Laurie was working as a brothel receptionist when Patterson, a counsellor, was invited to talk to the employees about mental health and self-esteem.

As far as guest speakers go, Patterson was softly spoken but still, she was one of the most captivating speakers the group had ever had. And when she left, many of the women in the room took her number, intending to see her again.

About a week later, during their regular work chit chat, one of the women said she had contacted Patterson multiple times but had never heard back. They all put it down to Patterson being too busy and moved on with their day. But if that were the case, Patterson would not have ended up in Laurie's new book CSI Told You Lies.

A compelling and compassionate look inside the world of forensics CSI Told You Lies sees the media personality and co-host of the podcast Australian True Crime give an intimate look at grief and trauma during major crime and disaster investigations.

She talks to forensic pathologists, homicide detectives, defence barristers, and families of victims as they confront their darkest moments. And as much as the book is made up about the facts of these events, it's also about the people who are involved in them.

Simply put, Laurie finds the human behind the headlines.

"In the news, we only ever see that moment, the worst moment," she says.

"We see the moment around when the terrible thing happens and maybe again around the court case, again a terrible time. We never get to see the rest of the time - what happens afterwards.

"Through true crime, hopefully, we can see what happens next. We say in every episode of the podcast - what happens next? What else? How does it affect your life? And the way trauma lives on is interesting, and I think needs to be talked about."

It's letting people Nicole Patterson was a creative person who loved painting. She sang Tiddas' You are my sister with her sister Kylie. And she was excited about getting her own counselling business off the ground.

And as well as being all of these things, the 28-year-old was the last known victim of serial killer Peter Dupas - one of the country's most notorious serial killers, serving life sentences with no parole for the murders of three women in Melbourne.

Dupas was 15 when in 1968 he attacked a neighbour in her home with a kitchen knife. He was placed on 18 months probation and admitted to Larundel Psychiatric Hospital for two weeks. As he was a minor, no permanent criminal conviction was recorded.

"From that point on, whenever Peter Dupas wasn't incarcerated, there was a certain radius around wherever he lived, inside which terrible things happened to women,"

He was then caught peeping through bathroom windows, was arrested for multiple instances of sexual assault and in one instance he stabbed an elderly woman while he raped her.

In 1997 Dupas then killed Margaret Maher, leaving her on the side of the road and cutting off her left breast. A month later, he stabbed Mersina Halvagis more than 50 times as she visited her grandmother's grave. In 1999, Dupas then murdered Patterson in her home.

"The Peter Dupas story is one I'm passionate about for lots of reasons, mainly the sentencing issues around it," Laurie says.

"It just makes me so mad. It's just such an obvious case of pathetic sentencing.

"Women were put at risk constantly, over decades, when clearly his offences have escalated from the age of 15. And they just keep giving him minimum sentences, knowing full well that he's going to attack women as soon as he gets out.

"It feels like they're just throwing him at us every six years."

Patterson was found on her living room floor after being stabbed 27 times in the chest and back - some of the wounds had punctured her lungs and heart. She was also naked from the waist down, her skirt and blouse cut from her body.

The pathologist on the case, Dr David Ranson, determined that both of Patterson's breasts had been removed after death, however, they were removed from the scene and never recovered. There was also a portion of flesh missing from the upper thigh region of one of her legs.

"We were told at the viewing not to cuddle her," Patterson's sister Kylie said in the book.

"We weren't to touch her because she was so badly damaged she might not stay in one piece."

Patterson is one of the many women featured in CSI Told You Lies.

Included in its pages are the names of Eurydice Dixon and Aya Maasarwe, who were both killed in violent assaults - just weeks apart - while walking home in Melbourne.

It also tells the story of Natalie Russell who was killed on her way home from school on a trail that is now known as Nat's Track. It's named not because it was the place she was murdered, but because it was so much more than that. It was the track she would walk to school and where she would go on runs with her dad.

Laurie never set out for it to be a book about female victims. She set out to write a book about forensics and, in particular, the staff at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Australia's foremost centre for forensic medicine and science.

But the fact is, most victims are women.

"You can't really stray away from it too much, can you?" Laurie says.

"Someone said to me yesterday it's a feminist book, and I was like, I didn't mean it to be but I guess there's a lot of reasons why.

