1. Why did you want to write about ‘whydunits’, as you call them in Killer Excuses and Reasonable Doubt, instead of ‘whodunits’?
As a court reporter for the Herald Sun I enjoyed covering both ‘whodunit’ and ‘whydunit’ criminal trials – as well as some very weird civil trials, but that’s a different story.
‘Whodunits’ are your classic ‘you’ve got the wrong man/woman – it wasn’t me’ trials. As any courtroom drama fan knows these can be fascinating – remember OJ Simpson. I was also gripped by the whodunit trial of the police killers Bandali Debs and Jason Roberts which I wrote about in my first book for The Five Mile Press – Eavesdropping on Evil.
Whodunit trials, though, are often not very interested in asking why someone killed someone. Prosecutors do not have to prove motive – as Lindy Chamberlain found out to her cost. They do not have to prove why you have killed someone, just that you have.
As fascinating as they can be, whodunits can leave questions like ‘why?’ frustratingly unanswered; not so ‘whydunits’.
In a ‘whydunit’ homicide trial, the accused person does not blame anyone else for the victim’s death. ‘Oh, I was there when the person died,’ they admit. Some even admit to firing the fatal shot, or inflicting the fatal stab wound, or to dropping the rock off the freeway overpass that killed the unsuspecting motorist, or to fatally strangling someone. They don’t, however, admit to committing the crime they are charged with. They say they have an excuse for doing what they did. Some say they should be excused completely – that they are not guilty. These people say they killed accidentally or in self-defence. Some admit they are guilty – but to a lesser crime than they are accused of. They say they are only guilty of, for instance, manslaughter instead of murder.
As fascinating as whodunits can be, whydunits often delve more deeply into why some seemingly ordinary people find themselves in the extraordinary situation of having killed someone. As someone who sees himself as an ordinary person, whydunits often challenged me. They made me ask myself: ‘Would I have done the same thing?’ Often they also made me ask: ‘When is it all right to kill someone? When should society excuse someone for killing someone?’ These were the questions which spurred me into writing about whydunits in Killer Excuses and Reasonable Doubt.
2. Which do you think are the most bizarre true crime cases in Killer Excuses? What were some of the wacky details you most remember?
Where to start? How to judge levels of bizarreness? How about the woman who drowned during a sexual frolic in the waters off Darwin’s Pee Wee beach? What about the man who denied murdering a woman but admitted ‘tapping’ her head with a meat tenderiser, carrying her corpse in his car boot for five days and was caught lying by her freshly dug grave wearing a blonde wig? Then there was the man who blamed a sambuco-laced espresso for causing him to try to murder his father and stepmother in a bizarre, bloody, blackly comic stabbing/wrestle.
Probably the most bizarre trial I have covered involved a pig farmer’s wife dying while her husband and his mates tried to exorcise demons from her. The fatal week-long ‘exorcism’ included a man trying to build a ‘hedge’ against the devil by running around – and over – a farmhouse waving a piece of clingwrap; a ‘Holy Communion’ of blackcurrant cordial and brown toast; flowerbeds being dug up; and the smashing of a greenhouse and black ceramic cats.
3. Which cases were the most horrific for you?
One of the most horrific trials for me to cover was that of two teenagers accused of the nightmarishly cruel killing of 73-year-old Marie Greening Zidan. The great-grandmother was bashed, strangled and sexually assaulted after she caught two teenage burglars in her home. The boys agreed they were there but each blamed the other for the fatal bashing.
Another trial that truly horrified me was that of a fresh-faced 15-year-old boy who admitted to watching two mates fatally bash a kindly 79-year-old lady in her home with fence palings. The teen said one of his mates even stomped on the dying victim’s neck and then rolled on the floor laughing. He said that when he looked in the victim’s bag for her car keys he ‘felt quite sick’ when she coughed blood on his shoe. What the teen admitted was gruesome enough but police had an even more disturbing theory: that the boy had done it all by himself and had then falsely dobbed in two mates into his terrible lone crime.
4. Which cases were the saddest for you?
Two of the saddest trials I have covered are the last two chapters of Killer Excuses: ‘Motherhood Shattered’ and ‘Going Gently’.
‘Motherhood shattered’ is the story of a woman who had long dreamed of having a baby, who defied the medical odds to have a baby, but who in the depths of the baby blues snapped and drowned that baby five weeks after her miracle birth.
