Author Michael Adams retells Wagga's most gruesome murder in his newest book The Murder Squad

Forgotten Australia podcaster and author Michael Adams knows all too well how important journalism can be.

The former magazine journalist and editor, and author of 19 books, used archived articles by The Daily Advertiser from the 1930s to help him compile information on one of the several murders he covers in his newest book The Murder Squad.

The Murder Squad tells the story of murders during the Great Depression from the perspective of the late detective Tom McRae.

These stories, once well-known and over the years forgotten, include 'The Hammer Horror', 'The Bungendore Bones', 'The Park Demon', 'The Pyjama Girls', and 'The Human Glove'.

The Human Glove is in reference to the murder of Wagga man Percy Smith in 1933.

Detectives located his decomposed body near the Hampden Bridge and used the skin from his right hand, putting it together to form a glove of skin, to identify him.

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While Mr Adams knew from the age of six he wanted to write books, it wasn't until his curiosity got the better of him that his first book was published in 2019.

"I published my first book - Australia's Sweetheart - in 2019, and while researching that I stumbled upon so many other stories I wanted to tell but couldn't fit in," he said.

"So I started the Forgotten Australia podcast.

"The stories from The Murder Squad are all of the cases I have covered on the podcast over the last five years."

Mr Adams said they were cases he wanted to know more about but struggled to find information on them.

"No one had ever really written a book about The Hanged Man - and I wanted to find out how much I could learn," he said.

"All of the stories I cover on my podcast are stories that were once known by everybody and are now remembered by no one - they're stories that have kind of slipped out of the history books.

"A lot of them are true crime and the reason for that is because of how traumatic they are - but when you do it from a historical point of view you're also learning about a period of time in itself."

Mr Adams said readers won't only learn about the murders, but about the Great Depression and how it led to many pointless and cruel crimes.

"While some of these cases are close to 100 years old it really affected me reading them because you're reading about people whose lives were snuffed out- so it is disturbing, and sometimes these cases are so gruesome, and there seems to be no motive or reason for them," he said.

"A lot of these murders were done for stupid reasons. In the Human Glove case, Percy Smith was murdered for his wagon, horses and possessions - a lot of these crimes were quite stupid.

"What I like about it is that by researching it and writing about it you're remembering the victims, the pain and what families went through and the perpetrators - who many didn't have the best lives themselves and then also the cops who were trying to do the right thing."

Mr Adams had compiled the information on the murders over the past five years and said putting it all together in a book took him about another year.

With some old police files not accessible, Mr Adams heavily relied on Trove - which has archived articles - as well as Ancestry.

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