First published in 2019
by Clan Destine Press
PO Box 121, Bittern
Victoria 3918 Australia
Copyright © Vikki Petraitis 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including internet search engines and retailers, electronic or mechanical, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data: Petraitis, Vikki
INSIDE THE LAW: 25 years of true crime writing
ISBN: 978-0-6482937-1-2 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-6482937-2-9 (eBook)
Cover Photo: Darren McNamara Cover Design © Willsin Rowe
Design & Typesetting: Clan Destine Press
Clan Destine Press
This book is dedicated to my dad, John Burke,
whose dinner-table stories throughout my childhood
taught me how to be a storyteller.
1. In the Beginning
I’ve never been inside my own books. Some true crime writers include themselves in the story, but I never have. I never felt the story was about me. The stories I’ve written for 25 years are about other people, their suffering, their triumph. I was just the storyteller. But a funny thing happens with storytellers. We spend time with people who have been through the worst life has to offer and we absorb their wisdom.
I’m not sure why I’ve kept in the background. With some books I’ve written, I’ve even left most of the publicity to the subject of the story, figuring it was their story to tell. But over the years, I’ve realised that my writing has changed people. Not just the story, but my writing, my lens. Increasingly, when I do talks, people come up to me and tell me that after reading my books, they decided to be an investigator or join the police force or become a criminal psychologist.
To hear that my books have changed people’s lives, is a feeling that defies description.
It’s taken me nearly 25 years to realise that the story is what it is; the magic is in the telling.
A student journalist once asked me how I remained unbiased in my stories. I laughed. Not for one minute am I unbiased. Every word, every sentence I write, takes the reader on the journey I planned for them. If my writing looks unbiased, don’t be fooled. Writing true crime has helped me learn about the world.
Listening to people who’ve lost a loved one to a serial killer, or who’ve been the victim of a crime and have survived – they are my teachers. And then, in turn, I teach. Sometimes, I feel like a bee, hovering from flower to flower, taking with me what I learn from one person to the next.
As a child, I devoured books from the moment I could read. Reading transported me to other worlds. A childhood full of siblings and noise, vanished as soon as a book was open. I trawled the house like a reading junkie, hunting out my next hit; books I hadn’t read yet, encyclopaedias, anything was fair game. Birthday money was spent on Enid Blyton books and I imagined myself climbing the Faraway Tree or flying in the Wishing Chair. My primary school library proved disappointing because it had books with boys and aeroplanes on the covers with titles like Biggles, while I hankered for girls’ adventures and mysteries.
By Year 7, I’d grown too old for the Famous Five and Nancy Drew. I prowled the aisles of the Kilbreda College library and spied a cluster of Agatha Christies. My fate was sealed the moment I reached up and selected Sparkling Cyanide. Death by dinner party was followed by clues and finally, the reveal – the person I least expected. The books were the ultimate in crime and mystery for a kid already addicted. (So many crime writers I’ve spoken to over the years list Famous Five, Nancy Drew, and Agatha Christie as the gateway reading that led to crime writing. Just a friendly warning.)
A couple of years after that – in 1980 – Australia was mesmerised when baby Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo while her family were holidaying at Uluru. Her mother, Lindy was ‘different’ in the eyes of ‘regular’ Aussies. She was a member of a religion most folks hadn’t really heard of, and she didn’t cry for the cameras. Those pretty much were her main crimes. As a 15-year-old, I watched the media wield its power and listened to people voice their opinions.
She’d have to be guilty; just look at her!
It was a heady time and the first in my short life where people felt part of a case. From the outset, I didn’t believe Lindy Chamberlain killed her baby. I felt the wrongness of what was done to her. I remember reading the book, Evil Angels by John Bryson and a few years later, taking my nan to see the movie. I laid out the case for the defence to Nan. I’m not sure I moved her from her guilty leanings, but I did my best.
When I began to fancy myself a budding author in my early 20s, I naturally wanted to write crime. I tried writing a murder mystery set in Melbourne, but immediately hit the limits of my knowledge of crime and criminal behaviour. At that age, I knew very little of life, having been to primary and secondary school, teachers’ college, then back to primary school as a teacher. My world was small, narrow, and sheltered.
A friend and I planned to write a novel. We made index cards, wrote a couple of chapters, and naturally, our first roadblock was that we had no idea why people killed. I remembered Agatha Christie alluding to it in one of her books. She said some people simply couldn’t apply the brakes. Did that mean we could all kill? I didn’t think I could.
I went on a quest to find out why people killed so I could write a believable fictional character who killed. The logical searching ground was my local book store. It was there I found a book called: Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess by Jean Ritchie.
Two things happened.
Firstly, I ditched any notion of writing fiction because true crime was so raw and it told the story of real people, real grief, real loss, real horror. Suddenly, the body-in-the-library fiction paled in comparison to the truth.
I became hooked on reading true crime – which in the early 1990s was nearly all from the United States or the United Kingdom. To me, it was human nature to the extreme; people pushed beyond the limits. It had death, loss and suffering, but at the heart of it lay human resilience and triumph.
Author Lisa Cron in her book Story Genius writes: ‘We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.’
I think this explains how true crime helps people confront reality. Perhaps true crime is compelling because we want to know how people survive it. Or how we might survive if it happened to us.
At its heart is a core of profound humanity: the victim’s family survived and became advocates; the dogged detective never gave up; the community marched for safer streets or tougher sentences. People came together to rise up. Good usually won, and evil ended up in a cell or – in the old days – at the end of a noose.
My urge to write soon became the urge to write true crime.
I found a book in Kill City – a wonderful crime book shop (now closed down) in Greville Street, Prahran. The book, by Gary Provost, was called How to Write and Sell True Crime. The step-by-step guide to researching, interviewing, and writing helped me formulate a plan. It