You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was recorded on it's two minutes after midnight on Wednesday, June thirteenth, twenty eighteen, and Eurydicy Dixon removes her shoes as she strolls through Princess Parking Inner, Melbourne. She's just finished having a few drinks with friends after performing a comedy show at Highland of Bar. It went really well.
She feels on top of the world.
Finally, her career is really starting to take off. How exciting. I'm nearly home. How about you, She texts her boyfriend as she strolls across the soccer pitch drenched in moonlight. Suddenly she's yanked back by her hair in the back of her dress. A weight is on her chest, her clothes are ripped open. She's being choked. Eurydicy never makes
it home. Her sister later shares in a victim impact statement, how the trauma of her sister's murder has pervaded the lives of everyone in their family, how her own enormous grief has been immobilizing. Sadly, the strongest emotion I feel is anger. She said, She's not the only one who feels that. Eurytic's name is one most Australians know because what happened to her on that average Wednesday night in a Melbourne park will forever be etched into our cultural psyche.
I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations Amom of Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
See let justice beacy and just did with me. I will fight sad Amin free.
If we are we saying name, then you did not dine. You see.
That song you just heard was written for twenty two year old Euridice Dixon. It's a tribute to a beautiful life gone too soon and for all the women lost to violence. It's been six years today since the rape and murder of the up and coming comedian, six years since her boyfriend Tony and her family the horrendous details of her death. Six years since Melbourne and Australia were widely erupted with anger at the circumstances surrounding her murder.
We learned today of the terrible motive behind a murder that shocked Melbourne.
The depraved crime that saw nationwide outrage and vigils in the days that followed.
One of these marches is planned for this month and has already attracted the interest of thousands of people. It's being held in honor of Eurydice Dixon, who was murdered here in Prince's Park.
A week after Eurydice's death, ten thousand people gathered at a candle at vigil at the park where she was killed. Men, women and children came with blankets and candles and flowers and sat in silence beneath dimmed park lights at six pm. Her killer remains behind bars. As recently as twenty twenty, James Todd lost a bid to reduce his sentence. At the moment, he won't be eligible for parole until he
is fifty four years old. His crimes were described in court as being one of the worst examples of murder and pure and unmitigated evil. Sarah Krasnysteine is an award winning author who has covered and written about this case in detail. She holds a doctorate in criminal law, and in this episode was able to give us an insight into just how US sentencing judge uses the information available
to them to determine an appropriate punishment. Sarah joins us. Now, before we focus on eu decease death, I'd like to talk about her life. What do we know about who she was and what she was doing with herself in twenty eighteen.
Yeah, I mean, we can't talk about the crime that James Todd committed without talking about the woman he assaulted and killed, who was twenty two year old. You were to see Dixon, but I'm mindful of what her father said outside of the Supreme Court after Todd was sentenced, which was that Euridice should be remembered for her wits, her courage, and her kindness and not for her death.
So in my piece about the case for the Monthly, I wrote that you ready to see Dixon was an artist, a comedian, and a writer, and the place to memorialize such an individual is not in the contact of her murder. It's the last note of her song and it was
chosen by someone else. So at the same time, though, it's important that she is remembered, so I'll just mention a few things that I learned were important to her through her family and friends at the trial and also in the context of comedy show that they put on in her honor shortly afterwards. She lived in Inner City Melbourne.
She had made her first debut at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in twenty eighteen, and the respect and love that she inspired in her friends and family was palpable in the courtroom. So I think it's also important to note that at the time of her death she was working on a show about radical empathy, and that it's notable that the subject of that was the men who felt left behind by feminism. I think it's also important for anybody who's interested in learning more about her as
a person and not just a victim. Was a book called No Apologies by Joanne Brookfield, which is about Australian live comedy, and she actually describes one of Dixon's acts in detail and gives her the respect that she deserved as a writer and a comedian and a performer with her own very funny, very unique and profound voice.
