Eurydice Dixon: violent end to young life shaped by tragedy, torment

Eurydice Dixon was just seven years old on the fateful afternoon police came knocking at the door of her parents’ house.

Over the years Eurydice Dixon had become impervious to schoolyard bullying.

When on stage, Eurydice Dixon would invite people to laugh at things other comedians wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot mic stand. She joked about feminism. She joked about suicide. Some nights she won the audience. Others she left in a heckling rage.

To people who knew her well, who understood where she came from, her comedy material wasn’t surprising. Her young life, ­abruptly ended in the early hours of Wednesday morning by an ­opportunistic attacker, had been shaped by tragedy, radical thought and a determination to see and do things her own way.

Eurydice was 22 on the night she played her last comedy gig and said goodbye to boyfriend Tony Magnuson at a tram stop outside Melbourne’s Federation Square. It was the last time he or any of her friends would see her.

She was just seven years old on the fateful afternoon police came knocking at the door of her parents’ house.

Her father, Jeremy Dixon, an anarchist and political activist, thought they’d come to hassle him. It was much worse than that. They told him his partner of nearly 20 years had been found dead an hour earlier at a Brunswick shopping centre.

Karen Walters was a radical political activist and for 10 years of her life, a heroin addict. Joseph Toscano, a prominent figure in Melbourne’s anarchist movement, wrote an obituary about Walters in which he mapped her political evolution from teenage, card-­carrying member of the ALP to university socialist and anarchist to an anarcho-feminist collective. She later described herself as a ­lesbian separatist.

Walters began experimenting with heroin in her late 20s, and by the time she started seeing Jeremy Dixon — who she first met on a student union picket line — she was in the drug’s thrall. Eurydice was born two years later.

Toscano writes that Walters never stopped campaigning for things she believed in. She was sacked from her job at a call centre when she tried to bring the union in to improve working conditions. On the night before she died, she and Jeremy made an anti-war banner to demonstrate against the US invasion of Iraq.

Yet, throughout, she was searching for something else.

“She was a troubled soul battling her own internal demons whilst extending a helping hand to those around her,’’ he writes. “She believed in universal and unconditional love and being a genuine pacifist, had contempt for physical violence. She strongly believed that death does not have to part us from those we love.’’

After Walters died, it was left to Jeremy Dixon to raise Eurydice and her younger brother on his own.

“I’ve known Jeremy Dixon for more than 40 years,’’ Toscano told The Weekend Australian. “He is a very good man. He’s looked after his children alone for many years. He’s an activist, he’s a lawyer, he’s helped make great changes in the law for people. What has happened is just horrendous.’’

The Dixons live in a commission flat in Parkville, a suburb that is home to university academics, professionals and cashed-up creatives who can afford to buy homes in one of Melbourne’s most ­exclusive and greenest inner-city pockets.

It wasn’t an easy life for Eury­dice. Even at the uber-progressive Princes Hill Secondary College, she was an obvious target for bullies. But over the years, she became impervious to school ground taunts; something that would come in handy in her chosen ­career.

Up on stage, Eurydice was her mother’s daughter. Kieran Butler, an experienced comedian who has been doing stand-up for many years, remembers the first time he saw her act. It was at a little club in Richmond and she had never tried comedy before. He became her mentor.

“She was young, like 19, and she was talking about subjects that ­nobody talks about when they’re 19,’’ he explains.

“She had a f..king hard time (growing up). By her own ­admission she was a strange sort of unit. And so she got bullied and she had a tough life at home. There’s been tragedy in her past.’’

Police are closely guarding the details of Eurydice’s final hours. A 19-year-old autistic man from Broadmeadows, Jaymes Todd, is in custody, charged with her rape and murder. Police have not confirmed a time or cause of death.

Todd went to Hume Secondary College but didn’t finish high school. His father, Jason Todd, told the Daily Mail he hadn’t seen his son since he turned himself in on Wednesday night. “We’re all as appalled as the rest of society,’’ he said.

Todd turned himself in at a police station after homicide detectives released an image of him captured by a CCTV camera inside a McDonald’s restaurant near where Eurydice blew Tony Magnuson a goodbye kiss and told him she was going to walk home.

Magnuson and Eurydice met through the comedy scene and had known each other for about three years. Their relationship began only four months ago and was still unknown to some of their friends. At just after midnight, ­Eurydice sent him a text message saying she was safe and almost home. Magnuson was already at his home, asleep on the couch, when it came through.

Police have viewed CCTV footage showing the moment Magnuson and Eurydice part ways. Although it was initially reported that Eurydice walked through the city to Princes Park, police are also investigating whether she caught a tram up Royal Parade and took a shortcut across the park.

A spontaneous, GoFundMe campaign for Eurydice’s family has already raised $50,000. ­Jeremy Dixon has indicated he will donate the money to a charity that Eurydice would have supported. A vigil will be held in the park on Monday night.