7: On the Couch with Hamish

0:00Speaker 1:This investigation Who the hell is Hamish is made possible thanks to subscribers of The Australian. For access to additional material connected to this series and all our investigations and news coverage, please search for the Australian subscription. And what were the stories that he told about his family?

0:21Speaker 2:Oh gosh, where do I start? His parents had died in a sailing accident off the coast of New Zealand. Now this story got more and more developed, and he added bits over time. So they died in a sailing accident. He was a kid, like a baby, or two, like a small kid. His sisters, his two or three sisters, had survived. And this was off the coast of New Zealand, where they'd grown up on a small island.

0:51Speaker 1:This is Charlie, an englishwoman, Hamish stated between the end of his marriage to beck Rosen and his time with Tracy Hall. They met through a dating app in London in twenty fifteen, and.

1:02Speaker 2:Then he said this thing about him having to move to Australia and being brought up by an aunt and uncle who didn't like him, but they favored his sisters. They didn't like him at all, and he was kind.

1:15Speaker 3:Of left out.

1:17Speaker 2:But he said he had a very good friend who was one of four boys. And he said this friend his parents took him under the wing because the parents already had four boys in the house, so adding another boy wasn't anything extra. So he said he saw them as mom and dad.

1:37Speaker 1:As it happened, Charlie came to Australia in twenty sixteen on a long planned working holiday. By this stage she and Haims should split up. Nonetheless, they met up in Sydney. He took her paddle boarding at Palm Beach. She was thrilled to be going to the beach made famous by Home and Way.

1:57Speaker 2:And we did that and then he said, I've got these cards that I've got to drop in for my aunt and uncle that disowned me from my sisters. It was on the way there is quite edgy, and it was the whole he was driving around, which I thought was quite a lovely little community, retirement community. And he was going to look at this shithole, look at this ship hoole, Look who would live here? I wouldn't live He I want to put a dog in this. It was very derogatory. It was a very pretty little community.

2:27Speaker 1:Charlie waited in the car at Avalon while Hamish went to visit his detested aunt and uncle. But this was another fabrication. It was the home of his parents, Philip and Anne Watson. They still live there today. Hamish's disdaining in the car that day was directed at them, his mother and father. At this point in the story, we need to talk about Hamish with an expert.

2:52Speaker 4:He's at some level of charismatic person. There's an air of mystery about him that he's created, you know, the death of the parents and a planeh the death of his brother at his hand. All these sorts of things make him exciting and mysterious, which makes him for some people a good proposition in terms of establishing a relationship. Life would never be dull with Hamish.

3:16Speaker 1:This is Tim Watson Monroe, a Melbourne criminal psychologist. He's spent the past forty years peering under the hood of people like Hamish, examining what drives them. He reckons Hamish's almost certainly a psychopath or a sociopath, two terms he says that mean the same thing, an absence of empathy. Apparently Hamish's elaborate constructions were not just a symptom of a compulsive liar. They were part of his strategy.

3:45Speaker 4:Well at face failure, it's a great way to gain sympathy straight up. You know her parents were killed, you know a brother's dead eye killed him. I'm intrusting you with this big secret and that place is a huge onus of response ability on the person who gets that information. Some might say at an unconscious level, in fact, hated his parents and you know this was his way of living out that fantasy. Who would know. I didn't examine him, but that could be an interpretation of that sort of message that he's giving people.

4:21Speaker 1:I'm Greg Barra this podcast Who the hell is Hamish? He's brought to you by the Australian newspaper.

4:28Speaker 5:I think I just.

4:30Speaker 2:I just want to understand why and how.

4:33Speaker 3:He could do it, and like what just what goes on in his head?

4:37Speaker 2:How did he get away with it for so long?

4:39Speaker 1:How?

4:40Speaker 2:There's so many questions?

