Introduction

When I first teamed up with top-rating radio broadcaster George Moore in October 2001 to do the Summer Weekend Show on Sydney’s Radio 2UE, neither of us realised just how successful the show would become.

Within weeks the ratings were through the roof and we eventually wound-up doing what has now become known as The Weekend Show all year round, from 1–6 pm on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. And that’s how it is today.

There are too many individual reasons to list that have contributed to The Weekend Show’s success. But from listener response, there is little doubt that our weekly ‘Crime File’ segment is one of them.

Each Sunday, just after 4 o’clock, we present a 10 to 15 minute abbreviated version of a famous (or, sometimes, not so well known) Australian crime. I read it out, George interjects from time to time with queries and, at the end, we discuss various aspects of the case. Then the listeners ring us up and have a chat about it.

Over the years we have looked at more than 140 cases, and for this book I have chosen 90 cases that I consider to be the most interesting for the Australian true crime enthusiast. Hence the subtitle – A ‘Best of’ Collection.

This is not a reference book such as Australia’s Serial Killers or the Never To Be Released series in which the criminals are catalogued according to the nature of their crimes or the sentences they received. And for this reason you will find that the stories in this book are not in chronological or alphabetical order.

Personally, unless a book is a reference book as the aforementioned are, I don’t like reading a book of stories – especially crime stories – that goes back into history, starts at the beginning and ends in the modern day.

My preference is to go from the old to the new (or vice versa) and then back to the old again, from one type of crime to another, from a long story to a short one. These are the books I find most interesting, and for this reason The Australian Crime File is a mix of the old and the new and the long and the short. I trust my selection of the order of the chapters is to your liking.

The other thing that this book allows me is the luxury of writing the stories as long or as short as I desire. A lot of them are about the length of a story that I would read out on air – say, around 1000 words, or 10 minutes or so of talking time. But with many of the others I have been able to indulge myself and tell the story in its entirety and not leave out anything as I have had to do when narrating it on the radio.

For example, the first story in this book is an exclusive interview I scooped with the prime suspect in the Claremont Serial Murders a few years back. The interview itself is quite long and could not be told in any other way than its entirety. When I did the same story on the radio I could only deal with the story of the murders themselves and couldn’t fit in any part of the interview. Time simply didn’t allow. Now the story appears in this book as it should–in its entirety.

Other favourites of mine are ‘Who Killed Mr Rent-a-Kill?’, which is the story behind the demise of Christopher Dale Flannery, Australia’s most notorious hitman; ‘The Kangaroo Gang’, which tells of the Australian gang of shoplifters who cleaned out London’s department stores like a pack of locusts in the 1960s; and ‘Harvey Jones’ Bones’, which is the story of a skeleton that came back to haunt one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters, eventually putting him away for life.

The Australian Crime File also deals with the macabre and the unusual. ‘The Case of the Walking Corpse’ tells of a serial killer whose last victim was buried in the killer’s place by mistake; the killer got off scot-free until he was spotted walking down the street by an old workmate who had been to ‘his’ funeral.

And, in ‘The Kingsgrove Slasher’ police hunt down one of the most feared beasts in Sydney’s criminal history only to find he is exactly the opposite to what they imagined.

And, in ‘The Mysterious Eugenie Fellini’, what could be more bizarre than when police captured a murder suspect after a long search only to find that the man they had arrested didn’t have all the right bits and was in fact … Well, you’ll have to read the chapter to find out.

Yes, these and many, many more tales of Australian crime are in this book, which I believe will become one of the Australian true-crime buff’s best bedside books of all time.

 

Paul B. Kidd

Sydney, 2005