True-crime writing: cold cases stir up painful memories

True crime writing isn’t victimless, as I learned long ago when revisiting the Wanda Beach murders.

Sonia Anderson holds an image of her daughter Bianca Girven, who was murdered nine years ago. Picture: Glenn Hunt

The controversy this week involving Sonia Anderson, the mother who was “blindsided” by the publication of a book by a forensic psychiatrist who interviewed her daughter’s killer, is a stark reminder of the Pandora’s box of emotion and ethics that is opened when writing about true crime.

Anderson was particularly upset that Donald Grant’s book, Killer Instinct, contained the final words uttered by her daughter Bianca Girven before her death in 2010, and that this was the first time she had come across them. Grant said it was not his role to contact victims’ families, adding that much of the material he had used was on the public record, although he agreed some of the reports on which he relied were not easily accessible.

Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant, author of Killer Instinct

Researching, writing and broad­casting true crime provides authors with a special challenge because it involves real people, real events and real emotions — emotions that are carried by the victim’s family and friends for years, decades, even generations after the crime.

Having written several true-crime books over nearly two decades, I’ve fallen into this trap as well — never consciously but almost inevitably upsetting people. When my first true-crime book, Wanda: The Untold Story of the Wanda Beach Murders, was published in 2003, I received a letter from lawyers acting for the family of one of the two victims asking what right I had to write the book. I thought long and hard about my answer to that question.

When I published Unsolved Crimes: The Cases that Haunt Australia in 2009, I received an email from Bruce Morcombe, the father of the then missing schoolboy Daniel Morcombe, asking why a photo of him and his distraught wife had been featured on the cover. Although it was not my decision to put their photograph on the cover, I apologised for the intrusion. Bruce accepted my apology. He had “bigger fish to fry”, he told me; he was looking for the man who took his son from the side of a Sunshine Coast highway.

The year after I expanded into publishing books in 2012, our company declined to publish a well-written and well-researched book on the 1986 disappearance of schoolgirl Samantha Knight because the authors had not received the necessary permissions from Samantha’s mother, Tess. This was a deal-breaker as far as we were concerned.

True-crime writers don’t always get it right but it is essential that they make every endeavour to contact the family involved and at least inform them that a book is going to be written. It’s a rule I have followed into my publishing career as well, but it is a lesson I learned the hard way.

In 2002, I was a freelance writer specialising in sport and ghosting biographies when I was approached by a publisher and given what is widely regarded as a writer’s dream assignment — what book would I really like to write?

It had long been my aim to write the definitive account of the still unsolved Wanda Beach murders of January 1965. But having received the commission and a healthy advance, where was I to start? The internet was in its infancy and few facts were available about the then decades-old crime. Contemporaneous newspaper reports were unreliable because, as the case unravelled in the media, theory after theory was thrown into the public domain.

With precious few leads to follow and no one to interview, I was thrown a lifeline from an unlikely source. My wife happened to teach the son of a leading cold-case homicide detective, who pointed me in the direction of the police archives at Kingswood in western Sydney, then arranged for me to receive a pile of original case files.

I was supplied a treasure trove of material, reams of typed police running sheets, copies of photos from the crime scene, autopsy reports, coronial inquest findings, interview records and a summary of the entire investigation written some years later. If the crime scene photos were not confronting enough — two female bodies partially buried in a sand dune forming the macabre illusion of one, elongated body — the photos of the two girls on the autopsy table brought home the horror of the crime. All of a sudden, the victims became real people to me — 15-year-old neighbours Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt, young girls with their whole lives in front of them.

Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, below left, were murdered in January 1965.

The fact that as I wrote the book my own 15-year-old daughter was in the next room studying for her exams and listening to her favourite music was not lost on me. These girls were someone’s daughters too, someone’s sisters, someone’s friends.

Mrs Schmidt arrives for her daughter’s funeral.

Using the names in the police records, I re-interviewed many of the key witnesses — the lifeguard who was on beach duty that day, various witnesses who saw the girls walking into the dunes, the man who found the bodies on the beach the following day, and even two young boys, now in their 60s, who talked to the girls at Wanda a week before their fatal visit there on January 11, 1965. I also wrote to members of the Schmidt family who had accompanied the girls to the beach that day and, after being left behind a dune to stay out of the wind, had walked back to Cronulla Station and caught the train home to West Ryde to sound the alarm. I did not receive a reply so I continued my research.

A family friend who knew the immigrant family at the time told me the mother had died without knowing who killed her daughter. I put that uncontested assertion in my book, word for word.