4:42Speaker 1:So what made Hamish such a pathological lie that he dreamed up ways to kill off his parents by playing and by boat and then run over his twin brother Phil and kill him off too. How could Hamish act as a father figured to teenage Jack raishin dispensing wisdom on manhood whilst keeping with Jack's seventeen year old girlfriend Jane. How could he have an affair with Jane while emptying the bank accounts of her grandparents, Peter and Lorraine Cross?

5:10Speaker 1:How could Max Devida sleep sounding next to Tracy Hall while stealing her life savings? She loved him? Did he ever love her?

5:19Speaker 4:It's hard to gauge, but you can't really love somebody who's steal from them. And there's a pattern with her of just ongoing lies, obfuscation, avoidance. He meticulously avoided meeting her friends and family. He seduced her in many ways in terms of grooming her, gaining her trust, romantic breaks, Admar and Bay and so on. And of course she fell in love with him, or fell in love with a person that she thought he was. But it was interesting that she then said, well, I'm no longer in love because the person I loved was a fantasy. But for him, cold hard, calculating, ruthless exploitation.

5:59Speaker 1:In case sessions with Beck rosen Hamies was able to fool a professor of psychology into believing that he really loved his wife and that there was nothing suspicious in his relationship with her son's girlfriend Jane. Yeah.

6:13Speaker 4:Well, these people are very skilled at what they do. Their stories are well rehearsed, and their body language is well rehearsed, and they have a great capacity. And I said to pick up on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of others. So in that context, you've got to be on guard in relation to the person playing to your own weaknesses. And I mean, look, I've had forty one years experience in dealing with psychopaths, so for me it's comparatively easy.

6:44Speaker 4:But I think if you're not dealing in the criminal milieu, then it probably is more difficult because you take people at face failure and you gather that they're there in the spirit of being genuine and their bone fardies are true.

6:58Speaker 1:What made Hamies such a despicable and destructive human being? And was he always like that? We have made numerous attempts to contact his family to see if they could shed some light on these questions. They've declined to be interviewed. The pain he has caused them must also be immense. However, we've tracked down a number of people who knew Hamish in his youth, including this woman, another former girlfriend, still living on the Northern Beaches. She was happy to talk but didn't want to be identified. She was Hamish's girlfriend when they were both teenagers back in the mid nineteen eighties.

7:35Speaker 6:I was probably yeah, I was in either year nine or ten at school, so I was fifteen or sixteen and I met him. She one of a boy I knew where we grew up. He's a good friend of mine, and he went to Pittwater House as well.

7:55Speaker 1:Pittwater House is an exclusive private school on Sydney's Northern Beaches. At Hamish attending.

8:01Speaker 6:Miss and I started sending each other notes and letters to him and we would talk on the phone, and he was really nice and kind and just a typical surfing boy. He was from Avalon, and because we were so young and had no driver's license or anything like that, my brother would actually drive down to Avalon and pick him up from his family home and he'd drive him up to our place and he'd come and start there sometimes for the weekend, and he sleeps on the couch and then my brother would drop him home again.

8:39Speaker 1:And what can you recall what he was like like?

8:42Speaker 7:Was he was?

8:43Speaker 1:He was he kind, and he was.

8:45Speaker 6:A really nice guy. Everyone loved him. He had heaps of friends. He was typical of the surfing boy. He loved to serve. All he did was ever talk about sirs flirting like he had heaps of friends at school.

9:06Speaker 1:Did you have any idea of what his relationship was like with his parents? Like, did you ever go to his house or did.

9:13Speaker 6:He I think I only went there once. He spent a lot of time at one of his best mates from school from Pittwater House. He lived in Avalon as well, and he spent a lot of time at their house. Was really close with their family. I only met his mom and dad I think once, But there was never any indication that he was I assume that he was from a great family. That's what was portrayed. And as I said, he had so many friends at school and everyone spoke really highly of him.

9:49Speaker 1:What was his nickname at school?

9:50Speaker 6:Can you remember Handbure? Everyone used to call him and they used to call him that throughout Avalon as well.

