My second book Victims, Crimes and Investigators came out in early 1994. I wanted to call the book Cops because essentially it was about policing and the personal experience of cops. The publisher, however, wanted a title to match a picture they’d found for the cover. It was a woman walking nervously down a dark alleyway.
Even though I didn’t like the cover or the title, I wasn’t about to argue with my new publishing house. My first publisher had told me what was on the inside of the book was mine and what was on the outside – cover image, title, tagline – was marketing.
I had my first ever author photograph taken for the back cover. I also met Shirley Hardy-Rix who was to be my publicist for the book. I visited Shirley at her home. In the room where we chatted, she had a bookshelf that contained multiple copies of her own books. She said it was important to keep a handful of copies for yourself because books went out of print and disappeared. My own library had hundreds of true crime books from overseas and on Shirley’s advice, I added mine to the collection.
Shirley was a great publicist and got me a cover story on The Australasian Post.
A Post photographer and journalist came to my house. While the photographer was taking what would amount to nine rolls of film, my husband chatted away to the journalist. From my posing position, leaning at weird angles, I couldn’t signal to him that he wasn’t just ‘having a chat’ he was being interviewed. Sure enough, he was quoted in the article.
When the magazine came out, it was in every supermarket in multiple racks at the end of each checkout counter. Shopping with my seven-year-old daughter was embarrassing.
‘There you are, Mummy!’ she’d say loudly every time she saw a copy of The Post. ‘There you are again! It’s Mummy!’
Being on the cover of a magazine so widely available seemed to drive home to people close to me that writing wasn’t just a quirky hobby that I worked around my real job. It was something important, something worthy of recognition. Something people around the country were interested in.
This realisation was a little jarring for me too. I hadn’t been writing for fame. I had become a writer because there were stories I wanted to tell; worthy stories, important stories.
Such public exposure meant it was a little harder to keep my writing and teaching life separate. In the days before true-crime stories were popular in Australia, I could understand that a parent might not necessarily want their child taught by someone who spent their leisure hours writing true crime stories. I worked at a primary school – a land far, far away from the writing I did.
The world of public opinion was also something I had to learn to navigate. I had to learn to cope with comments about my books, or their subject matter, not all positive, from people I knew. One person made a point of saying to me, ‘Oh I would never read that kind of book.’ Never lost for words, I replied, ‘Lucky for me and my book sales, thousands of people do read that kind of book.’
In an episode of Dr Phil, he performs an intervention on a woman and she calls him a quack. Dr Phil replies with words to the effect: ‘Aren’t I lucky that no part of my self-esteem is dependent on your opinion of me.’ I loved this – he was saying exactly how I felt. A writer’s self-worth has to come from within, not from how others see you or review your work.
Writers have to be self-motivated and self-driven and if lots of people love our books, we pretty much have to ignore those who don’t. You can’t please everyone. I’m reminded of this every time I go to Book Club. We are all reading the same book, yet reactions can run from ‘best book ever’ to ‘I hated it’. The book didn’t change; it is what it is. The variable is the heart and mind of each reader. And that is something the writer can’t control.
In the autumn of 1993, while I was working on my second book, and doing ride-alongs with the Frankston police to get some life-on-the-beat cop stories, a serial killer began murdering young women in the area.
In my neighbourhood.
Newspaper headlines screamed Corridor of Death! and Serial Killer! and put the fear of God into everyone.
It’s one thing to have an abiding interest in real crime, but quite another to have a serial killer operating in your own local streets.
For seven weeks from the first murder to the last, like other women in the area, I was very aware of the danger he posed. I had read every true crime book I could lay my hands on and, for a while, I thought the knowledge I’d gleaned gave me an advantage. There were reports of the wide-spread buying of guard dogs and security doors, but I’d read enough to suspect the so-called Frankston serial killer would not break into people’s homes, because his victims had been snatched off the street. I figured that if I moved through my suburb only in well-lit spaces and didn’t walk alone at night, I should be fine.
It turned out I was wrong on all counts because this killer had broken into someone’s home, and he did attack in broad daylight. But I didn’t know that then.
Living in Seaford during the seven-week killing spree, made me look at the world through a new lens – one of suspicion. I bet I wasn’t the only woman waiting for my order in the fish and chip shop, casting suspicious glances at any man waiting near me. And I bet I wasn’t alone in checking out strangers in the video shop, or the newsagent, or the supermarket, wondering: Could it be him? Or him? Is it you?
In the middle of this seven-week killing spree I spent a shift with a police officer called Wendy O’Shea who worked in the Frankston Community Policing Squad. It was the evening after the second victim, Debbie Fream, went missing. Her disappearance was the talk of the squad but no connection had yet been made between this missing woman and the murder of Elizabeth Stevens in Langwarrin a month earlier. There was no reason to think the cases were linked.
In fact, when Debbie vanished after leaving her newborn baby with a friend to pop up to the shops to get milk, the only answer that made sense to the police I spoke to was that she must have been suffering from post-natal depression and decided to leave for a couple of days.
What else could it be?
Even so, that evening after she disappeared, when I arrived at the community policing squad for my ride-along. it was clear some officers were worried. Debbie’s car had been found not far from where she was last seen, with the driver’s seat pushed all the way back. Debbie was short, so the obvious conclusion was that someone else had driven the car.
I listened as the police officers around me discussed more sinister possibilities about what could have happened to the young mother.
When Debbie was found murdered four days later, the discussion at the community policing squad was fresh in my mind. The world seemed a much nicer place when Debbie might have just left to have a few days by herself.
But that night with Wendy O’Shea, after discussing Debbie’s disappearance for a while, we moved on to a case of child sexual abuse that she had investigated. Wendy’s case was about a girl called Gemma who was abused by her stepfather. The abuse began on Gemma’s fifth birthday. I didn’t know it then but writing about child sexual abuse for the first time with Wendy would point me in a direction I follow to this day. Wendy’s Gemma has also played a role in fiction I’ve created which means her story got under my skin too.
There was one part of Wendy’s story I’ll never forget. When Gemma was asked in court if she still loved her stepfather after years of abuse, the girl held up her thumb and pointer finger and created a small space between them.
‘This much,’ she said. ‘I still love him this much.’
This comment illustrated profoundly the complexities of child sexual abuse.
By coincidence, I did another ride-along, with a uniform sergeant called Mick – who was also my next-door neighbour – on the night the third of the serial killer’s victims was found.
Despite an intense police presence patrolling the bayside suburbs, Year