Eavesdropping on Evil: Paperback

Senseless Slayings, High-tech Spying – and a Family from Hell

• A father talks to his daughter about killing another two policemen. She calmly suggests committing the murders on the other side of the city.

• A son tells his father how he shot a policeman, 'Ch-ch, in the head'.

• A 19-year-old yells out to police from a moving car, 'Bang, bang suck on that!' His mentor laughs: 'They'll be goin' ballistic if it happens again.'

• The hunt for the men who committed Australia's tenth multiple police killing when they gunned down Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller in 1998 not only involved remarkable detective work, but included an extraordinary bugging operation.

• For months, 24 hours a day, police eavesdropped on a seemingly ordinary outer-suburban Melbourne family. What they heard was anything but ordinary. They found themselves eavesdropping on evil people.

Eavesdropping on Evil not only details the police hunt for their colleagues' killers and the emotion-charged courtroom drama but, in what is believed to be a world-first for true-crime publishing, it includes a CD allowing readers to listen to the suspects' secretly-recorded conversations.

WAYNE HOWELL is the Supreme Court reporter for the Herald Sun. He spent the last four months of 2002 attending most days of the Debs–Roberts trial. In that time he wrote more than 50 articles about the proceedings in Court 12 of the Victorian Supreme Court.

The Five Mile Press