9:57Speaker 1:When she first heard that Handburne was involved in dodgy deals stealing money, she was shocked. She can't remember how why they split up, but they've kept in touch throughout the years, Hamish would always call on her birthday.

10:11Speaker 6:The first time I saw it, I actually couldn't believe that it was the same person. And it's still hard for me to believe that because he was just that's just not who he was. And then even after I read that, I was like, that's ridiculous. I mean, that's when he when I read that, he called himself something else. I was thinking to myself, that's not even his name. And then, and I don't know the time period of this, I was working over Neutrouba at the time. We ended up being in touch again, and he came to my work one day and we were just chatting and we're going to go up for lunch, and then he had to go and I never bought it up with him about what had happened or what I'd read, and there that was the last time I saw him.

11:04Speaker 1:There was no indication of any of this kind of.

11:09Speaker 6:Never shiftiness, never, no indication. And I actually, I actually, even when I was reading it and I was googling it, I actually read somewhere online where people can put comments under news stories, and I read someone wrote something like or handbone, how could you do this? To people, you were such a good kid from Avalon. It was spitted. I'm so out of character for the person that I knew.

11:44Speaker 1:She's not the only one shocked that handbone. The good kid from Avalon could turn out to be such a monster. We contacted the family from Avalon that Hamish was very close to you. They tell a similar story. The father, Hamish's best mate's dad spoke to us us but didn't want to be identified. Hamish saw this man as a father figure. These are his quotes read by someone else.

12:08Speaker 8:He lived down here in Avalon with his mum and dad and went to school with my sons. They were very close, and my wife and I were very close to Hamish too. He was always around at our place. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and didn't do drugs. He actually worked hard to keep his mates off the drugs and everything. He was a good boy. The Hamish I knew was not the Hamish of now. What I can't understand, and what all his friends can't understand, is why he started to rip people off. And I know the Canadian government are looking for him and he could certainly never go back there.

12:40Speaker 1:Several people have told me that Hamish's parents were cold and distant, and he concurs with that assessment. I asked if Hamish had a good relationship with his father.

12:49Speaker 8:No, no, he didn't. He came up to our place one night and he said he was in tears and he said, and that wasn't Hamish. Hamish was a tough guy. He said, I've just come home. There's a sign on the front lawn to say that the house is for sale, and Mum and dad didn't tell me anything about it. They're moving up to up to North Sydney to be closer to the city, or one thing or another. His father was an insurance man.

13:13Speaker 1:I think Hamish moved in with this man and his family when his parents sold the house. Far from being the brilliant mathematical mind sought out by Nassa, Hamish was a poor student and he left school at the end of year ten. He was working as a laborer for a landscaper. But this man says he never saw any hint of dishonesty from young Handbone.

13:36Speaker 8:He was always a great storyteller, There's no doubt about it. He was a Walter Mitty. He knew how to tell a story. But he wasn't a crook.

13:44Speaker 1:When this man's son completed his high school certificate, he and his mates planned a ski trip to Canada to celebrate the end of school. Hamish had dropped out two years earlier, but was also invited. He had never skied before and was unsure if he should go. He didn't want to wreck the trip for his friends.

14:02Speaker 8:I encouraged him to go. He was uncertain, but I said, you're a great surfer. You'll pick it up, and he did. The story I got was that he met an Asian guy over there. This guy liked him and he helped Hamish get set up as futures trader. He came back here and that's what he did. His future's business led to a problem with money.

14:23Speaker 1:It was on the Sydney futures floor that this Walter Mitty character would refine his speel. He learned how to turn a trickle of lies into a river of gold. Within a few short years of returning from that first ski trip to Canada, Hamish Watson was stealing millions of dollars, all of it without any real consequences.

14:43Speaker 5:My name's Clinton Free. I'm a professor at the University of Sydney, who researches and teaches in the area of white collar crime.

14:49Speaker 1:Professor Free has conducted interviews with hundreds of convicted fraudsters in jails in Australia and the US in an attempt to understand the motivations of these white collar brooks.