‘Going Gently’ is the story of a trial that still makes me teary when I recall it. It’s about a feisty woman who tried to take the fight up to her cancer but who eventually had to resort to relying on her husband to kill the person he most loved.
5. Which cases surprised you the most?
Many times whydunit trials came up with the unexpected and surprising.
Sometimes I was surprised at the chutzpah of the defendant’s excuse. How about Domenico Arico’s: ‘I’m not guilty of murdering my wife because I’m a male chauvinist pig’ excuse? He tried to persuade a modern jury that he should only be found not guilty of the manslaughter of his wife because she had provoked him into losing control and stabbing her by refusing to be a traditional wife – by going to university and by ignoring her wifely duties.
Often I was amazed at what some seemingly normal people do that ends in tragedy – millionaire James Ramage, for instance, fatally bashed his wife after she said sex with him repulsed her. He then drove to where she loved horse-riding and buried her. On the way back he stopped in to discuss kitchen renovations at a business! And how about decision by two teenage boys to throw rocks from a freeway overpass on to cars. They kept playing their incredibly stupid game until a huge rock went through a windscreen, killing a motorist.
6. What was involved in finding and writing about these stories?
I covered most of the trials while the Herald Sun’s Supreme Court reporter. I also spent many days reading hundreds of pages of court transcripts.
7. What did you enjoy most about writing this book and your others – Reasonable Doubt and Eavesdropping on Evil?
I liked being able to tell the full details of these intriguing stories and not be restricted to just a few paragraphs in a newspaper. I believe these stories not only give an insight into how our court system works but also reveal some of the strange ways human beings can behave.
8. What about a Killer Excuses TV series?
I have adapted several stories from Killer Excuses and Reasonable Doubt into TV-script format. I have had some interest from television program producers and stations but have had no takers yet.
9. What advice would you like to give anyone who wants to write true crime?
Don’t glorify criminals – remember their victims. True crime writing can be interesting without glamorising mostly stupid, cruel criminals. Crimes are interesting because they put people – victims and perpetrators – in often bizarrely stressful situations, not because the perpetrators are necessarily fascinating. Genuinely intriguing ‘master’ criminals are rare indeed – if they exist at all.
Wayne Howell
The Mr Asia Connection 30 Years On
By publisher and editor Linda Funnell, who worked on the original production of Greed and is now literary advisor to the Estate of Richard Hall.
Reading this book again 30 years after it was published, I’m surprised how fresh and immediate the story still feels.
Certainly much of it was written in the white heat of the revelations at the trial of Terry Clark and his associates in Lancashire, England, so it had the urgency of being a story ‘hot off the press’. And it was a huge story. The Mr Asia syndicate led to a Royal Commission of inquiry and drove changes in the way police and customs operated. My memory is that its first edition – published as Greed: The Mr Asia Connection – sold over 30,000 copies.
One of the interesting things about reading the book now is how Dick felt the need to explain that there was no ‘Mr Big’ in the Australian drug trade. The idea of a single, all-powerful Mr Big who ran everything was a pervasive one at the time, and was a concept Dick was to continue to debunk in a later book, Disorganised Crime, published in 1986. I don’t know that anyone but the most extreme conspiracy theorists would believe that now – we know the world is a more complex and unruly place.
The Mr Asia Connection was the first true crime book I ever worked on in my publishing career. On occasion Dick would come into the office and hand me the telephone to take down details of an inquest from a police source. At the time I was living in North Sydney and the fact that key events in the book had occurred in the neighbouring suburb of Neutral Bay only a year or so beforehand made it feel it very much that it was a story that had happened in my own backyard: had I been in the Oaks Hotel at the same time as Terry Clark and Allison Dine and not realised it?
Dick was wide-ranging in his research for the book, dealing with police contacts one day, then off to see a junkie the next.
He was also quite phlegmatic about the potential dangers of researching stories that involved criminals and corrupt officials. He believed that if a writer was threatened, the thing to do was to go public on the threat as quickly as possible. Once out in the open, the person making the threat was less likely to go ahead.
When the book was published, my memory is that an extract appeared in Penthouse magazine and Terry Clark wrote a letter from his prison to cell to the editor of Penthouse – which was published – expressing his displeasure.
But even though Terry Clark had a history of commissioning murders, I don’t think his response ever really worried Dick.