Hazel McHaffie

murder

The Bullet that Missed

As you know, I don’t like to judge an author on one book – especially perhaps one that has catapulted into the bestselling lists. So, I bought two of Richard Osman‘s novels and have just finished reading the second one.

The Bullet that Missed (clever title, by the way) features The Thursday Murder Club (TTMC) again. Once a week this gang of four pensioners in a retirement village, meet to look over old police files and try to solve murders, although their remit is decidedly elastic. This time they’re together investigating the unsolved Bethany Waites case: a brilliant young reporter who vanished while investigating a massive VAT fraud relating to the import and export of mobile phones. What is already known?
She was murdered almost ten years ago
She had got too close to the secrets of the fraudsters.
Her car plunged off of Shakespeare’s Cliff near Dover, late at night.
Someone had been in the car with her just beforehand.
There were ambiguous messages on her phone.
She left a note for a fellow reporter: I don’t say this often enough, but thank you.

Well … the police may deem it murder, but Elizabeth Best of THMC knows you should never trust a murder without a corpse. And she should know: she has faked a few deaths of her own over the years as an MI5 agent. And Bethany’s body has never been found.

Fast forward ten years and Elizabeth is suddenly being bombarded with threatening texts in her present real life. She’s wary, but then, uncharacteristically, makes a big mistake: she goes for a walk with her husband at the same time along the same route every day, giving her enemy an open invitation to strike her down and abduct her. And that someone wants her to go on a deadly mission: to kill a man she knew years ago, or her best friend Joyce Meadowcroft’s life will be forfeit. Elizabeth’s husband Stephen, abducted with her, is suffering from dementia, and at the stage of being aware something isn’t right but not sure what it is. He has flashes of perceptiveness however, and now, rare and expensive books in the library where his abductor took them, jog his memory and help him to identify Elizabeth’s tormentor. She links up with an old ally, a former KGB colonel, Viktor, the very man she was instructed to kill, and they combine skills to attempt to outwit their common foe, a money-laundering Swede nicknamed The Viking. He is closing in but hasn’t bargained on their disarming friendliness or cunning.

Joyce Meadowcroft meanwhile, unaware that her life is in Elizabeth’s hands, is beavering away at the cold case and involves her lawyer daughter to dig deeper into the facts relating to the murder of Bethany Waites. A gathering collection of anomalies move thinking on. Then one of the the key players in the case is murdered in prison. A fellow inmate, a notorious drug baron, manipulates the elderly sleuths and plots to kill one of them (Ron) and his associate once she is released. The past and present become inextricably tangled.

The introduction of new characters such as the KGB colonel is definitely a brilliant move in the machinations of TTMC. Convoluted layers of intrigue unravel, revealing different facets of the truth or lies according to the differing perspectives. Master-crooks get involved, enemies become allies, confessions become red herrings, bodies keep turning up, big money creates temptations, cryptocurrency offers new opportunities, careers are made and broken in an instant. Osman is setting things up to weave ever more complex stories. And therein lies the test for a writer – keeping all the threads perfectly woven and unbroken, maintaining the tension without unduly repeating the detail or pattern. Methinks this mighty mind will be well up to the challenge.

Overall assessment after two books? Much more depth and complexity than I first thought. Rather like the deceptively simple four main elderly characters in TTMC. Still not books I would just have to hang on to, and I’m not racing to get the others in the series, but I’m looking for a good outlet for these two – someone looking for light-hearted easy-read diversion from life’s stresses.

 

 

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Britain’s most prolific baby killer

Big apologies – I promised you a short post this week but shocking events have rather overtaken my good intentions. Sorry. Next time …. hopefully!

Five years ago, knowing nothing of what was actually happening in Cheshire, I sat in a restaurant in the centre of Edinburgh with a friend who was a senior neonatal consultant, discussing ways of inducing medical catastrophes in small children, for a book I was writing on Fabricated or Induced Illness aka Munchausens by proxy:  Killing me Gently. We kept our voices low aware of the possible effect on anyone overhearing our plotting. Two clinicians who had spent decades caring for such tiny infants, now contemplating how to harm them – it was so impossibly improbable it was laughable. Chilling now to think the same methods Lucy Letby used appeared on our list. It makes the horror the more acute and the more horrific. How COULD she?

Lucy Letby worked in our world: the world of tiny super-vulnerable infants. Infants who are so fragile that even a syringe-full of extra fluid can kill them. These tiny scraps of humanity inspire in most of us an instinct to protect and respect and treasure, so this case cuts very deep indeed.

How could a fully trained professional nurse, murder 7 such babies and attempt to murder a further 6 – at least (other suspicious cases were unproven, and an investigation is now on-going to track her footprints through two different hospitals prior to 2015 when the known murders began at the Countess of Chester Hospital).

Though speculations have been offered, no-one yet actually knows what prompted this murderous campaign, but for decent right-minded folk this blonde 33-year-old woman seems a wholly unlikely embodiment of the kind of evil that seems to lie behind it. Indeed her friends stoutly maintain they simply won’t believe it to be true unless Letby herself tells them it is. And we shall never know why unless she eventually chooses to explain herself.

But colleagues began to have suspicions when the mortality rate suddenly shot up in their hospital. It was usually 3 deaths per annum in this unit; suddenly they had 3 in a matter of weeks, unexpected, unexplained. Statistics and mortality reviews and interdisciplinary meetings figure large in units like this, especially where collapses are sudden and inexplicable. At first it was an association, which grew into a mounting conviction, when seven medical consultants discovered one common denominator in every case: the presence of Lucy Letby. No member of any neonatal team ever expects or wants to harbour this kind of suspicion. With hindsight they came to regret not having post-mortems carried out in some of the cases, but when toxicology results revealed evidence of synthetic insulin in the bodies of two of the babies, they were forced to contemplate the unthinkable: a malevolent human hand was responsible for this spate of sudden collapses and inexplicable deaths. They raised the alarm with management.

