The Luna Park Ghost Train Fire

​There is a specific kind of thrill we look for in a dark ride. We willingly plunge into the pitch black, waiting for the jump scare, knowing that eventually, the track leads back out into the light.

But on the freezing night of June 9th, 1979, the fake monsters inside Sydney’s Luna Park Ghost Train were replaced by a very real, lethal threat.

​This week on Homocidal Tendency, we head to the neon-lit, gritty waterfront of 1970s Sydney, Australia, to uncover a mass-casualty event that was quickly swept under the rug by a deeply corrupt police force. 

We discuss how a beloved amusement park became a death trap, and how the tragedy leads directly back to Abe Saffron an untouchable mafia kingpin who built his underworld empire by exploiting and weaponizing the city's marginalized queer community.

​Sometimes, the real monsters don't live in the haunted house. Sometimes, they own the deed to the property.

Sources & Further Deep Dives:

• ​Documentary: Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2021). A groundbreaking investigative series that blew the lid off the police cover-up.
• ​News Report: Claims Sydney underworld figure Abe Saffron orchestrated Luna Park Ghost Train Fire (ABC News).
• ​Documentary: King of the Cross: Abe Saffron - For a closer look at the sheer scale of the corruption and the empire Saffron built in Kings Cross.

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Transcript

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There's a specific kind of throw we look for when we strap ourselves into a dark ride. We willingly surrender our control, plunging into the pitch black, waiting for the sudden drop, the sharp turn, or the mechanical skeleton popping out of the shadows. We love the adrenaline because deep down we know we're safe. We know the track eventually leads back out into the light. But what happens when the fake monsters are replaced by a very real, very lethal threat? It's the night of June 9th, 1979. The neon lights of Sydney's Luna Park reflect off the harbor. Towering over the entrance is the park's iconic, massive smiling face of a giant, grinning clown that swallows a visitor's hole. Inside the park, the ghost train is running at full capacity. It's a classic narrow gauge wooden labyrinth of tight corners and cheap thrills. At ten fifteen PM, ride operators notice something wrong. Thick black smoke begins billowing out of the exit. Inside, the cheap wooden props and fake cobwebs are acting as a perfect kindling. The claustrophobic twisting corridors meant to disorient writers are now doing their job a little too well. By the time the smoke clears, the charred skeletal remains of the ghost train will stand as a decaying monument on the waterfront, the site where seven people never made it to the end of the track. The authorities will quickly call it a tragic electrical fault, but the truth will reveal how incredibly wrong they were. Understand the terror of the ghost train fire, you first have to understand the eerie, almost surreal atmosphere of Luna Park in the late 1970s. If you could take an urban exploration photography trip back in time, 1970s Luna Park would be the absolute holy grail. Opened in 1935 at the foot of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, it was built in the classic art deco style of Coney Island. The park's entrance is legendary, a massive, towering clown face with a wide, manic, nine-meter smile that visitors literally have to walk through to enter the grounds. By 1979, the pristine 1930s glamour had faded into a gritty, slightly decaying retro aesthetic that felt deeply cinematic. The Ghost Train was an opening day original from 1935. It was a masterpiece of old school, tactile Halloween horror. It wasn't modern, it wasn't sanitized, it was a labyrinth of highly combustible timber, canvases, and cheap thrills. Riders would climb into small, heavy wooden cars shaped like train engines and be violently jerked through a set of crash doors painted with the words Hell's Doorway. The ride was a 180 meter narrow gauge electrical track that whipped passengers through sudden, disordering 180-degree turns in absolute pitch darkness. The interior was lined with classic mechanical jump scares triggered by the cars rolling over floor switches. Riders would be assailed by dancing skeletons, an ape monster, a jarring dragon's head, and Dracula rising out of the graveyard. Deep inside the twisting tunnels was one of the primary focal points, which was a glowing, mechanical, fake fireplace prop. Tragically, multiple witnesses later reported that this exact prop is where they first spotted the real flames taking hold. Leading up to the night of June 9th, there were massive glaring red flags that Luna Park was a disaster waiting to happen. The park was struggling financially and the infrastructure was crumbling. Just two months before the ghost train fire, in April 1979, a section of track on the park's massive wooden roller coaster, the Big Dipper, it came loose. One coaster train stalled