It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian Price was released on a corrections order to live in the community because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded, and to some extent deranged individual. They burnt the boat to the waterline and they live there in a state of nature. Now, state of nature is not a great thing, because people do very bad things to each other. I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes. One of the worst crimes that I've covered since my time back here at the Herald Sun in Melbourne is the murder of a seventeen year old schoolgirl called Marsha Bookatish. Marsha lived with her parents in Doncaster, which is the leafy Eastern suburbs, good solid middle class suburb where people work hard and do the best they can. And Marsha was a good student at second school. She worked hard, she had a lot of friends. She was keen to become a lawyer and was studying very hard. But each night after dinner, an early dinner, she would go for a walk because she liked fitness and stuff like that, so she would walk from her parents' house across I think I saw a footbridge into what is called the Ku Nung Linear Park, which is a park full of gum trees and things that runs down a bit of a valley out there at Doncaster. And on Saint Patrick's Day twenty fifteen, that's March the seventeenth, Marsha goes walking after dinner as usual and doesn't come home. What happened that night was that she was basically stalked, ambushed, grabbed by a complete loose cannon, a very dangerous young man called Sean Christian Price. And today we're going to talk mostly about Sewn Christian Price and how his life story converged with Marshes and destroyed Marsha and therefore to some extent, destroyed her family because I don't think they would ever really get over losing their beautiful, kind and loving seventeen year old daughter and sister. Shawn Christian Price was a very different kettle of fish. Ten years after that murder, he is in a high security unit in Victoria's most high security prison, which is Barwin down the Geelong Wall out of Geelong towards Bachus Marsh, and there he is kept under lock and key most of the time. When I say lock and key, I mean even internally the people that handle him, the prison officers and the authorities who give the orders, they have a pretty good idea of who's who in their particular concretes zoo, and they know, or they think, that Sewn Christian Price is a very dangerous man and probably always will be while he is strong and fit enough to be so, because he is volatile, he's unpredictable, and when he goes off, he's very very violent. He's also as if somebody said to me, he's mad. He's bad, but he's not stupid, and that makes him probably more dangerous because he can sit and wait, he can think most of the time. The prison authorities keep Sewn Christian Price separated from fellow inmates. They detect, underneath this sort of calm exterior and his attachment to routine, that he can never be completely trusted. He's now forty one years old. He faces another thirty years before being eligible for parole. In fact, following this murder, he was sentenced to thirty eight years minimum plus another three years for a rape that he committed two days after the murder. It's the most horrible thing what he did. It seems that Sean Price chose Marsha at random after criss crossing Melbourne suburbs looking for a victim. But his attack was premeditated, but he didn't know who it was that he was going to attack and murder until he saw Marsha. He saw her and thought, she's the one I'm going to kill her. What it was about her that fitted the bill, I don't know, but probably the fact that she was vulnerable. She had the earbuds in which means she couldn't hear people walk up behind her, which is instructive if you are walking around in the early evening through bush and parks and things where there are not other people, no company, and the light's not probably listening to music or to podcasts such as this is not the best idea because other people can walk up behind you and you don't know they're there, which is a point Mirth pondering. The other thing was she was in this park, surrounded by bush. He was able to hide behind a tree, jump out and grab her, and so it was really a matter of opportunity. He's an opportunist. I don't really think that there was anything about her that triggered him any more than if it had been any one of fifty other young women, or perhaps any women. The police were able to piece together his movements and his moods even beforehand, which showed that he'd been building up to this motiveless murder for weeks at least. Now. Signs of prices, growing agitation, and growing menace showed up in all sorts of ways. One you would think was in his choice of reading matter. He was a guy that read quite a lot, and in the weeks before the murder, he'd borrowed books from Brimbank Library out in the Western suburbs where he was then living that reflected not only his ghoulish interests but showed an increasingly dark and disturbed state of mind. Price was reading about the serial killer Ivan Mulatt. There's a very dark and gripping book about Ivan Malatt called The Sins of the Brother written by Lez Kennedy and a very fine writer