Karina Berger

I just think it's all so cruel.

How would you have been trying to protect him? [gentle music] Long before hitting the ground in Bendigo, Karina and I spent many hours reading large files of evidence from this case.

We agreed about the significance of one woman who was very close to Roz.

Roz had confided a lot to her.

The Herald Sun published a photograph of Ray and Ros, and an amber-colored glass bottle of strychnine was inserted between the married couple.

There is a prominent poison warning on the bottle in the illustration that went with Andrew Rule's story.

[gentle music] Karina and I had also listened to Andrew Rule's one-off podcast episode about this case.

Here's an excerpt from that.

How would you have been trying to protect him? [dramatic music] Sometimes the best laid plans in journalism can go awry, and you can question whether those plans were just wishful thinking in the first place.

On a chilly morning, a month before the first episode in this podcast series, Karina Berger and I stood at the front door of Donna Minalic's home.

In a lengthy off-the-record conversation in this home the night before, we had answered Donna's questions while explaining our commitment to this long unsolved case.

We told her about the research that we had done already, the brief of evidence that we had studied, the interviews we'd done, and how we had spoken to her mother, Glenys, and stepfather, Alf, from whom Donna has been estranged for many years.

And at the end of the night, Donna agreed to be interviewed by us the next morning.

She would talk about the girl she was in 1986, about her friend Rosalind and Ros' husband, Ray McQueen, and a murder investigation in which Donna became one of the suspects.

Karina and I knew it would be a difficult morning.

We came forearmed with microphones, laptops, a mental checklist of topics and questions, and cakes from the local cafe.