One of the best anecdotes veteran crime journalist Paula Doneman shared with me for our podcast episode happened after I’d switched off my voice recorder and as we left the University of Queensland podcast booth where we had just spent an hour talking about Paula’s life and career in journalism. While she worked at the New York Post, the (in)famous crime and celebrity tabloid (which we discuss in the episode), Paula ran one day out the office in a rush to get to a story – journalists at the Post always seemed to be running places, she said – when she bowled into an older man and knocked him to the ground. To her horror, that man happened to be Rupert Murdoch, international media mogul and owner of the Post. When Paula hurriedly and apologetically explained why she was in such a rush to her very powerful boss, he told her to keep on running! There’s probably something profound in that about the recently remarried 93-year-old Rupert (think Succession vibes) but I’ll let the reader decide on that.
The University of Queensland campus holds important memories for Paula, now a Queensland crime journalist of over thirty years’ experience, because it is where she first made a name for herself writing for the university’s now defunct The Weekend Independent newspaper. Paula entered the very small cohort of journalists who can claim to have influenced the government to embark on a Commission of Inquiry – the Queensland equivalent of a Royal Commission – and she did so while still a student at university. “It was extraordinary,” she agrees as I ask her about the stories that led the inquiry, a series of investigative pieces Paula penned on the state’s prison system and the drugs that were running rampant through it, destroying lives and damaging the community. The prison drug trade, Paula explained, led to a vicious cycle where many petty criminals – even fine evaders could be jailed in the early 1990s – would develop a drug addiction behind bars, leading to drug debts and a further cycle of crime to pay for them. Even those prisoners who didn’t want to be involved could be coerced – with threats of reprisal to themselves or their families – to bring drugs back into prison after work release days spent in the community. All of this, including deaths in custody that were framed as suicides, was being done under the noses of prison officials.
Paula achieved the remarkable feat of forcing the Queensland government to embark on a Commission of Inquiry into the prison drug trade – while Paula still a university student.
Was the Queensland government – then just emerging from the devastation of the Fitzgerald Inquiry – receptive of this upstart university student’s controversial reporting? “I was condemned,” Paula laughs. “Publicly condemned…I had police ministers going on radio calling me anything from a charlatan to a loose cannon…it wasn’t received well at all.” Perhaps more concerning were the threats to Paula’s safety in the form of reprisals to herself and her sources. A source told her that a person he was working for “had actually been out to the university watching me at the journalism school, and I thought he was trying to steer me away,” only for Paula to be told in detail what she had been wearing that day. “I was unnerved. I was quite worried.” Ultimately, the commission of inquiry was a “vindication” for Paula’s dogged reporting – “I was so tempted to ring one particular former minister up”, she says – but says it was a “hollow victory” given how long it had taken for authorities to act on known issues in the prison system.
Like many of the journalists I’ve spoken to, cleverness and a dogged attitude in getting information seems to be natural to Paula. Getting information about the prison drug trade included using confidential sources and ringing every plumbing business in the area to find out which one was tasked with unclogging the prison drainage systems of used syringes. Eventually, she got a match and broke a story on it. “You’re not always going to have people coming forward with information initially, or you may not have enough of the picture, but there are always ways to think about how to find information.” This toolkit, Paula explains, was also honed at university under the tutelage of journalism veterans Bob Bottom, Evan Whitton and Professor Bruce Grundy, who emphasised the importance of understanding history and context behind a story. “It gives you much more insight and understanding and makes you better at your job” Paula explains.
