Remains found in search for missing teen Pheobe Bishop
Queensland police are continuing to appeal for information on the alleged murder of teenager Pheobe Bishop, following major advances in the investigation yesterday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
Despite what some experts say, Australia's crisis of baby-faced criminals committing violent offences isn't ‘overblown'
In the early hours of February 21, an elderly couple was asleep inside their home in the sleepy Cairns suburb of Manunda when a trio of teenagers allegedly broke in. The frightened woman was led into a room and allegedly raped by two of the boys, aged 15 and 16, while the other 15-year-old held her husband at knifepoint. Police arrested the youths the next day, and they were charged with multiple offences. For the Queensland Government, it was clear proof its controversial 'Adult Crime, Adult Time' youth justice reforms were necessary – and needed to go even further. 'I don't think crime anywhere in the state is acceptable at the level it is, but in the Far North at the moment, it's horrendous and it's ripping the heart and soul out of a beautiful part of the state,' Queensland Premier David Crisafulli told reporters at the time. In the months since, politicians in other parts of the country have responded to equally alarming incidents with promises of legislative crackdowns. In the Northern Territory in April, tougher bail laws were flagged following the alleged murder of 71-year-old shopkeeper Linford Feick by a teenager who had been bailed just six days earlier. And in Victoria late last month, the sale of machetes was swiftly banned after a violent brawl allegedly involving heavily armed youths in a Melbourne shopping centre – the latest in a string of knife-related attacks. For some experts, while appalling, serious offences like these are overwhelmingly uncommon and the so-called youth crime crisis has been overblown by some politicians and media commentators. In a submission to a senate inquiry in October, the Parenting and Family Research Alliance said juvenile offending rates between 2009 and 2023 had fallen by 42 per cent nationally, although it noted 'concerns' about a 'subset of youth' engaged in serious crime. That's the part opponents of youth justice crackdowns are missing, police and welfare sources from Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria told – worryingly young offenders are committing increasingly violent crimes in communities across the country. 'The do-gooders point to graphs and say there's no problem, but when a drugged-out kid steals a car and smashes it into a family and kills them or rapes a pensioner in her bed, they look the other way,' a senior community figure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. 'You can show me all the data you like but the fact is we have a problem here and we need to do something about it. The system isn't working. It's broken.' A litany of horror stories A number of serious alleged crimes involving especially young offenders have been chronicled across the country already this year. In March, two boys aged 13 and 14 allegedly stole a car from a home in Port Stephens in New South Wales before crashing it and fleeing the scene. The younger child was allegedly behind the wheel. A 13-year-old boy was out on bail for other offences when he allegedly threatened two women with a knife during a carjacking in Cranbourne in Melbourne in February. The same month, a 16-year-old male who had faced a total of 65 charges in the previous few years was granted bail over two alleged home invasions and car thefts in suburban Melbourne. When arrested by police, he was found with a machete, fishing knife and baseball bat. Also in February, a mob of teens allegedly attacked a shopping centre security guard in Bendigo, Victoria, kicking him and stomping on his head, before assaulting a member of the public who tried to intervene. Three males aged 14, 16 and 17, were arrested and charged. And the same month, a 17-year-old was allegedly driving unlicensed and under the influence of drugs when he struck and killed a 76-year-old man on a mobility scooter in Kingston, south of Brisbane. In January, dramatic footage emerged of the arrest of several youths who allegedly stole a Mercedes parked outside a Melbourne pub before ramming a police car. Among those allegedly crammed into the vehicle who attempted to flee were two boys aged 12 and 14, and two girls aged 16. That same month, Victoria Police arrested five male youths, ranging from 14 to 16, for an alleged attack on a 17-year-old who was left in a critical condition after being slashed with a machete during a 'prolonged assault'. And a 13-year-old boy from Yamanto, west of Brisbane, was in January charged with attempted murder after allegedly stabbing a supermarket worker, leaving the woman in a critical condition. Authorities grappling with a crisis Police forces across the country have ramped up efforts to tackle youth crime with a range of proactive initiatives, expanded powers and special taskforces. In the first three months of 2025, NSW Police seized more than 90 weapons, ranging from machetes and knuckle dusters to Tasers, in special metal detector 'wanding' snap operations, resulting in 67 people being charged with 71 offences. 'The number of weapons seized already is shocking,' Premier Chris Minns said. 'To have taken almost 100 knives and other weapons off our streets is as horrifying as it is important.' In March, NSW Police launched Operation Soteria to address an escalation of violence among youth offenders aged 11 to 16 in regional hotspots across the state. 'The operational arm of this operation consists of high-visibility policing, targeting a defined cohort of hundreds of repeat offenders believed to be responsible for 90 per cent of youth crime across regional NSW,' Deputy Commissioner Paul Pisanos said. The taskforce also oversees Operation Regional Mongoose, established in late 2023, which has arrested on average 13 young offenders every week. Highlighting both the increased efforts of police and the extent of the crime problem, authorities in Queensland made a staggering 4235 arrests and laid more than 18,000 charges in the first three months of the year alone. During those arrests, 112 deadly weapons were sized. In Victoria, offences committed by offenders aged 10 to 17 are at the highest levels since 2009, with 2024 marking the highest increase ever. A large proportion of repeat offenders had been released in the previous 24 hours. Youths make up 10 per cent of all offenders, according to Victoria Police, but are overrepresented in particular crimes like aggravated burglary and car theft. Address the bottom to improve the top Detective Acting Superintendent Paul Ready from Queensland Police's Youth Crime Taskforce said early intervention is a critical component of the state's efforts. 'That includes police diversions,' Mr Ready said. 