And this is where is becomes incomprehensible to me.
This team of medical experts – senior, highly trained, experienced, authority figures with ultimate responsibility for these patients – asked for an urgent meeting. Management took 3 months to respond.
After two more deaths the consultants asked that Letby be removed from the clinical arena. Management refused. What’s more the managers even demanded the consultants write a formal message of apology to Letby for maligning her! Still no formal investigation, no referral to the police.
Not till three weeks after yet another attempted murder was Letby finally removed from clinical practice and given administrative duties.
Protecting the reputation of the organisation and staffing levels appear to have played a big factor in this whole sorry saga; we know now the cost of management’s failure to act can be measured in the lives of babies, the grief of parents, the ongoing burden carried by colleagues, the regrets. That system which allowed the murderer to continue killing is itself rightly now under close scrutiny and has been publicly condemned.

Another strange phenomenon in this case is that the babies and their parents have been granted lifelong anonymity which makes it hard for the public to understand and appreciate the full facts and circumstances of each case. Each baby has been given a letter to identify them, but this seems to put him or her at one remove from reality. We can only hope that ultimately a clear, independent and transparent review – please please please not another donkey’s years inquiry! –  will allow access to and dissemination of accurate relevant facts, no matter how disturbing, in order to uphold the sacred legal principles of open justice for all concerned.

What we do already know is that Lucy Letby began her killing spree in the Countess of Chester neonatal unit in 2015. Twenty-five suspicious incidents were catalogued; she was present on every occasion. A variety of methods were used, carefully disguised to mimic natural occurrences in premature infants: air injected into veins or stomachs, insulin given, fluid overload induced. Neonatal units are busy places with lots of staff and parents around; she managed to carry out a phenomenal number of assaults in plain sight and somehow avoid detection. She was a quiet, ‘beige’, professional health care worker doing what she was trained to do, in the place where she was legitimately employed: looking after babies. Indeed, after the assaults, she comforted the parents, gave the dead babies their last bath, collected mementoes of hair, handprints, footprints, wrote condolence cards.

She was not removed from clinical practice till July 2016, and not finally arrested until 2018. Her trial began in October 2022 and lasted for ten months, culminating this week. The jury were out deliberating for 110 days considering each case separately in order to reach a verdict for each one. There has been only one death in the Countess of Chester unit in the seven years since Lucy left.

Letby herself has refused to be present in court either when the verdicts were delivered last week, or when the parents gave their impact statements and the judge passed sentence on Monday this week. It’s been castigated as the final insult, not standing up to what she has done, facing the families who have been irrevocably damaged, and to society’s condemnation of her actions as expressed through the judge. A campaign to change the law on this right to be absent will doubtless be given extra traction because of the harrowing evidence in this particular case. But it won’t affect Letby – she will remain in prison for the rest of her life without possibility of release. A whole life tariff is reserved for the most heinous of crimes and Letby becomes only the fourth woman in British history to be handed this sentence, joining notorious criminals Myra Hindley and Rosemary West.

My heart goes out to her parents; what an unimaginable horror to live with. I weep for the parents who came within her orbit and who now live with the loss of their precious babies or the terrible damage done to those who survive with developmental problems and physical and mental deficits. I fear for those staff who worked alongside a child killer and live with the ongoing questions and doubts. The wounds go profoundly deep; some will never heal.

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Forensic science close up

I suspect I’m not alone in sometimes railing against the time taken for real-life cases to come to court, or the release of dangerous criminals on technical grounds, or the vast sums spent on enquiries long after the event. How can people really recall events accurately years later? How can the judiciary live with the knowledge someone else was assaulted or kidnapped or died because they didn’t keep a criminal behind bars? How much money is wasted by the protracted goings on in our justice system? …

I occasionally dip into programmes like Forensics: the real CSI, or Silent Witness, or Professor Sue Black in action, and find the science fascinating. But I was brought up short in a more intense way by a detailed book about the work of the scientists whose job it is to provide evidence that will be robust enough to stand up in a court of law against other scientists and lawyers doing their damnedest to get the criminal off. Conscience duly smitten. How dare I criticise these people? The only wonder now is how those involved cope with the exhaustion, frustration and criticism, and keep persisting case after case after case. Some take years and years of meticulous investigation; some are never solved. Forget needle in a haystack; we’re talking a single hair or thread in a whole crime scene, a minute particle of a chemical in the bones of a whole nation.

The book is Shallow Graves, by forensic scientist Ray Fysh, (well, actually written for him by James Nally) – a fascinating insider’s view into the demanding work of gathering evidence. Fysh was a working class lad from South East London. Back in 1970, at the time he joined the Met Police, forensic investigation was seen as a niche area for geeks and boffins, but Ray and his team set about transforming it into an essential and integral part of police investigations. He progressed from being a toxicologist to become specialist advisor on all areas of forensic evidence gathering, helping to solve cases and stop violence, a key player in reducing murder rates and saving lives and minimising traumatic loss to families. No mean feat, huh?

So highly prized was his expertise, that he became the go-to man for many major investigations, cases indeed that strike a cold dread into the hearts of anyone who read or heard about them – the murders of Sarah Payne and Damilola Taylor and Billie-Jo Jenkins; London’s 7/7 and 21/7 transport bombings; the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko – that kind of level.

The detailed descriptions of what happened and how tiny factors like a thread or a hair or a shoe print or a radio-active isotope could clinch a case, make mesmerising reading. So, for example, in the case of Billie-Jo Jenkins in 1997, it was the pattern of pinprick blood spatter and minute skin particles on her foster-father’s clothing that eventually convicted him of the murder. Imagine the sheer impotence of the team, then, when seven years after her death, Sion Jenkin’s team successfully appealed against this incriminating evidence on the say-so or another expert, resulting in him walking out of prison a free man.