"Fundamentally, most victims are women. There's nothing we can do about that. And men are victims of violent crime as well, the fact is just most perpetrators are men. It's not sexist, it's just a fact."

The crimes, however, are just one part of this book. The work that forensics do extends beyond murder scenes.

Richard Bassed has worked through some of the most harrowing scenes imaginable. Among them were the Black Saturday Bushfires in 2009 and the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004.

Bassed is an odontologist, which means it's his job - at least when it comes to disasters such as these - to identify the dead using dental records.

As he says in CSI Told You Lies, "They don't call me in unless there isn't much else left".

Bassed spent a year working in Thailand identifying people who died as a result of the tsunami. It was one of the longest DVI - disaster victim identification - jobs ever undertaken. Aside from the size of the task at hand, this was also because, in the immediate days following the disaster, the bodies were recovered and taken to a temple - as is customary in Thailand.

The problem which arose from that was that there was no record kept as to where each body was taken from. This meant the bodies found in hotel rooms, for example - of which Bassed says made up about half the victims - could no longer be identified by the context they were found in.

The disaster is estimated to have killed more than 230,000 people, across a multilingual, multi-faith, ethnically diverse and politically contentious diaspora of developing nations that take in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, the Maldives, Burma, Somalia, South Africa and Malaysia. On top of that, the area is a known holiday destination.

This meant that no government was in a place financially that could assume leadership of the job, as compared to the MH17 disaster - which is also covered in the book. In that instance the majority of the victims were Dutch, therefore the Dutch government took control of the operation, with the help of a team of about 30 of the best forensics from across the world.

The magnitude of the tsunami effort, however, meant those same 30 forensics needed the help of about 300 more. This meant that some less-than-stellar applicants were wanting to take up the position, which led to issues such as contamination of evidence and mistakes in paperwork, meaning tests and overall identifications needed to be repeated.

It's all of these extra hurdles - the politics of it all - that you don't realise is part of navigating the job. It's more than just running dental work, taking a DNA sample and running an X-ray.

"It's funny, isn't it? We love forensics in fiction. But in reality, what they do is challenging, and we don't want to think about it," Laurie says. "I was talking to a man whose story I couldn't include in the end because there was an inquest ongoing. But he and I were talking about it ... it's a hard topic to broach, obviously.

"But to be able to say to him that his father was cared for, in that time, was a really good thing. He appreciated that. And I was able to say to him, the odds are it was a caring environment, and they treat him like a patient. And that's the way they think of him - he was a patient.

"It's good to be able to explain that to people - that it's not business-like, they don't treat people like exhibits or whatever. They're very kind and gentle."

Forensic anthropologists are not only called upon for domestic crime scenes but often assist in cases of crimes against humanity, war crimes, massacres and mass-grave excavations internationally. For Soren Blau, the first trip to assist with one of these cases was to Timor-Leste.

The country's capital of Dili was the location for the Santa Cruz Massacre in 1991, which saw many young protestors - who were against Indonesia's occupation of the country - lose their lives. While there were several unverified lists of victims, before forensic anthropologists went to recover and identify the bodies in 2007, the victims were in two mass gravesites.

While Blau and the other technicians were no doubt technically ready for the job, they potentially were not ready to navigate the cultural sensitivities of the case.

Not that they didn't have any cultural training. It's just one thing to sit through a PowerPoint presentation for cultural sensitivity training, and another to fully immerse yourself in a deeply religious society, and - as Laurie describes in the book - "the religion in question is a rather theatrical mix of Catholicism, supernatural animism, herbal healing and witchcraft".

In this instance, it meant that the forensics team had to allow families to conduct their own lines of inquiry when searching for the graves. This involved using a medium to facilitate the finding process by calling on the spirits of the dead to guide them to potential locations - even if there was no evidence that the graves were indeed in those locations.

"She's quite a sensitive person, Soren, and so even now, you can see it in the expression on her face, when she thinks about these families who would say things to her like, 'You're not going to find my son because he came to me in a dream and he said he's not dead'," Laurie says.

"And as I said in the book, she's got his DNA. He is dead and she's found him. But what can you do? And what do you want to do? That's the other question. The moral question is, well what do you want to do? If this man, if that's his belief, and that's what makes him happy and comforts him, then what's the purpose in trying to convince him otherwise? If the purpose in victim identification, is really because it comforts the family in our context, then if his dream comforts him, why challenge it?"

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: