The Janine Balding Story
Australian History Biography Non-Fiction True Crime Social Issues Crime Investigation Victim Advocacy
The Janine Balding Story is the harrowing yet sensitively told account of Australia’s most infamous gang murder, reconstructed by award-winning journalist Janet Fife-Yeomans with the full cooperation of Janine’s mother, Beverley Balding. Published by Macmillan in 1995 and still the definitive work on the case, this 242-page illustrated paperback traces the 1988 abduction, rape and brutal killing of 20-year-old bank teller Janine Balding in a Sydney park, the five-day police manhunt that followed, and the subsequent trials that shocked the nation. Because the book was written while memories were fresh and court records newly unsealed, it captures the raw emotion of the victims’ family and the chilling mindset of the young offenders in a way later retellings cannot match.
What makes this first-edition copy especially desirable for true-crime collectors is its completeness: all photographs, diagrams and newspaper clippings originally tipped-in by Macmillan are present, giving readers the same visual evidence jurors saw. The narrative is paced like a thriller yet grounded in meticulous reporting—Fife-Yeomans interviewed detectives, attorneys and even prisoners who knew the killers inside, producing a court-grade timeline that has become a reference for Australian criminology students. Parents and educators frequently assign the book to senior-high classes because it confronts violence without sensationalism, opening discussion on sentencing laws, media ethics and victims’ rights reforms that sprang directly from the case.
Collectors prize the 1995 Macmillan softcover for its tight binding, clean unmarked pages and absence of the spine fading common on later reprints. This copy shows only light cover wear, no ex-library stamps, no inscriptions, and no dog-eared pages—condition notes that matter when building a curated Australian-true-crime shelf. With the ISBN 9780330356640 now long out of print, solid first editions are increasingly scarce, making this an affordable entry point for readers who want the full photographic documentation and the original, unedited text that later mass-market reissues quietly censored.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
Buy Now