Dear Madman is a historical crime memoir based on a tragedy that has haunted my family for generations.

In the Lockyer Valley in 1911, my great grandfather unwittingly hired a dangerously disturbed man with a history of violent crimes against girls to work on the family farm, endangering the lives of his wife and four young daughters. But when the man accidentally revealed his true identity, my great grandfather fired him, setting in motion a chain of events that inevitably led to murder. After he killed the girl, the murderer hid in the bushes and wrote three notes of confession to the girl’s mother. Mrs Williams, Dear Madman, he wrote, misspelling madam. I humbly confers to you for a deed of murder …

These notes were always part of the story my nana had told me since I was seven. My great aunt told a different version. There were no notes. No remorse or forgiveness. How can you forgive the murder of a child? When my great aunt died, she hoped the curse she believed had been placed upon her with the death of her sister would die with her, but it didn’t. The pattern of intergenerational trauma followed us all. Loss after loss after loss.

Desperate to free us, I began to search for the truth behind the myth of the madman who’d shadowed our days. What I discovered was only the beginning of a story that twisted and turned as often as the river that flowed through the farm. A story that changed me forever.