15:01Speaker 5:I guess the classic theoretical model in fraud is something called the fraud triangle. The idea of the fraud triangle is that fraud occurs when there's a confluence of three things, an opportunity to commit fraud, a motivated offender, and a rationalization and ability to provide some sort of justification for what might otherwise be seen as misconduct. And in the research I've done, I've been quite interested in that idea of rationalization, and then have done interviews with I guess, hundreds of different offenders who've been given custodial sentences for fraud, both in Australia and the US. And there is a small minority of people who I think don't require a rationalization, so they're able to be manipulative, they're able to lie, they're able to lack empathy. I think there's a small group of society that doesn't require that, and you know, the term sociopath, I think, is sometimes used in reference in form to that category.

16:01Speaker 1:And Hamish, he says, slots into this extreme category.

16:05Speaker 5:I think people who don't require a rationalization to commit fraud, they tend to be much more likely to engage in significant, forward, really substantial amounts of fraud over very extended periods of time. So one of the characteristics I think that's discernible of people who have taken very large sums of money with multiple offenders over long periods of time often is an absolute indifference to the victim's plight.

16:38Speaker 1:Professor Free interviewed an offender in a Victorian jaile who'd stolen more than ten million dollars from a range of victims. This fraudster saw his crimes as being the thought of the victim. The criminal told the academic that there was a queue of greedy people waiting to line up to invest in his schemes, and that that deserved everything that had happened to them. Professor Free said that among the sociopathsy interview this was common. They rationalized their actions by blaming the victim.

17:06Speaker 5:And it really positioned the victim as being party to the misconduct that they were actively involved, either because they were greedy or they didn't do sufficient due diligence. And it's a really interesting repositioning or reframing of a fraud, as effectively you're placing the blame in some senses, on the victim, and I think there's a certain psychology which lends itself to doing that.

17:36Speaker 1:Professor Free also believes that throwing young Hamish into the baar pit of the Future's trading floor almost certainly exacerbated his criminality.

17:44Speaker 5:What we do know is that there's a very strong association between offending and people who feel that others are offending. So if we're an environment, for example, off in the finance industry is taken as an example of this that seemed to have crimate gene nic elements to it. So it seems to be an environment where there is criminal activity, where there is insider trading, where there is sharp practice. People tend to be much more likely to engage where they're surrounded by what we might call a crime agenic culture.

18:19Speaker 1:Many frauds, does, he says, are opportunistic or they steal for a specific purpose. There's a young mother, for example, who cooks the books that are offered to buy her kids Christmas presents. If she's caught, it's unlikely she'll offend a game. That's not the case with Hamish.

18:35Speaker 5:I think if we think about someone like Hamish, he has a track record of inflicting extremely significant pain, financial emotional on his victims. And it's not I don't think a big leap to think that a relatively short sentence and putting them out in the community is appropriate, because it does seem to me that though people who lack empathy, those people who have been highly manipulative, have betrayed family and friends and trusts, it seems highly appropriate that they receive substantial custodial sentences because the risk to society of people like that is extremely is extremely high.

19:17Speaker 3:He is a predator. If they let him out of jail, it's pretty much guaranteed he's going to re offend. That's what predators do.

19:24Speaker 1:Twenty years ago, this woman was engaged to Hamis Watson. As you can guess, it ended badly. She's had a long time to mullod all over.

19:35Speaker 3:Just because he's not a sexual predator, he's a predator in other ways. He he has the intention, the intentions there. It's all premeditated. It's not just something that happens. It doesn't just like oh I'm going to buy bread, but oh fuck, I forgot to buy bread. I bought bacon instead. Now he has the intention of doing this, and he has done it over and over for the last twenty years plus, So what makes you think he's going to do it and behave any differently.

20:06Speaker 1:We've heard the story of Haims's twin brother Phil from numerous people who heard it second hand. Here is the source.

