Speaker 1: It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian Price was
Speaker 1: released on a corrections order to live in the community
Speaker 1: because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded, and to
Speaker 1: some extent deranged individual. They burnt the boat to the
Speaker 1: waterline and they live there in a state of nature. Now,
Speaker 1: state of nature is not a great thing, because people
Speaker 1: do very bad things to each other. I'm Andrew Rule.
Speaker 1: This is life and crimes. One of the worst crimes
Speaker 1: that I've covered since my time back here at the
Speaker 1: Herald Sun in Melbourne is the murder of a seventeen
Speaker 1: year old schoolgirl called Marsha Bookatish. Marsha lived with her
Speaker 1: parents in Doncaster, which is the leafy Eastern suburbs, good
Speaker 1: solid middle class suburb where people work hard and do
Speaker 1: the best they can. And Marsha was a good student
Speaker 1: at second school. She worked hard, she had a lot
Speaker 1: of friends. She was keen to become a lawyer and
Speaker 1: was studying very hard. But each night after dinner, an
Speaker 1: early dinner, she would go for a walk because she
Speaker 1: liked fitness and stuff like that, so she would walk
Speaker 1: from her parents' house across I think I saw a
Speaker 1: footbridge into what is called the Ku Nung Linear Park,
Speaker 1: which is a park full of gum trees and things
Speaker 1: that runs down a bit of a valley out there
Speaker 1: at Doncaster. And on Saint Patrick's Day twenty fifteen, that's
Speaker 1: March the seventeenth, Marsha goes walking after dinner as usual
Speaker 1: and doesn't come home. What happened that night was that
Speaker 1: she was basically stalked, ambushed, grabbed by a complete loose cannon,
Speaker 1: a very dangerous young man called Sean Christian Price. And
Speaker 1: today we're going to talk mostly about Sewn Christian Price
Speaker 1: and how his life story converged with Marshes and destroyed
Speaker 1: Marsha and therefore to some extent, destroyed her family because
Speaker 1: I don't think they would ever really get over losing
Speaker 1: their beautiful, kind and loving seventeen year old daughter and sister.
Speaker 1: Shawn Christian Price was a very different kettle of fish.
Speaker 1: Ten years after that murder, he is in a high
Speaker 1: security unit in Victoria's most high security prison, which is
Speaker 1: Barwin down the Geelong Wall out of Geelong towards Bachus Marsh,
Speaker 1: and there he is kept under lock and key most
Speaker 1: of the time. When I say lock and key, I
Speaker 1: mean even internally the people that handle him, the prison
Speaker 1: officers and the authorities who give the orders, they have
Speaker 1: a pretty good idea of who's who in their particular
Speaker 1: concretes zoo, and they know, or they think, that Sewn
Speaker 1: Christian Price is a very dangerous man and probably always
Speaker 1: will be while he is strong and fit enough to
Speaker 1: be so, because he is volatile, he's unpredictable, and when
Speaker 1: he goes off, he's very very violent. He's also as
Speaker 1: if somebody said to me, he's mad. He's bad, but
Speaker 1: he's not stupid, and that makes him probably more dangerous
Speaker 1: because he can sit and wait, he can think most
Speaker 1: of the time. The prison authorities keep Sewn Christian Price
Speaker 1: separated from fellow inmates. They detect, underneath this sort of
Speaker 1: calm exterior and his attachment to routine, that he can
Speaker 1: never be completely trusted. He's now forty one years old.
Speaker 1: He faces another thirty years before being eligible for parole.
Speaker 1: In fact, following this murder, he was sentenced to thirty
Speaker 1: eight years minimum plus another three years for a rape
Speaker 1: that he committed two days after the murder. It's the
Speaker 1: most horrible thing what he did. It seems that Sean
Speaker 1: Price chose Marsha at random after criss crossing Melbourne suburbs
Speaker 1: looking for a victim. But his attack was premeditated, but
Speaker 1: he didn't know who it was that he was going
Speaker 1: to attack and murder until he saw Marsha. He saw
Speaker 1: her and thought, she's the one I'm going to kill her.
