Captains Blog 1319 - 1319 • Published 10 Apr 2009 09:30 0 Comments

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Tragedy surrounds us.
It can be something as basic as losing your job or the end of a relationship. Mortality is something that we have to live with.
But murder may be the worst of all.
And we’ve had more than our share of it in recent months.
I’ve been writing about murder for twenty years. I’ve interviewed the cops who investigate it and the reporters who’ve covered it. Most of them retain some level of detachment but there are those few who have been troubled by what they have seen and heard.
I’ve met men who have killed. Some disturbed me. Others, believe it or not, I liked.
I’ve spoken to those left behind - and that was when I realised that ghosts are real.
I could see the phantoms reflected in the eyes of mothers and fathers as they talked of their slain children. I could hear the voices of the dead echoing in the words of the living.
The sudden, often violent, death of a friend, a loved one, a relation is hard to understand and difficult to cope with.
What can be a sudden, unpremeditated act spreads out like a cancer, devouring everything in its path.
A life is stubbed out - but others are left battered and bruised, some never to recover.
I recall interviewing the mother of one murdered man who died never knowing who killed her son. She laboured every day to keep the case alive - a case made more complicated by it not being labelled a homicide for over a year. At first police called it a ‘suspicious death’ but she knew the day after the post mortem that it was murder. She knew because the pathologist told her.
So she complained and she wrote and she complained some more. Finally, it was officially termed a murder.
It remains unsolved.
Whoever killed her son took another life that day. Her death was delayed by a few years but he killed her just as if he’d laid hands on her.
She never got to say goodbye to her son properly. The closest she came was to hug the actor playing him in a ‘Crimewatch’ reconstruction.
Equally, the families of the accused can face hell.
And I’ve met a few of them, too.
Some know their son is guilty and accept it.
But there are others who cannot believe that the child they nurtured, the little boy who made them rejoice when he took his first steps, whose hand they took on the first day of school, who made them proud when he scored his first goal at football, could be a killer.
I saw something in their eyes, too - a need for you to believe them, to believe IN them. A need to hang on to the idea that somehow the Police were wrong.
And sometimes, the police are wrong.
In my teens a boy from my school stabbed a young woman to death. He was jailed - there was no question of his guilt - but his family faced a sentence, too. They were ostracised, harrassed and terrorised.
The crime was senseless but so was the reaction of the local people. Why he committed the murder I still do not know but it was not his family’s fault. They were, as far as I know, a decent, hard-working family. But they were blamed anyway.
Murder is a crime that does not stop with the initial mindless act.
It just keeps rolling along, knocking down everyone in its path.

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This blog appeared in Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 01 Jan 70

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