LadyKiller

Lady Killer

In May 1997, mother-of-three and devoted wife, Kerry Whelan disappeared without a trace. Twenty-four hours later her husband Bernie received a ransom letter.

Kerry's story was to become one of the most notorious and captivating in Australian criminal history. The case sparked the country's greatest police manhunt, it dominated the nation's news headlines for nearly ten years, sparking controversy and debate and leading to dramatic changes in the Australian legal system. It also emerged as more than a cut and dry abduction...

Dorothy 'Dotty' Davis was a wealthy widow who had mysteriously vanished the year before, her case had never been solved or closed. As the police began to search for clues into Kerry's disappearance the two cases became interlinked, joined by one common thread, prime suspect Bruce Allan Burrell.

Burrell was seemingly respectable advertising executive living the good life with a coterie of well-to-do friends, including the Whelans and Dotty Davis. However, when the detectives began their routine background checks a very different picture emerged. Burrell's glamorous lifestyle was in fact a complete sham.

What had looked like a simple extortion became a disturbing tale of a serial murderer; a suburban psychopath who preyed on women purely for greed.

When police searchers began scouring the bush of a remote country property, they did not know that they would be looking for the bodies of two of the killer's victims, as a tenacious detective and his team embarked on a ten-year mission to bring Burrell to justice.

Journalists Ellen Connolly and Candace Sutton have followed this chilling case from the start. Not only do they reveal the inside story for the first time, they expose the mind of a suburban psychopath who preyed on women for greed.

The amazing inside story of the decade's worth of detective work that finally brought down conman and murderer, Bruce Burrell.

Candace Sutton and Ellen Connolly are journalists who have followed this chilling case form the start. In Ladykiller not only do they reveal the inside story for the first time, they also paint a sinister portrait of a very ordinary-looking man whose extra-ordinary passions destroyed lives, families and united a nation against him.

Revealed for the first time:
Key evidence never before made public
The real story of the ransom demand
Burrell's possible third victim
Intimate details from inside the task force operation
The Whelan and Davis families' ordeal in their own words
The true cost of justice...

Ladykiller
Allen and Unwin
Authors: Candace Sutton and Ellen Connolly