Who the Hell is Hamish? · The Australian

The Day Max Died

·19 min·1 clip

Max claimed he watched his parents die in a plane crash at age six, a lie that hooked Tracey with his vulnerability.

The episode opens with a recorded phone call in which a victim tells journalist Greg Bearup he lost approximately 800,000 dollars of family money to Hamish, nearly bankrupt him, nearly destroyed his marriage, and wants nothing more to do with the matter. Bearup frames the series as one that must come in at the end of the story to make sense of the beginning, and chooses to enter through a love story between Tracey Hall and a man she knew as Max. Tracey is described by a friend as a blonde beach babe with big blue eyes, single mother in her early 40s, working at eBay in Sydney. She matched with Max Tevita on a dating app in March 2016. Their first phone conversation lasted 40 minutes as her cab crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge -- Max presented as charming, funny, genuinely interested in her eBay project work, and emotionally vulnerable in ways she found appealing. He described working in The Family Office managing money for wealthy families, studying mathematics at MIT and Harvard, being recruited from Lockheed Martin by Wall Street to write trading algorithms, surviving the September 11 attacks by being beneath the World Trade Center when the planes hit, watching a colleague they were meeting die in the collapse, and being orphaned at age six when both parents died in a plane crash he survived while sitting in the back seat. The detail density and emotional texture of these stories was extraordinary. Tracey acknowledges they were hard to keep up with and almost too elaborate, but she was genuinely engaged. They arranged to meet, texted constantly, and fell deeply in love. Bearup notes that Hamish would destroy everything they built together. The episode ends before the character of Hamish Watson is formally introduced, creating suspense about how he intersects with the Max and Tracey story.

As heard by us

A patient true-crime ending that turns one conman's trail into human wreckage.

Hamish McLaren's deceit is traced through the people left to absorb it, with the focus narrowing on Tracey and Max before settling on Tracey as his final victim.

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Why you'd press play

When you want the end of Hamish McLaren's story to feel painfully human.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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