Speaker 1: I'm being stalked, and no one took serious note of it,
Speaker 1: and so then I had to stage my own disappearance
Speaker 1: in order to prove that I was being stalked, to
Speaker 1: bring attention to the problem of being stalked.
Speaker 2: That logic is not what a proof.
Speaker 3: He was very close to the grandfather who also was murdered.
Speaker 2: Oh dear, and becoming a bit of a theme.
Speaker 3: And this young gentleman was the last to see Grandpa.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrew Rules's Life and Crimes. It's that time of
Speaker 1: year again where we chat about what books to read
Speaker 1: over summer, and possibly even what films to watch or
Speaker 1: any other pastimes that crop up.
Speaker 2: I'm here with the.
Speaker 1: Podcast Long Suffering producer John Burton, whose full name is
Speaker 1: longer than that, and he is going to take part
Speaker 1: in this because I think he's a very keen reader
Speaker 1: and a student of the printer word, among others.
Speaker 3: Welcome John, thank you kindly, among others and among others.
Speaker 3: Today I'll be more talking about documentaries. Documentaries, I think sentries.
Speaker 3: For those of you who are more audio and video wise.
Speaker 1: Oh excellent. That's good, because I'm not terribly wise. And
Speaker 1: what would you recommend our listeners watch or get hold of.
Speaker 3: So there's a few interesting ones that are kicking around
Speaker 3: that are highly regarded, and I highly regard them as well.
Speaker 3: One of them, probably one of the most timely, is
Speaker 3: a documentary on Netflix about Sean puff Daddy Coombs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard of P Diddy.
Speaker 3: P Diddy, and you may have been enthralled or at
Speaker 3: least seen a passing reference or to the recent trials.
Speaker 3: And I think he's just been convicted and sentenced to
Speaker 3: something like fifty months or something like that. One of
Speaker 3: the weird ways that Americans, you know, run their prison sentences,
Speaker 3: sometimes two hundred years, very strange. But there is a
Speaker 3: new documentary on Netflix called Sean Coombs The Reckoning, and
Speaker 3: it's basically this sort of multi part portrait of his
Speaker 3: rise and fall. It starts off with footage of him
Speaker 3: hold up in a New York apartment, frantically calling his
Speaker 3: attorney and looking over the road to a bunch of
Speaker 3: law enforcement folk who are looking back at him. And
Speaker 3: you always know it's going to be a good documentary
Speaker 3: if they've got that sort of thing, if someone has
Speaker 3: found a piece of vision of the person in question
Speaker 3: in the moment of strife that you know is going
Speaker 3: to engulf their life. You know, someone's onto something they've
Speaker 3: dug somewhere good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does have that ring about it. This one
Speaker 1: of It's somewhere sort of a modern cross between O. J.
Speaker 1: Simpson and The Fall of Prince Andrew.
Speaker 3: A bit, a little bit and throughout it it's a
Speaker 3: mo two part series, but it goes through his rise,
Speaker 3: but at every stage there are people, you know, warning,
Speaker 3: you know, the sort.
Speaker 1: Of the the against him about him, about him, that
Speaker 1: he might be a smooth dude and good looking and
Speaker 1: this and that and make money in the music business,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Yes, but deep down he's a gangster with
Speaker 1: some bad habits, deep down done not all that deep
Speaker 1: PABs perhaps not just under the surface.
Speaker 2: And what was his real name is Sean Combs?
Speaker 3: Real name Sean Coombs sort of seen as a bit
Speaker 3: of a wonder kind producer, seen as someone in the
Speaker 3: early nineties that was finger on the pulse youthful music
Speaker 3: and presario knew his way around a recording studio, but
Speaker 3: interestingly was very early is caught up in some worrying things.
Speaker 3: His group organized a charity basketball match which ended up
Speaker 3: in a crush, too many people trying to get in.
Speaker 3: Everyone wanted to be there, multiple people died. This was
Speaker 3: seen by some as the making of him, because he
Speaker 3: got his name out there, even if it was in
Speaker 3: a bad way.
Speaker 1: No such thing as bad publicity in some respects exactly so,
Speaker 1: especially in the rap world.
Speaker 3: No exactly so chouting his rise, but always with that
Speaker 3: little caveat, and the caveats get bigger, the whispers get bigger.
Speaker 1: True, it strikes me, you know, I've been around a
Speaker 1: while and you can see the way that history sort
Speaker 1: of changes, but doesn't change that the rise of the
Speaker 1: rapper group, big money in it, therefore hangers on. You
Speaker 1: have rappers with big mobs of people following them around
Speaker 1: and all, you know, soaking up the money. Of course,
Speaker 1: it's very reminiscent of the old time boxes, you know,
Speaker 1: Liston and Ali and all the rest of them, all the.
Speaker 2: Way back to Joe Lewis. These guys who were.
Speaker 1: Black guys making a lot of money in a sort
Speaker 1: of a new and exciting scene, which while boxing wasn't
Speaker 1: new when it became televised and had radio coverage, etc.
Speaker 1: It became monetized and that meant that boxers were fighting
Speaker 1: for big purses.
Speaker 2: Which gave us those huge.
Speaker 1: Heavyweight events, and it meant that these guys became household
Speaker 1: names and they made millions of dollars instead of not
Speaker 1: making millions of dollars. And it seems to me that
Speaker 1: the rappers are to some extent a bit like that.
