NEED TO KNOW
- True crime author Vikki Petraitis has spent decades investigating some of Australia’s most confronting cases.
- Now, her first crime novel has leapt the screen in the star-studded ABC series Dustfall starring Anna Torv.
- She reveals why she believes women are drawn to true crime – and why amateur detectives can play an important role in unsolved cases.
Vikki Petraitis is one of Australia’s most remarkable storytellers. The 61-year-old Melbourne author has 17 true crime books to her name, and her podcasts have been downloaded 10 million times worldwide, regularly topping international charts. But Vikki’s best work is dangerously intimate. Her writing is superb, full of twists, but it’s her compassion for victims and families that sets her apart.
The big twist in Vikki’s career came in the last decade. Despite decades spent proving that truth really is stranger, Vikki switched to fiction.
“The Unbelieved was my PhD novel,” she tells The Weekly. “After working in true crime for so long, I took inspiration from the headlines, the zeitgeist. It was written from the real-life cases of women who have been the victims of abuse yet somehow became the villains when the media turned on them. Grace Tame, Gisele Pelicot, Brittany Higgins.”
The road to Dustfall
On Oct 11, that debut novel finds new life as Dustfall, a gripping six-episode ABC-BBC co-production starring Australia’s Anna Torv (Mindhunter, The Newsreader) alongside British legend Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply), rising talent Zoe Phillips (East of Eden) and actor-musician Peter Fenton (Praise). Dustfall arrives on screens with big wraps, having already won the Audience Award at France’s prestigious Series Mania Festival in March.
“[Producer] Xavier Marchand had apparently been looking for a project like The Unbelieved for some time, so after he bought the book by chance at an airport, he gave it to Anna and (director) Emma Freeman, who immediately wanted to make it,” Vikki explains, fresh from a preview on the weekend. “To see it on screen for the first time was incredibly powerful.”
Dustfall was filmed on the Gold Coast and in the period it took for the screenplay to be written, then cast, filmed, edited and scored, Vikki wrote and published two equally compelling sequels: The Stolen and, just last month, The Reckoning. Why is there such an appetite for deep-dive forensic crime books and podcasts, particularly among women?
Women and true crime
“On a subliminal level I think women are attracted to this material for their own safety,” theorises Vikki. “Anecdotally, women often tell me that they absorb true crime to teach themselves about red flags – checking the back seat of the car before they open the front door, waiting under light posts not in dark corners, and never parking beside a white van.
“These are things men don’t understand,” she says. “Women navigate the world in a state of hyper-alertness. It’s not to say we’re always fearful, but we have situational awareness. It’s why we often carry hefty handbags and walk at night with keys between our knuckles. And it’s also why we admire female protagonists who have faced the ultimate challenge.”
Dustfall’s heroine Detective Antigone “Tig” Pollard (Anna Torv) certainly fits that criterion. Tig returns home to the tiny hinterland town of North Gap in Queensland, mourning her grandmother and burnt by the failure of a prominent rape case in the city. When a bloodied and naked teenage girl is found in a North Gap cane field, Tig is soon drawn back into the dark.
Truth is stranger than fiction
Before she made the switch to crime fiction and started a PhD in creative writing at La Trobe University in 2017, Vikki was a true crime author with several bestsellers and major investigations to her name. The Frankston Murders explored serial killer Paul Denyer, who in 1993 killed three women during a seven-week spree in a Melbourne bayside suburb.
The Phillip Island Murder focused on the 1986 murder of Beth Barnard, supposedly by Vivienne Cameron, the wife of the local farmer Beth had been having an affair with. Vivienne disappeared the same night Beth died, and the lethal love triangle shocked the quiet community. But while police closed the case, Vikki smelt a rat and kept investigating.
“That case spawned three books and a podcast that generated four million downloads,” Vikki says proudly. “I’m not a cop. I’m a woman who asks questions and listens to people who have stories to tell. Often, that’s what it takes to force police to take another look. It happened with The Teacher’s Pet too, where new witnesses helped secure a conviction.”