20:14Speaker 3:So what happened was that I started living with him at Curley and it was Mother's Day, was coming up to Mother's Day, and he said, well, why didn't you invite your mother down for Mother's Day? And I said great, okay, So she came down and the morning of Mother's Day, Mum and I walked out and he's sitting on the balcony at Curly and he had his hands in his lap with his head bowed down, his bottom lip quivering and kind of like just half head half cocked, looking out at the ocean. And both of us walked out, looked at each other and thought, oh God, someone's killed his dog. And we were like, so, what's going on?

20:48Speaker 3:And he told us this story. Okay, So he told me his mother was a criminal lawyer and she had defended or basically she got something to put a big crimine jail. And on the back of that, they all had to go into the witness protection program and they were sent down to Melbourne because their lives were endangered. And at the age of sixteen, in rebellion, he and his brother Phil stole a car Hamish was driving, and he woke three days later to find out that he'd killed his brother Phil in a high speed crash. He'd basically run into a telegraph pole. And he said, I can never go home again because Mum looks at me and sees Phil, and so Mother's Day is forever spent on my own. And my mum and I looked at each other and we were like, holy shit, that's intense.

21:34Speaker 3:Identical twin brothers. If you understand the connection with identical twins, it's intense. So every year Hamish went off to Phil's done to Melbourne. You get dressed in his suit and would be all sad and somber and long faced, and we'd be like, okay, Well, with days leading up to this as well. So he'd jump on a plane and go and sit by Phil's grave and then come back that afternoon and we're we're all sad and somber, and I'd have dinner ready for him and everything, and then next day back into the business is normal. We'd been planning to get married, and I was having a conversation with his sister, Julie Rourke one afternoon and she goes, why won't you, like, when are you guys going to get married? And I said, well, I really want to get married in October, but we can't. She said, well why not? And I said because of Phil? And she said what Dad? And I said, no, Phil as in your brother, as in HAMI. She's identical twin brother. And she said, You've got to come over for a cup of coffee. And I knew at that point my guts just fell out and I've started shaking, and I just knew shit was going to hit the fan.

22:39Speaker 1:And You've had a long time to think about this, Yes, what are your theories on him?

22:45Speaker 3:Right? Okay, So personally, the fact that he killed off Phil at the age of sixteen and was identical twin brother and Phil is also the same numb as his father, unless all of a sudden be I asked you, what was your brother's name, and he's just pulled the nearer, you know, the most familiar name from his memory. I don't know, but I do theorize that he killed off the good part of himself in that car crash. He killed off the part of himself that was funny, that was kind, that was generous, that was loving, that was honest.

23:22Speaker 3:He killed that part and all that was left was Hamish Watson.

23:28Speaker 1:And that wasn't very nice. No, No, But was he also killing off his father?

23:33Speaker 3:Quite possibly?

23:34Speaker 1:Did you meet his parents? Yes? What was his relationship like with his parents?

23:40Speaker 3:Julian Hamish seemed to be close his mother, his father, and his sister Penny were not a strange so much, but they were very cold and distant as individuals, but also with him, and maybe that's because they knew he was nuts.

23:55Speaker 1:Hamish stated a string of beautiful women, including this woman who was his fiancee. She says his seduction technique was simple.

24:03Speaker 3:I was listening to Beck Rosen's account of him. No was the other girl's name Tracy Tracy Tracy Hall's account where she said he was engaged and he listened. In a world where most men just want to fuck you, when somebody comes in and they show interest in what you're saying, they show interest in your hobbies, they show interest in your life above and beyond having sex, it's actually quite a turn on it.

24:29Speaker 1:And that worked for Hamish's fraud victims too. He would learn everything he could about what they were interested in, and he would talk to them about it. He would listen to what they had to say. He would make people believe he was their best friend. And the sex, yeah.

24:44Speaker 3:Well, it wasn't exactly sexually wonderful or intimate kind of relationship.