Comedy is such a hard profession, especially when you're young and rising, which is what Dixon was doing. And on the particular night Wednesday, June thirteen, twenty eighteen, she just finished a comedy show at the Highlander Bar. From all accounts, it sounds like she did a great job. She was pretty happy with herself afterwards, chatting with her friends and her boyfriend, and then she walked home after celebrating via Melbourne's Princess Park. Can you tell us about that walk.
You've written about how she in fact enjoyed her commute. She often took her shoes off.
It's a very Melbourne map that she covers. So she had just said goodbye to her boyfriend Tony Magnuson after the show, and they had a snack, kind of a late night snack, and he got on a tram and she started walking back to her place in the other direction, and so they saw each other for the last time outside of Linder's Street station. So it's a very Melbourne iconic setting for what happens next she walks through the city.
There was a sense in the description and in the camera footage that she was kind of open to the world. And there was a mention which touched me kind of as a writer, that she was seeing kind of speaking to herself. And I think anyone who is a writer or writes comedy or does performances, we do that all the time, we're kind of living in a separate world all the.
Time, saying things out loud to process them exactly.
So that was quite familiar to me. So she walks down through the city back towards the Inner North where she was living, and it's right outside Flinders Street station as well that James Todd happens to see her, and that he starts following her home.
You know that park, Well, you've retraced yourridcey steps. Is it a well lit place? Is it frequented by many people at that time of night.
Well, this is part of the reason why this case kind of grabbed me from the beginning, which was that Princess Park where she spent her last moments. Like you mentioned, she does take off her shoes when she answers the park, which I think is this glorious image of, you know, a woman who is embracing this quality that I think is eroded in all of us by crimes like this, which is that openness to life and a kind of
enjoyment of the moment in the place. And she's walking across the grass of Princess Park, and yeah, it is familiar to me. I trained for two marathons around it. It's a three k radius, so it's not very big, and there would be weekends where I'd run around it, you know, ten times for training. I went to UNI at Melbourne UNI nearby, so picnics and played a and
you know, exercise and relaxation. That has all happened in my life in that space where yeah, she had her last living moments and then where she was violently attacked.
Can you talk us through what happened to you?
To see?
After midnight on that evening, so.
James had been following her for about an hour since he saw her outside of Flunder Street station. She was walking. He was keeping a distance behind her. If she stopped to look at something or at a crosswalk, he would stop and roll a cigarette and pretend to just be hanging out. But he had his eyes on her the whole time. And the footage of that is quite chilling because it is very much like a hunter's stalking prey.
Around midnight, she texted her partner that she was almost home and to see if he had made it home safely as well. She was nine hundred meters from her home when she was walking across one of the soccer pitches of the park and Todd attacked her from behind, and he sexually assaulted her and strangled her, and she was killed not even a kilometer from her house.
She was found the next morning, very early in the morning. How did they find her?
So she was.
Killed just after midnight and she was found just before three am by a man who was like she had been returning home from work. He was just a passer by and he was riding his bike across the soccer pitches in the dark, and he saw a figure on the ground and he stopped to check on her, and then he called Triple O when he found that she
wasn't responsive, and he tried to administer CPR. And in the sentencing hearing, when we heard that evidence, it was immensely reassuring to know that, you know, people will stop and he doesn't know what happened to her, and when he can kind of see that it's been violent, that doesn't stop her from trying to help. So that was quite life affirming. At the same time, there is something quite dark in the fact that he was going to just walk home in the same way that women have
been and would be again. After this case was in the media, warrened that we're not allowed to do.
I want to talk about the evolution of the media coverage of this, but first of all, let's just talk about that initial coverage, because I'm imagining it would have been women found murdered in local Melbourne park, signs of sexual assault, it would have been all of those initial kind of reports. Do you remember breaking how did it make you feel?
Yeah? I remember that day after she had been found, and he confessed fairly quickly, and the day after that he was brought into the magistrates court and charge. So it was quite quick. And at that early stage, all that we knew was that this terrible crime had happened in Princess Park in the middle of the city, and the victim was extremely young, and the mind raises with all of the tropes of who the stranger in the dark might be, a man with a bellaclava and a knife.
