FOREWORD

In August 2002, Britain’s Channel 4 apologised to the citizens of South Australia after it aired a documentary on 18 July claiming that Adelaide was the ‘murder capital of the world’ and that Australia was ‘the most dangerous place in the world for serious assaults’. Channel 4’s erroneous assumptions came in the wake of the abduction and presumed murder of English tourist Peter Falconio and the narrow escape of his partner, Joanne Lees, when they were attacked by a lone gunman while travelling through the remote outback of the Northern Territory in July 2001. Channel 4 also sent a letter of apology to Australia’s High Commission in London, and the offending statements were deleted from any further screenings of the documentary.

Statistics confirm that the outrage of South Australia’s citizens was justified. As it turned out at the time, Washington had the highest murder rate per capita in the world, with 50.82 per 100,000 citizens. Pretoria had 27.47 per 100,000 citizens, and Moscow 18.2. In a black irony, London recorded 2.36 per 100,000 citizens from 1997 to 1999, while Adelaide came in well down the list, at 1.9 over the past decade until 2002.

But, rightly or wrongly, the documentary highlights a misconception about Australia that is not even remotely near the truth: Australia is perceived by many around the world as a nation with an unusually high murder rate. Perhaps this can be explained by reference to the fact that Australia’s high-profile murder cases, while not numerous, have created headlines worldwide and given other nations the impression that because of Australia’s vastness, people go missing all the time in one way or another … and most of them are murdered.

High-profile cases in this category that come to mind immediately are: the Azaria Chamberlain case in the desert at Ayers Rock; the British and German backpacker victims of Ivan Milat, found in the wilderness of the Belanglo State Forest; and the random campfire killings of five holiday-makers by German tourist Josef Schwab in the remote Kimberley. And then there was another one – the abduction of Peter Falconio and the terrifying ordeal of Joanne Lees on a main road in the Northern Territory, where it is possible to drive all day and not see another human being … it’s not difficult to understand why the world looks upon Australia as a nation where murder is commonplace.

True, if Australia’s bushland, forests, foreshores, sandhills or deserts could give up their secrets, there is little doubt that they would account for many of the people from all walks of Australian life who have mysteriously vanished without a trace over the years. Then there are the swamps, mineshafts, culverts and paddocks that may well be the last resting places of so many more.

But killers who conceal their victims obviously don’t want them to be found. While it is a misconception that more murders occur in Australia than anywhere else, there is little doubt that concealing a body in Australia’s vast wilderness, where chances are it will never be discovered, is easier to do than in most other places. Hide them as they may, however, there is no guarantee that they will remain undiscovered. We can only guess in horror at how many more backpackers would have gone missing had the remains of those already murdered not been discovered in Belanglo State Forest in 1992. It is doubtful that Neddy Smith would have been convicted of the murder of Harvey Jones had Jones’s remains not turned up in grisly fashion at Botany Bay 13 years after he disappeared.

On the other hand, some of Australia’s most infamous killers have preferred to leave their victims in the public places where they killed them, on show, as if to taunt investigators in an horrific game of ‘catch me if you can’. John Wayne Glover, the Granny Killer, bashed old women to death in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman in broad daylight, leaving their bodies in the street where he killed them, as if he were begging to be caught in the act or at least identified running away. He wasn’t. William ‘the Mutilator’ MacDonald stabbed his victims up to 60 times before slicing off their genitals and leaving their bodies on display in a busy city laneway, a public bathing area and a public lavatory. When caught, MacDonald wondered what had taken police so long. Eric Edgar Cooke, the ‘Night Caller’ killer who either shot, stabbed, strangled or ran over his seven victims in Perth in the early 1960s, made no attempt to conceal his crimes, and when apprehended admitted he knew that it was only a matter of time before his flagrant attitude towards homicide would bring about his undoing. It did.

When caught, each of these killers admitted that he was glad it was over.

Unlike these showponies of Australian murder, others choose to hide their victims in the knowledge that, when a body can’t be found, in most cases it is all but impossible to prove a case of murder against a suspect, no matter how strong the circumstantial evidence. But it doesn’t always work that way – as you will discover in some of the cases in this book. The best-laid plans of even the most devious killers go astray when their victims turn up unexpectedly…

Paul B. Kidd

October 2010