The Bodies In The Barrels Murders by Jeremy Pudney

This is a true serial killings story involving barbaric and sadistic torture methods and macabre rituals which occurred in what the author termed "a sleepy backwater" in South Australia between 1992 and 1999.

Where is this sleepy backwater?  It is Snowtown, a settlement noted for its quality stock breeding, fat lambs, wool and wheat crops, 150 kilometres from Adelaide.  According to the author, "its wide main street is virtually deserted during the day and the town is dissected by a rail line on which trains that used to stop now barely slow as they pass."  If you have been to Australia, it is easy to picture it.

It is now famously known as the Snowtown murders.  It was Australia's most horrific and sustained serial killings and the single biggest criminal investigation and trial in Australia's legal history.  Unfortunately, South Australia already had a reputation for producing the country's highest number of serial killers.  Even so, it appalled the nation and the world.

The Bodies in the Barrels Murders (2005) is divided into three sections:  The Beginning, The Murders and The Trial.  Part police reporting, criminology text, biography and social history including unreported details from the 171-day trial, it is the authoritative account of the twelve horrifying and gruesome deaths which reads like the worst horror movie you could possibly imagine in your lifetime.

About the author:  Born in Adelaide in 1974, Jeremy Pudney was also raised in the South Australian capital.  He completed a Journalism degree at the University of South Australia and began his journalism career in 1993.  Jeremy was a police reporter at South Australia's only daily newspapers, The Advertiser, when the Snowtown murders story broke.  He is now a television reporter with Network Ten in Melbourne.  Primarily a police reporter, he is also assigned to major national and international stories.  The Bodies in the Barrels Murders (2005) is Jeremy's first book.

For video buffs, this documentary (watch at your own peril;  contains disturbing images) is as informative as the book.

I do not rate books of this nature.