Maxine Carr and Ian Huntley are the Tabloid candidates to replace Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the pantheon of evildoers. The fact that Carr was not much more than a battered and abused woman under Huntley's domination hasn't deterred those tabloid rags from trying to spur the whole nation into a self-righteous witch burning.
Summer is drawing to a close now, and just like every other summer that I can remember we find that the headlines are taken up with the death of children. Milly Dowler has found herself shunted from the pages. The dismembered torso of the child found in the Thames is barely mentioned. The baby who was left to drown in it's buggy in Wales has been all but forgotten. There is now a double murder that has horrified people like nothing that has been seen before (or at least, horrified like nothing that was seen before last summer). Just over 2 weeks ago, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing. Their bodies, still officially unidentified, were found on Saturday last. Somewhat uniquely in this kind of high profile case, the suspects were identified and questioned before the enquiry changed from missing persons to murder. By all rights this should have been a cut and dried, open and shut case whereby the two murderers are reviled, condemned, judged, and sent down. Not that that would have been any comfort to the parents of Holly and Jessica, but it would at least have been something. Now it seems that matters are getting complicated.
The two people who were arrested, Maxine Carr and Ian Huntley, both worked at the same school attended by Holly and Jessica as teaching assistant and caretaker respectively. This alone sent a thrill of revulsion through me. Whilst I appreciate that (unfortunately) murder victims are generally killed by people whom they know, this seemed like a desperately horrifying betrayal of trust. People send their children to school every day on trust that they will be safe, and that the people employed by the school will care for them. It seemed to me that the school had employed the modern day equivalent of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. It was assumed by many that the two would be charged, and that a sorry (yet, God help us, familiar) tale would be recounted at the inevitable trial.
Then, yesterday, there were a series of announcements that wrong footed everybody. Firstly we were told that Huntley had been charged with the girls' murder, but also that he had been detained under the Mental Health Act of 1983, and that he was being held in Rampton Secure Hospital. Then we were told that Carr had been charged. Not with murder, but with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. What are the implications of these decisions? Like everyone else, I can only speculate based on the limited and confusing facts available. I don't claim to have any special insight into what might be going on, but I would like to try and make sense of it.
Firstly, we have Huntley. As things stand, and assuming his guilt, he is the sole murderer of Holly and Jessica. I'm sure that I wasn't the only one who assumed that the girls had been murdered by a paedophile, but now I am no longer certain. The main thing that puts doubt into my mind is the fact that he is being detained in a secure mental hospital. There is also the fact that the girls' bodies have yet to be formally identified. Is this because he committed acts of such appalling savagery that a post mortem was unable to determine the cause of death? It's an awful thought, but I suspect that the truth is somewhat more mundane (or as mundane as a double murder can be). We've just had 2 weeks of hot and humid weather in England, and if one assumes that the girls were murdered not long after their abduction then their bodies will have been left to decompose during that time. Hence the inability to identify both them and the cause of death.
That is the first part of the fog that is obscuring the events in Soham. Huntley's detention at Rampton is another. Basically, under the MHA, 2 doctors must state in writing that they believe Huntley has a psychotic disorder which makes him a danger to himself and/or others. The doctors at Rampton have anything up to 6 months to assess him and find out what, if anything is wrong with him (apart, of course, from the fact that he has probably murdered two children). What must this man have told the police during questioning that led them to consider the possibility that he is not fit to stand trial?
There seem to be a few of possibilities here; one is that he is genuinely mentally ill. Another is that this is merely a ploy by Huntley to avoid standing trial. Finally, it may be that the police wish to utterly eliminate the possibility of Huntley using the Insanity defence at trial, and so they are having him assessed by the doctors best able to determine whether or not he is psychotic.
I wouldn't like to say which, if any, of these possibilities is the most likely. But I do know a little bit about Rampton, and I know that the people who are held there are (in the words of a consultant who used to work there) "really, truly, properly insane". So if we assume that his insanity is real and not faked, and if one recalls the TV clips showing a calm yet concerned Huntley saying that he feels so helpless as to what to do about the disappearance of the girls, not to mention the uniqueness of the police sectioning him before charging him, a picture does begin to emerge. It tends to suggest a man that has completely disassociated himself from what he did to such a degree that he believes utterly that he did not commit the crime.
I find this relevant because of the current archaic laws concerning insanity in a criminal case. To paraphrase the MacNaughton legal rules, to make use of a defence of insanity, Huntley will have to show that he did not know what he was doing or that he didn't know that it was illegal. I would assume that the doctors at Rampton are now trying to determine whether this is indeed the case.
Then we have Carr. As I write this, it would appear that she isn't a murderess. Rather she is a foolish woman who did a stupid thing to cover for the man whom she loves (or at any rate, believes that she does). At her first appearance at the Magistrates Court this morning, the usual rent-a-mob showed up to leech some of the high tension and emotion from the aftermath of this dreadful situation in order to fill their otherwise empty lives. Maybe if people like them expended more effort putting their own lives in order rather than using somebody else's tragedy to pass their time, then the world in general would be a better place, but I digress.
As you may have guessed, I have some sympathy for Maxine Carr. Only up to a point though, as she would appear to be responsible in part for prolonging the agony of Holly and Jessica's parents. Yet before anyone rushes to condemn her for protecting Huntley, I would say this; I have seen a lot of women stand by their men, despite the fact that their men are responsible for beating them, mentally and emotionally abusing them, destroying their self esteem, and generally reducing them to the level of a timid and unquestioning piece of chattel. If we're saying that it's Carr’s fault for allowing Huntley to do that to her (and again, I'm making the assumption that he did), then one may as well say that rape victims are asking for it, or that battered wives had it coming.
I would also point out that there is a degree of uncertainty about the events leading up to Huntley and Carr being questioned. Their are conflicting reports of what happened; some say that they handed themselves in voluntarily, others that they were taken by police from the home of Huntley's father. There is, at the moment at least, the possibility that Carr went to the police first, and Huntley's detention followed soon afterwards. If that is the case, and if the home circumstances of Carr and Huntley are as I suspect, then she is to be as much praised for her later courage as she is to be reviled for her earlier cowardice.
Of course, as I have said this is all merely speculation. We have the luxury of being able to examine such facts that are available and then draw our own conclusions. Though having written this, I am now beginning to see why it is easier to simply condemn the accused out of hand. To try and look at what happened, to attempt to see beyond the grief felt by those who loved the girls, or beyond the vitriol yelled by those who were strangers to them, raises uncomfortable questions about a society in which tragedy's like this can happen. Is it any wonder that we usually cast about for a scapegoat to explain the murderous behaviour of these people? Maybe it's our way of protecting ourselves from answers that we don't want to hear.
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