Most teenage girls who dream in their bedrooms of becoming famous think they may be pop stars, perhaps actors or models, a few of them like Malala and Greta Thunberg do it through activism. Very few teenage girls dream of becoming a terrorist. However this is what happened to Shamima Begum, a 15 year old …
Continue reading Essay: The Crime and Punishment of Shamima Begum
It is here we get to the truth that underlies and pulses through the story of 112 Ocean Avenue. Not the truth about if DeFeo Jr was possessed by an evil force that compelled him to kill his family, not the truth about if the Lutz's really experienced a haunting by the same spirit.
We do women no favours if we discount their violence, their crimes or the great damage we can do and only see them as victims. More importantly we compound the damage they have done to their victims. We, however also do wrong if we don't take into account the fact that we live in a society where it is all to easy for impressionable, vulnerable women to be manipulated by older, more powerful men. My answer to the question that we should never be asking, if these women are victims or villian, is instead to let go of the pervasive "perfect victim," fallacy and accept that a great deal of the time, people can be both.
Marks manages to not just tell the story of Rikki's murder, but delves further into what lay behind the police and press's insistence that it must have been Ruth who was behind the murder. Reports of her harsh punishment of her children, as well as Rikki having to steal from local shops because he was starving was probably enough to make up most people's minds. It is hard to feel sympathy for someone who is willing to so mistreat children, however the laser like focus on Ruth meant that other suspects were ignored.
While it is easy to agree with Bremner, that media and social media are creating significant barriers to the persuit of justice, it is a genie that, short of worldwide apocolypse, can not be put back into the bottle.
Through the decades of speculation all the focus has been on the who of the killer, not the who of the women, who were easily dismissed and almost faded into the background while the mysterious Bible John, became bigger than life in the way that unsolved mysteries often do.
It is only when we get to the higher understanding that most people, most organisations, are neither wholly good, or wholly bad, that we can transcend some of these entrenched issues and see things clearly. One thing can be very bad for some people, and positive for others. Neither negates the other, they both just... are.
All books reviewed on the blog are availible to buy at the TCF bookshop where profits go to support independent bookshops and help keep the podcast running. For most people, losing a loved one to a violent murder is probably the worst thing we could imagine happening to ourselves or anyone we know. Even thinking …
Continue reading My Brother the Killer: A True Crime Book by Alex Sharkey
In part two of our New Year episodes, we look at a run down of the best crime fiction books TCF has reviewed in 2022. Again, this is in no particulary order.
Mairi rounds up the best true crime podcasts which passed over TCFs desk in 2022.