Speaker 1: What it was about her that fitted the bill, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but probably the fact that she was vulnerable.
Speaker 1: She had the earbuds in which means she couldn't hear
Speaker 1: people walk up behind her, which is instructive if you
Speaker 1: are walking around in the early evening through bush and
Speaker 1: parks and things where there are not other people, no company,
Speaker 1: and the light's not probably listening to music or to
Speaker 1: podcasts such as this is not the best idea because
Speaker 1: other people can walk up behind you and you don't
Speaker 1: know they're there, which is a point Mirth pondering. The
Speaker 1: other thing was she was in this park, surrounded by bush.
Speaker 1: He was able to hide behind a tree, jump out
Speaker 1: and grab her, and so it was really a matter
Speaker 1: of opportunity. He's an opportunist. I don't really think that
Speaker 1: there was anything about her that triggered him any more
Speaker 1: than if it had been any one of fifty other
Speaker 1: young women, or perhaps any women. The police were able
Speaker 1: to piece together his movements and his moods even beforehand,
Speaker 1: which showed that he'd been building up to this motiveless
Speaker 1: murder for weeks at least. Now. Signs of prices, growing agitation,
Speaker 1: and growing menace showed up in all sorts of ways.
Speaker 1: One you would think was in his choice of reading matter.
Speaker 1: He was a guy that read quite a lot, and
Speaker 1: in the weeks before the murder, he'd borrowed books from
Speaker 1: Brimbank Library out in the Western suburbs where he was
Speaker 1: then living that reflected not only his ghoulish interests but
Speaker 1: showed an increasingly dark and disturbed state of mind. Price
Speaker 1: was reading about the serial killer Ivan Mulatt. There's a
Speaker 1: very dark and gripping book about Ivan Malatt called The
Speaker 1: Sins of the Brother written by Lez Kennedy and a
Speaker 1: very fine writer called Mark Whittaker, which may well be
Speaker 1: the one that he was reading. And he also read
Speaker 1: about a crazed Swede, a man who called himself Thomas Quick,
Speaker 1: who was convicted a couple of decades ago of multiple killings,
Speaker 1: but was then retried and acquitted after revealing that he'd
Speaker 1: made dozens of false submissions. This Thomas Quick case is
Speaker 1: quite a cause celeb in Scandinavia and to some extent
Speaker 1: in Britain, because this man Quick had made false admissions
Speaker 1: about killing children all over Scandinavia, and although there was
Speaker 1: not one shred of actual physical smoking gun evidence, DNA
Speaker 1: blood type nothing to connect him to any of these murders,
Speaker 1: he was convicted of something like seven or eight of
Speaker 1: them out of thirty, which was very embarrassing for all concerned.
