Book Review
Bound by Blood: The True Story Behind the Wollongong Murders
JS Linton
ISBN: 1-74114-176-1 2004 ix+289 pages Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW
Thérèse Taylor
Charles Sturt University, NSW
In conjunction with 'The Shearer's Tale: Murder and injustice in the Australian bush'.
These two books - non-academic and in the ‘true crime' genre - are relevant to understanding rural Australia and regional cities, offering accurate accounts of incidents that have marked our culture and require explanation.
During the 1980s the once-industrial regional city of Wollongong became dominated by service industries and directly linked to Sydney - a kind of social and economic change characteristic of contemporary rural regions. Following this, the early 1990s witnessed the coming to light of exploitative sexual relationships between many Wollongong men in traditional elites and underage, socially marginal youths. Several of the accused committed suicide in the wake of the scandal. Possibly, the dissolution of social norms and obligations in the new Wollongong enabled these facts to emerge. Many people lost out, and others gained, as new money and new values swirled through the city.
In June 1998, while several of the Wollongong crimes addressed through the Wood Royal Commission awaited trial, the mutilated body of a local shopkeeper, David Ahearn, was found in his south coast unit. Two weeks later there was another victim: former mayor Frank Arkell. After Mark Valera, a youth of 18, was charged with these murders, his best friend, Keith Schriber, brutally murdered Jack Van Krevel, Valera's father. Valera's sister, Brenda van Krevel, was convicted as an accessory; all three are now in jail.
Drawing on interviews with the investigating police officers and with the survivors' families and friends, Bound in Blood gives a competent account of this series of murders. But its optimism in the face of its grim subject seems naïve - it dismisses child abuse and pedophilia allegations against Jack Van Krevel, citing his respectability and his friends' good opinion of him - and it says little about the overall context, the events preceding the murders, and issues of institutional corruption. Hence it avoids some of the more explosive allegations against Arkell; and treats his murder (when he was awaiting trial) as merely the result of an unstable youth's rage against society and family, and thus treats as coincidental its ensuring - no doubt to the relief of certain New South Wales power-brokers - that many questions arising from the Wood Royal Commission would never be answered.
The story of the two teenage killers displays the themes common in such stories: drug use, heavy metal music, an obsession with morbid pictures, and a probable background of sexual abuse. But the book does not offer a developed explanation of their actions. Although a full explanation may be impossible, there is certainly room for further psychological and a criminological studies.
More studies in this field are needed. Extreme crimes of violence, with no clear motive, are a feature of contemporary society and are too often seen in rural areas -the Snowtown Murders are an obvious case.
Tom Molomby's The Shearer's Tale effectively tells the fascinating story of the disappearance in 1936 of farmer and store keeper, Harry Lavers, from his home in Grenfell in the Riverina; and of how the police investigation produced a chain of circumstantial evidence that led to the conviction for murder of Fred McDermott, an itinerant shearer, living with a woman described as a ‘half caste'. Consistently protesting his innocence, McDermott won the support of clerical and legal figures who eventually prevailed in obtaining a full inquiry. Molomby vividly conveys much of the culture of the Australian bush of the 1930s and 40s, and, as a Sydney barrister, he subjects the court record to a lawyer's gaze. But although he is well familiar with the trial, his account of it and of the investigation tends merely to repeat the evidence without commenting on its flaws or its importance. A significant typographical error should be noted: ‘the prosecution case at the trial would be destroyed by the evidence of Whiteman and Kelly alone ...' (p. 163) should surely read ‘would not be destroyed'.
Whereas Bound in Blood relies on police sources, and reviews a murder case from the point of view of the investigating officers, The Shearer's Tale, taking up concerns Molomby has previously addressed in a book on the wrongful convictions for the Hilton Hotel bombing of members of the Ananda Marga sect, is an eloquent critique of the abuse of police investigative powers - abuse involving misguided suspicion focused on one man - and of trials in which the accused is unable to organise a fair defense. Both texts fail to consider any point of view other than their own. The police figure either as heroes or villains.
The Lavers case, unsolved to this day, has entered the popular memory of the Forbes district, generating theories and speculation. Rarely considered in our literature or history, the issue of missing persons and unexplained deaths haunts Australian oral folklore and popular media.
By an eerie coincidence, shortly after this book was published, skeletal remains, suspected of belonging to Lavers, were discovered at the base of a hill near Grenfell. The farmer who made the discovery commented: ‘Never think there was a skeleton put in there, would you? I think well you find them where you find them, I suppose.'
More indefinite, the 1990s Wollongong murders and suicides await further study and explanation. They buried a secret history of sexual abuse and blackmail, of a kind that Australia had not confronted before, and has not yet resolved.
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