Читать книгу Inside the Law - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 5

I’ve never been inside my own books. Some true crime writers include themselves in the story, but I never have. I never felt the story was about me. The stories I’ve written for 25 years are about other people, their suffering, their triumph. I was just the storyteller. But a funny thing happens with storytellers. We spend time with people who have been through the worst life has to offer and we absorb their wisdom.

I’m not sure why I’ve kept in the background. With some books I’ve written, I’ve even left most of the publicity to the subject of the story, figuring it was their story to tell. But over the years, I’ve realised that my writing has changed people. Not just the story, but my writing, my lens. Increasingly, when I do talks, people come up to me and tell me that after reading my books, they decided to be an investigator or join the police force or become a criminal psychologist.

To hear that my books have changed people’s lives, is a feeling that defies description.

It’s taken me nearly 25 years to realise that the story is what it is; the magic is in the telling.

A student journalist once asked me how I remained unbiased in my stories. I laughed. Not for one minute am I unbiased. Every word, every sentence I write, takes the reader on the journey I planned for them. If my writing looks unbiased, don’t be fooled. Writing true crime has helped me learn about the world.

Listening to people who’ve lost a loved one to a serial killer, or who’ve been the victim of a crime and have survived – they are my teachers. And then, in turn, I teach. Sometimes, I feel like a bee, hovering from flower to flower, taking with me what I learn from one person to the next.

As a child, I devoured books from the moment I could read. Reading transported me to other worlds. A childhood full of siblings and noise, vanished as soon as a book was open. I trawled the house like a reading junkie, hunting out my next hit; books I hadn’t read yet, encyclopaedias, anything was fair game. Birthday money was spent on Enid Blyton books and I imagined myself climbing the Faraway Tree or flying in the Wishing Chair. My primary school library proved disappointing because it had books with boys and aeroplanes on the covers with titles like Biggles, while I hankered for girls’ adventures and mysteries.

By Year 7, I’d grown too old for the Famous Five and Nancy Drew. I prowled the aisles of the Kilbreda College library and spied a cluster of Agatha Christies. My fate was sealed the moment I reached up and selected Sparkling Cyanide. Death by dinner party was followed by clues and finally, the reveal – the person I least expected. The books were the ultimate in crime and mystery for a kid already addicted. (So many crime writers I’ve spoken to over the years list Famous Five, Nancy Drew, and Agatha Christie as the gateway reading that led to crime writing. Just a friendly warning.)

A couple of years after that – in 1980 – Australia was mesmerised when baby Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo while her family were holidaying at Uluru. Her mother, Lindy was ‘different’ in the eyes of ‘regular’ Aussies. She was a member of a religion most folks hadn’t really heard of, and she didn’t cry for the cameras. Those pretty much were her main crimes. As a 15-year-old, I watched the media wield its power and listened to people voice their opinions.

She’d have to be guilty; just look at her!

It was a heady time and the first in my short life where people felt part of a case. From the outset, I didn’t believe Lindy Chamberlain killed her baby. I felt the wrongness of what was done to her. I remember reading the book, Evil Angels by John Bryson and a few years later, taking my nan to see the movie. I laid out the case for the defence to Nan. I’m not sure I moved her from her guilty leanings, but I did my best.

When I began to fancy myself a budding author in my early 20s, I naturally wanted to write crime. I tried writing a murder mystery set in Melbourne, but immediately hit the limits of my knowledge of crime and criminal behaviour. At that age, I knew very little of life, having been to primary and secondary school, teachers’ college, then back to primary school as a teacher. My world was small, narrow, and sheltered.

A friend and I planned to write a novel. We made index cards, wrote a couple of chapters, and naturally, our first roadblock was that we had no idea why people killed. I remembered Agatha Christie alluding to it in one of her books. She said some people simply couldn’t apply the brakes. Did that mean we could all kill? I didn’t think I could.

I went on a quest to find out why people killed so I could write a believable fictional character who killed. The logical searching ground was my local book store. It was there I found a book called: Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess by Jean Ritchie.

Two things happened.

Firstly, I ditched any notion of writing fiction because true crime was so raw and it told the story of real people, real grief, real loss, real horror. Suddenly, the body-in-the-library fiction paled in comparison to the truth.

I became hooked on reading true crime – which in the early 1990s was nearly all from the United States or the United Kingdom. To me, it was human nature to the extreme; people pushed beyond the limits. It had death, loss and suffering, but at the heart of it lay human resilience and triumph.

Author Lisa Cron in her book Story Genius writes: ‘We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.’

I think this explains how true crime helps people confront reality. Perhaps true crime is compelling because we want to know how people survive it. Or how we might survive if it happened to us.

At its heart is a core of profound humanity: the victim’s family survived and became advocates; the dogged detective never gave up; the community marched for safer streets or tougher sentences. People came together to rise up. Good usually won, and evil ended up in a cell or – in the old days – at the end of a noose.

My urge to write soon became the urge to write true crime.

I found a book in Kill City – a wonderful crime book shop (now closed down) in Greville Street, Prahran. The book, by Gary Provost, was called How to Write and Sell True Crime. The step-by-step guide to researching, interviewing, and writing helped me formulate a plan. It also gave me the parameters to choose a case to write about.

Provost spoke of the need to find a case that had lots of and thens. It was not enough to find a fascinating crime, but it had to have and then moments. A woman befriends the old woman next door and then the old woman vanishes. And then the neighbour tries to withdraw money from the missing woman’s bank account. And then… you get the drift.