Who could ever forget the abduction and killing of 8-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000; those haunting photos of her beautiful innocent little face, and the devastation of her family? It took 7 months and 5 days to convict and charge Roy Whiting – months and months of sifting through a vast collection of items from Whiting’s white van and her makeshift burial site, constantly bearing in mind the mantra: Every contact leaves a trace. Then a black child’s shoe was found on the road; 350 fibres were extracted from the velcro strap; a few proved it was Sarah’s, worn on the day of her abduction; others were indistinguishable from fibres from a red sweatshirt on the front seat of Whiting’s van. And on that sweatshirt was a hair from Sarah’s head – bearing her DNA.

The scale of the case remains unparalleled. Police received over 35,000 calls from the public. Eight hundred premises, waterways and agricultural complexes were searched across five counties. More than sixty miles of roads were combed for clues. The case involved 910 police officers and 112 support staff, costing the taxpayer over £2 million. in all, counting everyone involved, 136,941 hours have been put in – which equates to 5,705 days, or 15.6 years.
And yet Whiting’s conviction ultimately came down to the discovery of a few fibres and a single blonde hair …
You can’t put a price on a moral imperative like getting justice for Sarah Payne and her family.

It took 25 years to catch David Fuller for the so-called ‘Bedsit murders’ in Kent; 34 years until he was sentenced. And again it was forensic evidence that convicted him. But in those intervening years he had been busy. Police found in his home a massive collection of written and filmed evidence of 10 years of violating 102 deceased females aged between 9 and 100 in mortuaries in Kent and Sussex hospitals where he worked as an electrician with access to all areas – crimes committed while the police were methodically looking for evidence for the bedsit murders.

The discovery of a tiny torso wearing bright orange shorts in the Thames was a huge challenge to Ray Fysh and the team. No child had been reported missing. There was no face to use in appeals to the public. Desperate to give this little boy some dignity in death, using applied science, they made amazing strides in tracking across continents to try to identify him, discovering that he was from West Africa, the victim of people trafficking for human sacrifices to appease African deities. No one was ever charged for his murder but the relentless pursuit of answers led to the development of ground-breaking techniques in familial DNA searches and geological mapping to identify where someone had lived – techniques since used to solve countless crimes. Ray sees this progress as the investigative team’s tribute to the little lad whose name they were unable to discover. They themselves assumed the role of his family and gave him a dignified farewell.

The constant struggle to find water-tight forensic evidence even in cases of blatant crime was so clearly evident in the case of the serial rapist who committed 8 such attacks in the space of a year, 4 of them in less than a month. He brazenly seized females aged from 10 to 52, dragging them into more secluded spots to carry out his sexual assaults. And when the evidence is deemed to be insufficient, the team must watch in horror those responsible either go free or be allowed out on parole or prematurely released. Their exhausted impotence surely knocks my semi-detached anger off the bottom of the scale.

The Night Stalker terrorised south London for 17 years, going on sprees of burglary and sexual assault and then lying low. He targetted elderly people who lived alone and attacked at least 98 victims – mostly elderly women but a few men, aged between 68-93. Though thousands of names were added to the ‘possible’-list based on forensic factors, somehow the real villain had been erroneously eliminated from enquiries early on, which meant he was thereafter not considered a possible suspect. Bizarrely investigators actually had his DNA, they knew about his shoe size, his accent, his smell, his MO, his Carribean origins. They suspected he was a carer of some kind, with a religious background, but again and again he eluded them. In the end it was his car which identified him, and the Jamaican taxi driver who had cared for his wife with MS and been a Jehovah’s Witness was finally arrested after 17 years of diligent work involving state-of-the-art equipment and countless experts.

The stories individually and collectively catalogue the colossal amount of work, the eye-watering costs, much of it not bringing results, which these skilled and patient people carry out. They show the huge hurdles to be overcome to get a conviction in court even where no-one is in any doubt as to guilt. I have a new respect for their stamina and dogged determination, and I am moved by their sheer humanity in wanting to give closure and dignity and a sense of justice to the families as well as the deceased. It’s a sad end to this tale that the government decided to cease funding this service which was the envy of the world on the grounds of cost.

Apologies for this long post … I’ll make it super brief next week!

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Where the Crawdads Sing

After a period of intense serious studying of the ethical variety I felt the need for some lighter air. Ahah, time to visit a 2018 runaway bestseller which has been sitting on my shelf tempting me to play truant.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a one off. It combines the expertise of a real-life naturalist with the instincts of a lyrical author; a mix of murder mystery and a coming of age narrative and gentle romance. Descriptions of the lagoons and channels of the North Carolina coast in the1950s and 60s, the native birds and insects, the shells and grasses, are amazingly evocative, and form a perfect ongoing backdrop to the story, a veritable peon to nature.

Catherine Danielle (Kya) Clark is a child abandoned in stages – first by her mother when Kya is only 6, then by each of her siblings, and finally her drunken father. She’s left to live a solitary life in a rundown shack on the marshes with no income save that gleaned from selling the mussels and oysters she garners from the mud before daylight. The Truant Officer manages to get her to school for one day, but she contrives to elude the authorities thereafter, determined not to expose herself to ridicule and abuse from people who know her only as the Marsh Girl. She may be unable to read or write but she’s super-observant when it comes to the wildlife of the marshes, and she painstakingly amasses a collection of feathers and shells and grasses, painting identifying pictures on brown grocery bags to tell their story – a prelude to her eventually becoming an acknowledged expert and renowned published author of many books.