Speaker 1: And there's always that suggestion that the boxes are mixed
Speaker 1: up with the mob and with gangsters and with big
Speaker 1: book makers and with dishonest stuff. Always that suggestion from
Speaker 1: that goes all the way back to the bare knuckle
Speaker 1: days really, and the rappers same thing. Where there's easy money,
Speaker 1: there's crooks.
Speaker 3: Well, everyone loves to hang around someone who's rich and
Speaker 3: famous if they can as well.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that deadly mixtures of money, notoriety. You know,
Speaker 1: the girls will follow the guys, all that stuff, It
Speaker 1: all goes together. Yeah, So that's a very fertile feel
Speaker 1: to make a documentary about. What other ones we're looking at?
Speaker 3: So another Netflix one and it's called Fred and Rose West,
Speaker 3: a British horror story.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, Fred West. I'd forgotten about Fred West. It
Speaker 2: is a horror story.
Speaker 3: It is a horror story. And you know, one of
Speaker 3: these ones that may have been on the periphery of
Speaker 3: your knowledge because it was, you know, mid nineties. It
Speaker 3: would have troubled the world pages probably back then, but
Speaker 3: I don't think it was front page material in Australia.
Speaker 1: No, I can recall it clearly. But then again, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm in the business and probably took more of an interest.
Speaker 1: But very strange set up. They almost looked like each other,
Speaker 1: Fred and Rosemary West. There was something very deeply creepy
Speaker 1: about them.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it should explain the plot. I think Fred West,
Speaker 3: one of his and Ros's children went missing, didn't turn
Speaker 3: up to school, and they found her body under some
Speaker 3: paving stones in the backyard, and Fred was immediately brought
Speaker 3: in for questioning and it unraveled. He thought he was
Speaker 3: smarter than the cops. He had that sort of swagger
Speaker 3: about him, and bit by bit they broke him down
Speaker 3: and found out.
Speaker 2: The true horror of what he was up to.
Speaker 3: I think it was nine or more young women who
Speaker 3: he had murdered, and they were all sort of had
Speaker 3: a very much a type young women, runaways or sort
Speaker 3: of girls who were.
Speaker 2: Floating through life, hard to trace, hard to trace.
Speaker 3: And this was at a time the actual murders happened
Speaker 3: in the seventies, but the police investigation and they caught
Speaker 3: up with him in the mid nineties, so they got
Speaker 3: away with it for a long time. The first episode
Speaker 3: is titled Fred, and again, like the Sean Combs docum entry,
Speaker 3: they've got themselves. I think they must have got either
Speaker 3: a police proof of evidence or the record of interview.
Speaker 3: They certainly have a record of interview of him, and
Speaker 3: it seems like it was the first time it's come
Speaker 3: to light, so they've managed to get that. They've also
Speaker 3: got footage of Fred going through his backyard with police
Speaker 3: and going through the paving stones and saying, well, yes,
Speaker 3: she's buried here, and this one's buried here, which is
Speaker 3: quite confronting to look at. It's sort of old, analog,
Speaker 3: grainy footage, but it's very compelling. And so the first
Speaker 3: episode is called Fred, and so Fred obviously was brought
Speaker 3: in and he was in it from the beginning. You know,
Speaker 3: he was not getting free. But the second episode is
Speaker 3: called Rose Rosebary as in the Wife, and it's it's
Speaker 3: all about well, hang on, maybe Fred isn't the sole
Speaker 3: butcher here, maybe his accomplice. And so it goes through
Speaker 3: a Rosa's story, which in itself is upbringing bad married
Speaker 3: Fred when she was fifteen or something, and goes through
Speaker 3: and will.
Speaker 2: Have been abused as a child.
Speaker 3: It's inevitable, and goes through and it paints a picture
Speaker 3: of Fred was not the only monster in this family.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It's probably second only. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you have a hierarchy in these things, really,
Speaker 1: but it's up there with that terrible story which became
Speaker 1: a very brilliant book really about the Moore's murderers. The
Speaker 1: book was called Beyond Belief and the Mores murderers were
Speaker 1: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and they have also gone
Speaker 1: into infamy back in the sixties and their crimes. They
Speaker 1: killed a series of children up in Yorkshire and buried
Speaker 1: them out on the moors. But that same aspect of
Speaker 1: folly a French call it where you've got a couple,
Speaker 1: I mean a man and a woman, which is particularly
Speaker 1: sinister and creepy and awful because most of us tend
Speaker 1: to trust a couple. We tend to trust the fact
Speaker 1: that a woman is present, that a couple won't be
Speaker 1: abductors or killers. But when they are how sinister is it?
Speaker 1: Because they can persuade children that they're okay, And children
Speaker 1: who would not get into a car or except the
Speaker 1: live from or whatever from a man alone, will happily
Speaker 1: go when it's a couple.
Speaker 3: And they are the subjects of that really quite chilling
Speaker 3: photo or sets of photos, aren't they where black and white?
Speaker 3: They're both sort of staring into camera, whiteyde and yeah,
Speaker 3: very very creepy.
Speaker 2: Very creepy.