Speaker 1: When he said, no, I made all that up. I
Speaker 1: want to be retried, and they granted him a retrial,
Speaker 1: and a very good lawyer proved to the court that
Speaker 1: there wasn't one shred of real evidence to connect this
Speaker 1: poor mad guy with those murders. That is a cautionary
Speaker 1: tale for all judges, juries and detectives. To get back
Speaker 1: to Shun Price, it looked as if he was preparing
Speaker 1: for what was ahead when he got up before dawn
Speaker 1: on that Monday morning of March seventeenth, twenty fifteen. Price
Speaker 1: was living in public housing in Albion. Now, Albion's one
Speaker 1: of those little suburbs that you don't know's there unless
Speaker 1: you live next door. It's like Dallas out of broad Meadows,
Speaker 1: or one of those subsets of a bigger suburban albions,
Speaker 1: not far from Saint Urbans, not far from Sunshine, and
Speaker 1: not that far from out of foots Gray. But it
Speaker 1: has its own little shopping center or whatever, and it's
Speaker 1: a pretty or was then a reasonably low rent sort
Speaker 1: of district. And there were blocks of flats there that
Speaker 1: were probably getting towards the end of their useful life,
Speaker 1: and those blocks of flats were cheap for the government
Speaker 1: to rent. And one of those blocks I think was
Speaker 1: used to some extent as a bit of a halfway
Speaker 1: house for people like Sewn Price that had been let
Speaker 1: out of prison on various things bail, parole, and I
Speaker 1: think corrections orders, so that they would be let out
Speaker 1: on the basis that they reported in daily or weekly
Speaker 1: or whatever it is to the local corrections office. And
Speaker 1: it was one way to lessen the burden of providing
Speaker 1: prison beds, but to have at least some vague control
Speaker 1: over prisoners who probably many of them should have been
Speaker 1: in prison. It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian
Speaker 1: Price was released on a corrections order to live in
Speaker 1: the community because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded,
Speaker 1: and to some extent ranged individual. Now Shawn Christian Price
Speaker 1: had a background which was explored a little when he
Speaker 1: was charged with the murder. His background is very dark
Speaker 1: and very bad. He'd been the victim of systematic child
Speaker 1: abuse as a little kid. He'd grown up in very
Speaker 1: dire circumstances where various relatives and family members were alcoholics,
Speaker 1: were drug addicts, were sex offenders, and all of the
Speaker 1: above affected the way that little sewn Christian Price was
Speaker 1: brought up because he was abused. Some of the major
Speaker 1: adults in his family were drug takers, they were criminals
Speaker 1: of various levels, They were violent, and none of this
Speaker 1: was good for him, both by example a very bad example,
Speaker 1: and mainly because it greatly affected him because he was abused,
Speaker 1: and it affected the way his mind developed naturally enough,
Speaker 1: and so he grew into a rather tall, lean, pretty
Speaker 1: good looking sort of a young man, but an extremely
Speaker 1: disturbed one and very dangerous and by the age of
Speaker 1: his high teen so Tommy's eighteen nineteen twenty, he was
Speaker 1: a very violent sex offender. He would ask someone for
Speaker 1: directions out in the suburbs. You know, do you know
Speaker 1: how to show me where to go to Smith Street,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. And having made that connection, he
Speaker 1: would follow that person, probably someone that he, you know,
Speaker 1: he picked out at a railway station or a bus
Speaker 1: station or whatever. He would follow them home and then
Speaker 1: attack them. And this meant that he had attacked and
Speaker 1: sexually assaulted various people and he went inside for these
Speaker 1: very serious crimes and was locked up. Then for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: he ended up outside of prison system and inside the
Speaker 1: Thomas Embling Institution for people with dangerous mental illness, basically
Speaker 1: what was once called the criminally insane. Back in the
Speaker 1: old old days, there was a ward at Arrarat, I
Speaker 1: think that was for the criminally insane. In more modern
Speaker 1: times we have the Thomas Embling facility now. Back in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands, in fact, in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: this Sean Christian Price hit the headlines very briefly because
Speaker 1: he was the inmate at the Thomas Embling who punched
Speaker 1: the then health Minister Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott was doing a
Speaker 1: routine visit at this place to have a look at it,
Speaker 1: and this guy Price launched himself at the health minister
Speaker 1: and punched him, which was covered in the media at
Speaker 1: the time, of course, but we've instantly forgot who'd done
Speaker 1: it because he was sort of a no name lunatic,
Speaker 1: and by and large Sean Price found his way in
Speaker 1: and out of institutions after that date, from two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, two thousand and six all the way along
Speaker 1: until in twenty fourteen or thereabouts. He is turned loose
Speaker 1: on the street, in effect because they led him to
Speaker 1: this corrections order while living in a flat in Albion
Speaker 1: near Sunshine in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and that
Speaker 1: decision to let him do that is what led him
Speaker 1: to have the freedom of movement to do what he did,
Speaker 1: and what he did was basically make a plan to
Speaker 1: kill an innocent young woman, and he did. He stalked
Speaker 1: and killed Marsha Bukatish. The murder, a little like the
Speaker 1: murder of Juel Maher about two and a half years earlier,
Speaker 1: enraged and angered a lot of people in Victoria. They
Speaker 1: felt that it was very similar to the Jill Marques
Speaker 1: in some ways it was, and the public at large,
Speaker 1: or segments of the public, saw it as further proof
Speaker 1: that women could not walk around safely at night or
Speaker 1: any other time without fear of being attacked, which was true.