and another slammed directly into the back of it, injuring 13 people. Despite the ghost train being a completely enclosed wooden structure filled with terrified patrons in the dark, the right had no sprinkler system, no emergency lighting, and no comprehensive evacuation plan. But we need to look at the bigger picture to understand how seven people were left to burn in the dark. You have to look past the postcard version of 1979 Sydney. Across the water, the gleaming white sails of the newly built opera house caught the harbor lights. But just a few miles away was King's Cross, the city's neon soaked red light district. It was a thriving, chaotic hub of drag clubs, illegal casinos, and underground gay bars. But that's just a taste. We'll get into that a little bit later in depth. Let's get back to Milson's point, the literal footprint of Luno Park. This wasn't just a nostalgic carnival, it was some of the most insanely valuable real estate in the entire southern hemisphere. It offered dead center and unobstructed views of the harbor. For a developer looking to build luxury high-rises or a casino, Luna Park was standing in the way of millions of dollars. And like we said, by the winter of 1979, the park was vulnerable. It was financially bleeding. The paint was peeling, the rides were breaking down, and safety protocols were practically nonexistent. It was a decaying wooden tender box sitting on a literal gold mine. It's Saturday night, June the ninth. The air coming off the harbor is freezing. Inside the park, patrons are packing into the ghost train to escape the winter chill. The ride is a maze of highly combustible timber, canvas drops, and cheap mechanical jump scares. And there's no emergency lights, and there's no emergency sprinkler system. Approximately 10 PM. Several riders report a strange chemical smell inside the tunnels. Some think it's just the grinding gears of the cars. Others assume it's a new immersive special effect just added to the ride. ten eleven PM. A car carrying a family passes a mechanical prop known as the fake fireplace. The riders notice real orange flames licking at the edges of the painted wood. They assume it's part of the gag. It isn't. ten fifteen PM. The riders outside the crash doors notice the thick black smoke billowing out of the tunnel. Within seconds, the smoke turns into a roaring draught of fire. The winding enclosed tunnels of the ghost train are acting like a massive chimney, pulling oxygen from the doors and incinerating the dry nineteen thirties timber in an instant. Chaos erupts. Staff desperately try to pull the heavy wooden cars off the tracks as they crash through the exit doors. But then the most terrifying moment of the night happens. A car busts through the smoke-filled doors, completely engulfed in flames. Staff run to Dalset, only to look inside, and they make a horrifying discovery. The car is empty. Somewhere inside the blinding, toxic, pitch black maze, terrified riders had unbuckled the restraints and stepped out onto the tracks to try to find their way out of the dark. When the fire trucks finally arrive at Milson's Point, the harbor is illuminated by a massive tower of flame. The ghost train is fully engulfed. The heat is so intense the tin roof of the ride actually melts and collapses inwards. Firefighters battle the blaze for hours, but the old wooden structure it didn't stand a chance. By the time the flames are knocked down, the ride is nothing but a charred smoking skeleton of iron tracks and ash. It's only then, as the smoke clears, the emergency crews make their way into the remains of the tunnels to search for the missing passengers. What they find is the stuff of absolute nightmares. Inside the maze, at a completely blind dead end, they discover the remains of seven people. They're huddled together. There's twenty nine year old John Goodson, a father from out of town, with his arms wrapped desperately around his two young sons, Damien and Craig. Just a few feet away are four boys from Waverly College, Jonathan, Richard, Michael, and Seamus. They hadn't burned to death in their cars, and the blinding, toxic smoke, they had panicked, unlatched their safety bars, and stepped out onto the tracks trying to find the exit doors. But the ghost train was designed to be a labyrinth. It was designed to confuse you. In the pitch black, choking on fumes, they had taken a wrong turn and walked directly away from the exit, trapping themselves in a narrow corridor as the fire consumed the building. It's an unfathomable, horrific tragedy, seven lives wiped out on a Saturday night amusement park ride. But what happens next is almost as terrifying as the fire itself. In the aftermath of a mashed casually event, you'd expect a sprawling meticulous forensic investigation. The area should be locked down for weeks. Every piece of debris sifted. Instead, the New South Wales police practically brought out the brooms. Within days before the ashes were even cold, the police publicly declared the fires a tragic accident. So what's the official