In 2007, 20-year-old Matthew Leveson went missing. It took a decade to find his body.

It’s the 22nd of September 2007, a Saturday night on Sydney’s bustling Oxford Street.

The bars are heaving with regulars and the LGBTQ+ nightclubs light up the street.

Oxford Street embraces many people from all walks of life - it’s a place where you can be yourself with no worries. At its heart sits the multi-level gay nightclub ARQ.

It’s around 10.30pm, which is still early for Oxford St, and 20-year-old Matthew ‘Matty’ Leveson lines up early with his 43-year-old boyfriend Michael Atkins to get their ‘free entrance’ stamp. The stamp will come in handy as a ‘fast pass’ later when the club gets far busier. 

After the pair are all stamped up, they head to a friend's house three suburbs away in Alexandria to have a few pre-drinks before heading back to Oxford Street around midnight. The lovers danced and drank and had a great time with their friends. At around 2am, they were seen leaving the club. But Matthew didn’t seem happy.

He shoots a text to his friend saying the likes of 'Michael needs to get over himself.'

While Matthew seemed to be a vibrant and happy person, he’s not entirely happy in his relationship with Atkins and has even talked to his mates about moving to London for a fresh start.

But Matthew will never make it to London. In fact he’ll never see any of his friends again. 

Michael Atkins is the last person to see Matt alive, and will go on to lie about what happened that night for over a decade. He will ultimately walk free of any crime.

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Matthew was in the prime of his life, a playful and beautiful person with an affinity for fruity cocktails who was enjoying his twenties to the fullest. 

He met his older boyfriend in 2004 when he was only 17 years old (Atkins was 40) on an online dating site called Gay Matchmaker. The pair only chatted for the first two years of their relationship and in 2006 they agreed to meet in person. They became an item and Matt moved in with Atkins. 

But what is a 40-year-old man doing chatting to a 17-year-old schoolboy? Apparently this isn’t the first time Atkins has done this.

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True Crime Conversations host Emma Gillespie speaks to journalist and author of Deal With The Devil, Grace Tobin who worked alongside Matt’s family for justice for almost a decade.

“This is a pattern with Atkins, he dated and who knows? Still is dating really young guys,” she says on the podcast. 

“To be honest, I think that was the draw card for Atkins because, of the research that I did into Atkins' past, this was something that he was doing all the time.”

Atkins dated mostly women in his youth, even holding down a seven year long relationship with one particular woman in his twenties. However, not long into his thirties he started exploring the other parts of his sexuality and one of the first males he dated as an adult was another 17-year-old schoolboy. 

Atkins seemed to gravitate towards young boys who had just started exploring their own sexuality and filled with excitement and life. Many people witnessed Atkins as controlling and possessive in his relationship with Matthew. The older man had even started pressuring Matthew into having threesomes with other young men, according to Matt’s friends. 

While Atkins had a day job, both he and Matthew had begun selling the party drug GHB to club patrons, packaged in little fish shaped soy sauce bottles. While it only started out as a way to fund the pair’s active social life, the business became quite lucrative, and Atkins took it more seriously. 

In the early hours of Sunday morning at 2am on September 23, a CCTV camera in front of ARQ captures Matthew leaving the club, unhappily striding ahead of Atkins. He wasn’t seen again.

Just two hours earlier, witnesses saw Matthew having a blast inside the nightclub with his friends and his older brother Pete who had come to party with them. Pete described Matthew as being ‘out-of-sorts’ that night and was sure he had taken some sort of drug, and while he was slightly concerned for him, the brother chalked it up to the problems he knew Matthew was having with Atkins. 

Texts messages between the couple, just before 2am confirm this with a message from Atkins to Matthew asking where he was, and that they needed to get back to the car to get more ecstasy to sell. 

Between 2am and 3am, Atkins was seen back in the club, presumably there to sell more drugs, but Matthew is not with him. A bit after 3am, Matthew’s friend wondered where he went and texted him to find out. At 3.19am, Matthew replies to the friend saying ‘Mike’s having a cry, he’s taking me home, he says I can’t stay.’

