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Emma Rusher: A serial killer once knocked on her family's door, and Candice Fox channels that chilling moment into Redbelly Crossing, a thriller about two brothers who don't speak, and a brutal murder in a small town. Candice hopes this story will help solve a real-life cold case, and here she is today to tell us all about it. Welcome to Audible, Candice.
Candice Fox: Thank you so much for having me.
So lovely to have you here. For listeners who may not be aware, can you share a little bit about Redbelly Crossing?
Someone asked me the other day whether this is the most important book I've ever written, and I think that it is. This is my 21st novel. For the first time, I am writing a book which comes all the way up to that border between crime fiction and true crime, and sort of stepping over into it. This is a fiction novel, but it was fuelled by a true crime that I sort of got myself involved in. While I've taken things from true crime before and put them in my novels, I've never gone so far as to say, “This is the case that I drew from,” and actually gone and met with the victims’ families and that kind of thing, as I have done in this novel. So, it's been a wild ride.
And this crime is really close to home.
It is.
It literally began with a knock on your family's door. Do you want to walk through a little bit about how it started?
My mother had this story that she used to tell when we were kids, and as kids we didn't take it that seriously. I thought it was kind of a cautionary tale. All families have that kind of thing, and they're not necessarily true. So, it was a story about when she was 17, she was home alone, and there came a knock at the door. She opened the wooden door but left the screen door shut. There was a man standing there, and he said that he was a door-to-door salesman and he was selling encyclopedias. And as she's talking to him through the screen, Mum said that she got this all-body sensation. Her hair was standing on end all over, because she's thinking to herself, “For a door-to-door salesman, why isn't he carrying anything?” There was no briefcase. There's no encyclopedias. He wasn't dressed like a salesman.
So, she was telling us this as kids and saying, “Listen to your feelings.” But she's not someone who has a lot of subtlety, you know? So, the ringer at the end, she would say, “He ended up being a serial killer who'd killed some women in my neighbourhood.” As kids, you go, “Oh, okay.” You don't question it any further. So, fast-forward, I'm 35 years old, my daughter Violet is one and a half years old. She was tottering around the house in just a nappy, and she had a top hat on, and she was carrying a little toy briefcase. I said to my husband, “She looks like a little door-to-door salesman.”
As I said it, it brought back this memory that my mom had told us when we were kids of this story. I texted her about it and I said, “I'm having this memory. Was that a real thing that happened to you or was it just, you know.” And she said, “No, no, it's true. It was a real thing.”
I said, “Well, hang on. How did you know that this guy was a killer?” And she said, “There were two women who were murdered in my neighbourhood. And the feeling from the police was that this guy was going door to door, knocking on doors, talking his way in. There was a smashed glass in one of the apartments and a broken cup in another of the apartments.”
I said, “Okay, well, so who was the killer then?” And she said, “They never caught him.” I said, “What do you mean they never caught him? You went to the police? You, at the time?” And she said, “No, I never went to anyone. I never told anyone about it, just you kids. Because I wasn't supposed to open the door to anyone when I'm home alone. I would have got in trouble.”
I'm thinking, “Oh, my God, Mum, you might be the key to solving these cases.” So, I've looked at these cases and we have Lynette White, who was home alone. She was a brand-new mother. Her baby was 11 weeks old, and someone knocked on the door. They came into the apartment and held her at knifepoint. And the thinking from police was that they were interrupted by the delivery of some cloth nappies for her baby. That person has knocked on the door and maybe Lynette's made a bolt for it, or the killer is panicked and he's stabbed her to death.
Almost a year later, we have Maria Smith, who was home alone. Her husband had just left for work, and she was about to leave for work. Someone's come in and brutally raped and strangled her with her stockings. It was her mother's birthday. So, when her husband, Stephen, was calling the house from work during the day and she wasn't answering, he's thinking to himself, “She's out for lunch with her mother.”
I just thought, “Oh, my God, I've been handed this thing from my mum, which might help with these cases.” I think that my hopes and desires, when I've read about these women, was that I was going to help somehow by getting this information through, and something was going to happen. But nothing really did.
