In the chilly early hours of the 22nd September 2012, 29 year old Irish-born Jill Meagher was dragged into a darkened laneway in the centre of a bustling inner-city Melbourne alley only five hundred metres from her front doorstep.

In that lonely and dingy Brunswick alley, Jill Meagher was viciously overpowered, raped and murdered by Adrian Ernest Bayley.

Later that morning her stalking killer returned to retrieve Jill’s defiled body, which he heartlessly dumped in a shallow grave fifty kilometres from the city before deviously beginning to cover his grubby tracks.

This was not just a tale about another rape, another murder or another frightful repeat offender. The tragic story of Jill Meagher found it’s way deeply into the psyche of ordinary citizens.

More than 30,000 of them were so fervently impacted by the senseless death of Jill Meagher that they extracted themselves from their lounge chairs and marched in a rally to remember the victim and to draw the proverbial line in the sand against violence towards women.

One of the most recognised crimes that outraged Australia. This powerful read is an insight into who Adrian Ernest Bayley was and his lifetime of crime, and describes how the police came to make an arrest and how the justice system allowed this criminal to continue to live amongst us when he should have been kept in prison. (Annotations to text by prev owner criminal lawyer.)