story? A discarded cigarette from a passenger or a faulty electrical wire in a forty-year-old building? Case closed. Nothing else to see here. Move along. But witnesses who were at the park that night tell a completely different story, and their statements are being actively ignored by the investigators. First, multiple parkours report an overwhelming smell of kerosene in the tunnel just before the ride went up in flames. You don't smell kerosene from an electrical short. Second, and far more damning, witnesses report seeing a group of rough looking men loitering near the ghost train's electrical fuse box at the back of the ride just minutes before the fire broke out. When the flames started, these men didn't run for help or try to save anyone. They calmly turned around, walked out of the park, and disappeared into the Sydney night. The police didn't follow up on the caren scene. They didn't sketch the men at the fuse box, but they did bulldoze the remains of the ride, haul the debris to the dump, and sweep the deaths of seven people completely under the rug. Why? Because if it was arson, you have to ask who would benefit from the burning down a waterfront amusement park. And in 1979, Sydney, all roads lead to Mr. Sent. To understand how a man could allegedly order the burning of a beloved amusement park and walk away scot-free, you have to understand how he built his empire. Abraham Gilbert Sepran wasn't born into a Mafia dynasty. He was born in 1919 in Sydney's Inner West, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up sleeping above his family's drapery store. His mother wanted him to be a doctor, but Abe had different plans. He dropped out of high school at 15 to chase a buck, starting with small time street hustles, reselling used textbooks, and peddling black market cigarettes. By the time World War II hit, Sydney was flooded with American servicemen on leave. They had pockets full of cash and were looking for booze, girls, and a good time. Saffron was right there waiting for them. In the 1940s, New South Wales had an incredibly strict liquor licensing law. Pubs had to close at 6 p.m., a rule notoriously known as 6 o'clock swill. Saffron saw this as an unlimited business opportunity. He would run a network of underground speakeasies and pubs that would sell past like the the cutoff time. But now we need to look at why a ruthless mob boss like Abe Saffron had his hands all over Sydney's queer underground. Jumping to the 1970s, New South Wales, homosexuality was still heavily criminalized. Police harassment wasn't just common, it was systematic. If you were gay, lesbian, or trans, walking down the street holding your partner's hand could get you arrested, beaten, or public outed in the newspaper ruining your life. So the community had to go underground. They went to King's Cross. King's Cross was a neon drenched Bohemian red light district. It was a place where the rules of polite solidity simply evaporated. And right in the middle of the gambling dens and the brothels, a massive, vibrant queer nightclub and drag scene had exploded. If Saffron was the King of the Cross, Les Girls was his crown jewel. Operating out of a prominently placed building Saffron owned in the heart of the Red Light District, Les Girls was a legendary cabaret featuring all trans and drag floor show. The star of the show was Carletta, an absolute trailblazer and one of the first high-profile trans women in Australian history. In a deeply hostile 1960s and 70s environment where cross-dressing was routinely prosecuted as quote unquote offensive behavior, Saffron completely shielded Carletta and her cast from the police. Carleta herself later noted that Saffron protected them from the cops specifically because they were a massive money draw. Saffron wasn't an ally. He was a capitalistic predator. He realized long before anyone else that the queer community was a captive audience. He monopolized the gay bars, the drag cabarets, and the underground bathhouses. He charged exorbitant prices for watered out drinks, and the community paid it because they had absolutely nowhere else to go. Saffron didn't just operate in King's Cross, he was secretly backing the creation of Sydney's modern gay mecca, Oxford Street. He went into business with Don O'Donnell, a legendary tough as nails lesbian entrepreneur, and her business partner, French restaurateur, Roger Testerday. Together, this bizarre triad of a mafia kingpin, a lesbian icon, and a French chef opened a string of the most famous square clubs in the city, including Capricio's, which was a rival for Les Girls for Drag Shows, Jules, and Ruby Reds, which was Sydney's first dedicated lesbian bar. The money that Saffron used to bribe politicians, pay off corrupt cops, and allegedly eventually hire the arsonist for Lino Park's fire didn't come from thin air. It was blood money. It was a massive organized crime syndicate that was built directly on the back of marginalized queer people. But all this is to catch 2020. Saffron offered something the community desperately