called Mark Whittaker, which may well be the one that he was reading. And he also read about a crazed Swede, a man who called himself Thomas Quick, who was convicted a couple of decades ago of multiple killings, but was then retried and acquitted after revealing that he'd made dozens of false submissions. This Thomas Quick case is quite a cause celeb in Scandinavia and to some extent in Britain, because this man Quick had made false admissions about killing children all over Scandinavia, and although there was not one shred of actual physical smoking gun evidence, DNA blood type nothing to connect him to any of these murders, he was convicted of something like seven or eight of them out of thirty, which was very embarrassing for all concerned. When he said, no, I made all that up. I want to be retried, and they granted him a retrial, and a very good lawyer proved to the court that there wasn't one shred of real evidence to connect this poor mad guy with those murders. That is a cautionary tale for all judges, juries and detectives. To get back to Shun Price, it looked as if he was preparing for what was ahead when he got up before dawn on that Monday morning of March seventeenth, twenty fifteen. Price was living in public housing in Albion. Now, Albion's one of those little suburbs that you don't know's there unless you live next door. It's like Dallas out of broad Meadows, or one of those subsets of a bigger suburban albions, not far from Saint Urbans, not far from Sunshine, and not that far from out of foots Gray. But it has its own little shopping center or whatever, and it's a pretty or was then a reasonably low rent sort of district. And there were blocks of flats there that were probably getting towards the end of their useful life, and those blocks of flats were cheap for the government to rent. And one of those blocks I think was used to some extent as a bit of a halfway house for people like Sewn Price that had been let out of prison on various things bail, parole, and I think corrections orders, so that they would be let out on the basis that they reported in daily or weekly or whatever it is to the local corrections office. And it was one way to lessen the burden of providing prison beds, but to have at least some vague control over prisoners who probably many of them should have been in prison. It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian Price was released on a corrections order to live in the community because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded, and to some extent ranged individual. Now Shawn Christian Price had a background which was explored a little when he was charged with the murder. His background is very dark and very bad. He'd been the victim of systematic child abuse as a little kid. He'd grown up in very dire circumstances where various relatives and family members were alcoholics, were drug addicts, were sex offenders, and all of the above affected the way that little sewn Christian Price was brought up because he was abused. Some of the major adults in his family were drug takers, they were criminals of various levels, They were violent, and none of this was good for him, both by example a very bad example, and mainly because it greatly affected him because he was abused, and it affected the way his mind developed naturally enough, and so he grew into a rather tall, lean, pretty good looking sort of a young man, but an extremely disturbed one and very dangerous and by the age of his high teen so Tommy's eighteen nineteen twenty, he was a very violent sex offender. He would ask someone for directions out in the suburbs. You know, do you know how to show me where to go to Smith Street, whatever it might be. And having made that connection, he would follow that person, probably someone that he, you know, he picked out at a railway station or a bus station or whatever. He would follow them home and then attack them. And this meant that he had attacked and sexually assaulted various people and he went inside for these very serious crimes and was locked up. Then for whatever reason, he ended up outside of prison system and inside the Thomas Embling Institution for people with dangerous mental illness, basically what was once called the criminally insane. Back in the old old days, there was a ward at Arrarat, I think that was for the criminally insane. In more modern times we have the Thomas Embling facility now. Back in the early two thousands, in fact, in two thousand and six, this Sean Christian Price hit the headlines very briefly because he was the inmate at the Thomas Embling who punched the then health Minister Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott was doing a routine visit at this place to have a look at it, and this guy Price launched himself at the health minister and punched him, which was covered in the media at the time, of course, but we've instantly forgot who'd done it because he was sort of a no name lunatic, and by and large Sean Price found his way in and out of institutions after that date, from two thousand and three, two thousand and six all the way along until in twenty fourteen or thereabouts. He is turned loose on the street, in effect because they led him to this corrections order while living