Police searching for missing girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have found two bodies near Mildenhall in Suffolk.
Two men and a woman made the grim discovery while out walking at a beauty spot about seven miles away from where the girls vanished in Soham, Cambridgeshire, on 4 August.
Police believe the bodies, which were found in a copse, are those of the 10-year-olds though they have yet to be formally identified.
reprise, me too. Not that I’m a criminologist… just that this has upset me more than a lot of the highly publicized cases here in the U.S. lately. I think it’s because when I picked up on it, the BBC had just posted the “disturbed earth” story; the thought of what those families were going through that night was horrific. I’ve been checking bbc.com first and last thing every day this week, and often several times in between.
It reminds me a lot of the Samantha Runion case here…
Those poor girls. Those poor families.
A couple doing this is unusual. I hope the UK doesn’t have its own version of Bernardo and Homolka. Canada was really rocked by those evil bastards. If they do get indicted, watch the woman turn over like the Andrea Doria and insist she was just doing what the evil abusive boyfriend wanted.
And it’s also scary because the girls probably didn’t do anything “wrong” like going with somebody they didn’t know. Maybe the woman pulled up and offered them a ride, and she was somebody who worked in their school after all, so…that’s what makes it so scary. Of course, the numbers for this kind of abduction are going down in the U.S., don’t know about the UK, but it’s so newsworthy it seems more frequent than it really is. Your kid’s much more likely to get killed falling off her bike or drowning in a pool, but those are tragic accidents that are somehow more “acceptable”; when malice is involved against children, it subverts everything decent in the world.
RIP, Holly and Jessica.
Sorry to say Mehitabel but my guess is that Bernardo and Homolka were probably aware in some way of a previous pair of evil beasts in the UK.
Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.
They are horrifically similar in that they used the available recording media of the day to store the pleas of their victims for lord alone knows what future purpose.
I was not aware of the Canadian case but just googled it.
One thing that does horrify me(among many) is the fact that the defence lawyer actually collected the tapes of the events, on instruction from them and kept them away from investigators.
Had the police concealed evidence from the defence then that would have been inadmissable and yet this lawyer somehow thought he had a duty of client confidentiality.
I always thought that client confidentiality extended only to things that the client might say, and not to physical evidence.
That lawyer should be charged with obstructing a police investigation, and most certainly be barred from practising.
In the UK a couple is definatly not unusual.
Ian Brady and Moira Hindley spring to mind, as do Fred and Rosemary West.
You’re right about the relative frequence of accidents vs. abduction. But I wouldn’t exactly say accidents are “acceptable”; rather that it’s much easier to anticipate what might happen, and take steps to prevent it, and if something bad does happen, it’s through error. Abduction and molestation are, as you said, malicious acts, and how can you regulate other people’s malice?
You can’t. You can teach your kid to swim and ride a bike, and counsel hir to always wear protective gear when riding and stay away from water when unaccompanied. And that should be enough. The bike is not going to jump out from a doorway; the water is not going to say, “C’mere kid, it’s okay”. What you can’t control is what other people do. These people were known to the kids, for fuck sake. If they’d been threatened by someone else, they probably would have felt safe going to one or both of them for help. :smack: of despair.
Sadly, there was a report on our morning news about a 9 year old in the US who is missing following the murder of her parents.
We are fortunate to live in a society that musters outrage at such events. The intensity and scope of attention given to the case proves that it’s the exception rather than the rule, thank god. We’re not yet desensitized to such crimes. It’s easy to think we never could be. Certainly we never should be.
But there are places in the world where 10 year old children are regularly subjected to unspeakable crimes: forced into dangerous labor, employed as sodliers, exploited as sex slaves, withered by disease and malnutrition, killed by the actions of armies acting both maliciously and justly. And kidnapped, molested, and murdered. It happens. And there are entire communities of parents that have become so weary of the social/economic/political conditions that allow it to happn that they just give up on preventing it as a community an just protect their own children exclusively. No one drops off flowers at the church for the hundred children who died last week of (fill in terrible, unjust, overwhelmingly prevalent cause here) in the land of (insert non-industrialised nation here.)