And unfortunately, to this day, that is all anyone can say with confidence happened. The true details leading up to Matthew's murder will never come to light but it all revolves around Atkins, whose lies began the next morning and continued for over a decade.

The Sunday morning after the night out at ARQ, Atkins lays groundwork for his fabricated story. He sends several messages to Matthew’s phone first thing in the morning saying things like:

“Morning baby, I woke up, and you weren't there, just let me know where you are, please.” 

“Miss you xxx,”

“Baby will you please call me, what's up?”

Atkins then texts Matthew's friends, asking whether he stayed over after partying with them. He’s weaving a tale that he’ll eventually tell to Matthew’s parents, that their son went back out to continue clubbing with his friends and Atkins never saw him again. 

By Tuesday, Matthew is expected at work and when he obviously doesn’t show up, his close friend and colleague find this very unusual and raises the alarm by calling his family. 

Matthew’s parents, Mark and Faye are immediately worried sick. They call Atkins to find out what’s going on and Atkins just relays the story he’s made up; that he woke up Sunday morning and Matthew was already gone, but that he wasn’t worried because Matthew had done this sort of thing before.

Mark and Faye immediately call the police and file a missing persons report, during this time Atkins is distant and incredibly unhelpful. His initial conversation with the police is the first time of many that his story changes. 

This time he claims the pair went out clubbing together but he wanted to leave early whilst Matthew didn’t. Atkins claims that eventually they went home together and woke up the next morning and everything was fine. At around 8-9pm on the Sunday, Matthew left to go meet friends in the city and Atkins hadn’t seen him since. 

His change of story was incredibly suspicious, but to top it off, the day after they filed the missing persons report for his partner, Atkins drove up to Newcastle to sleep with a 23-year-old man he’d been chatting to for months. 

Atkins was a prime suspect from the beginning, but there wasn’t anything tangible the police could use yet, until the Thursday. Five days after the night out on Oxford Street, police find a piece of evidence that changes the mostly ignored Missing Persons Report into a proper investigation.

Matthew’s missing car was found on a sports oval, the police found frayed wires in the boot from a boombox that had been hastily removed and in the space it was laying in, a receipt for Bunnings Warehouse. The receipt showed that sometime on Sunday, hours after Matthew was last seen, someone went to Bunnings and bought a mattock pick along with Gaffa tape. The police take the timestamps on the receipt to the store and request the CCTV footage, and the footage reveals Atkins in a pink polo shirt buying the suspicious items.

Atkins is brought in to be interviewed again quickly after this evidence comes to light. The interview is something to behold as he shamelessly lies repeatedly, even in the face of hard evidence. When asked directly “did you buy a pick and Gaffa tape from Bunnings,” he replies “no, I don’t think so” despite there being literal video evidence.

Atkins shows a complete lack of emotion during the interview, yet the interrogating detective claimed that after they turned the tapes off, Atkins said to him “I want to tell you but I'm scared what will happen to me if I do.” For whatever reason, the police didn’t jump on Atkins after he showed this vulnerability, and the squad never got a confession.

Image: AAP

Over the next year, Mark and Faye never give up on finding their son, though they’ve come to terms with the fact that he is most likely dead.

Tobin revealed to the podcast that the parents “felt let down by the police… they were just desperate for answers,” and so they took it upon themselves to find the evidence the police weren’t looking for. 

“If it had been a young 20-year-old blonde, gorgeous girl with a much older boyfriend that had been missing for four or five days, things would have been really escalated by police and by media, but for Matt there was very little that was done.” 

Because of this, Matthew’s parents were out in the Royal National Park themselves, the suspected dump site, knees deep in the soil digging for their own son’s corpse. The pair did their own detective work by narrowing down areas in the 16, 000 hectare park. From making fuel calculations, to noting the moon phase on September 22, they attempted to figure out where shadows would have fallen in the forest to create prime burial sites. But they were unsuccessful. 

In 2008, Atkins was charged and went to trial by jury. This is where the sloppy police work became evident. Police failed to give Atkins a proper warning prior to his official interview, meaning huge parts of it weren't even heard by the jury, ultimately costing them the trial.