Paula grew up in Brisbane, to a police officer father and a psychologist mother, which of course makes Paula’s lifelong career covering crime and the psychology of cold-blooded killers seem pre-ordained. There are other clues, too. Paula describes herself as a “latchkey” child, referring to the fact that mum and dad were often away working and many of the household responsibilities – and a lot of free time – fell to Paula and her four siblings. “We weren’t brought up with any kind of rose coloured glasses on,” Paula explains, recounting an anecdote where her parents once warned her and her siblings to not go near a house at the end of the street because the man there – a known paedophile – “didn’t like children”. She recounts a moment when she was about four when her dad returned home after searching for a missing girl who had been murdered, lifting Paula out of the bed and holding on to her tightly. Paula’s mum worked for a time at the Department of Child Safety and dinner table discussions about politics were common. “It was very robust, dynamic household,” Paula says. Fittingly, Paula loved detective novels as a child and her school report cards regularly suggested she asked too many questions and was exceedingly cautious – not bad traits for a future journalist.
Paula was headhunted by The Courier-Mail after her successful time at UQ’s Weekend Independent – and was met with a frosty newsroom reception.
After her (wildly) successful stint at university, Paula was headhunted by The Courier-Mail newspaper in Brisbane, skipped a cadetship and was immediately put on an A-grade reporter’s salary, much to annoyance of her fellow reporters. “It was a pretty brutal baptism of fire in that newsroom, people didn’t talk to me for a few months.” She remembers a reporter telling her that “perhaps I’d be more comfortable doing flower shows and fashion” but in the end she made good friends there and learned under great mentors who backed her in difficult times. She was part of the original team in the newspaper’s investigative unit with the likes of Paul Whittaker and Michael Ware, breaking hard-hitting news stories. I ask Paula what got her through that tough first stage of working at the paper, faced with not only the grind of daily reporting but sometimes cold colleagues who were jealous of the fact she had rode in as an A-grade reporter. “Part of that is the work ethic that my parents instilled in me,” Paula explains. Paula believes her parent’s careers in the criminal justice system “taught me about injustice, and also taught me about social justice.” She learnt young to take responsibility for her actions and to do her best every day. The other motivator was the death of her brother in a motorbike accident. “That just blew up my world,” Paula says, explaining that it was the first time she truly felt heartbreak. What followed was Paula burying herself in her work – “it propelled me a lot.”
Paula is frank about the dangers of the job. “When you start the see things that aren’t right…as a journalist, we’ve all got that responsibility to do our best to pursue that.” The reality is that “there are always dangers when you’re poking around in places that people do not want you poking around.” Paula’s been harassed, threatened, and even assaulted in a bikie clubhouse throughout her storied career as a crime journalist. She’s always had protocols in place to deal with potentially dangerous situations but concedes journalists are bigger targets now then they used to be. Those early days at The Courier-Mail, and ever since, have been a lifelong passion of “deconstruction, and then putting things back together,” understanding the history and context of the crime stories around her and shining light in dark corners and giving voices to those who aren’t heard or are too scared to speak.
Paula’s hard work as a young journalist paid off and she landed a gig at the Murdoch-owned New York Post, the tabloid famous for its crime and celebrity journalism. “That was another baptism of fire,” Paula explains, saying she went from the premier paper in Queensland to the bottom of the pile in New York. On her first day “I literally had to fight my way” to the front of a press conference because there were so many reporters. A highlight was doorstopping comedian Jerry Seinfeld, an unfamiliar experience for the Queensland crime journo. “I lost my shit,” Paula laughs, describing how she stood shivering in the cold waiting for Seinfeld to appear before having to take her photographer’s camera and run towards him after her snapper went to find a bathroom. Seinfeld was “very accommodating” and probably sympathetic to the Australian reporter, and gave her the heads up for his next move. The US experience was “very different”, Paula says, explaining that the First Amendment meant far more could be reported on about crimes and a press pass was like “gold”. Overall New York was “one of the best things I’ve done in my career,” Paula concludes.
Paula wrote a book on serial killer John Leonard Fraser, a man she says had “no empathy” at all and who she believes she never truly got to know.
