Silent Death
Karen Kissane, Hodder Australia, 2006, ISBN 0733620094, $35.00
As I was reading Karen Kissane’s Silent Death a long-buried memory came back to me. I was about 13 years old, when my mother spoke of family dysfunction as normal. All through my childhood and adolescence I had longed to be part of a normal family and here was my mother telling me, to my horror, that tension, power struggles, abuse and violence were, in fact, normal after all.
On the surface Julie and Jamie Ramage’s marriage was the embodiment of normalcy. They had an enviable lifestyle and two high-achieving teenage children. But one day in June 2003 Julie decided to leave her husband, moving to a townhouse in Toorak with her daughter, and, soon after, starting up a new romance. When she told her husband six weeks later that their marriage was over and she wasn’t coming back, he punched her in the face, strangled her to death and buried her in a shallow grave. The public was interested in the case: they saw a high-status family, who seemingly had it all, fall apart so dramatically. When Jamie Ramage pleaded not guilty to manslaughter rather than murder, citing provocation as a mitigating circumstance, or partial excuse, and the jury eventually agreed, the case provoked heated public debate.
Karen Kissane has written a thoughtful, involving account of the case and the difficult questions it raises. Kissane, who initially wrote a feature article in The Age, begins by describing the murder, tells of the Ramages’ relationship, and then takes us compellingly through the trial and its aftermath. She elicits the opinions and insights of those involved -friends and family members, counsellors and lawyers -to discover what led to the killing of Julie Ramage and whether justice was served.
In the core of her book she discusses the defence of provocation, long used in Australian courts as a partial excuse for murder. In the Ramage case defence attorney Philip Dunn argued that Jamie Ramage’s actions in killing his wife were understandable, and in effect partially excusable, as his wife had provoked him during their final meeting by saying that their sex life repulsed her, she was much happier with the new man in her life and the marriage was over. This claim was enough for the jury to convict Ramage of manslaughter instead of murder, which would have attracted a much harsher sentence.
Kissane’s careful day-by-day account of the trial is riveting. She guides us through