Category Archive: CRIME
The Mushroom Tapes
Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025) Erin Scutter was born in 1974 . Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”. Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not. In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023, Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her house in Leongatha, New…
Continue Reading →Traduce the Juice
O.J. Simpson I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 October 1995, the day O.J. was acquitted (because no gloves fitted). The predominantly black staff at my hotel celebrated the verdict, high-fiving each other. On the other side of the country, Los Angeles gave both a huge sigh of relief and a squawk of anger and disbelief. Absurdly, the trial had taken on racial connotations because it seems that then, as now, it is impossible to view many awful events through anything other than the prism of race (or gender, although ‘Race beats gender’). And celebrity beats everything. The best…
Continue Reading →The Threepenny Opera
(Die Dreigroschenoper) Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 10 March 2024 It might not be opera, more cabaret Singspiel, but it was still pretty good. Brecht’s rosy worldview, his ‘Berlinized’ take on John Gay’s balladic Beggar’s Opera, was presented with great élan and sophistication under the direction of TVC’s bête noire, Barrie Kosky, with a subtly simple staging of moving Jungle-Jims, up and over which the cast nimbly climbed and clambered, and a cabaret-style spangly curtain through which heads, and sometimes feet, would peep. Brecht’s libretto is extremely witty but it isn’t really a Marxist social satire, rather a nihilistic view of…
Continue Reading →Dark Side of Parkside
Walking Tour (Adelaide Fringe Festival, 2 March 2023) Parkside, an old suburb just to the south of the Parklands which encircle the Adelaide CBD, is famous for one of the most well-known of all Adelaide’s infamous homicides – the one known as “the body-in-the-freezer murder”. But, while those of us who knew someone involved in this macabre crime, or who worked in the odd building which housed the freezer, are familiar indeed with the gory details, there are some – particularly people born this century – who must have only a vague notion of the events, if any notion at…
Continue Reading →Victims ‘R’ Us
2022: the new Government in South Australia has produced an important ‘law reform.’ The Government website states: If someone pleads guilty or is found guilty of the crime, you can tell the court about how the crime has affected you. You can do this by making a Victim Impact Statement (VIS). Your VIS can help the judge or magistrate understand how the crime has affected you and is one of the things they think about when deciding what penalty to give the offender. A VIS gives you a chance to talk about how you feel, and what has happened to…
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