Death comes quickly when you're pushed off a cliff. Unless you're brutally bashed before being tossed over. The long concrete pathway skirting the cliff face between the beaches of Bondi and Tamarama in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs seems too spectacular a setting to have the odour of murder hanging over it, but it was here in the late 1980s that a handful of young men were dragged to their deaths after nightfall. With blood stains on the walkway and screams heard at night, the area was dubbed the Bondi Badlands. No one was too surprised then, when bodies started turning up at the bottom of the cliffs - these included men such as barman John Russell, who was found with his right hand still clutching a clump of his murderer's hair; TV newsreader Ross Warren, whose keys and wallet were discovered on a sea ledge, his body swept out to sea; and Thai national, Krichakorn Rattanajurathaporn, who fell off the cliffs while fleeing his assailants after being bludgeoned with a claw hammer.The exact circumstances of some of these hellish deaths may never be known, but what has become clear is that a gang of teenage thugs (some as young as 14) were engaged in a murder spree and this cliffside walk - then a popular gay beat - was one of their favourite killing fields ...This book is about the slow road to justice for several distraught families, the inadequate initial police investigations and then the ferocious single-mindedness of one police officer, Detective Sergeant Stephen Page who, moved by a series of letters from a victim's mother, revived the investigation and slowly but surely pieced together the dark mural of murder he code-named Operation Taradale.
