By most accounts, Mark was the only one of her sons who stayed close to her. He made regular trips over the years to see her in what he called ‘the loony bin’.

One staff member who worked at Caloola in the 1970s, who didn’t want me to use his name in connection with the place, says he remembers Mark as short and fat, with a sandy-orange mullet and stars tattooed across his knuckles. It doesn’t exactly make him sound like a dreamboat.

He also had a decent criminal record, which I’ve been able to access through Freedom of Information.

Before he even met Snow, Mark had six convictions for possession, mostly of small amounts of marijuana, but also speed; plus three fines for drink driving (including two loss of licence); one conviction of being in possession of a controlled substance without a prescription (Valium); and, more troublingly, a conviction for ‘exposure’, which is what they used to call it when men flashed in public.

In case you’re thinking he calmed down after they met in the late 80s, he didn’t. The record shows that he was arrested at 3.35 a.m. on 15 December 1995, for example, after becoming involved in an altercation at the Bondi Hotel, during which he crushed a glass in his fist and required stitches.

At 4.10 a.m. on 19 September 1996, he was arrested outside the Golden Sheaf in Double Bay, bleeding from grazes on his elbows. Security staff said he had walked from the hotel onto the street with a drink in his hand and, when challenged to return his glass, he chose instead to put the security guard against the wall by the throat.

On 14 April 1997, he verbally abused a female bartender at the Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne’s St Kilda – no record of why he was there, since he was living with Snow in Bondi by then – and, when asked to leave the premises by the back door, he staggered down the laneway and was later seen in the taxi queue challenging other patrons to fight him.

Given the picture I’m painting it’s probably worth asking why Snow was smitten, pretty much on sight.

I’ve read all the reports the various psychologists have done on Snow since she’s been in prison, and they all come to the same conclusion: that Mark got his hooks into her when she was still young enough to be vulnerable. She’d been raised in what they used to call a ‘broken home’, with her father mostly absent; she didn’t like her step-father; she’d had that abortion; and her first attempt at some kind of professional success had fallen in a heap with the failure of the normalisation project at Caloola. So she was badly in need of being ‘rescued’.

Reading those reports I wasn’t convinced. Couldn’t it simply be that Snow saw a kindred spirit in Mark, I wondered? A bloke as strange and cold as she is? Had anyone asked Snow how she saw things? I wasn’t sure that they had, so I wrote to her, putting the obvious question: what did a girl like you see in a bloke like that?