in a flat in Albion near Sunshine in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and that decision to let him do that is what led him to have the freedom of movement to do what he did, and what he did was basically make a plan to kill an innocent young woman, and he did. He stalked and killed Marsha Bukatish. The murder, a little like the murder of Juel Maher about two and a half years earlier, enraged and angered a lot of people in Victoria. They felt that it was very similar to the Jill Marques in some ways it was, and the public at large, or segments of the public, saw it as further proof that women could not walk around safely at night or any other time without fear of being attacked, which was true. Although to be fair to everyone else, Seawan Price was not an example of a hostile husband or a jealous boyfriend. He was, in fact a very dangerous lunatic. He's a man with mental problems. He was criminally insane in many ways. And it's not a lot of points to be scored about somebody like him, except to say this that when you get someone like him, they really need to be locked up, just as a dog with rabies needs to be locked up, because they're just too dangerous to be around the rest of us. As a Supreme Court judge pointed out subsequently, the judge in the murder case, Lex Lazry, actually was very vocal about the fact that someone like Price had been turned loose and said it was a very bad thing to have happened, which was true. And of course hindsight is a wonderful thing. So what is it that creates someone like this Shawn Christian Price? Isn't nature or nurture? Well, we've already alluded to his background, but there's a deeper, darker background to Sean Price, his middle name Christian. It's there for a reason. This was raised in one of his coat appearances by his defense counsel. Defense counsel that he sacked during his murder trial because his defense funnily enough, and this is a very fine defense council called Mandy Fox, who has since became a judge, so clearly a very good lawyer. Mandy Fox attempted to put a defense case for her client by pointing out to the court that his upbringing had been deplorable, that he was the product of child abuse, and someone now Sean who'd been very uninterested in the proceedings before this, had sometimes ranted and raved and used swear words and sometimes used to obscend gestures in court, etc. He suddenly became very animated and interested in his own defense counsel, and he sacked up and said, I don't want you to defend me anymore. And it would seem that he did not want the full circumstances of his childhood and childhood abuse aired in court because it was so grievous. Now do we know that for a fact, No, we don't, but he did object to it. He sacked his lawyer, and he made an attempt of defending himself without raising any of that sort of material, and In fact, what he did was he got up and said, I don't want any sympathy, I don't want any special concessions. I did it, and I deserve to be punished all words that effect, basically as a way to avoid that material being aired in public. Now that is an insight into the workings of the mind of the child that became the man. Sure Christian Price was descended from Fletcher Christian. Fletcher Christian was of course the most famous of the mutineers from the Bounty, the ship on which there was a mutiny against Captain Bligh back in the late seventeen eighties. I do believe something like that. And Fletcher Christian was a first mates mate was something. He had some sort of rank in them hierarchy on the ship, and he was the de facto leader of the mutineers. They saw bly as a tyrannical captain, etc. Etc. And what the mutineers did was placed Fly and other senior officers such as you know, a ship's surgeon and so on, in a glorified rowing boat. You know, they had, I think like a life beat or a whaling boat as they called them, with some oars and a bucket of water, and not much else, some bread or something, and set them afloat on the ocean, on the Pacific, I think, and basically knowing that those men would probably drown or dive first. Now, due to Bli's genius as a navigator, those abandoned seamen actually got their way to safety, which was one of the great survival stories of all time. Meanwhile, the mutineers, what they did was not so good. They took the boat the bounty, and they went to Tahiti, I do believe, and they kidnapped and abducted six Tarhitian men and eighteen Tahitian women. And you can see where this is going. They enslaved those Tartaritians by and large, got them on board, and they headed off into the ocean towards an uninhabited island that they knew of, a tiny island called pit Can Pitcan Island. And they got there, they unloaded the boat of all the goods they could, and the timbers and the tools and all the rest of it, bolts of cloth, canvas, anything useful, and of course the stores, you know, salt, pork, and all the rest of the stuff they had. And then they burnt the ship and they burnt the ship because they knew that the British Navy would send battleships after them, and that the battleships would eventually see the bounty mord at pit Can and come in and take them all and hang them, no doubt for mutiny. And so they burnt the boat to the waterline, and they lived