What crime stories have you been obsessed by?

[WomenHour]

I was griped by the James Bulger murder 25 years ago

Ana Kriégel

I find this one unrelentingly sad.

Bullied online and in person, few if any friends because she was different. Lonely.

Even the manner that she was lured to her death was so cruel and the murder brutal.

I don't find the killers ages shocking to be honest.

I hope she haunts the dreams of every fucker that was ever mean to her.

The Claudia Lawrence documentary did brush over the fact there had been a few developments over the years but they couldn't say too much and a few people they interviewed were released.
As someone on here wrote, maybe sometimes the police do know what really happened but can't prove it and that could be case for many unsolved crimes and mysteries.

*@Gobbycop
*
Well said written.
I absolutely agree with you.
Those guys sat through the Stay Safe programme in primary school. They know right from wrong. They knew what they were doing.
I feel the management at the school too let her down. They knew she was being bullied.

The Oscar Pistorious case. I still think that whole trial was mismanaged and the outcome so sad. I can't bring myself to believe he shot her deliberately.

Oh! And the Twin Towers. It was horrific, but so perfectly planned and executed.

I also have a morbid sort of fascination with Joanne Dennehy. She just seems to have loathed men and wanted to kill them.

Her story is far from the usual serial killers start in life too, she seemed to be a much loved daughter of middle class parents who went a bit wayward in her teens and messed around with drugs, all pretty standard stuff though.

How did she become so psychopathic and what made her want to kill random men? It's such a role reversal and I'd really like to know what happened and what went on in her head.

I think this has been said already....but does anyone else wonder what someone else would think if they looked at recent search history on Google?!

I also think sometimes that human nature almost 'wants' things to be mysterious and unsolved. As if, with the decline in religion, we want to believe that there is mystery and 'something' out there.

So we talk up some cases, often with a misunderstood element, into being something else, something otherworldly or mystical. When in real life it's just a combination of events that are perfectly explicable. I'm thinking of Elisa Lam and Dyatlov Pass. When you really really look into cases like this, you find yourself wondering why you ever thought it mysterious. When each element is broken down for you and the story put back together, so you go "oh yes, of course."

But humans like mystery. As this thread shows!

I was chatting to a GP once at a party and he used to work at the local prison GP on occasions. He was of the opinion some people are just born bad.
In most thriller or crime stories the murderer is usually shown as someone whose childhood was chaotic or suffered abuse themselves. They usually start out by killing animals :(
My own opinion ( based on nothing) is maybe a bit of both as even people brought up in very loving homes can do bad very things to others. We all can have tipping points in life too.
In the West's case I agree that Rose was the brains behind it all and with Myra Hindley she just went along with whatever he told her to do . Both Fred West and her had misplaced loyalty to absolute monsters to do what they did. It is beyond comprehension.

Didn't Fred west kill his first wife ,before he met Rose? The pair of them had very dysfunctional families from what I have read and I think they were both sexually abused as children ,Myra Hindley is completely different ,in not sure she just went along with it but I doubt she would have instigated anything if she had,nt met Ian Brady

Not before he met Rose but they think he killed his kids nanny who was pregnant with his baby before he met Rose.

@runningtogetskinny

The Ipswich murders by Steve Wright, I cared for one of the women when she was in a children's home (not reported at the time) seeing her face on the front of newspapers in shops was very upsetting. Her life was truly awful and I was angry at the time as family members suddenly appeared claiming to be upset. Confidentiality prevents me from saying more but it was very hard not to contact the press, while Steve Wright was her killer others played a major role into how she ended up leading such a tragic life

I read an article in Glamour which handled the case in a very sensitive way - it was an interview with a prostitute who knew all five of the victims and had worked with them. She herself was a heroin addict, had been since the age of 14. She'd been in care too and I think that was how she got into drugs and prostitution, she fell in with a bad crowd. She talked about how the five women had all ended up on the game and how all the local prostitutes were terrified that they could be next, and that they could have unknowingly had sex with the killer. I can't remember if the woman who was interviewed had, although she did say that one of her clients had tried to kill her. G-d knows where she is now.

Fred killed before he met Rose.
And Rose killed her SD while Fred was in prison.

And Myra was equally involved in the abduction and killings of those kids.
To try and say she was basically brainwashed because she was a women is insulting to them kids that where murdered.She was equally to blame.

I don't entirely disagree with you Handsoff but I've always thought the notion of 'evil' to be a rather archaic and outdated concept considering what we know now about attachment theory and the impact of early relational trauma on the developing brain and how the neural pathways required for empathy aren't formed properly.

I mean if you read about the backgrounds of most serial murderers there are generally speaking very similar themes of appalling abuse and neglect (maybe head injuries too).

She (JD) just seems like an anomaly to me.

Another thing to look at is the severe head injuries suffered by Fred, I remember reading some statistic about the amount of people on death row who had frontal lobe injuries (the section that deals with right and wrong) no excusing anything at all but it is fascinating.

The Amora Bain Carson case is just...fucking hell. How could anyone do that to a baby?

The taxi driver in Cumbria who went on a shooting spree ( and killed him self) years ago also had trauma to his head when someone hit him a few years before ( tried to run off without paying ) so could be something in it. I remember a surgeon talking about it on the radio and how common this could be.

There was that college student in the 50s/60s in America who went on a shooting spree, totally out of character, and was found to have a massive tumour in his head.

Yes I was watching a documentary about people who had commited dreadful crimes and there was something about head injuries ,so there may well be something in it .

@Handsoffisback
I understand what you're saying: often when couples or pairs kill together, it's because of the idea of 'folie à deux' whereby two people who might individually lack the resolve to abduct/torture/murder come together and essentially hype each other up - Leopold and Loeb; Brady and Hindley; Bonnie and Clyde. Almost always, though, one is the dominant partner, and just needs a partner - so it's safe to say Brady was the dominant partner and Huntley probably could have been anyone. People are always more unsettled by woman like Hindley and Rose West being sadistic killers because it jibes with the idea of woman as benign, nurturing and maternal.