24:49Speaker 1:Charlie the english woman who dated Hamish in twenty fifteen, so she picked him as being odd early in their relationship, but was still fascinated by him.

25:00Speaker 9:I think I was intrigued.

25:03Speaker 2:I was very intrigued. I'd ever come across someone quite like this before. I think I knew there was something not quite right, but I knew I didn't feel physically threatened at all. I knew there wasn't an aggression there. I felt physically safe, and he wasn't pushing for any sort of sexual intimacy at all. So I didn't feel, you know, the normal red flags that women would have, like in terms of their physical well being. They weren't being raised. It was something else that was odd, But I felt safe.

25:35Speaker 1:He was in his late forties, she was in the late twenties. Charlie says the six on the rare occasions they were intimate, was like luster.

25:44Speaker 2:Not weird, just really vanilla, really basic, almost weird to the point where it was almost like having being with a virgin, someone who didn't know what they were doing, someone who and he would always have a shower first. Was really funny about that. But it was like being with like a teenage boy actually, someone who wasn't particularly confident. Sometimes he wouldn't take his top off most of the time, actually, I think, and I remember it being very vanilla, very basic and and kind yeah, kind of being like with someone who doesn't really know what they're doing. I do remember when we were in Thailand. I was quite annoyed by the end the end of like the last day or two, because there hadn't been I mean, I wanted to and there hadn't been anything from his side, and he sat there and he'd been reading this science fiction book and he'd gone if just read one hundred pages today, proud of himself.

26:47Speaker 3:It's like, and.

26:50Speaker 2:Yeah, I just said, I'm I'm sorry. I'm a bit annoyed. Like we've been here for you know. I think we were out there for like maybe seven or eight days, and it was like day six and I was like, what's going on? And then he was like, well, why didn't you say Nathan.

27:04Speaker 1:He's another woman who dated Hamish around twenty fourteen. They met at a cafe in Sydney.

27:10Speaker 9:It was when he was living down in Wilmorton.

27:14Speaker 7:And it was funny because at the time, I mean, it's a bit of a long, long, short winded story. Throughout the time, I did feel like something wasn't quite right.

27:24Speaker 9:I actually said to my friends at the time, I think he might be.

27:27Speaker 7:Married, like or something, because he just keeps going outside all the time and having conversations that I can't hear.

27:33Speaker 1:This woman didn't want to be identified, but she sent his favor she had of Hamish on her phone.

27:39Speaker 7:He told me that he he well, similar to the other stories that his parents had died in a.

27:47Speaker 9:Plane crash.

27:49Speaker 7:He told me that he had gosh, so many things that his family was the McLaren Racing team and owned the McLaren Racing team.

28:02Speaker 9:And I found that.

28:04Speaker 7:I was I was like, oh wow, you know, but then you know, naturally someone of that status if you google them and see that, you find.

28:11Speaker 9:A picture of them associated with that brand, and there was nothing. So a couple of my friends an all. That's a bit weird. But he was so charming, and he was so I I'm sure he was just so he was so convincing.

28:25Speaker 1:It only lasted a few months, and as for the six, there just wasn't any none.

28:31Speaker 9:We never were intimate. He I you know, questioned about a few.

28:37Speaker 7:Times because obviously that's quite a natural progression in a relationship, and he basically said, you know, he'd done that in every other relationship and it didn't work out for him, so.

28:47Speaker 9:We wanted to try something different, yes, or like.

28:52Speaker 7:Waiting a while, so like that, the intimacy piece was definitely not there.

28:59Speaker 9:He wasn't he was them.

29:01Speaker 7:He wasn't a particularly affectionate person, but he was just really I suppose the one thing that kept you there was that he was just really engaged, you know, he was always really involved. He wanted to you know, he loved to talk and to listen, so yeah, great listeners. But yeah, in terms of yeah, there was no sexual relations to that, which I always thought was really odd.

29:23Speaker 9:Look towards the end, like I.

