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Summoned

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IN THE HEART OF MELBOURNE, BELOW THE CITY STREETS, is a vast climate-controlled vault containing maps, pictures, papers, realia. Each item is rolled, framed, bound or boxed according to the best way to preserve it. Only authorised personnel may enter the vault: staff trained to handle the fragile materials and retrieve them for those who make an appointment in the State Library’s secure reading room. There, behind hermetically sealed electronic doors and under the constant supervision of a librarian, one may inspect items as diverse as the love letters of an executioner or the cast of a serial killer’s hand.

One box summoned from the archive looks very much like any other. It is made of blue-grey, acid-free cardboard and is big enough to store a thick telephone directory. The lid is a flap which pulls up to reveal four tattered, clothbound volumes: one purple, two green and one brown. Remove them from the box and lay them carefully on the table, and it is easy for a loose page to protrude, or a cover to lift, allowing the contents to be glimpsed—newspaper cuttings, photographs, jottings in fountain pen—‘blood detective piggott’s casebook stained carpet’, ‘child’s body in bag’, ‘headless corpse in river’, ‘Chinese execution’. Many of the words are as grim as the photographs depicting them. But more has been summoned than just the smell of old glue and newsprint: here are spaces of shadow, the streets of a well-known city at once recognisable and yet strangely unfamiliar, a world refracted through the prism of its criminal past.

The scrapbooks—each 29 by 23 centimetres and about 3 centimetres thick—were compiled by forensic pioneer and Melbourne Criminal Investigation Branch Detective (later Superintendent) Frederick Piggott. They cover his thirty-six year career investigating some of Victoria’s most horrific and mysterious crimes.

Piggott joined the Mounted Police in 1898 and after fourteen years of postings to Victorian country stations, applied for a transfer to Melbourne’s Criminal Investigation Branch. He was successful and, in June 1912 at age thirty-eight, he joined the CIB. Although Piggott was now based at Russell Street, his long experience in bushland districts was not overlooked and he was often assigned to investigations in country regions.

It was a time when police applicants could be accepted with little more than a grade four education, their duties seen as more reliant on physical strength than educational achievement. In this era of under-educated and under-resourced policing, Piggott exercised a shrewd intelligence and a forensic attention to detail far ahead of his time. He championed an increased role for science in crime detection, providing Australia’s earliest known summoned example of blood-spatter analysis and pushing for such diverse applications of forensic science as odontology, entomology, anthropology, botany, physics, engineering, handwriting analysis, and hair and fibre comparisons.

This book presents for the first time the inside facts on nine of the most challenging Victoria Police investigations of the early twentieth century, drawing upon Piggott’s long-hidden personal papers and supplemented by the official files of the period: police statements, coronial depositions and the testimony of eyewitnesses. All of the dialogue presented here, together with the localities and times, is actual and sourced in each case from the most authoritative records available. These uncensored accounts expose the graphic and often perplexing nature of the period’s criminal investigation work, and point to the dawn of a new era in Australian crime detection.

Young detectives learnt on the job, mentored by their higher-ranking colleagues. In the brown scrapbook—the earliest of the four—among the first cases noted is one involving the decapitation of a schoolboy.