I entered the true-crime writing world, a babe in the woods, ignorant of almost every aspect of book writing. But every writer begins with the self-belief – despite any supporting evidence – that they can write, and that people will want to read what they write. I was no exception. Writing looked easy enough. Just words on a page, right?

Lucky for me, I had no idea how much I didn’t know.

Provost’s advice helped me choose my first project. The origins came from an unlikely place – a teacher professional development day which began with a story.

The speaker addressed a room full of teachers and spoke about the need to support children from broken families. The new program we were learning about was sponsored by the family of a woman called Vivienne, the speaker told us solemnly.

Vivienne came from a broken home; her parents divorced when she was young and Vivienne never really got over it. When Vivienne grew up, she married a man called Fergus, and when Fergus began having an affair, Vivienne ‘snapped’.

According to the speaker, all the hidden rage and sorrow from her parents’ failed marriage came crashing down on her, and she broke into the home of the woman her husband was having the affair with and killed her. Vivienne then jumped to her death off the Phillip Island Bridge.

As the speaker spoke about the case, a kernel of an idea formed. This story was perfect. A woman who’d never gotten over her parents’ divorce… and then she found out her husband was having an affair… and then she drove to the mistress’s house in the dead of night… and then she vanished off the face of the earth.

Of course, back then, I thought it was a simple story of love, betrayal, and murder. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

The first port of call was a newspaper search which in those days meant that you rang the newspapers and asked them to do a search and then they found what you were after and sent you the photocopies of the articles. That, or microfiche which I never really mastered. It turned out that there were only two articles published in major newspapers about the case.

This was the first odd thing: such a sensational crime and an almost total newspaper blackout.

The next step was to contact the Coroner’s Court and try to gain access to the file. It wasn’t long before I was staring down at crime scene photos of a young woman called Beth Barnard who’d suffered a terrible death.

The photos were confronting. Stab wounds in movies look like thin red lines; in real life they gape open and show the yellow subcutaneous fat. A cut throat is a dark cavern of sinew. Dead eyes stare blankly.

Most striking was the huge letter A carved into her chest. I think they forgot to mention that at the Catholic primary teacher professional development day.

Perhaps in that moment more than any other, I realised that to be a crime writer, I would have to put aside my horror and distress, lock it in a box, so that I could get on with the job of documenting the story. The story had to rule over all else.

Back at home, with copies of all the documents and photos I began writing the story. That turned out to be the relatively easy part. It was when I organised to interview actual people, things became real.

I had a weird crisis as I stood in my wardrobe, wondering what real writers wore. I was scheduled to do my first police interview with Detective Rory O’Connor at the Russell Street Police Headquarters, and I wanted to look the part. Nowadays it would be called #Imposter-Syndrome – a label which would have made the whole wardrobe moment easier. I would have realised what I was suffering from, taken a deep breath, off-loaded on my Twitter feed, received 37 replies to reassure me, then I would have donned a pair of jeans and be done with it.

But my crisis was in 1991 and hashtags hadn’t been invented. I also had no online community to consult because online communities hadn’t been invented yet either. In fact, I had never even met another writer.

I arrived at Russell Street wearing a writerly jacket and a headband which quite possibly made me look more Alice in Wonderland than author. I was 25 years old and felt like a pretender. It’s an unavoidable thing, but when I had yet to publish a book, I was just a girl with a notepad on a steep learning curve.

Back then, I taped all my interviews on a little voice recorder with tiny cassette tapes. I dutifully transcribed each one which was really helpful because listening to myself butt-in on questions, my transcribing-self kept telling my interviewing-self to SHUT UP.

Listening, I learnt, was the key.

It’s worth putting my writing into a broader context. In a nutshell, I got married at 20, baby at 22, Diploma of Teaching at 23. Full-time teaching job at 24. Writing time was carved out in between all my other commitments. Was it hard to write and teach? I don’t remember it being hard. Writing was something I prioritised. Like all working mothers, I juggled to fit it in. I wrote my first book at a desk in my kitchen.

I would come to understand that I always needed something extra, something other than family and a regular job. Writing was my extra. Something I did just for me.

In How to Write and Sell True Crime, Gary Provost suggested writing three chapters then sending them to publishers who published similar books. At that time, there were hardly any books published in Australia about local crime. I had read Tom Nobel’s Untold Violence, and Andrew Rule’s Cuckoo, but that was about all I could find. Tom’s book was published by John Kerr, and it was to him that I sent my first attempts at writing – typed on a typewriter.

From typewriter to big desktop computer: the fledgling writer at work in her kitchen.

John read my three chapters and invited me to his office in Richmond to discuss my book. He had one concern about the story; he said it didn’t have a satisfactory ending. What neither of us realised was that this was the story’s greatest strength. It was precisely because it didn’t have a satisfactory ending, that it invited the reader to play detective.

John agreed to publish the book but on one condition.

‘Since you’re not a writer,’ he said, ‘I want to pair you up with a journalist to do this story.’

I was so excited. I’d never met a journalist before; nor a writer of any kind. He first suggested Tom Nobel, but Tom was busy on another project. The next name he mentioned was Paul Daley, a feature writer for The Sunday Age.

Paul agreed to do it, and for the next year, we took turns to drive to each other’s houses every couple of weeks to write. By then I had obtained an early computer, and the book began to take shape. I sat at Paul’s side and soaked up his knowledge of writing. I learnt words like tautology and added them to my vocabulary. Lessons of grammar, so dry at school, took on new and wonderful meaning when you were using them to craft sentences. I learnt more about the beauty and power of words sitting at Paul’s side than I had in all of my education.

Slowly, but surely, I became a writer.