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The Murder Stew

  • 3 days ago
  • 6 min read

Hungry for recommendations? Editor-in-Chief Kayleigh Greig brews a stew of all the most grim and gruesome artists, authors and areas.


Warning: This piece discusses real and imagined murder in detail.


Music: Flower Face

“In the morning, I’ll love the mangled bits of you.”—Flower Face, ‘Cornflower Blue’


Her voice may seem as sweet as her name, yet her lyrics are anything but. Flower Face’s songs descend like a spell, hushing all chatter as no audience can do anything but listen, entranced by vocals as breathy and angelic as the choir at heaven’s gate. But when your mind adjusts to her mesmerising murmurs and you begin to make out their meanings, every hair on your body stands on end. 


‘Cornflower Blue’ is a tale of obsessive love. The singer’s thoughts spiral as she wonders if her partner reciprocates her feelings to the same severity—wonders if they would love her even in death. “I want to lay on the train tracks with you // I want to tie you up like lovers do.” Despite their chilling message, Flower Face’s words are spoken like poetry. They’re cathartic, balancing the gentleness of her tone with the wickedness of her thoughts. And unlike other artists we know (*ahem* D4vd ahem), she’s—hopefully—not actually a murderer, so you can listen to her dreamlike imaginings guilt free, without fear of paying for an elegy to the artist’s own nightmarish memories. The track can be found in the album The Shark in Your Water (2022) alongside one of my all-time favourites, ‘Spiracle’, another delightfully dark ode to unconditional love taken too far. 


My last and greatest recommendation would be to listen to ‘Kaleidoscope’ (2021), an instant favourite of my dad who places a lot of emphasis on meaningful lyrics. I interpret it as a lamentation of the toxicity of modern life, with lyrics such as “Plastic drippin’ through the feedin’ wire” and “The concrete pourin’ outta you”, but it contains whispers of other themes that make it deliciously dissectible. 


The artist herself, real name Ruby McKinnon, lives in Montreal, Canada and survived stage three cancer at the age of seventeen, now aged twenty-eight. Much of her music speaks of mortality, heartbreak, and the people who have formed her life. As someone with zero musical knowledge, I struggle to define her genre, but I know that every time I’ve listened to Flower Face Radio or tried to make playlists based on her style, I’ve failed miserably to find other artists like her. With her lack of defined choruses, her songs unfold more like a ballad, bringing you on a journey from beginning to end. If anyone can find a singer as haunting, delicate and twisted, I’m all ears. 


Book: Strange Pictures by Uketsu

“I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you.” —Uketsu, Strange Pictures


For someone getting a lil sick of the same ol’ same ol’ story structures, Strange Pictures is a refreshing rewrite of the murder mystery genre. At first, each chapter feels like its own story, until it dawns on you: that character you thought was so innocent? They’re the same as the suspicious creep from the first scene. Each arc also begins with its own drawing, seemingly harmless at first, until the narrative reveals the barbed truths beneath. 


Reading Strange Pictures feels more like completing an escape room, where each turn of the page proffers a new set of clues you have to piece together to reveal the whole picture. The tale is both twisted and human, rolling you through waves of disgust that turn to empathy and back again for the journey of each character. For a ride of epiphanies, horrors and cleverness, this is a book I’d highly recommend.


The mystery doesn’t stop at the novels either, as the author, Uketsu, never appears without a paper mâché mask, black bodysuit and voice modulator in his online platforms, where he also creates surreal short films and introduces his other mystery and horror fiction novels, such as Strange Houses. Though translated from the original Japanese, Strange Pictures is a smooth read, and when I read his other novels—and I intend to—I expect them to be the same. 


Place: Wakehurst Parkway

“There’s a man in the fridge.” —Richard Leonard to girlfriend Denise Shipley, 1994 [1]. 


Aside from the renowned Quarantine Station at North Head, Sydney is home to another horrific haunt: Deep Creek Reserve off the Wakehurst Parkway. That’s on the Northern Beaches, tucked beside the gloomy waters of Narrabeen Lake. On 2 August 1994, Stephen Dempsey, a thirty-four-year-old man, was murdered at Deep Creek—by an arrow to the heart, no less. Only his torso was ever recovered, washed up at Towlers Bay wrapped in chicken wire. His head, arms and legs were never found by the police [2], but two weeks after the murder, the killer commenced a relationship with nineteen-year-old Denise Shipley, who found the body parts in the freezer of their Warriewood apartment. Who was Dempsey’s killer? Twenty-one-year-old Richard Leonard, who didn’t know Dempsey prior to the murder, but was known to mutilate kittens with his grandmother (who encouraged him and bought more for him to kill!) and boasted about the sharpness of his $90 knife [1]. 


