An outline of a body is on the floor. A whole wall is covered in a butcher's paper timeline. Two university students are huddled in front of a laptop.
"No-one walk behind me for a second," says Daisy Nugent, a criminology and psychology student at the University of Newcastle.
"I'm looking at the autopsy photos and you probably don't want to see them."
The room itself is nothing extraordinary – except that within these walls the wheels of justice are slowly turning.
The students are part of the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative that reviews unsolved cold cases as well as potential miscarriages of justice.
RMIT, Griffith University, Sydney University and the University of Newcastle are involved in the project that looks at cases from around the country.
"I think we've got maybe seven cases on the go that are in various stages," says criminologist and associate professor Xanthe Mallet, a project leader at the University of Newcastle.
The Newcastle team draws on different areas of expertise within the university.
"Brisbane is very law based, Melbourne is criminology and forensics only, whereas we have the crim, the psych, the law, and we're currently working with the engineering school to get engineers to do part of our work," Ms Crebert says.
"We're getting every part of this university to try and help out."
The team named their workspace "the room with no windows" and its lack of embellishment encourages complete focus.
"You get very, very enclosed … and very stuck," is how Ms Nugent describes it.
"This is kind of the 'room where it happened', as I like to refer to it," laughs fellow criminology student Isabella Crebert.
They first started reviewing this particular case in December 2021 – and they're still going.
"This case that Isabella and Daisy have been working on for nearly a year is really quite progressed," Dr Mallet says.
"We've probably spent 50,000 work hours on it [collectively] at this point.
"We're just getting to the point with one of our cases where the wheels are beginning to turn outside this room.
"Our legal colleagues have … come in more front-and-centre for that case, and we will keep working in the background."
It's certainly a slow burn. Not like the speed you see in documentaries, true-crime podcasts or online network Reddit.
Sometimes the change has been more systematic rather than specific to individual cases.
"We've realised that even if we can't help an individual client, we're identifying things where there may be opportunities for law and policy reform," explains Peter Gogarty, a criminologist at the University of Newcastle.
The team can't go into further detail about the cases it's working on.
While developments in high-profile cases such as one recently featured in the podcast Serial can happen, those involved in the Newcastle Innocence Project admit to getting frustrated when people expect rapid results.
"Things don't happen in 30 minutes. We don't solve cases overnight," Ms Nugent says.
"But if there is something to be questioned, it should be questioned no matter how long it takes," Ms Crebert says.
