The Killing Streets: Tanya Bretherton on Australia’s first serial killer

I am a true crime author, based in Sydney. My latest book, The Killing Streets, explores the first serial killings to ever occur in this city, many of which remain unsolved to this day.

Tanya Bretherton

My true crime stories are always based in Sydney. I was not born here, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I love writing about this city so much. Sydney is a harbour town, and the entire place is defined by the geography and the water. Port Jackson separates the north from the south, the Parramatta River cuts the city right across the middle from east to west, and the Georges River slices Sydney through the south west. The shoreline shapes the rhythm of the city in strange ways too. When the weather blows in from the coast, the storms can be really violent. And, like the tide, the peak hour traffic is certainly relentless.

When I first moved to Sydney, I imagined spending a lot of time at the beach. The beach is certainly an important part of life for many people who live here, but instead, my work led to me to the state archives. It isn’t a beach, but you do spend a lot of time surrounded by sandy-coloured scraps of aged paper.

The archive is its own kind of shoreline. There are lots of little discoveries and gathering up documents is a little like gathering seashells. Fragments of the past are washed ashore. We scoop them up. We hold each sea shell in our hands and study them carefully, thinking about the journey it took to wash on the shore of the archive.

In the archives, there are also messages in bottles. The words and images of those who are long gone are there, just waiting to be recovered. There are letters which were once folded in the pockets of the dead, and even after eighty years, the fold lines are still visible. There are blood-stained notes, left behind by people who have died by their own hand. There are letters penned by long-distance lovers. There are spiteful wills, foreclosures on family homes and criminal records too. Birth and death and all that happens in between is recorded as well.

From The Sydney Morning Herald, Sat 20 Jan 1934

When I select the topic for a true crime book, the crime, the person, and the place all are important. My books are always a mix of personal narrative and social history, because each of us are a big story and a little story at the same time. The Suitcase Baby is about a woman named Sarah Boyd committing an unthinkable act of violence–the murder of her child. It is also about the society of the ’20s and the factors that led to that murder. The Suicide Bride deals with a murder-suicide at the turn of the twentieth century, but it is also about the institution of marriage and the challenges of mental illness. My latest book, The Killing Streets, examines the life of Eric Craig, the man arrested for the first serial killings in Sydney’s history, but it also looks at life in the city during the depression.

I like reading and writing history, and particularly true crime because it is the study of broken things–broken institutions, broken laws, broken people and broken families. True crime writing often places a lot of focus on the psychological portrait of a criminal and the pathology of someone capable of breaking the law. I don’t discount that psychology is important, but sociology also has a role to play. What we define to be a crime changes over time, and this is fascinating as well.

When I write true crime I consider the person, but I also consider their context. Who we are is important, but what happens to us during the course of our life is also important too. When we are walking along the shoreline, we always find more broken seashells than we do whole shells. None of us is perfect. We are all a bit battered by the tides of life. A broken seashell is no less beautiful and no less fascinating just because it is cracked.

When I am looking for a writing project, I am looking for the broken shells because they make for the most interesting stories. A broken shell immediately has a story, it has a history. Writing true crime is a little bit like studying those broken sea shells ever so closely and trying to work out what caused them to crack.

The Killing Streets is out now.

The Killing Streets

Uncovering Australia's first serial murderer

by Tanya Bretherton

In December 1932, as the Depression tightened its grip, the body of a woman was found in Queens Park, Sydney.

It was a popular park. There were houses in plain view. Yet this woman had been violently murdered without anyone noticing. Other equally brutal and shocking murders of women in public places were to follow. Australia's first serial killer was at large. Police failed to notice the similarities between the victims until the death of one young woman...

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