there in a state of nature. Now, state of nature is not a great thing, because people do very bad things to each other. Now, these eight mutineers and the captives, that is, eighteen women and half a dozen Tasian men, they arrived on pitt Kenn in seventeen ninety. Now, by the time an American whaling ship visited the island in eighteen eight, that's eighteen years later, almost a generation. All but one of the eight mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, had been killed in fights with each other and with the Tahitians. By then, the enslaved women at given birth to the first generation of pitt Can Islanders. This included Fletcher Christian's son, Thursday October Christian. We know when he was born. He's born on a Thursday in October, which year probably seven point ninety one, not sure. Thursday October Christians many descendants are among the few hundred Pitcurners, as they call them Pitcurners who survive on Pitcn and on Norfolk Island and scattered around New Zealand and Australia. These Pitcn Islanders have spread over the years. They not only went to Norfolk Island, which is well known in about eighteen fifty because Pitken was overcrowded. They also over time have spread to Auckland in New Zealand and to parts of Australian Melbourne and Sydney, where they do all sorts of things, some of them heavily involved in shady operations, particularly prostitution. As it turns out, the creepy combination of criminal and cannibal trapped on an island bred a closed society where child sets abuse was rife and it was accepted under this catual excuse of it's the Polynesian way. Now supporters of that sort of attitude included, can you believe this? The millionaire author Colleen McCulloch. Now some listeners will recall her as the author of The Thornbirds, which was made into a big film that sold millions of books. Was made to a very big film with I think Brian Brown as the handsome priest, and somebody else and somebody else. It was a very big film around the place, and off the back of it more books were sold, and it made Colin McCulloch quite a wealthy and fairly famous author. Now Colen, in her wisdom, went out and lived on Norfolk Island, thinking it was a good place, and she married a pitceroner. And she was once quoted as saying by a reporter, I was quoted in print as saying, quote, it's Polynesian. It's a Polynesian way to break your girl in at twelve. In other words, she was promoting basically child rape. Really the truth of this lifestyle, if that's the right word of this entrenched abuse was exposed in the year two thousand when British police arrived to investigate the rape of a teenage girl on Pitgen Island. Pit Keen is sort of a British dominion or protectorate words that effect. The British police spoked to dozens of women, some on the island and some who had fled from it, and they uncovered a network of interwoven maze of sex abuse that went back I'd say eight generations. Each victim was related to the men being charged with similar offenses against other young girls. Husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins were part of systematic abuse that had been a way of life on Pitcn and most likely also on Norfolk Island, where so many of them had moved back in the mid eighteen fifties. Some defended, some actually defended this tradition of underage sex. Others were ashamed. Almost every man on pitt Ken was investigated, and six were eventually convicted of thirty five charges in two thousand and four, after trials that attracted international attention. An English journalist Kathy Marx and I spoke to this woman. She's very good. She lived on the island to cover the trials and later wrote a book called Lost Paradise. Good title. Kathy Marks believed that convictions were the tip of the iceberg of the praved practices that affected these pitt Kerner clans even when they moved to mainland communities. And this is where we're getting closer to shorn Christian Price. None of this excuses Shorn Price's evil acts, but it might explain the forces that shaped him. Whether before his birth or after it. What it doesn't explain is why the parole board would release someone so dangerous against the wishes of a judge. It seemed a random thing to do. Like the toss of a coin heads, he stays in tails, he goes out. When Shawn Price won the toss and was let out, Marsha Vuketish lost. She lost her life. Unlike Thomas Quick, the Swedish lunatic murderer or non murderer who made a string of false confessions in the nineteen nineties, Price is absolutely guilty, beyond any doubt. But something that Thomas Quick's tough old defense lawyer told a reporter rings true. I just found this quote recently and it struck me as true about this case and about many others. This old lawyer said, I don't like people that much in general, but if you spend so much time with a client, you see the person behind the headlines. It all starts with a little boy under a Christmas tree playing with toys, and it ends up very tragic. Somewhere along the line. Everyone's a victim. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnny Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to heroldsn dot com dot au, forward Slash Andrew Rule. One word advertising inquiries go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.

