True Crime The Death of Dr Duncan

Tim Reeves: Wakefield Press, $33

Reeves is an authority on this story and gives a straightforward account of events as they unfolded from May 1972, when a gay hate crime took place in Adelaide. George Duncan, a London-born academic at Adelaide uni, was thrown into the River Torrens and drowned, believed to have been a victim of SA police who attacked “poofters” as sport. Records are meticulously presented, even the fact that Channel 7 missed the body’s retrieval from the river, so the police threw him back and pulled him out again. An internal report concluded, chillingly, this was “merely a high-spirited frolic that went wrong”. Vice squad members were acquitted of criminal charges in the ‘80s but the force’s code of omerta was never broken. PENELOPE DEBELLE