When police officer David Raymond walked into the darkness hunting a killer, he often had just one partner besides him, a partner who couldn’t speak but whose instincts David trusted with his life. For 26 years, David worked with police dogs in Far North Queensland. But one dog would come to define his career: Vader, a jet-black German Shepherd who tracked killers, confronted armed offenders, searched for the missing and helped save lives. In this episode of Real Crime, David Raymond takes us inside the extraordinary world of police dog operations: the danger, the humour, the psychological toll and the remarkable bond that develops when a man and a dog repeatedly walk into danger together.

It’s a story about courage, loyalty and an almost instinctive trust between two partners and the heartbreaking reality that even the strongest partnerships eventually come to an end.

David Raymond and Vader: a police officer, a police dog, and the unbreakable bond that brought them both home.

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Long before Roberta Williams became one of the most recognisable names in Melbourne’s gangland story, she was Roberta Merciecaa, a rebellious 15-year-old growing up around Frankston.Lee McIntosh knew her then.

As a youth worker, Lee worked with young people dealing with broken homes, trauma and uncertain futures. She understood them because she had lived through her own family upheaval. But Lee came to Real Crime with a mystery of her own. She had never met her father and wanted to find the man who had been missing from her life for decades.

In this episode, Lee takes us back to the teenage years of the girl who would become Roberta Williams, revealing a fascinating prequel to the Underbelly story. And then we embark on a very different investigation: the search for Lee’s long-lost father. Two stories about family, identity and the strange turns a life can take and one question Lee has waited a lifetime to answer.

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Three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer vanished from Fairy Meadow beach at Wollongong in 1970. A teenager later told police he had abducted and killed her. Decades on, he was charged with murder—but the case ended when a judge ruled that his police interview could not be used at trial. He pleaded not guilty, and no jury reached a verdict. After a tireless campaign for justice by Cheryl's family, the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions agreed to review the court ruling but recently upheld the decision to exclude the confession of the alleged killer. It was a devastating blow but the family fights on. They are now demanding an independent review of this decision and why evidence from new witnesses has not been investigated by police. In this From the Desk, Adam Shand asks how a family finds answers when the evidence at the heart of a case cannot be heard in court.

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