Getting Away With Murder. Sydney’s shame: Up to 80 men murdered, 30 cases remain unsolved.

<strong>TRUE CRIME AUSTRALIA GAY STUDIES
The rash of unsolved murders of gay men along the Sydney coastline during the 1980s and early 1990s has been in the news again. In 2013, Australian Story ran a feature on the quest of American Steve Johnson to have the coronial ruling of suicide overturned for his younger brother Scott, who died at North Head in 1988. Lateline followed up with a controversial interview with Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young of the Unsolved Homicide Unit, who had been tasked to re-investigate Johnson’s death. Young was smartly removed from the investigation after intimating that Steve Johnson had exerted political pressure to have his brother’s case prioritised, a suggestion Johnson and the New South Wales Police Minister flatly rejected. Late last year, to considerable fanfare, SBS screened a four-part drama series, Deep Water: The real story, a companion documentary and online investigation into the murders of gay men around Bondi Beach and the eastern suburbs. (Addendum: on 30 January, the New York Times published an article entitled ‘When gangs killed gay men for sport: Australia reviews 88 deaths’.)
You can see why this is a topical subject: murder, sex, mystery (the trifecta of the true-crime genre). Duncan McNab’s Getting Away With Murder is not the first book to cover these murders – journalist Greg Callaghan’s Bondi Badlands: The definitive story of Sydney’s gay hate murders (2007) traversed similar territory – but what distinguishes this book is McNab’s former life as a Sydney police detective, and one with a good working knowledge of Sydney Gay subculture.
From 1977 to the end of 1986, Duncan McNab was a member of the NSW Police Force. Most of his service was in criminal investigation. The many unsolved deaths and disappearances of young gay men are the crimes that continue to haunt him.

Around 80 men died or disappeared in NSW from the late 70s to early 90s during an epidemic of gay-hate crimes. The line between a vicious assault and murder is a slender one and this was a time of brutal attacks on gay men, featuring gangs of young thugs like the ‘Parkside Killers’ and ‘Bondi Boys’, who took to the growing gay rights community with fists and feet.

Even more troubling are incidents in which gay men disappeared and have never been found, or where deaths were initially dismissed by the NSW Police as either misadventure or suicide. We now know that a number of these men were hunted down by gangs and thrown over beachside cliffs near the nation’s top tourist spots.

Investigation of crimes against gay men wasn’t always high on the list of priorities for the police and over twenty years later they are still slow to come to grips with their own dismal track record. The families of the victims, and some journalists, have not given up and continue to push the NSW Police Force for more answers.

This book is the story of a unique time in our history when social change, politics, devastating disease and police culture collided, and you could literally get away with murder.
303 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour), portraits (some colour) ; 24 cm #240423
Cold cases (Criminal investigation) — New South Wales — Sydney. | Gay men — New South Wales — Sydney. | Hate crime investigation — New South Wales — Sydney. | Police misconduct — New South Wales — Sydney. | Murder — New South Wales — Sydney. | Victims of hate crimes — New South Wales — Sydney. | Australian