A new book, Sinful Shepparton, purports to throw a spotlight on homicides in this part of the state.
There is chaos lurking in the dark underbelly of Shepparton, according to the authors, Nathan Currie and John Killick.
They have compiled a 250-page record of 36 surprising, startling and occasionally gruesome crimes perpetrated over a century, drawing on official records and newspaper reports.
Significantly the book opens with a domestic violence double murder committed on a Yabba farm in 1887 that resulted in a conviction and a death penalty, later commuted to life imprisonment due to insanity.
Another perpetrator was not so lucky. Following his conviction in a brutal stabbing murder at Ulupna near Strathmerton, the offender was sentenced to death and the punishment carried out in 1898.
While the recently solved cold case involving the 1983 death of Shepparton teenager Michelle Buckingham is featured in one chapter, who would have thought there were other, unsolved cases lying undiscovered in the region’s past?
They include the double murder of two unknown people discovered at the bottom of a 300ft mining shaft not far from the Rushworth court house in 1908. Neither their identity nor that of the offender has been discovered.
Perhaps the most notorious case forever identified with Shepparton was the 1966 murder of two teenagers, Garry Heywood and Abina Madill, by the offender known as Mr Stinky.
Raymond Edmunds was eventually tracked down in 1985 due to the matching of fingerprints lifted from the 1966 crime scene. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the double murder and a series of rapes in suburban Melbourne.
The book provides some gripping, if not morbid reading, but there are a few errors that can be irritating, for example the reference to ‘Milburn River’, which does not exist in this region.
And should the reader be puzzled by the apparent high number of homicides recorded in the back and attributed to Shepparton, take heart that some of the 36 chapters include murders carried out an hour’s drive from the city and somehow found their way into the regional anthology.
And, I hasten to add, not all murders committed in the district are recorded here, and compared to the Victorian state average (93 last year), Shepparton is not a murder hotspot.
Living in a city the size of Shepparton can bring things close to home.
Many years ago I was reporting on a murder trial and enduring the excruciating detail of evidence on a long day, when the witness recounted how he had attended a party, just prior to the alleged murder, when he uttered the specific address of the house I had recently purchased.
Sometimes you can know too much about Shepparton.
• Sinful Shepparton is available from Collins Booksellers at a recommended price of $35.
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