Betrayed

Winner of the 2023 Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime

The relentlessly fascinating, sometimes hilarious and often jaw-dropping true story of two American women who became unwitting drug mules by driving a hashish-laden campervan from Stuttgart to Bombay, then later to Australia, where they were arrested and jailed.

In 1977, Vera ‘Toddie’ Hays and Florice ‘Beezie’ Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera’s nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way.

This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie’s wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, and all that the women faced in the aftermath.

On the ground at the time, journalist Sandi Logan draws from his interviews with those attached to the events, and accounts in the women’s diaries, to tell the incredible tale of an unlikely pair who became infamous and their fight for justice.