Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ have to be self-motivated and self-driven and if lots of people love our books, we pretty much have to ignore those who don’t. You can’t please everyone. I’m reminded of this every time I go to Book Club. We are all reading the same book, yet reactions can run from ‘best book ever’ to ‘I hated it’. The book didn’t change; it is what it is. The variable is the heart and mind of each reader. And that is something the writer can’t control.

      In the autumn of 1993, while I was working on my second book, and doing ride-alongs with the Frankston police to get some life-on-the-beat cop stories, a serial killer began murdering young women in the area.

      In my neighbourhood.

      Newspaper headlines screamed Corridor of Death! and Serial Killer! and put the fear of God into everyone.

      It’s one thing to have an abiding interest in real crime, but quite another to have a serial killer operating in your own local streets.

      For seven weeks from the first murder to the last, like other women in the area, I was very aware of the danger he posed. I had read every true crime book I could lay my hands on and, for a while, I thought the knowledge I’d gleaned gave me an advantage. There were reports of the wide-spread buying of guard dogs and security doors, but I’d read enough to suspect the so-called Frankston serial killer would not break into people’s homes, because his victims had been snatched off the street. I figured that if I moved through my suburb only in well-lit spaces and didn’t walk alone at night, I should be fine.

      It turned out I was wrong on all counts because this killer had broken into someone’s home, and he did attack in broad daylight. But I didn’t know that then.

      Living in Seaford during the seven-week killing spree, made me look at the world through a new lens – one of suspicion. I bet I wasn’t the only woman waiting for my order in the fish and chip shop, casting suspicious glances at any man waiting near me. And I bet I wasn’t alone in checking out strangers in the video shop, or the newsagent, or the supermarket, wondering: Could it be him? Or him? Is it you?

      In the middle of this seven-week killing spree I spent a shift with a police officer called Wendy O’Shea who worked in the Frankston Community Policing Squad. It was the evening after the second victim, Debbie Fream, went missing. Her disappearance was the talk of the squad but no connection had yet been made between this missing woman and the murder of Elizabeth Stevens in Langwarrin a month earlier. There was no reason to think the cases were linked.

      In fact, when Debbie vanished after leaving her newborn baby with a friend to pop up to the shops to get milk, the only answer that made sense to the police I spoke to was that she must have been suffering from post-natal depression and decided to leave for a couple of days.

      What else could it be?

      Even so, that evening after she disappeared, when I arrived at the community policing squad for my ride-along. it was clear some officers were worried. Debbie’s car had been found not far from where she was last seen, with the driver’s seat pushed all the way back. Debbie was short, so the obvious conclusion was that someone else had driven the car.

      I listened as the police officers around me discussed more sinister possibilities about what could have happened to the young mother.

      When Debbie was found murdered four days later, the discussion at the community policing squad was fresh in my mind. The world seemed a much nicer place when Debbie might have just left to have a few days by herself.

      But that night with Wendy O’Shea, after discussing Debbie’s disappearance for a while, we moved on to a case of child sexual abuse that she had investigated. Wendy’s case was about a girl called Gemma who was abused by her stepfather. The abuse began on Gemma’s fifth birthday. I didn’t know it then but writing about child sexual abuse for the first time with Wendy would point me in a direction I follow to this day. Wendy’s Gemma has also played a role in fiction I’ve created which means her story got under my skin too.

      There was one part of Wendy’s story I’ll never forget. When Gemma was asked in court if she still loved her stepfather after years of abuse, the girl held up her thumb and pointer finger and created a small space between them.

      ‘This much,’ she said. ‘I still love him this much.’

      This comment illustrated profoundly the complexities of child sexual abuse.

      By coincidence, I did another ride-along, with a uniform sergeant called Mick – who was also my next-door neighbour – on the night the third of the serial killer’s victims was found.

      Despite an intense police presence patrolling the bayside suburbs, Year 12 student Natalie Russell had disappeared that day on the way home from school.

      By the time I arrived with Mick to observe his night shift, there was a pall of disbelief over the Frankston police station.

      One of the cops standing outside having a smoke, said what they were all thinking: ‘Right under our noses.’ There was a huge police presence and the killer had sailed through the net and taken a school girl. They had all done everything they could, but it wasn’t enough.

      Mick and I went inside just as a cop came downstairs and said, ‘They’ve found her and she’s dead.’

      I was struck by the lack of emotion in his voice. But I felt it too; it was like all the air had been sucked out of the place.

      Mick and his partner were sent to the scene. Since I had permission to do the ride-along, he bustled me into the back of the police car and told me to keep in the shadows. The ride there was eerie. No lights and sirens. And a radio silence of sorts. All messages were cryptic. They didn’t want to alert the media who used police scanners.

      So there I was on a cold winter’s night, sitting in the back of a police car in the carpark of the Monterey Secondary College looking at the track along which Natalie Russell had met her death. Mick and his partner left me there while they went off to join the other cops guarding the scene and keeping everyone away.

      I didn’t know anything about Natalie in that moment except her name.

      But I would come to learn so much about her.

      Alone with my thoughts for a couple of hours, I was filled with a deep sadness for the teenager who lay beyond the trees; and for her family who had lost her.

      Until that night, the police stories I’d written had always been from a distance. The cases, the investigations were always done and dusted by the time I got to them.

      But this one was unfolding right in front of me. Just metres away. I was flooded with a nervous energy that sat alongside the disbelief that I was actually there, at the scene.

      There were police everywhere: silent and searching and patrolling. The police helicopter hovered in the sky, shining its powerful Nitesun down on the horror below. Rain fell gently through its beam.

      When Mick finally returned to the car, he told me to throw away my notes. Nothing could be written about this until after they caught the serial killer.

      Of course, I wouldn’t throw my notes away, because I wasn’t a journalist. If I did write about it, it would not be for the media. I’d wait until it was all over and then write the story properly.

      But a book about a serial killer would challenge me in ways I had not yet experienced. This was not a story СКАЧАТЬ