The disappearance of Susan Thomson leaves more questions than answers

Australian True Crime

Meshel Laurie

True Crime

4.6 • 979 Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Susan Warren, 15 years old in the year of 1965, ran away with a man 8 years her senior, Arthur Thomson.

The next 34 years of her life are quite frankly, a complete mystery.

She had no friends, no community, and hardly any family contact.

In fact, her life was so isolated that when she went missing in 1999, there wasn’t a missing persons report with the police until 2006.

And this wasn’t because Arthur reported her missing - it was actually the subsequent result after both he and his mother, were found dead in their rural Queensland home.

Searching through his “museum like” house, full of antique furniture with their price tags still attached, they found an old letter from Susan that she had addressed to her mother.

This letter indicated that she had not just ran away, as Arthur had fleetingly suggested to the community years prior.

The complete mystery of Susan’s life and disappearance has always stuck with crime and investigative journalist, Paula Doneman, who is our guest for today’s episode.

For Support:

Lifeline on 13 11 14

13 YARN on 13 92 76 (24/7 crisis support phone line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples)

1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732

CREDITS:

Host: Meshel Laurie. You can find her on Instagram

Guests: Paula Doneman. Her twitter handle is @pauladoneman. Here is the link to her original article on Susan Thomson

Executive Producer/Editor: Matthew Tankard

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We're bringing Australian True Crime live to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne this July,
0:04.3	and I have to tell you that Brisbane sold out already.
0:07.4	Good for you, Brisbane, so we've quickly added a second show.
0:10.3	Now we can't keep adding more shows, so please make sure you get your tickets. Our special guests,
0:15.2	our forensic criminologist Santee Mallet in Brisbane and Sydney and the one and only Charlie Bazzina in
0:19.9	Melbourne. There'll be a Q&A of course so you can ask your own burning questions on the night but you have to book quickly.
0:26.0	This is a true crime podcast as the title suggests.
0:29.0	So please consider this your warning that it's not suitable for children and it probably will
0:33.8	contain content that may be triggering to some people. Also it's an Australian
0:38.3	true crime podcast so Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
0:41.9	listeners should be aware it may contain the voices of deceased people.
0:47.0	The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded.
0:59.4	They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.
1:07.0	And when they walked in, they found this note above the electricity meter and it said,
1:13.6	Ring triple O, we are both dead,
1:16.6	mom in bedroom, me in shed.
1:32.0	journalist Paula Donovan has been writing about crime for decades, including a stint as the ABC's Queensland crime editor. She's covered literally thousands of crimes
1:34.6	over the course of her career, but the one that stays with her isn't the most
1:38.1	violent or the most infamous. In fact, it's a story that not everyone is convinced includes a crime at all.
1:46.4	In 2006, a man took his own life on his remote country property.
1:51.9	Even in his final moments, Arthur Thompson took steps to control
1:55.2	every element of the situation and the narrative that would follow, but he seems to
	...

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