Tag: true crime

Book review: The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I read The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein due to the stellar lineup of authors, and I was not disappointed. I don’t read a lot of true crime and didn’t closely follow the case of Erin Patterson at the time it took place, so only had a peripheral knowledge of it. Patterson was facing three murder charges – the deaths of three family members by poisoned mushrooms in beef wellington. It was a case of life being stranger than fiction. The trial ran for eleven weeks. 

Basically what we’re doing is bearing witness… We’re bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it.

The Mushroom Tapes is primarily a series of transcripts from conversations between the three authors driving to and from the courthouse, in coffee shops, or at their hotel. Each writer reflects on the trial, the people involved in, and spectators of the proceedings. They also contemplate what motivates a woman to kill, whether Patterson did it, and question their own motivations for being there as they grapple with the ethics of it.

I’m thinking about the room we’re about to walk into. The sorrow it contains. Medea is an interesting comparison because, like this, it’s a horror story.

The book provides a different perspective to that shown through a media lens. It is their presence in the courtroom as ordinary observers of all those around them, and their observations of the mood up close. For me it was also an interesting insight into the minds of the three women writers and their relationships to one another.  

Sometimes, as a writer, there’s a detail that you don’t know how to deal with … But if you can look at it the right way, it’s a portal into something deeper and bigger.

The Mushroom Tapes is a dialogue driven collaborative work of non-fiction for lovers of true crime and fans of the authors who penned the book (I am writing this while eating mushroom filo…eek!).

Podcast review: Snowball

On By rlsmithwritingIn Reviews1 Comment

I’m not sure what the equivalent term is for a page turner when it’s a podcast. Ear grabber, binge listen or hearing hair-raiser perhaps. The latest offering from Unravel is called Snowball and it’s one of the best and most bizarre true crime offerings I’ve ever listened to…and nobody died for it.

Naive New Zealand man Greg Wards fell in love and married charismatic American con artist, Lezlie Manukian from California after meeting her on a backpacking trip to the UK. Lezlie moved to New Zealand with him and ripped off his whole family. Right before Lezlie got on a plane to go back to the US to visit her family she had a parting message for Greg.

“The snowball is about to hit you.”

Soon after his family discover that Lezlie had defrauded over a million dollars from them. Greg’s brother Ollie Wards, a journalist, decided to investigate Lezlie in an attempt to understand what happened and help his family put the experience behind them. Ollie’s podcast paints a picture of a genuine, warm, compassionate and close knit kiwi family and the trail of destruction left across the globe by Lezlie.

It was a fascinating study into the art of the con artist, one of the worlds oldest professions. Grifters, scammers, hustlers, swindlers, fleecers. They make a living out of violating trust. It’s all about brains, not brawn. They play to emotions and hone in on vulnerability.

Greg was a perfect target. A naive New Zealander on a big exciting adventure. A Yankophile in the United Kingdom who heard the confident American at a crowded party and was immediately enchanted. She would have charmed him, a master actor and a good listener who excelled at fabricating common ground to break down her targets defences. She didn’t grow a pinocchio nose when she lied, and what man would expect a beautiful charismatic woman fascinated by their greatest desires to rip the rug right out from under them? As one of her victims said, he’d come home to a beer and a blow job…emotion trumps reason.

I felt a great deal of warmth toward the Wards and was gobsmacked by what happened to them. I was also flabbergasted by the chutzpah of Manukian. You have to wonder why people like her don’t just go into acting – I’d have thought it would be much more rewarding in the long run. An extraordinary tale that had me gasping ‘no way’ at every turn.

Book Review: This House of Grief by Helen Garner

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I don’t read a lot of true crime but just finished Helen Garner’s work, This House of Grief. I know some people find the genre too hard because of the voyeuristic nature of it, or because they cannot bear to hear about the terrible things people are capable of doing to one another. The genre is often criticised for being disrespectful to victims and their families, an argument that primarily revolves around issues of consent, appropriation, representation and concerns when stories are embellished for the purposes of drama.

Those who do like true crime reference its value in providing insight into, and an understanding of, the inner workings of the legal system and human behaviour. There have been instances of true crime pieces shining a light on forgotten cases and having an extraordinary impact, such as facilitating the resolution of unsolved crimes or the reopening of cold case investigations. Rachael Brown’s, Trace, a true crime podcast series about the cold case of the murder of single mother Maria James at the back of her bookshop in 1980 resulted in a new coronial investigation. Katherine Kovacic’s historical fiction novel, The Portrait of Molly Dean, based on a 1930 unsolved murder delivers a sensitive remembrance for a largely unknown young woman who’s life might otherwise have been forgotten.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner is a non fiction true crime story about the murder trial of Robert Farquharson. Farquharson was charged after the car he was driving left the road and crashed into a dam outside of Winchelsea, Victoria and resulted in the death of his three children on Father’s Day. Farquharson was convicted to three terms of life imprisonment without parole in 2007. The original conviction was overturned in 2009 but a retrial again found him guilty of murder and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 33 year minimum.

Garner never interviewed Farquharson but did attend both trials as part of her process of writing the book. The trial and re-trial form the narrative spine of the novel in which Garner herself is both a witness to events, and a character within the text. The story blends Garner’s personal experience of the harrowing trial with the procedural formality of the legal system. Her her own emotional responses to the unfolding evidence, and the mundanities of her everyday life run along side the factual reporting of the trials. It is written with the calm eloquent voice of an observer equipped with the exceptional skills of a fiction author and a fearless honesty. Garner strives for an empathic understanding of the terrible event as the rational, ordered legal system tries to make sense of it and find the truth at the centre of all the swirling grief. She lays her own and others emotions, prejudices, and preconceived notions of human behaviour bare, challenging their intractable nature and unreliability on the page.

As Garner records and critiques the courtroom drama and her own conflicting responses to it, she describes in expressive detail impressions of the people she encounters in appearance, language and tone, the mood of the room, the surreptitious glances and subtle shifts in body language. When the evidence leans toward a guilty verdict Garner clings to the possibility of reasonable doubt because she doesn’t want to believe a father could be capable of intentionally killing his three children. When rebuked by a barrister friend, she reflects on the question of why lawyers always make her feel stupid. It seems to be a comment on gendered views where the legal system is masculine and certain, but she is feminine and tentative.

Garner has received both praised and criticism for this work and other true crime books she has written (Joe Cinque’s Consolation; The First Stone). I found This House of Grief a fascinated and compellingly intimate insight into Garners inner world. In striving to be objective she had to wade through confusion, doubt and sudden flights of compassion or repulsion she felt for the subjects of her study, and her own responses to those feeling.

Ultimately This House of Grief raised more questions for me than it answered – about the fallibility of the legal system and the ambiguity in taking a highly technical procedural process and asking ordinary emotion laden laypeople to make a judgement of certainty about what they hear; about our societies insistence on imposing gender stereotypes that sometimes turn out men so incapable of managing their own emotional turmoil they carry out terrible acts in some misconceived belief it will soothe their own pain; about women unable to reconcile the possibility that love and vengeance can coexist in a way that can make the ones they love capable of both great heroism and of terrible violence; about how our own social conditioning, past experiences and emotional worlds shape how we perceive and interpret what goes on around us; and how our individual prejudices and beliefs shape what we can and cannot bear to hear and believe about the world.