My mother and murder
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Virginia Peters
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Virginia Peters’ biography and other articles by this writer
I'M meant to be writing a book about murder, a particular murder. It took place five years ago in Lismore, northern New South Wales. The victim was a young woman who came from a small village in Germany. I was initially drawn to her Missing Persons photo. It ran for days in the local paper: a picture of her standing on a white beach, barefoot, her mahogany mane tangled from a recent swim. Directly behind her a low-slung branch looped into the frame, protruding from the sides of her head, like antlers. The antlers gave the already statuesque girl a proud, majestic look.
She did not look like a victim, my mother and I agreed as we studied the front page of the newspaper in a café. I thought she looked familiar, but not like anyone I knew.
Six days after the girl was reported missing her naked body was found decomposing beneath a palm tree in the centre of Lismore, half an hour from where I live. It was a case that interested me very much. It also interested my mother.
Three years ago she and I attended the inquest into the girl's death. I couldn't quite see how this big case could be moulded to fit my usual length, eight thousand words, and I had a suspicion that it was me who'd have to expand: to broaden my thinking, move away from my short domestic fiction, take a bigger space in the world.
The second day of evidence I told my mother she was not to come with me anymore. ‘The police won't take me seriously if they see you with me everyday,' I explained, as she sat next to me in the car in her red sneakers and jeans.
‘But I have every right to be there.'
Silence.
‘I won't sit with you,' she bargained.
‘The trouble is, you look like me,' I told her. Although she was eighty-three and her hair was white, we had the same haircut. Her leather jacket was even similar to mine. ‘And the police,' I continued, ‘have already seen me with you. This is my career we're talking about. This is not entertainment.'
It was the bit about my career that finally got her. I was yet to publish, unless you count two stories in a student anthology. My mother didn't come anymore.
At the end of the inquest I approached the detective in charge of the case and asked him for full access to the evidence. He never mentioned seeing my old doppelganger. To reward my curiosity he gave me an office to work from at the police station. The sign on the door read Special Operations. I worked there for months. I was given carte blanche with the files.
SIMONE, THE VICTIM of this murder, my murder victim, led me back to her little village in Germany - her plan being, I imagine, to help her family come to understand what happened to her, and perhaps even solve the crime.
I kept up a steam I've never quite been able to account for, grappling to prove who killed her as much as to understand why exactly I'd become so intimately involved. But now that has all changed. I've lost my focus.
Von Hooklah, as I call my mother, affectionately, and for no reason other than it sounds vaguely pompous, has inserted herself into the middle of things again. She is about to die. She has cancer in an organ she never knew she had, the pancreas, and every time I try to write she keeps popping into my head, as though she has something to do with it all - murder, that is.
Lately, having plenty of time to speculate rather than write my book, I'm realising my mother and I have a long history with crime. When I was a child in New Zealand she'd take me out of school for the day to attend the criminal courts. Later, languishing in the latter stages of my pregnancies, we'd watch cases at the courts in Sydney for several days at a time. Independent of each other, we always seem to follow the same articles in the newspaper, identifying with murder stories involving unlikely female victims - those who, according to victimology studies I've since read, have less chance of being murdered due to their education and social habits, for example - in short, we were interested in victims not so dissimilar to ourselves.
When I was nine my mother might have had cause to mourn my own death, but I didn't drown. My best friend had invited another child that weekend, instead. I was sure I was involved in the poor girl's death, that somehow I'd psychically murdered her. ‘You do realise that should have been me,' I told my mother years later, when I finally felt able to talk about it. ‘I went to that house every other weekend.'
She looked intrigued. ‘You know, the thought never crossed my mind.'
It continues to cross mine. Ineradicable guilt, a tendency to weep when watching a heft of water slowly shift down a river.
Shortly after the drowning I channelled my energies into a gang loosely based on Enid Blyton's Famous Five series. I called it Police Five. We identified and followed shoplifters at Coastland's shopping mall, and were paid by the in-house detective in hamburgers and milkshakes.
Later that year, we became ambitious and decided to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a young woman who never returned from her day at the beach. We arrived at the area of last sighting after a two-hour trek along the sand, only to find that it looked nothing like a crime scene at all. People were swimming, hordes being tossed about like sticks in rolling surf. There was nothing for us to do but join them.
Two days later, after a news flash on the kitchen radio, my mother drove me back to the site. I discovered that the exact place where I'd changed into my swimsuit in the bush-clad dunes was now bare: in its place, a hole where a body had been buried in a shallow grave.
‘I was standing on top of her,' I told my mother.
