Inside story: Humanising a cold case victim – writing the life and brutal death of Mollie Dean

This essay focuses on two Australian books about a murder, the non-fiction A Scandal in Bohemia: The Life and Death of Mollie​ Dean by Gideon Haigh, and a novel, The Portrait of Molly Dean by Katherine Kovacic; both published this year. Both books recount the main facts of the life and brutal killing of Mary Winifred ‘Mollie’/’Molly’ Dean, but in very different ways. In late November 1930, Molly/Mollie was murdered in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, only doors away from her home, at a time when a number of other young women were raped and strangled in that otherwise infamously sedate city. The story was covered in sensationalist detail in newspaper articles, and then retold, thinly veiled, in a number of fictional works in the ensuing decades, including George Johnson’s My Brother Jack. In thinking about Haigh and Kovac’s books almost nine decades after Mollie/Molly’s death, it is notable how various commonly-used literary definitions and genre descriptions – of fiction and non-fiction, truth and invention, biography and true crime, for instance – are not very useful. Discussing these books in terms of the context of the burgeoning popular interest in true crime stories – whether related in books, podcasts or television cold case investigations, reveals the extent to which writers can relay biographical, historical and criminological information in popular formats, and the means they use to do so.