We think that it was going to be an older guy. So my curiosity was, oh, my gosh, this terrible thing has happened in one of the collective Melbourne places. I wonder who it was. I can't believe how young this victim is. And so I showed up at the magistrates court for that reason. And you know, we see James Todd walk out and he was so young.
Yeah, because he was nineteen.
Surprisingly young and a young nineteen. The way he carried himself, the kind of baby fat on his face, he presented like a child.
You mentioned that it all happened quite quickly. Let's talk about that her killer surrendered to police. How did that all unfold?
So one of the many chilling things about this crime is that the day of the murder had been very normal for James Todd, and so was the night after the murderer. So he raped and killed Ort to see Dixon, and then he left the park with her phone, and he slept on a bench at a very nearby train station. And then he actually returns to Princess Park just before five am, where he was moved on by the police who were trying to establish a crime scene. He then
takes a tram back into the city. He eats a pie and has a coffee, and then he takes the train home and he's back home by around quarter to seven in the morning, googling a violent porn on his iPad. He also, and we know this from the police search, that he was googling for Princess Park. He was trying to find of news about the crime had broken yet, and so those kind of news searches are interspersed with
searches for rape and murder porn that night. So the day passes and around six point thirty in the evening, he has a friend call him and say that his face is on the news. So they've released the CCTV footage which shows him walking through the city, just outside Melbourne UNI. And that's when he googles broad Meadows police station number and he calls the police saying that it's him on the news, but he wasn't involved in any death.
And he's driven to the station by his girlfriend. They've been together four years at that point, his girlfriend and her mother and it's the girlfriend's mother who says, you know, you better call your own mom and have her come down. And that's when he's interviewed.
And in that interview he does crack. But it takes a while, doesn't it.
Yeah, he kind of maintains his denial over one hundred of questions. It sounds like it was a very long time, but it actually would have been I think a fairly standard police interview. So they're asking him all about his day, and he maintains his innocence for I think was over six hundred questions. And then the detective explains to him how the DNA comparison is going to work when they do it, and that probably if he has anything to tell them, the earlier the better. And so he says,
don't worry about the DNA. I did it and I'll tell you everything. But of course then what he says is not the truth.
What do you mean by that?
So he had a kind of elaborate story. He had just wanted to rob her. He wasn't stalking her with intent to rape. That was something that just popped into his mind when he was on the ground with her after this botched attempt to rob her. That the strangulation was an an attempt to stop her crying out about the robbery, and it matched none of what subsequently came to light about his motivation.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Jimy Bass. I'm speaking with Sarah Krasmustin about the murder of Youriddicy Dixon. Up next, we examine James Todd's sentencing hearing and his sexual sadism diagnosis. We know he eventually pleads guilty. So does that mean he does go with the prosecution and the police's version of events eventually.
Well, yes and no. It means that for the purposes of what can be proved in terms of his conduct and his intention, that there is not a viable argument in favor of his innocence for the murder charge. But motivation is always an internal thing. The lord has to just prove that that he intended to kill her or that he intended to cause her serious harm. He was quite vigorous at the sentencing hearing in saying that he did not have this rape and murder of fantasy that
he was acting on. That was not something that was in his mind when he was stalking her, because in terms of his moral culpability, killing someone at the service of a violence sexual fantasy is incredibly aggravating and serious, and if it happened in a fit of panic or what have you, it's still, of course terrible, but violence is slightly different. Can you tell us a.
Bit more about him? We know he's nineteen, we know he has a girlfriend. What else is there to know about James Todd.
