Stigmabase | Australia - New Zealand

Aboriginal Murder Mystery: What Killed Kaakutja? - When William Bates, an elder of the Baakantji people of New South Wales, found a skeleton by a river in 2014, he identified it as an Aboriginal male. The mouth was wide open. “To me, he was crying for help,” Bates recalls, “so I said, I’ll help you.” The bones bore obvious signs of violence. In most murder mysteries, establishing the time of death is one of the first things detectives do, and in the course of an initial study, researchers assumed he had been killed during the bloodshed between British colonisers and Australia’s indigenous peoples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.