Speaker 1: She had the bleached blonde hair, Mayra Hindley and Ian
Speaker 1: Brady I think his name was. He had the quiff,
Speaker 1: the sort of rock role quick, a lean face like
Speaker 1: a ferrety face, hard looking Scottish in origin, I think.
Speaker 1: And he'd come out of pretty ordinary circumstances in Scotland
Speaker 1: or somewhere, and he'd been adopted out as a child,
Speaker 1: which I have to say is a very common shared
Speaker 1: attribute of a lot of people. I have done a
Speaker 1: lot of bad things. Adopted boys haven't got a great record.
Speaker 1: Mister Stinky was an adopted boy. Paul Stephen Haig, who's
Speaker 1: still in jail in Victoria for killing seven people, is.
Speaker 2: An adopted boy. And on it goes.
Speaker 1: It's quite a long list of monsters and Ian Brady
Speaker 1: was right at the top of it. Don't know about
Speaker 1: Fred West. It would be interesting to know his background
Speaker 1: because it will be very patchy.
Speaker 3: Well, Rose was not his first wife.
Speaker 2: No, what happened to the first one? There?
Speaker 3: I asked, Well, certainly the well and this is where
Speaker 3: it gets particularly horrifying. It he and his first wife
Speaker 3: had a child, and that's one of the more horrific
Speaker 3: parts of the documentary talking about that and how that
Speaker 3: ended up. But to being on a slightly more flippant note,
Speaker 3: Fred did have a very profound quiff.
Speaker 2: He had.
Speaker 3: He had the sort of rush back, crush back, and
Speaker 3: then that that sort of morphed into a kind of
Speaker 3: a nineteen nineties kind of lad look, even though it
Speaker 3: was about, you know, fifties at the time. With the
Speaker 3: lad look, the lad looks, oh yeah, read this.
Speaker 2: Is up in the up in the Midlands or something.
Speaker 3: I want to say, it's it's Canterbury or somewhere like
Speaker 3: yeah yeah. And it was one of these ones where interestingly,
Speaker 3: the documentary starts with a journal and this is always good.
Speaker 3: It's a small town journo who was her first job
Speaker 3: was to cover this thing and she did all the
Speaker 3: right things, she asked the right questions, she did the
Speaker 3: right searches, you know, really good on the ground journalism.
Speaker 3: And then it ends up with a gentleman from the
Speaker 3: tabloids in Fleet Street, I think from the Mirror talking
Speaker 3: about paying jurors for their stories and how that had
Speaker 3: the potential to disrail the eventual conviction.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, of Rose, Oh god, yeah. And that's on Netflix.
Speaker 2: That's on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Any other really creepy things you're going to watch? Is
Speaker 1: anything just slightly lighter?
Speaker 3: I'll give you one more creepy in one light? How's
Speaker 3: that for creepy? Carmen family murders. The Carmen family murders.
Speaker 3: This is a case I'd never heard of before, but
Speaker 3: neither so. It starts off with a distress at sea
Speaker 3: and the coastguard or someone goes out and they rescue
Speaker 3: this guy who had spent seven days odd on the
Speaker 3: sort of inflatable life raft. His boat had capsized. Sadly
Speaker 3: on that boat. Also, was his mother lost at sea.
Speaker 3: He came from a very wealthy I think Rhode Island family.
Speaker 3: His maternal grandfather was sort of bastion of the Greek
Speaker 3: American community, had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, started
Speaker 3: a business, multi millionaire, the large house, the indoor pool, horses,
Speaker 3: the whole shebang, and his mother. This guy who's rescued
Speaker 3: his mother's lost at sea. The son, the guy who's rescued,
Speaker 3: is on the spectrum or on the neurodiverse spectrum. So
Speaker 3: he quite matter of fact in a lot of the
Speaker 3: lot of his ways, interviewed by police, and his matter
Speaker 3: of fact, and either the police didn't know or didn't
Speaker 3: factor in, or maybe they did factor in his.
Speaker 1: Condition. His condition, and that alt is the way he
Speaker 1: doesn't act out the emotions the way most.
Speaker 3: Of us would exactly exactly around the funeral, he's talking
Speaker 3: to reporters and he's being very matter of fact and.
Speaker 2: All that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: Anyway, so he's interviewed by police. Now we subsequently learned
Speaker 3: that previous to that, previous to this particular tragedy, he
Speaker 3: was very close to the Greek American grandfather that I
Speaker 3: mentioned before, the one who set up the house and
Speaker 3: the forces and wys.
Speaker 2: Of stuff, who also was murdered, Oh dear, and becoming
Speaker 2: a bit of a theme.
Speaker 3: And this young gentleman was the last to see Grandpa
Speaker 3: was the last to see Grandpa.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3: So it sets up and I won't sort of go
Speaker 3: towards the spoiler, but it goes through the various investigations,
Speaker 3: and it's one of those ones where they do it
Speaker 3: a very good job of saying, there is very credible
Speaker 3: evidence on this side, but there's also credible evidence on
Speaker 3: this side, right, And perhaps some of this evidence can
Speaker 3: be explained by his condition.
Speaker 2: Yes, but maybe it's not.