needed, but couldn't get anywhere else. Protection. And this brings us to the most sickening, heartbreaking irony of the entire story. Exactly one year before the ghost train burned to the ground, in June 1978, the very first Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras took place. It started as a peaceful, joyous street parade. But the New South Wales police descended on that parade with absolute brutality. They violently beat the activists, threw them in cells, and actively published their names in newspapers to ruin their lives. That is the police force of 1970 Sydney. If you were gay and dared to walk down the street, the police would beat you bloody. But exactly one year later, when a mob boss allegedly burned seven innocent people alive in a amusement park to make a real estate play, those exact cops, they bought out the brooms, swept the crime scene clean, and actively intimidated witnesses to protect them. They hunted the queer community in the streets, but they gladly worked for the mob boss who exploited them in the shadows. Because Saffron had the police high command on his payroll, his clubs were generally safe from the brutal police raids that terrorized other venues. He bribed the cops to look the other way, allowing the drug shows and their gunneral bars to operate openly. It was a terrifying devil's bargain. The queer community was forced to fund the city's most dangerous organized crime syndicate just to have a safe place to dance. If a club owner tried to open an independent gay bar without paying Saffron his cut, their venue would mysteriously burn to the ground, or the police would suddenly show up and raid the place, beating all the patrons and shutting it down. Saffron used the corrupt police force as his own personal enforcers. He operated on a simple, brutal philosophy. If you have something I want, I will burn you out, buy you out, or force you out. And by the winter of 1979, the thing Saffron wanted the most wasn't another nightclub. It was the land sitting directly underneath the Lunapark Ghost Train. And that was the spark. Saffron had built an absolute monopoly on vice. He systematically bought up the licenses to all the pubs, strip clubs, sex shops, and illegal casinos around King Cross. He essentially brought the Las Vegas Mafia business model directly to Australia. And along the way, the press gave him a new name, Mr. Scent. But Saffron wasn't a street brawler. He didn't rule with his fist. He ruled with his wallet and a terrifyingly psychological edge. He was an absolute master at finding a person's deepest weakness and exploiting it. He kept meticulous files on the politicians, judges, and high-ranking police officers who visited his illegal brothels and casinos. By 1979, the year that the ghost train burned, the boss of the cross was completely untouchable. He survived three separate inquests into organized crime without serving a day behind bars. He operated under the terrifying assumption that he could take whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and the law would look the other way. And what he wanted next was that one affront property at Nilson's Point. By the late 1970s, Ape Safron was looking for his crown jewel. He had conquered the neon underworld of King's Cross, but he wanted legitimacy, or at least kind of massive wealth that came from legal high-end real estate. And Milson's point, the land beneath Luna Park was the ultimate prize. But there was a catch. Luna Park didn't actually own the land it sat on. It was Crown land, meaning that it was owned by New South Wales government and leased out to a private company called Luna Park Limited. For months leading up to the winter of 1979, Saffron had been circling the park like a shark. He didn't want to run a dilapidated park, he wanted the lease. The rumor mill in the Sydney underworld was deafening. Saffron was secretly putting together a massive redevelopment plan. If he could get control of the lease, he could bulldoze the rickety rides and build an absolute goldvine, a glittering high-rise casino complex right on the water, looking dead center at the opera house. He tried to buy his way in, but Saffron had a major problem. His name was Toxic. He was Mr. Sent. The government couldn't publicly hand over the most iconic piece of waterfront property in Sydney to the city's most notorious mob boss. Saffron allegedly tried using front companies and proxy businessmen to make a bid for the park's lease. But the management of Luna Park pushed back, the deal stalled, the owners weren't selling, and the government wasn't playing ball. Saffron was locked out. And in Ape Saffron's world, when a door gets locked, you don't walk away. You burn the building down. This is where we had to look at Saffron's playbook. Arson was his signature move. Like we said before, through the 60s and 70s, if a rival nightclub opened in King's Cross or if a venue owner refused to pay his extortion fees, their property would mysteriously go up in flames in the middle of the night. It was such a common tactic