It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian Price was released on a corrections order to live in the community because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded, and to some extent deranged individual. They burnt the boat to the waterline and they live there in a state of nature. Now, state of nature is not a great thing, because people do very bad things to each other. I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes. One of the worst crimes that I've covered since my time back here at the Herald Sun in Melbourne is the murder of a seventeen year old schoolgirl called Marsha Bookatish. Marsha lived with her parents in Doncaster, which is the leafy Eastern suburbs, good solid middle class suburb where people work hard and do the best they can. And Marsha was a good student at second school. She worked hard, she had a lot of friends. She was keen to become a lawyer and was studying very hard. But each night after dinner, an early dinner, she would go for a walk because she liked fitness and stuff like that, so she would walk from her parents' house across I think I saw a footbridge into what is called the Ku Nung Linear Park, which is a park full of gum trees and things that runs down a bit of a valley out there at Doncaster. And on Saint Patrick's Day twenty fifteen, that's March the seventeenth, Marsha goes walking after dinner as usual and doesn't come home. What happened that night was that she was basically stalked, ambushed, grabbed by a complete loose cannon, a very dangerous young man called Sean Christian Price. And today we're going to talk mostly about Sewn Christian Price and how his life story converged with Marshes and destroyed Marsha and therefore to some extent, destroyed her family because I don't think they would ever really get over losing their beautiful, kind and loving seventeen year old daughter and sister. Shawn Christian Price was a very different kettle of fish. Ten years after that murder, he is in a high security unit in Victoria's most high security prison, which is Barwin down the Geelong Wall out of Geelong towards Bachus Marsh, and there he is kept under lock and key most of the time. When I say lock and key, I mean even internally the people that handle him, the prison officers and the authorities who give the orders, they have a pretty good idea of who's who in their particular concretes zoo, and they know, or they think, that Sewn Christian Price is a very dangerous man and probably always will be while he is strong and fit enough to be so, because he is volatile, he's unpredictable, and when he goes off, he's very very violent. He's also as if somebody said to me, he's mad. He's bad, but he's not stupid, and that makes him probably more dangerous because he can sit and wait, he can think most of the time. The prison authorities keep Sewn Christian Price separated from fellow inmates. They detect, underneath this sort of calm exterior and his attachment to routine, that he can never be completely trusted. He's now forty one years old. He faces another thirty years before being eligible for parole. In fact, following this murder, he was sentenced to thirty eight years minimum plus another three years for a rape that he committed two days after the murder. It's the most horrible thing what he did. It seems that Sean Price chose Marsha at random after criss crossing Melbourne suburbs looking for a victim. But his attack was premeditated, but he didn't know who it was that he was going to attack and murder until he saw Marsha. He saw her and thought, she's the one I'm going to kill her. What it was about her that fitted the bill, I don't know, but probably the fact that she was vulnerable. She had the earbuds in which means she couldn't hear people walk up behind her, which is instructive if you are walking around in the early evening through bush and parks and things where there are not other people, no company, and the light's not probably listening to music or to podcasts such as this is not the best idea because other people can walk up behind you and you don't know they're there, which is a point Mirth pondering. The other thing was she was in this park, surrounded by bush. He was able to hide behind a tree, jump out and grab her, and so it was really a matter of opportunity. He's an opportunist. I don't really think that there was anything about her that triggered him any more than if it had been any one of fifty other young women, or perhaps any women. The police were able to piece together his movements and his moods even beforehand, which showed that he'd been building up to this motiveless murder for weeks at least. Now. Signs of prices, growing agitation, and growing menace showed up in all sorts of ways. One you would think was in his choice of reading matter. He was a guy that read quite a lot, and in the weeks before the murder, he'd borrowed books from Brimbank Library out in the Western suburbs where he was then living that reflected not only his ghoulish interests but showed an increasingly dark and disturbed state of mind. Price was reading about the serial killer Ivan Mulatt. There's a very dark and gripping book about Ivan Malatt called The Sins of the Brother written by Lez