Speaker 1: This is very interesting, isn't it. It's interesting how we
Speaker 1: judge people by their demeanor, and we do it unconsciously. Unconsciously,
Speaker 1: but I would call what you're describing a stronger version
Speaker 1: of the Lindy Chamberlain effect. Lindy Chaplain and her husband
Speaker 1: Michael were slightly unusual people. They were well, they were
Speaker 1: religious for a start, which meant deeply religious, which meant
Speaker 1: they had a certain sort of calmness about bad things
Speaker 1: happening because they believe there was a higher purpose or whatever.
Speaker 1: And they had a calm demeanor when many of us
Speaker 1: would not. So they didn't carry on, they didn't wail,
Speaker 1: they didn't cry, they didn't sob. They were very self contained,
Speaker 1: and that played against them both because people looked at
Speaker 1: them and said, oh, you're not upset enough. We don't
Speaker 1: trust you. We think you did it. And then they
Speaker 1: set out to prove they did it, and then they
Speaker 1: ignored anything that was going to exonerate them, and search
Speaker 1: and searched for any evidence or any witness that they
Speaker 1: could use to make a case against them. It became
Speaker 1: a very one sided investigation merely, I think, largely. I
Speaker 1: think because people took a set against them early, or
Speaker 1: maybe only one or two investigators took a set against
Speaker 1: them early in the piece, and I think that their
Speaker 1: demeanor had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 3: It's interesting in this documentary because the young gentleman at
Speaker 3: the center of it all will be in a police
Speaker 3: interview room and the police will ask him a question,
Speaker 3: you know, what did you think of your mother? And
Speaker 3: he will say, I love my mother very dearly, and
Speaker 3: I probably shouldn't I probably shouldn't say this, but she's
Speaker 3: got a lot of flaws. So she's got a lot
Speaker 3: of flaws, and listop a couple of floors, and then
Speaker 3: he stop himself and say, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Speaker 2: Should I have said that? Yeah? It builds up a
Speaker 2: very interesting lisk that does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is fascinating that because you can see how
Speaker 1: somebody could just with lazy investigators or investigators who jump
Speaker 1: to conclusions, that someone like that could just dig a
Speaker 1: hole for themselves and be manipulated into doing so because
Speaker 1: we're investigators just want to dick the box and say
Speaker 1: we've got a result, we've got a conviction, we've got
Speaker 1: an arrest, and then a conviction. They attempted to go
Speaker 1: with the one they've got in the hand rather than
Speaker 1: one that's out there in the wind that they can't find.
Speaker 2: And we've seen this a lot of times. We do
Speaker 2: see this, don't we have?
Speaker 3: If I can go from the tragic to the comic,
Speaker 3: I'll give you one last recommendation, Andrew and listeners, And
Speaker 3: this is one on ABC I Views, so we'll move
Speaker 3: away from from Netflix. And this is a series. It's
Speaker 3: actually a series that goes across a wide swath of
Speaker 3: human experience and it's called I was Actually there, Oh yes,
Speaker 3: And it's events like the two thousand and four tsunami,
Speaker 3: the nine to eleven. They've got an episode about that,
Speaker 3: someone who's at nine to eleven, all of these sort
Speaker 3: of ones, but the one that I would like to
Speaker 3: bring to your attention, Andrew is one starring one Fairly Arrow.
Speaker 1: I saw this, Oh it is wonderful. Fairly Arrow the
Speaker 1: sort of nightclub singer with the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast,
Speaker 1: a very Gold Coast story, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is Fairly was.
Speaker 1: She was the big blonde girl who could sing a bit,
Speaker 1: and that took a pretty normal Gold Coast voice from
Speaker 1: the eighties, yeah, eighties, early nineties. And then we see
Speaker 1: Fairly Arrow the way she used today after thirty years
Speaker 1: in America and many many, many years of plastic surgery
Speaker 1: and a different accent. It's sort of shocking in a
Speaker 1: slightly comical way. Well, but fairly what did Fairly do?
Speaker 2: John Well?
Speaker 3: Slightly comic in a engaging way is pretty much the
Speaker 3: way that this documentary. I was not in a newsroom
Speaker 3: at this point. I don't know if that you were
Speaker 3: sent up at any stage to cover this at the time.
Speaker 3: But a Fairly came to police, or came to the
Speaker 3: world's or the world's attention, Australia's attention when she when
Speaker 3: she went missing, presumed kidnapped.
Speaker 2: Presumed kidnapper.
Speaker 3: This was a very very grave thing. The Gold coast
Speaker 3: police pulled out all stops. One of them says in
Speaker 3: the documentary, we had more of these computer terminals put
Speaker 3: into our building in order to try to find Fairly
Speaker 3: Fairly appears two or three days or weeks or.
Speaker 1: Something found on the trust up beside of roads and weak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but not very well trusted, not overly well trust, not
Speaker 1: knocked about much. No well fed, looked well fed, and
Speaker 1: not that distressed.
Speaker 3: Not that distressed by a couple of young lads who
Speaker 3: were in this documentary. They do a very good job
Speaker 3: in this documentary of finding finding the appropriate people and
Speaker 3: you know fairly. It goes to the to the police
Speaker 3: and they interview on all that sort of stuff. She
Speaker 3: then fronts the media almost immediately to tell her story
Speaker 3: of horror, which is not all that horrible, not all
Speaker 3: that horrible, because she's sort of half smiling because it
Speaker 3: turns out gentle listener, I don't think this is a spoiler.