Believing that Christine was an only child (she had a half-brother, I later found out) I focused on her school friends recorded in the police notes. I was able to talk on the phone to one such friend who, I later learned, was supposed to go to the beach with the two girls that day. She burst into tears at the mention of Christine’s name. We later spent half a day reminiscing about her “beautiful friend” over tea, and this intelligent, generous woman told me that on the day of her wedding she visited Christine’s grave and left her bouquet there.

And so, I was able to write what I believed to be a factual account of the Wanda Beach murders, based on original police files and interviews with many key witnesses. I also speculated on why the crime remained unsolved. The answer was simple: the weight of material gathered by the investigators overburdened the investigation.

Behind the scenes, I was told that NSW police had misplaced a sperm sample extracted from the swimsuit worn by one of the girls. I wrote to the police media unit to ascertain the status of the missing sample but it declined to comment on an ongoing murder investigation (I quoted that response word for word, too.) With the advent of DNA technology still many years away, the chance to identify the Wanda murderer now appeared lost, although a partial male DNA profile was later extracted.

Who was the killer? It was never my intention to solve the case. I didn’t see that as my role. I did, however, distil the hundreds of people linked to the crime down to three main suspects.

Alan Bassett, an inmate of Morisset Psychiatric Hospital kept at the governor’s pleasure for 29 years after murdering a young woman in similar fashion, had recently been released. After taunting police for years with “hidden clues” of the crimes in his artworks, Bassett was ruled out as a person of interest. He had merely been tagging the police along.

The movements of convicted child-killer Derek Percy were relatively unknown before he was linked to the Wanda case by Melbourne cold-case detectives in the early 2000s. The revelation that Percy’s grandmother lived in the adjoining suburb to Christine and Marianne, and that the then 16-year-old might have been visiting Sydney the week of the murders (he lived in Victoria at the time), led me to write a follow-up book, Derek Percy: Australian Psycho, in 2008. But Percy preyed on children, not girls his own age, and there is no way the pallid teenager could have talked the teenagers into going into the dunes with him.

The name of the third person of interest was provided by Sydney cold-case detectives — Christopher Bernard Wilder. Long before Wilder killed eight women during a murder spree in the US in 1984, the NSW-born son of a US naval officer had been charged over a gang rape on a Sydney beach as a teenager in 1962, received electric shock therapy for his sexual deviance at Sydney’s discredited Chelmsford Hospital and, as early as 1968, was identified by his young wife as the Wanda Beach murderer. Before he could be interviewed regarding Wanda, Wilder moved to the US, where he made his fortune in the building game and racing cars.

In 1982, he returned to Sydney to visit his parents and was charged with the kidnapping and rape of two girls he lured from Manly Beach with the promise of taking their photographs for modelling purposes.

When I asked a serving homicide detective why they thought Wilder was their man, they simply said to look at his MO — he was able to sweet-talk young women into going with him to have their photos taken. “That’s what we think he did to Christine and Marianne to lure them into the dunes in 1965,” the detective said.

Wilder was killed in Massachusetts in 1984 while on the run from US authorities.

After my book was published I was contacted by lawyers acting for the Schmidt family informing me that Mrs Schmidt was alive and wanted to know what right I had to publish a book on Marianne’s death. I had a signed release from the NSW police media unit allowing me to quote from the case files, but I was mortified that I been misinformed about Mrs Schmidt’s passing and then added to the family’s pain and anxiety.

I immediately wrote a letter of apology to the Schmidt family, but the real question I had to ask myself was: what would I have done if the family had asked me not to write the book? Looking back, I believe I still would have gone ahead.

But I learned an intrinsic truth about writing true crime: it brings little or no comfort to many of the people involved in the actual events. Having their particular stories raked over by strangers, revealing details not widely known to the public, can be invasive and upsetting because we are not writing about abstract events.

In 2015, leading into the 30th anniversary of the abduction and murder of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby, I wanted to write a book about how that particular crime changed us as a nation. I wrote to the victim’s sister, asking if she would care to be interviewed for my book. Anita’s sister Kathryn wrote back in a most gracious manner, declining my invitation but wishing me well.

Today there are many hacks doing the rounds, regurgitating tales of shock and gore from the internet, masquerading as true-crime writers. And there is a voracious public appetite for the genre, too.

There are some shining examples, including podcasts by The Weekend Australian’s Hedley Thomas and Dan Box, whose reporting on unsolved murders and suspected murders have led to the reopening of old cases. But for every Thomas or Box there are any number of voyeur copycats talking about true crime while offering no insight into the human condition. There are also countless true-crime programs, even designated pay-TV channels, searching for content, and a steady stream of professionals — detectives, coroners, psychologists, paramedics and journos — willing to tell their stories.

Just be careful where you tread.

Alan Whiticker is a true-crime author and international publisher with New Holland Publishers.