that Sydney Fire Brigade practically had a designated route to the King Cross properties. Fire does three things for a mob boss. It sends a terrifying message, it destroys any financial viability the current owner has, and it forces a fire sale. If Luna Park was suddenly viewed as a dangerous, uninsured death trap, the current owners would go bankrupt. The government would be first to terminate the lease, and the respectable front company, secretly backed by Saffron, could swoop in and buy the ashes for pennies on the dollar. It was supposed to be a standard intimidation job. A late night hit on an old wooden ride, tanked the park's value, forced the sale. But on the night of June 9th, the plan went horribly wrong, tragically wrong. The arsonists didn't check the tunnels. They lit the match while the ghost train was running at full capacity. When a fire claims seven lives, the standard procedure is absolute. Painstaking preservation. The site is a graveyard and a crime scene. You grid the area, you sift through the ash for accelerants. You bring in specialized arch and chemists. But the morning after the ghost train fire, the New South Wales police didn't bring in the chemists, they run out of the bulldozers. The man who took control of the scene was Detective Inspector Doug Knight. In the 1970s, in the Knight was known as a fixer. He was deeply embedded in the corrupt police network that fed directly back to Ape Saffron's Empire. And the speed at which Knight dismantled the Luna Park crime scene is staggering. Within hours of the flames being putting out. Before the site could be properly analyzed, Knight ordered the physical wreckage to be scooped up. The charred wooden train cars, the melted tracks, the electrical boxes, all the crucial forensic evidence was loaded into trucks and unceremoniously dumped. By Tuesday, just three days after seven people burned to death, Knight publicly announced that the investigation was essentially over. He went to the press and declared it an accidental electric fire. But Knight had a massive problem. There were hundreds of people at Luna Park that night, and they saw things that didn't fit his electrical fire narrative. So the police had to systematically silence the public. When eyewitnesses went to the police station to give their statements, they were subjected to aggressive intimidation tactics. Let's look at the kerosene. Multiple writers who were on the ghost train just minutes before the fire erupted reported an overwhelming eye-watering stench of kerosene inside the tunnels. When they tried to put this in their official police statements, detectives actively bullied them. Officers would lean over the desk and say, No, you didn't smell kerosene. You smelled burning electric wire. That's what we're writing down. If witnesses argued, they were threatens, or their statements were completely thrown out. Then there were the bikes. Cerebral witnesses vividly remembered seeing a group of large, rough looking men in leather jackets, the classic underworld enforcers standing right next to the ghost train's fuse box moments before the fire started. These men didn't panic when the fire broke out, they calmly walked out of the park. When witnesses tried to report these men, the police outright refused to take down the descriptions. They didn't do composite sketches, they didn't put out a call for information, and they pretended these men never existed. The suppression of evidence culminated in the inquest later that year. A coroner's job is to figure out the exact cause of death, but they can only work with the evidence the police provide. And Doug Nice provided a sanitized, fictionalized version of events. They withheld the witness statements about the kerosene, they hid the reports about the men at the fuse box, they presented the Bulldoze dump crime scene as an unfortunate necessity. Because of the police withhelding the arson evidence, the coroner was forced to return an open finding, meaning the official cause of the fire couldn't be definitely proven. But the police narrative, electrical fault, was the only one on the table. It was a masterclass in corruption. The police didn't just fail to investigate Absaffron, they acted as his personal cleanup group. They insulated the city's biggest crime boss, handed him the leverage he needed for the real estate play, and left the families of John Goodson and the four teenage boys with absolutely no answers. Decades later, the truth finally started to bleed out from the inside. New South Wales sergeant Colin Wedderburn, who was the police prosecutor at the original 1979 inquest, went on the record to state that the fire was deliberately set. He alleged that Doug Nye perverted the course of justice and orchestrated a monumental cover-up. And this corruption didn't just stop at one dirty detective, it went all the way to the top. The documentary exposed a Lunapark ghost train fire, highlighted a terrifying web of consequences that allegedly linked Abe Saffron directly to the highest offices in the state, including