Speaker 3: It turns out a gentle listener at Fairly and an
Speaker 3: acquaintance of hers, had hashed a plot to hide her
Speaker 3: away in a motel where where she had over the
Speaker 3: course of the time when she was disappitud Pezza, she'd
Speaker 3: get room service. She'd gone out to you know, take
Speaker 3: the bins out, you know. She she'd accepted new towels
Speaker 3: from the new towns.
Speaker 1: I asked for some motels. I think she was having showers,
Speaker 1: all of that sort of thing. And she was staying
Speaker 1: there with a partnering crime if for such as we
Speaker 1: could say, was a friendly fellow, will call him Cowboy
Speaker 1: or something. He did have a nickname like that, and
Speaker 1: he looked to me like a guy that had once
Speaker 1: been ado writer or something. He's a slightly we saw
Speaker 1: the old version of him, but you can tell he
Speaker 1: was a swaggering sort of dude back in the day,
Speaker 1: and you'd be tempted to wonder whether Fairly had done
Speaker 1: a bolt with him. And then said, oh, hang on,
Speaker 1: I want in a bit of trouble here because my
Speaker 1: husband's at home and he's not gonna be happy. Perhaps
Speaker 1: I've been abducted. Perhaps that's how it's got rolling. But
Speaker 1: she sold it to the police and the public, or
Speaker 1: tried to as they didn't take notice of my claims
Speaker 1: that I was being stalked. Yes, I'm being stalked, and
Speaker 1: no one took serious note of it, which might be true,
Speaker 1: and so then I had to stage my own disappearance
Speaker 1: in order to prove that I was being stalked and
Speaker 1: to get attention, to bring attention to the problem of
Speaker 1: being stalked with a false claim. The logic is not waterproof.
Speaker 1: You'll know, it's fairly oh some people in them. We
Speaker 1: could unwoke past to call it sort of blonde logic.
Speaker 1: But it was very silly stuff. And you do wonder
Speaker 1: whether she was covering up a temporary liaison with the cowboy.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I don't know. We should say that
Speaker 3: that fairly ended up being fined. Magistrate did not see
Speaker 3: fit to impose any further sanction on her, but she
Speaker 3: was fined something like twenty thousand dollars back in nineteen
Speaker 3: a lot of money. Whereas I think her we say
Speaker 3: partnering in crimes with air quotes on this one, because
Speaker 3: I believe her friend was in no way But yeah,
Speaker 3: he seemed, by the police or anything like that.
Speaker 1: He seemed to be a fairly harmless fellow and thought
Speaker 1: he was doing her a favor or something. Her husband
Speaker 1: wasn't amused.
Speaker 3: Her husband, who was a member of the singing group
Speaker 3: the Kinsman, was he Yes, who you know it's funny
Speaker 3: because you know they do what they do when they
Speaker 3: grab all of the archival TV. And there's him in
Speaker 3: his singing group on family Feud or right, and there
Speaker 3: she is singing pop song with someone else on very
Speaker 3: very daytime television at eleven am.
Speaker 2: It's very much that.
Speaker 1: It's a very Gold Coast nineteen eighties cheesy story in
Speaker 1: every way it is. It's it could almost a good
Speaker 1: The Coen Brothers could make it into a very funny film.
Speaker 3: There's a sort of itonia or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yes, it issue yea, and fairly as she was then,
Speaker 1: it was sort of funny. She's this naive bit, daffy
Speaker 1: bit and sort of likable in a way, a bit naughty,
Speaker 1: you know all of that.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it's spelt the end for us.
Speaker 1: She went around basically being interviewed by everybody then, and
Speaker 1: they would put her on pay some money to come on,
Speaker 1: which she needed to pay the police to pay for
Speaker 1: the cost, she think. And so she go on Willithy
Speaker 1: or something and be absolutely grilled and crucified, which had
Speaker 1: to happen naturally, and then she get a payment for
Speaker 1: that and that to help pay off the debt.
Speaker 2: And now thirty years later. She's a bit unhappy about that.
Speaker 1: She says she thought it was a little bit of
Speaker 1: an overreaction and she's really only trying to bring attention
Speaker 1: to being.
Speaker 2: She says, stooked, which she never knows she might have.
Speaker 3: Been, never know anyway, Andrew, that is the sum total
Speaker 3: of my recommendations. And our listeners aren't really here to
Speaker 3: listen to me, so oh.
Speaker 1: Yes, well they do want to hear about that stuff. Well, books,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have a little bit of a dip
Speaker 1: into the self publishing phenomenon. Crime writing particularly attracts a
Speaker 1: big range of writers from you know, wonderful writers because
Speaker 1: in the end, a lot of writing is about crimes
Speaker 1: of some sort, you know Shakespeare, These a lot of
Speaker 1: things are right through though, to especially in true crime,
Speaker 1: to the rankest I mean rankest of amateurs, and they
Speaker 1: all think they can do it. And in these days,
Speaker 1: because the technology is simple and easy and everyone's got
Speaker 1: a laptop, so anybody can publish some sort of true
Speaker 1: crime thing, ll do a podcast or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And so we have a range of books out on
Speaker 1: the market, and I see many of them which are
Speaker 1: either pretty rough homemade books done by amateurs. Some are
Speaker 1: a bit better than that. They've gone to a vanity
Speaker 1: publisher who's helped do a bit better cover and knock
Speaker 1: it into shape a bit. And some are better again
Speaker 1: and intrigued by this phenomenon, and a couple of them
Speaker 1: are quite worth reading. Now there's one out called eleven Minutes,
Speaker 1: which is a very good title. It's pretty sharp.
