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Book Extracts

An image of Sydney in 1867 with details of the reward offered to identify the Sussex Street victim and news from the murder trial.
Book extract

Murder, Misadventure and Miserable Ends

A young boy found the woman’s head. The torso was nearby, but police found little else to solve the case. The killer could easily have eluded them, but for a bizarre and blatant act involving the rest of the body. WARNING: Graphic content

Images for Mandatory Murder extract online
Book extract

Stoners’ kill plot exposed in texts

It was a brutal murder in an outback town, paid for by the victim’s partner and organised by her son. But it was the jail sentence for a man who wasn’t even at the crime scene that kept the NT’s first contract killing in the news.

The 1904 deaths of the Slys made headlines in turn-of-the-century Sydney.
Book extract

The Suicide Bride

Three desperate children run to a neighbour with horrific news: “Mammy and Daddy are dead.” It’s 1904 and an all-too-common case of murder-suicide, but there’s a wider family story, raising stark questions about criminality and the notion of nature versus nurture. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

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NSW
Digital artwork for Daily Telegraph

My Mother, A Serial Killer

HAZEL Baron was just nine when she first suspected her mum was a killer. Here she describes the day her dad disappeared.

NSW
Depraved killer’s shocking prison persona

Depraved killer’s shocking prison persona

Twenty years ago, Katherine Knight committed the unspeakable crime that would see her dubbed Australia’s Hannibal Lecter and locked up, never to be released. Why then do fellow inmates see her as a kind-hearted “Nanna”? WATCH NOW

‘I’m proud to be a deviant’

‘I’m proud to be a deviant’

IN bringing the man who abducted and murdered Daniel Morcombe to justice, police had to learn all about Brett Peter Cowan’s perverted world. 

Book extract
Ashley Coulston, right, with police in 1993.

Motive for share house executions still baffles

THEY were random victims — three young people set on a collision course  with a deadly stranger by an innocent ad for a housemate. Just weeks after the chilling killings, the cold-blooded murderer was ready to strike again, only to be thwarted by exceptional acts of bravery. 

NSW
Noose

Noose

SOME believed him innocent, jurors who found him guilty still didn’t think he should hang, but the Premier was determined  that Ronald Ryan would go to the gallows. Australia’s last-man hanged faced his fate “like a small child who had composed himself into calm bravery”. “Whatever you do, do it quickly, ” he told the hangman.

Original URL: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/bookextracts/page/7