Not one of the town’s church groups or families holds out a helping hand to this abandoned child, but a black couple who supply fuel for her boat, keep a kindly eye on her, slipping her small sums of money and cast-off clothes. And in time, a local lad, Tate, approaches her territory sensitively and kindly, sharing her love of nature, and teaches her to read.

When Tate moves on to University to become a scientist, Kya feels abandoned yet again, making her all too susceptible to the wiles and false promises of handsome seducer, Chase Andrews. Kya is by now a beautiful but unfathomable young woman, made the more vulnerable by her isolation and lack of social awareness. But she’s learned the hard way how to look after herself, so when Chase attempts to abuse her she fights back and leaves him wounded and vengeful.

Some years later when Chase’s body is found sixty feet below a tower not far from Kya’s patch, minus a shell necklace she had made for him, the finger of suspicion points to Kya, even though there is no evidence at all to show she was anywhere near the tower on that night; on the contrary she was visiting her publisher faraway at the time in question. But the zealous Sheriff arrests her and locks her in a cell for two months before her case is heard in court. – a severe punishment in itself for a wild-child who has never been confined anywhere. But listening to the evidence, the townspeople finally begin to appreciate the enormity of their neglect and the sheer resilience and strength of this self-sufficient girl. I won’t spoil things for you by divulging the result of the trial, suffice to say the unexpected ending leaves one’s sympathies exactly where they should be.

This is a debut novel, but Owens is a spectacularly good writer. Just a few examples must suffice:

Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws – not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes.

As she rounded a stand of tall grass, suddenly the ocean’s face – gray, stern, and pulsing – frowned at her. Waves slammed one another, awash in their own white saliva, breaking apart on the shore with loud booms – energy searching for a beachhead, Then they flattened into quiet tongues of foam, waiting for the next surge.

Berkley Cove served its religion hard-boiled and deep-fried. Tiny as it was, the village supported four churches, and those were just for the whites; the blacks had three more.

The limited use of the local dialect is pitch perfect, and the sympathetic portrait of our heroine is both moving and unsettling. The pace is slow and exactly right for a backwater small town, but nevertheless the tension created by the side-by-side narratives of Kya’s struggle to survive and the unravelling of the mystery of Chase’s death, is maintained to the end. If I have a niggling complaint it’s that very occasionally the author shares the thoughts of secondary characters, which doesn’t work for me.

I was dismayed to discover that both the author and the major film which followed the book are shadowed by unsavoury criticism, so I stopped researching further lest more revelations should taint my enjoyment of a superb piece of literature. Craven and dishonest, I know, but still …

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Backstory

It’s probably fair to say that Patricia Cornwell is generally adjudged the undisputed mother and queen of forensic thriller writing.

It was her first novel, Postmortem, that kick-started this genre and spawned a fascination with the world of the dead. BBC series like Silent Witness, and Waking the Dead, which explore unexplained deaths, are aired at prime time. Just this week, Channel 5 has started showing a brand new 3-part documentary, Cause of Death, taking viewers inside a coroner‘s office as he and his team investigate unexplained deaths.

But way back in the 1980s, it was not instant hits all round. Initially Cornwell had to endure the usual run of rejections, and even when Postmortem was published, it took time before it was duly acclaimed. When she slipped out in her lunch break from the mortuary where she worked for her very first book signing, precisely no copies of the book were sold, and she fielded just one question: an elderly lady asking where she could find the cookbooks!

Since then, of course, she has achieved phenomenal success, won an impressive raft of literary prizes, and sold over 120 million books. Probably her most famous character is Chief Medical Officer Dr Kay Scarpetta, and next week her 26th book in the series comes out. 26!! But it’s Scarpetta’s backstory, and that of her niece Lucy, and policeman colleague Pete Marino, that help to drive the novels – a massive achievement in itself to sustain the suspense and time-lines across so many years, a backdrop to countless horrific crimes and painstaking investigations, each a compelling read in its own right.

Another powerful characteristic of her books which I am in awe of is the precision – whether it’s the minute records of exactly which bones were fractured in a frenzied attack, or the precise level of decomposition of a body, or the battery of tests needed to establish where a body has been, the scene is described in meticulous detail. She lists as her interests:
Forensics | Forensic Technologies | Ballistics | Weapons | Explosives | Pathology & Autopsies | Crime | Historical and Unsolved Criminal Cases | Jack The Ripper | Helicopter Piloting | Scuba Diving | Archaeological Excavation Experience |
It shows! And she’s famous for working tirelessly to stay up to speed as methods of detection and analysis evolve.

But until this week I was unaware of her own harrowing personal story. Interviews with her to mark the publication of Livid on 25th October, have revealed a grim start in life. She was just five years old when her father walked out on Christmas Day. Shortly afterwards she was molested by a local patrolman, and required to testify in court before a grand jury. Her mother suffered from psychotic depression and spent large swathes of her daughter’s early life in hospital, meaning Patricia was either responsible for caring for her at home or in foster care herself. Her foster mother verbally abused her, bullied and force-fed her (leading to subsequent anorexia). She also left Patricia’s beloved dog locked in the basement to die of neglect. The grown up Cornwell is still riddled with deep-down anxieties about families and responsibilities.

By her own admission, in Scarpetta she has created a character who would have rescued her from all this torment – someone who is unflagging in the pursuit of justice for the murder victims who end up on her autopsy table. But it doesn’t require a PhD in psychology to see the origins of her deep empathy with inner turmoil and the effects of suppressed emotion which are so evident in her fiction. She has used her own personal tragedy and her extraordinary literary talent to make sense of the world. In her own words: I think your pain becomes your poetry, your gift. What a gift!