So one of the things that was striking to me, and I think to many given the activation in the media around this case, was the fact that obviously, as I said, he's so young at the time, and that he had no prior criminal history, so this offending was the first the criminal justice system had ever seen of him. We know that he was about to finish a hospitality training course in the city, and like I said, he'd had a girlfriend for four years at the time of
the murder, so had been maintaining a normal relationship. He lived with his parents and his two brothers in public housing in Broad Meadows, and we did not get a
great deal of information about that home life. But one of the reasons that I was interested in writing about the story at the level of detail that I did was we know that someone who offends in this way, but the extremity of human violence before they're even twenty years old, we're not seeing the same sort of failure of character or control that we see in older offenders, because we've got data that says that their brains haven't finished forming yet. So it speaks to these deeper and
broader social and systemic failures. So I was very curious about his home life, his education, the kind of name or what he grew up in, what he had been exposed to, and we just didn't get that level of detail. But what we did get was shocking. There was evidence that he had routinely slept rough in parks or at
the beach despite having this home with his family. There was a video submitted by his counsel of the police walk through at the time of executing the warrant, and we weren't allowed to see it, and I think the reason for that was to preserve kind of the privacy and dignity of the other family members who were not
charged with anything. But the defense psychologist who had seen the video said it showed his home in a state of squalor that was the worst he'd seen in eighteen years of practice as a forensic psychologist.
Wow.
So that was something that was quite shocking, and it was described verbally. So, this is an environment where a family of five are living with multiple pets. It's so dense and cluttered with rubbish that it was very normal for Todd to be in his room and not know if anyone else was home. The level of squalor was so longstanding that the kitchen floor had collapsed and rotted away. And the cooking occurred in the bathroom near the toilet, which was clogged, and every room was stacked with rubbish
and food waste. So that kind of complicated backstory changed the weather in the courtroom, and you could almost feel this kind of anger and rage not disappear, but it's complicated by this very complicated compassion for the child who had grown up in that environment, and it made it harder to see him as a monster. That's something I
still think about five years later. I've been in that courtroom every day for the past three weeks because I'm serving a double murder, which I'm writing about for my next book, and Todd's case made such an impact on me that there are moments when I can only see everybody in the room as they were at the time, and it's always in the context of that planned mitigation where we learned these details about his backstory.
It is a hard one to wrestle in your mind, because as you were telling me that, I was almost feeling a glimmer of I don't know what it was, compassion for him. But then in the same instance, I'm thinking about what he did to Uridicy, and I can't put the two together. So how do we look at what he experienced as a child in the context of what he did to another human being.
Yeah, it's why I would have no desire to be a judge. They are extremely difficult jobs and reconciling this ethically and legally yet alone putting it into a narrative
that people are going to understand in the public. Victoria is the same as every other Australian legal jurisdiction, and that the job of sentencing for a criminal offense is always to match the seriousness of that offense with a unit of time and punishment, and so seriousness and the laws understanding is the harm that the offender caused and their moral culpability for it. So how much control they had, what choices they had, and so it's not just a
one size fits all proposition. So here, obviously the harm was the greatest known to the law, the violation of the body and the taking of a life. But Todd's culpability was much more complex. So the judge in this case was Justice Kay the Victorian Supreme Court, and the task before him was to knit together, or balance all of these factors which were pointing in different directions. So On the one hand, we had Todd's extreme youth, and there are special rules that apply for young offenders, and
that's generally anyone under twenty six. There was also the psychological and medical considerations, which was he had had a long standing diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, and the question was how that did and did not interact with the other diagnoses that he had and this background of social deprivation that he had at home and his high volume exposure to violent porn. So this was a very complicated thing to unscramble. It's like unscrambling an omelet. So he
has the autism spectrum disorder. He also had sexual sadism disorder, so that's a paraphilia and I didn't understand paraphilias before this case, but they are conditions in which sexual pleasure depends on fantasizing about and engaging in extreme sexual behavior. They become disorders when they threaten harm or cause distress.
So the sexual sadism disorder that he had was characterized by driving sexual pleasure through causing witnessing or fantasying about a non consenting indivisuals pain, and both the forensic psychologist for the prosecution and the forensic psychologist for the defense agreed that it was not possible to treat the paraphilic interest that was underlying the disorder, So that was something that spoke to his extreme dangerousness to the community going forward.
On the other hand, the way it interacted with his autism disorder was something that would have normally deserved mitigation because these are things that are outside of his control. And again it was mentioned in the court, and I think it's important to always mention in the discussion that there's nothing about that autism diagnosis that meant that he
would be violent. Was this jew of factors that were very personal to him and that they interacted in a particular way, And so that's what the court was looking at.
Can I ask the sexual site is disorder? Had he been diagnosed with that prior to all of these proceedings. Did we know that he had this for a while.
