Guest
Meni Caroutas
Episode Number
№2
Meni Caroutas is a former police officer, investigative journalist, author and true-crime storyteller whose career has been built around one persistent question: what happened to the people who simply disappeared?
Meni began his working life in policing, serving at Kings Cross during the 1980s, an environment that exposed him early to crime, vulnerability and the complicated realities that often sit behind a headline.
He later moved into journalism, bringing that firsthand understanding of policing into television and investigative reporting.
His media career has included work on Channel 10’s Hard Copy and Channel Nine’s Missing Persons Unit, as well as appearances across Australian true-crime programs, podcasts and media.
But it is his work on missing-person cases that has become the defining thread.
Meni is the host of The Missing Australia, a true-crime podcast that has attracted millions of downloads and repeatedly ranked among Australia’s leading programs in the genre.
Rather than treating missing-person cases simply as mysteries to be consumed, Meni returns repeatedly to the people left behind: parents, children, partners and friends living with the extraordinary uncertainty of not knowing.
That work led to his book Someone Somewhere Knows Something, in which he revisits a collection of unresolved Australian cases, examines old evidence, follows new leads and gives families another opportunity to have their stories heard.
For Meni, the phrase is more than a title.
Someone, somewhere, usually knows something.
And sometimes the difference between silence and an answer is whether somebody is still willing to ask the question.
In The 8th Voice, Meni explores crime, policing, journalism, justice and the human cost of the unresolved. It is a conversation about why certain cases stay with us, what years of investigating other people’s darkest moments does to the investigator, and why giving up on the missing is never really an option.