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Broadmoor

Broadmoor. The very word carried a deeply chilling resonance. The most infamous high security hospital in the world. Makes me think of spine-chilling names like Peter Sutcliffe, Ronnie Kray, Charles Bronson … serial killing, cannibalism, paedophilia, arson, and the like heinous crimes. Or the horrific occasion in 1977, when two inmates trapped a third in a locked area in Broadmoor, and tortured him to death, skinning him alive, ramming a spoon into his brain, before garotting him. What kind of a mind could conceive of, and calculatedly carry out, such barbaric acts? I still remember the shivery sense of profound relief when these men were locked away in this maximum security psychiatric hospital facility for the criminally insane. Little public sympathy for them; widespread fear should they ever be released; a general ‘throw away the key’ mentality! ‘Monsters’, ‘evil incarnate’, ‘irredeemable’. ‘The more whole-life sentences running sequentially the better.’

But TV journalist Jonathan Levi, and cultural historian Emma French, have uncovered a much more nuanced picture of this notorious place. In their book: Inside Broadmoor, (published in 2019 but written before the new hospital was opened in the December of that year) they bring together their observations based on nearly ten years observing and interviewing staff, experts and the patients themselves, and they find that the staff really believe in redemption and rehabilitation – at least in most cases. No matter what they’ve done these men deserve to be treated humanely, and they aim to give them the best chance of a future.

This generosity of spirit from the staff comes in spite of the fact that the threat of violence is ever present. There are on average five physical assaults on staff members each week, but violence is seen as intrinsic to some of the medical conditions these patients suffer from, so it’s viewed more compassionately here than by the public at large.

The authors asked why did the men commit such dastardly deeds? Might they do it again? Can clinicians unravel the mysteries of their brain chemistry and render them safe? Are any conditions untreatable? Is there such a thing as pure evil? What can we do with those who are beyond help? What draws people to this work: 8-900 staff at any given time, all sworn not to reveal any information outside the hospital?  If the inmates are themselves the victims of appalling histories, does society owe them anything in compensation?

It’s hard to believe that 200 of Britain’s most dangerous men can be housed here together, maximum unrelenting security measures notwithstanding, some of them day in day out with no reprieve of any kind for decades. Each one suffering from a serious mental disorder rendering every man a grave and immediate risk to the public, not to mention their combined threat.

There is a popular misconception that, when someone goes to Broadmoor, they are there for life; in reality only a very few high-profile criminally insane individuals remain there for decades. Over the years a lot of work has gone into de-stigmatising and altering perception of severe mental illness, with great emphasis on intensive programmes of drug and psychological therapies. The old prison mentality and ethos has largely gone. As a result, nowadays, the average stay for a Broadmoor patient is less than 6 years, and there is a notably lower reoffending rate than in the UK prison population overall. This is not to say the men all go free into the community – depending on their diagnosis and progress they may be sent to a variety of other less high security institutions.

The demographics of today’s patients have changed radically over the last 150 years. Religious and ethnic factors play a significant part in this, and the authors concluded that, It is tragically clear that work needs to be done urgently to address these inequalities.

What really emerges is the vulnerability of these men alongside their criminal insanity.

It is nothing short of chilling  that … the fate of many Broadmoor patients was fixed from early childhood. Critically, theirs was a childhood not just of deprivation and economic hardship, but of abuse too … Childhood experiences, often shocking and sickening beyond belief, seal the fate of many patients very early on.

One illustrative case is Dillon, born into a ‘satanic’ family. Father broke his bones, sexually abused him, and raped and beat his mother. From birth, mother rejected Dillon, convinced he was evil. She sexually abused him and tried to kill him repeatedly. He was kept locked up in the attic, not allowed to talk to his brothers, or tethered naked to a post and made to eat food off the floor like a dog. By the age of 5 he was an arsonist. From the age of 7 he went into care but became arsonist, kidnapper, violent offender, out of control alcoholic. What chance did this boy have in life? And yet most of us don’t see beyond the violent, criminally insane adult. The staff in Broadmoor do.

One consequence of receiving effective medication, therapy and healing, is that patients can arrive at a deeply vulnerable moment; they begin to have consciousness of the crime that brought them to the hospital in the first place. This is a point of profound fragility. In some cases it’s more than they can handle and proves lethal; they take their own lives. Suicide is rendered possible in the lower risk areas, especially in Victorian buildings where ligature points, such as bars at the windows, have remained because of a shortage of funding to make the necessary alterations.

Hmm, a shortage of funding … Maintaining these dangerous men in secure units under constant surveillance is horrendously expensive. It costs upwards of £300,000 per annum to keep each patient in Broadmoor – five times the cost of a prison stay. Peter Sutcliffe’s 32 year stay in Broadmoor cost the taxpayer in the region of £10 million. In just one of a number of rooftop protests, Charles Bronson did £250,000 of damage.

I found this book profoundly challenging – challenging my preconceptions, my prejudices, my lack of real understanding: the barbed wire around my own reactions. I commend it to you.

 

 

 

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Truth and ethics

I’m suffering from a troubled conscience as I write this post.

Nobody surely could have failed to be horrified at what happened to Sarah Everard in March this year. Her brutal kidnap and murder stirred the anger and sorrow of the nation, compounded by the fact that her killer was a police officer. – a police officer using his privileges and knowledge to desecrate and murder an innocent young woman. We’ve all been taught to trust the police, so it erodes the very fabric of our security. And the links between other sexual offences such as flashing, and subsequent rape and murder, brought the crime closer to us all.

Small wonder then that I felt sick to the pit of my stomach at the opening to Cold Kill by Neil White. Chapter 1 launches straight into the murder of a young woman, experienced through the eyes of the killer … wearing heavy boots, a polo shirt, a police crest on his breast, a black and white check ribbon around his cap, handcuffs dangling from his belt. By page 4 ethical questions are screaming in my head. Should I even read this fiction? Should writers write purely for entertainment about what is a living nightmare for some families?