No, it was only in the context of the sessions that he'd had preparatory to the sentencing place, so to see how he was built and what was relevant. He had had previous interactions with child psychologists from a very young age to deal with social and emotional issues. And mood regulation issues. But no, this didn't come out. And indeed, the very nature of it was that it was quite
hidden before it reached the stage. And as part of why it was so terribly dangerous is that no indication of it had been picked up previously in any of these sessions.
Did Todd share any insights into why he picked you to see how he picked it, why he decided to do what he did.
Not in the context really of the sessions. But there was a phone call that he'd had that was recorded, of course from prison to his father, in which he spoke about the living out of this fantasy and that it hadn't matched what he had hoped and that he hoped it would be better next time, which was a distressing thing to hear. But no, not that I know of.
Can you expand more on those victim impact statements? They're such an important part of the process where the family gets to have their say before a sentence is handed down.
Yeah. So in Victoria, at least anyone who is affected by the crime can file a victim impact statement and those can be kept private for the judge to read,
or they can be read out in court. And Dixon's sister read out hers, and she stood next to their brother, and she described understandably how the trauma of her sister's murder had pervaded the lives of the family, and the immobilizing impact of her grief on her own life, how it had shifted the course of her life, and she spoke with madness about her anger, which I think all
of us can understand. Dixon's partner, Tony Magnuson, read out his statement, and he similarly explained kind of the shark waves of the loss in his own life, and they are extremely difficult things to read yet alone to be in the room for, because you're or I am filled with the kind of a cute awareness that, but for the grace of whatever you want to call it, that
could be me at any moment. And yeah, you see the great cost of the individual example of these staggering statistics about violence against women.
I was quite moved by the way her dad spoke in and around the court case because he actually shared compassion towards Todd's family as well, which he doesn't have to do and which would have been so hard when everything is still so fresh.
Oh, it was the most magnificently in law human experience. To see a parent who was still grieving their child showed concern for the person who took that life. You know, he said he extended his sympathy to those who loved Todd, and that it was a terrible tragedy all round, and that he wished for Todd to get better, and that he thought you were would have also wished for Todd
to get better. And it spoke to it was a little window into this family that she came from and this element that was in the heart of her artistic work, which was, like I said, this radical compassion as the only way of fixing all of these problems which ultimately killed her. So it was tragic but very powerful to see her father saying that.
Let's talk about Todd in that courtroom, because apparently he wept during some of these statements, but you think otherwise you were there, tell us how did he react?
Yeah, so, I mean I had been reported that he wept during the victim impact statements. The way that that courtroom is structured, it's very archaic. It was built so long ago that the sound doesn't travel well and the angles are quite awkward. The press box is kind of like these two pews, and they're next to the dock where the accused sits behind a plexiglass screen. And that
was the case even before COVID. And the way that I work is that I sit and observe as much as it's possible too, probably to a creepy extent, But I had tried to make sure that I was as close as possible to him for as long as possible, so that I would have as much information from which
to make these assessments about emotion. And it's not something that's afforded to most court reporters, because they're under a huge time pressure to come in and out of a case and to go and do their crosses outside, or to go and file their reports on a twenty four hour cycle or even less than that. Whereas I'm writing at length and I kind of wait till there's some dust on the MATERI so I can see kind of what the larger implications are. And so I afforded more
time in the research process to do these things. And that's a long way of explaining that I didn't understand what his face was doing as weeping. Given how long I had spent watching him. It seemed too extreme and too performative. It seemed like he was fulfilling what was
expected of him at those times in the court. But I did see him have very strong emotion at other times, And the strongest emotion that I saw was this mix of fear and shame, and so that had a palpable impact on the way his face moved, and when he looked up directly, and when he hit his face, the way he held his body, the way he walked, and so I think he was feeling very strong emotions, just not in the way that most of the reports presented it.
The sentence that Todd received yourself described it as surprising. Why was that?
