Why would anyone kill for that? A friend's new true crime series
A friend of mine, former lawyer Ivo T George, is coming up to retirement and has found something most of us never find at that stage of life: a new passion of the kind that can take over one's whole life. Ivo's passion is murder — or more precisely, the question that comes after murder, the one the headlines never answer.
Not who did it, Not how, but Why.
The result is short true crime short stories in a series called Strange Reasons to Kill, and I've had a ringside seat while it came together. Full disclosure. I've helped behind the scenes with research and getting the books published, along with my new friend Claudette Codesal, so I'm hardly neutral. If you are a bit left field like me, you will find the short-stories fascinating.
The idea
Every case in the series has a motive that seems strange -- absurd, petty or simply incomprehensible. A wife killed because she was too happy. A string of elderly women killed by a man who sold pies. A doctor who poisoned his wife while his own colleagues fought to save her.
The twist, and what makes these more than a catalogue of horrors, is that the strange reason almost never turns out to be unique. It is usually a known type: something criminologists and psychologists have seen before, named and studied. Each chapter tells the story, then shows you what lies beneath it.
What were they thinking? For these killers, murder was not the last resort. It was the easy option, the nearest door, taken by someone who couldn't see, or couldn't bear, the others.
The latest Volume Two has five cases
The Genius: Peggy Carr, Florida, 1988. A woman lies in a hospital bed, unable to speak. Her parents were deaf, so she can still sign to her sister, and she keeps asking one thing: why? It took investigators two years and an undercover operation to find the answer: a neighbour, a member of Mensa, and a rare poison.
The Lesbian Lovers: Edward Baldock, Brisbane, 1989. A council worker and father of four waits for a taxi at Kangaroo Point after a night out. He is offered a lift instead, and never makes it home. The case became notorious as the "vampire killing". Ivo looks at how much of that story was actually true.
The Pie Seller: John Wayne Glover, Sydney, 1989–90. Nurses at a North Shore hospital find a note under a patient's pillow with three words on it: no more grannies. The genial pie salesman who wrote it had already been interviewed by detectives. What he hated, it turned out, had one face.
The Psychiatrist: Annette Bouwer, Dunedin, 1999. A 47-year-old mother of two dies after months of a mysterious illness, treated in the very hospital where her husband was a senior psychiatrist. The illness was real. Its cause was not what anyone thought.
The Unfavoured: the Hargan family, McLean, Virginia, 2017. Police find a mother and daughter dead in a beautiful family home, in what looks like a murder-suicide. It wasn't. At the centre of it was a house being built for one sister, and nothing for the other.
Who it's for
These are for you. They are short, carefully sourced from court records and trial reporting, and respectful to the victims, who are people here, not plot devices. Each one can be read in a single sitting.
👉 Get Strange Reasons to Kill on Amazon -- Volume 1
👉 Get Strange Reasons to Kill on Amazon -- Volume 2
Retirement, it turns out, can be murder. I am looking forward to my retirement.
