast Murdaugh Murders, a true-crime investigation she began in 2019, and which has now evolved into a complex puzzle of unsolved deaths, insurance fraud, drugs, power and murder. The previous day, a jury in Charleston, South Carolina delivered the first guilty verdict related to the case, and Matney was of course there to cover it. “It was super exciting, and really felt like a huge sigh of relief,” she says. “It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.”Hedley Thomas knows this feeling well. Earlier this year, he experienced a similar vindication when his 2018 podcast series The Teacher’s Pet led to the conviction of former high school PE teacher Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife, Lynette, who disappeared from the couple’s Sydney home 40 years ago. For the past year, Thomas has also been reporting on the murder of another Queensland woman, Shandee Blackburn, and the failings of a DNA laboratory, in Shandee’s Story. Continue reading...