Speaker 2: This one. It's quite well conceived by a guy called
Speaker 2: Gregory M. Carroll.
Speaker 1: And Gregory M. Carroll has a surname which is intriguing
Speaker 1: because it is shared with a long dead armed robber
Speaker 1: and probably killer in Melbourne called Ianravel Carrol. And Ian
Speaker 1: Carroll was a boxer and a gunman who was without
Speaker 1: doubt one of the half a dozen people who did
Speaker 1: the Great Bookie Robbery in nineteen seventy six as I
Speaker 1: think it was, and that was the Victorian Club in
Speaker 1: the city in Melbourne. Great Bookly robbery, very well known.
Speaker 1: We've talked about it many times in the podcast. A
Speaker 1: big amount of cash officially one point three million, unofficially
Speaker 1: maybe five or six million dollars in cash untraceable. It
Speaker 1: has attracted a lot of time and attention and stuff
Speaker 1: over the years and what we didn't know was that
Speaker 1: Ian Carroll who ended up dead within within two or
Speaker 1: three years because he had an argument with mad Dog Cox,
Speaker 1: the guy that we call mad Dog Cox, whose real
Speaker 1: name was not mad Dog nor Cox, and Cox shot
Speaker 1: him dead down at Matalizer I think it was, and
Speaker 1: legged it. And Carol was one of these very heavy
Speaker 1: hitters and a good crook as they call him, mixed
Speaker 1: up with the Paterson Dockers and the whole thing in
Speaker 1: the boxing gym's and classic Melbourne crook. But his brother, Gregory,
Speaker 1: his little brother, Gregory, has written this book. And Gregory
Speaker 1: was a straight guy who wasn't a crook. He went
Speaker 1: into the legit world and did whatever he did, and
Speaker 1: quite a smart guy. And he's ended up i think
Speaker 1: in retirement writing this book, which is basically about the
Speaker 1: Great Bookie Robbery, which is why he's called eleven minutes
Speaker 1: because that's how long it took, and he's amalgamated quite clever.
Speaker 1: He's called it a novel and he's twisted the facts around.
Speaker 1: The facts were a bit rubbery anyway about the Bookie robbery.
Speaker 1: There's facts and these assumptions, and there's claims and counterclaims,
Speaker 1: but he has the advantage of having known his brother,
Speaker 1: so he perhaps had some sort of insight into his
Speaker 1: character and the character of the people he ran with,
Speaker 1: and he's been.
Speaker 4: Able to apply that to the whole booky rob robbery story.
Speaker 4: But he's also closely studied all the stuff that's been
Speaker 4: written and said about it in the past and amalgamated
Speaker 4: it into one pretty good readable book. Now, it would
Speaker 4: be improved.
Speaker 1: If it were edited a bit better, but it's pacey
Speaker 1: and easy to read and tough, un laconic. The dialogue
Speaker 1: is sparse but pretty good. It's sort of believable. It's
Speaker 1: not lots and lots of it. It's pretty sharp, and
Speaker 1: I mean, you could sit here and pick holes in it,
Speaker 1: but I don't see any point in doing that. It's
Speaker 1: quite a good read for what is essentially a vanity publishing,
Speaker 1: self pubblished thing. It's at the top end of it,
Speaker 1: and I'd suggest that it's probably very close to being
Speaker 1: as readable as Brian Brown The Actors books, which are
Speaker 1: in his dotage. Brian Brown, who's now in his seventies,
Speaker 1: is knocking out these best sellers that are rough, tough
Speaker 1: crime books, and I think the first one was called
Speaker 1: Sweet Jimmy a couple of years ago, and he's done
Speaker 1: some more because he's been quite successful. And of course
Speaker 1: the fact that he is Brian Brown and has a
Speaker 1: profile and he is who he is means he can
Speaker 1: sell books. And they're quite readable and they're quite good.
Speaker 1: But Brian Brown has written them using the knowledge he
Speaker 1: has of the film industry, so he sketches stuff in
Speaker 1: pretty fast, and his dialogue he's there, and it's pretty
Speaker 1: sparse and tough, and they're pretty good. They're not literature.
Speaker 1: None of this stuff is you know, Elmore Leonard let
Speaker 1: Alone anything better. But it's pretty readable and pretty good,
Speaker 1: and you can see that it would easily translate into
Speaker 1: film or a streamer into some sort of film. And
Speaker 1: I think that Gregory Carroll's book isn't far behind Brian Brown,
Speaker 1: but of course Brian Brown will always outsell Gregory Carroll
Speaker 1: because one's a big time actrum Month's not. There have
Speaker 1: been some other self published books. We've done one on
Speaker 1: the podcast. It is called Bandit or Priest, written by
Speaker 1: a man who calls himself Fabian Christian. That is about
Speaker 1: a case we've covered in the podcast, and we took
Speaker 1: the Fabian Christian about a robbery, a real life robbery
Speaker 1: that happened in the nineteen eighties in the Ara.