I should explain I was led to the book by blurb about the author. Neil White failed all his exams at school, but in his 20s returned to education, qualified as a solicitor in his 30s, and now spends his days in the courtroom and his evenings writing crime fiction – a story of triumph through hard work and application. I was intrigued to know just how able this writer is. And yes, he’s certainly able! His brilliant capture of the first murder caught me unawares and raised all manner of qualms.

And boy, did this whole book challenge me! Moral dilemmas aplenty. Reporters wheedle their way into the living rooms of the distraught and grieving families, as they share intimate stories about the victim and the relatives, as they seek to titillate public curiosity. Just how morally right is it for reporters to intrude on private horror and pain in the interests of selling newspapers or raising viewing figures? One of the reporters is in a relationship with a police officer … where does that place them when it comes to a collision between personal and professional loyalties?

The public gather – like knitters at the guillotine. To what extent should their ghoulish interest be exploited? The fathers of the murdered girls have backstories; one an ex cop, the other heading up a dark underworld. How much of their past histories should be exposed to public scrutiny?

A retired child psychologist has confidential information that could prove vital in the murder inquiry … but which principle trumps which? Old confidences from a child patient, or the young women this killer is targetting now?

In the case of Cold Kill, there’s an extra level of revulsion knowing that the killer is there, unnoticed, invisible, privy to what the detectives are thinking, what the police are searching for, what the lawyers are advising. Part of their world. Secretly smirking. Laughing up his sleeve at their blindness, his own cleverness. And his ubiquitous presence is conveyed so effectively by occasional sections devoted to his perspective, amidst the narrative relating to the investigators. He is merely ‘he’. Sent shivers down my spine, feeling those cold eyes everywhere, watching, waiting, plotting, exacting terrible revenge, seeing his macabre MO like a signature at each killing. 

I did read to the end in spite of my reservations, and indeed this author is a compelling storyteller. But nevertheless I felt guilty for having been ‘entertained’ by crimes that have devastated the lives of real families. I’m still analysing this surprising development. Have I lost the art of differentiating fact from fiction? Or is this a matter of timing?

 

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Domestic psychological thrillers

Although I’ve read a large number of thrillers in an effort to understand the secrets and techniques that make for success, I’ve come across surprisingly few that fit more precisely into the family-based variety I’ve been trying to create myself; ‘domestic’, so-called ‘real-life’ fiction. So when I saw Until You’re Mine by Samantha Hayes in a supermarket second-hand charity corner at the weekend, I snapped it up. And I read it in two days.

I love the cover (her trademark style apparently), and the strap-line spoke to me: To create her family she will destroy yours. My kind of territory, huh?

And it got better and better the more I read about the book and its author. She’s dipped a toe in being a barmaid, a fruit picker, a private detective, a factory worker; she’s lived on a kibbutz, holidayed on Cornwall (my home county)… – a colourful life even before she took up crime writing. And in her novels she focuses on current issues, designed to challenge the reader to think, What if this happened to me or my family? Exactly what I try to do.

And indeed, Until You’re Mine bears some striking similarities to my own new novel, Killing me Gently, which becomes available for purchase this coming weekend*. Both are based around a young career woman, trying to adapt to being a mother; things clearly not being what they seem to be; threats hanging over families; marriages and relationships in peril.

In the case of Until You’re Mine, there are three principal women involved. Claudia Morgan-Brown has a history of numerous previous pregnancies all ending in miscarriages or still births – leaving her feeling ‘ an unworthy shell of a woman‘ and ‘a freak‘. Around perfect families with perfect babies ‘jealousy stuck in my craw like a bowlful of mud shoved down my throat.’ And yet her job – a job she loves – revolves around parents and children. As a social worker heading up a child protection team, she’s constantly dealing with dysfunctional, violent, abusive, disadvantaged families. Nor is she a stranger to the painful experience of removing children from their inadequate or unfit parents.

And it’s in the course of her work that she goes to check out the welfare of 2-month-old twin baby boys, Oscar and Noah Morgan, whose mother has just died of pancreatic cancer. They are being well cared for, but Claudia falls in love with their so-recently bereaved father, James, who reciprocates the emotion. ‘He was hurting. I was hurting. Together, we were mended.’ And now she’s heavily pregnant with James’ baby, but determined to keep working up till her due date and take the minimum of time off after the birth.

Husband, James, is a naval officer, a submariner, away for long stretches of time. And in reality Claudia knows very little of his past life. She does know, however, that he has inherited wealth from his first wife, enabling them to live in a huge and beautiful house, and that he has secrets about which she knows nothing. They decide to hire a live-in nanny to enable Claudia to keep doing what she’s good at.

Enter Zoe Harper, who comes with impeccable credentials, and is clearly really good with children. The twins adore her. We, however, know from the outset that Zoe isn’t what she appears to be. She lives in the ‘centre of an ever-changing lie’. We know she is preoccupied with pregnancy and babies. We know she’s recently left an intense relationship but still longs to make contact with her past. We also know she has her own agenda and is on a mission which somehow relates to counting down to the birth of Claudia’s child.

The third woman is Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher. She’s dealing with domestic crises at home – an errant husband and a rebellious teenage daughter determined to abandon her education and career prospects, leave home and marry her boyfriend. And on the work front Lorraine is dealing with two cases of pregnant women being sliced open and left for dead. Both the victims had troubled pasts and had been in the care of social services. Both had been wanting to terminate their pregnancies early on but for some reason had not gone through with it. Both babies and the first mother have died, but the second mother has survived, and somehow the survivor is the link between the social worker, nanny and detective.

Through the eyes of all three women we inch forward towards the critical date – the birth of Claudia’s baby girl. It’s tense, gripping stuff. But the three stories simply don’t hang together. Who is to be believed? Three women desperate to become mothers. Three women juggling competing demands. Three murders already. We’re counting down the days to deadlines with huge trepidation. The suspense keeps us glued to the pages. The killer twist in the tale, when it comes, is brilliantly executed. And the last sentence is perfection.