29:25Speaker 7:Actually remember sending him a text at the end of it saying I don't actually think you are who you say you are. I was actually quite freaked out at the end because I was like, Wow, I've just spent a couple of months with someone and I have absolutely no idea who they are.

29:38Speaker 1:It might be time to call in the expert again. He's Tim Watson Monroe.

29:43Speaker 4:Often they avoid intimacy because they can't connect emotionally with people.

29:47Speaker 1:One of his girlfriends kind of said it was almost kind of amateuri that there was no connection, that it was like kind of having sex with the sixteen year old boy for the first time. You know that there was no he didn't really know what he was doing.

30:00Speaker 4:It would be consistent I think with somebody that can't cope with intimacy. It's more mechanical, it's more physical, and if you don't look into the eyes of your lover because you're avoiding that, they don't want to be discovered either, so they tend to objectify their victims. That is, they deal with them as objects rather than as people, and so they avoid intimacy like that at all costs when it's real love intimacy.

30:28Speaker 1:Tim says it's safe to diagnose Homish as a psychopath.

30:32Speaker 4:Well, I haven't examined him, but he's very typical of con men, but probably in the top point one percent in terms of his ability to dupe others. You're dealing with somebody here who is capable of considerable forward planning, a well established track record and historical one that dates back to at least the time that he was working in the stock market, and he's fine tuned his skills over the years. With mostpaths, they have a great capacity to zone in on the weaknesses of the flaws or the vulnerabilities of their victims, and he does this with immense capacity in terms of what he's done over the years.

31:15Speaker 1:So if you were going to interview him in jail today, what would you be asking him? What would you want to know?

31:21Speaker 4:My first question with most psychopaths, or sociopaths as they're known, is how do you feel about what you've done? And that often gives you some insight whether they have empathy, whether they have insight, and whether they have remorse. Quite often people will feign remorse. But I think if you look at his history over many years, the amounts of money involved, not just in Australia but around the globe. Really it's a rhetorical question. He may say that he feels very sorry, but his actions over the years have demonstrated a continued desire and capacity to commit the crimes that he has with Tracy.

32:00Speaker 1:Two elaborate lengths, you know, included clearly having male sent to his address under the name of Max de Vida that he'd get picked up. He would, you know, they never flew on the same plane in case you saw his boarding pass. Have you seen people operate at this level before? Oh?

32:16Speaker 4:Sure, I mean his methodology. In fact, it's quite simple. It's not hard to set up a post box number, and once you gain the trust of people, particularly if they're vulnerable. She'd come out of divorce, of course, was looking for love. You know, she wanted to be in love, and so it was pretty easy in that regard.

32:38Speaker 1:I mean, what made him like this was it was he born this way? Was it something from his childhood? You know? What makes the psychopath.

32:46Speaker 4:Well, in general principles, I mean the jury's art. Some say it's nature, some say it's nurture. My view is it's a combination of both. So you can have bad genes and they can be potentiated by life's experiences. Or you can be born into a very privileged family. You can be loved and turn out a psychopath. Nonetheless, but generally this type of behavior tends to emerge fairly early in life. And it may have been that there were behavioral problems when he was younger, although his friends would be the best judge of that. But it's almost a gift in terms of a chameleon like capacity to adapt to the environment you're in and play to the audience, and he does this very well.

33:28Speaker 1:Do you think that he has his skill on the foresight to have hidden the money? I mean, was it all short term or was there some sort of long term planning that he would have put in place in the eventuality that he got caught.

33:41Speaker 4:Well, you mentioned he played the long game. Who knows. There's no signs of any money anywhere as I understand it. But if he's capable of creating and maintaining such elaborate hoaxes. You would think it's part of the script to have a plan B and to have the money off somewhere for a rainy day or when you're caught. Mind you, it'll be a fairwhile before he gets suspended, as I understand it.

34:05Speaker 1:So he was a mentor to Jack Rose and the boy Jack. He looked up to him, and I think you've heard that. You know, the Jack's kind of clear, But I just want to understand what makes him tick? Is there just nothing to understand? He was just a selfish, you know, psychopath.