Speaker 4: Valley, probably Australia's biggest robbery, because it was of.
Speaker 1: Gems, opals, diamonds, gold stuff, all sorts of stuff which
Speaker 1: could have been worth anything up to thirty million then
Speaker 1: in the eighties, and which now, of course you'd say
Speaker 1: with inflation, might have been worth a hundred million whatever.
Speaker 1: If those valuations.
Speaker 2: Are right, it would be by far Australia's biggest ever.
Speaker 1: Robbery, and yet it's one that's largely forgotten. No one
Speaker 1: was killed, although it did attract tragedy. As we heard
Speaker 1: in the recent podcast, the wife of the robbed man
Speaker 1: died of fright within months of the robbery, and the
Speaker 1: husband the robbed man, the wealthy man that was robbed,
Speaker 1: he died of a heart condition fairly soon after as well.
Speaker 1: So it wrecked their family. This robbery not a great book,
Speaker 1: not a great piece of writing. But again it's a
Speaker 1: novel based heavily on a true story, and therefore it
Speaker 1: has some currency and it's worth it. It's a good
Speaker 1: one to read on the beach.
Speaker 3: And listeners will have I think just heard that they
Speaker 3: will have by the time this comes out.
Speaker 1: I hope so Fabian Christian is the author, and not
Speaker 1: totally his full name. He has a different surname, but
Speaker 1: it's worth a look. And I noticed it's another one
Speaker 1: on my desk. This is Father Teacher, Child Killer, the
Speaker 1: Abduction of Louise Bell and Michael Black, and it's by
Speaker 1: Michael Madigan. And that is another sort of self published
Speaker 1: type book or reasonably amateurs sort of book that is
Speaker 1: a real story about a true case that some people
Speaker 1: might find quite interesting. So we're looking at the sort
Speaker 1: of knock about end of the spectrum here.
Speaker 2: This literature. It ain't.
Speaker 1: But if it's literature you want, John, yes, I suggest
Speaker 1: having a look at some from overseas. There is an
Speaker 1: Irish author, a very big deal Irish author called John
Speaker 1: Boyne b O, Y and A and John Boyne, among
Speaker 1: many other books, and he's written some big bestsellers. This
Speaker 1: big deal he's written a series called the Elements series,
Speaker 1: I think, and it's four books Earth, Wind, Air, and
Speaker 1: Fire in whichever order. I actually think the first one
Speaker 1: might be Water in the series. But each of these
Speaker 1: books they're not terribly long, they're less than one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand words, they might be eighty thousand, and each of
Speaker 1: them they all.
Speaker 2: Look like each other.
Speaker 1: These books, they've got a similar design theme and they
Speaker 1: all link. So the main protagonist in the first book,
Speaker 1: he's a woman who leaves her husband, who's a disgraced politician,
Speaker 1: and she cuts her hair and wears sippy clothes and
Speaker 1: no makeup, and she goes and lives on a little
Speaker 1: island off off Ireland to get away from publicity. And
Speaker 1: there she runs into local people and so on, has
Speaker 1: an affair with a young guy, and all this stuff
Speaker 1: very readable, very good, and got a bit of edging
Speaker 1: on it. It's quite edgy, and there's a bit of
Speaker 1: blood in it because she's here because her husband has
Speaker 1: turned out to be a criminal, you know, he's a
Speaker 1: child molester in fact, and it's a very believable scenario
Speaker 1: with a crime subplot. Then the second book, it picks
Speaker 1: up one of the young guys from the island who
Speaker 1: leaves that island to go to Dublin and then to
Speaker 1: London or somewhere. He becomes a professional football player soccer player,
Speaker 1: and tells his story, which is involves a crime involves them.
Speaker 2: He's a gay kid who's.
Speaker 1: Playing soccer just to make money, but he's trying to
Speaker 1: impress one of his co players, and one of the
Speaker 1: co players, this co player rapes a girl and it's
Speaker 1: a moral dilemma crime story. It's quite riveting. And then
Speaker 1: the third book interlocks with the first two, and so
Speaker 1: on and so on. So each of these books interlocks
Speaker 1: with the other, and yet each one has a different
Speaker 1: main protagonist. Right, So I think it's a great series
Speaker 1: to get hold of that having read one, you will
Speaker 1: want to read the other three. Recommend John Boyne's Elements
Speaker 1: series earth Wind, Fire and Watar, which sounds like an
Speaker 1: old sort of progressive rock album, doesn't not.
Speaker 3: Oh I was going to ask, is this a new
Speaker 3: series of books or has this around for.
Speaker 1: A little bit, around a little while. It wasn't published yesterday,
Speaker 1: but it's not old. But John Boyn has been around
Speaker 1: a long time and has sold a lot of books
Speaker 1: and won big awards. He's a very big deal in
Speaker 1: the Northern hemisphere. Irish writing is really kicking goals at
Speaker 1: the minute.
Speaker 3: Well, we had on the show the author of The Chain,
Speaker 3: which did a while.
