MURDER EP 1 Candice Fox’s childhood drove her obsession with crime and murder.

Some crime writers are a product of their own childhood, perhaps growing up in their own environment of murder and mayhem. Candice Fox talks about how both her mother's fostering and father's job as a parole officer has shaped her fascination with the act of murder.

“As a little kid I was just growing up in this environment where I learnt that crime and murder and mayhem are just a part of the world.

“People say, ‘Oh, why are you so fascinated by murder?' but everyone is. When there's a crime scene at the side of the road people slow down, they want to see. It's natural to be fascinated by dark stuff, I think. I'm just really, really fascinated by it.”

Use the real world
For Candice, the world was a scary place, but she used that in her writing. “I sort of just got the idea from a young age that the world is full of scary people, that children aren't always safe. The children themselves are sometimes quite scary people, I suppose that comes from some of them being violent, some of them being quite traumatised.”

Her father's job meant that dinner time was full of enthralling and sometimes terrifying stories. “My father who was the parole officer at a Sydney prison would come home and tell my mother horrific stories of things that would go on at the prison and things that people who were in the prison had done.”

The human experience
But it’s Candice’s fascination with human behaviour that spurs her on. “I suppose I am always looking for an answer for as to how people got to the stage that they're at. Some of my – I hesitate to say ‘favourite' murders, because that sounds like I have no compassion for the victims – but some of the murders that have most intrigued me that I have read about… I've been so fascinated when I've heard what has happened. How did the killer get to that stage? What happened to Ted Bundy in his childhood that made him do what he did? I'm just really interested in that.”