Look What You Made Me Do

Look What You Made Me Do, by Megan Norris, is a riveting exploration of revenge killings during marital breakdowns. This gripping work won the 2017 Davitt Award from the Australian Sisters in Crime for best True Crime.

"Extraordinary read - the events so accurately described in this book provide powerful insights into the widespread patterns of coercive control and profound impacts of enduring trauma.” - Sharon Wilkinson, lawyer and Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner, Mediator, DFV Abuse and Sexual Assault Practitioner, and Coercive Control Educator.

One Australian woman is hospitalised every three hours and two more lose their lives each week as a result of family violence. But for some women, there is a punishment far more enduring than injury or their own death.

Look What You Made Me Do is a timely exploration of the evil inflicted by vengeful fathers who have killed their children simply to punish partners for ending unrewarding, often abusive relationships.

Drawing on her own experience as a court reporter, award-winning crime writer Megan Norris examines the revenge murders of eighteen children to shine a light on the ultimate act of family violence and the shattering legacy of grief such crimes have on surviving mothers. The idea for this book began when Megan was working on a previous book, On Father’s Day, which followed the journey of surviving mother, Cindy Gambino-Moules, after the revenge murders of her three little boys. Their father, Robert Farquharson, plunged his car into an icy Victorian dam on Father’s Day 2005. To give Cindy’s story some perspective, Megan interviewed other grieving mothers to identify missed red flags and to highlight the flaws in a system that continues to fail vulnerable women and children. She realised that collectively these true stories highlighted missed red flags and the risk of lethality that had been underestimated and deserved to be more than a chapter in Cindy’s book.

From the triple murders in the dam, the 2018 execution-style shooting murders of Sydney teenagers, Jack and Jennifer Edwards, whose angry dad was granted a licence to kill despite his long-standing history of domestic violence, to the premeditated murders of Brisbane mum, Hannah Clarke, and her three children whose car was torched by her vengeful ex – Look What You Made Me Do shows it is not only women who are at risk when family violence turns deadly. A former winner of an Eliminating Violence Against Women Award, Megan Norris won the 2024 Mitchell Ferrario Award for Compassion in Media at the recent Queensland Homicide Victims Support Network’s annual Night of Recognition.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

Megan Norris has been a trailblazer. The events so accurately described in this book provide powerful insights into widespread patterns of power and control, and the profound harms that can result. (Dr Debbie Kirkwood, Author of Just Say Goodbye, and former researcher for the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria)

This book highlights the red flags of coercive control, and provides profound lived experiences and enduring trauma which might lead to change and hopefully save lives in the future. (Sharon Wilkinson, lawyer and Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner)

It’s through sharing these stories that we can lift the sense of shame that clouds victim-survivors and debunk the myths around intimacy, power, and control... We must continue to create change and push for law reform. (Mark Woolley, Small Steps 4 Hannah, Foundation Chair)

A must-read… an important resource to guide what could be done, or should be done, to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. (Kathleen Simpson, Queensland Solicitor of the Year, Principal Domestic Violence and Family Court Lawyer at DV Lawyer)