Case 25

Prue Bird

***Content Warning: child victim ***

On February 2 1992, 13-year-old Prue Bird was preparing lunch in the kitchen of her family home in the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy. A friend who was staying at the house went outside to put something in the garage and when they returned, Prue was nowhere to be seen and her lunch was sitting uneaten on the table. 

Investigators soon discovered that Prue had an unlikely link to another major crime. Her grandfather was Paul Heltzer, one of the men arrested in relation to the Russell Street Bombings. What’s more, Heltzer had agreed to provide evidence against his co-accused in exchange for a lighter sentence, one of whom had warned, “It would be a shame if anything happened to your sweet little Prue, wouldn’t it.”

Was Prue’s disappearance linked to the Russell Street Bombings, or was that threat just a bizarre and unfortunate coincidence?

CREDITS

 

Casefile Presents

 

EPISODE:

Research & writing – Anonymous Host

Narration – Anonymous Host

 

MUSIC:

‘Flatline intro’ and ‘Come play with me’ intro and outro – www.dl-sounds.com

Audio production – Mike Migas 

Scoring – Mike Migas and Andrew Joslyn

 

OTHER:

Logo and website design – Paulina Szymanska

 

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RESOURCES

 

VIDEOS:

The Innocent (Part 1) – Australian Story

 

ARTICLES:

‘I was the catalyst’: Russell Street bombing key witness Paul Hetzel breaks silence on murder of granddaughter Prue Bird – ABC

 

ARCHIVES:

Following newspaper articles from The Age:

  • February 18th, 1992, Page 3
  • August 6th, 1992, Page 4
  • July 8th,1997, Page 29
  • September 26th, 1999, Page 5
  • September 28th, 1999, pages 10 and 11

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