Speaker 1: Although to be fair to everyone else, Seawan Price was
Speaker 1: not an example of a hostile husband or a jealous boyfriend.
Speaker 1: He was, in fact a very dangerous lunatic. He's a
Speaker 1: man with mental problems. He was criminally insane in many ways.
Speaker 1: And it's not a lot of points to be scored
Speaker 1: about somebody like him, except to say this that when
Speaker 1: you get someone like him, they really need to be
Speaker 1: locked up, just as a dog with rabies needs to
Speaker 1: be locked up, because they're just too dangerous to be
Speaker 1: around the rest of us. As a Supreme Court judge
Speaker 1: pointed out subsequently, the judge in the murder case, Lex Lazry,
Speaker 1: actually was very vocal about the fact that someone like
Speaker 1: Price had been turned loose and said it was a
Speaker 1: very bad thing to have happened, which was true. And
Speaker 1: of course hindsight is a wonderful thing. So what is
Speaker 1: it that creates someone like this Shawn Christian Price? Isn't
Speaker 1: nature or nurture? Well, we've already alluded to his background,
Speaker 1: but there's a deeper, darker background to Sean Price, his
Speaker 1: middle name Christian. It's there for a reason. This was
Speaker 1: raised in one of his coat appearances by his defense counsel.
Speaker 1: Defense counsel that he sacked during his murder trial because
Speaker 1: his defense funnily enough, and this is a very fine
Speaker 1: defense council called Mandy Fox, who has since became a judge,
Speaker 1: so clearly a very good lawyer. Mandy Fox attempted to
Speaker 1: put a defense case for her client by pointing out
Speaker 1: to the court that his upbringing had been deplorable, that
Speaker 1: he was the product of child abuse, and someone now
Speaker 1: Sean who'd been very uninterested in the proceedings before this,
Speaker 1: had sometimes ranted and raved and used swear words and
Speaker 1: sometimes used to obscend gestures in court, etc. He suddenly
Speaker 1: became very animated and interested in his own defense counsel,
Speaker 1: and he sacked up and said, I don't want you
Speaker 1: to defend me anymore. And it would seem that he
Speaker 1: did not want the full circumstances of his childhood and
Speaker 1: childhood abuse aired in court because it was so grievous.
Speaker 1: Now do we know that for a fact, No, we don't,
Speaker 1: but he did object to it. He sacked his lawyer,
Speaker 1: and he made an attempt of defending himself without raising
Speaker 1: any of that sort of material, and In fact, what
Speaker 1: he did was he got up and said, I don't
Speaker 1: want any sympathy, I don't want any special concessions. I
Speaker 1: did it, and I deserve to be punished all words
Speaker 1: that effect, basically as a way to avoid that material
Speaker 1: being aired in public. Now that is an insight into
Speaker 1: the workings of the mind of the child that became
Speaker 1: the man. Sure Christian Price was descended from Fletcher Christian.
Speaker 1: Fletcher Christian was of course the most famous of the
Speaker 1: mutineers from the Bounty, the ship on which there was
Speaker 1: a mutiny against Captain Bligh back in the late seventeen eighties.