The police took the clue from me, and then I didn't hear anything, and I just couldn't leave the story alone. I tried to get a podcast up. I hooked up with a producer, and we pitched the podcast everywhere. We didn't get anything hopeful with that. And then I went to all my true crime writing friends and said to them, “Surely, you should write a true crime novel about this. It's really interesting.” I didn't have any luck there.
Then I just said to myself, “You know what my skills are in? My skills are in writing fiction.” I had already been playing around with ideas, saying, “If I was going to write this, how would I write it? Who would the killer be?” And wondering a whole bunch of things about Lynette and Maria's husbands and fictionalising how they dealt with it.
So, fictional structures were already happening. I ran it by a colleague and she said, “Candice, you have had some sensationally bad ideas in your time, but this really takes the cake. These guys are going to be upset and feel exploited by this.” I said, “Well, what if I got their blessing? What if I said, ‘I want to write this fiction, and at the end of it I want to have an afterword that calls attention to the real-life cases.’” I'm going on these big podcasts. I'm standing in front of huge audiences. I'm in the paper. I'm in the radio. Maybe I can do this and find someone like my mum who has another little key to it and they don't know?
How did you handle that? How have you carried that weight of responsibility to the victims’ families? Incredibly nervously?
Yeah, because I just was ready for them to say, “Thanks, Candice, but we don't want you to take the most awful thing that has ever happened to us and make it into art, and your interest in it is purely voyeuristic.” I was just ready to have incredibly awful things said to me about it, but I thought there's a chance that they'll see my good intentions, and it's worth it if I have to be yelled at. Maybe it's worth it.
For anyone listening or watching this interview and it's jogging some memories for them, what should they do?
What they should do, hopefully, is to read this book and see if it kind of jogs your memory in any way and go to the afterword and look at the real cases, because there are very tangible things in there that you might know, and you don't know that you know it. Is it possible that you ever met Lynette or Maria or had anything to do with them and the police haven't interviewed you because you just slipped through the cracks back in the day? And maybe it's just like my mother. You had some encounter back then, which you think is relevant.
We're at a time in the ’60s and ’70s where women, I think, were not being believed as much as they could have been about sexual assaults and home invasions and things like that. That happened, particularly, when it's a young woman. My mother would have been 17.
When she had the knock on the door.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, on average, it takes men 40 years to come out with childhood sexual abuse. I don't know what the number is for women. So, is it possible that there's someone out there that something happened to you and you haven't been ready to talk about it until now? And now you're thinking it's too late. Well, guess what? It's not too late. It's never too late, actually.
So, what should someone do? If this is ringing bells for them?
Go directly to the police, and you can do that anonymously. You can call Crime Stoppers, you can text, you can email. There are so many avenues for you to do that. And aside from the practical things that can be done, I hope that people read the book and consider this meeting of fiction and true crime, because I don't think it's been done before.
It's so innovative.
Oh, thank you.
Well, it really is.
I can't think of a fictional novel that's done it. There is a song called “Runaway Train” by a band called Soul Asylum. In the film clip, they had all these pictures of missing and runaway children, and they actually had success with 21 cases with kids coming home. One girl saw herself and called her mother, and she'd run away and she'd been missing for a year. I think that this is something where artists have these big platforms and maybe this could inspire somebody else to do the same thing. I'm not sure, I'm wandering in unknown territory here. I think that when fiction and true crime come together, there's this moral gray area. And I think that we could tease it out a little bit and see what's going on there.
I really enjoyed listening to Redbelly Crossing as a novel in its own right. So, let's talk about that a little bit, because as much as it's ripped from the headlines and true life, it is a complete stand-alone novel for people to really enjoy as a new Candice Fox story. What inspired you to focus on this family? Because it really centres around two brothers who don't speak anymore, and the whole novel really is a lot about parents and their relationship to children, and family relationships that are fractured. Is that something that you thought about when you were bringing this story to life?
Yes. I am getting more and more comfortable talking in the media about my childhood and the more difficult aspects of that. My mum had four kids and then she adopted two, and then she fostered 155 children. She was a prolific animal rescuer. She was someone who was really addicted to chaos and, really, it's a whole spectrum of things, this childhood and her in particular.
She is what people call “the legend.” “And what a great thing that she's done.” And on the surface, it looks like a very Partridge Family type of thing. But you get all the way down here, though, and at its darkest points is this woman who created such a chaotic environment that all of us kids were sort of in this turbulent sea all the time. It did something to our minds to have her so focussed on the other children coming in, and then everyone sort of had, “It's my time to have a crisis now, it's my time to have a crisis,” because having a crisis was what she would focus on.
