INTRODUCTION

Paul B. Kidd

My background in journalism is that I am an outdoors men’s magazine editor, television and Sydney Radio 2UE talkback broadcaster, 60 Minutes researching producer and freelance photojournalist. There was a time when I only wrote, talked about and produced the fun things in life – fishing, boating, men’s adventures and the great outdoors, with lots of humour thrown in.

So how on earth did I get involved with the most terrible murderers this country has ever known? And not just once, but with this book it’s now 13 books in all, specialising in the most evil of the evil – the child killers, serial killers and those who rape and murder in packs like wild animals.

Nowadays it seems as though I’ve written about every human frailty imaginable and what those frailties can make one allegedly sane human being inexplicably do to another – or, in so many cases, others. The list is endless. Just think of something unimaginably evil and I’ve written about it. And it’s all true.

I don’t write about crazy people. Just the ones who are judged to be sane. The sane people who rape and murder children and elderly women and then throttle them with their underwear. Those who have sex with dead people, souvenir body parts, decapitate their victims so they can’t look at them while they are debauching their bodies, or disembowel their victims while they are alive. Or the woman who skinned her de facto husband and cooked part of him for his children’s dinners.

Yes, they were all sane.

So let’s face it, it’s a far cry from catching marlin and whiting, testing a new fishing boat or going on an adventure in Kakadu, the Kimberley or Guam.

So how did I get here on Murderer’s Boulevard?

Well, I’d always had a fascination for crime, having grown up in Western Australia while serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke made the suburbs of Perth his own private killing fields in the early 1960s. I arrived in Sydney in early 1963, just a couple of months before serial killer William ‘the Mutilator’ MacDonald was captured after having killed five men and locked away forever where he is to this day.

So in the late 1980s, while I was working at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph as the boating, outdoors and fishing editor, I loved to listen to the stories of my colleague and friend Joe Morris (Snr), the legendary police rounds reporter who had been following the cops around to the most horrific crimes for 50 years.

Joe had covered all of the famous cases – the Thorne Kidnapping, the Bogle–Chandler mystery, the MacDonald Mutilator murders and the Wanda Beach murder mystery are just a few that come immediately to mind. He was a walking, talking encyclopaedia of horror. He had seen the lot.

Joe was a real man’s man who had a hatred for the spineless cowards who raped and murdered children, and the bullies who hunted in packs and set upon lone women and gang-raped them before putting them to the knife or gun so that they left no living witness.

And, in particular, Joe despised Kevin Crump and Allan Baker, the ex-convicts who abducted Mrs Virginia Morse from her isolated farmhouse and murdered her in such horrific circumstances that the judge ordered that their papers be marked ‘never to be released’. You can read more about Crump and Baker in ‘The History of “Never To Be Released”’ in this book.

With Crump and Baker in mind, and Anita Cobby’s killers suffering the same fate, Joe and I, intending to write a book, set about looking for similar cases where the killer(s) had been sent to jail forever. As it turned out, there was no shortage of material from all around Australia. Sadly, after all of the research had been done and enough material and photos had been gathered for our book and we were at the writing stage, Joe suffered a stroke and passed away a week before Christmas 1991, aged 82.

Seeing as we had gone so far and Joe wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, I pressed on alone and, in June 1993, Never To Be Released: Australia’s Most Vicious Murderers was published and went straight in at No 3 on the bestseller list. And it is still on sale to this day.

Given that there was no shortage of additional material around Australia, Never To Be Released 2 and 3 followed over the years and they are also all still on sale.

And now, having written Never To Be Released 4, I can safely say that there will also be a number five and possibly more, given that someone being sent to jail forever – never to be released – seems a common occurrence throughout Australia these days.

Paul B. Kidd

Sydney, 2010