Collection: Adult Non Fiction - True Crime

This is the story of Dulcie Markham, a key figure of the underworld of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, who, according to one crime reporter, 'saw more violence and death than any other woman in Australia's history'. Nicknamed the 'Black Widow' and 'Angel of Death' by the crooks, reporters and pol...

February 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the shocking murders in Australia's criminal history. On a hot summer night in 1986, beautiful young Sydney nurse Anita Cobby alighted from a train at Blacktown station and set off to a horrific fate. Updated with more information, previously unp...

The Ardlamont murder trial, which took place in Edinburgh's High Court in December 1893, was the culmination of one of the most intriguing criminal cases in British legal history. But perhaps more remarkable than that was that it brought together the two principal real-life inspirations behind th...

On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police ...

The Australian Gamble explores Jack Rooklyn's role as a thread that connects some of the best-recognized characters, and most pivotal events, in Australian criminal history. It is a story that begins overseas, with the origins of the Bally poker machine company - a scandal-prone business with a n...

On 15 June 1862, a gang of bushrangers held up a gold escort at Eugowra, just east of Forbes, NSW. They escaped with a pile of cash and 77 kilograms of gold, worth about 10 million today. It remains the largest gold robbery in Australian history.

The mysterious disappearance of thousands of false teeth, international travel via the postal system, doughnut-delivery heists, clowns terrorising a neighbourhood, the theft of a three-storey-high replica mango, criminal clairvoyants making off with haunted cash: could crime get any weirder, and ...

Australia's master storyteller trawls our rich history of cold cases, notorious robberies, shameless frauds, and razor gangs to uncover a cast of colourful villains. From the men and women who stepped off the convict ships and continued to ply their trade, to the dark streets of the burgeoning to...