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Don't know about "evil", but I do know that people can do evil things.
20 years ago (!), when I was a journalist, I spent quite a long time writing
a series of articles on a murderer/rapist dubbed by the tabloids "Mr
Stinky". I never spoke to him, but I spoke to a lot of people around the
case - relatives of the victims, the police officer who investigated these
crimes for two decades, and I once saw the man in court. It prompted a kind
of mini aria of voices, based on the people I spoke to and the reports and
statement I had read. I'm not sure that it was so much an expression of an
attempt at understanding so much as incomprehension - Edmunds seems to me a
kind of blank in the middle of it.
All the best
A
Raymond Edmunds
This poem is based on the story of Raymond Edmunds, who killed two teenagers
in Shepparton, a small country town in Victoria, Australia, in 1966. He was
arrested and charged twenty years later after one of the most expensive
criminal investigations in Victoria's history and was convicted of five
rapes as well as the murders, although he was also the prime suspect in
dozens of rapes in the Melbourne area over two decades. He was known in the
tabloids as Mr Stinky.
Part One: The Crimes
Gary
hectic with moonshine
shooting ghost rabbits
out a fast window
we stop here idling
the car's green pulse
regular as leaves
and all the time the moon fidgeting
unfocussing it all with the glare
this argument about a woman
hot and wordless in the back
Edmunds
I had the gun I shot him twice he lay there
arms and legs flung out relaxed after
just lay there
Abina
now I guess my father's passion
already he maps
my darkening landscapes
with curt eyes
I have found
what he kept from me:
the fluid animal chant
inside my skin
it sets a fever into men:
they are violent shadows under the trees
under the knowing moon's hot mouth
Edmunds
I went back to the car and told her
she didn't believe me ran out shouting away from me
I hit her she just broke like rotten wood
I hit her again in case she got away
lying there half dressed like that
smelling of me and vodka
I think of them often
every day how they wanted to go from me
now they stink in each breath I can't open up
let them go
Part Two: Shepparton
of course, it was a sensational murder:
SHENANIGANS IN SLEEPY ONE-HORSE TOWN
yawned a reporter, feral in the pub,
slyly and unscrupulously hunting down
the usual tragedies. Methodist neighbours
never once heard she was that kind of girl.
to get herself murdered. like that. grainy families
enduring stony funerals under their hats.
Abina's regular boy (cleared reluctantly
after extensive questioning) was haunted to Singapore
and died, randomly and unnoticed,
only 24. The bitterness of his sisters
hardened like a fist.
later they matched the rapes up in Melbourne.
he wasn't one of our own.
it was like a serial:
another faceless woman drained of colour
and manhunts scaled up in flatroofed suburbs
and satisfied fat headlines crying MONSTER.
the small print says police are making no progress
each time on tv there's other murders
the covered hump in the scrub different relatives weeping
the ambulance outside anonymous houses
the serious-faced policemen chatting in groups
digging it all up again for post mortem inspection
we feel his presence secretly a dim
reluctant shudder in our own blood
Part Three: The Police Officer
after a while
you get to know
the whorls of his mind
as well as you know
the lines in your hand.
after a while
you dream of faces:
flickering jaws
and slabs of eyes:
you wake in the stink
of a strange body
jotting the same words
in reports
of different offences.
twenty years after
you find a name.
it's there in the phonebook
like all the others:
arrest without drama
a face you know:
beer-bellied t-shirt
pain-spattered, crumpled,
could be your neighbour,
could be your husband:
scoop him clean
like a rotten melon:
throw the rind
in the freezer.
*
over the years
I often thought
of what I would do:
facing each day
the faces that lived
in the names and the numbers.
you think of your daughter.
you think of a rope
around a neck,
murder in dreams
when we got him
I looked at his neck
those damp flabby folds:
I looked at his mouth
shapeless, selfish:
I looked at his eyes:
and I felt sorry.
Part Four: The Fellow Prisoner
When he comes in, I give him an hour.
I'm curious, see? Then I nip along
and peek through the slit in his door
to see how he's going. And he's sitting there,
the whole cell tidy, his blanket folded
on the shelf by his window, every little thing
arranged and put away. He knows
he's going to be there for a long time.
Others come in, they spend long hours
staring at nothing. Not Edmunds.
I didn't want to talk. He looked at home,
like he'd been preparing himself for twenty years.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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