At 4 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1998, two friends boarded a water taxi in New Zealand and vanished, never to be seen again.

Their disappearance sparked a decades-long debate centered around an unknown man and his true identity.

With eyewitnesses saying one thing and the controversial conviction saying another, the case remains

disputed to this day.

So today we ask, who was the mysterious man behind the murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope?

This is Red Web.

Welcome back, Task Force, to another episode of Red Web, the podcast all about Unsolved mysteries, true crime, and the unknown.

I'm your resident mystery enthusiast Trevor Collins and joining me hearing this case

for the very first time, Alfredo

Diaz.

You know, we take Uber's like this no tomorrow.

Easy peasy.

Right.

And we get lazy about checking the license plate maybe or whatnot or making sure it's

the picture matches who's driving. And so this just reinduces that fear. Okay, yeah, I see where you're thinking. I don't know. It's just scary. Yeah, we so nonchalantly get into a stranger's car nowadays. I just remember back in the day, it's like, don't get into a car with a stranger. Right. Now we pay for that. Stranger danger.

Well, it was also like, don't put your face online. Don't put your name out there. That's true. And anonymity. And now it's like, we need your identity if you want to use social media. And you're just like, okay. And so everyone's like, this is my favorite this. And this is my opinion on that. And here's my face. and here's my geolocation.

Yeah, it's funny now, isn't it?

Like, it's,

it's funny now, isn't it? Like the way, you're totally right. The way when we reflect back on being a kid, how everything's turned on its head. And here's the thing. I don't want to sit in a world and trust that everyone's so sinister that I can't trust anything. Yeah, because you never do anything. you'll never go anywhere, you never see anything, experience, whatnot.

Right.

But in this line of work, with you and I exploring

all sorts of things from the paranormal and the unknown to true crime and the unsolved cases

...