'I interviewed more than 40 true crime experts last year. 5 revelations have stayed with me.'

I am often asked how I do it. How I spend my days talking and thinking about such horrible things.

Murder, rape, child abuse, domestic violence, assault; these are the topics that fill my work days writing for Mamamia, and interviewing guests for our podcast, True Crime Conversations.

Truthfully, the desire to unpack and understand these horrendous crimes and the want to honour the victims and families affected by them is my 'why.' I think we as a society can learn a lot from dissecting the most depraved things we do to one another. I think we need to hold our justice systems to account by exploring their flaws and their failures. Importantly, I also think we need to re-write the way women are spoken about within these narratives. To deconstruct the often subtle misogyny used when speaking about female perpetrators and victims of crime.

Watch: What happened to Kylie Maybury? Post continues after video.

As a consumer, I find true crime fascinating. It's the ultimate story — the ultimate tension to explore.

I've interviewed more than 40 true crime experts last year. Everyone from detectives, prosecutors and journalists, to victims, criminals and advocates.

Here are the moments that have stayed with me.

1. The myths women have been taught about sexual predators.

I had many 'ah uh' moments during my interview with former police officer-turned-sex crime educator Brent Sanders.

The episode we did together received the most feedback of any we've done this year, with particularly parents reaching out to let us know they were making their daughters listen ASAP.

He deconstructed the advice women have been taught for ions, to 'submit' to dangerous male attackers, in order to survive.

"They're looking for someone who will follow the script they've written for them," he told me. "If he had a crystal ball, and he drove past you and he could see you yelling, screaming, running [and] fighting back — every single offender I have ever interviewed, or ever studied ever, will just keep on driving.

"They're absolutely paranoid [about] getting caught, and they're totally unprepared for anything other than submission."

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The second myth he deconstructed, was the falsity we're sold as women that we can't physically beat a male assailant.

"There's not one martial art that you and I could study anywhere in the world that will teach us how to overpower an attacker," he said. However, "the first thing they show you is how to identify your opponent's weakness.

"If I grab you, I'm 105kg, you're not. You can't overpower me — not because I'm better than you, that's just my advantage. So don't play to my advantage. If you want to defend yourself, identify my weakness."

2. The major oversight destroying victim's loved ones in court.

As a journalist for the Adelaide Advertiser, Sean Fewster has covered court and crime for two decades.

But there was one detail he shared in our episode together, unravelling the crimes of Stephen Graham Peet — a man who killed his girlfriend and her two young children in 2016 — that I haven't been able to shake.

Yvette and her two children were murdered in 2016. Image: RED HEART campaign.

He explained, that the first time loved ones heard about the details of both her murder, and that of her kids, was in open court.

"The Office of the DPP in South Australia has a remit to ensure the fair trial of a defendant. They do not anywhere in their charter have the remit to look after the wellbeing of victims of crime.

"So if they believe that the best way to guarantee the fairness of the process for the defendant, is to keep the victim's family in the dark, they'll do it," he explained.

It's not the first time he's witnessed it.

It happened in another South Australian triple-murder in 2010 too, that saw a 20-year-old man convicted of killing a teenage girl and her parents because he was jealous of his friend who was dating her.

"The first time that the families in the Kapunda triple murder heard how their loved ones died, was in court," said Fewster.

"This is not new. This is something that the DPP does time and time again, and I've never understood the lack of empathy."

I couldn't believe that was how we treated the families of murder victims in our own backyard.

3. There is no official count for murdered women in Australia.

If you have an eye on the news, you'll be familiar with the sheer amount of women murdered in Australia.

We average about one woman a week at the hands of a former or current partner.

Sherele Moody is a journalist and advocate and has taken on the mammoth task of counting and memorialising Australian women and children killed both here and abroad.

Another woman has been killed.
She was stabbed to death in a domestic violence attack in Garbutt. She's the 75th Australian woman killed this year.
Just updating the post as I did not have all the information earlier.
No one is charged. She is the 75th Australian woman lost to… pic.twitter.com/EUuo9sqNPo

— Sherele Moody (Femicide Researcher) 🌈 (@ShereleMoody) November 5, 2024

She does it…and this is the moment that shocked me, because as she told me "there's no real documentation of lives lost in Australia. There's no memorial for lives lost. There's no online database where you can look up people who have been murdered."

In other words, if Moody and other groups like Destroy The Joint didn't give up their free time to keep track — we'd have no way of knowing how many women are killed year on year.

I had assumed the government…the police…someone in power was monitoring this. But alas, it's been left up to advocates to keep track of these grim figures.

4. How one daughter feels about her mother's murderer.

There was one scene in my guest, director Patricia Gillespie's documentary that really stood out to me.

In The Fire That Took Her, Judy Malinowski's daughter was reflecting on her mother's murderer and the fact he still got to see his children via visitation in prison.

It was something she saw as completely unfair, she explained, as she was never going to see or speak to her mum again. She couldn't understand it and how it was allowed to happen.

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"One of the things that I'm preoccupied by in almost all my work is this idea of the shrapnel of violence, right? Like, when somebody is killed or or severely harmed…it's not just that victim that's hurt.

"It's everyone who loves them, everyone in their orbit, people in their community, people in their work life. These things have a ripple effect," Patricia told me.

It's the real and raw emotions like that, of Judy's daughter, that are often left out of these narratives. I found it incredibly confronting and devastating to hear her perspective as someone affected deeply by murder.

5. The execution that went ahead when it really shouldn't have.

This happened very recently, which is why I can't stop thinking about it. A man named Marcellus Williams was executed in America in September 2024, for the 1998 murder of Felecia Gayle.

But when you actually dig into the evidence (or lack there of), it's astounding that he was even convicted of the murder in the first place.

This was a man who was convicted largely on the evidence of a prison snitch and his ex-girlfriend (both of whom only came out of the woodwork when reward money was announced), and some personal belongings of the victim that were found in William's grandfather's car (that his girlfriend was using to conduct sex work). The murder weapon was in fact mishandled by the prosection, and contaminated. Plus, four African American jurors were removed from his trial for no other reason, it seems, than their race.

Where it gets even more troubling, is the fact that the prosecutor, the jurors and even the victim's family don't think he should have died….and were very vocal about that fact in the months before he died. The Innocence Project and a petition with more than a million signatures all failed to make a difference.

It's not that Williams was necessarily innocent, that was something that needed to be explored. But I feel there was enough reasonable doubt to halt his execution and yet the governor and the Supreme Court refused.

The whole case smells fishy, and I can't believe in 2024 the American justice system didn't stop it.

Feature image: Supplied.