Babysitter killers and daughters of death:Women, true crime and the media in 1970s australia

Daughters of Death is a popular collection of true crime stories concerning women and murder, published in 1973 as a special issue of the Great Australian Crimes series. Sold at 50c through newsagents, it contains a collection of 13 historical stories written by the veteran journalist Hugh Buggy, enclosed by a wraparound contemporary feature, ‘Babysitters Turn Killers!’, by a younger journalist, Ian Moffitt. Both titles appear on the cover: the main coverline Daughters of Death is placed above a grainy, enlarged black and white image of the faces of two girls, identified as the babysitter killers in a minor coverline slashed across the bottom right-hand corner of the image. The collection follows a tradition of mid-century true crime miscellanies that use women as an organising category, such as James Holledge’s 1963 Australia’s Wicked Women. However, in its idiosyncratic bundling of two types of true crime journalism, historical and contemporary, the magazine links this interest in women and criminality to shifts in technologies of the popular media and in the genre of true crime itself. The juxtapositions of the collection mark a shift in true crime writing in Australia, from a tradition centred on individual crimes, criminals and the authoritative narrator, to a form of journalism informed by contemporary developments in criminology which deflects criminal responsibility to society and its media representations.