Newspapers were full of the story at the time, but to recap: Jock Palfreeman, who had attended a private school in Sydney, was arrested for murdering a young Bulgarian, Andrei Monov, who died of a knife wound. Palfreeman’s explanation was that, armed with a knife, he had intervened when a gypsy was being beaten by a group of football hooligans and that he had acted in self-defence. The prosecutors argued that, motivated by his radical politics, he murdered Monov and wounded Monov’s friend Antoan Zahariev in cold blood.

Hawkins sets the scene of a post-independence Bulgaria, which has endured economic hardship, organised crime, racism (particularly against the gypsy minority), and football hooliganism. There has also been concern from human rights bodies over the country’s police and judicial systems. The other important background was a groundswell of feeling in Bulgaria that foreigners were drawn to Sofia for cheap drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes; local media often presented Palfreeman as an outsider who was intent on trashing Bulgarian culture.

Hawkins explores the background of Palfreeman, a strikingly unusual character whose appetite for life and adventure contains many seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. A compulsive traveller and self-styled Robin Hood figure, he baffled even close friends when he decided to join the British army, an odd move given the anti-establishment views he often espoused. His defining personality traits are a ‘compulsion to help the underdog’ and a ‘propensity to intervene’, which may explain why he chose to step in where many would have fled. Even when imprisoned, he continued to stand up to bullies and tried to form a union to agitate for the rights of his fellow inmates. This streak goes way back; as a teenager he had helped a protester who was being beaten by police at a Sydney May Day event.

Belinda Hawkins with Jock Palfreeman at Sofia Central Prison

 One of the most interesting threads of Every Parent’s Nightmare is its examination of the contrasting personalities of Jock and his pathologist father, Simon. While Jock is impulsive and gripped by passions, his father is meticulous and values control and orderliness. The passages describing Simon’s grief at not being able to help his son more, even as he racks up dozens of soul-destroying and energy-sapping trips to and from the Bulgarian capital, are among the most affecting in the book.

From the outset it became clear that the trial would not be impartial. The trial judge consistently interpreted witness statements in the most damaging way for the defendant. CCTV footage from the ministry of health, which would have offered a crucial viewpoint of the fatal incident, disappeared in mysterious circumstances, allegedly due to a damaged hard drive. Witnesses for the prosecution were allowed to change their stories significantly. Little effort seems to have been made to locate the gypsies whom Jock tried to help. Given the notorious prejudice against them in the judicial system, it is perhaps unsurprising that they did not come forward.

Potential key witnesses at trial were security guards who supported Palfreeman’s version of events: that he brandished his knife only after being attacked. But their testimony wasn’t accepted by the court, who instead accepted a less plausible sequence of events according to which Jock somehow trapped a much larger group single-handedly and wounded the two men out of premeditated malice rather than panicked self-defence.

The author seems to have had regular access to the Palfreemans. There is a danger in this: her book could have suffered from a close identification with their views. But Hawkins is at pains to include independent perspectives on the death. She tries to articulate the Monov family’s grief, particularly his mother’s devastation on losing her son.

Every Parent’s Nightmare becomes heavy-going, a consequence of the nature of the story rather than of Hawkins’s reportage, which is excellent throughout. The comprehensiveness of her research only heightens the frustrating nature of Jock Palfreeman’s situation, especially during the trial when the court seems to veer further from the truth as it goes along, proceeding inexorably towards a guilty verdict and a subsequent failed appeal. Here, with one disheartening setback after another, the messiness of life frustrates any attempt to mould the events into a recognisable narrative arc. As Jock’s hellish experience in the dilapidated Sofia Central Prison lengthens, the possibility of the truth being uncovered begins to seem ever more remote. As Hawkins concedes in the prologue, ‘it is impossible to pin down exactly what happened’. Given the fractured and changing recollections of those involved, it is a fair assessment.

A final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights may yet provide a sensational epilogue, but the overall feeling is that Palfreeman and family are completely exhausted after this lengthy and frustrating legal process. Despite its commendable coverage of the background to the case, Every Parent’s Nightmare never loses sight of the human element or of the tragedy at its centre. The enduring image is of a young man who can only regret arming himself one night, an impulsive decision that has altered the lives of several people forever.