Leonard Lawson: The Comic Book Killer
True Crime with Elli Mac
07/01/26
•76m
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In Australia in the early fifties, one man had created his own superhero.
Leonard Keith Lawson was barely in his mid-twenties when he gave the country The Lone Avenger — a masked Wild West vigilante, riding out of the fictional town of Redrock to make things right. Children swore the Lone Avenger's Code. They wore the replica gun belts. They queued at newsagents for the next issue.
At its peak, the comic was selling seventy thousand copies an issue across Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.
He was twenty-six years old, married with three children, and one of the most recognised names on Australian news-stands.
But underneath all of it, something dark had been growing. Something that had been there for a long time — waiting.
And on the morning of the seventh of May, 1954, it finally got out.
Five young women drove into the bush with Leonard Lawson that day. What happened in those trees would change everything — and would end with Leonard standing in a courtroom, a death sentence hanging over his head.
But the sentence didn't hold. After seven years, he walked free.
He was out for just five months, and In that time, he would take two young lives — and set in motion a chain of events that would claim a third.
This is the story of Leonard Keith Lawson. The comic book killer.
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📩 For business inquiries: ellimacproductions@gmail.com
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📚 Sources for this episode: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J6vSx1GsVzts1o-ZT_-MKMYGmesaTZ2g/view?usp=share_link
Previous Episode
Did Kelly Gissendaner Deserve To Die?
June 23
•92m
On the morning of February 8th, 1997, Kelly Gissendaner began making frantic phone calls from her home in Auburn, Georgia.
Her husband, thirty-year-old Douglas Gissendaner, had never come home the night before.At first, the possibilities seemed endless.
Maybe his car had broken down. Maybe he had been involved in an accident. Maybe he was lying injured somewhere, unable to get help.
But thirty-six hours later, deep in the woods of Gwinnett County, investigators discovered a burned-out vehicle. The car belonged to Douglas.
Then, less than two weeks later, Douglas Gissendaner’s body was found face down in the dirt, still on his knees.
He had been kidnapped, driven to a remote stretch of road, and brutally stabbed to death.Initially, investigators believed it may have been a robbery gone wrong.
But as police began digging deeper into Douglas’s marriage, they uncovered a months-long affair, dozens upon dozens of secret phone calls, a carefully constructed alibi, and what prosecutors would later describe as a cold, calculated, and meticulously planned murder plot.
And at the centre of it all... was Douglas’s own wife.
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📩 For business inquiries: ellimacproductions@gmail.com
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📚 Sources for this episode: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zZ_wUbLyVHqbuA9J2CXHsNRPb7V8dpTB/view?usp=share_link
Next Episode
Killer Grandma? The Case of Sandra Layne
July 7
•54m
On the evening of 18 May 2012, in a quiet gated condominium community in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, a seventeen-year-old boy dialled 911 from inside.
He was bleeding. He told the dispatcher his grandmother had shot him, and that he was going to die.
Before help could reach him, more shots rang out.
The woman who fired them was not a stranger, she was Sandra Layne, his grandmother.
When police arrived at the scene, she told them: "I murdered my grandson."
What had happened inside that home?
Was this the act of a frightened, elderly woman defending herself against a troubled and volatile teenager?
Or was it something else entirely?
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📩 For business inquiries: ellimacproductions@gmail.com
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📚 Sources for this episode: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XcoDYOh9JpHPJEGOGjSQGbAdVCAWrwoS/view?usp=sharing
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