I've never forgotten the sensation on realising that the sand covering a murdered woman had been sifting between my toes.
IN THE TWO years between Simone's death and her inquest the state attorney of Wurzburg declared in the German media that her three travelling companions were suspects. They were all German nationals. Two were siblings: Tobias and Katrin Suckfuell. They made an odd pair. Tobias was tall and elegant, with flowing blond hair and a pubescent tuft on his chin - more romantisch than contemporary. His sister looked stronger than her little brother: quite the man, with her short crop and heavy features. It was as though they'd been genetically rewired.
As I sat in the Lismore courtroom with the national media and the police, all gathered in Simone's honour, I could see several people were missing. For starters, the Suckfuell siblings, under no obligation to attend, had declined an expenses-paid trip back to Australia. Only the third traveller had made the effort to come.
Tobias's friend Jens Martin was a quiet young man with long brown hair and the face of Jesus. He'd been depicted as a silhouette in previous news coverage and proved to be just as elusive in the flesh. Despite being present the night Simone disappeared, he insisted he saw and heard nothing.
Her family was also missing at the inquest. That I couldn't understand.
‘They're pig farmers,' a journalist told me. ‘And they don't speak English.' They were also very religious and came from a tiny, centuries-old village in Bavaria. I pictured them cut off from the rest of the world - reality, even - living in sepia.
The word around the traps was that since the Suckfuell siblings had been named suspects, Simone's family had bizarrely closed ranks, protecting them. I couldn't fathom why.
The coroner wound up the week-long proceedings by saying that the siblings needed to clear their names, as two detectives had taken the stand and accused them of murder. He would write personally, extending yet another invitation to visit our shores. How civil. How genteel. How like an invitation to high tea.
AT THE TIME I decided to write a book I didn't know that there was a body of research and theory about ‘true crime'. Lately I've been wading through the academic texts. I've learned that theorists fashionably describe reading the newspaper reports of murders as ‘synthetic witnessing' - as though we wear polyester. We, apparently, are witnessing representations of crime, constructions of the real world otherwise made fairly unreal, in a media that is little more than a machine. We come through the other end of this machine having happily spent our own pains and fears on other people's problems: vicarious experience. I'm disappointed by this reductive approach, this attempt to stereotype and make common a phenomenon I've always felt was unique and personal.
When I wasn't sifting through files at the police station I was thinking about Simone. I couldn't stop. The evidence had me hooked. Except I wasn't just reading, I was living it. Like her, I started to drink beer. I hung around the places where she'd last been seen. I ate the Gollan Pub nachos, her last meal. I got the feeling she was following me, and I would catch glimpses over my shoulder of other dark-haired girls. Often I'd wake in the night, my eyes opening like a shutter lens, hoping to snap her ghost at the side of my bed.
Where was I going with all this? The shelf space devoted to true crime is a section I avoid. I can't bear the black covers, the tabloid starbursts and drips of gloss red, the grinning murderers with their walrus moustaches. If I couldn't even bring myself to read a book in this genre, I wondered why I was trying to write one that might join them.
So far my book begins, not with Simone, the victim, but with me. A banal scene that, abbreviated, looks something like this:
I'm sitting at my laptop. An oil painting of a giant pear hangs over my head - a birthday present from my husband. That year, the year of my forty-second birthday, he'd bought me a scarf, a mix of silk and wool, expensive, but brown. It's 2005 - otherwise known as the year of the brown scarf.
I'm writing a short story set in a mental institution, a really nice one surrounded by a sea of undulating mowed grass. As yet, I don't know why the first-person narrator is in this place, nor do I know what's going to happen to her, and I'm wondering if that's the point of the story, her dilemma, that nothing ever ‘happens' to her.
It's a recurring problem in my stories, I've been told by my tutor at uni, nothing happening. ‘It's fiction - make something up! Stick in a car crash, sex, murder!'
‘But I can't. It won't feel real.' I can only write what I think I know.
What's always captured my imagination, and my mother's, about crime is the sense that the story is not made up, that it at least feels real. We like the disturbance of reality; better still, the breakdown of domestic order. Perhaps this relates to the sense of possibility in our own lives, the idea that a normal day can continue on as a normal day, until something goes terribly wrong. It keeps us on edge. We've never been interested in the garish spectacle of mass murder, nor the meaninglessness of random violence. We're interested in relationships, the small gestures and details of middle-class ordinariness, its fences and hedges and civility that contain life to a cliché, the capriciousness of it all. Not that we expected anything to happen to us. In fact, I'd become despondent with the comforting thought that nothing ever would.