Phew! A serendipitous find but highly recommended. And I’ll certainly be hunting down more of Samantha Hayes’ books.

* Yep, at last! We’ve had a few glitches in the publishing process this time, hopefully now ironed out. More on this next week.

 

 

 

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Splinter the Silence

In Splinter the Silence, Val McDermid explores the issue of internet trolling/hate mail/harassment/villification/abuse of women who put their heads above the parapet to speak about discrimination and injustice. In this fictional case, the public figures are apparently hounded to the point of suicide, although the reader knows from the outset that they are actually being murdered, each killing disguised to mimic the suicides of famous feminists. The murderer has his own reasons for objecting to women who step outside their domestic role and tell men what’s right or wrong.

Well, sadly, I know people in real life who would still tether women to the kitchen sink if they could. I have myself come in for criticism for being a woman and daring to voice and defend an opinion; for having ideas above my subservient station. Fortunately, positive responses have far, far outweighed the negative, so it hasn’t been that difficult to maintain perspective, but then, I’m not an A-list celebrity, so such pernicious or malicious activities don’t hit the headlines, the number of critics doesn’t reach stratospheric levels. Nevertheless, I can vouch for the discomfort of being on the receiving end of such unjust vitriol. It’s not as far fetched as you might imagine.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the matter of standing up and being accountable, and about all the cases coming to public attention right now that lend themselves to strong column inches. I’ll itemise a few, but please note, I have no privileged access to information on any of them, so the facts I include are as subject to distortion and prejudice as any other media-generated stories.

OK, serious time, folks. And in every case multiply the questions many times over.

Ten days after legally completing his transition from female to male, a transgender man, TT, underwent intrauterine insemination, resulting in a pregnancy. He has now taken his case to the High Court in an effort to be the first to have no ‘mother’ registered on the birth certificate. Hello? ‘Cake’ and ‘eat’ instantly spring to mind. Expensive legal and parliamentary resources are to be deployed to look into the ramifications of the current laws governing fertility treatment.
One British doctor is reported as saying, now that it is medically possible to transplant a womb into biological males, it would be illegal to deny them access to this opportunity to carry a child to birth. What do you think? Would it?
What about the rights of the unborn child?
One author of a letter to the Telegraph outlined the scenario and concluded, ‘The lunatics truly have taken over the asylum.‘ Do you agree? Or is this a case of establishing the deep-seated needs of people who have struggled all their lives with their dysphoria?

Then there’s the issue of rights and dignity and bodily integrity and mental welfare of female athletes with naturally high testosterone levels? Renewed calls have been made for such women to be given drugs to lower their levels before they compete, or for them to be channelled into other categories such as intersex competition.
What about the effect on these sportswomen of the abuse and accusations levelled at them?
Is it a fair playing field?
Other scientists have cast serious doubt on the integrity of the research behind this latest demand; how many people either know of this or have the scientific or mental wherewithal to judge the issue fairly?

Exactly four years ago, on their half-term break, Shamima Begum and two school friends fled this country, aged only 15, to join Isil and become jihadi brides. In those years, Begum has borne three children, two of whom died of illness and malnourishment. She has told the world she doesn’t regret her actions, that she was unfazed by the sight of severed heads, that’s she’s into retaliation, but wants to bring baby number three back to her home country.
We have no way of knowing just how much coercion lies behind her public pronouncements, but her responses to interviewers chill the blood. The government have refused to jeopardise more lives by sending anyone to rescue her, but at first the lawyers told us, she’s a British citizen, she cannot be rendered stateless, so legally speaking, there is no choice; we must have her back. Then a couple of days later we hear that no, the government are not obliged to repatriate her … and indeed the Home Secretary has revoked her British citizenship … she has dual Bangladeshi nationality … the baby has a Dutch father  …
What consequences should this girl’s actions have?
Whose rights take precedence?
What kind of a future lies in front of her or her baby son?
Who should assume responsibility?
Is it a measure of our own more civilised behaviour that we rise above the terrorists’ creed and show compassion now towards this girl?
What of all the other people who’ve dabbled in terrorism but who now want to return?And a zillion other questions.
No wonder opinion is divided.

Retired accountant, 80-year-old Geoff Whaley, diagnosed with MND two years ago, decided that an agonising and undignified death was not for him; he would go to Dignitas in Switzerland for a controlled end to his life. But his careful planning was threatened days before his proposed departure by the appearance of police at his door, interviewing his wife of 52 years under caution, in response to an anonymous tip-off. It was this unwelcome intrusion, coupled with the laws of this country opposing assisted suicide, not his impending suicide, that engendered fear and anguish in this man, provoking him to protest to the BBC and MPs:
‘The law in this country robbed me of control over my death. It forced me to seek solace in Switzerland. Then it sought to punish those attempting to help me get there. The hypocrisy and cruelty of this is astounding.’
Put aside for a moment your personal views on assisted dying, and ask, what could possibly have motivated someone to blow the whistle in this way at the Whaley’s eleventh hour? Genuine concern, self-righteousness, extreme religious views, a sense of public duty, malice? Or what?
Should other people’s private scruples be allowed to control the rights of families in such tragic circumstances?

Imagine being born in war-ravaged Yemen, stranded in a hospital in a country where social, political, economic and health care systems have all collapsed, where about half of the 28 million inhabitants are living on the brink of famine. Now add to that the babies being conjoined twins. Their picture appeared in the British press; the Yemeni doctors appealing for help from the UN to get them to Saudi Arabia.
What should our response be?
What is our responsibility in such cases?
What chance did they realistically have?
At least 6,800 civilians have been killed and 10,700 injured in the war, according to UN statistics. Did these two extremely vulnerable boys warrant such an exceptional rescue mission?
In the event they died in their homeland, but the questions remain.