Rise of the “Amateur Detective”
At an Inquiry into Unsolved Murders and Missing Persons at NSW Parliament in September, criminologist Dr Louise Steding lamented the “impasse between police communication and action – the public needs to see justice done and the workings of the justice system.”
Yet senior detective and head of the NSW homicide squad Joe Doueihi warned of the risks inherent in sharing confidential police files with crime podcasts and community policing in his testimony. He observed that cases could be contaminated and witness memories muddied by amateur sleuths, however well-meaning. Excessive media also reduces the chance of a fair trial.
Vikki remains firmly on the side of journalists and podcasters, lobby groups and advocates. “Sure, you’ve got to be careful, but if the cops and coroners aren’t doing anything, why not? People are doing their own investigations, so I’m a big proponent of police-led podcasts. Work together with the journos, use them to filter information and flush out fresh clues.”
Giving voice to the voiceless
Vikki has worked closely with police and first responders, hearing their stories first-hand to understand the psychology of the fight-or-freeze instinct and the trauma it leaves behind. “There are so many awesome cops whom I have total admiration for,” says Vikki. “They are regular people with families whose job is to risk their lives to save ours. I’m in awe of that.”
True to her zeitgeist-mining, Dustfall takes its cues from a crime wave hiding in plain sight.
“Fifty per cent of policing in Australia today is focused on family violence, the vast majority of it leaving female victims,” she says. “Men have always desired power and control in society, but domestic violence in our country should be declared a national emergency.”
The Mushroom Murderess
That insidious power imbalance feeds a frenzied media that too often villainises women, says Vikki.
“Look at Erin Patterson. The cold fact is three people didn’t survive her lunch. But her trial was a witch hunt that trickled into social media and hysterical commentary. At no point did I see or hear the media ask: what pushed this woman to such extremes?”
“I followed that trial,” says Vikki. “I sat in that court to hear the witness’s testimony, and I read the transcripts. What I discovered was a woman at breaking point who was living on $38 a month in child support and who had asked for her in-laws’ help in getting their son – and her children’s father – to do the right thing, and who was only told: ‘We will pray for you.’”
Given that the Australian Institute of Health & Welfare discovered 2.3 million women (23%) have experienced emotional abuse from a current or previous partner since the age of 15, Vikki reckons the real story should be: “Why aren’t there more Beef Wellington murders?”
Spot the plotline
In The Reckoning, Vikki manifests that very thought as several convicted sex offenders suffer a mass poisoning at an Australia Day cricket match. There’s also a sovereign citizen siege inspired by the 2022 Wieambilla shootings that killed two police and three shooters. The Lindt Cafe siege and Port Arthur Massacre also form valuable grist for Vikki’s milieu.
The Lindt Siege, in which a lone terrorist mounted a 16-hour stand-off with police in the Sydney CBD in 2014, is another powerful true case that inspired a fictional depiction in Vikki’s writing.
“I have interviewed so many cops who have taken me inside the minds of first responders. Some police wanted to storm the building that day; others urged caution. When the moment came, some officers opened fire, and others froze. Those psychological moments are so powerful on the page, but mostly because they come from real life.”
Ripping inspiration from the real world creates frighteningly plausible potboilers. Thomas Harris modelled the villains in Silence of the Lambs on true monsters. Hannibal Lecter was inspired by Alfredo Ballí Treviño, an eerily icy surgeon Harris met in a Mexican prison. While Buffalo Bill was a composite of serial killers, Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. Even Agatha Christie’s famous Murder on the Orient Express based its snatched baby plot on the infamous 1932 Charles Lindbergh kidnapping
In Australia we’ve seen Candice Fox’s Troppo and Chris Hammer’s Treasure and Dirt both make waves on the ABC. Now Dustfall will join that genre of chilling truth reincarnated as thrilling fiction. “It’s one thing to write about these feelings, but to see them flicker across an actor’s face and get the chills, that’s a magic all its own,” says Vikki. Especially when it’s dark magic.
Dustfall premieres Sunday 11 October at 8.20 pm on ABC TV, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iView.