34:24Speaker 4:Well he's bad, he's not mad, He's in touch with what he's doing. It's well planned. There are a lot of people like this out there, and sadly for Jack, he's a victim. And there's nothing much more to understand beyond that. I mean, the great heartbreak for these people is that they entrust their souls to the perpetrator. They believe in them, and it comes as a really brutal awakening when they realize they've been duped and robbed.

34:55Speaker 1:Is there any chance of redemption?

34:57Speaker 4:I can't speak about him, but given in general principles, the protracted nature of this type of offending, the calculated way in which it has been done. I'm not aware of any expressions of remorse consistent with psychopathic behavior. So without remorse, without insight, and without empathy, the chances of recovery from this sort of lifelong pattern of behavior are remote.

35:22Speaker 1:Tim just just on one other question there, I mean, obviously this podcast has made more difficult in the future for Hamish to operate. Would how would he view this? Would would this be striking his ego?

35:36Speaker 4:Well again, on the one hand, inevitably, because there's clearly a narcissistic tendency in his behavior, maybe he's a toxic narcissist who knows. On the other hand, it's going to shut down his game pretty dramatically, particularly given the breadth of the audience with these particular podcasts, It's hard to say. I think ultimately it's a good thing if people are aware of these sorts of crimes and they know to be perhaps a bit more suspicious when they meet people online or anywhere else. For that battle.

36:23Speaker 1:At the end of their unromantic trip to Thailand in twenty fifteen, Charlie and Hamish were at Kosamari Airport. She was flying back to London and Hamish back to Sydney.

36:34Speaker 2:So we went to the airport and he'd said to me before we go, he said, all right, as soon as we get there, he's like, I've got to do work stuff.

36:43Speaker 3:It is like, so let's just.

36:44Speaker 2:Say goodbye now and I'll give you a call when you get back to London. But as soon as I get to the airport, I'm going to have to be on my own, so it's like fine. And then he just ignored me as if I was invisible after that in the taxi all the way there in the airport and I just kept my distance, and then there was an announcement for his name, and it was Hamish McLaren, Can you come to the thing? And he got up and he went, look, they don't even get my name right.

37:14Speaker 2:He was like, what the hell who is McLaren? They can't even read? And I kept the name ahead, waited for him to be out of sight, and then I googled it and that was the moment. That was the last time I'd seen him on that trip. And that was when the stuff the twenty fourteen articles I saw on Google with Lisa Lisa Ho and I was like, okay, this is the character he is and I was angry. Initially didn't last long because I had a fourteen hour flight that time, but I remember feeling like, initially like a bit pissed off, like how dare you insult my intelligence by lying and lying and lying? And they bubbled up and it bubbled up. And then when I got home, I remember saying, which is ironic given the name of your podcast. I remember saying down the phone, who are you?

38:09Speaker 3:Who are you?

38:11Speaker 2:And he can't give me an answer, and he was flustered and he was going, look, look, it's eight am in Sydney. I've just been for a run. I'm feeling great. The sun is shining. You're in you know, you've just come off this long flight. You're in rainy, dark England. Like that's dreary and miserable. Don't inflict your negativity onto me. I don't want this at eight am in the morning. You're ruining my day. But if someone asks you who you are, surely you'd say you'd be able to say your name?

38:51Speaker 1:Who the hell is home? She's brought to you by the Australian Newspaper. It was written in Braziled by me Greg beer Up and produced by Nicholas Adams Jazz Bar. The executive producer is Eric George. If you know more about Hamish, please contact us at Hamish podcast at the Australian dot com dot you. You can subscribe to this series in your podcast up of choice to keep track of all future episodes. To learn more about our investigation, head to who the hell is Hamish dot com dot au.

39:23Speaker 1:They will also find additional material, including this week's bonus episode, an extended interview with criminal psychologists Kim Watson Munroe