Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis
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spoke of the need to find a case that had lots of and thens. It was not enough to find a fascinating crime, but it had to have and then moments. A woman befriends the old woman next door and then the old woman vanishes. And then the neighbour tries to withdraw money from the missing woman’s bank account. And then… you get the drift.
I entered the true-crime writing world, a babe in the woods, ignorant of almost every aspect of book writing. But every writer begins with the self-belief – despite any supporting evidence – that they can write, and that people will want to read what they write. I was no exception. Writing looked easy enough. Just words on a page, right?
Lucky for me, I had no idea how much I didn’t know.
Provost’s advice helped me choose my first project. The origins came from an unlikely place – a teacher professional development day which began with a story.
The speaker addressed a room full of teachers and spoke about the need to support children from broken families. The new program we were learning about was sponsored by the family of a woman called Vivienne, the speaker told us solemnly.
Vivienne came from a broken home; her parents divorced when she was young and Vivienne never really got over it. When Vivienne grew up, she married a man called Fergus, and when Fergus began having an affair, Vivienne ‘snapped’.
According to the speaker, all the hidden rage and sorrow from her parents’ failed marriage came crashing down on her, and she broke into the home of the woman her husband was having the affair with and killed her. Vivienne then jumped to her death off the Phillip Island Bridge.
As the speaker spoke about the case, a kernel of an idea formed. This story was perfect. A woman who’d never gotten over her parents’ divorce… and then she found out her husband was having an affair… and then she drove to the mistress’s house in the dead of night… and then she vanished off the face of the earth.
Of course, back then, I thought it was a simple story of love, betrayal, and murder. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
The first port of call was a newspaper search which in those days meant that you rang the newspapers and asked them to do a search and then they found what you were after and sent you the photocopies of the articles. That, or microfiche which I never really mastered. It turned out that there were only two articles published in major newspapers about the case.
This was the first odd thing: such a sensational crime and an almost total newspaper blackout.
The next step was to contact the Coroner’s Court and try to gain access to the file. It wasn’t long before I was staring down at crime scene photos of a young woman called Beth Barnard who’d suffered a terrible death.
The photos were confronting. Stab wounds in movies look like thin red lines; in real life they gape open and show the yellow subcutaneous fat. A cut throat is a dark cavern of sinew. Dead eyes stare blankly.
Most striking was the huge letter A carved into her chest. I think they forgot to mention that at the Catholic primary teacher professional development day.
Perhaps in that moment more than any other, I realised that to be a crime writer, I would have to put aside my horror and distress, lock it in a box, so that I could get on with the job of documenting the story. The story had to rule over all else.
Back at home, with copies of all the documents and photos I began writing the story. That turned out to be the relatively easy part. It was when I organised to interview actual people, things became real.
I had a weird crisis as I stood in my wardrobe, wondering what real writers wore. I was scheduled to do my first police interview with Detective Rory O’Connor at the Russell Street Police Headquarters, and I wanted to look the part. Nowadays it would be called #Imposter-Syndrome – a label which would have made the whole wardrobe moment easier. I would have realised what I was suffering from, taken a deep breath, off-loaded on my Twitter feed, received 37 replies to reassure me, then I would have donned a pair of jeans and be done with it.
But my crisis was in 1991 and hashtags hadn’t been invented. I also had no online community to consult because online communities hadn’t been invented yet either. In fact, I had never even met another writer.
I arrived at Russell Street wearing a writerly jacket and a headband which quite possibly made me look more Alice in Wonderland than author. I was 25 years old and felt like a pretender. It’s an unavoidable thing, but when I had yet to publish a book, I was just a girl with a notepad on a steep learning curve.
Back then, I taped all my interviews on a little voice recorder with tiny cassette tapes. I dutifully transcribed each one which was really helpful because listening to myself butt-in on questions, my transcribing-self kept telling my interviewing-self to SHUT UP.
Listening, I learnt, was the key.
It’s worth putting my writing into a broader context. In a nutshell, I got married at 20, baby at 22, Diploma of Teaching at 23. Full-time teaching job at 24. Writing time was carved out in between all my other commitments. Was it hard to write and teach? I don’t remember it being hard. Writing was something I prioritised. Like all working mothers, I juggled to fit it in. I wrote my first book at a desk in my kitchen.
I would come to understand that I always needed something extra, something other than family and a regular job. Writing was my extra. Something I did just for me.
In How to Write and Sell True Crime, Gary Provost suggested writing three chapters then sending them to publishers who published similar books. At that time, there were hardly any books published in Australia about local crime. I had read Tom Nobel’s Untold Violence, and Andrew Rule’s Cuckoo, but that was about all I could find. Tom’s book was published by John Kerr, and it was to him that I sent my first attempts at writing – typed on a typewriter.
John read my three chapters and invited me to his office in Richmond to discuss my book. He had one concern about the story; he said it didn’t have a satisfactory ending. What neither of us realised was that this was the story’s greatest strength. It was precisely because it didn’t have a satisfactory ending, that it invited the reader to play detective.
John agreed to publish the book but on one condition.
‘Since you’re not a writer,’ he said, ‘I want to pair you up with a journalist to do this story.’
I was so excited. I’d never met a journalist before; nor a writer of any kind. He first suggested Tom Nobel, but Tom was busy on another project. The next name he mentioned was Paul Daley, a feature writer for The Sunday Age.
Paul agreed to do it, and for the next year, we took turns to drive to each other’s houses every couple of weeks to write. By then I had obtained an early computer, and the book began to take shape. I sat at Paul’s side and soaked up his knowledge of writing. I learnt words like tautology and added them to my vocabulary. Lessons of grammar, so dry at school, took on new and wonderful meaning when you were using them to craft sentences. I learnt more about the beauty and power of words sitting at Paul’s side than I had in all of my education.
Slowly, but surely, I became a writer.
2. Murder on Phillip Island
There are a number of accounts of what happened on Phillip Island on the night of Monday 22 September 1986 – some were later believed by detectives, some were not. But suffice to say, by the Tuesday morning, when a woman’s mutilated body was discovered in a farmhouse on the Island, events were set in motion that would shatter several local families forever, and send ripples through the peaceful community.
Sergeant