Speaker 1: I do believe something like that. And Fletcher Christian was
Speaker 1: a first mates mate was something. He had some sort
Speaker 1: of rank in them hierarchy on the ship, and he
Speaker 1: was the de facto leader of the mutineers. They saw
Speaker 1: bly as a tyrannical captain, etc. Etc. And what the
Speaker 1: mutineers did was placed Fly and other senior officers such
Speaker 1: as you know, a ship's surgeon and so on, in
Speaker 1: a glorified rowing boat. You know, they had, I think
Speaker 1: like a life beat or a whaling boat as they
Speaker 1: called them, with some oars and a bucket of water,
Speaker 1: and not much else, some bread or something, and set
Speaker 1: them afloat on the ocean, on the Pacific, I think,
Speaker 1: and basically knowing that those men would probably drown or
Speaker 1: dive first. Now, due to Bli's genius as a navigator,
Speaker 1: those abandoned seamen actually got their way to safety, which
Speaker 1: was one of the great survival stories of all time. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the mutineers, what they did was not so good. They
Speaker 1: took the boat the bounty, and they went to Tahiti,
Speaker 1: I do believe, and they kidnapped and abducted six Tarhitian
Speaker 1: men and eighteen Tahitian women. And you can see where
Speaker 1: this is going. They enslaved those Tartaritians by and large,
Speaker 1: got them on board, and they headed off into the
Speaker 1: ocean towards an uninhabited island that they knew of, a
Speaker 1: tiny island called pit Can Pitcan Island. And they got there,
Speaker 1: they unloaded the boat of all the goods they could,
Speaker 1: and the timbers and the tools and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it, bolts of cloth, canvas, anything useful, and of
Speaker 1: course the stores, you know, salt, pork, and all the
Speaker 1: rest of the stuff they had. And then they burnt
Speaker 1: the ship and they burnt the ship because they knew
Speaker 1: that the British Navy would send battleships after them, and
Speaker 1: that the battleships would eventually see the bounty mord at
Speaker 1: pit Can and come in and take them all and
Speaker 1: hang them, no doubt for mutiny. And so they burnt
Speaker 1: the boat to the waterline, and they lived there in
Speaker 1: a state of nature. Now, state of nature is not
Speaker 1: a great thing, because people do very bad things to
Speaker 1: each other. Now, these eight mutineers and the captives, that is,
Speaker 1: eighteen women and half a dozen Tasian men, they arrived
Speaker 1: on pitt Kenn in seventeen ninety. Now, by the time
Speaker 1: an American whaling ship visited the island in eighteen eight,
Speaker 1: that's eighteen years later, almost a generation. All but one
Speaker 1: of the eight mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, had been killed
Speaker 1: in fights with each other and with the Tahitians. By then,
Speaker 1: the enslaved women at given birth to the first generation
Speaker 1: of pitt Can Islanders. This included Fletcher Christian's son, Thursday
Speaker 1: October Christian. We know when he was born. He's born
Speaker 1: on a Thursday in October, which year probably seven point
Speaker 1: ninety one, not sure. Thursday October Christians many descendants are
Speaker 1: among the few hundred Pitcurners, as they call them Pitcurners
Speaker 1: who survive on Pitcn and on Norfolk Island and scattered
Speaker 1: around New Zealand and Australia. These Pitcn Islanders have spread
Speaker 1: over the years. They not only went to Norfolk Island,
Speaker 1: which is well known in about eighteen fifty because Pitken
Speaker 1: was overcrowded. They also over time have spread to Auckland
Speaker 1: in New Zealand and to parts of Australian Melbourne and Sydney,
Speaker 1: where they do all sorts of things, some of them
Speaker 1: heavily involved in shady operations, particularly prostitution. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: the creepy combination of criminal and cannibal trapped on an
Speaker 1: island bred a closed society where child sets abuse was
Speaker 1: rife and it was accepted under this catual excuse of
Speaker 1: it's the Polynesian way. Now supporters of that sort of
Speaker 1: attitude included, can you believe this? The millionaire author Colleen McCulloch.