So, the way to seek and get attention?
Yeah. My role in that family was the smart, capable one. The one who had no problems. So, I'd come to her with problems and she'd be like, “Well, this kid's uncle's been abusing him for the last year. And these kids, we can't find their parents because they've run off, and you don't have any problems.”
That's something I carried into adulthood, saying I don't actually have problems. No one has time for my problems. I solve my own problems. So, in this book, you've got Russell and Evan, who have both come out of this furnace that they were raised in with their father, Arthur. And they're just completely different people who had different roles. They deal with them in different ways. Evan, he deals with it by being a soldier to his father, loyal and unquestioning. And that's how he protects himself. Whereas Russell really had to get out of there by exploding, he had to let it bottle all the way up until he just exploded. And now, for Russell, exploding is the way to solve problems, because he doesn't have a valve anymore.
And when you have these two brothers, they've come back together, they've both been assigned to this murder case, and they really have to look at each other and say, “How did you end up like that, when we both came from the same place? And is that okay? Are you dealing with it right? Or am I dealing with it right? And if I'm not dealing with it right, what does that mean?”
I don't want to give a spoiler away, but the way that the brothers handle themselves, as you just said, one is the soldier of the father, the other is quite explosive and sheds light on things at all times, is kind of the way that they approach their work and the unfolding clues and situations that are before them in this book.
Yeah, and it's their families around them trying to deal with who they are. Evan's son is very troubled. His wife is trying to deal with that. Russell is trying to mend things with his teenage daughter, because he's come out in the last five years, and that's destroyed the marriage. So, she's saying, “Did we ever really know you at all if you were gay this whole time?” It's this cluster of families who are all pointing at each other and saying, “I don't understand you, I don't understand you.” And then into that melting pot, you throw an atmosphere which is very threatening. So, Redbelly Crossing is a fictional place, but it's based on a place which I find very atmospheric. Snakes, rivers, treachery, darkness, town weirdos. That kind of thing.
Just a casual Australian town.
Yeah, yeah. Just your average Australian small town. And then you throw the murders in as well. So, I had to do things in this novel which I then had to go to Paul and Stephen and say, “I've drawn from what happened to you and I fictionalised it. And because I've fictionalised it, I've had to do certain things.” I moved it away from Randwick and Coogee, where their wives were murdered. I didn't want people to look at people in the novel and say, “Oh, clearly they were these people from real life,” the real suspects and things like that. So, in one sense, the jarring kind of nature of the glittering Sydney eastern beaches and the daylight in which these horrible crimes sort of invaded, I've removed that aspect. And in the novel, I only had time, really, for the reader to meet one husband. So, I've had to say to them, “The two of you become one now.”
He's a very moving character.
Yeah. And then at the end of the day, the biggest thing in the fiction is you find out who the killer is. And I'm looking at these guys who are in their 70s and 80s and saying, “You may never have that in real life.”
Resolution.
Yeah. “My only hope for you is that you have that one day, but I don't know if you will or not. But in the book, you do.” And that was one of the scarier aspects of this whole journey, was handing the book to them and saying, “I hope this doesn't hurt you.”
You must have held your breath.
Oh, and they took two or three days to read it, which is fine. Which is totally fine, I get it. But for two or three days I just sweated bullets and just jumped every time the phone rang. But at one point in this whole journey, Stephen said to me, “You keep banging on and on and on about ‘I don't want to hurt you’ and all that kind of thing.” And he said, “I think you're worrying a little bit too much about how we feel.” I said, “How you feel is the whole point here.” But Paul also said, “It's been 50 years-plus. People say the wrong thing, or people avoid you, or people talk to you weirdly, or people try to bring it up as a joke. Like, all of that stuff has happened. But at the end of it, it's your good intention.”
Wise words.
They are wise. The two of them. They're good guys.
I'm just going to move on to a couple of other questions, just more broadly about you. You have also spoken before about how you spent Christmases inside Sydney's correctional facilities with your parole officer dad. Wondering if that inspired and influenced your writing?
Oh, I've always been pretty comfortable around prisons for that reason.