The first part is what I said about this need to balance all of these competing characteristics. So the forensic psychologist who testified for the defense had said that Todd's autism diagnosis interacted with the sexual sadist diagnosist to make him more rigid in the pursuit of these fantasies of rape and murder that had kind of grown and metastasized in proportion to the volume of violent porn that he was watching. He was less likely than somebody without those
diagnoses to be able to desist. The prosecutions for psychologists disagreed with that assessment, saying that we'd seen Todd have a relationship, have friendships, His friends and girlfriends understood him as somebody who had a very social range of responses and was considerate to others. There was evidence that he was able to desist from violent sexual behavior or listen
to his girlfriend in matters of sexual consent. So there was competing assessments of the impact of his diagnoses, and the law had and still has, I believe, a limited understanding of the way that neurodivergence works in criminal offending. So all of that was kind of an open question about how it would translate into the sentence. But the
other consideration was his extreme youth. So on the one hand, we have a whole body of law that says that we should give the least amount of punishment required to fairly punish the offense, and that the airs of presumption when the offender is very young, that life imprisonment will be disproportionate to all of the factors relevant to their offending and who they are, mostly because of that youth. For that reason, but the Crown and the defense had
agreed that life imprisonment wouldn't be an appropriate punishment. So normally that agreement would have not a determining impact, but a strong impact on the sentence. Always the sentencing judge retains the final discretion, the final say so, and what that sentence will be and how long it will be.
So I was surprised because of the body of law about youth and life imprisonment and this agreement between the parties that life imprisonment wasn't going to be appropriate, because at the end of the day, Justice Kaye found that it was proportionate to impose a sentence of life, and that was because even taking the youth into account, it was the extreme dangerousness of this offending that meant that no other sentence would be possible, and all of the reasons for that held up on appeal.
So he's given life, which means thirty five years right as a non parole.
So the head sentence is life. That's the most that he can serve, and the non parole period is thirty five years, and that's the least he can serve. At thirty five years, he won't necessarily be released, but he becomes eligible for parole consideration. So the Adult Parole Board will then look at his time served, who he is, what rehabilitation he's done, if any expert reports on his psychological state, his personality, and they will make an assessment
whether he's safe to release at that time. And he'll be in his mid fifties by that point.
I think it's good to know that that decision isn't just you know, he's led out straight away. It's assessed because reading the detailed the sentencing, it said things like his chances of rehabilitation were slim and that the risk he posed to women was unacceptably great. That doesn't sound like the kind of person, at least at the time of sentencing, that you want released back into the community.
It's a real concern specifically for those reasons, and then generally when we look at the efficiency of imprisonment in terms of reducing crime more broadly, so, prison actually has a criminogenic effect, which means that it increases people's likelihood to commit crimes. It cuts off their social ties in the outside world, living situations, job prospects, relationships, all of the things that would hold people and prevent them from offending in the future. It's also a place of punishment,
it's not a place necessarily of rehabilitation. So all of the sexual offender rehabilitation programs that would be available in other contexts are necessarily available to him. Because of his youth and the nature of his crime, he would probably be in productive custody. And again that kind of isolation has a dangerous impact. So yeah, it's quite concerning.
That being said, though, I've heard that Todd is I wouldn't say enjoying, but he likes elements of prison.
Yes, that point was made by the forensic psychologist, I think for the prosecution, who was kind of asked this was kind of at that early stage where he had spent the months in prison in preparation for the sentencing hearing, how he was going in prison, the impact of prison on him, because again the court will take into account where there is kind of a pre existing psychological or neurological condition, whether the impact of prison would weigh more
heavily on Todd than it would for someone without his diagnoses. And in that case, it was ironic that the order and predictability of the environment, compared to the chaos of the home that he had come from, was actually having a beneficial effect on him, and I think that said something more generally about the way in which the soul could have been avoided if he had had a different home life, different background. Where would we all have found ourselves.
I want to move away from Todd now and get back to Uriticy and the community response to what happened, because the only word that I can come up with is anger. It felt like when everything started to come out, the response was huge, wasn't it.
