I first met Roseanne Beckett in Mulawa Women's Prison in 1999. Fellow journalist Travy Pillemer and myself had been interviewing prisoners for a Fairfax story about women in prison. The superintendent of the prison encouraged Roseanne to talk to me. I remember that she seemed rather frail and talked very fast about the appalling medical treatment in the prison. A few weeks later, her friend and fellow ex-prisoner delivered hundreds of pages of trial transcript to me. For me, 16 years of reporting on the case had begun.
This week Roseanne won her malicious prosecution case against the state of NSW in the NSW Supreme Court. There are so many different ways one can tell this story. So many beginning and so many endings. Here is an overview of the case that was published by New Matilda yesterday.
This version of the story starts back in Ocrober 1989 when her solicitor Michael Jones sat down to write a letter.
Here is the story.