Leonard admitted to the murder by confessing to a pastor at Christian City Church, clutching a Bible while he detailed how he threw his crossbow and the body into the water at Deep Creek, later returning to sit in the water and dismember it “incredibly neatly” according to the coroner, who said it was clearly done “by someone who knew what they were doing” [2].


“You know sometimes when I got, when I got bored [...] I’d bring him out and roll his head across the floor and bring his arms out and try to stick his arms and play jigsaws,” Leonard admitted later in prison. “Denise sort of sat there. She was completely freaked out. Jesus, she couldn’t cope.” [1] 


Leonard claims his actions were a result of unwanted sexual advances from Dempsey. In fact, Dempsey frequented Deep Creek, which was and still is a known ‘beat’ location [2], and if you don’t know what that is, I’ll leave this as explanation: if you’re ever on a run around Narrabeen lake and see men wondering off into the bush in flip flops, they’re probably inappropriately dressed for a walk because that’s not what they’re there for. As for Dempsey, though, how could he possibly make an unwanted advance while being far away enough—the depth at which the arrow was lodged suggests a distance of nine or ten metres, though Leonard claims it was only three [2]—for Leonard to shoot him with a high-powered compound bow? This wasn’t the first time Leonard threatened someone at Deep Creek with a bow either. Eight months earlier, two witnesses—one of whom happened to belong to an archery club—passed Leonard while he was fishing at Deep Creek, heard a noise and then turned to find Leonard’s bow knocked and pointed at them. Thankfully, the archery witness was later able to describe the bow in great detail, contributing to Leonard’s arrest. He was also known to have fired arrows at a man canoeing in Deep Creek [2]. 


It seems Leonard, an abattoir worker, simply had a taste for blood. At the time he was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes against Dempsey, he was also found guilty of fatally stabbing (thirty-seven times!) Ezzedine Bahmad, a father of six, who was driving their taxi to Collaroy Plateau on 18 November 1994. Leonard’s girlfriend, Shipley, was present, and later helped dispose of both bodies, three months after Dempsey’s death [1]. Sadly, this story is no ghost tale, but a tragic reality, and its echoes seem to have fed into the dark energy of Wakehurst Parkway. 


With all this death, it seems that supernatural spirits have gravitated towards the area. One, a female ghost, typically described as a nurse or nun due to her old-timey uniform, has been sighted on numerous occasions around Middle Creek Bridge. 


“It was just after 11pm […] I saw a female on the opposite side of the road. I slowed down and as I got closer, I realised it was a ghostly white apparition of a female dressed in an old-style uniform. I sped up, and as I looked in the rear view mirror, the apparition had vanished,” a local man named Brad told the Manly Daily [3].  


Another ghost, somehow known to be named Kelly, has been seen standing in the middle of the road, or even appearing in the back seat of cars. 


“It was about 2am, and I had the feeling of someone touching the back of my neck. […] She is like a white, veiled apparition of a girl in the back seat. I usually see her when I go past the C3 Church at Oxford Falls. Other times there’ll be a buzz on the radio or the car doors will lock when I go down the road,” Mary Loughland told the Manly Daily [3]. 


Though some of these ghosts may be nothing but superstition, The Wakehurst Parkway is connected to the cases of many real victims, from Stephen Dempsey to others such as Graeme Thorne, Frances Tizzone, and the many fatalities of crashes on its slippery bends. Foggy, lonesome, and engulfed by bush, the Wakehurst Parkway at night is enough to bring a chill to anyone’s neck. 



by Kayleigh Greig



References:


[2] Dempsey, S., & Leonard, R. (1994). NSW POLICE FORCE STRIKE FORCE PARRABELL Bias Crimes Indicators Review Form Investigation No: 67 Victim/Deceased: Investigation Status: Solved Offender’s: Description. https://lgbtiq.specialcommission.nsw.gov.au/assets/lgbtiq/hearings/20221205/exhibits-combined/Exhibit-6/Exhibit-6-Tab-266K-NPL.0129.0001.0136.pdf


[3] Rozenberg-Clarke, J. (2019, May 22). There’s 2 Good Reasons To Avoid Sydney’s Wakehurst Pkwy & Yes They’re Both Ghosts. PEDESTRIAN.TV. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/wakehurst-parkway-ghosts/ 

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