There was enough doubt cast from stories created by the defence that the jury had no choice but to find Atkins not guilty. After all, Matthew might have gone overseas, Matthew might have been part of a drug deal gone wrong, there were apparently even possible sightings of him since his disappearance. There was enough confusion that Atkins walked away free in 2009, acquitted of all charges.

He promptly moved to the thriving LGBTQ+ scene in Brisbane, Fortitude Valley and found himself a boyfriend who was eerily similar to Matthew; young, blonde, attractive and popular. 

But Matthew’s parents aren’t done yet. They spent the next few years fighting for an inquest to be opened and for a reward to be provided for new information. 

In 2014, Gary Jubelin was put on the case as an official inquest began. This is when Grace Tobin began working alongside the family to get their story on 60 Minutes. “I think the truth is, Matt being gay has made a difference to how this case has been treated by the police, by the media, by the public.”

Tobin admits she believes that Matthew’s sexuality was a huge factor in the way the case played out, especially in the early days. It didn’t feel like a priority to the police; the media weren’t interested in covering the case and therefore the public wasn’t able to put pressure on investigators to find the culprit from the start. 

It took 12 long months to gather all the evidence to air on 60 Minutes, and once it did, outrage swept the nation and as soon as the inquest was in the public eye and was extended from a measly four days to weeks, and ultimately it ended up running for years.

Jubelin knew they needed Atkins to take the stand to achieve any results from the inquest but because it was not a trial, he was not obliged to speak out of fear of possible incrimination.

“The thing about inquests is that persons of interest can be asked to give evidence, but they can still just get in the stand and say that they object to answering any questions on the basis that the evidence given would tend to incriminate them in an offence,” Tobin explains on the podcast, “and if there are reasonable grounds to the objection, a coroner will just excuse them from evidence.”

There is an option that Jubelin brought to Matthew's family, where at the time that Atkins is called up to take the stand, the coroner can give him a certificate which would provide him with immunity from prosecution.

“He could get up there and say I shot him, I strangled him, I buried him here, and he was covered, he could just leave that day.”

The family were unfairly provided with a no-win situation and had to decide what was most important to them, getting their son’s body back for a proper burial or the smallest chance of justice. The end decision to offer Atkins immunity was based on the fact that Atkins would almost definitely not be sent to prison if he didn’t take the stand as there was not enough evidence.  

But despite being offered this, Atkins didn’t take it and refused to give evidence.

The final option was for the coroner to use their power and force a person of interest to give evidence. This was a legal grey area and took months to be resolved, but Atkins lost all his appeals and was forced to take the stand with the immunity deal. 

Atkins still lied about his story, and eventually his lies caught up with him and he perjured himself. His certificate of immunity didn’t cover perjury, and so Matthew's family finally had Atkins in a position where he would face prison time, only up to 10 years, or they could offer a second deal. 

The location of Matthew’s body in exchange for no jail time. 

“They didn’t want to die and leave their other two sons searching for Matthew, that’s why they chose that option,” Tobin explains Mark and Faye’s decision to forgo pursuing prison time. 

Jubelin has openly spoken about how the way they offered the two deals to Atkins was entirely unprecedented and Matthew's parents should never have been put in the position they were in choosing between their son and justice. 

Atkins was taken out to the Royal National Park and eventually identified where he remembered burying Matthew’s body. Over a number of days, the police were coming up empty until an excavator accidentally knocked over a small palm tree and his body was found. The young palm was only 10 years old and detectives believe a seed must have rolled onto his burial site and been fertilised by his body. 

After a decade of searching on their hands and knees, Mark and Faye found their son’s remains very close to where they had already been looking. Too much time had passed for any forensics to be viable off Matthew's body, so Atkin’s final version of events is all anyone has and it’s an unlikely story. 

Even after getting immunity from any crimes he could have owned up to, Atkins stands by this story. That Matthew came home with him after the night out at Oxford Street and he was pissed off, but when Atkins woke up the next morning, Matthew was dead. He found a bottle of GHB on the bench and claims the young man must have overdosed. Atkins claims he panicked and felt like he would be blamed so he decided to go bury his boyfriend. 

Mark and Faye completely reject Atkins' version of events to this day. Atkins is a completely free man.

Feature Image: AAP.

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