No hiding under carpet

TV series for true crime author

IT takes grit to hold your nerve as a true crime writer and Tasmanian journalist Debi Marshall has it in spades.

Today’s Hobart launch of her new five-part Foxtel series, Debi Marshall Investigates: Frozen Lies, focuses on an infamous killing in Adelaide and its link with a notorious group of paedophiles known as The Family.

Frozen Lies is a career highlight for the Walkley winner, who has reinvestigated unsolved crimes for more than 30 years, including some of the country’s most atrocious.

Today’s screening of the first two episodes, to which the State Government contributed $115,000 through Screen Tasmania, is not for the fainthearted.

It explores the sensational 1979 murder of flamboyant Adelaide lawyer Derrance Stevenson, whose killing was known, for self-explanatory reasons, as the “body-in-the-freezer case”.

Marshall’s investigation veers into a horrifying world of organised paedeophila, serial killings and high-level coverups in Adelaide. The Family was a name coined by a detective who vowed to “break up the happy family” of wealthy men in Adelaide believed responsible for the kidnapping, sexual abuse, torture and murder of young men and boys between the early 1970s and mid1980s.

The series also delves into the tragedy that turned Marshall onto true crime reportage. Her swag of best-selling true crime books and TV productions come after the 1992 murder of her partner Ron Jarvis, a case that was closed only in 2014 after Marshall’s search for the truth helped secure the murder conviction of Steven Roy Standage.

“I was so heartbroken and so outraged,” Marshall said on the eve of this afternoon’s private-invitation event at the State Cinema in North Hobart.

“I knew in my heart who had murdered him and I went after him.”

Tenacity is a Marshall hallmark.

“I have a strong sense of justice and deep empathy towards crime victims’ families and I have never been a hide-underthe-carpet type of person,” she said.

“The reason I keep doing what I do is because it is so important to break the silence that keeps the truth hidden.

“And there is that other old chestnut, too: while good people do nothing, nothing happens.”

A sister Frozen Lies podcast reveals Marshall’s investigative process and follows new leads. A book on the case is also on the way.

Episode three of Foxtel’s Debi Marshall Investigates: Frozen Lies premieres on Tuesday at 8.30pm. Watch the unfolding series On Demand on Crime + Investigation.

See Tas Weekend in today’s Mercury