Kennedy and a very fine writer called Mark Whittaker, which may well be the one that he was reading. And he also read about a crazed Swede, a man who called himself Thomas Quick, who was convicted a couple of decades ago of multiple killings, but was then retried and acquitted after revealing that he'd made dozens of false submissions. This Thomas Quick case is quite a cause celeb in Scandinavia and to some extent in Britain, because this man Quick had made false admissions about killing children all over Scandinavia, and although there was not one shred of actual physical smoking gun evidence, DNA blood type nothing to connect him to any of these murders, he was convicted of something like seven or eight of them out of thirty, which was very embarrassing for all concerned. When he said, no, I made all that up. I want to be retried, and they granted him a retrial, and a very good lawyer proved to the court that there wasn't one shred of real evidence to connect this poor mad guy with those murders. That is a cautionary tale for all judges, juries and detectives. To get back to Shun Price, it looked as if he was preparing for what was ahead when he got up before dawn on that Monday morning of March seventeenth, twenty fifteen. Price was living in public housing in Albion. Now, Albion's one of those little suburbs that you don't know's there unless you live next door. It's like Dallas out of broad Meadows, or one of those subsets of a bigger suburban albions, not far from Saint Urbans, not far from Sunshine, and not that far from out of foots Gray. But it has its own little shopping center or whatever, and it's a pretty or was then a reasonably low rent sort of district. And there were blocks of flats there that were probably getting towards the end of their useful life, and those blocks of flats were cheap for the government to rent. And one of those blocks I think was used to some extent as a bit of a halfway house for people like Sewn Price that had been let out of prison on various things bail, parole, and I think corrections orders, so that they would be let out on the basis that they reported in daily or weekly or whatever it is to the local corrections office. And it was one way to lessen the burden of providing prison beds, but to have at least some vague control over prisoners who probably many of them should have been in prison. It defies belief that someone like Sean Christian Price was released on a corrections order to live in the community because he was clearly a very dangerous, deluded, and to some extent ranged individual. Now Shawn Christian Price had a background which was explored a little when he was charged with the murder. His background is very dark and very bad. He'd been the victim of systematic child abuse as a little kid. He'd grown up in very dire circumstances where various relatives and family members were alcoholics, were drug addicts, were sex offenders, and all of the above affected the way that little sewn Christian Price was brought up because he was abused. Some of the major adults in his family were drug takers, they were criminals of various levels, They were violent, and none of this was good for him, both by example a very bad example, and mainly because it greatly affected him because he was abused, and it affected the way his mind developed naturally enough, and so he grew into a rather tall, lean, pretty good looking sort of a young man, but an extremely disturbed one and very dangerous and by the age of his high teen so Tommy's eighteen nineteen twenty, he was a very violent sex offender. He would ask someone for directions out in the suburbs. You know, do you know how to show me where to go to Smith Street, whatever it might be. And having made that connection, he would follow that person, probably someone that he, you know, he picked out at a railway station or a bus station or whatever. He would follow them home and then attack them. And this meant that he had attacked and sexually assaulted various people and he went inside for these very serious crimes and was locked up. Then for whatever reason, he ended up outside of prison system and inside the Thomas Embling Institution for people with dangerous mental illness, basically what was once called the criminally insane. Back in the old old days, there was a ward at Arrarat, I think that was for the criminally insane. In more modern times we have the Thomas Embling facility now. Back in the early two thousands, in fact, in two thousand and six, this Sean Christian Price hit the headlines very briefly because he was the inmate at the Thomas Embling who punched the then health Minister Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott was doing a routine visit at this place to have a look at it, and this guy Price launched himself at the health minister and punched him, which was covered in the media at the time, of course, but we've instantly forgot who'd done it because he was sort of a no name lunatic, and by and large Sean Price found his way in and out of institutions after that date, from two thousand and three, two thousand and six all the way along until in twenty fourteen or thereabouts. He is turned loose on the street, in effect because they led him to this corrections order while