Writing on Gravestones

Writing on Gravestones is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles yet written by on-the-spot observers and reporters. The stories look at crime in its broadest definition. Serial killers, mass murders, bank robbers and jailbreakers are here, but there are stories about the sort of torture that masquerades as love and drives a battered wife to kill, about the children who kill, about the anguish that drives a father to kill his children. There is an inescapable emphasis on the victims and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity, empathy and compassion rather than sensationalism. There are very well known names and crimes here: Martin Bryant, Jaidyn Leskie, Brenden Abbott, the Bega schoolgirls, the Arnotts extortion attempt. Then there are the lesser known: the story of a man dubbed "the gentlest of axe killers" who after 20 years of nightmares went back to a Victorian town and killed the man who had regularly raped him as a child. Fundamental Christianity gone wrong in Wimmera: drug dealing and murder among the young Indochinese street gangs in Melbourne's west; the murder of a vagrant by a group of children in Wagga. Classic crime reporting.