The Murder Victims: Fate’s Wicked Child Buried at Cheltenham Cemeteries Graveyard
Australian History Local History True Crime Biography & Memoir Cemetery Studies Victorian Era Social History
The Murder Victims: Fate’s Wicked Child Buried at Cheltenham Cemeteries Graveyard is the scarce 2011 paperback produced in only 110 copies by Melbourne’s Friends of Cheltenham and Regional Cemeteries. Author Travis M. Sellers, president of the society, turns a true-crime lens on one of Victoria’s most haunting 19th-century child murders, reconstructing the life, death, and anonymous burial of a young victim whose grave still lies in Cheltenham’s historic lawn cemetery. Because the print-run was tiny and never re-issued, this 200-page reference is already a collector-level piece of Australiana, prized by criminologists, genealogists, and Cemetery-Studies enthusiasts who need primary source material that never made it online.
Inside, readers get rare archival photographs of the gravesite, transcriptions of original coroner’s inquests, witness statements, and newspaper reports that have never been digitised. Maps pinpoint the exact plot location within the sprawling Melbourne graveyard, while side-bars explain Victorian-era burial law, child-protection reforms, and the evolution of cemetery record-keeping. The result is a hybrid true-crime / local-history textbook that satisfies both the academic need for verifiable data and the armchair detective’s appetite for a dark, emotionally charged narrative.
This copy carries personalised touches: a previous owner’s name on the inside cover and neat underlining or marginal notes on roughly thirteen pages—evidence that it was actively used for research rather than shelved unread. The binding remains tight, pages are free of dog-ears, and all limited-edition plates are present, making it a sturdy reading copy that can handle further consultation or classroom use. For collectors of Australian true crime, Cheltenham memorabilia, or niche cemetery studies, Fate’s Wicked Child offers an immediately usable, conversation-starting volume that is almost impossible to find in any condition.
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