Back in Queensland Paula came across a crime that would define her career. Keyra Steinhardt was nine years old and walking home from school in broad daylight when serial killer and rapist John Leonard Fraser kidnapped, raped, and murdered her. Paula got the call about the abduction late at night from one of her cadet reporters and was on a plane the next morning to Rockhampton, knowing she had an incredibly important story on her hands. Fraser had been spotted, charged with her abduction, and appeared in court with Paula watching on from the media gallery. “I remember when he walked in…the whole room changed. He just had this menacing presence. And I looked at him and I just thought, ‘this is what it would be like if you were swimming, and the next minute, you’ve just got a white pointer in front of you.’ I’ll never forget this eyes…I just thought this is probably the last thing that poor little girl saw.” Paula was then chief crime reporter for The Courier-Mail newspaper, so she kept across everything happening in the state, and she’d figured out a pattern. Three women, all with similar kinds of vulnerable life circumstances and experiences, had disappeared within a couple hundred metres of one another in central Queensland. She wondered if Fraser was linked to them.
Paula decided to write a book on Fraser, an attempt to investigative and explain how this monster had moved from place to place, committing horrific crimes, many of which Paula suspected weren’t yet linked to the serial killer. “I wanted to find out about him, because my gut was that there was a lot more to find out,” Paula explains. “And the more I delved, the more disturbed I became.” “He was a honed predator who was able to stay off the police radar” and despite being deemed a psychopath by prison psychiatrists as early as 1974, he served only seven years of a 21-year-sentence and returned to the community, and his heinous crimes. “He had no empathy, absolutely no empathy,” Paula says, saying that she never got to really know him, only parts of him. “I probably learned a lot more about Fraser through his victims and the way he chose his victims,” Paula explains, pointing out how he only chose women who were vulnerable.
Which leads us to another bizarre part of the Fraser story, that of Natasha Ryan, “the girl in the closet” as she was labelled by the media. Nathasha had disappeared in 1998 and Fraser later confessed to her murder, a charge that would form part of a police case against Fraser for the disappearance of several women in central Queensland. The police didn’t stop investigating with Fraser’s confession, however, as the serial killer was known for being a prolific liar. “Things a killer would know,” the title of Paula’s book on Fraser, was born from a list written by police in their attempt to independently corroborate Fraser’s claims. Then, midway through the trial, police got a tip-off saying Natasha Ryan was alive. They visited a Rockhampton address and found her. “I’ve been reporting for 32 years and I don’t know a case where a victim is found alive during the trial of her killer and would become the only defence witness in support of her killer,” Paula says. The story went global, even knocking the Iraq war out of the headlines. Ryan died in June 2024.
Paula won a Walkley Award in 2013 for her reporting on an Australian Defence Force sex ring self-dubbed “The Knights of the Jedi Council”.
Paula tutors students in journalism at the Queensland University of Technology, and I ask her about the advice she gives to budding young reporters. “You need stay at a distance and be objective, because you’re not good to anybody if your credibility and that of your story comes into question.” Crime is a tough beat and comes with the potential for vicarious trauma, so you have to protect yourself. Part of that is pursuing interests outside journalism and socialising with a wider circle of friends than other reporters. Paula also emphasise the important of sources and the sacredness of those relationships, which are threatened in Queensland by an absence of source protection and the presence of coercive tools like the Star Chamber. “In Queensland, we fall short,” Paula says, explaining that she tells students they have to ask themselves if they would be prepared to go to jail to protect a source. “My answer was, I absolutely would,” Paula says. Listen to the people who talk to you – it’s a privilege, not an entitlement – and don’t judge a book by its cover.
The veteran journalist pushes back against much of the criticism against mainstream media and believes the working journalist is often not understood very well. “The bigger picture discussion is that resources … are limited.” Everyday journalist show up and “work extremely hard to get that paper out.” The mainstream media is evolving and it’s still “full of the same people who live in the community, and we’ve all got a job to do.” Journalists today are more vulnerable than ever with social media changing the dynamic of news reporting. Still, Paula, now a freelancer, is excited about the future ahead of her, even if it involves entering uncharted territory. “You have to think a little bit outside the square,” she explains of her role as a freelancer. “Any chance or opportunity that presents itself to exercise your skills and knowledge and ability, for me, that’s what freelancing really has become.” This crime reporter isn’t done yet.