The Awful Truth

Friend and foe alike call him Poison Pen. The outrageous true story of an Australian journalist whose career path has taken him into a world that fiction writers can only dream about. 

In 2003 Homicide police re-opening some of Australia’s most bizarre murder mysteries interviewed him and also examined several chapters of this publication. The author Brian Hansen takes you behind the scenes and tells why police grilled him and what new information he revealed to them.


Brian Hansen may be best known as one of Australia’s foremost sporting writers and authors but for many years he was a specialist crime and court reporter who covered the most famous cases and became an intimate associate of the lead characters on both sides of the law.


In this book he makes startling disclosures on some of Australia’s most bizarre unsolved crimes including the Bogle/Chandler Mystery and the recently re-opened Easey Street Murders and the strange disappearance and probable murder of his Truth newspaper librarian Julia Garciacelay.


Murder pursued him as he and his newspaper, the provocative national weekly Truth became directly involved in four cases involving six gruesome murders that left five women and one man dead – two of the victims notorious Queensland crime figures.


Hansen knows what it is like to be close to death with a gun being pushed up his nose in a hold-up. He mixed with killers and criminals for his daily bread.