We'd had to previous explosively violent stranger murders of young women in Melbourne just in the previous months before this matter was heard, and we'd also heard police repeating this broad instruction to women to be careful about how and where they walked home at night, instead of a broad instruction to men not to kill and rape women. And so I think we were all fed up with that, and then we were all fed up more broadly with the types of factors that were leading again and again
to sexual assault and murder. And we're still fed up with it, and we're still seeing it, and we're still at the very beginning of implementing systemic solutions to this problem of male violence against women.
In the wake of you a decease murder. Did anything change? Did the Victorian authorities change anything? Was it discussed in parliament? Because, as you said, this was after quite a few stranger murders in Melbourne itself, in one city.
I think the broad answer to that is no and not enough. I used to work in the Victorian Department of Justice in a unit that formulated legislative reforms to the Crimes Act, and in a certain respect, while the criminal law is extremely important here, it happens at the end of this process when the damage that can't be undone has already occurred. So these are not necessarily solutions
that can be fixed with new laws. They are social issues that need a whole range of behavioral and financial solutions, and I think if they had been efficiently implemented in response to cases like this, we would not be seeing the situations that we continue to say.
As someone that is so embedded in this world, you have a history of being there with the Crimes Act, You've got a criminal law background. Please, Sarah, is there any help of fixing this in our lifetime? Yeah?
I mean I think that there's so many people doing great work in this I am the mother of two sons and I think that these conversations don't start with grown men. They start with a whole range of ways
of seeing women as equal and valuable adults. So this is a complicated web, from the way we handle internet regulation and peorn regulation, to the gender pay gap, to the stories that we read and value towards the voices that we see and hear are women being treated equally as real human people, And then how we talk about what masculinity means, the pressures and kind of expectations on men, and how that plays out in politics and in sports and in society economically, and so you know, this is
a broad systemic issue. There, it's a unified field, and there's many people working in the space. But as I said, we're still at the very beginning of taking it seriously enough to ask these questions about what the solutions look like.
It does make me feel a little bit better that you're at least hopeful though, that we can see change.
Well. I think if the problems are socially caused, they
can be socially fixed. And one of the things that happens when you write about cases like this is there's sometimes criticism about centralizing or even humanizing the offender taking a spotlight away from the victim, and I understand the emotion at the heart of that criticism, but I don't agree with the point because if we're not curious about the factors that creates someone like James Todd, then they are still going to be creating other young men like him,
and that makes none of us safer. So yeah, I think that's very dark and it's not as necessarily a fun space to be in. But I think the questions are important, the curiosity is important.
The reality is since twenty eighteen, since this happened, we have lost an unfathomable number of women who have been murdered. Why do you think it is that so many people remember urytices story.
Yeah, it's an interesting question and I don't think it has one answer. I think the location has something to do with it. That this kind of had so many iconic Melbourne places and spaces involved in the actual crime that there was a sense that it could have been any of us in the city. Her youth and Todd's youth, I think had a shocking impact on people that didn't see that coming. And I would like to say that she absolutely deserves like every woman who's killed at the
hands of men to be remembered. But I'm also mine that not as many people remember other names. So Aya Marsawe who was killed by Cody Herman in twenty nineteen.
Another stranger murder, another stranger murder.
Both of them were similar ages twenty and twenty one, so again the same violence, the same ages. People remember Jill Mahr and Adrian Bailey, but they aren't as familiar with Adrian Bailey's other victims who are sex workers. And I won't name them now because I don't have any
permission to name them, but their names are available. And so looking where our attention and our compassion and our energy go in mainstream media outlets, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that we still look for women who fit a certain mold and that race, ethnicity, gender, and profession do play a role in where that attention goes. But again, unless all women are valued equally, none of us are safe.
And I guess at the end of the day, it's important that we try and tell as many of these stories as we can right to keep this issue on the front foot and so people know what's going on. Absolutely thanks to Sarah for assisting us to tell eurydice story. Sarah has written about a number of the women mentioned in this interview, like Eurydicy, like Aya. You can find her work linked in our show notes. True Crime Conversations is a Mumamea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath,
with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Giamoylan. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation. In the meantime, if you have a case you think we should cover next, send us an email to true Crime at mamamea dot com dot au.