living in a flat in Albion near Sunshine in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and that decision to let him do that is what led him to have the freedom of movement to do what he did, and what he did was basically make a plan to kill an innocent young woman, and he did. He stalked and killed Marsha Bukatish. The murder, a little like the murder of Juel Maher about two and a half years earlier, enraged and angered a lot of people in Victoria. They felt that it was very similar to the Jill Marques in some ways it was, and the public at large, or segments of the public, saw it as further proof that women could not walk around safely at night or any other time without fear of being attacked, which was true. Although to be fair to everyone else, Seawan Price was not an example of a hostile husband or a jealous boyfriend. He was, in fact a very dangerous lunatic. He's a man with mental problems. He was criminally insane in many ways. And it's not a lot of points to be scored about somebody like him, except to say this that when you get someone like him, they really need to be locked up, just as a dog with rabies needs to be locked up, because they're just too dangerous to be around the rest of us. As a Supreme Court judge pointed out subsequently, the judge in the murder case, Lex Lazry, actually was very vocal about the fact that someone like Price had been turned loose and said it was a very bad thing to have happened, which was true. And of course hindsight is a wonderful thing. So what is it that creates someone like this Shawn Christian Price? Isn't nature or nurture? Well, we've already alluded to his background, but there's a deeper, darker background to Sean Price, his middle name Christian. It's there for a reason. This was raised in one of his coat appearances by his defense counsel. Defense counsel that he sacked during his murder trial because his defense funnily enough, and this is a very fine defense council called Mandy Fox, who has since became a judge, so clearly a very good lawyer. Mandy Fox attempted to put a defense case for her client by pointing out to the court that his upbringing had been deplorable, that he was the product of child abuse, and someone now Sean who'd been very uninterested in the proceedings before this, had sometimes ranted and raved and used swear words and sometimes used to obscend gestures in court, etc. He suddenly became very animated and interested in his own defense counsel, and he sacked up and said, I don't want you to defend me anymore. And it would seem that he did not want the full circumstances of his childhood and childhood abuse aired in court because it was so grievous. Now do we know that for a fact, No, we don't, but he did object to it. He sacked his lawyer, and he made an attempt of defending himself without raising any of that sort of material, and In fact, what he did was he got up and said, I don't want any sympathy, I don't want any special concessions. I did it, and I deserve to be punished all words that effect, basically as a way to avoid that material being aired in public. Now that is an insight into the workings of the mind of the child that became the man. Sure Christian Price was descended from Fletcher Christian. Fletcher Christian was of course the most famous of the mutineers from the Bounty, the ship on which there was a mutiny against Captain Bligh back in the late seventeen eighties. I do believe something like that. And Fletcher Christian was a first mates mate was something. He had some sort of rank in them hierarchy on the ship, and he was the de facto leader of the mutineers. They saw bly as a tyrannical captain, etc. Etc. And what the mutineers did was placed Fly and other senior officers such as you know, a ship's surgeon and so on, in a glorified rowing boat. You know, they had, I think like a life beat or a whaling boat as they called them, with some oars and a bucket of water, and not much else, some bread or something, and set them afloat on the ocean, on the Pacific, I think, and basically knowing that those men would probably drown or dive first. Now, due to Bli's genius as a navigator, those abandoned seamen actually got their way to safety, which was one of the great survival stories of all time. Meanwhile, the mutineers, what they did was not so good. They took the boat the bounty, and they went to Tahiti, I do believe, and they kidnapped and abducted six Tarhitian men and eighteen Tahitian women. And you can see where this is going. They enslaved those Tartaritians by and large, got them on board, and they headed off into the ocean towards an uninhabited island that they knew of, a tiny island called pit Can Pitcan Island. And they got there, they unloaded the boat of all the goods they could, and the timbers and the tools and all the rest of it, bolts of cloth, canvas, anything useful, and of course the stores, you know, salt, pork, and all the rest of the stuff they had. And then they burnt the ship and they burnt the ship because they knew that the British Navy would send battleships after them, and that the battleships would eventually see the bounty mord at pit Can and come in and take them all and hang them, no doubt for mutiny. And so they burnt the boat to the waterline, and they