'We're constantly looking at how we can develop that capability. We give our frontline members a greater input so that they can talk to the young person and their carers or legal representatives about cautioning and diversion or restorative justice. 'We see, anecdotally, that a majority of young people who have early intervention don't come back to the system, which is what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to cut off that flow from the bottom end so we can fix the top end.' The Queensland Government has highlighted drops in crime data in the first part of 2025 as a sign its crackdown is working. Mr Ready is also encouraged. 'What we're seeing is some of the data is breach of bail is reducing,' he said. 'It's still early days and we want to see that continue.' Supporting victims is crucial In January 2021, Queensland couple Katherine Leadbetter and Matthew Field were driving in their car when it was struck by an out-of-control stolen vehicle driven by a drugged and drunk 17-year-old. The couple and their unborn baby were killed. The offender was found guilty of two counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, although he will only serve 60 per cent of that duration. Natalie Merlehan was in her car and also hit head-on by the boy. Despite suffering significant injuries, she leapt from her mangled vehicle and provided first-aid to Ms Leadbeter and Mr Field until paramedics arrived. 'It was a significant tragedy that garnered a lot of public attention, yet at no point did anyone from the government reach out to assist me,' Ms Merlehan said. 'It was deemed a property crime because I was inside my car, so that automatically disqualified me from any assistance. I had to engage a solicitor and a barrister, which in itself was quite horrific. 'I suffered a brain injury, I have permanent nerve damage on the right side of my body, and damage to my spine that's required five surgeries. Anyone who hears my story would objectively conclude I was the victim of a crime, but the system didn't see it that way.' Ms Merlehan, who has a background in criminology, began advocating for greater supports for all victims – even those who 'don't fit into a tiny box defined by governments'. Adding to her frustrations was the previous government's 'refusal to accept there was a problem and there was something they could do', she said. 'We had so many really significant crimes occur during that term. At least with the current government, they seem to be trying to make some positive change and while obviously there's a lot of conjecture around sentencing, they're acknowledging the issues.' Empathy and understanding aren't weak For some in the community, a heavier-handed response is preferred. Scan social media comments on news stories about youth crime and you'll get a sense of heated attitudes. 'Lock them up and throw away the key,' is a common phrase. A lawyer representing youth offenders, who asked not to be named, said rising anger in the community wasn't helping tackle the problem. 'I worry when I hear how some people talk about these kids. There was a rally in North Queensland and someone got up and called for them to be 'put in coffins'. There's a lot of anger. 'Yes, if they have committed a crime, they should answer for it. But do we just throw these young people away like garbage? Very few people want to stop and wonder what led this young person to commit such an act.' Trudy Reading from the advocacy group Voice for Victims shares a similar pragmatic views. 'We established our group in July 2023 off the back of some pretty horrendous incidents in Queensland and because had politicians telling us there wasn't an issue,' Ms Reading said. 'It was almost a bit of a sweeping under the carpet. Since then, we've had three rallies public rallies and we've made submissions to the previous and current government on a range of different reforms.' Those proposed reforms include support for victims and a tougher stance on crime responses, but also initiatives to curve youth crime by 'cutting it off sooner' through early intervention. 'We understand the majority of these kids are often victims themselves,' Ms Reading said. 'We know they're suffering from they alcohol or drug dependency, or they've come from broken homes or with domestic violence that significantly impacts supervision and support. Those are reasons they're offending. 'At the moment, [the system] allows that reason to become an excuse for their behaviour. We've lost sight of how to fix the issue. We need to catch these kids earlier. We know that big detention centres don't work and we know those kids come out at with 90 per cent reoffending. So … is there a crisis? Debate around crime statistics don't really matter if a large part of the community feels unsafe, a team of experts from Bond University pointed out. Terry Goldworthy, Gaelle Brotto and Tyler Cawthray, each associate professors in criminal justice and criminology at the uni, analysed the youth crime situation across major states in analysis for The Conversation. 'A sense of crisis is created to some degree by not only rising crime rates, but also a sense of helplessness felt by the community and a perceived failing of the government to provide for a safe and secure community,' they wrote. 'How the public perceives crime issues is just as important as the reality of crime trends themselves.' A 2023 survey of Queenslanders found almost half of respondents felt youth crime was either increasing or at crisis point, and as a result, three-quarters of people had taken steps to beef-up home security in the year prior. The researchers said short-term action by police and governments to address community safety concerns is warranted. 'But all states and territories also need to address the longer-term, multi-factoral causes of youth crime, such as truancy and disengagement from school, drug usage, domestic violence in the home and poor parenting.' As she still grapples with her ongoing recovery and enduring trauma, Ms Merlehan she said agreed. 'We need to look further into the rehabilitation and education of kids that are in custody because it's not necessarily just about locking them up. You're taking those serious offenders off the street but also they have to go back into society at some point. 'We want them back there with the tools that they need to adhere to a minimum standard that society would expect and that's obviously through training, education, schooling and giving them those opportunities while they're incarcerated.' For those opponents of tough policing and sentencing reforms who downplay the 'crisis', Ms Reading said she had two questions. 'Having sat through statisticians giving evidence about the data, I question the efficacy of what they're collecting and want to see it appropriately scrutinised. 'But really, my second and main question is whether these experts actually gone out and spoken to victims and seen the impact it's having on them and their families and the way that they conduct their lives after these significant incidents.
ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
Convicted baby killer Lucy Letby is languishing in prison. There's just one, big problem
The idea of a nurse, ostensibly sweet mannered and competent, coldly killing tiny, frail babies in her care is bone-chilling. When the young British neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was accused of murdering numerous infants, we gasped in horror and the media fed our incomprehension and appetites by providing colourful, constant coverage of the charges and trial. It seemed like it was sewn up. Letby had written incriminating entries in her diaries and googled the parents of the babies she had allegedly killed by injecting oxygen into their veins, poisoning them with insulin, and feeding them too much milk. But, most damning of all was the graph which was printed over and over, showing a list of nursing staff against a list of the babies who had died between June 2015 and 2016: Letby had been present, every single time. She was convicted in August 2023 of seven counts of murder and other attempted murders, and is currently serving multiple life sentences with no chance of release. Letby was the fourth woman in British history to be sentenced to die in jail. "She has thrown open the door to Hell," the Daily Mail wrote, "and the stench of evil overwhelms us all." There's only one problem — the cacophony of globally renowned expert voices, some of whose research was heavily relied on by the prosecution, now saying in unison: there is no evidence of wrongdoing. As David Conn wrote in the Guardian, "It is unprecedented that so large a group of experts with such distinguished reputations have so rapidly, publicly and comprehensively spoken out to dispute convictions for murder." The whole thing is awful: grieving parents facing the reopening of painful cases and painful discussions again, and yet also, a potentially innocent woman languishing in jail after a miscarriage of justice and poorly run case. And the grim fact that a public who lapped up the stories of the evil nurse has now largely lost interest. I do not know if Letby is guilty or innocent, but this apparent contradiction between the legal system and medical experts is troubling. The detail is thick and few of us are equipped to deal with the medical and scientific complexities of this case. But this is exactly the problem — the idea of an evil killer, dressed in scrubs, is so spine-tingling that we throw caution. There are several lessons to be learned from this sorry saga; here are just three. In May 2024 an extensive, 13,000 word investigative piece in the New Yorker was the first substantial work to tip people off to the fact that "in the rush to judgement, serious questions about the evidence were ignored." But the man whose slender 1989 academic paper was relied upon by the prosecution to link mottled skin to a pulmonary vascular air embolism (and, they argued, thereby an injection of air into the babies' veins) had been alarmed months before, once he was made aware of the case. Dr Shoo Lee is a respected Canadian neonatalist who argued before the Court of Appeal that the prosecution's expert witness had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. He said none of the babies in the trial should have been diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism and alternatives should be considered. When the court rejected the appeal request, Lee assembled a 14-strong team of the most respected paediatric and neonatal specialists in the world, including a former president of Britain's Royal College of Pediatrics and a former director of Boston Children's Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. Dr Lee promised to release their conclusions whatever they were. And they were incendiary: finding no medical evidence that Letby had murdered or attempted to murder any baby in her care. The report was 698 pages long. At a press conference in February this year, Lee said there had been serious errors and failings in medical care, and some of the deaths could have been prevented. One panel member, Dr Neena Modi, neonatology professor at Imperial College London, said: "There was a combination of babies being delivered in the wrong place, delayed diagnosis and inappropriate or absent treatment." Police shared a graph showing Letby's presence — marked with an X — at the time of each "suspicious incident" involving the deterioration or death of a baby with the media, which reprinted it numerous times. But, as the New Yorker pointed out, "the chart didn't account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all." The neonatal unit Letby worked at, at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the west of England, was struggling, and a 2016 review by a team from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health found there were inadequate numbers of doctors and nurses. There had been more deaths in the maternal ward as well as neonatal care. Law Professor Burkhard Schafer from the University of Edinburgh argues this graph shows police are skilled at looking for a responsible human, not "finding a systemic problem in an organisation like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category." When Schafer saw the diagram of suspicious events, an alarm bell rang. To be true, he says, such a diagram should have included all deaths in the unit, not just those in court, and it should