Speaker 1: Adrian McKinty, Irish guy who lived in Melbourne and was
Speaker 1: a friend of one of our former colleagues, David Power,
Speaker 1: who worked with us great and good friends. And Adrian
Speaker 1: is from I think it was from the North of
Speaker 1: Ireland perhaps, and he lived in Melbourne because I think
Speaker 1: his wife was an academic who worked here, and I
Speaker 1: think he was driving ubers or taxis or something and
Speaker 1: writing at the same time now in America and has
Speaker 1: had a had a bit of a hit with a
Speaker 1: couple of books, I think, and I may have kicked
Speaker 1: on I hope.
Speaker 3: Yes, Indeed, the chain sort of blew up.
Speaker 1: The chain was. Yeah, it was a very well constructed thriller,
Speaker 1: very American, and you could see that it would film
Speaker 1: very well, very tense and tight, a couple.
Speaker 3: Of different points of view, which is always fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah. True, it was as if you know, it was
Speaker 2: very well done, as if a computer did it.
Speaker 3: Really it was very sharp, although we should say, just
Speaker 3: for the benefit of listeners, have written before the time
Speaker 3: of AI.
Speaker 1: Yes, true, no, no, no, not at all. I know
Speaker 1: it wasn't, but it's just really well grafted together.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. What else is on your reading list?
Speaker 1: My reading list? I should plug someone that we might
Speaker 1: talk to in the new year. The evergreen Australian journalist
Speaker 1: and author. Gideon Hague now Gideon Hague, is a man
Speaker 1: of prodigious writing talents and a brain as big as Tasma,
Speaker 1: with whom I worked when he was a slip of
Speaker 1: a boy many years ago at another place, and he
Speaker 1: was a pale faced, thin little guy that used to
Speaker 1: smoke too much, and I had a worried look and
Speaker 1: always very very fine writer. He's become a most accomplished
Speaker 1: writer as a fully fledged adult writer, A great writer
Speaker 1: about cricket, particularly which is a passion of his, but
Speaker 1: also about other things. And sometimes he's done some very
Speaker 1: interesting books about relatively small subjects. I think he did
Speaker 1: one on the history of the office, the office in Australia.
Speaker 1: I think the office as in the office, an office building.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 1: And did he do one about the car industry or something.
Speaker 1: I haven't read them all, of course, but he did
Speaker 1: one called Certain Missions about a murder in Melbourne in.
Speaker 2: The fifties that was a very big deal.
Speaker 1: In the fifties about a young woman who was murdered
Speaker 1: fair body found down at Port Melbourne or somewhere under
Speaker 1: a boat, and the man charged with it was a
Speaker 1: very popular well spoken, handsome radio announcer, and it was
Speaker 1: a phenomenon at the time. My mother told me about it.
Speaker 1: She said, you know, people were queuing up to go
Speaker 1: to court to see this, this radio announcer in court.
Speaker 1: Gideon wrote a very interesting book about that. His latest
Speaker 1: offering is one called who is Wallace and Wallace Mister Wallace,
Speaker 1: I remember this story happening at the time. Mister Wallace
Speaker 1: lived and was jailed or locked up sorry in the
Speaker 1: Arradale Asylum for the criminally Insane at Ararat for sixty
Speaker 1: something years. He went in there in early middle age
Speaker 1: after shooting a man in King Street, Melbourne in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. He shot him in the nineteen twenties somebody,
Speaker 1: I think, two young men tried to bounce him about
Speaker 1: something he said. He told him not to smoke in
Speaker 1: a cafe and they waited for him outside and we're
Speaker 1: going to give him a hard time, and he pulled
Speaker 1: a revolver out and shot one of them. Now, he
Speaker 1: didn't defend himself in court terribly well. He wasn't well defended.
Speaker 1: He was found not guilty by virtue of insanity. He
Speaker 1: wasn't overly insane, although he did say things like I
Speaker 1: own Brazil and things like that, but he didn't act crazy.
Speaker 2: And he ended up locked up.
Speaker 1: Until he died at one hundred and six one hundred
Speaker 1: and seven, and he became quite famous in the last
Speaker 1: decade of his life as the oldest effectively the oldest
Speaker 1: prisoner anywhere in the western world, because he'd been locked
Speaker 1: up for virtually a well for life, really, and that
Speaker 1: was more than sixty years. And in the end he
Speaker 1: was totally institutionalized. But he had a nice suit on
Speaker 1: and eat the same food every day. He would play
Speaker 1: chess and beat everybody in the place, and sometimes he
Speaker 1: would smoke a pipe and they call him mister Wallace
Speaker 1: to his face, and old Bill.
Speaker 2: Behind his back.
Speaker 1: Some people would call him Mensies because he looked like
Speaker 1: Sir Robert Mensi had the big bushy eyebrows. That is
Speaker 1: a most unusual book about a most unusual man. And
Speaker 1: like Gideon's other sort of crime related books, it's small
Speaker 1: but sort of perfect in its way. And if you
Speaker 1: want something unusual, get hold of that and a couple
Speaker 1: of the others. And that John brings us to the end.
Speaker 2: Of our holiday. God, because we've rabbit it on far
Speaker 2: too long. Thank you, Andrew, it's a pleasure. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for
Speaker 1: true Crimeersustralia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
Speaker 1: features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au
Speaker 1: forward slash Andrew rule one word.
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Speaker 4: Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au.
Speaker 2: That is all one word news podcasts sold
Speaker 1: And if you want further information about this episode, links
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