lived there in a state of nature. Now, state of nature is not a great thing, because people do very bad things to each other. Now, these eight mutineers and the captives, that is, eighteen women and half a dozen Tasian men, they arrived on pitt Kenn in seventeen ninety. Now, by the time an American whaling ship visited the island in eighteen eight, that's eighteen years later, almost a generation. All but one of the eight mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, had been killed in fights with each other and with the Tahitians. By then, the enslaved women at given birth to the first generation of pitt Can Islanders. This included Fletcher Christian's son, Thursday October Christian. We know when he was born. He's born on a Thursday in October, which year probably seven point ninety one, not sure. Thursday October Christians many descendants are among the few hundred Pitcurners, as they call them Pitcurners who survive on Pitcn and on Norfolk Island and scattered around New Zealand and Australia. These Pitcn Islanders have spread over the years. They not only went to Norfolk Island, which is well known in about eighteen fifty because Pitken was overcrowded. They also over time have spread to Auckland in New Zealand and to parts of Australian Melbourne and Sydney, where they do all sorts of things, some of them heavily involved in shady operations, particularly prostitution. As it turns out, the creepy combination of criminal and cannibal trapped on an island bred a closed society where child sets abuse was rife and it was accepted under this catual excuse of it's the Polynesian way. Now supporters of that sort of attitude included, can you believe this? The millionaire author Colleen McCulloch. Now some listeners will recall her as the author of The Thornbirds, which was made into a big film that sold millions of books. Was made to a very big film with I think Brian Brown as the handsome priest, and somebody else and somebody else. It was a very big film around the place, and off the back of it more books were sold, and it made Colin McCulloch quite a wealthy and fairly famous author. Now Colen, in her wisdom, went out and lived on Norfolk Island, thinking it was a good place, and she married a pitceroner. And she was once quoted as saying by a reporter, I was quoted in print as saying, quote, it's Polynesian. It's a Polynesian way to break your girl in at twelve. In other words, she was promoting basically child rape. Really the truth of this lifestyle, if that's the right word of this entrenched abuse was exposed in the year two thousand when British police arrived to investigate the rape of a teenage girl on Pitgen Island. Pit Keen is sort of a British dominion or protectorate words that effect. The British police spoked to dozens of women, some on the island and some who had fled from it, and they uncovered a network of interwoven maze of sex abuse that went back I'd say eight generations. Each victim was related to the men being charged with similar offenses against other young girls. Husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins were part of systematic abuse that had been a way of life on Pitcn and most likely also on Norfolk Island, where so many of them had moved back in the mid eighteen fifties. Some defended, some actually defended this tradition of underage sex. Others were ashamed. Almost every man on pitt Ken was investigated, and six were eventually convicted of thirty five charges in two thousand and four, after trials that attracted international attention. An English journalist Kathy Marx and I spoke to this woman. She's very good. She lived on the island to cover the trials and later wrote a book called Lost Paradise. Good title. Kathy Marks believed that convictions were the tip of the iceberg of the praved practices that affected these pitt Kerner clans even when they moved to mainland communities. And this is where we're getting closer to shorn Christian Price. None of this excuses Shorn Price's evil acts, but it might explain the forces that shaped him. Whether before his birth or after it. What it doesn't explain is why the parole board would release someone so dangerous against the wishes of a judge. It seemed a random thing to do. Like the toss of a coin heads, he stays in tails, he goes out. When Shawn Price won the toss and was let out, Marsha Vuketish lost. She lost her life. Unlike Thomas Quick, the Swedish lunatic murderer or non murderer who made a string of false confessions in the nineteen nineties, Price is absolutely guilty, beyond any doubt. But something that Thomas Quick's tough old defense lawyer told a reporter rings true. I just found this quote recently and it struck me as true about this case and about many others. This old lawyer said, I don't like people that much in general, but if you spend so much time with a client, you see the person behind the headlines. It all starts with a little boy under a Christmas tree playing with toys, and it ends up very tragic. Somewhere along the line. Everyone's a victim. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnny Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to heroldsn dot com dot au, forward Slash Andrew Rule. 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