Speaker 1: Now some listeners will recall her as the author of
Speaker 1: The Thornbirds, which was made into a big film that
Speaker 1: sold millions of books. Was made to a very big
Speaker 1: film with I think Brian Brown as the handsome priest,
Speaker 1: and somebody else and somebody else. It was a very
Speaker 1: big film around the place, and off the back of
Speaker 1: it more books were sold, and it made Colin McCulloch
Speaker 1: quite a wealthy and fairly famous author. Now Colen, in
Speaker 1: her wisdom, went out and lived on Norfolk Island, thinking
Speaker 1: it was a good place, and she married a pitceroner.
Speaker 1: And she was once quoted as saying by a reporter,
Speaker 1: I was quoted in print as saying, quote, it's Polynesian.
Speaker 1: It's a Polynesian way to break your girl in at twelve.
Speaker 1: In other words, she was promoting basically child rape. Really
Speaker 1: the truth of this lifestyle, if that's the right word
Speaker 1: of this entrenched abuse was exposed in the year two
Speaker 1: thousand when British police arrived to investigate the rape of
Speaker 1: a teenage girl on Pitgen Island. Pit Keen is sort
Speaker 1: of a British dominion or protectorate words that effect. The
Speaker 1: British police spoked to dozens of women, some on the
Speaker 1: island and some who had fled from it, and they
Speaker 1: uncovered a network of interwoven maze of sex abuse that
Speaker 1: went back I'd say eight generations. Each victim was related
Speaker 1: to the men being charged with similar offenses against other
Speaker 1: young girls. Husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins were part
Speaker 1: of systematic abuse that had been a way of life
Speaker 1: on Pitcn and most likely also on Norfolk Island, where
Speaker 1: so many of them had moved back in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties. Some defended, some actually defended this tradition of
Speaker 1: underage sex. Others were ashamed. Almost every man on pitt
Speaker 1: Ken was investigated, and six were eventually convicted of thirty
Speaker 1: five charges in two thousand and four, after trials that
Speaker 1: attracted international attention. An English journalist Kathy Marx and I
Speaker 1: spoke to this woman. She's very good. She lived on
Speaker 1: the island to cover the trials and later wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Lost Paradise. Good title. Kathy Marks believed that
Speaker 1: convictions were the tip of the iceberg of the praved
Speaker 1: practices that affected these pitt Kerner clans even when they
Speaker 1: moved to mainland communities. And this is where we're getting
Speaker 1: closer to shorn Christian Price. None of this excuses Shorn
Speaker 1: Price's evil acts, but it might explain the forces that
Speaker 1: shaped him. Whether before his birth or after it. What
Speaker 1: it doesn't explain is why the parole board would release
Speaker 1: someone so dangerous against the wishes of a judge. It
Speaker 1: seemed a random thing to do. Like the toss of
Speaker 1: a coin heads, he stays in tails, he goes out.
Speaker 1: When Shawn Price won the toss and was let out,
Speaker 1: Marsha Vuketish lost. She lost her life. Unlike Thomas Quick,
Speaker 1: the Swedish lunatic murderer or non murderer who made a
Speaker 1: string of false confessions in the nineteen nineties, Price is
Speaker 1: absolutely guilty, beyond any doubt. But something that Thomas Quick's
Speaker 1: tough old defense lawyer told a reporter rings true. I
Speaker 1: just found this quote recently and it struck me as
Speaker 1: true about this case and about many others. This old
Speaker 1: lawyer said, I don't like people that much in general,
Speaker 1: but if you spend so much time with a client,
Speaker 1: you see the person behind the headlines. It all starts
Speaker 1: with a little boy under a Christmas tree playing with toys,
Speaker 1: and it ends up very tragic. Somewhere along the line.
Speaker 1: Everyone's a victim. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is
Speaker 1: a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Johnny Burton. For my columns, features and more,
Speaker 1: go to heroldsn dot com dot au, forward Slash Andrew Rule.
Speaker 1: One word advertising inquiries go to news Podcasts sold at
Speaker 1: news dot com dot au. That is all one word
Speaker 1: news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about
Speaker 1: this episode, links are in the description.