In April 2002, wealthy socialite Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul King left their home in a leafy eastern suburb, dined with her son and his family and then disappeared into thin air. Twenty-five days later, after an investigation that swamped the front pages, their bludgeoned bodies were found in a shallow bush grave just outside Melbourne.
Why was Melbourne so fascinated by the Wales-King murders. For the longest time, reporters went absolutely berserk, almost stalking the family for pictures and quotations. From the time the Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul King went missing, the rumour mill went into overdrive and every utterance of anyone even remotely connected with the case was plastered all over the pages of every newspaper in town.
The reason I wanted to read this book is to see if Hilary Bonney answered this question, and ultimately, she asked the same question. As the author states in the conclusion to the book, there are 340 murders in Australia (on average). Twelve of these victims are parents killed by their children, of these, five are mothers.
At the same time that the Wales-King case was being plastered all over the newspapers, a nearly identical set of circumstances were being played out in Altona, when a 39-year old fitter and turner killed his Italian born mother and mother, again for money. No major headlines, no intense media interest and no "walking tours of their Altona" as there were of Wales-King Armadale.
