As reviewed in the Age newspaper

In 1963, a brawny teenager, pumped with a numb bravura fuelled by testosterone and flagon wine, threatened a girl with a knife at Northcote railway station. A Constable Bellesini, who attended the scene, was confronted by the youth, who lashed out at him with the blade.

Constable Bellesini calmly shot the youth in both legs. Twenty-four years later Peter Raymond Keogh, now older but no wiser, used another knife to kill his former girlfriend Vicki Cleary, outside the kindergarten where she was employed in Coburg. Keogh was found guilty of manslaughter and served less than four years in prison. Ten years after his release, in an act of cruel irony, he committed suicide.

Vicki Cleary was the sister of Phil Cleary, who was so angered by the leniency meted out to Keogh that he has pursued what he considers to be a gross miscarriage of justice ever since. Just Another Little Murder makes for compelling, distressing reading. It chronicles a bullying coward's passage through life and is a memorial to a murdered woman.

Cleary exposes how Keogh, with a long police record for sexual assault, constantly evaded any severe prison time and made a mockery of the supposed judiciary. In the Supreme Court, charged with the murder of Vicki Cleary, the spectre of a "provocation defence" and a couple of apologetic psychiatric reports were at Keogh's back. They worked. As Cleary has said, the book is a re-trial of Peter Keogh and the criminal justice system.

Cleary details the trail of destruction Keogh brought to others' lives and takes a mighty swing at everyone along the way: judges, lawyers, teachers, parents, parole officers, anyone who came in contact with Keogh and failed to recognise him for what he was, an abusive man with an eye for manipulation.

The centrepiece of the book is the chapter detailing the murder as Cleary re-creates the sequence of events through the varied eyewitness accounts of those present in Cameron Street on the day. This is the most powerful and
uncompromising chapter especially when coupled with the medical evidence of the knife wounds: Keogh, his attack partially obstructed, pulled his victim out of her car in order to better wield his weapon.

The book is rather confusing in places suffering from too much detail. Accustom yourself to Cleary's style, however, and the passion of the writing outweighs such a minor criticism. In the documentary film James Ellroy's east of Death, Ellroy, the crazed genius of American crime writing, says: "Closure is bullshit ... the ramifications of murder go on and on and on."

Hopefully, the Cleary family has now found some peace and, if there is any justice, this book should become prescribed reading for the Australian legal
fraternity.

THE STUART CASE details a very different example of legal blundering. On December 19, 1958, Gieseman's carnival arrived in Ceduna, South Australia. One of the itinerants working in it was a young Aborigine of the Aranda (Arrernte) tribe, Max Stuart. Stuart set about buying alcohol and drinking heavily. The following afternoon, an eight-year-old girl, Mary Hattam, went missing. Later that night, her body was found. She had been raped and murdered.

After a tip-off, the police arrested Stuart, interrogated him for many hours, and obtained a confession. It was this confession, supported by the evidence of Aboriginal trackers that they had found Stuart's footprints near Mary's
body, that clinched the Crown's case. He was sentenced to death.

This is a good book. As entertainment, it is a top-notch, edge-of-the-seat courtroom drama. As an argument against capital punishment, it is irrefutable. As a historical document, it is meticulously researched and
clearly written. And it lays bare Australia's judicial system in all its inadequacy.

This is expressed by Justice Abbott, one of the judges who heard the first appeal: "Because you have a man who is illiterate and incapable of understanding and expressing himself (in English), you want a special system
of justice built up for him ..." Had there been such a system, however unwieldy, Stuart might not have been put through the torture of being condemned to death for a crime it appears he did not commit.

David Honeybone is editor of Crime Factory magazine.