the police commissioner, a high court justice, and even a former New South Wales premier, Neville Brown. How does a mobos control the highest judges, politicians, and police chiefs in Australia? He didn't just use cash, he used the closet. Saffron ran highly exclusive, deeply secretive VIP rooms and underground mail brothels. He kept meticulous lockpiles on the powerful closeted politicians and police commanders who visited them. He knew exactly who was leading a double life. In 1970 Sydney, the threat of being publicly outed in the newspaper was enough to completely destroy a career, a family, and a life. Saffron didn't just control the city with guns, he controlled it with fear. He held the secrets of the most powerful men in the state, and the threat of those secrets coming into the light is exactly why a murder investigation into the Lunar Park fire would disappear just days after it started. When the people running the state are deeply connected with the man who allegedly ordered the arson, the victims they never stood a chance. For decades, the idea that Ape Saffron burned down the ghost train was treated like an urban legend. It was something people whispered about in the pubs but could never really prove. But as the years went on, the dam began to break. The theory that Saffron orchestrated the fire isn't just based on a hunch, it's backed by a mountain of terrifying coincidences, blatant corruption, and eventually a death by confession from his own flesh and blood. So here's how the pieces fit together. The most glaring piece of circumstantial evidence is what happened after the fire. Lynn Park was shut down, the original owners were financially ruined, and the government had to award a new lease to reopen the park. The company that mysteriously won the bid to take over the lease was called Harborside Amusements. On paper, it looked like a legitimate company, but when investigative journalists dug into the board of directors, they found that Harborside Amusements employed Saffron's cousins, Al and Call Goldstein and his nephew Sam Cowper. Furthermore, Saffron immediately had a hundred of his own lucrative arcade machines installed in the park. But he didn't just want the land. He ended up controlling it. As we discussed earlier, Saffron was the undisputed king of Arsen in Sydney. Whenever a rival club opened or someone refused to sell to him, the building mysteriously burned down. The ghost train fire was identical to his standard operating procedure. Use a fire to tank the property, force a fire sale, and buy the ashes through a proxy company. For nearly thirty years, the families of the seven victims were trapped in a horrific limbo. The police had officially closed the book on the fire, the politicians had moved on, and the man who allegedly ordered the arson, Abe Saffron, took his secrets to the grave when he died in September 2006 at the age of eighty six. Saffron spent his entire life avoiding the murder charge. He died a free, wealthy man, never answering for the ghost train. But when the patriarch of a crime family dies, the loyalty holding the family together often fractures. And just months after Saffron's death, the inevitable wall of silence around the Sydney mob finally cracked. In May 2007, Saffron's own niece, a woman named Anne Buckingham, sat down for an interview with legendary investigative journalist Kate McClendon from the Sydney Morning Herald. Buckingham had been extremely close to her uncle. She knew how his empire operated, and during the interview, the topic of the 1979 Lunar Park Fire came up. Buckingham completely dropped the facade. She went on the record and admitted that her uncle, Mr. Sin himself, was the man responsible for the ghost train fire. She laid out the exact motive we've been tracking. She told the journalist that Saffron had an absolute obsession with the waterfront real estate. In her exact words, her uncle, he liked to collect things, and he desperately wanted the control of the Lunapark Lease to build his waterfront casino. But then Buckingham offered a chilling clarification, a detail that makes the tragedy even more senseless. She stated that Saffron never intended for anyone to die. It was supposed to be a textbook intimidation job. The thugs that Saffron hired were supposed to just sneak into the park, wait for the ride to empty out, light the match, and burn the wooden structure to the ground, tank the property value, force a sale, and then buy the ashes. But the arsonists bungled it. In a horrifying display of incompetence, they let the kerosene while the ride was still actively running. They didn't check the tracks. They didn't realize that John Gutson, his two little boys, and four teenagers from Waverley College were strapped into their cars, heading into the dark. When the article hit the front pages of Sydney's papers, it was an absolute bombshell. It was the absolute vindication the victim's families had been waiting for for almost thirty years. The Mobas Omblood had finally confessed the crime. But the Mafia doesn't like