Hobart Bookshop: A Compulsion to Kill
The Hobart Bookshop
The Hobart Bookshop is pleased to invite you
to the launch, by Rob Valentine,
of Robert Cox’s new book
A Compulsion to Kill.
Where: The Hobart Bookshop
When: 5.30pm, Thursday September 18
Free event, all welcome.
A Compulsion to Kill is a dramatic chronological account of 19th-century Tasmanian serial murderers.
Never before revealed in such depth, the story is the culmination of extensive research and adept craftsmanship as it probes the essence of both the crimes and the killers themselves.
The Hobart Bookshop
22 Salamanca Square
Hobart Tasmania 7000
ph 03 6223 1803 | fax 03 6223 1804
hobartbookshop@gmail.com
www.hobartbookshop.com.au
What the Publisher says:
Anyone who thinks serial killing began with Jack the Ripper in England in 1888 will be shocked by the revelations in a new book.
Titled A Compulsion to Kill: The Surprising Story of Australia’s Earliest Serial Killers, it records seven cases of serial murder between 1807 and 1862, with a total of 33 victims.
Surprisingly, all the killings took place in sparsely populated Tasmania.
A Compulsion to Kill is the work of Hobart writer Robert Cox, author of two other books of Australian history and three collections of short stories.
“I’d written about a forgotten serial killer, Charles Routley, in a previous book,” Cox said, “and that piqued my curiosity about whether there were others.
“I started to look into it and was astonished at what I discovered— six other instances, all by escaped or former convicts.”
The first of them — and the first in Australia — were carried out in 1807 by little-known runaways named John Brown and Richard Lemon.
They killed three soldiers near Launceston and went on to kill a fellow fugitive and at least one Aborigine.
Better known was Alexander Pearce, the notorious cannibal convict.
He escaped from Macquarie Harbour penal settlement with seven others, but he was the sole survivor of the hazardous 150km trek to freedom.
Two of the escapees died of exhaustion, but all Pearce’s other companions were murdered and eaten.
Later, during a second escape from Macquarie Harbour, he butchered and consumed another runaway.
Emulating Pearce a few years later, a pair of convicts named Edward Broughton and Matthew McAvoy murdered and ate the flesh of three fellow fugitives from Macquarie Harbour.
Their particularly noisome contemporary Thomas Jeffrey (sometimes called Jeffries) was known as “The Monster”.
He was a rapist, sadist, cannibal and baby-killer.
After absconding with three others in December 1825, he was a party to five murders during a 40-day reign of terror.
His victims included of a five-month-old boy.
Shortly before his execution, he also confessed to being involved in a murder in England and two in NSW.
Another slayer of five men was the Irish convict John “Rocky” Whelan, who killed all his victims during a 24-day rampage in 1855.
The final chapter of A Compulsion to Kill is devoted to the Parkmount murders, a still-unsolved triple slaying in northern Tasmania in 1862.
Cox said the crime fascinates him because police twice had the likely killers, John Parker and Robert Sharman, in custody.
They were sent for trial both times but their trials were abandoned for lack of evidence, and no one was ever punished for the killings.
“Really, there was plenty of evidence pointing to their guilt,” Cox said, “especially their conflicting and frequently changing stories about where they were at the time of the murders.
“Better police work would have secured convictions, I think.”
A Compulsion to Kill, published by IP (Interactive Publications) under its Glass House Books imprint, is available in bookshops now.