Seedy Depression tragedy dressed in smart clothes

TALES of a Depression era killer in Sydney's suburbs makes for a frighteningly good read.

WHAT is behind our collective taste for true crime, a genre that has become increasingly popular since the 1990s but goes back at least to the early 19th century memoirs of Parisian policeman Eugene Vidocq?

Sometimes a crime is so shocking we want to understand the mind, or circumstances, of the perpetrators (Helen Garner's essay, Killing Daniel, on the violent death of Melbourne toddler Daniel Valerio in 1993 comes to mind); or the impact on its victim (in My Dark Places American crime writer James Ellroy recounts the obsessions set in place by his mother's rape and murder when he was only 10).

Then there are crimes that seem to offer an insight into their times and mores -- a memorable display at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum featured a 1950s spate of housewives lacing their husbands' teas with rat poison, conjuring a picture of domestic decrepitude and simmering postwar discontent. Peter Corris takes this route in retelling the story of William Cyril Moxley in Mad Dog.

It was 1932, the height of the Depression, when 21-year-old Sydney nursemaid Dorothy Ruth Denzel and her compositor boyfriend Frank Barnby Wilkinson were abducted at shotgun point from a suburban lovers' lane. They were taken in Wilkinson's Alvis sportscar to an unlet house in then semi-rural Moorebank where Denzel was raped, then to scrub near the edge of the Holsworthy Army Reserve, where the killer bludgeoned both and buried them in shallow graves. Because the car was so identifiable, police fairly quickly arrested unskilled woodcutter Moxley, who was tried and hanged within the year, the first execution in eight years in NSW.

The crime would fail to stick in Sydney's collective memory like the later deaths of Bogle and Chandler and Anita Cobby. But, Corris writes, many people at the time felt "sullied" by it. Leafing through the records, he realised he had found a "Depression Tragedy" so "compelling in its detail" that it offered an insight into the pinched lives of many Sydneysiders at the time. He places Moxley as one of the many fringe dwellers eking an existence through hard labour.

Yet Moxley, like many brutal killers, remains an enigma in these public records (perhaps one of the most chilling details is the account by a mother of her lucky escape, when Moxley, on the run after the killings, held her hostage in her house with her children, forcing her to make him his tea). So Corris, author of the light-handed and likeable Cliff Hardy detective novels, chooses to dramatise some events from Moxley's, and later his counsel's, point of view. This is not an entirely successful decision, since the sections in which Corris tautly relates the facts of Moxley's odd background and flight through Sydney's abundant bush are far stronger, bearing the mysterious charge of the "true".

Moxley's behaviour post-arrest is certainly bizarre, such as his claim to have accidentally killed his brother, thus being "fated" to violence. He also claimed to have been shot in the head two years before the crime. (Curiously, it seems Moxley had also acted as a police informer.) The rest of the book follows his shockingly swift trial, legal haggling over his insanity plea and appeal. Some of its most fascinating material consists of letters from the public, which offer far greater insights into the era than the broader statistics Corris sometimes relies on.

Yet the problem is that it is hard to share his sense that this story rises above the terrible banality of casual violence. A joyful chronicler of dark inner-city Sydney in his fiction, Corris never quite conveys the sense of place and atmosphere around this era. Certainly, its desperate characters have been more grippingly explored by writers working with the NSW police photographic archive, specifically the exhibition City of Shadows (in the accompanying book, historian Peter Doyle explores the lurks of the city's petty criminals and flim flam men, along with a vibe of homicidal expectation that seems to lurk in the surveillance photos of its mean rooms and streets).

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Mad Dog is its presentation. With its gift-packaged design, including reproduced documents and photographs, this is a beautiful little hardcover. Faux-1930s endpapers feature, among the woodblock pictures of courthouses and documents in the border montage, tiny images of Denzel and Wilkinson's decomposing corpses.

This seems to conform to an aesthetic turn in a usually dressed-down genre, from the glossy coffee table images of Jean-Paul Belmondo-cool crims in City of Shadows, to, less edifyingly, the Nine Network's voyeuristically slow motion Underbelly franchises. Such an attractive package for such dark materials may say as much about our era as Moxley's crime said about his own.

Delia Falconer's most recent book is the nonfiction work Sydney.

Mad Dog: William Cyril Moxley and the Moorebank Killings

By Peter Corris

New South, 256pp, $29.95 (HB)