Networked Knowledge - Book Reports

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

Debi Marshall homepage

See also
Go here: for lectures and articles on forensic issues
Bob Moles: A state of Injustice - book now online
Bob Moles: Losing Their Grip - The Case of Henry Keogh - book now online

KILLING FOR PLEASURE: the definitive story of the Snowtown serial killings - April 2006

External Link: Random House to order this book

Review of this book by Bob Moles

A disused bank vault holding eight dismembered bodies immersed in barrels of acid. Two bodies buried in a suburban backyard. A further two found in the bush.

Informed by material never seen before - an interview with Bunting's last lover Elizabeth Harvey, and with the Crown's key eye-witness James Vlassakis and with details of the torture and crimes not previously released - this is a tensely woven and microscopic examination of tawdry lives and tragic deaths.

Four men who tortured and killed for fun, for power. Four men who kept each other's dark secrets for years. By the time the police investigation concluded, the story had invited comparison with the nightmare of Rosemary and Fred West, the British House of Horrors. Details of what the killers did to their victims before and after their deaths were deemed so depraved that suppression orders were in place throughout the trial. But the killers were not insane. They made deliberate choices to kill and lived in a culture of complete anarchy, sadistic violence, deviance and chaos.

Journalist and author Debi Marshall explores the killers' psychopathic makeup in minute and harrowing detail. She charts the victims' exposure to generational paedophilia, incest, unemployment and hopelessness. Marshall covers the exhaustive trials and interviews the lawyers who ran them. Through interviews, she captures the voices of the victim's families and examines the police and forensic investigation and then wades into the social structure that spawned the people in this story.

See also NetK: South Australia homepage

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