Lucents. Within hours of the article being published, the underworld was panicked. Buckingham immediately tried to walk back the entire confession. She contacted the press, frantically claiming that she was misquoted, that she never said her uncle was involved, and the journalists had completely fabricated the story. It was a desperate attempt to stop the genie back into the bottle. But Buckingham didn't realize one critical detail about her interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. The journalists had it all on tape. The paper released the audio recordings of the interview, completely destroying Buckingham's retraction. The public could hear her in her own voice, explicitly tying her uncle to the deaths of seven innocent people. The tape submitted the confession into public record forever. The paper released the audio recordings of the interview, completely destroying Buckingham's retraction. The public could hear her in her own voice, explicitly tying her uncle to the deaths of seven innocent people. The tape cemented the confession into public record forever. It proved that the whispering, the rumors, and the conspiracy theories, they were all true. The confession of Anne Buckingham in 2007 was a massive vindication for the families. But a newspaper article is in a courtroom, and Ape Saffron was dead. The corrupt cops who had covered for him had either passed away or quietly retired on government pensions. For another 14 years, the official legal records still claim that the fire was an accident. But the people of Sydney never forgot. The real turning point, the moment the dam finally broke for good, came in 2021. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation released a staggering multiple investigation documentary called Exposed, The Ghost Train Fire. Journalists Carl Mulderman Hana and Patrick Bidley did what the New Wales South Police refused to do in 1979. They tracked down the surviving witnesses, they interviewed the former honest cops who had been muzzled by their commanders. They laid out the kerosene, the mobsters at the fuse box, their regged lease bids, and the sheer breathtaking scale of police cover-up. The documentary sent shockwaves to the country. The public outrage was absolutely deafening. In the direct aftermath of the broadcast, the New South Wales government was finally forced to act. In a historical moment, a formal motion was passed in the State Parliament, acknowledging the massive failures of the 1979 police investigation and officially apologizing to the families of the victims. Shortly after, the New South Wales coroner finally requested a new inquest into the fire to finally replace the corrupt electrical fault and finding it with the truth. Today, Luna Park still stands on the edge of Sydney Harbor. The giant, manic smiling face still welcomes tourists. But the ghost train is gone. In its place is a memorial plaque, shaded by a garden, honoring John Damien and Craig Gutson, and Jonathan, Richard, Michael, and Seamus. Seven lives that were stolen because the Crown Boss wanted to build a casino and a broken system that let him get away with it. It's a sober reminder that the real monsters aren't the mechanical props hiding in the dark of a haunted house. The real monsters are the men who operate in broad daylight of corruption, believing that human lives are just the cost of doing business. Abe Saffron tried to burn Lunar Park to the ground. He funded his criminal empire by extorting and terrifying the gay community. And he used that blood money to try to steal Sydney's waterfront. But history has a poetic way of correcting itself. Today, Saffron is dead, and his waterfront casino, it was never built. Instead, Luna Park still stands, and every year during Mardi Gras, the park is completely taken over by the LGBTQ community. They like the Ferris Wheel and Rainbow Colors, drag queens perform on the midway, and the community dances on the exact same ground that Saffron tried to steal. So I have to say I wanted to do like a different kind of case, something different than like serial murder or scumbags just like murdering people for their own means, but this one kind of like choked me up. Like obviously, seven people died for no reason. I thought it was gonna be like a different kind of tale. It wasn't like it wasn't a queer person doing the crime, it's just the queer community backed the crime. But yeah, this case it still sucks and it like choked me up. But thank you for joining me on this deep dive into Australia's darkest mystery. If you want to see the archival photos from 1970s Luna Park, the original crime scene blueprints, and the full timeline of Ape Ron's Underworld Empire, head over to our social media pages. I'll leave the link in the show notes. And if you haven't already, please hit the follow button, leave us a rating, and share the show with another true crime fan. It helps us keep pulling the stories in from the shadows. Until next time, stay safe, trust your instincts. I'm Matt, and this has been Homicidal Tendency.