Family murders

I'm not talking about my family, though there are a fair number of skeletons in the cupboard when you start looking for them. I'm talking about the latest case of an apparently estranged father killing his wife/partner and child. While I'm reluctant to generalise it does seem to be a mainly male crime. No one knows exactly what happened or what the family circumstances were but my first thought was - there's got to be a better way of sorting out family problems than this.

People are quick to blame women for using their children as pawns but is this really the whole cause of the problem? I'd be the first to say that women can be nasty, vindictive and deceitful - but so can men. It would be fairer to say 'People can be evil - whatever their sex'. Many blame the family courts for always awarding custody to the mother - is this really true? If the positions were reversed would we see a spate of women killing their partners and children?

If you look at the situation prior to the era of easy divorce when the mother was unlikely to get custody because she was not in a position to support herself and the children financially - were there many cases of mothers killing their children and partners? If there had been then I'm sure someone would have made use of the statistics by now

Strange reasoning

Comments on news stories can show up some very strange reasoning. The two stories which have given rise to the strangest in the last few days have been the woman who was murdered with a captive bolt gun and the doctor who attempted to poison his pregnant girl friend. The murder was committed by an abattoir worker as might be expected and was carried out because the lady concerned did not want him as her boy friend and made it clear she didn't want him. The strangest were along the following lines:

She brought it on herself because she humiliated him by saying she wouldn't go out with him

All meat eaters are responsible for this murder because if you hadn't eaten meat there wouldn't have been a slaughter house for this guy to work in.

The doctor who attempted to poison his girlfriend to bring about an abortion of his baby prompted the following comments:

He's definitely innocent and she framed him by poisoning herself

Why was she going out with a married man? [She didn't know he was married until the police told her]. It's all her fault.

Women have abortions - this was no different. If he's got to go to jail then all women who have abortions should be jailed as well

What rational woman takes a cup of tea she thinks was poisoned to the police?

When I read the last one my immediate reaction was - any rational woman who wants to stay alive!

Dr Crippen rehabilitated

I finished reading Martin Edwards' Dancing for the Hangman - a fictional recreation of the events which led up to this infamous murder case. Crippen writes his version of his life in between conversations with his solicitor - who seems to have done him no favours - newspaper cuttings, extracts from evidence given at his trial and other contemporary documents.

Crippen himself comes over as a determined individual on the fringes of medicine even though he was a qualified doctor. It seems as though one of his main motivations was to earn enough money to keep his wife, Cora, in singing lessons and music hall costumes.

Crippen did not have private means and so he gravitated to the charlatan side of medicine in order to earn enough to support himself and his wife. He does not appear to have been terribly successful as a business man and was consequently just scraping by much of the time. He was by turns naive and knowledgeable about people and possibly trusted some to have his best interests at heart when they were simply furthering their own ends. Did he murder his wife? Will we ever know? This book certainly raises some interesting questions and puts forward one possible theory of how it happened.

I found the book fascinating and well written - though I have to confess to skipping over the gory bit! I thought the relationships between Crippen, his wife Cora and lover Ethel Le Neve were very well done and believable as was his relationship with the policeman in the case - Walter Dew. Did he think he got the right man? The way the media - then only newspapers - treated the case was also fascinating. Did they influence the outcome? We are never likely to know. Well worth reading whether you like crime fiction or true crime.