“I was always troubled that her death had never gone before a court. I felt a reinvestigation could deliver justice,” Teachers Pet podcast producer Hedley Thomas told today’s Radio Alive conference.

“I didn’t have a budget for voice actors so I pulled in people from everywhere, my wife, a friend from golf…” Hedley Thomas told Ben Fordham in a Q & A about how the award winning podcast was made.

“It is the most successful podcast globally, but you didn’t even know how to hit record,” said Ben Fordham, as Thomas told him about the first interview he did with a zoom recorder, without formatting the disk to properly record it.

“Yes, but it was produced with aurthenticity,” said Thomas.

He acknowledged some of the faults in the audio, such as too much backgrgound noise and recording telephone calls while driving in his car. “I should have changed some of the settings to make it sound better and maybe I shouldn’t have put it on the dashboard of the car… I’ve learnt a lot more about how to record audio now.”

Some of the audio was recorded in the wardrobe of Hedley Thomas’ bedroom, to help the soundproofing.

Episode one was put out without really planning the whole sequence of episodes, which was partly because there was so much material and Hedley Thomas did not have a firm plan for thne series when he began, but it was also because he wanted to ensure that he coudl respond to new information.

“It took a while, it was a slow build, but then people got interested in the case and it generated a momentum of its own,” he said.

The podcast has currently been removed in Australia because Chris Dawson is now charged, and will soon come before a court over the case. “We respect the Australian laws of sub-judice, so we had to geoblock it for this country.”

Ben Fordham put to Hedley Thomas that Hugh Jackman is currently negotiating to make a movie about the case, but Thomas woudl not ocnfirm or deny that detail during the conversation.