Delivering demons punishing wives: False imprisonment, exoricism and other matrimonial duties in a late 20th-century manslaughter case

This article provides an analysis of R v Vollmer and Others, Australia’s most famous ‘exorcism-manslaughter’ case, in which a woman, Joan Vollmer, underwent an ‘exorcism’ performed by four people, resulting in her death. We examine how taken-for-granted distinctions were collapsed during the resulting trial - distinctions between crime and punishment, exorcism and punishment, church and state, the past and the present, law and religion, reason and unreason and between a demon and a woman. We show how the defence argument for the reality of demonic possession normalized the bizarre, while simultaneously exoticizing the mundane or ‘traditional’ criminal case involving a husband defendant and a dead wife. The apparent assumption on the part of the police and the media that this case was bizarre serves to veil the fact of its relative ordinariness. A wife is killed, and the lethal punishing violence inflicted on her body downplayed, to be reinterpreted in the legal context as somehow a consequence of something she herself precipitated. Our analysis of the Vollmer case provides a novel perspective on that always intriguing conundrum of crime and punishment.

Exiled to the colonies: 'Oscar Wilde' in Australia 1895-1897

When Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in 1895, his plays were withdrawn from the London stage and, as Joel Kaplan and Seila Stowell note, exiled to the provinces and played with their author's name discreetly removed. Here, Fotheringham examines the impact of Wilde's trials and imprisonment throughout 1895-1897 on public reception to Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company's performances of his plays in Australia.