Shortcut: The Unsolved Murder of German Backpacker Simone Strobel

Meshel Laurie (0:00)

This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. In 2005, 25-year-old German backpacker Simone Strobel disappeared from a caravan park in Lismore, New South Wales. Six days later, her body was found hidden beneath palm fronds, and despite a lengthy investigation, nobody has been convicted of her murder. In the ABC's Unravel podcast, Lies in Lismore, investigative journalist Richard Baker reexamines the case, uncovering alleged confessions, questions about the police investigation, and new revelations uncovered more than two decades later. Richard Baker joins us to discuss the case and his search for answers in the death of Simone Strobel. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

You demonstrate how our opinions are cultivated and changed by the media. For example, a person who I would say is one of the sort of central figures of the podcast, Tobias Suckfuhl, that's his beautiful German name. He's also known as Toby Moran now.

I was well and truly in the cohort back in the day that, oh, it's the boyfriend. It's something dodgy about this guy, you know, classic last words, the last one to see her. She stomped away from an argument and we've never seen her again kind of vibes.

SPEAKER_2 (1:31)

In 2005, the couple was backpacking around Australia. And this is one of the last time Simone was seen alive, leaving a pub in Lismore before her naked body was found beneath Palm Frons near a caravan park.

Council assisting Philip Strickland told the Inquest on the night of Simone's death, witnesses heard screaming and shouting, leave me alone and why should I? But there was insufficient evidence the person screaming was Simone.

Meshel Laurie (1:59)

But then you bring him back to speak for himself, and I feel completely differently about him. But he now admits completely that he lied to police early on in the investigation. What can you tell us about those lies and why he told you that he lied to them?

Richard Baker (2:16)

And these are the fundamental reasons why police were so suspicious of him. So his lies were this, that he and Simone hadn't been arguing, when in fact they had, that no one in the group was drunk, now they were, and that no one had had any drugs. So there was some marijuana passed around the campsite where they were that night, Simone walked off. And then the other sort of lie or the thing he did was, they had two other German friends, Tobias' sister, Katrin, and a mutual friend called Jens, traveling with them at the time Simone disappeared. And Tobias, once he'd given his version of offense to police, including those lies, he asked them to back him up and tell the same lies.

Tobias, I asked him, obviously, why did you say these things? And his story has been, and he maintains, was that throughout the course of the day, so he reported Simone missing the morning after she walked off and never came back to their campsite. And he had several interactions with police that day.

And he got a creeping feeling that they were not taking her disappearance seriously enough in that he felt they were treating her like she was a local young woman who might have had a few too many and had a stash with her boyfriend and gone off to see some friends or whatever to a nearby town. Stay with people she knew just to blow off some steam and let things cool down. And his point was, no, you don't understand, you don't know her. This is totally out of character for her to do this. We don't know anyone. Where would she have gone? She had no money, she had no shoes on. And all of those points. And so his reason for the lies was to try and sharpen up the police response to say, no, no, something's wrong here. This needs serious investigation and right now.

Whatever the reasons for that six-day delay, I mean, I think that is a big reason why Simone's case is unsolved, because those six days and that humid weather at the time of year caused a lot of decomposition with Simone's body and a lot of forensic evidence to be not able to be found.

Meshel Laurie (4:45)

What's the evidence around the location of her remains? Does the evidence suggest that her remains were there for that entire six days or do they think that it was moved there at some point?

Richard Baker (4:56)

It's a really good question. I've wondered that during the course of making this myself. Now, the police's theory has always been that Simone was killed or killed in the caravan park and then transported to that location and remaining there for the time after. There's never been any deviation in the police mind that Simone was killed from 12:30 AM. So early in the morning, she went missing around 11.3 to 5.3 in the morning. So in that window of time, I wondered though, is it possible for her to have been abducted, taken, held somewhere else and then put back there, perhaps after people have observed police search that area and think, they won't look there again.