This is the final episode of the Midnight Mystery Archive.

In Part 1, we covered who Kerryn Tate was and what happened on December 29, 1979: a 22-year-old woman hitchhiking southeast of Perth, a deliberately set fire, a body found in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. 45 years of the case staying open. And the biological evidence recovered at the scene in 1979 that police kept, year after year, waiting for science to catch up.

This is Part 2. The science caught up.

In 2023, Western Australia Police handed that biological evidence to their investigative genetic genealogy team — a unit WA Police has described as leading the world in this methodology. The team uploaded the DNA to a public genealogy database, the same kind people use to find their cousins and trace their ancestry. The database returned genetic matches: not to the offender, but to their relatives. From those relatives, the team built a family tree. Ten thousand people. Constructed from birth certificates, death records, census data, genealogical archives, and genetic connections. Every branch narrowed the pool. At the end of that tree was one name.

Terrence John Fisher.

Fisher had died in 2000 at the age of 50, of natural causes, while living with his father in Manning, Perth. He had never been charged. His name had never appeared in the original 1979 investigation. He had lived his life — working as a carpenter with the WA Public Works Department, sailing at the Fremantle Sailing Club, frequenting pubs in Carlisle and Victoria Park and Manning — and had died without ever facing a single consequence.

When WA Police named Fisher publicly in March 2025, they also said this: if Fisher were alive, he would be a person of interest in the deaths of two other Western Australian women — Barbara Western, murdered in 1986, and Carrie Turner, murdered in 1991. That is not an accusation. It is a statement of investigative significance. Police do not name dead men as persons of interest in other murders without a reason. The reason is not publicly detailed. What it means is that investigators looked at those three deaths and saw something worth pursuing.

Terrence John Fisher cannot be arrested. He cannot be tried. He cannot be convicted. Whatever he did on December 29, 1979, he died having never faced it.

Kerryn Tate's sister Anne-Marie Tate said publicly: "I strongly urge anyone who's had even a slight suspicion about Terrence Fisher to please come forward to police." She is still asking. The family is still building the picture of who he was. So is WA Police. And the investigative genealogy team that identified him is still working.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old. She would be 68 today. This case, and this show, are for her.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
Available now on Amazon - Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
Order your copy today.

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• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

This is the final series of the Midnight Mystery Archive — the last two-parter before the podcast goes on hiatus. It ends in Australia, one of MMA's largest listener bases, with a case that captures something essential about why this show existed: what happens when a young woman's life is cut short, and what forensic science can now do that nobody could have imagined when the crime occurred.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old when she was murdered in bushland southeast of Perth, Western Australia, on December 29, 1979. Forty-five years later, in March 2025, Western Australia Police named their prime suspect. He died in 2000. He will never stand trial. But his name is now on the record.

This is Part 1: who Kerryn was, what happened on December 29, 1979, and how a case with almost no leads in 1979 eventually had a name to put to it.

Kerryn was born in New South Wales and had been living in Western Australia for about a year. She worked in the arts. She was warm, social, well-connected — the kind of person whose presence in a room you noticed. She also hitchhiked. In 1979 Perth, this was not reckless. It was mainstream. Young Australians hitchhiked to the beach, between suburbs, between cities. It was an ordinary mode of transport. Kerryn was so accustomed to it that she carried a black motorcycle helmet specifically so she could accept lifts from motorbikes. That helmet is evidence of a routine, not a risk.

On the night of December 28th, Kerryn attended a dance at the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club. She stayed with friends in Swanbourne. The following morning, December 29th, a friend drove her to her house-sitting address in Mount Lawley at approximately 11 AM. That is the last confirmed sighting of Kerryn Tate alive.

She was heading to Karragullen, approximately 40 kilometers southeast of Perth, to house-sit for other friends. She presumably hitchhiked. The next morning, December 30th, forestry workers found her body in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. She was slumped over a smoldering tree stump. A fire had been deliberately set around the scene — calculated, not panic. A bloodstained piece of wood was recovered nearby. Kerryn had been beaten to death. Her jewelry was gone: the watch, the earrings, the bangle, the pendant, the rings that the Christmas Day family had noticed just four days earlier.

In 1979, without CCTV, without DNA, without any digital record of vehicle movements, identifying a stranger who gave a hitchhiker a lift on a rural road was essentially impossible. The case went cold. But it never closed. Police kept the biological material from the 1979 scene. In 2023, that evidence went to Western Australia Police's investigative genetic genealogy team. What they found is the story of Part 2.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
Available now on Amazon - Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
Order your copy today.

THE HALLS OF MEDIOCRITY
Sports. True crime. Athletes who had everything and threw it away.
New episodes every Tuesday.
Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY ARCHIVE
True crime. Cold cases. Every Friday.
midnightmysteryarchive.com | Substack | Patreon

Follow us: X | Facebook Group

• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

For 23 years, investigators and the public assumed the dark figure captured walking behind Trevor Deely on Haddington Road — 34 seconds after Trevor passed the camera — was the same man who had waited outside his office for 34 minutes in the rain. In December 2023, that assumption was definitively disproved.

Enhanced CCTV analysis, using the same UK-based company that had processed the footage in 2016, finally confirmed that the Haddington Road figure was a different person entirely — someone who had given a statement to the Garda in the original 2000 investigation. The footage had been too poor to confirm his identity at the time. The 2023 enhancement resolved it. He wasn't following Trevor. There was nothing sinister about his movements.

Trevor's brother Mark described it as a "bittersweet moment" — and said it put investigators "nearly straight back to square one."

The man in black who spoke to Trevor at the back gate of his office at 3:35 AM remains unidentified. That person — whoever they are — is still the central unresolved thread in this case. The Garda believes he may hold information critical to understanding what happened to Trevor. He may not know that. They are asking him to come forward.

Part 2 also covers the Garda's working theory: two separate informants, in 2017 and 2019, told investigators that Trevor was accidentally shot by a known Dublin criminal and that his body was concealed in the Chapelizod area, roughly five and a half miles from where he was last seen. In August 2017, Garda sealed off a three-acre site in Chapelizod and searched for six weeks. They found a gun and a quantity of drugs. Neither was connected to Trevor. The search ended in September 2017 without finding him.

Twenty-six years later, Trevor Deely has never been found. The man in black has never been identified. And the case remains open.

This episode also covers the lasting impact of Trevor's disappearance on how Ireland handles missing persons — the Garda National Missing Persons Unit, CCTV preservation protocols, and Ireland's national Missing Persons Day — changes driven in large part by the failures exposed in those first four days of Trevor's investigation.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
Available now on Amazon - Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
Order your copy today.

THE HALLS OF MEDIOCRITY
Sports. True crime. Athletes who had everything and threw it away.
New episodes every Tuesday.
Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY ARCHIVE
True crime. Cold cases. Every Friday.
midnightmysteryarchive.com | Substack | Patreon

Follow us: X | Facebook Group

• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell