The Suitcase Baby: The heartbreaking true story of a shocking crime in 1920s Sydney

Front Cover
Hachette Australia, Jan 30, 2018 - True Crime - 336 pages

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 NED KELLY AWARD, DANGER PRIZE AND WAVERLEY LIBRARY NIB

True history that is both shocking and too real, this unforgettable tale moves at the pace of a great crime novel.


In the early hours of Saturday morning, 17 November 1923, a suitcase was found washed up on the shore of a small beach in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. What it contained - and why - would prove to be explosive.

The murdered baby in the suitcase was one of many dead infants who were turning up in the harbour, on trains and elsewhere. These innocent victims were a devastating symptom of the clash between public morality, private passion and unrelenting poverty in a fast-growing metropolis.

Police tracked down Sarah Boyd, the mother of the suitcase baby, and the complex story and subsequent murder trial of Sarah and her friend Jean Olliver became a media sensation. Sociologist Tanya Bretherton masterfully tells the engrossing and moving story of the crime that put Sarah and her baby at the centre of a social tragedy that still resonates through the decades.

**Includes an extract from Tanya's latest fascinating and chilling true crime story, The Killing Streets**

 

Contents

Title Page 1 Harbouring secrets
Cornering a suspect
Walkover
Gone to ground
Ablach
Plotting a Boyd curve
Suitor
In sight of the
Bouncing baby
In December 1923
The trial
The verdict
Suitcase
Doing time
Strangers in a strange land
Baggage

Water babies
Flappers and floppers
Hard and fast
Inquest no 482
Sunken garden
Acknowledgements
Endnotes Extract from The Killing Streets About the Author Copyright

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About the author (2018)

Tanya Bretherton has a PhD in sociology with special interests in narrative life history and social history. She has published in the academic and public sphere for twenty years, and worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney for fifteen years. Dr Bretherton's specialty is converting detailed research into thought-provoking works which are accessible to a general readership. Currently she works as a freelance researcher and writer.

Her first book, The Suitcase Baby, was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award, the Danger Prize and the Waverley Library 'Nib' Award. Her second book The Suicide Bride, was shortlisted for the Danger Prize and in 2020 she won the Danger Prize for The Killing Streets.

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