I could go on … and on …

All the youngsters who become victims of disturbing material on line … the BBC being criticised for not offering abortion advice after an episode of Call the Midwife featuring a backstreet abortion … impecunious students being paid to contract dangerous tropical diseases like typhoid and malaria in the search for new effective vaccines … the matter of a 97-year-old Duke of Edinburgh flouting the country’s law on the wearing of seatbelts …

I have opinions on all these issues. You don’t have to listen to me. You are perfectly entitled to disagree with me – fundamentally and even vociferously. But you ought not to shut me up! Especially not in a threatening or damaging way.

 

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The Crying Tree

Daniel Robbins has been on death row for nineteen years (half of his life) when the execution warrant arrives.

29 October 2004. One minute after midnight.

29 October is my birthday, so the date instantly hooked me in. When we’re young we count down the days – or sleeps! – to such dates; imagine counting down to your own death, or that of someone you love.

Robbins had a troubled upbringing, in and out of care, and there’s now no one in the outside world who’s in contact with him. But he remembers one thing his real mother taught him: Truth is not necessarily what people want to hear, and now he’s in prison because he failed to tell the truth – the truth about how, in 1985, he came to shoot dead 15-year-old Shep Stanley. Shep’s father is Deputy Sheriff Nathaniel Stanley (Nate), and it was he who found the fatally wounded boy. He cradled Shep while he bled to death, and his testimony helped put the 19-year-old shooter in the state penitentiary, and on death row.

Shep’s mother, Irene, is beside herself, depressed and suffocated by pain. Shep was the apple of her eye, her world. Even her daughter, Bliss, feels left out. Believing she couldn’t cope with hearing the truth about what really happened on the night of her son’s murder, Nate keeps the secret for nineteen years. Until, that is, he discovers his wife has been secretly writing to the condemned man for years … that she’s forgiven him. Incensed beyond control he blurts out the truth. The revelation catapults Irene into a frenzy of activity which takes her all the way to the window opposite her son’s killer.

The book, The Crying Tree ( a perfect title) is cleverly structured. The first section flips between the years leading up to the murder and its aftermath (1983-1990) – and the days immediately after the death warrant comes through (the first two days of October 2004). The second part picks up at 1995 and takes us up to 7 October 2004. The third and fourth sections inch us ominously through the remaining days of October 2004 as the condemned man counts down the rest of his mortal life.

I didn’t see the twist at the end of section 3 coming – always a thrill! – and Irene’s reaction to the truth Nate reveals is powerfully captured in some brilliant passages describing her whole life disintegrating (P247-8), beginning with ‘Irene drove south on Highway 3, speeding past river towns like Neunert and Grand Tower. Headlights made her squint, trains made her stop, and the words her husband had said made her shake with fury … she had no idea what to do with Nate’s confession.’

Alongside the story of the Stanleys’ life and tragedies, we walk beside the man responsible for masterminding the actual execution, Superintendent Tab Mason. He’s a damaged soul himself after years of terrible abuse. He feels the weight of his responsibility acutely – it’s not a job, it’s an ‘ordeal’ – and he has real issues with the notion of forgiveness. Execution is a rare occurrence in Oregon; the last one was seven years earlier, and this is Mason’s first case being ‘in the driving seat’. ‘We’re talking about a man’s life, and I won’t be tolerating any talk that may lead someone to believe we are in any way eager to take on this job.’  He’s determined that every man jack involved in any way, is prepared for this. ‘There are thresholds on the road to killing someone … everyone, from officer to cleanup crew, had to figure out whether or not he had it in him to cross over that line.’

But his careful planning and preparation is thrown into chaos when the murdered man’s mother writes to him … when she arrives seeking mercy … when her daughter supports her – a woman who is herself a criminal prosecutor who’s ‘probably put more men to death than he had sitting in his entire unit‘! It’s a ‘compellingly outrageous‘ situation to be in.

The author of this superb book, Naseem Rakha, an acclaimed journalist, doesn’t shirk the big questions either. The rightness of capital punishment. The Biblical understanding of Do Not Kill. Religion and homosexuality. The meaning and consequences of forgiveness. How grief affects people. Punishment and imprisonment. Nature versus nurture. Weighty questions all.

And her command of language is fabulous. I Iove the idea of
– a face ‘buttered with sympathy’ or ‘buffed of expression and the eyes drained of color’, of – a man running to ‘get as far away from himself as possible’.
 – the women in a backwater, ‘their long flannel shirts covering up what gravity had claimed’.
– the people in the tavern ‘strung out on a line waiting for life to turn better’.

Her masterly handling of suspense and conflict, particularly in the chambers where the deed will be/is done, chills the spine. I experienced a CT procedure recently which necessitated everyone else leaving the room leaving me alone in the tunnel with an IV infusion to automatically shoot dye into my veins and thence into my heart, while a robotic disembodied voice warned me it was coming, and my body reacted strangely to the substance. It felt weirdly isolating. And I could see parallels. Only, in my case, I lived to recall the experience!

The Crying Tree is no run-of-the-mill miscarriage of justice story, no who-really-done-it. This is a tale that gets deep inside the heart of a family torn apart by the murder of a beloved and talented son, an act that forever changes the meaning and cohesion of their lives and relationships. Some of the attitudes and language make us cringe today in the UK, but this was the US in the 2000s, and it’s a salutary reminder of how prejudice, ignorance and intolerance can ruin lives. Shep’s mother ends up realising she failed her son, but ‘We all make mistakes … Every one of us. And we all pay. One way or another, we all pay.’

A masterpiece from a hugely talented writer.

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