have covered more time. The diagram the police issued has been likened to the "Texas sharpshooter fallacy". Imagine a shooter firing bullets into the side of a barn, then tracing a bulls-eye around the area where most bullets penetrated. In other words, statistical mistakes can be made when analysts ignore a big data set in favour of a small cluster that fits a convenient theory. This exact mistake had been made in cases about two nurses accused of murder before, in the Netherlands and in Italy, leading to a miscarriage of justice due to the belief that "a coincidence cannot be a coincidence". Both spent time in prison and both were later exonerated. This "X" diagram was crucial in the Letby case. As David Conn writes: …there was no evidence against Letby, only the consultants' suspicions due to the statistical coincidence of her having been on shift. Nobody ever saw her harm a baby or commit any of the acts — injecting babies with air, or lacing two feeding bags with insulin — of which she would later be accused and found guilty, and there has never been any tangible or forensic evidence of her doing so. She was well respected as a committed young nurse, who had taken intensive care qualifications, and would volunteer for extra work and overtime when the unit was stretched. Senior staff believed that this explained why she was often on shift for the sickest babies. Especially if insufficient evidence is given and complexity is skipped over. Those following the case read about notes written by Letby that police found in her house, which contained these contradictory statements, some of which appeared to show guilt: "WHY ME?"; "I haven't done anything wrong"; "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them"; "I AM EVIL I DID THIS." She wrote, too, "We tried our best and it wasn't enough." We didn't read of the police video where she said she was processing the guilt of having babies die on her watch: "It was just a way of me getting my feelings out onto paper." Her self-loathing was wrapped in up feelings of incompetence, and the stress of suspicion. Psychologists have said these notes were "meaningless as evidence." Then there was the fact that Letby had googled the names of the parents whose babies had died afterwards, 31 times. This confused me when I read it. What I didn't know was that this was somewhat of a compulsive habit of hers — she seemed to google everyone she met — during the year of the investigation, she had conducted 2,287 searches for people online, saying later she was always on her phone. Her last hope seems to be the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which examines possible miscarriages of justice. Another public inquiry is underway into how murders such as these could have taken place in NHS hospitals, though in August 2024, 24 British experts — doctors, nurses and scientists — sent a letter to the government urging them to postpone or delay such an inquiry due to concern about a failure to learn lessons from "possible negligent deaths that were presumed to be murders". It is up to the courts to decide if there has been miscarriage of justice. Perhaps, in the interests of public confidence, they will take the chance to do so. Whatever happens, we must be acutely conscious of the suffering parents who have been through a horrific ordeal, losing a child then enduring a gruelling public trial. Surely, more than anyone, they deserve to know the truth. Juila Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast, Not Stupid.
News.com.au
7 hours ago
- News.com.au
‘Nightmare': Aussies in shock over state of Kmart store
Aussies have been left shocked after bearing witness to the 'feral' state of the shoe section at a Kmart store in Sydney. In a clip posted to social media, shoppers labelled the mess a 'nightmare' and demanded to know 'what is going on?' with the chain retailer. The footage, which has been viewed nearly 30,000 times, shows an aisle at the Paramatta store completely covered in boots and other footwear – to the point where the ground was invisible. Captioned: 'One wrong step and you're buried in $7 boots', hundreds of pairs could be seen stacked on top of each other, making the aisle unwalkable. Viewers were quick to share their own experiences with the retailer, with many describing it as an everyday occurrence. 'I was literally there today and it was a f**king nightmare!' one said. 'I work at Kmart and it sucks,' one employee weighed in. 'Why is every Kmart in Australia like this??!! Those poor staff,' said another. 'I used to work around that area years ago and the amount of times people just threw stuff on the floor or wedged the items between the racks infuriates the ex retail worker in me,' empathised a fourth. Kmart did not respond to in time for publication. The incident came less a month after a group of teens were slammed for their 'stupid' behaviour inside an Adelaide Kmart. The clip, which was viewed over 900,000 times, saw a prankster teen approaching a man in the store and asking him the time before pretending to take money from him via Apple Pay. The prank, coined the 'Apple Pay' prank, has been circulating TikTok over the last few days. The goal is to elicit some kind of extreme response from the target for the sake of a viral video. Viewers were quick to label the prank as 'dangerous and embarrassing'. 'This is a dangerous thing to do in Australia,' one person said.