Such a terrible thing to have happened to those two girls, their families, their community. I just wish the whole world–all six billion people–could look at it with the same outrage and shock, and reel at its incomprehensibility.
Instead I wonder what Chechneyans or Rwandans or Kurds or Timorese or underaged Cambodian sex workers or trafficked Albanian laborers or Saudi girls preparing for circumcision think when they see the story on page one on BBC’s website. Surely they feel the universal pain of tragedy–who wouldn’t? But do they envy our world too, even as it mourns?
Maybe this is an inappropriate digression. I don’t mean to undermine the grief. Just saying…
Whoa, hold on to your sidecar a minute there, Casdave…
I didn’t follow the public debate in any great detail before that child-porno-possession law came into effect but, nonetheless, there’s all the difference in the world between saying:
Position One - “Mil’ord, this magazine is conclusive evidence the defendant was thinking paedophilic thoughts, therefore he is guilty of an offence”, and
Position Two - Making possession of child pornography an offence because an offence has been committed against children in the making of that pornography.
What can, and is, legislated for is the stage between thought and acting out the primary offence itself: For example ‘Conspiracy’ is such an offence: The ‘planning’ stage, if you will.
We might also, when an offence of child molestation is being tried, potentially introduce child porno material as evidence of, for example, a pre-disposed state of mind – in theory. Depends, I’d imagine, on the particular circumstances of the case and the judge’s view.
The distinction between Position One and Two is that between an Orwellian society and a free society. You say it’s a fine distinction, it might be. But it also has to be an absolutely clear and unambiguous distinction, IMHO, and for obvious reasons.
Jjimm – Thanks for the link. The psychology of these people does make for fascinating, if grizzly, reading. I’ll take a look.
London_Calling
to the best of my recollection, digitally “faked” images of children are also illegal, so to some extent fantasies are illegal. Sorry - no cites, this is from a student project I supervised this year and I don’t have it to hand. You could try googling for John Carr of the NCH, an expert in child pornography on the internet . He has written a paper which takes the latest legislation into account.
Reprise
I guess your feelings just show you’re human, despite whatever you’re exposed to as part of your career. Police see more vile stuff than most, but they still get upset at something like this. Forensic pathologists see plenty of bodies, but still find some cases upset them. It’s better than being unmoved, I think, so long as they can still function. I’m grateful to them for the job they do. For what it’s worth, I think your job is worthwhile.
The one thing about this that annoys me is that 2 ten year olds sell more papers that one 14 year old.
The site that I read implied that the lawyer was in a difficult moral position, and that he turned over the tapes to the prosecution and resigned from the case… what else could he have done?
Not sure what you mean by “faked” – based on real images but amended (abuse has taken place in the creation) or wholly a self-creative process ?
The latter, as I understood it. Obviously both types are illegal, but there was debate about the latter i.e. if no actual children had been harmed in the making of them, chould they be considered illegal.
To be honest Twisty, had this crime not occured in a small community, had there not been a spate of highly publicised abductions in the US recently, and had it not happened in a country with large media organisations, I’m not sure that we would have heard about it.
I don’t just mean that we wouldn’t have heard about this crime had it happened in Asia, Africa, or Central America - I doubt it would have been so highly publicised had it occured in Germany, France, Sweden, etc.
And this is what makes sick, he may never go to trial 
Your link didn’t work for me, freckles, but I found this. It says he’s been charged. You mean, you think he’ll ultimately be declared unfit?
Just curious, why do you say that, Reprise? We (for everyone else, I mean we in Australia) have had a similar amount of coverage on other high-profile English child abduction cases, and the news sources I’ve consulted seem to have devoted more effort to the Jessica and Holly case than they did to the American cases that preceeded them. I wondered why you think the American cases affected the coverage of the English case?
I can’t get my head round the “bad not mad” thing. Surely anyone who abducts and murders for kicks is mad? It’s a weird distinction to make, between different kinds of madness.