Rape and Murder aspiring comedian Eurydice Dixon in Australia

Young comedian's killing shocks Australia

Eurydice Dixon has been remembered as a promising young comedian 

he alleged rape and murder of a young comedian as she walked home at night in Australia has prompted an outpouring of public grief and anger.

The body of Eurydice Dixon, 22, was found at a football field in Melbourne early on Wednesday, only hours after she had performed a gig at a city bar.

For many, it has evoked memories of the 2012 murder of an Irish woman, Jill Meagher, whose death in an adjacent Melbourne suburb prompted a peace march involving an estimated 30,000 people.

When Eurydice Dixon finished her comedy gig at a Melbourne bar last Tuesday she was reportedly in high spirits, sharing a drink with her boyfriend before heading home.

She bought some food and walked through an area she knew well: Princes Park in an affluent northern suburb of the city. Just before midnight, she sent her boyfriend a message: “I’m almost home safe.”

A passerby found Dixon’s body in the middle of a football pitch just before 3am on Wednesday, a few hundred metres from her home. A 19-year-old man has been charged with her rape and murder. Police say the two did not know each other.

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What happened to Dixon, a smart, aspiring comedian with a dark sense of humour, was horrific, in part because walking through a park is so ordinary.

But her death has become something else: a flashpoint for an intense, often angry conversation about violence against women in Australia, and how it is men – not women – who need to change.

A decade ago, stranger-murders were framed as nightmare tales of evil monsters. Now, everyone from the country’s conservative prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to the 10,000 people who stood silently at a candlelit vigil for Dixon on Monday night, talk of culture and the structural causes of violence.

In an address to parliament this week, Turnbull said : “What we must do as we grieve is ensure that we change the hearts of men to respect women.” He said Australia needed to start “with the youngest men, the little boys, our sons and grandsons”.

Just a few hundred metres from home, Eurydice Dixon sent a message.

"I’m almost home safe, HBU [how about you]," she wrote.

In high spirits after a successful stand-up gig in the CBD, the Facebook message was sent just after midnight as she walked home through Princes Park in Carlton North.

She had made the same journey home on a Tuesday night without incident many times before but still insisted on letting her mates know she felt safe.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/19/eurydice-dixon-death-male-rage-australia-women-men-attitudes