Never had someone say that to me.
They're just a familiar space to me. My dad would have all his work parties at the prison, and so they would shut everybody down in their cells, and we would have cake and stuff that was made by inmates. My mum would never eat it because she's like, “They do things to the food.” I'm sure they do. But she was like, “You kids go right ahead.” I have been to prison a couple more times for research. I met a serial killer at San Quentin in the US, in San Francisco. I wrote to him and I said, “Could I come and visit you on death row?” Because I've never spoken to a serial killer before.
What was the one thing the serial killer shared with you that stayed with you?
We were talking about his victims, and I had asked the question, “What was your plan exactly? Were you just going to keep murdering women and girls until the police caught you?” And he said, “Oh, by the time we got to number five, what was her name?” I said her name, and he goes, “Oh, whatever her name was,” like this, with the hand flick. And I thought, “There it is. That's it. The flicking of the hand away of an entire life.”
I sort of tried to get him to understand the effect that he had had. I said, “You removed this person, a human being who had a name not only from her entire future, but also her place in the future of all these different people. She might have had children.” And he just didn't get it. That was a time where I approached that line, and I was in the gray area between crime fiction and true crime, wondering if I'm doing bad things. And I've done it again with Redbelly. I said to Paul and Stephen, “I've met a murderer.” And they were very interested in that. They said to me, “Was he sorry for what he did?” And I had to say, “No, he was not. He was not capable of being sorry because he was a psychopath. No remorse.”
I didn't know how that landed for Paul and Stephen. Whether they would have wanted whoever did this to their wives to be sorry, or whether understanding that he was not capable of that was healing at all. But I told the truth. My policy in dealing with these guys the whole time was, “I'm not going to massage or manipulate anything in any way. I'm just going to say it how it is. And if they don't like it, then we'll adjust, because I'm on this journey with them together.”
That's what's so wonderful about your stories is because you lure us in with this straight writing and talking, but, actually, you are the queen of twists.
Oh, good.
Anybody who has reading Redbelly Crossing in their future, you will really enjoy the twists in this one. What's something about Redbelly Crossing that you almost didn't include, but it wouldn't be the same without it?
I almost didn't include it because I didn't know if I would be allowed to include it. It was the title. I was at the real town that it's based on, and I was there with my daughter Violet and my husband, and it was a blistering hot day. We were there on the river, on the beach, and she said, “Guys, look.” We looked up the beach and this gigantic red-bellied snake was coming down the beach, just gently paddling along. It wasn't that far away. I said, “Violet, let's go.” I grabbed her and we got as close to it as I determined we weren't going to startle it. I said, “All right, watch carefully. You're never going to see this again. This is a once in a lifetime. It's going to get in the river and cross the river.” And it did, it got in the river and it swam across to the other side to get into the reeds.
It was just this magical moment. I had been throwing around titles for the book and I said, “Tim, ‘Redbelly Crossing.’” Then I held on to that for several months in just terror that another author was going to come out with a redbelly book. So, I didn't tell any of the other authors about it.
One last question. Could you tell us a couple of books that have inspired you?
So, I was writing full-size novels at 16. I started submitting them at 18. I wrote four full novels, and they were all rejected by everyone in the universe. I had over 200 rejection letters, and I just was not making it through. What I was writing was vampires and werewolves. I had never written crime before, and I don't know why, because all I was being told is “Write what you know.”
Between the foster kids and my dad working in a prison, there was so much crime around. So, my gateway book between the supernatural writing and crime writing was Every Dead Thing by John Connolly. I wrote to him at one point. He is a super nice guy. I said, “You really inspired me. I wrote a crime book because of you. And the crime book got published and you helped me.” And he was so lovely about it. So, every few years I go look at his correspondence. “Look at me now, John.”
So, I love that book. I love Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, because, really, that's a book about bad parenting and creating something and then going, “Oh, God, what have I created?”
Unintended consequences.
Yeah. And the child going, “Why did you make me if you weren't going to love me?” So, those are two books that I hold very close to my heart.
Thank you for sharing that. I have one last ask of you. Can you please give us your best “This is Audible”?
Oh, “This is Audible.”
Nice.
Like that?
Yes. Thank you, Candice.
Thanks, Emma. Thanks for having me.
