Jill James

Memoir of a Murder Jill James

Memoir of a Murder vividly explores the damaging long-term effects of years of sexual abuse suffered by James at the hands of her father, a man she believes could have been a serial killer. Recovering from total memory loss, caused by the physical and emotional consequences of being the childhood victim of a psychopath, James finds that her devastating journey out of a lifetime of forgetfulness, takes her back behind the locked doors and grimy satin blackout curtains of occultist Rosaleen Norton's infamous Brougham Street residence. During that early post-war period in Australia, a recovering society teetered as the public struggled to find a return to some form of normalcy; the moral majority had no time for a Sydney trance artist, a woman who professed to be the Witch of the Cross, and whose paintings reflected a mind filled with obscenity. The police, forced to take an interest in the sometime street artist, often raided her flat, hauling her before the court on trumped up charges of vagrancy, completely missing the evil practiced by a woman who James graphically describes as a paedophile. Norton professed to observe witchcraft, which in itself was illegal during that turbulent time, and to worship Pan, but she always disavowed that she conducted Black Mass. James' memoir puts lie to that denial exposing Norton's notorious practices of sexual abuse, as she captures the essence of a childhood trauma of such magnitude that it led to fifty years of amnesia.