Author: Vikki Petraitis
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Reviewer: Carol Woeltjes
Okay, you’ve just found someone you know lying in a pool of blood on the floor. What would you say/scream? ‘Come quick. The worst has happened’. I don’t think so. It’s a little too stilted and contrived. More likely, at least for me, a whole bunch of expletives followed by checking for a pulse and screaming for help.
The above utterance is one of the many documented in the police records related to the murder of Beth Barnard and the disappearance of Vivienne Cameron; one of the many comments I found baffling and almost comical, if it weren’t for that fact that a woman was dead and another missing.
When I read true crime, I often have to remind myself that this is a real person’s life. They lived and breathed, loved and were loved. This was not a problem in The Vanishing of Vivienne Cameron. Vikki Petraitis never loses sight of the women. They are why she is writing and why she has doggedly pursued this case for decades.
Petraitis uses a light touch and dashes of humour to ease the burden of what is a shattering tale of ‘violence, jealousy, rage, possession, family, freedom, love and hate’, with a little money splashed about the edges.
Now, it is the nature of true crime writing and murder in general that the victim is unable to speak for themselves, their thoughts and behaviours always filtered through someone else’s agenda. To combat this, Petraitis uses facetious asides to highlight inconsistencies and offer some humanity while slowly layering the narrative to give the victims an identity that is more than the one-dimensional roles allotted to them within police records.
The tangents also help to add some coherence to a story disrupted by lies and purposeful misdirection, something that no doubt accurately reflects any murder investigation, but to my untrained eye seems particularly rife within this case and not only related to the stories told by those interviewed, but in the behaviour of those investigating as well.
Prior to reading The Vanishing of Vivienne Cameron, I knew very little about the case. A friend had mentioned it, but I had not listened to the podcast and didn’t know any of the details. What struck me was the injustice and disregard for the women, something that remains today. We always hope for improvements, and there have been many, but reading this has shown me how short a distance we have actually travelled.
There is a commonality here with Petraitis’s fictional works; many of the themes are reminiscent of the small-town cover-ups found within The Unbelieved. It is easy to see the long-term impact investigating this case has had on Petraitis. I’m grateful for the work that she has done and the grace with which she has done it.
Publisher blurb
A murdered young woman; a missing wife; a forty-year mystery.
In 1986 on Phillip Island, a young woman called Beth Barnard was savagely murdered and her boyfriend’s wife, Vivienne Cameron, went missing. The police immediately jumped to what they thought was the obvious conclusion: in a jealous rage, Vivienne had killed Beth and then herself. Vivienne’s body was never found.
But Vikki Petraitis wasn’t convinced. The official line didn’t explain all the evidence, and it certainly didn’t seem like the behaviour of a mother with two small boys. Fascinated by both the case and the bias it revealed in investigators, Petraitis wrote her first true-crime book about the murder, with Paul Daley, and decades later made a podcast on the case. Both brought new evidence and testimony to light, and asked questions that were not asked at the time.
Now, to mark the fortieth anniversary of Beth’s murder and Vivienne’s vanishing, Petraitis brings together all her discoveries and true-crime experience in a brilliant forensic investigation into what happened all those years ago, and why.