A Compulsion to Kill: The Surprising Story of Australia's First Serial Killers
About this ebook
Beginning in 1806 with Australia’s first serial killers, John Brown and Richard Lemon, A Compulsion to Kill recounts the stories of Alexander Pearce, ‘the cannibal convict’; Thomas Jeffrey, a sadist, sexual predator, cannibal, and baby-killer known as ‘the monster’; Charles Routley, who burnt one of his victims alive; cannibal convicts Broughton and McAvoy; Rocky Whelan, who in twenty-four days slew five men in cold blood; and John Haley, who killed three people in fits of rage. The final chapter investigates the still-unsolved Parkmount murders, three killings for which the two probable culprits twice faced court, only to be discharged due to faulty police investigation and neglected evidence.
Most of these stories have never been told before, and none has previously been related with such detail and verifiable accuracy. A determined storyteller, Cox delivers a supremely dramatic page-turner in the true crime genre.
The book includes extensive references and an index.
About the author
Tasmanian author Robert Cox writes mainly in two genres: history and short fiction. Originally considering himself a journeyman, a writer by trade, he has had stints as advertising copywriter, public relations consultant, government communications manager, book reviewer, magazine journalist and editor, and newspaper reporter and subeditor. During a five-year spell as a freelancer, he wrote anything and everything from documentary film scripts to verses for greeting cards.
His real interests, however, were more literary, and through all those incarnations he continued to write and publish short stories, poetry, feature articles, and essays, producing work that has been commended in national short story competitions and several times anthologised. He has been the recipient of an Arts Tasmania literary grant.
No longer a jobbing hack, he now writes full time. A Compulsion to Kill is his sixth book, and he is co-editing reminiscences of the celebrated Tasmanian poet Gwen Harwood as Behind the Masks: Gwen Harwood Remembered by her Friends (Ginninderra Press). His other current project is a biography of the seminal Tasmanian resistance fighter Kikatapula, whom he calls ‘perhaps Australia’s most influential indigenous warrior of the colonial period’.
Robert Cox lives an eremitic life in a rural valley in southern Tasmania.
