The butcher comes out at the front of his shop. He's only seen the last stage of this altercation.

He said, what have you done? You've shot a man in cold blood. And the one thing Bill says,

which he will repeat at intervals over the next little while is, I had to do it. I had to do it.

Gideon Hay is one of the world's preeminent cricket journalists, but his other great passion

is historical true crime. Gideon's latest book in the genre is called Who Was Wallace?

It's an investigation into the life and circumstances of a man who was Australia's oldest

prisoner. He joins us on Australian True Crime to talk about it.

This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjuri Woi Warang people of the Koolan Nation. And a warning,

this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

So look, you know, I've done a number of true crime books. I think I've talked to you probably about all of them. But they're all slightly different and they all kind of explore

a slightly different aspect of true crime. I think there's a lot of true crime that's very

formulaic, you know, victim perpetrator, detective solution. The context is always really interesting.

It's interesting to think about Australia. Yes. In the not too distant past, but very different.

You know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty brutal, pretty harsh in a lot of ways.

You know, we like to think of ourselves as a pretty relaxed society, a very lucky country.

But when we read your books, oftentimes we go, whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the last time

I was on, I think I talked about the girl in Cabin 350, which is about a woman who disappears.

Yes. But now, with who is Wallace, we have a man who was incredibly visible. There's

absolutely no ambiguity about the crime of which he's committed. But it's all about punishment.

It's all about the consequence. How does society deal with a ruction like this, an aberrant

behaviour in the case of William Richard Wallace? And again, it's brutal. It's pretty harsh.

A man for whom society could really find no place.

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