Author Acknowledgements

Thank you, Cindy and Stephen, for your unwavering faith in my ability to turn this painful story into a book. It has been my privilege to tell your story, and I hope this book will generate insight into a little-understood crime.

A very big thankyou to my husband, Steve, for his enduring patience and endless cups of coffee during the early starts and many nights away, researching and writing this book. Without you I couldn’t have fulfilled the promise I made to Cindy to tell this story.

Thanks also to Gerard Clanchy for promptly answering my emails and phone calls, and to Michael Thompson at the Victorian Court Reporting Office for never complaining about my constant dinging of his reception bell as I drifted in and out of the transcript reading room during December 2012.

Thanks to my good friend and colleague, journalist Leigh Reinhold, whose support and perspective in the writing of this book has been invaluable. And to my fellow writers, Emily Webb and Patrice Fidgeon, for their encouragement. And to my freelance magazine associates, photographer Lisa Saad and make-up artist Julian Jones, who spent an entire day in Winchelsea, shooting Cindy and her family.

A special thanks to everyone at The Five Mile Press for believing in the project, especially publishers Poppy Grijalbo and Kay Scarlett, and my commissioning editor, Julia Taylor. A huge thanks to proofreaders Miriam Cannell and Kyla Petrilli, whose invisible, but painstaking contribution has been priceless. And to Phil Campbell for his powerful cover design, and Shaun Jury whose endless patience during the internal design and typesetting process went beyond the call of duty as he made amendments and corrections until the moment we finally went to press. Like everyone involved in this book, they formed a strong connection to Cindy’s journey, and her story, which none of us will forget.

Thank you to Dr Deborah Kirkwood for having the faith to write the revealing foreword to this book, and to criminologists Judy Wright and Wayne Petherick for your insight into this crime; to Dr Michael Epstein for your insight into post-traumatic stress disorder, and to all those mums who have shared their own experiences to shed new light on the subject of retaliatory filicide.

And last but certainly not least, a huge thankyou to my fabulous eagle-eyed editor, Liza Dare, whose painstaking attention to detail cannot be matched. The many hours we spent scouring court transcripts, or locked in marathon phone sessions verifying new material, make this book a true collaboration. Thanks, too, to your stoic husband Mike, who must be sick of my endless phone calls. A very big thank you to my parents, Tom and Muriel Jones, who spent their entire summer trip down under watching me typing and buried under mountains of transcripts, without complaint, because they understood how important this work was to me.